Or so it seems. No, I’m not talking about Joe Paterno again [spits]. I’m talking about the description of the United States as a Grand Experiment in democracy or sometimes as a lower-case grand experiment in democracy. I always assumed that one of the founders* said that, that it was a quote in other words. But no, it seems that’s not the case. Unless I’m missing something — which is entirely possible; no, really, it’s entirely possible — the whole thing is a charade.
* Probably Jefferson [spits], right? I mean, he’s usually the guy who said the stuff about the things, isn’t he? But apparently not in this case. Unless, again, I’ve missed something. Which is to say, this is chance for you to note that somebody is Wrong on the Internet! And not just any somebody, but me.
23 comments
January 20, 2012 at 4:34 pm
Vance Maverick
So who did say it? It’s certainly one of those phrases, like “The Great Game”, that feels like it’s been in the air forever.
Tangentially (superfluous adverb!), I remember wondering about “The Great American Novel” back in 1992 or so. I eventually tracked it to John DeForest (via Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore), which was satisfying even though it wasn’t in one of the Federalist Papers. (Of course now the piece is online, and Wikipedia takes you straight there.)
January 20, 2012 at 4:42 pm
eric
Would you settle for Tocqueville saying “the great experiment,” as in “the great experiment was to be made, by civilized man, of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis” at the end of chapter 1 of Democracy in America?
January 20, 2012 at 4:44 pm
Vance Maverick
I sure would. Ari?
January 20, 2012 at 4:45 pm
Paul Rosenberg (@PaulHRosenberg)
PT Barnam. That’s who said it. But don’t try to track it down. He said it on the sly.
January 20, 2012 at 4:51 pm
eric
Of course that Tocqueville phrase is an artifact of the Henry Reeve translation; the original is “C’est là que les hommes civilisés devaient essayer de bâtir la société sur des fondements nouveaux, et qu’appliquant pour la première fois des théories jusqu’alors inconnues ou réputées inapplicables, ils allaient donner au monde un spectacle auquel l’histoire du passé ne l’avait pas préparé.”
January 20, 2012 at 5:04 pm
Pudd'nhead Wilson
C’mon Eric. That can’t possibly be good enough. We need a genuine American, preferably one that doesn’t even speak French.
Seems Madisonian to me. Maybe something like “great experiment in self-government”?
Of course, Carl Becker said it. He’s historical and stuff.
January 20, 2012 at 5:35 pm
eric
Arthur Goldhammer’s translation of that Tocqueville sentence runs,
Because after all, Tocqueville didn’t say “experiment,” great or otherwise. Really, this is another instance of what Ari is pointing to; people want great figures to have said the US was a grand/great experiment, even when they didn’t.
January 20, 2012 at 5:45 pm
Vance Maverick
Well, “essayer”, rightly translated as “attempt”, carries some of the meaning.
Becker uses the phrase as if it were already established — but also quotes it once, from a speech by John Bright, another foreigner (but after Tocqueville).
January 20, 2012 at 5:53 pm
eric
Well, “essayer”, rightly translated as “attempt”, carries some of the meaning.
Yes, this is true – but Goldhammer points out that Tocqueville was no friend to “experiment” applied to society and was unlikely to use the phrase in a complimentary fashion or to associate it with “great”.
January 20, 2012 at 6:13 pm
Vance Maverick
I wonder if even Reeve meant to convey the full detached attitude toward possible outcomes implied by the scientific use of the word….
January 20, 2012 at 6:53 pm
Main Street Muse
I do think this has been a grand/great experiment in democracy.
However, if Newt Gingrich, who could not make tenure at West Georgia College is considered the great intellect of the GOP, the experiment is not quite going as planned….
[I am in no way a fan of Jefferson, though I think he was truly way ahead of his time in terms of hypocrisy and reliance on debt.]
January 21, 2012 at 1:07 am
andrew
I’m surprised “Great American Novel” is so late. I would have guessed it to be from the early republic, coming out of one of those “why isn’t American literature great yet?” discussions.
January 21, 2012 at 1:53 am
andrew
From the conclusion to Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution, and the Means of Making it a Benefit to the World (1784 or 1785, must have gone through multiple versions/editions):
On the other hand, he was a Brit.
January 21, 2012 at 3:30 am
andrew
From Washington’s first inaugural:
January 21, 2012 at 3:44 am
andrew
Adams also refers to it as an experiment in his
firstinaugural, but the language is really boring so I won’t quote it. Searching his works at the Online Library of Liberty suggests he uses the language of experiment a lot to talk about politics, but that he lacked the ability to produce powerful language.Jefferson uses it a lot too, and more poetically. The phrase “great experiment” shows up in this draft of a declaration of a protest on federalism and internal improvements from 1825. But there’s instances of him referring to the U.S. as an experiment going back a lot farther than that. For example, a letter from 1802:
January 21, 2012 at 3:56 am
andrew
One more and then I’m going to sleep. (By the way, the serial commenting is just to keep out of the spam filter while posting links.) Here’s Washington to Catherine Macaulay Graham, January 9, 1790 (again from the library of liberty site):
I don’t know if there are any literal-phrase “grand experiment in democracy” quotations from the founding generation, but the spirit’s there. A lot.
January 21, 2012 at 5:55 am
chris y
If the Great Experiment returns negative results, will any journal accept it?
January 21, 2012 at 11:45 am
Vance Maverick
Andrew’s citations are great. Was Ari just trolling the readership, to see who had us in their RSS feeds still?
January 21, 2012 at 1:47 pm
ari
Andrew’s citations are not great! (I mean, they are, but nobody really said grand experiment. Like I said, we’re call captive to Big Jefferson.)
January 21, 2012 at 4:53 pm
andrew
Literalist.
January 22, 2012 at 1:01 pm
eric
Big Jefferson
This kind of demands a short Sherman Hemsley joke.
January 23, 2012 at 1:16 am
Lurker
You know, this usage of the term “Great Experiment” is decidedly a US one. Even though I have been an avid follower of European political and historical discourse for more than a decade, I have not seen it used on the US government. Instead, it is usually used, and almost always pejoratively, of the USSR which used this terminology extensively in 1920′s. It’s even a joke: “Communism, the only system of government proven unfeasible empirically”.
January 27, 2012 at 5:26 pm
William Adelman
“Our nation was founded as an experiment in human liberty. Its institutions reflect the belief of our founders that men had their origin and destiny in God”
I think if we ask people who knew Dulles’ friends well, we’ll get a very clear answer.
“Dulles also became a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, an international law firm. According to Karlheinz Deschner’s book The Moloch Dulles ascribed assets of 1 billion dollars to the Nazi party in 1933 after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, and according to Stephen Kinzer’s 2006 book Overthrow, his firm benefited from doing business with the Nazi regime. Throughout 1934, Dulles was a very public supporter of Hitler. However, the junior partners, led by his brother Allen, were appalled by Nazi activities and threatened to revolt if Dulles did not end the firm’s association with Hitler et al. In 1935, Dulles closed Sullivan & Cromwell’s Berlin office; later he would cite the closing date as 1934, no doubt in an effort to clear his reputation by shortening his involvement with Nazi Germany”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles