National Affairs: Macaulay at Roanoke

Between the mainland of North Carolina and a string of shifting sandbanks that make one of the most treacherous regions of the Atlantic coast lies the verdant ten-mile strip of Roanoke Island. There Sir Walter Raleigh made his early and unsuccessful attempts to colonize the land which he, ever the courtier, tactfully called Virginia in honor of his virgin Queen Elizabeth. A previous settlement had already failed when in the summer of 1587 some 120 settlers under Governor John White landed at stout little Fort Raleigh, on the northern tip of the island. On Aug. 18 Governor White’s daughter, Eleanor Dare, bore her husband Ananias, a daughter who was christened Virginia, first child born to English parents in the present U. S. Virginia Dare was nine days old when Governor White left his colony to sail back to England for more money and settlers. When he returned four years later, Fort Raleigh was a deserted, weed-covered ruin. Sole explanation was the Indian word CROATOAN, cut into a post beside the gate.

Last week Franklin Roosevelt entrained in Washington to attend the celebration of Virginia Dare’s 350th birthday. At Roanoke he and North Carolina’s Governor Clyde Roark Hoey enjoyed the sight of a New Deal project, a new Fort Raleigh, erected by WPA. Then the President climbed upon a flag-bedecked stage and launched on one of his favorite themes, a modern political parable to a historical incident which he used as a broadsword to slash his political enemies.

Classes “We hear of the gentlemen of title who, on occasion, came to the Colonies, and we hear of the gentlemen of wealth who helped to fit out the expeditions. But it is a simple fact . . . that an overwhelming majority of those who came to the Colonies . . . belonged to what our British cousins would, even today, call ‘the lower middle classes.’

“It is well, too, that we bear in mind that in all the pioneer settlements democracy and not feudalism was the rule. The men had to take their turn standing guard at the stockade. . . . The women had to take their turn husking corn. . . .

“I fear very much that if certain modern Americans,” and the President’s voice began to rasp for the first time, “who protest loudly their devotion to American ideals, were suddenly to be given a comprehensive view of the earliest American colonists and their methods of life and government, they would promptly label them socialists. . . . We know, however, that although this school persisted . . . during the first three national Administrations it was eliminated, for many years at least, under the leadership of President Thomas Jefferson and his successors. His was the first great battle for the preservation of democracy. His was the first great victory for democracy.”

Rebuttal. In 1857 Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote to his friend Henry Stephens Randall, onetime (1851-53) New York Secretary of State, ostensibly to thank him for a four volume set of the Colonial History of New York. But the substance of the letter was Lord Macaulay’s Whiggish reflections on Randall’s biography of Thomas Jefferson and on the political future of the U. S. This letter stirred in Republican James Abram Garfield so much resentment that 21 years later he flayed it from the stump during a Congressional campaign.* Last week Franklin Roosevelt, like Garfield before him, chose Macaulay’s letter as a good butt for political rebuttal.

Macaulay: “I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both.”

Roosevelt: “Macaulay condemned the American scheme of government based on popular majority. In this country 80 years later his successors do not dare openly to condemn (it) . . . for they profess adherence to the form. . . . They love to intone praise of liberty, but in their hearts they distrust majority rule because an enlightened majority will not tolerate the abuses which a privileged minority would seek to foist upon the people as a whole.”

Macaulay: “In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here and sometimes a little rioting. But it matters little. For here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class, numerous indeed, but select . . . an educated class . . . deeply interested in the security of property and maintenance of order. Accordingly, the malcontents are firmly yet gently restrained.”

Roosevelt: “Almost, methinks, I am reading not from Macaulay but from a resolution of the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Liberty League, the National Association of Manufacturers or the editorials written at the behest of certain well known newspaper proprietors. . . .”

Macaulay: “. . . There is nothing to stop you. Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor. . . . Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a strong hand, or your Republic will be . . . laid waste by barbarians in the 20th Century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth. . . .”

Roosevelt: “My anchor is democracy, and more democracy. . . . I seek no change in the form of American Government. . . . It is of interest to read Macaulay’s letter with care—for I find in it no reference to the improving of the living conditions of the poor, to the encouragement of better homes or greater wages, or steadier work. . . .”

* He objected to it five years before when it was read to a Western Reserve University audience.