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Introduction

Affirmative action policies, perceived as special preferences for blacks, other defined minorities such as Native Americans, Hispanics and certain groups of Asians, and women, have introduced a new approach to promoting equality in American life. The old approach, initially voiced in the Declaration of Independence, emphasized equality for individuals, defined as equality of opportunity. The new approach focuses on equality for groups, defined as equality of result. It is the collision of these two views on equality that underlies the growing public controversy over affirmative action and quotas.

In order to understand how these perspectives fit into the American debate, this essay examines their origins in the diverse experiences of whites and blacks. The central argument here is that affirmative action policies have forced a sharp confrontation between two core American values: egalitarianism and individualism. It is the egalitarian element in the American Creed that created the consensus behind the civil rights revolution of the past 30 years. But the more recent focus of the civil rights movement, with its emphasis on substantive equality and preferential treatment, forced the country up against the individualistic, achievement-oriented element in the Creed. As a result, the consensus has been broken.

Most Americans make a critical distinction between compensatory action and preferential treatment. Compensatory action involves measures to help disadvantaged groups catch up to the standards of competition set by the larger society -- examples include Head Start and other education programs, federal college aid, job training, community development. Preferential treatment involves suspending those standards -- adopting quotas or other devices that favor citizens on the basis of their membership in groups rather than on the basis of merit. While most Americans support the former, public opinion polls show that majorities of blacks and whites consistently oppose the latter.

The essay concludes with suggestions for refocusing affirmative action on its original goal of guaranteeing equal treatment to individuals. New strategies for enabling members of minority groups to move into the social and economic mainstream should be universalistic or linked to variable traits, such as poverty, rather than to race, gender or ethnicity. Examples include a nationwide system of job apprenticeship for all non-college-bound youths and a civilian version of the G.I. Bill that encourages young people to earn money for college or training by volunteering for service in their communities. The ultimate goal remains, as Lyndon Johnson stressed a generation ago, greater equality of opportunity within a free market economy.

Two Views on Equality

From its inception, the United States has been composed of two peoples whose values and outlook stem from radically different experiences. The dominant or majority view, as explicated in the American Creed and described in the writings of many foreign sociological observers of the country, has been characterized by an emphasis on social egalitarianism, respect across class lines, equality of opportunity, and meritocracy. The minority view, identified with the situation of black Americans, has clearly been for most of American history a system of explicit hierarchy, of caste, of inequality related to hereditary origins.¹

The American Creed can be subsumed in five terms: liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism (the rule of the people) and laissez-faire. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, egalitarianism, in its American meaning, has emphasized equality of opportunity and of respect, not of result or condition.² These values reflect the absence of feudal structures and monarchies and aristocracies. As a new society, the country lacked the emphasis on social hierarchy and deference characteristic of post-feudal cultures. These aspects, as Tocqueville and Max Weber stressed, were reinforced by the country's religious commitment to the "nonconformist", largely congregationally organized, Protestant sects which emphasize voluntarism with respect to the state, and a personal or individual relationship to God, one not mediated by hierarchically organized churches, which predominated in Europe, Canada and Latin America.³ In much of Europe, on the other hand, the historic national values are derivative from strong monarchical and mercantilist states, feudal class and hierarchial religious structures and traditions, which favored an emphasis on hereditary status and family origins.

The importance of these values is also linked, as Friedrich Engels, Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci stressed, to the fact that the United States is the purest bourgeois nation, the least affected by feudal heritages.⁴ The key values endemic in capitalism and industrialism are universalism and achievement. Success in market economies is facilitated by rejection of particularistic obligations, that is of nepotism and other sources of close personal ties. The norms of the market call for meritocracy. An efficient market is open both domestically and abroad. Hiring the best qualified person, whether he or she is black or white, Jewish or Gentile, native or foreign born, is the best way to maximize economic return. The logic of the market dictates selling to those who will pay the most and buying from the lowest priced seller.

A stress on achievement, on moving up in the class system, linked with the widespread belief in individualism and equality of opportunity, has been greater in America than in Europe. On the public policy level, this can be seen most clearly in the early emphasis on the extension of public education to all, as well as the decision to try to give everyone a common education.⁵

It cannot be stressed enough that much in contemporary attitudes and behavior may be explained by the emphasis in the culture on achievement, on getting ahead. As Robert K. Merton has noted, Americans have always believed that everyone (only whites until recently) should try to be a success, regardless of background.⁶ Opinion poll data indicate that this value remains powerful, and that most white people now believe it applies to blacks as well. While understandably ambivalent about the promise of America, a majority of blacks also is committed to the belief that hard work and educational attainment will enable them to get ahead. A Spring 1991 Gallup poll found that both races, "69 percent of whites and 68 percent of blacks say that African-Americans should focus most of their energy on improving [their] education."⁷

The strength of the achievement norm is related to another one -- universalism. Counterpoised to particularism or special treatment, universalism refers to the belief that everyone should be treated similarly in the marketplace of life without reference to traits stemming from birth, class, religion, ethnicity, gender and color.

The treatment of blacks has been the foremost deviation from the American Creed throughout the history of the Republic. If we count American history as starting around 1600, blacks have been here almost from the beginning. However, unlike whites, they spent their first two and a half centuries, that is, until 1865, as slaves. For the next 100 years they largely served as a lower caste group working under explicit or implicit Jim Crow policies, with little opportunity to gain educational or financial resources. Caste systems, whether slavery or segregation, were much more explicitly hierarchial and hereditary than European feudalism. Blacks have only been given a claim to political equality and economic opportunity since the 1960s.

Thomas Jefferson and George Washington voiced their concern over the way the treatment of blacks would affect the future of America. Jefferson wrote in 1781 that, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."⁸ Anticipating in 1791 the possibility that the country might break up because it could not resolve the problem, George Washington told a friend that if this happened "he had made up his mind to move and be of the northern."⁹ Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration, felt -- correctly as it turned out -- that its proclamation that "all men are created equal" would undermine slavery, and that the idea of equality would have a continuing effect on American politics.

Following the logic of Jefferson's observation, Gunnar Myrdal noted in An American Dilemma (1944), his classic analysis of American racism, that white Americans, including most southerners, believe in the Creed, even though their racist practices violate it. From this assumption he concluded that if blacks would organize to vigorously defend their rights and assert that they are mistreated, whites would have to give in. Once they were forced to recognize that blacks were not treated equally, they would have to change their behavior if they wanted to maintain their belief in the Creed.¹⁰ The political successes of the civil rights movement in the sixties showed Myrdal was right. However, in yielding politically, many among the white male political elite also have agreed to group rights, to a form of equality of results.

The value system of white Americans has stressed the individual.¹¹ Citizens have been expected to demand and protect their rights on a personal basis. The exceptional emphasis on law in the United States as compared with Europe, derived from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, has stressed individual rights against the state and other powers. The experience of black Americans, however, has focused on group characteristics, on defining and treating people not according to their personal merits, but according to their ancestry, their race, and their ethnic group.

Post-feudal Europe, too, was organized in particularistic terms, that is, according to class background. European workers and American blacks thus share a stress on class and group solidarity and collective remedies. However, Europe was less stringently stratified than the post-slavery system in the United States. Thus pre-World War II America differed from Europe in two ways: 1) for its large white majority it was much more egalitarian, individualistic and populist; 2) for its black minority it was much more hierarchial and particularistic, group defined, and less free.

NOTES

1. Curiously, many of the classic writings about the United States in the 19th century, which stressed its exceptional character as an egalitarian society, even those written by people who were strongly abolitionist in their sentiments, either ignored the position of blacks, or cited it as a major exception to the pattern which would in time inevitably change and be incorporated into the larger system.

2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 51.

3. Ibid, p. 312.

4. For previous discussion and references see S. M. Lipset, Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 25.

5. It is interesting to read the works of Horace Mann and others writing in the 1830s and 1840s in support of the common school. By this term, they meant what today is called the integrated school. They insisted that the public schools should be common to all, rich and poor, children of immigrants and of natives. This goal, of course did not include blacks, most of whom were slaves at the time.

The strength of this early American commitment to meritocracy and competitive achievement may be seen in the many writings which consciously rejected the European class differentiated education system. To foster equality of opportunity, the educational reformers held up for scorn European academic high schools, the gymnasia in Germany, the lycees in France, the grammar or public schools in England, which only served the top ten percent of the population at best. As they noted, in Europe, other youth were not supposed to obtain skills which would permit them to move up. They could not go to high school. As urban industrial jobs developed, the children of the underprivileged were allowed to attend vocational schools. American educators and politicians rejected this model as fostering a class society. Rather, as noted, they pressed for education in a common school. These trans- Atlantic variations continued deep into the twentieth century, as many European countries maintained academically high standard schools attended by a small privileged minority, destined for university.

The vitality of the early stress on meritocratic values is attested by one of the most remarkable and curious developments in American history, the emergence in the late 1820s of the first political groups in the world to be known as Workingmen's parties. In New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other cities, these parties received between ten and fifteen percent of the vote in local and state elections. They later merged with Democrats during the subsequent Jacksonian period. Some of the Workingmen's parties, particularly the one in New York City, advocated the most radical policy any political party has ever put forth: the nationalization of children, sending them away to boarding school from age six on. The Workingmen were not socialists, they believed in private property; they wanted people to strive to get ahead to become rich, precisely because they favored a more open, more competitive society. Common schools in their view were not sufficient to foster egalitarianism. Attending the same school for five or six hours a day would not change the basic environment of children of diverse social origins. They contended that the only way to eliminate the advantage which family and neighborhood environment give the affluent is to require that all students spend 24 hours a day in the same place, in a state-financed boarding school.

In effect, the Workingmen clearly linked class- based cultural advantage to the perpetuation of inequality. Their solution, as noted, was to take all white children away from their parents, one clearly linked to a comparable proposal made by Plato millennia ago. That "solution," I submit, is the most drastic proposal ever made by a political organization. It is much more extreme than nationalizing all the property in the country.

Not surprisingly, the Workingmen did not gain power. They were, however, able to elect members to legislatures and city councils. The fact that a party with this radical plank could get ten to fifteen percent of the vote in New York City, indicates that during the first half century of the republic, at the time of slavery, there was a strong commitment to the value of equality of opportunity for whites, which was linked to a belief in a competitive market economy. Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1967), pp. 183-189; and Walter Hugins, Jacksonian Democracy and the Working Class, A Study of the New York Workingmen's Movement 1829-1837 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), pp. 13, 18-20, 132-134.

6. Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Il.: The Free Press, 1957), p. 169.

7. Mark Whitaker et al, "A Crisis of Shattered Dreams," Newsweek, May 6, 1991, p. 31.

8. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (New York: Harper and Row Torchbooks, 1964), p. 156.

9. James Thomas Flexner, Washington: The Indispensable Man (New York: New American Library, 1984), pp. 389- 390.

10. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 462-466.

11. Generalizations such as these are inherently comparative, in this case with other countries, and are obviously not meant as absolute judgements. Obviously, Americans have distinguished and discriminated by group characteristics, as is evident in nativist anti- immigrant policies, quota restrictions against Jews and the like. But as compared to all other nations, they have been more individualistic.

Seymour Martin Lipset is a senior scholar at the Progressive Policy Institute.