Fortunately, these proposals are not included in the Contract with America. Our food programs are one of the admirable functions of our national government and I do not want to see them turned over to the states. I cannot trust state legislatures to spend wisely or even honestly whatever funds Congress might divert to them for health programs for our senior citizens and our children.
So if we choose wisely from the many suggestions of the Contract with America, much good could be achieved, but if others of the proposals are ever passed a great deal of harm would result. As the debate began regarding the contract, the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, the religious conservatives, leaped before the television cameras to announce their own Contract with the American Family. Several of its proposals would gain approval from most citizens: elimination of current laws that place extra tax burdens on couples who marry, restriction of child pornography and a proposal to punish criminals rather than their victims.
This second contract, with the American family, has other recommendations that might gain wide acceptance, such as the right to have religious displays ‘in noncompulsory settings such as courthouse lawns, high school graduation ceremonies and sports events’ and the outlawing of late-term abortions.
But the hard core of the philosophy underlying both contracts is contained in the young colonels’ specific legislative recommendations to diminish or eliminate budgets for social purposes like education and child care, services to women and children, and money for cultural activities such as the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities and public broadcasting.
I find the overall spirit of these two contracts mean, vengeful and contrary to the two-centuries-old drive for social justice in America. If the provisions are rigorously enforced, the result will be an ugly society of which I would not be proud to be a part.
I am particularly depressed to find our young colonels imitating the behavior of similar young revolutionaries I’ve followed in the past. Like their predecessors in one country after another, these young men seem to have a visceral fear of women and a distrust that they manifest in harshly repressive laws against women, girls and babies. If all their laws against women were enacted, life in the United States could be hell for women and for many children.
Even though the contracts do not recommend openly that affirmative action be repealed or that justifiable quotas be abolished, I have heard spokesmen for the contracts assure listeners that ‘sanity would be restored in those fields,’ a euphemism for ‘they will be abolished.’ Curtailment of affirmative action would be a major move in the wrong direction, and the fact that the Supreme Court has recently outlawed college scholarships intended only for African Americans is a warning of the dangers that lie ahead. If I sound monomaniacal on this and similar problems regarding race, I am. My wife spent her life fighting racial injustice and I try to advance her agenda. When the president of my college suffered a heart attack and died following a racial confrontation on his very liberal campus, that very night I sent the school the royalties from one of my books, to be spent on pacifying the campus through the granting of some of the demands of the black students. I feel just as strongly today. There have been grave injustices in American life and they should be rectified.
I would hope that Congress and the American voter would be intelligent enough to pass the constructive parts of the two contracts while rejecting the destructive. Some of them have been rejected, but usually for reasons of political necessity rather than by any rejection on the part of the young colonels of the underlying philosophies. Sensible people should encourage Congress to discriminate between the acceptable and the unacceptable in the remaining acts, which, if blindly accepted by Congress without fine-tuning in favor of a just and compassionate society, I fear will create a government that we will soon thereafter have to cleanse until it conforms more closely to the great traditions of our nation.
I am convinced that we are a people committed to justice, to the care of the less fortunate, to a breeze of freedom that flows over all our actions, and to the national characteristics of hopefulness and a willingness to take considerable risks in the present in order to safeguard our security in the future.
The new breed in Congress today exhibit an intense anti-art bias. Both the specific recommendations and the spirit in which the Contract with the American Family proposes them in the field of the arts bespeak a brutality and a know-nothingness ill suited to a democracy. There is ample evidence that the provision discontinuing all funds allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting stems from the personal vendetta of the Republican leaders who feel—erroneously, I believe—that Public Broadcasting Service broadcasts are unfair to conservatives but partial to liberals. These men who would apparently like to transform the United States into today’s Sparta seem determined to kill off any free expression of the arts in American life by taking away all government-financed support. Their suggestion that the funds thus lost can be made up by contributions from private individuals flies against the experience of all the major European and world capitals, which fund their arts from the government coffers much more generously than we ever have. To take away the meager government funds we now provide would be disastrous and a signal that we intend becoming a nation of boors.
The deplorably and dangerously pervasive character of the two Contracts is that they favor the rich to the detriment of the poor, the already fortunate rather than the aspiring, and the Christian conservative as opposed to the Jewish/Muslim/Native American freethinker. Indeed, the second contract, the Contract with the American Family, is the official voice of the Christian Coalition, the extreme right wing of the Christian faiths and of the new Republican Party. Do we really want to invite these reactionaries to dictate what the moral values of our society shall be? Looking at the day-to-day programs of these very conservative bodies—the agenda they are reluctant to reveal in their formal contract—I am frightened, for I have observed that when men and women of such mean spirit start to dictate national policy, moderate men like me are sooner or later outlawed too. The fire-burning puritan preacher will, in the end, turn his blaze on me, so my personal interest in the great debate now under way is not abstract. It cuts to the heart of my being, and it imperils all other moderates.
When I charge that the two contracts, taken together, reek of meanness, I do not mean this in any trivial sense. I believe the revolution of the young colonels threatens the long-established social contract that has operated in the United States since our Constitution came into being. It is that solemn agreement forged by the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who argued that society is held together by an often unspoken or unwritten agreement that the very poor will refrain from revolution if the very rich will allow even a modicum of their wealth to trickle down to the lower levels. Under this sensible agreement the rich pay taxes to ensure domestic tranquillity. Any large movement that imperils the ancient modus vivendi endangers the democracy.
I find it cynical that now both the political right and the religious archconservatives borrow this almost sacred word contract to mask their intentions. Instead of meaning, as it did, a high-minded agreement among classes in the eighteenth century, the term now identifies a slick device to fracture the agreement. The results could prove disastrous in the decades ahead. It is for that ominous reason that although I can see merit in some of the provisions of the contracts, I am frightened by the overall impact of the proposals. The noble contract engineered by Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson must be protected and preserved, for from it stems the greatness of our nation.
Having watched at close quarters the operation of several state legislatures, I shiver when I hear that the new Republican agenda includes closing many operations now supervised by knowledgeable men and women in Washington, with the budgets and the responsibilities being shuffled off to the states. I am not heartened by this prospect of allowing fifty different state
legislatures to determine what food, if any, should go into the school lunch for deprived children. Nor do I like the scenario of the state legislatures’ trying to decide how to discipline fourteen-year-old girls who have had illegitimate babies.
My assessment of state legislatures was accurately voiced by an unnamed comedian when he or she said: ‘No man’s life, liberty or property is safe while the Legislature is in session.’ And a paraphrase of a political cartoon I saw recently exemplifies a dangerous trend that portends ominous consequences for our nation: ‘The young colonels want to give the poor back to the states, and all the rest of America to the big corporations.’
Americans forget that our nation has already experimented—unsuccessfully—with a loose confederation of sovereign states not bound by any superior central authority. When the thirteen colonies declared their independence from Great Britain on July 2, 1776 (not July 4, as popularly believed), some form of government was required, and the ineffective Articles of Confederation were instituted and governed our fledgling nation during the years 1781–89. Patriots quickly saw that the Articles were a toothless form of government, since the central agency lacked the power to collect taxes from the individual states, enforce tariffs or pay for an army. A movement was launched by the leaders of the thirteen confederated states, and in May 1787 delegates assembled in Philadelphia, where they labored until September 1787 on the drafting of the Constitution as we know it today. The first Congress convened in 1789, the birthday of our present government, and one of its first acts was to begin developing the Bill of Rights.
Government by a loosely bound collection of states was thus tried and it failed, but even so the Confederation did manage to pass a few bills of considerable benefit to the nation as a whole. The laws governing the distribution of national lands were exemplary; the rules laid down whereby a territory could graduate into statehood served the nation well in the next hundred years. Nevertheless, the Fathers of our country bade farewell to the Confederation and welcomed with opened arms the establishment of a strong central government endowed with extraordinary powers, and it is the assaults on that basic concept of government by the young colonels that should be sounding warning bells to us all. Over two hundred years ago America found a form of government ideally suited to the character of the people; let us not at this late date alter or imperil that proven form at the whim of young radicals.
I am personally affected and greatly agitated by one of the stated philosophies of the new young colonels’ regime. When its leader said repeatedly, during his battle to win votes for his party, that members of the other party could not be considered to be in the mainstream of American life and that liberals generally could not be trusted to behave like responsible Americans, and when he even questioned the patriotism of Democrats and liberals, his arrows of contempt struck me with ugly force. Was my Americanism truly in question? Was it possible that I was little better than a Communist? Was it right for him to read me out of the mainstream, and was my patriotism faulty?
When I first heard this charge I was taken aback. This political leader of the young colonels in the House of Representatives was speaking of me, and I had to review my record to see where my failure to be a good American lay. When our nation was threatened by Adolf Hitler and the Japanese militarists, I joined the navy even though I could claim exemption from military duty because of my age (thirty-six) and my religion (Quaker). I served two long tours of duty in the South Pacific, and during the Korean War I participated at one time or another with all four branches of our armed forces: army, marines, air force and navy. I went along on patrols probing enemy lines. While serving aboard our great aircraft carriers, I flew as a passenger in our dive-bombers as they operated against Communist rail networks. I survived three airplane crashes, the last in the middle of the Pacific, and when I returned to civilian life I ran five times for political office, lost but was successively appointed to seven major government boards, including the one that supervised NASA and the International Broadcasting Board in Munich, which managed our radio broadcasts to nations behind the iron curtain.
Instead of the Speaker’s questioning my patriotism, I think I have a great deal more right to question his—although of draft age, he evaded service in the armed forces. No, I shall give him the benefit of the doubt and alter the word evaded to the possibly more gentle avoided; evaded carries a sense of his having taken specific steps to escape a duty, and he has explained several times that he was excused under the same legal exemptions that allowed so many other leading Republicans of our generation to remain at home. I accept his excuses. But the fact remains that I went to war and he didn’t, and I get angry when he presumes to read me out of the mainstream of American life, as if he were now the sole arbiter determining what behavior is now acceptable in America.
The dangers created by the young colonels are not limited to their revolutionary behavior in the 1995 Congress. They represent a real shift in American attitudes, and I expect to see their Speaker eventually running for the presidency. But if the voters of Virginia were brave enough to reject Colonel Ollie North’s bid for the Senate in 1994—and he the beau ideal of the typical young colonel—the nation as a whole might also reject this Speaker for the young colonels.
In an age when we have wisely become aware of some of the weaknesses of our present government, we must also be aware that rash overcorrections could threaten the miracle that the early patriots achieved when they devised our unique system of government. Meeting in Philadelphia during that hot spring and summer of 1787, they were a choice selection of political geniuses. Many had attended colleges in both Europe and the American colonies. They were widely read; they understood the lessons of history and the grim conditions that could engulf a country ruled by tyrants or ambitious kings. When I read of their prolonged debates and discussions concerning what a good government should be, I am amazed by what a wide body of historical reference they drew upon: Greek history, Roman, medieval times and recent events in their European homelands. They were as brilliant a group of men as could have been gathered at that time by any nation of the world.
I have been immensely impressed by the fact that of all the world’s governments that were functioning then or thereafter, ours has been the longest-lived and the most successful. All others have been forced or have elected to modify their systems. Great lands like Russia and China have changed spectacularly while smaller nations like Switzerland and Sweden have altered their forms of government. If some would suggest that Great Britain has existed longer with one unchanging governmental structure than we have, I would point out that the individual states that constitute Britain have undergone striking changes, such as transforming their kings and queens into useful figureheads and altering enormously the relative powers of the two branches of Parliament, with the House of Lords becoming more or less a figurehead while the Commons really controls the government.
No, we in the United States have the most successful form of government the world has ever known, and since it has proved so worthy and storm-tested, I look with dismay at attempts to alter it overnight by dictate from untried young colonels whose breadth of experience cannot begin to match the philosophical and political wisdom of our Founding Fathers. The victorious young colonels are not free to nullify our social contract and ride roughshod over our historic traditions.
Recommendations
1. Since the young colonels won the election by a huge margin, the nation should pay them respect by studying with care the proposals of their Contract with America and the Contract with the American Family.
2. Those provisions that we find acceptable should be supported, but those that are clearly outside the American tradition should be vigorously opposed.
3. The drift toward turning over to the states functions now performed by the federal government is an invitation to slide backward to the year 1777, when our newborn nation attempted to govern itself with the ineffectual Articles of Confederation. If a new Confederation i
s forced upon us, I predict that within a decade we will junk it, as before, and return to a strong central government.
4. We must not be afraid of a reasonable national debt. If we drive our economic system back to debt zero we will soon regret it and change the laws to permit a workable debt. Excessive debt such as we have today should be cut back, but only within reason.
5. As we revise our government we must keep in mind the over-riding economic problem of how to provide employment of some kind for those trapped in poverty.
6. I would move with extreme caution in negating the worthy results of affirmative action. Termination of all such laws will be interpreted as a kind of declaration of war between the races, and a nationwide alienation could result with dreadful consequences.
7. A constitutional amendment limiting terms in Congress would be a mistake.
8. Do not permit a school voucher plan that diverts tax money to private schools.
9. Do not allow draconian laws to be passed disciplining young women. Work out some more humane way of dealing with early pregnancies.
The basic structures of the United States are so firmly rooted that they can absorb the radical changes signaled by the 1994 elections. We have seen that at least half of the twenty alterations proposed by the contracts of the nation’s new congressional leaders were sensible and in many cases overdue. They can be installed without danger to the republic.
This Noble Land: My Vision for America Page 19
