The American Tradition (June 1963 | Volume: 14, Issue: 4)

The American Tradition

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Authors: Bruce Catton

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June 1963 | Volume 14, Issue 4

As we are possibly just a little too fond of saying, our nation draws its greatest strength from the ancient traditions of American democracy. These traditions embody certain lofty standards of thought and of behavior, and we like to believe that in time of crisis we can rely upon them. Occasionally it almost seems as if we do so automatically, fondly trusting that some built-in nobility of aspiration and conduct will rescue us either from the results of our own folly or from the evils created by fellow citizens in whom, unaccountably, the traditions never took root.

Like most of our accepted beliefs, this one contains a good substratum of truth. Yet sometimes it pays to see just what these saving traditions are and where they can be found. Who are their guardians, anyway? How do the best of these traditions take shape in action? What are we called upon to do about them, and how do we know when we are actually doing it? Democracy’s traditions, although noble, can be vague; what happens when we need to make them concrete?

We can begin by studying what has already happened, and at times the record is somewhat surprising. For an illustration, consider Herbert Mitgang’s excellent new biography, The Man Who Rode the Tiger , which contains a first-rate object lesson.

Mr. Mitgang is telling the story of the late Judge Samuel Seabury, who fought long, tenaciously, and with much success to provide decent government for the people of New York City. He happily describes Judge Seabury as a twentieth-century man with eighteenth-century manners; and indeed if ever a man was fitted by birth and family background to be a guardian of the best American traditions it was this same Seabury—he was the great-great grandson, and namesake, of the first Episcopal bishop in the United States, and his ancestry ran back to John and Priscilla Alden, and altogether he was It. He was fully conscious of his family heritage—as Mr. Mitgang says, he “bore the Protestant ethic and the Anglo-Saxon legal traditions of his ancestors, not as a burden but as an escutcheon.” He was born in 1873, of a family which had very little money but which was rich in tradition, and toward the end of the nineteenth century he became a New York lawyer and set out to see what he could do.

He was a very good lawyer. In the end, he made a great deal of money, and he enjoyed the things you can do when you have a great deal of money. But making money was not his chief objective. He began as a devout single-tax man, a fighter for decent living conditions for men who have to work with their hands, a dedicated enemy of Tammany Hall. He served as unpaid counsel for various lowly folk who had got caught in the legal machinery of a heedless city; he became a judge,