The Pragmatic Inaugural

Nicolaus Mills: The Pragmatic Inaugural

BY COMPARISON with the soaring rhetoric he used to launch his presidential campaign and mark his election-night victory, the language of President Obama’s inaugural was subdued. Nothing in it was comparable to Lincoln’s first inaugural appeal to “the better angels of our nature” or Franklin Roosevelt’s declaration in his first inaugural that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

But there was nothing ordinary in the political or generational break that the president called for in his inaugural. The historical roots for what he had to say lie deep within the nineteenth century in the pragmatism of America’s greatest philosopher, William James, and the speech that James delivered in Boston in 1897 at the unveiling of the statue dedicated to Civil War hero Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the black troops of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, most of whom, like Shaw, were the victims of the Fifty-Fourth’s unsuccessful assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina in 1863.

At the heart of James’s philosophy was his belief that the only way to know the truth was by measuring “what works best in the way of leading us.” James’s aim was to get away from verbal and ideological solutions in order to focus on “fruits, consequences, facts.” As he wrote in his most famous essay, “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,” pragmatism asks, “Grant an idea or belief to be true, what concrete difference will its being true make in any one’s actual life?”

In his inaugural President Obama was equally resolute in insisting on the same respect for practical consequences. As he observed midway through his speech, “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works–whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified. Where the answer is yes, we intend to move forward. Where the answer is no, programs will end.”

For William James, pragmatism meant, above all else, a break with philosophical arguments that went nowhere. Pragmatism allowed everyone to start fresh. During his inaugural President Obama signaled a parallel break with the past. He would not allow himself to get caught up in the ideological debates that in recent years had consumed the Reagan, Clinton, and two Bush administrations. The issues so important both to the World War II generation and Baby Boomer presidents were not going to be continued by him. As he told those who wanted to keep these issues alive in the hope of making partisan gains, “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them–that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”

James’s belief that pragmatism was relevant to the politics of post-Civil War America was made dramatically clear by him at the dedication of the Shaw Memorial. It would have been easy for James as the principal speaker that day to focus on the bravery of the martyred Shaw and his black troops. But James went far beyond eulogy, noting how the bronze relief that the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens had created in memory of Shaw and the troops of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment was different from the monuments to generals that had become part of the American landscape. The Shaw memorial, as James observed, was “the first soldier’s monument to be raised to a particular set of comparatively undistinguished men.” The memorial’s uniqueness lay in its honoring of what ordinary men are capable of achieving, even in defeat.

Shaw had shown courage on the battlefield, but what James believed truly distinguished him was the kind of “civic courage” that in an era of Northern and Southern racism led him to assume command of a black regiment. Such courage, reflected “by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly” were the qualities that James saw as the key to America’s future, and in his inaugural President Obama made the same type of civic courage the centerpiece of his speech.

After praising the bravery of Americans who had died in places like Concord, Gettysburg, and Normandy, the president spoke of the quieter challenges of the twenty-first century and the need for a “new era of responsibility.” In this era, “hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity” were going to be critical, the president insisted, and what he offered by way of his most telling example of these virtues was “the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job.” The attributes that James defined as civic courage were for President Obama attributes that said “we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world.”

Small wonder then that the president’s inaugural with its emphasis on pragmatic good works was grounded in the language of everyday life! He had no interest in upstaging his own message with rhetoric that drew attention to itself. Even more than asking Americans to believe in him, he was asking them to believe in one another.

Nicolaus Mills is a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.