From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/opinion/sunday/nasty-like-us.html
By EDWARD TENNER
Published: May 26, 2012
Published: May 26, 2012
Plainsboro, N.J.
EDITORS
and pundits seem to agree that the 2012 presidential election will be
one of the hardest fought in memory. Even the international press has
jumped in; an Economist cover predicts “Hardball,” and in April The
Guardian called the campaign “ruthless in its backstabbing,” warning,
“you have seen nothing yet.”
What should be explained instead is
how civil our recent contests have been, for as a society America has
always been attracted to ruthlessness. It might be defined not just as
hard competition but as the deployment of unfair, unethical and
distasteful (if often technically legal) methods. American culture
blended a Protestant sense of mission and virtue with a pragmatism that
could countenance slavery and Indian removal.
America hardly
invented ruthlessness — think of that all-American hero, Napoleon
Bonaparte — but it extended it to the common people. Moralists from
Benjamin Franklin to Horatio Alger and beyond might celebrate character
as the path to success, but the man in the street knew differently.
Adventurers like the notorious filibusterer William Walker
became folk heroes. After a New Orleans jury acquitted Walker of
violating the Neutrality Act of 1818, he began a fund-raising tour for a
new adventure. The early 20th century rags-to-riches baseball star Ty
Cobb “came in hard and with spikes high,” as his biographer Charles C.
Alexander put it, and kept alive the false rumor that he sharpened them.
Secession
sought to protect not just the plantation owners’ way of life but also
the aspirations of Southern yeomen to slaveowning wealth, following the
career of the populist military hero and president Andrew Jackson. And
after the war, the robber barons were as much admired as condemned for
their tactics. As the muckraking historian Matthew Josephson wrote
during the Depression in his book “The Robber Barons,” objections to the
ethics of post-Civil War entrepreneurs like Jim Fisk and Jay Gould were countered by the observation that they were “smart men.”
Americans
had mixed feelings about their 20th-century technological and financial
heroes, too. Thomas A. Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company hired
thugs to enforce his patent claims; independent filmmakers moved to
Hollywood partly to avoid them. Steve Jobs paid little attention to
conditions in his Chinese contractors’ factories. After his death
protests grew too large for Apple to ignore; but even then, not only was
“bad Steve” praised, but many of the demonstrators in the early Occupy
Wall Street movement still revered him.
Attacks on the ruthless
may actually increase their allure. In the 1930s, The New Yorker
reported that a young man applying for a brokerage job declared that he
had read “The Robber Barons” and wanted to become one of them. Fifty
years later, the Oliver Stone film “Wall Street,” intended as an exposé
of greed, inspired a generation of fans of the fictional Gordon Gekko,
as portrayed by Michael Douglas. Perhaps it was this dark glamour that
helped persuade President Bill Clinton, supported by his deputy attorney
general (and current attorney general), Eric H. Holder Jr., to pardon a
refugee from justice, Marc Rich.
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