The Poverty of Catholic Intellectual Life
1
In the middle of August in 1818, some three thousand five hundred Methodists descended on a farm in Washington County, Maryland, for days of prayer and fellowship. Their lush surroundings seemed to quiver in the swelter of a mid-Atlantic summer, to which the believers added the fever of faith. Men and women, white and black, freedmen and slaves, they were united by gospel zeal. There was only one hiccup: the scheduled preacher was ill-disposed and nowhere to be found.
The anxious crowd turned to the presiding elder, a convert to Methodism from Pennsylvania Dutch country named Jacob Gruber, who accepted the impromptu preaching gig as a matter of ecclesial duty. His sermon began, in the customary style, with a reading from Scripture: “Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34). After explaining this verse from a theological perspective, Gruber ventured to apply it to the moral conditions of the American republic at the dawn of the nineteenth century. How did the United States measure up against this biblical standard?
Not very well at all. America, Gruber charged, was guilty of “intemperance” and “profaneness.” But worst of all was the “national sin” of “slavery and oppression.” Americans espoused “self-evident truths, that all men are created equal, and have unalienable rights,” even as they also kept men, women, and children in bondage. “Is it not a reproach to a man,” asked Gruber, “to hold articles of liberty and independence in one hand and a bloody whip in the other?” There were slaves as well as white opponents of slavery at the camp that day, and we may assume that they were fired up by Gruber’s jeremiad.
But there were also slaveholders among his hearers. This last group was not amused. Following their complaints, he was charged with inciting rebellion and insurrection. Luckily for Gruber, he had the benefit of one of the ablest attorneys in Maryland, a forty-one-year-old former state lawmaker who also served as local counsel to an activist group that helped rescue Northern freedmen who were kidnapped and sold as slaves in the South. The case was tried before a jury in Frederick that included slaveholders and was presided over by judges who were all likewise slaveholders. Even so, Gruber’s lawyer offered a forceful defense of his client’s right to publicly voice revulsion at slavery. In his opening statement, the lawyer declared that
there is no law which forbids us to speak of slavery as we think of it. . . . Mr. Gruber did quote the language of our great act of national independence, and insisted on the principles contained in that venerated instrument. He did rebuke those masters who, in the exercise of power, are deaf to the calls of humanity; and he warned of the evils they might bring upon themselves. He did speak of those reptiles who live by trading in human flesh and enrich themselves by tearing the husband from the wife and the infant from the bosom of the mother.
The lawyer went on to identify himself with the sentiments expressed in the sermon. “So far is [Gruber] from being an object of punishment,” that the lawyer himself would be “prepared to maintain the same principles and to use, if necessary, the same language here in the temple of justice.” The statement concluded with an unmistakable echo of Gruber’s sermon: that so long as slavery persisted in the United States, it remained a “blot on our national character.” Only if and when the detestable Institution was abolished could Americans “point without a blush to the language held in the Declaration of Independence.”
Gruber was acquitted of all charges. His triumphant lawyer was none other than Roger Brooke Taney: radical Jacksonian, successor to John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court, and author of the decisive opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Alongside fellow Jacksonian Orestes Brownson, Taney was the most influential Catholic in American public life during the pre-Civil War period. In Dred Scott, he rendered an opinion defined by an unblinking legal originalism — the notion that the judge’s role is strictly limited to upholding the intentions of constitutional framers and lawmakers, heedless of larger moral concerns. Applying originalist methods, Taney discovered that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery under the Missouri Compromise and that African-Americans could not be recognized as citizens under the federal Constitution. His reasoning prompted his abolitionist critics to “go originalist” themselves, countering that the Constitution had to be decoded using the seeing stone of the declaration. Put another way, Taney set in train a dynamic in American jurisprudence that persists to this day.
What do American Catholics make of Taney today? What does he represent to us? For most, Taney is occluded by the fog of historical amnesia that afflicts Americans of every creed. If he is remembered at all, it is as the notorious author of Dred Scott — one of those figures whose name and face are fast being removed from the public square amid our ongoing racial reckoning. Many of the chief justice’s contemporaries would have approved of this fate for “The Unjust Judge” (the title of an anonymous Republican pamphlet, published upon his death, that condemned Taney as a second Pilate). Taney ended his life and career attempting to foist slavery on the whole nation, prompting fears that markets for bondsmen would soon crop up in Northern cities. His evil decision sealed the inevitability of the Civil War and hastened the conflict’s arrival. “History,” concluded one abolitionist paper, “will expose him to eternal scorn in the pillory she has set up for infamous judges.” Speaking against a measure to install a bust of the late chief justice at the Supreme Court, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts fumed that “the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history.” An abolitionist ally of Sumner’s, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, said he would sooner spend two thousand dollars to hang Taney’s effigy than appropriate half that amount from the public fisc for a bust of the man.
Modern American institutions should be excused for declining to memorialize a figure like Taney. What is inexcusable is the contemptuous indifference and incuriosity of much of the orthodox Catholic intellectual class not just toward Taney and figures like him, but almost to the entirety of the American tradition, in all its glories and all its flaws: the great struggle to preserve authentic human freedom and dignity under industrial conditions; to promote harmony in a culturally and religiously divided nation; to balance competing and sometimes conflicted regional, sectional, and class interests; and to uphold the common good — all, crucially, within a democratic frame.
This profound alienation is, in part, an understandable reaction against the progressive extremism of recent years, which has left orthodox and traditionalist Catholics feeling like “strangers in a strange land.” But it is also a consequence of an anti-historical and deeply un-Catholic temptation to treat anything flowing from modernity as a priori suspect. The one has given rise to the other: a pitiless mode of progressivism, hellbent on marginalizing the public claims of all traditional religion and the Church’s especially, has triggered a sort of intellectual gag reflex. I have certainly felt it, and sometimes vented it. Anyone who knows his way around the traditionalist Catholic lifeworld knows the reflex: Who cares, really, what American political actors, Catholic or otherwise, have done through the ages? The whole order, the whole regime, is corrupt and broken.
Whatever the sources, the results are tragic: highbrow Catholic periodicals in which you will not find a single reference to Lincoln, let alone Taney; boutique Catholic colleges that resemble nothing so much as Hindu Kush madrassas, where the students can mechanically regurgitate this or that section of the Summa but could not tell you the first thing about, say, the Catholic meaning of the New Deal; a saccharine aesthetic sensibility, part Tolkien and part Norman Rockwell, that yearns for the ephemeral forms of the past rather than grappling with the present in the light of the eternal; worst, a romantic politics that, owing to an obsession with purity, can neither meaningfully contribute to democratic reform nor help renew what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. felicitously called the “vital center” of American society: the quest for a decent order in a vast and continental nation, uniting diverse groups not in spite of, but because of, their differences.
All this, just when a dangerously polarized nation could desperately use that intellectual capaciousness and historical awareness, that spirit of universality, for which the Catholic tradition is justly renowned.
The whole order, the whole regime, is corrupt. The Catholic critique of modern politics is formidable. It cannot be reduced, as Michael Walzer did in these pages not too long ago, to a fanatical yearning for a repressive society bereft of “individual choice, legal and social equality, critical thinking, free speech, vigorous argument, [and] meaningful political engagement.” As if these ideals were not instantiated in various modes and circumstances under preliberal regimes; or as if actually existing liberal democracies have always and everywhere upheld them, heedless of other concerns, such as solidarity, social cohesion, or simple wartime necessity.
The tension arises also at a much deeper level: namely, the metaphysical. The classical and Christian tradition holds that every agent acts for an end (or range of ends). It is the examination of the ends or final causes of things that renders the world truly legible to us. Most things in nature, from the lowliest shrub to astronomical objects, act for their respective ends unconsciously. But human beings’ final end — to live in happiness — is subject to our own choices. Those choices are, in turn, conditioned by the political communities we naturally form. It follows that a good government is one that uses its coercive authority to habituate good citizens, whose choices fulfill our social nature, rather than derail us, unhappily, toward antisocial ends.
Government, in this telling, is not a necessary evil, but an expression of our social and political nature. Government is what we naturally do for the sake of those goods that only the whole community can secure, and that are not diminished by being shared: common goods. Justice, peace, and a decent public order are among the bedrock common goods, though these days, protection of the natural environment — our common home — supplies a more concrete example, not to mention an urgent priority. And just as government is not a tragedy, the common good is not a “collectivist” imposition on the individual. Rather, it comprehends and transcends the good of each individual as an individual. We become more social, more fully human, the more we partake in and contribute to the common good of the whole.
The Church took up this classical account of politics as its own, giving birth to what might be called a Catholic political rationality. In doing so, sages such as Augustine and Aquinas made explicit its spiritual implications. If there be an unmoved mover or absolute perfection in which all others participate, as the unaided reason of the Greek metaphysicians had deduced, then true happiness lies in communion with this ultimate wellspring of reality — with the God who has definitively revealed himself, first at Sinai and then even more intimately in Jesus of Nazareth.
The eternal happiness of the immortal soul is thus the final common good of individuals and of the community. It is the summum bonum, the highest good. Men and women’s status as rational, ensouled creatures thus cannot be partitioned off from how we organize our politics. To even attempt to do so is itself to stake a spiritual claim, one with profound ramifications, since politics is architectonic with respect to all other human activities (to repeat the well-known Aristotelian formula), and since the law never ceases to teach, for good or ill.
This final step in the argument is where things get hairy, since it turns on revealed truths to which Catholics give their assent and adherents of other belief systems do not. The ideal — of properly ordering, or “integrating” if you will, the temporal and spiritual spheres — has never been abrogated by the Church, not even by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Yet what this proper ordering should look like as a matter of policy has clearly shifted in the mind of the Church since the council and in the teaching of recent popes. A reversion to the specific legal forms and practices of, say, King Louis IX or even Pope Pius IX is unimaginable. It would be unimaginably cruel. “This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom.” It is among the most unequivocal statements ever to be etched in a Holy See document (Dignitatis Humanae). True, religious freedom, like all rights, must be circumscribed by the common good. And a “confessional state,” under the right circumstances and with due respect for religious freedom, is not ruled out. But if the Roman pontiff isn’t running around demanding confessional states in the twenty-first century, then a lay Catholic writer such as yours truly would be wise similarly to demur.
As vexing as disagreements over the scope of the Church’s public authority have been, the basic metaphysical rupture is of far greater practical import today. The revolt against final causes unsettled the whole classical picture of an orderly cosmos whose deepest moral structures are discernible to human reason; and whose elements, from the lowest ball of lint to the angels in heaven, are rationally linked together “like a rosary with its Paters,” to borrow an image from the French Thomist philosopher A.G. Sertillanges. The anti-metaphysical revolt lies at the root of orthodox Catholics’ alienation from modern polities, and American order especially, which has lately reached a crisis point.
As Walzer correctly hints, the revolt against metaphysics was launched by Luther & Co. for reasons that had nothing to do with political liberalism. Rather, the Reformers accused Rome of having polluted the faith of the Bible by deploying pagan categories to explain it. (In this sense, the Reformation was a special instance of the fundamentalist “biblicism” that had already erupted as early as the thirteenth century in the violent reaction of some Latins to the Muslim recovery of Aristotle.) Still, it was Hobbes and his progeny who brought the revolt to a stark conclusion, ushering in the modern. “There is no finis ultimis,” Hobbes declared in Leviathan, “nor summum bonum as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.”
Ditch the highest good, and you also sweep away the common good, classically understood. The whole analogical edifice crumbles. What are human beings? Little more than selfish brutes, thrown into a brutish world and naturally at war with their fellows. Why do we form communities? Because we fear each other to death. The best politics can achieve is to let everyone maximize his self-interest, and hope that the public good emerges “spontaneously” out of this ceaseless clash of human atoms. Self-interest comes to dominate the moral horizon of the modern community; selfishness, once a vice, now supplies what one thinker has called its “low but solid ground.” Yet practices such as commercial surrogacy and suicide-by-doctor, not to mention the more humdrum tyrannies of the neoliberal model, leave us wondering just how low the ground can go and how solid it really is. Invoking natural law in response, Catholics find that our philosophical premises, which like all serious thinking in terms of natural law appeals to reason and not to revelation, are treated like nothing more than an expression of subjectivity and a private “faith-based” bias.
Historic Christianity had taught that “order is heaven’s first law,” as Sertillanges put it, that even angels govern each other in harmonious fashion. The new politics insisted that order was a fragile imposition on brute nature; that if men were angels, they would have no need of government. Over the years, I have heard liberals of various stripes earnestly profess that the classical account of politics is nothing more or less than a recipe for authoritarianism, even “totalitarianism.” This is madness. As George Will wrote in a wonderful little book published in 1983, the classical account of politics formed for millennia the “core consensus” of Western civilization, and not only Western civilization.
Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, and Aquinas believed that governments exist to promote the common good, not least by habituating citizens to be naturally social rather than unnaturally selfish. The great Jewish and Muslim sages agreed, even as they differed with their medieval Christian counterparts on many details. Confucius grasped at the same ideas. To frame these all as dark theorists of repression is no less silly and ahistorical than when The New York Times claims that preserving slavery was the primary object of the American Revolution.
The reductio ad absurdum of all this is treating all of past history as a sort of dystopia: a benighted land populated exclusively by tyrannical Catholic kings, vicious inquisitors, corrupt feudal lords, and other proto-totalitarians. Under this dispensation, as progressives discover ever more repressed subjects to emancipate, history-as-dystopia swallows even the relatively recent past, and former progressive heroes are condemned for having failed to anticipate later developments in progressive doctrine. The dawn of enlightened time must be shifted forward, closer and closer to our own day.
The whole order, the whole regime, is corrupt and broken. That about sums up the purist moral instinct, the phobia of contamination, at the heart of, say, The 1619 Project or the precepts of Ibram X. Kendi. It is the instinct of a young liberal academic with a big public profile who once told me with a straight face that he thinks Aristotle was a “totalitarian.” But it is also, I worry, the instinct that increasingly animates the champions of Catholic political rationality, driving them to flights of intellectual fancy and various forms of escapism, and away from the vital center of American life.
The temptation — faced by the orthodox Catholic lifeworld as a whole, not just this or that faction — is to ignore the concrete development of the common good within American democracy. We face, in other words, a mirror image of the ahistorical tendency to frame the past as a dystopia. Only here, it is modernity, and American modernity in particular, that is all benighted. Meanwhile, the very real shortcomings of the classical worldview — not least, its comfort with slavery and “natural hierarchies” that could only be overcome by the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — are gently glossed over, if not elided entirely.
There is a better way. It begins with taking notice that American democracy has, at its best, offered a decent approximation of Catholic political rationality: the drive to make men and women more fully social; to reconcile conflicting class interests by countervailing elite power from below; and to subject private activity, especially economic activity, to the political imperatives of the whole community. To overcome our misplaced Catholic alienation, then, we need to recover American Catholicism’s tactile sense for the warp and weft of American history: to detect patterns of reform and the common good that lead us beyond the dead-end of the current culture war.
Doing so would liberate us from the phantoms of romantic politics, be it the fantasy of a retreat to some twee artificial Hobbiton or the dream of a heroically virtuous aristocracy. (Today that latter dream could only legitimate the predations of Silicon Valley tycoons, private-equity and hedge-fund oligarchs, and the like.) It may even begin to shorten the distance between orthodox Catholicism and the American center, to the mutual enrichment of both.
To be clear, I have no brief here for the theory, often called “Whig Thomism” in Catholic circles, according to which modern liberal democracy and the American founding represent a natural blossoming of the classical and Christian tradition as embodied by Aquinas, improbably recast by proponents as the first Whig. There clearly was a rupture, and the philosophy and theology of Federalist 51 cannot easily be reconciled with Catholic political rationality. Nor am I suggesting that we chant the optimistic mantra, first voiced by American bishops in the early nineteenth century, that the Founders “built better than they knew”: meaning that the framers of the Constitution somehow (perhaps providentially) transcended their late-eighteenth century intellectual limitations to generate a sound government; or that American order ended up working much better in practice than its theoretical underpinnings might have suggested. “Better than they knew” is a backhanded compliment where patriotism and reason demand sincere reverence for the Founders’ genius for practical statesmanship and constitution-building. This, even as we can critique how their bourgeois and planter-class interests warped their conceptions of liberty and justice — a task progressive historiography has carried out admirably, and exhaustively, since the days of Charles and Mary Beard and the early Richard Hofstadter.
Such debates, over how Catholic or un-Catholic the Founding was, are finally as staid and unproductive as Founders-ism itself. Even the extreme anti-Founding side is engaged in Founders-ism (albeit of a negative variety): the attempt to reduce the American experience to the republic’s first statesmen, who fiercely disagreed among themselves on all sorts of issues, making it difficult to distill a single, univocal “American Idea” out of their sayings and doings.
So what am I proposing? Simply this: that American Catholics must not lose sight of their own first premise, inscribed right there in the opening of the Nichomachean Ethics, that people naturally seek after the good — after happiness — even if they sometimes misapprehend what the genuine article entails. Widened to a social scale, it means that the quest for the common good didn’t grind to a halt with the publication of this or that book by Hobbes or Locke, nor with the rise of the modern liberal state and the American republic.
Whether or not it was called the common good, the American democratic tradition — especially in its Jacksonian, Progressive, and New Deal strains — has set out to make the republic more social and solidaristic, and less subject to self-interested and private (including its literal sense of “idiotic”) passions. The protagonists of this story have acted within the concrete limits of any given historical conjuncture, not to mention their own limits as fallen human beings. The whole project demands from the Catholic intellectual what used to be called “critical patriotism”: a fiercely critical love, but a love all the same.
Such a Catholic inquiry must begin with a consideration of the concrete fact of American actors, Catholic and otherwise, striving for the common good via the practice of democracy, especially economic democracy.
2
Consider Roger Brooke Taney. In addition to being a world-historic bad guy, he was an economic reformer. At crucial moments as a member of Jackson’s Cabinet and later as the nation’s chief judicial officer, he insisted that government is responsible for ensuring the flourishing of the whole community, as opposed to the maximal autonomy of private corporate actors. In this aspect, his story is illustrative of how democratic contestation functions as the locus of the American common good, drawing the best energies of even figures whom we otherwise (rightly) condemn for their failings.
He was born in 1777, in Calvert County, in southern Maryland. Six generations earlier, the Taneys had arrived in the region as indentured servants. They had won their freedom through seven years of hard toil. Freed of bondage, the first Taney in Calvert became prosperous, even getting himself appointed county high sheriff. In short time, his descendants joined the local gentry. To ease their way socially, they converted to Catholicism, the area’s predominant faith. Yet the colony was soon overrun by migrating Puritans, who barred Catholics from holding public office, establishing their own schools, and celebrating the Mass outside their homes.
The Taneys had supported the revolution in 1776, not least in the hope that it might bring them greater religious liberty. The birth of the new republic otherwise barely touched them, at least initially. They continued to occupy the commanding heights in the area, from a majestic estate that overlooked the Patuxent River to the west, while to the south flowed Battle Creek — named after the English birthplace of the wife of the first colonial “commander,” Robert Brooke, another convert to Catholicism. It was a measure of the Taneys’ social rise, from their humble origins to the Maryland planter semi-aristocracy, that Roger’s father, Michael, had married a Brooke. Having begun their journey in the New World as indentured servants, the Taneys now owned seven hundred and twenty-eight acres of land, ten slaves, twenty-six cattle, and ten horses.
Michael Taney, Roger’s father, belonged to the establishment party, the Federalists, but he broke with them on important questions. He opposed property qualifications for voting, while favoring monetary easing to rescue struggling debtors. These stances were more befitting a follower of Jefferson than a disciple of Hamilton. Michael Taney, then, was a slave-holding democrat — a contradictory posture that we find replicated, a few decades later, in Jacksonian democracy, of which his infamous son was both a leader and a supreme exemplar.
Under the rules of inheritance that in those days governed the fate of male children, Taney’s older brother was to take over the estate, while a younger son was expected to find his own way in the world as a professional, if he was the book-learning type. This was his good fortune, for the business of the estate soon soured: the Napoleonic Wars wrecked the international tobacco trade, and Maryland’s climate was ill-suited to other crops, such as wheat, cotton, and indigo, that dominated slave economies further south and west. The revolution had been a great spur to commercial boom, and that meant urbanization. In Maryland, the center of gravity shifted to towns such as Baltimore, while places such as Calvert County fell behind. It was for those urban power centers that Taney was destined. He graduated valedictorian at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and went on to study law in Annapolis under a judge of the state Court of Appeals, and soon rose to the top of the Maryland bar, eventually becoming attorney general, with a stint in the state legislature as a Federalist before the party imploded.
The post-revolutionary commercial boom decisively gave the upper hand to what might be called “market people”: coastal merchants and financiers, technologically empowered manufacturers, large Southern planters, and enterprising urban mechanics in the North who mastered the division of labor to proletarianize their fellows. Their rise came at the expense of “land people”: the numerical majority, the relatively equal yeomanry that formed the nation’s sturdy republican stock, Jefferson’s “chosen people of God.” The disaffection of the latter set the stage for a ferocious democratic backlash and the birth of American class politics.
As he won entrée to the urban professional bourgeoisie, Taney didn’t leave behind his emotional commitment to the “land people” from whose ranks he thought he hailed. I say thought, because in reality the Taneys belonged to the rarefied planter-capitalist class of the Upper South, even if their fortunes had begun to wane. Still, as a result of this subjective sense of class dislocation, the future Taney would remain acutely aware of the topsy-turvy, and the misery, to which Americans could be exposed in market society. It was predictable that he would rally to Andrew Jackson’s battle cry against finance capital generally and particularly against the Second Bank of the United States.
Congressionally chartered, the Bank of the United functioned simultaneously as a depository for federal funds, a pseudo-central bank, and a profiteering private actor in the money market. Its biggest beneficiaries were market people, those who held “the money power,” in the coinage of Jackson’s senatorial ally and one-time pub-brawl belligerent Thomas Hart Benton. In the 1820s, Taney became a Democrat, and declared himself for “Jacksonism” and nothing else. Soon he found his way into Jackson’s Cabinet as attorney general in the heat of the Bank War.
In 1832, Jackson issued the most famous presidential veto of all time, barring the Bank’s charter from being renewed on the grounds that it made “the rich richer,” while oppressing “farmers, mechanics and laborers.” Taney was a principal drafter of the message, alongside the Kentucky publicist and Kitchen Cabinet stalwart Amos Kendall. The BUS counterpunched by tightening credit in an attempt to bring the Jackson administration to its knees. In response, Old Hickory tapped Taney — “the one who is with me in all points” — to oversee the removal of American taxpayer funds from the Bank’s coffers. It was Taney who, at the behest of a Baltimore crony named Thomas Ellicott, improvised the so-called pet-banking “experiment,” in which the federal deposits were gradually placed with select state banks.
The Bank War was a lousy reform at best, and emblematic of American populism’s enduring flaws. Jackson had not contemplated an alternative to the BUS before restructuring the nation’s credit system on the fly; state banking was the gimcrack alternative improvised as a result of this lack of planning. As the unimpeachably scrupulous Taney was later to learn, to his utter mortification, his Quaker friend Ellicott was a fraudster who had dreamed up state banking as a way to rescue his own bank, which had been engaged in reckless speculation, and to fund further gambling of the kind.
The local and the parochial, it turned out, were no more immune to corruption than the large Northeastern institution; indeed, local cronyism was in some ways worse, since its baleful effects could more easily remain hidden. What followed was a depression, an orgy of wildcat banking, and decades of banking crises that comparable developed nations with more centralized banking systems would be spared. As Hofstadter noted, what had been needed was better regulation of the Bank. Jackson, however, only knew how to wallop and smash.
What matters for our purposes, however, are less the policy details than the overarching concept. Taney was a sincere reformer, keenly aware of what the insurgent democracy was all about. At stake in the struggle, he declared at one point, had been nothing less than the preservation of popular sovereignty against a “moneyed power” that had contended “openly for the possession of the government.” This was about as crisp a definition of the Bank War’s meaning as any offered by those who prosecuted it.
Jacksonian opponents of the Bank considered it an abomination for self-government that there should be a private market actor that not only circumvented the imperatives of public authorities, but also used its immense resources to shape political outcomes to its designs. With the Bank defeated, no longer could a profiteering institution wield “its corrupting influence . . . its patronage greater than that of the Government — its power to embarrass the operations of the Government — and to influence elections,” as Taney had written in the heat of the war. Whatever else might be said about the Jacksonians, they had scored a decisive victory for the primacy of politics over capitalism. Politics, democracy, the well-being of the whole had to circumscribe and discipline economic forces. The Bank War, in sum, had been all about the common good.
Taney believed that market exchanges, especially where markets were created by state action, should be subject to the political give-and-take that characterized Americans’ other public endeavors; subject, too, to the imperatives of the political community. It was a principle that Taney would champion even more explicitly in some of his best rulings as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, especially in 1837 in the Boston Bridges case. As Hofstadter commented, although the outcome of the Bank War was on the whole “negative,” the “struggle against corporate privileges which it symbolized was waged on a much wider front,” most notably the Charles River Bridge case.
The facts of the case are more arcane than a brief summary will permit, but the upshot was that a private corporation — the Harvard corporation, as it happens — had been granted a charter to operate a bridge across the Charles River dividing Boston and Charlestown. Could the state legislature later grant a license to another corporation to build and operate a second bridge, to relieve traffic congestion on the first? Harvard argued that this was a violation of the exclusive contractual concessions that the state had made to it. The second charter, Harvard insisted, trespassed the constitutional prohibition against state laws abridging pre-existing contractual rights — one of the Hamiltonian system’s main defenses against the danger of democracy interfering with the market. Chief Justice Taney, writing for a Jacksonian majority, disagreed with Harvard. Again, the principles that underlay his thinking are more important, for our purposes, than its immediate practical import for corporation law. “Any ambiguity” in contractual terms, Taney wrote in a famous passage,
must operate against the adventurers and in favour of the public. . . . [This is because] the object and end of all government is to promote the happiness and prosperity of the community by which it is established. . . . A state ought never to be presumed to surrender this power, because, like the taxing power, the whole community have an interest in preserving it undiminished. . . . While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and the happiness and well-being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation.
That is, the preservation of the state’s prerogative to act for the common good, even if that at times means derogating private-property rights. Those are genuinely marvelous sentences. There are scarcely any more crystalline expressions of the classical account of politics in the entire American tradition. It is notable, too, that Taney went on to reason that no lawmaking body could possibly bind its own power to act for the common good in granting a privilege to a private actor at some earlier point in history.
In the shadow cast by Dred Scott, praising Taney’s economic jurisprudence can feel a little like the old joke about whether Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed the play. But in fact the tragedy of Dred Scott lay in Taney’s violation of the principle that he had himself articulated in the course of the Bank War and again in the Boston Bridges case. Dred Scott represented a moral catastrophe of epic proportions. It was also a failure to uphold common-good democracy: indeed, Taney’s common-good reasoning in the Charles River case could have served as a dissenting opinion in Dred Scott.
Taney — the lawyer who had once called slavery “a blot on our national character,” who had stated that the Declaration of Independence would be a source of shame until slavery was abolished, and who early in life had manumitted his own bondsmen — ruled that Congress had lacked the authority to ban slavery in parts of the Northwest Territory under the Missouri Compromise. He reasoned that Congress’s power under the Property Clause of the Constitution to make rules for all territories only applied to American lands at the time of ratification, in 1787, and not to territories subsequently acquired, such as through war or the Louisiana Purchase. In the Charles River case, he had insisted that a lawmaking body cannot possibly shackle itself at a particular moment in history in such a way that subsequent generations of lawmakers would be unable to act for the common good of the whole. In declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, however, he imposed just such a limitation on Congress.
But Taney went further than that. In also passing judgment on Dred Scott’s standing to bring suit as a citizen of the United States, he denied the primacy of morality and political rationality that had characterized his reasoning in the Bank War and his Jacksonian rulings on economics. Men at the time of ratification, he pointed out, did not believe that black people were endowed with any rights that whites were obliged to respect. To be sure, the abolitionist press seized on that one sentence to suggest that Taney was expressing his own opinion regarding the moral status of black Americans. Yet the full quotation and reasoning do little to exculpate Taney for attempting to write into the Constitution, in perpetuity, the racist biases of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — prejudice that even enlightened slaveholders in the eighteenth century acknowledged to be just that.
Taney ended his life an authentic villain, fully deserving his ignominious reputation, a fact made all the more painful by his brilliance and doggedness in defense of the economically downtrodden in other contexts. “The Unjust Judge,” the pamphlet anonymously published to celebrate Taney’s death, noted that “in religion, the Chief Justice was Roman Catholic.” And his own Pope Leo X had “declared that ‘not the Christian religion only, but nature herself, cries out against the state of slavery.’” (Never have the words of a Roman pontiff been deployed to such devastating effect against the moral legacy of an American Catholic jurist.)
Removing the “blot on our national character” and correcting Taney’s hideous error in Dred Scott would require the shedding of democratic blood. And future generations of democrats, including the Progressives and especially the New Dealers, would enact far more effective reforms than Taney’s cohort achieved, even as they drew inspiration from the Jacksonian example. Those looking for a Catholic exemplar — for a figure who confidently advanced Catholic political rationality within the American democratic tradition — need look no further than the Reverend James A. Ryan. The moral theologian and activist came to be known as “Monsignor New Deal” for his advocacy for a “living wage” (the phrase was the title, in 1906, of the first of his many books), health insurance for the indigent, the abolition of child labor, and stronger consumer laws, among other causes. In 1936 he vehemently challenged the racist and anti-Semitic populist Father Charles Coughlin and endorsed Franklin Delano Roosevelt for president. In 1942, he published a book called Distributive Justice, in which he insisted that economic policies must not be detached from ethical values and championed the right of workers to a larger share of the national wealth. He was both an originator and a popularizer of New Deal ideas, prompting Roosevelt to serenade him in 1939 for promoting “the cause of social justice and the right of the individual to happiness through economic security.” In 1945, he delivered the benediction at Roosevelt’s last inauguration.
What distinguished Ryan’s public presence was a humane realism about modern life that is sorely lacking among many of today’s “trads.” As the historian Arthur S. Meyer has noted, for example, Ryan in theory gave preference to Catholicism’s patriarchal conception of the living wage. But recognizing that economic necessity forced many American women, especially poor and working-class women, to enter the labor force, he didn’t pine for a romantic restoration of the patriarchal ideal. Instead, he called for the extension of living-wage and labor-union protections to working women. At a more fundamental level, he understood that under modern industrial conditions, social justice and class reconciliation could not be accomplished by means of mere exhortations to virtue targeted at the elites, but by means of power exerted from below and bolstered by state action — in a word, by means of democracy.
To advance the common good today, to act (in the words of Matthew) as salt and light, the American Catholic intellectual must enter this drama, wrestling with its contradictions, sincerely celebrating its achievements, and, yes, scrutinizing its shortcomings in the light of the moral absolutes that we believe are inscribed in the hearts of all men and women. This, as opposed to striking a dogmatic ahistorical posture and rendering judgment from a position of extreme idealism giving rise to an unhealthy and philosophically indefensible revulsion for the nation and its traditions. Critical patriotism and a return to the American center — the vital center redux — should be our watchwords, and this implies, first and foremost, a recognition that American democracy is itself a most precious common good.