The Imperial Self in American LifeStephen J. Whitfield
From Columbia Journal of American Studies Vol. 4, No. 1 2000
An even more creative use of the law to promote business expansion occurred in the postbellum era, when state legislatures sometimes responded to the concerns of farmers, consumers and of some producers by trying to pass laws to restrict the vast accumulation of private wealth and to assert the claims of the wider community. But here Constitutional interpretation came to the rescue of corporate dynamism in an unforeseen manner. In the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified to cover the rights of the newly freed slaves; and its first section had therefore prohibited state governments from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The first section proved ineffective in ensuring such rights to blacks but did become, quite ingeniously, a loophole for corporations most dramatically in a case that involved assessments of railroad property. In Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886), Chief Justice Morrison Waite, with an important concurring opinion by Stephen J Field of California, inaugurated the doctrine of "substantive due process." Corporations were curiously declared to be in the same category as natural persons, a redefinition that liberated business enterprises from the burden of taxation and regulation which they considered restrictive and unfair. Legal decisions thus tended to provide dynamic and potential conceptions of property, as opposed to the reinforcement of what might be called a rentier interest that favored stability, continuity and conservatism. [20] By making a company into a person whose liberty and property could not be easily violated, legal interpretation thus attached business to the image of an "imperial self" with the same traits of aggressiveness and expansiveness as the citizens whom the ideology of individualism had marked for maximal opportunities. The animating value was similar: to transcend social and natural limits. These were dismissed as European thinking, uncongenial to the American temperament.
Consider the rapidity of urban growth as a way of hurrying to be great. It took almost a million years of human history before the first city reached a population estimated at one million; it took Chicago only a century. Consider also how ephemeral some communities were. Their inhabitants were in such a hurry to be great that they often moved on to more promising places. Troy had been built nine times, each time on the ruins of a previous city. But American communities were usually not rebuilt but abandoned, on a landscape that the expatriate Gertrude Stein described as follows: "In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is." For example, Iowa had become a territory in 1838; according to the 1930 census, 2,205 towns and villages had been built and lived in, then abandoned. For Kansas the figure was comparable: over 2500 such communities in about a century had born and died. Of the thirteen colonies which declared their independence from Britain, eight had founded or selected a different capital by the War of 1812; and these were the presumably more stable states on the Atlantic seaboard. The Western mining camps were in this respect the most flamboyantly unstable of communities, and were often deserted when a vein of prosperity ran dry; the inhabitants simply moved on." [21]
Stephen J. Whitfield holds the Max Richter Chair in American Civilization at Brandeis University. He is the author of eight books, including most recently A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till (1988), The Culture of the Cold War (1996), and In Search of American Jewish Culture (1999). Professor Whitfield is also the editor of A Companion to 20th-Century America (2004).