THE AMERICAN CHARACTER

A Speech by Sen. J. W. Fulbright Delivered on December 5, 1963

(Note: This speech was delivered a couple of weeks after the assassination of President J. F. Kennedy at an award ceremony for the 1963 Rockefeller Public Service Awards. The speech was published in the Congressional Record a few days later; thus it is a public document. A letter that Senator Fulbright sent on April 16, 1964 to R. B. McCallum, master of Pembroke College at Oxford University, who had been one of Fulbrights instructors when he studied there as a Rhodes Scholar, mentioned that Fulbrights office had received over 10,000 letters in response to the speech. See University of Arkansas Special Collections, Fulbright Papers, Series 88 Subseries 11 Box 19)
As we mourn the death of President Kennedy, it is fitting that we reflect on the character of our society and ask ourselves whether the assassination of the President was merely a tragic accident or a manifestation of some deep failing in our lives and in our society. It may be that the tragedy was one which could have occurred anywhere at any time to any national leader. It may be that the cause lies wholly in the tormented brain of the assassin. It may be that the nation as a whole is healthy and strong and entirely without responsibility for the great misfortune which has befallen it. It would be comforting to think so. I for one do not think so. I believe that our society, though in most respects decent, civilized, and humane, is not, and has never been, entirely so. Our national life, both past and present, has also been marked by a baleful and incongruous strand of intolerance and violence. It is in evidence all around us. It is in evidence in the senseless and widespread crime that makes the streets of our great cities unsafe. It is in evidence in the malice and hatred of extremist political movements. And it is in evidence in the cruel bigotry of race that leads to such tragedies as the killing of Negro children in a church in Alabama. We must ask ourselves many questions about this element of barbarism in a civilized society. We must ask ourselves what its sources are, in history and in human nature. We must ask ourselves whether it is the common and inevitable condition of man or whether it can be overcome. And if we judge that it can be overcome, we must ask ourselves why we Americans have not made greater progress in doing so. We must ask ourselves what, if anything all this has to do with the death of our President. Finally, and most important, we must ask ourselves what we must do, and how and when, to overcome hatred and bigotry and to make America as decent and humane a society as we would like to be. I do not pretend to be able to answer these questions. I do suggest, however, that the conditions of our time call for a national self-examination, although the process may be a long and difficult one. I further suggest, and most emphatically, that if such a national self-examination is to be productive, it must be

conducted in a spirit of tolerance rather than anger, serenity rather than guilt, and Christian charity rather than crusading morality. We might begin our reflections about ourselves by an examination of the effects of crusading selfrighteousness, in the history of Western civilization and in our society. Moral absolutism righteous crusading and intolerances has been a major force in the history of Western civilization. Whether religious or political in form, movements of crusading moralism have played a significant, and usually destructive, role in the evolution of Western societies. Such movements, regardless of the content of their doctrines, have all been marked by a single characteristic: the absolute certainty of their own truth and virtue. Each has regarded itself as having an exclusive pipeline to heaven, to God or to a deified concept of History or to whatever is regarded as the ultimate source of truth. Each has regarded itself as the chosen repository of truth and virtue and each has regarded all nonbelievers as purveyors or falsehood and evil. Absolutist movements are usually crusading movements. Free as they are from any element of doubt as to their own truth and virtue, they conceive themselves to have a mission of spreading the truth and destroying evil. They consider it to be their duty to regenerate mankind, however little it may wish to be regenerated. The means which are used for this purpose, though often harsh and sometimes barbaric, are deemed to be wholly justified by the nobility of the end. They are justified because the end is absolute and there can be no element of doubt as to its virtue and its truth. Thus it is that in the name of noble purposes men have committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against one another. The medieval Christians who burned heretics alive did not do so because they were cruel and sadistic; they did it because they wished to exorcise evil and make men godly and pure. The Catholic and Protestant armies which inflicted upon Europe thirty years of death and destruction in the religious wars of the seventeenth century did not do so because they wished anyone harm; on the contrary, they did it for the purpose of saving Christendom from sin and damnation. In our own time the crusading movements have been political rather than religious, but their doctrines have been marked by the same conviction of absolute truth and the same zeal to perpetuate it. Thus the German Nazis with their fervent belief in a primitive racial myth murdered six million Jews in the zeal to elevate mankind by ridding it of a race that they deemed venal and inferior. Similarly, the Russian Communists under Stalin -- who, as Djilas writes, was a man Capable of destroying nine-tenths of the human to make happy the one-tenth killed millions of their own people and consigned countless others to the slave labor camps of Siberia in order to pave the way for a society in which all men should be equal and happy and free. And the Chinese Communists of the present are able to contemplate with equanimity a nuclear war in which hundreds of millions would be killed because of their conviction that such a war would destroy capitalism and lead to a higher and nobler civilization. The strand of fanaticism and violence has been a major one in Western history. But it has not been the only one, nor has it been the dominant one in most Western societies. The other strand of Western civilization, conceived in ancient Greece and Rome and revived in the European Age of Reason, has been one of tolerance and moderation, of empiricism and practicality. Its doctrine has been democracy, a radically different kind of doctrine whose one absolute is the denial of absolutes and of the messianic spirit. The core of the democratic idea is the element of doubt as to the ability of any man or any movement to perceive ultimate truth. Accordingly, it has fostered societies in which the individual is left

free to pursue truth and virtue as he imperfectly perceive them, with due regard for the right of every other individual to pursue a different, and quite possibly superior, set of values. Democratic societies have by no means been free of self-righteousness and the crusading spirit. On the contrary, they have at times engaged in great crusades to spread the gospel of their own ideology. Indeed, no democratic nation has been more susceptible to this tendency than the United States, which in the past generation has fought one war to make the world safe for democracy, another to achieve nothing less than the unconditional surrender of its enemies, and even now finds it possible to consider the plausibility of total victory over communism in a thermonuclear war. It is clear that democratic nations are susceptible to dogmatism and the crusading spirit. The point, however, is that this susceptibility is not an expression but a denial of the democratic spirit. When a free nation embarks upon a crusade for democracy, it is caught up in the impossible contradiction of trying to use force to make men free. The dogmatic and crusading spirit in free societies is an anti-democratic tendency, a lingering vestige of the strand of dogmatism and violence in the Western heritage. Although no Western nation has completely dispelled the absolutist spirit of the crusades and the religious wars, some have been more successful than others. The most successful of all, I believe at least among those nations which have had an impact on the world beyond their own frontiers has been England. For a number of complex historical reasons, while most of Europe remained under absolute monarchs and an absolute Church, England evolved very gradually into a pluralistic society under a constitutional government. By the time of the establishment of the English colonies in the new world, the evolution toward constitutional democracy was well advanced. The process quickly took hold in the North America colonies and their evolution toward democracy outpaced that of the month country. This was the basic heritage of America -- a heritage of tolerance, moderation, and individual liberty that was implanted from the very beginnings of European settlement in the new world. America was quite rightly been called a nation that was born free. There came also to the new world the Puritans, a minor group in England who became a major force in American life. Their religion was Calvinism, an absolutist faith with a stern moral code promising salvation for the few, damnation for the many. The intolerant, witch-hunting Puritanism of seventeenth century Massachusetts was not a major religious movement in America. It eventually became modified and as a source of ethical standards made a worthy contribution to American life. But the Puritan way of thinking, harsh and intolerant, permeated the political and economic life of the country and became a major secular force in America. Coexisting uneasily with our English heritage of tolerance and moderation, the Puritan way of thinking has injected an absolutist strand into American thought a strand of stern moralism in our public policy and in our standard of personal behavior. The Puritan way of thinking has had a powerful impact on our foreign policy. It is reflected in our traditional vacillation between self-righteous isolation and total involvement and in our attitude toward foreign policy as a series of idealistic crusades rather than as a continuing defense of the national interest. It is reflected in some of the most notable events of our history: in the unnecessary war with Spain, which was spurred by an idealistic fervor to liberate Cuba and ended with our making Cuba an American protectorate; in the war of 1917, which began with a national commitment to make the world safe for democracy and ended with our repudiation of our own blueprint for a world order of peace and law; in the radical pacifism of the interwar years which ended with our total involvement in a conflict in which our proclaimed objective lf unconditional surrender was finally achieved by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Throughout the twentieth century American foreign policy has been caught up in the inherent contradiction between our English heritage of tolerance and accommodation and our Puritan heritage of crusading righteousness. This contradiction is strikingly illustrated by the policy of President Wilson in World War I. In 1914 he called upon the American people to be neutral in thought as well in their actions; in early 1917, when the United States was still neutral, he called upon the belligerents to compromise their differences and accept a peace without victory; but in the spring of 1918 when the United State had been involved in the war for a year, he perceived only one possible response to the challenge of Germany in the war: Force, Force to the upmost, Force without stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust. The danger of any crusading movement issues from its presumption of absolute truth. If the premise is valid, then all else follows. If we know, with absolute and unchallengeable certainty, that a political leader is traitorous, or that he is embarked upon a course of certain ruin for the nation, then it is our right, indeed our duty, to carry our opposition beyond constitutional means and to remove him by force or even murder. The premise, however, is not valid. We do not know, nor can we know, with absolute certainty that those who disagree with us are wrong. We are human and therefore fallible, and being fallible, we cannot escape the element of doubt as to our own opinions and convictions. This, I believe, is the core of the democratic spirit. When we acknowledge our own fallibility, tolerance and compromise become possible and fanaticism becomes absurd. Before I comment on recent events, it is necessary to mention another major factor in shaping of the American character. That factor is the experience of the frontier, the building of a great nation out of a vast wilderness in the course of a single century. The frontier experience taught us the great value of individual initiative and self-reliance in the development of our resources and of our national economy. But the individualism of the frontier, largely untempered by social and legal restraints, has also had an important influence on our political life and on our personal relations. It has generated impatience with the complex and tedious procedures of law and glorified the virtues of direct individual action. It has instilled in us an easy familiarity with violence and vigilante justice. In the romanticized form in which it permeates the television and other mass media, the mythology of the frontier conveys the message that killing a man is not as long as you dont shoot him in the back, that violence is only reprehensive when its purpose is bad and that in fact it is commendable and glorious when it is perpetuated by good men for a good purpose. The murder of the accused assassin of President Kennedy is a shocking example of the spirit of vigilante justice. Compounding one crime with another, this act has denied the accused individual of one of the most basic rights of a civilized society; the right to a fair trial under established procedures of law. No less shocking are the widespread expressions of sympathy and approval for the act of the man who killed the accused assassin. Underlying these expressions of approval is an assumption that it is not killing that is bad but only certain kinds of killing, that it is proper and even praiseworthy for a citizen to take justice into his own hand when he deems his purpose to be a just one or a righteous act of vengeance. This attitude is a prescription for anarchy. Put into general practice, it would do far more to destroy the fabric of a free society than the evils which it purports to redress. The mythology of the frontier, the moral absolutism of our Puritan heritage, and of course other factors which I have not mentioned have injected a strand of intolerance and violence into American life. This violent tendency lies beneath the surface of an orderly, law-abiding democratic society, but not far

beneath the surface. When times are normal, when the country is prosperous at home and secure in its foreign relations, our violent and intolerant tendencies remain quiescent and we are able to conduct our affairs in a rational and orderly manner. But in time of crisis, foreign or domestic, our underlying irrationality breaks through to become a dangerous and disruptive force in our national life. Since World War II times have not been normal, they are not normal now, nor are they likely to be for as far into the future as we can see. In the era of nuclear weapons and cold war, we will live with constant crises and the continuing and immediate danger of incineration by hydrogen bombs. We are a people who have faced dangers before, but we have always been able to overcome them by direct and immediate action. Now we are confronted with dangers vastly greater than we or any other nation have ever before known and we see no end to them and no solutions to them. Nor are there any solutions. There are only possibilities, limited, intermittent, and ambiguous, to alleviate the dangers of our time. For the rest, we have no choice but to try to live with the unsolved problems of a revolutionary world. Under these conditions, it is not at all surprising that the underlying tendencies toward violence and crusading self-righteousness have broken through the surface and become a virulent force in the life and politics of the postwar era. They have not thus far been the dominant force because the nation has been able to draw on the considerable resources of wisdom, patience, and judgment which are the core of our national heritage and character. The dominance of reason, however, has been tenuous and insecure and on a number of occasions in these years of crisis we have come close to letting our passions shape critical decisions of policy. American politics in the postwar period has been characterized by a virulent debate between those who counsel patience and reason and those who, in their fear and passion, seem ever ready to plunge the nation into conflict abroad and witch-hunts at home. As the years of crisis have gone on, the politics of the nation have been poisoned by the increasingly irresponsible charges of those zealots who, as President Kennedy would have said in his undelivered Dallas speech, assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory, and that peace is a sign of weakness. The voices of suspicion and hate have been heard throughout the land. They were heard a decade ago when statesmen, private citizens, and even high ranking members of the armed forces were charged with treason, subversion, and communism, because they had disagreed with or somehow displeased the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr. McCarthy. They are heard today when extremist groups do not hesitate to call a former President or the Chief Justice of the United States a traitor and a Communist. They are heard in the mail which United States Senators receive almost daily charging them with communism or treason because they voted for the foreign aid bill or for the nuclear test ban treaty. If I may, I should like to read a section of a letter which a recently received from a person called John Haller of Greenville, Pennsylvania, who writes on stationery carrying the letterhead, In Defense of the Constitution. The letter is not atypical. It reads, in part, as follows: Just heard on the news that you are defending the wheat sale to Russia and are giving them credit at the American Taxpayers expense. For some time now I have been checking your record and find that you would make a better COMMUNIST than you make an American. Any proposals that would protect American or our free-enterprise system are opposed by you and any proposals that would help our enemies are

given your whole hearted support. Your famous memorandum is a disgrace and you are a traitor to the CONSTITUTION. This malice and hatred which have become part of our politics cannot be dismissed as the normal excesses of a basically healthy society. They have become far too common. They are beyond the pale of normal political controversy in which honest men challenge each others judgment and opinions but not each others motives and integrity. The excesses of the extremists in our country have created an intolerable situation in which we must all guard our words and the expression of an unorthodox point of view is an extraordinary act of courage. It was in this prevailing atmosphere of suspicion and hate that the murder of the President was spawned, whatever its immediate causes may have been. In an atmosphere in which dissent can be regarded as treason, in which violence is glorified and romanticized, in which direct action is widely preferred to judicial action as a means of redressing grievances, assassination is not really a radical departure from acceptable behavior. As Chief Justice Warren said in his eulogy of President Kennedy: What moved some misguided wretch to do this horrible deed may never be known to us, but we do know that such acts are commonly stimulated by the forces of hatred and malevolence, such as today are eating their way into the bloodstream of American life. What is to be done? What must we do to overcome hatred and bigotry in our national life? For a start, we can call forth the basic decency of America in the wake of the tragedy which has befallen us. Again, in the words of the Chief Justice: If we really love this country; if we truly love justice and mercy; if we fervently want to make this Nation better for those who are to follow us, we can at least abjure the hatred that consumes people, the false accusations that divide us and the bitterness that begets violence. Is it too much to hope that the martyrdom of our beloved President might even soften the hearts of those who would themselves recoil from assassination, but who do not shrink from spreading the venom which kindles thoughts of it in others? It is to be hoped, profoundly to be hoped, that there will be some redemption for the death of our President. That redemption could issue from a national revulsion against extremism and violence, from a calling forth of the basic decency and humanity of America to heal the wounds of divisiveness and hate. We will, and should, continue to have controversy and debate in our public life. But we can reshape the character of our controversies and conduct them as the honest differences of honest men in quest of a consensus. We can come to recognize that those who disagree with us are not necessarily attacking us but only our opinions and ideas. Above all, we must maintain the element of doubt as to our convictions, recognizing that it was not given to any man to perceive ultimate truth and that, however unlikely it may seem, there may in fact be truth or merit in the views of those who disagree with us. On another level, we must do more than we are now doing in the way of organized public effort to explore the depths of human motivation. We must learn more than we now know about the pathological roots and the therapeutic treatment of violence and unreasoning passion in human behavior. Passions writes Eric Hoffer, usually have their roots in that which is blemished, crippled, incomplete and insecure within use. The passionate attitude is less a response to stimuli from without

than an emanation of an inner dissatisfaction. <The Passionate State of Mind, p. 1> We must seek the means in our homes and in our schools and in community programs of mental health of overcoming that which is crippled, incomplete and insecure within us and of bringing meaning, fulfillment, and dignity into the lives of all Americans. Furthermore, if we are to overcome violence and bigotry in our national life, we must alter some of the basic assumptions of American life and politics. We must recognize that the secular Puritanism which we have practiced, with its principles of absolute good, absolute evil, and intolerance of dissent, has been an obstacle to the practice of democracy at home and the conduct of an effective foreign policy. We must recognize that the romanticized cult of the frontier, with its glorification of violence and of unrestrained individualism, is a childish and dangerous anachronism in a nation which carries the responsibility of the leadership of the free world in the nuclear age. Finally, we must revive and strengthen the central core of our national heritage, which is the legacy of liberty, tolerance, and moderation that come to us from the ancient world through a thousand years of English history and three centuries of democratic evolution in North America. It is this historic legacy which is the best and the strongest of our endowments. It is our proper task to strengthen and cultivate it in the years ahead. If we do so, patiently and faithfully, we may arrive before too long at a time when the voices of hate will no longer be heard in our land and the death of our President will be redeemed.