America's traditional values: the conscience of a nation.

Discussion of "traditional values" has been prominent not only in political slogans and speeches but some polls indicate that they are an important concern for a significant segment of the electorate as well. Yet as a university professor who has researched and written in this area, I have become disturbed (and alarmed) by the way value terms are employed in public discourse. Discussions have often been confusing, misdirected, and skewed for partisan advantage. And, for the most part, those using the rhetoric of traditional values have totally missed the point of how a very special set of values developed as an integral part of the great experiment called the United States of America. Therefore, we need to take a historical look at the values that have served as the goals for America's evolving society and ask three important questions: what are these values, from whence did they come, and how well have we lived up to them?

Over the centuries a number of foreign visitors have traveled through much of the United States, met with citizens from various walks of life, and studied American social-political institutions. The observations and conclusions of these travelers are available today in published essays and books. Their writings provide us with interesting insights about what the United States is all about and what being an 'American" is like. Also, in hearing and reading what citizens say and observing what citizens do, they are able to peel away the veneer and make explicit the values and value conflicts inherent in the American experiment.

Hector St. John Crevecoeur was born in France in 1735 and died there in 1813. During his life he traveled in the Great Lakes area, the Ohio valley, and Pennsylvania. He farmed for awhile in Orange County, New York, and served as French consul in New York City. In 1782 he wrote Letters from an American Farmer, which provides an excellent description of rural life on the eve of the American Revolution. He is perhaps the first writer to note that America had become a "melting pot" of many cultures. He has this to say about what it meant then to be an American:

   What then is the American, this new
   man? ... He is an American, who, leaving
   behind him all his ancient prejudices
   and manners, receives new ones from
   the new mode of life he has embraced,
   the new government he obeys, the new
   rank he holds. Here individuals of all
   nations are melted into a new race of
   men, whose labors and posterity will one
   day cause great changes in the world....
   The American is a new man, who acts
   upon new principles; he must therefore
   entertain new ideas, and form new opinions.

The most celebrated foreign traveler to the United States, however, was Alexis de Tocqueville. He was born in Paris in 1805 into a family that was supportive of the French aristocracy. As an adult he grew increasingly skeptical of the role of the aristocracy in politics and came to think of the United States as a political model for French democracy. In 1831 he and a friend visited the United States, traveling as far west as Michigan, as far south as New Orleans, and spending time in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. His impressions of the country were published in 1835 under the title, Democracy in America (a second volume followed in 1840). Some have called it "the most insightful book ever written about the United States." Here are a few sample quotations:

   Americans of all ages, all stations of life,
   and all types of dispositions are forever
   forming associations. In democratic
   countries knowledge of how to combine
   is the mother of all other forms of
   knowledge....

   There are many men of principle in both
   parties in America, but there is no party
   of principle....

   In no other country in the world is the
   love of property keener or more alert
   than in the United States, and nowhere
   else does the majority display less inclination
   toward doctrines which in any
   way threaten the way property is owned.
   ...

   Two things in America are astonishing:
   the changeableness of most human
   behavior and the strange stability of certain
   principles. [For example] Men are
   constantly on the move, but the spirit of
   humanity seems almost unmoved.

From these brief quotations, certain American characteristics and values seem to emerge. One can sense that Crevecoeur and de Tocqueville detected a unique combination of attributes--something quite different from the Europe of their day. But it would be up to a twentieth-century Swedish economist and sociologist to pull all the "impressions" together and initiate a serious study of the American character and system of values.

Gunnar Myrdal was born in Sweden in 1898 and became a world renowned economist. He was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics in 1974. In 1938 the Carnegie Corporation of New York commissioned him to direct a study of the United States' Negro problem* The material that he collected and interpreted was published in 1944 as An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Although the study's focus was on the race problem, in order to thoroughly explore it (and offer solutions) he had to examine the nation's value structure.

In analyzing the American value system, Myrdal and his associates identified a constellation of general values (or normative concepts) which they termed the American Creed. To Myrdal, this "creed" represented the National Conscience. These values can be viewed as the fundamental ideals of the nation--ideals to which all citizens can reasonably be expected to be committed. They constitute the basic standards that can be employed in describing, debating, and evaluating national issues and problems. They include concepts such as the following:

* Property rights

* Free speech

* Freedom of religion

* Freedom of personal association

* Right to privacy

* Rejection of violence

* Faith in reason as a method of dealing with conflict

* General welfare of all

* Equal opportunity

* Equal protection under the law

* Rule of law (constitutional limits on government)

* Rule by consent of the governed

* Due process of law

* Separation of powers (political)

* Local control of local problems

The ideological roots of the American creed are to be found in the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baron de Montesquieu, and others--in the tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and in English law. In the United States the creed is reflected in a number of political and legal documents that describe the ethical basis of American society and government. These include the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the U. S. Constitution, and the constitution's first ten amendments, constituting the Bill of Rights.

Hence, the American creed (or conscience) might be viewed as an overarching value umbrella that can be employed in analyzing and making decisions regarding controversial public policies. In the process, the creed values, which have citizen support, have to be translated into specific policy decisions where there is likely to be disagreement. The task then is to measure or judge public policy proposals against the standard of the creed. Myrdal had this to say about the judgmental process:

   A need will be felt by the person or
   group, whose inconsistencies in valuations
   are publicly exposed, to find a
   means of reconciling the inconsistencies....
   most persons want to present to
   their fellows--and to themselves--a
   trimmed and polished sphere of valuations,
   where honesty, logic, and consistency
   rule.

Thus, since most people want or appear to be consistent and logical in their valuations, they will eventually, after some foot-dragging and denial, adjust or change their valuations in a direction that is consistent with the generally accepted American creed. This is precisely what Myrdal and his associates thought would happen with regard to the race problem in the United States--a gradual evolutionary process moving race relations toward consistency with the creed's tenets.

In the 1960s, in the midst of the civil rights movement, a team of educational scholars proposed an amendment to the Myrdal American creed formulation. Donald Oliver and James Shaver noted, in Teaching Public Issues in the High School, that Myrdal hadn't accounted for the possibility of conflicts between creed values when applied to practical situations--such as when one person's use of his or her property is likely to violate his or her neighbor's right to privacy or when one person's free speech is restricted because it is likely to incite others to acts of violence.

Oliver and Shaver realized that conflicts between the values in the creed would arise and could be resolved only if all of the values were viewed as logically related to a "higher" value, namely, human dignity. Thus they posited human dignity as the ultimate value and considered the values of Myrdal's creed as both defining characteristics of and instrumental to this human dignity. To quote from their 1966 report, Teaching Public Issues in the High School:

   The multiplicity of purposes in American
   society can be summarized in one
   very abstract phrase: to promote the dignity
   and worth of each individual who
   lives in that society.... it is not likely to
   be disputed at least as an ideal, even
   though it presents some problems in
   translation and practice.

So now we have a hierarchy of American values. At the very top is human dignity and below that is the overarching umbrella of the American creed. Below the creed we find a multitude of individual and group values (which may or may not be consistent with each other and may or may not be consistent with the higher general values).

Over the years, Americans have gradually overcome many practices that were glaringly inconsistent with the values of the American creed. But it hasn't been easy for citizens to live up to the professed high ideals. Progress has been slow at times but, on occasion, seems to leap ahead with zest. The United States is probably best described as a work in progress. The historical examples that follow illustrate how Americans have struggled with themselves over a number of value-related issues.

* In the early years of the republic, after much heated argument, the vote was finally extended to those who didn't own property.

* During the nineteenth century free public education was gradually provided to more and more children.

* The abolitionist movement advocated freeing the slaves, but it took a Civil War and an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to finish the task. (Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address includes a number of statements that relate to the American creed.)

* Ever so gradually the general citizenry came to accept Native Americans as human beings worthy of the fruits of a free society.

* In 1920, after a long, bitter struggle, women were finally allowed to vote throughout the United States.

* Again and again we have had difficulty accepting various immigrant groups into mainstream American society.

* The Progressive movement of the early twentieth century championed legislation to improve factory work conditions and limit child labor.

* New Deal-era legislation offered assistance to the unemployed and the poor through the Works Progress Administration and other programs.

* The civil rights movement of the 1960s resulted in legislation designed to grant full rights of citizenship to black Americans. (Read Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech of 1963 and note how his "dreams" correspond to the ideals of the American creed.)

* In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, homosexuals have been actively seeking and gaining acceptance in American society.

* Since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in 1973 the country has been polarized over the question of the legal status of the human fetus.

A close examination of the examples cited above reveals that historically U.S. citizens have had a problem in determining just who is eligible for the level of human dignity described in the American creed. Other than the original white male property owners, who else should be included? The struggle continues to this day.

In thinking about American values, it is important not to confuse the ideal with reality. The ideals of the American creed can be thought of as societal goals, whereas the social reality is what has been accomplished and the continuing struggle to more fully realize the goals. The very essence of what America means is contained in these goals and this struggle--these are America's traditional values and its conscience as a nation. This experience can certainly be an instructive model for other peoples throughout the world.

Whether we are thinking of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or a Bush-they all speak the language of the American Creed. They just have diverse ways of going about fulfilling its promise.

Charles E. Gray is a professor of history emeritus at Illinois State University.