In Ken Burns’ acclaimed 1991 documentary, The Civil War, southern writer Shelby Foote became the series’ most memorable commentator. Burns had not planned to give him so much visibility, but Foote’s Mississippi Delta drawl and his often-witty observations essentially stole the show. But some of Foote’s observations were actually quite profound, many having contemporary relevance.
Foote noted that prior to the Civil War, people said “the United States are” — using the grammatical plural; but after the Civil War it became “the United States is.” As Foote put it, a major outcome of that horrible conflict was that it made the country “an is.”
Over the past decade, our status as “an is” has eroded, weakened, degenerated — pick your preferred description. The Civil War settled many things, including the issue of slavery and the right of states to secede from the union, but it may be that being “united” has less permanence than we have previously believed.
I was at the World War II memorial in Washington a few years ago and an old veteran who was visiting expressed his discomfort that there were fifty-six concrete pillars comprising the design, one for each state and the seven US territories plus the District of Columbia. “During the war,” the veteran explained, “we said ‘the forty-eight,’ and ‘the forty-eight’ meant something.”
The comment suggested to me that the “united” in the “United States” might not have been as fully embraced even during WWII as many of us had believed. In other words, Foote may have declared the country to be “an is” following the Civil War with more optimism than the national mood actually supported. And perhaps the post-WWII challenge posed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War created a sense of unity and singular purpose that was more a reaction to the urgency of the moment than a developed sense of national unity.
A college government professor once commented about Robert E. Lee’s decision to accept a senior military position in his home state of Virginia, rather than command of the union Army, that it suggested by 1861 we had “created America but not yet Americans.”
The question we have today, and it is a most serious one, is are we still distant from truly being Americans? If perhaps no longer a collection of states, are we instead a collection of regions having differing regional histories, aspirations, and cultures? Are we to some extent a nation with a coastal culture that is distinct from the culture of the vast interior? Are those from the great urban centers detached from those in the rural heartland? Does the South, now among the nation’s more vibrant regions, still cling to the certainly fallacious idea that it would be better off as a separate polity? As some suggest, are we now a collection of angry tribes?
Perhaps this is just the international fad of the moment. Surprisingly — at least to some — the post-Cold War period has been one of disintegration. The Soviet Union largely broke apart, but in its peripheral areas Russia still exerts great influence. Czechoslovakia broke into separate states, as did Yugoslavia. Various old tribal identities continue to create centrifugal forces in the Middle East, some more visible and vigorous than others.
Being “united” takes more attention and energy than has seemed the case in the past hundred and fifty years. Perhaps it is not a natural condition, but rather the result of constant endeavor. And the evidence is growing that there has been insufficient attention and energy paid to it during the past few years, especially since 2016.
Donald Trump ran for president in 2016 challenging and dismissing many of the factors that had served to unite the United States. He appealed to regional and cultural distinctions, and seemingly cared little for the themes of unity. He worked his friendly constituencies hard dismissing those unfriendly and unconvinced, even within his own party. He gave out his pejorative little nicknames to Republicans and Democrats alike. And he won the election by winning the electoral vote while losing the popular vote by the largest margin in American history. Yet he believed he had won a clear mandate and acted accordingly.
In 1960, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon by a very narrow popular vote margin. Recognizing that almost as many people had voted against him as for him, and likely aware that he was replacing a very popular President Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy reached out to the other side. He appointed two Republicans to his cabinet, Douglas Dillion and Robert McNamara, and gave them major positions — Treasury and Defense respectively.
After Eisenhower (except for George H. W. Bush), all Presidents have appointed at least one member of the other party to a cabinet post. President Obama originally named three Republicans to his cabinet, though one withdrew before going through confirmation. This can be viewed in many ways, but it is unquestionably an effort at bi-partisanship and an attempt to make the United States more united. But Trump made no such effort despite having numerous positions that remained open (off-and-on) throughout his administration, and despite being a minority president to a degree unlike any other.
In addition, his countless rallies during his tenure were not crafted to broaden his appeal, but rather to deepen it with those who had already bought into his numerous exaggerations and misrepresentations. Most famously, this culminated with the rally he summoned at the White house on January 6, 2021, that resulted in his true believers storming the US capitol in an effort to stop the formal and largely symbolic counting of the electoral votes from the November election. This action not only illustrated how divided the nation had become, but how far Trump’s followers were willing to go to solidify and further the chasm that had developed.
But this refusal to attend to the “united” concept was not just a failure of Trump. It was also the inevitable outcome of the position taken by the Republican congressional leadership, best reflected in October 2010 when Senate Republican Mitch McConnell declared his objective was to make President Barack Obama a one-term president. McConnell’s remark was not unique, rather it reflected a growing Republican Party adoption of governmental obstructionism and political extremism.
In 2012, respected political scientists Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann published an exceptionally blunt book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. The book was a follow-on to their earlier work on the growing dysfunction in Congress titled The Broken Branch. In the 2012 work, the authors wrote that: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by the conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
The assertion was unremarkable coming from Mann, a former director of the government program at the left-of-center Brookings Institution, but it was quite notable coming from Ornstein, a senior fellow at the very conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an organization whose staff included former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. The assertion was even more remarkable because it concisely described and predicted the direction of the Republican Party after 2016 and the political arrival of Donald Trump.
One could go into great detail on each of the elements of obstructionism and denial detailed by Mann and Ornstein, but let us restrict this discussion to one — the current GOP’s scorn of compromise. As Mann and Ornstein note, in the Obama administration there were examples where Republicans turned against legislation they themselves had crafted when Obama stated he would support it. Compromise on an issue where the two parties disagree is quite unlikely when one party will even renounce its own proposal so as not to be seen as compromising. The most recent example would be Republican opposition to a commission examining the details of the January 6th insurrection despite the fact that the House bill was crafted with Republican participation. In the end, thirty-five House Republicans voted with Democrats to pass the bill, sending it to the Senate where it was filibustered, attracting only six of the necessary ten Republican votes to bring it to the floor for debate.
To return briefly to Ken Burn’s Civil War, in one segment Foote offered an interesting view on why the horrible 1861–65 experience occurred. In his view: “It was because we failed to do the thing we really had a genius for, which is compromise. Americans like to think of themselves as uncompromising. Our true genius is in compromise. The whole government is founded on it, and it failed.”
And it did fail in 1861. To be sure, compromise does not always yield the desired result. The “Missouri Compromise” of 1820 and the “Compromise of 1850,” delayed the civil war but did not prevent it. And Foote is correct, many in today’s political arena seek to be known as “uncompromising,” even when compromise is needed, and their loudest objections are not necessarily factually based.
But when political leaders believe their own interests are best served by being uncompromising, and they are unwilling to accept facts — be they historical, legal, or scientific — then the odds of ever being “united” become distressingly remote. Yet this seems to be our current condition, one that is divisive and destructive, one requiring enlightened leadership if we are to once again be the United States and return to being an “is.”
Lincoln, in an 1838 speech said that no foreign power could ever, “take a drink from the Ohio or leave a track on the Blue Ridge.” But, he continued, were the nation to fail it would result from a national “suicide.” Such a concern faces us now. We must have leaders who seek to emphasize the great ideas and principles that unite us and de-emphasize those lesser issues that stoke division. They must learn to distinguish the essential from the inessential, the fundamental from the trivial. They must accept that every hill is not worth holding, much less dying on.
Being “united” is evidently not the default condition in political nature. Securing it takes work, recognition, consideration and — yes — compromise. It takes the understanding that other points of view might have enough value to be considered rather than summarily dismissed. Those conditions create unity, they make us an “is”.
