Journal of Undergraduate Research

Volume 2, Issue 5 - February 2001

A Furious Soul: George F. Kennan and American Society Joshua Botts

Historians of American foreign relations recognize George F. Kennan as a significant figure in cold war history.1Other historians of modern America, however, have not paid much attention to the one-time Director of the State Department Policy Planning Staff and Ambassador to the Soviet Union. While this is understandable given Kennan's status as a foreign policy expert and critic, it is also unfortunate. Kennan did not limit his attention to matters of international relations. Within the body of his own prolific written output are an indictment of the student radicals, a ringing endorsement of segregation, and a "political philosophy" that reveals Kennan's elitism and skepticism about democracy.2 The importance of Kennan's attitudes about American society lies in how these attitudes shaped his foreign policy views. Kennan's disillusionment with American society led eventually to a stance of neo-isolationism and calls for "self-containment" as he saw greater dangers emanating from within than threatening from without.

Though not within the mainstream of the American body politic, George F. Kennan's views were not without precedents. Kindred spirits such as John Quincy Adams, Henry Adams, and Walter Lippmann reveal a tradition of elite intellectual skepticism of democracy. 3 Kennan considered himself a true heir of the founding fathers' distrust of the masses and their dreams of a republic led by an elite in behalf of their less capable fellow citizens. After his extended service in Europe, he saw himself as a latter day Tocqueville, commenting on American society as an outsider.4 Because of the attention paid to his pronouncements on

American foreign policy, Kennan tried to advance a domestic agenda.

The most significant aspect of this agenda was his proposal for a kind of domestic equivalent to the

State Department's Policy Planning Staff. This "Council of State," which Kennan first proposed in 1979, would be composed of an apolitical elite experienced in national affairs and devoted to confronting long-term problems within American society. After Congress passed legislation creating the Council, Kennan posited, the President would select its members from a list of "outstanding citizens" in a manner similar to the nomination of Supreme Court justices. The Council of State would fulfill the founding fathers' vision of the Senate, which he declared was "to look at the nation's problems from a more lofty and detached position than that enjoyed by their fellow legislators of the House of Representatives." Because Senators now too faced popular, direct election, Kennan saw them as unfit for the type of dispassionate, rational analysis of the nation's ills that he hoped the Council could accomplish. Though the Council would be an advisory body, Kennan felt that the prestige of its members would make it difficult for the Congress or the President to ignore its suggestions. Kennan's Council of State would allow for elite governance without abandoning the trappings of democracy.5

The indictment of democracy inherent in Kennan's Council of State runs throughout Kennan's books and manuscripts. In 1938, Kennan witnessed Austria's authoritarian Schuschnigg regime tackle a social insurance law in a manner that had proven impossible for earlier democratic leaders. Out of this observation, Kennan first expressed his deep misgivings about the American democratic political system. "There seemed to be little doubt," Kennan mused, "that if malicious despotism had greater possibilities for evil than democracy, benevolent despotism had greater possibilities for good." He explained how the Austrian government's restrictions on speech could be reasonably compared to American "taboos and conventions," how representative government was in fact impossible for so "checkered and internally divided" a country as Austria, and how Austrian leaders directed their responsibility "to the nation as a whole rather than to vociferous pressure groups."

Kennan "could not help but suspect that all democratic regimes were to some extent conspiracies, that all authoritarians were inchained [sic] to the favor of the public." After all, for Kennan the real enemy was not a type of government, but rather "cruelty, stupidity, ignorance, violence, and pretense."6Themes of ignorance and stupidity permeated Kennan's conception of democracy; thus to limit or dilute popular participation in favor of a benevolent elite were logical extensions.

The practical conclusions concerning American democracy that Kennan reached in 1938 and never completely abandoned would have gone far to limiting popular power in political affairs. In an essay Kennan wrote at this time and entitled "The Prerequisites," he called for the disenfranchisement of women, blacks, and immigrants as part of a larger reorganization of the United States government along more authoritarian lines.7In each case, the loss of political power would, in Kennan's estimation, would create for the government a kind of paternal responsibility for the welfare of the disenfranchised. "We are kinder," Kennan claimed, "to those who, like our children, are openly dependent on our kindness than to those who are nominally able to take care of themselves."8 Kennan's indictment of "boss-ridden" democracy is especially intriguing. He almost sounds like a Progressive crusading for accountability in government, though a democratic government that was completely accountable to the people would most clearly run afoul of Kennan's instinctive antagonism to democracy and his attachment to elite rule. In a recent article in The New Yorker, Kennan said he supported

Bill Bradley's candidacy in the 2000 presidential election because he "had ventured the hope that he could make himself the head of something resembling an independent political movement in the country, no longer dependent on the great moneyed interests. If we really could get campaign reform, then I could see chances of the growth of a new form of politics and government in this country."9

The comparison of Kennan to Progressives is an interesting one. Both sought rational government by a scientific elite, yet they did so for different reasons. Progressive liberals hoped centralization and bureaucratization would improve the lives of all members of society. Tellingly, Progressives held great faith in the power of informed public opinion to help achieve rational government. Theirs was essentially an optimistic, though paternalistic, vision for democracy.10 Kennan was a conservative desperate to limit the power of the irrational, uninformed masses, whose influence had so degraded American society. Kennan's distaste of American popular culture, particularly the automobile, advertising, environmental degradation, and the intellectual vacuum perpetuated by the mass media, originated from Kennan's particular brand of conservatism.11 Kennan's organic conservatism sought a slow, deliberate evolution of society, eschewing sharp changes justified as progress.12 Ordered liberty stood at the center of Kennan's political thought, linking him to America's earliest Puritan settlers.

George Kennan's agenda was not limited to such organizational imperatives. Kennan also presented ideas to solve, or at least ameliorate, the plight "of the American Negro," America's "greatest social and political problem."

Because of the alienation that Kennan saw of blacks from American political life, he called for a system of segregation akin to apartheid.13For Kennan, the solution to America's racial differences stood in "some sort of a voluntary segregation and autonomy for large parts of the Negro community."14Writing in 1968, Kennan criticized "the stock proposals for correcting" the race problem because they did not control the urban migration of blacks that Kennan saw at the root of the trouble. Either "economic incentives" or "direct administrative control" (like he witnessed in South Africa in 1967 and commented favorably upon 15) were necessary to forestall "the migration of new poverty into" the cities already racked with unrest. Kennan's concerns went far beyond the demographic problem of urban migration. He asked if it was "realistic to suppose that the American Negro is going to find his dignity and his comfort of body and mind by the effort to participate and to compete as an individual in a political and social system he neither understands nor respects and for which he is ill-prepared."16 By the 1990s, Kennan had moderated these views, but remained skeptical of government social engineering efforts such as busing students to achieve desegregation.17

At the root of Kennan's critique of American society was his belief that it was a "self-indulgent, undisciplined permissive system."18At the twilight of the Second World War, Kennan claimed that the coming peace would reveal the decline of American society that had occurred during hostilities. "No great effort,"

Kennan said, "can be carried out by our people beyond our borders without a corresponding neglect of internal administration and internal discipline." The coming peace would demand that American leaders pay attention to both the internal and external environment.19 In the "Long Telegram" of February 22, 1946,

Kennan stressed the importance of the "health and vigor of our own society" to the nascent international struggle with the Soviet Union. He claimed that "every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society, to improve self-confidence, discipline, morale, and community spirit of our own people, is a diplomatic victory over Moscow."20 In his famous "X article" published in the summer of 1947, Kennan also claimed the Cold War boiled down to a "test of the over-all worth of the United States as a nation among nations." Drifting to the rhetoric of a new Manifest Destiny, Kennan preached that America's "security as a nation dependent on [Americans] pulling together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear."21As the United States assumed greater responsibilities internationally notwithstanding the turmoil Kennan saw at home, his emphasis shifted from containing communism to "self-containment" of the ills of American society through "more dirigisme" from the government.22 National purpose and discipline, having failed to foment from below, had to be imposed from above. George F. Kennan is best known as a critic of American foreign policy, yet he is just as much a critic of

American society. In fact, the two critiques are linked fundamentally. Without national unity and purpose,

American foreign policy cannot be successful. A successful foreign policy, meanwhile, means little to a nation torn asunder by internal wounds. George F. Kennan's views were not completely unprecedented within the

American body politic, yet his compatriots met with the same frustration that he endured as his calls for a Council of State, an authoritarian government, a segregationist solution to racial antagonism, and a greater degree of national unity and purpose fell upon deaf ears. Perhaps it is kinder for Kennan's reputation that he be remembered principally for his foreign policy views, but such a picture is misleading and incomplete. As

Kennan himself wrote on so many occasions, America's domestic health does much to shape the nation's foreign policy. Kennan's advice about the former cannot help but influence his goals for the latter.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank several people and institutions for making this research possible. I must thank the staff at the Seeley G. Mudd Library at Princeton University for their assistance. I am also grateful to the University of

Florida, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the History Department for selecting my project and providing me with funding. Professor Robert Zieger first helped me transform my own curious musings about

George Kennan into a workable research topic and later provided valuable comments on my initial efforts to present my findings. The finished product enjoys whatever value it possesses largely thanks to his suggestions. Lastly, I'd like to thank my family and friends for listening to me tell them more than they ever wanted to know about George Kennan, the history of American foreign relations, and the two day trek up to and back from New Jersey.

REFERENCES

1. Biographies of Kennan include Barton Gellman, Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American

Power (New York: Praeger, 1984), David Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy (New

York: Oxford University Press, 1988), Anders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy

(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Walter L. Hixson, George F. Kennan: Cold

War Iconoclast (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). He is the central figure in John Lewis Gaddis,

Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1982) and Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C., George F. Kennan and the Making of

American Foreign Policy, 1947-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). He is also a prominent figure

in Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947-

1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). back

2. George F. Kennan, Democacy and the Student Left (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), Idem., America

after Vietnam (Williamsburg, Virginia: Colonial Williamsburg, 1968), and Idem., Around the Cragged Hill: A

Personal and Political Philosophy (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993). back

3. Mayers, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, p. 317. back

4. George F. Kennan, Address, "Tocqueville in Retrospect," Historical-Philosophical Society Faculty, Association

of University Teachers, Belgrade, October 31, 1963, George F. Kennan Papers, Folder 1-B-110, Box 10, Seeley

G. Mudd Library, Princeton University. Used by permission of the Princeton University Library. Subsequent citations

of materials from this library end with the box number. back

5. Quote in Idem., Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy, 245. Council of State is

discussed explicitly in Ibid., pp. 238-248 while the origins of this proposal appear in Idem., et al., Encounters

With Kennan: The Great Debate (London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1979), p. 28. back

6. Quotes in Idem., "Fair Day Adieu!" p. 31-33, 1938, George F. Kennan Papers. Folder 2, Box 25. Kennan

requested that "the early date of its composition" and "the fact that it was blanketed by the Memoirs, published

some 30 years later" be noted in any citation to this document. back

7. Because Kennan pulled this document from the available portion of his papers, this account will rely on

secondary sources. See note 41 of Frank Costigliola, " 'Unceasing Pressure for Penetration': Gender, Pathology,

and Emotion in George Kennan's Formation of the Cold War," Journal of American History 83:4 (March 1997),

pp. 1324-1325. back

8. Cited in Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, p. 219. back

9. Cited in Nicholas Lemann, "The Provocateur," The New Yorker (November 13, 2000), pp. 98-99. Kennan also

decries moneyed interests in Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left, pp. 235-236. back

10. Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition And the Men Who Made It (New York: Vintage Books,

1948, reprinted 1989), pp. 265-365. back

11. For these critiques, see George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), pp. 8 and 75-

77, Idem., Memoirs 1950-1963 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), pp. 61-89, Idem., Democracy and the

Student Left, pp. 229-233, Francois Duchene, ed., The Endless Crisis: A Confrontation of America in the

Seventies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), pp. 82-95, George F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger:

Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1977), pp. 19-25, Idem., et

al., Encounters With Kennan, pp. 198 and 201-202, and Idem., Around the Cragged Hill. 157-179. back

12. Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy, pp. 211-255, Gellman, Contending with Kennan, pp. 141-157,

and Mayer, George Kennan and the Dilemmas of US Foreign Policy, pp. 317-319. back

13. Kennan supported the theory behind South African apartheid, but acknowledged the injustice perpetuated by

that system in practice. See Idem., Luncheon Talk, U.S.-South Africa Leader Exchange Program, November 1,

1967, George F. Kennan Papers, Folder 1-C-156, Box 22 as well as Idem., The Cloud of Danger, pp. 76-79. back 14. Idem., Democracy and the Student Left, pp. 233-234. back

15. Idem., Luncheon Talk, U.S.-South Africa Leader Exchange Program. back

16. Idem., America after Vietnam, p. 12. back

17. Idem., Around the Cragged Hill, pp. 126-130. back

18. Written comments on Idem., Meeting with Senate Foreign Relations Committee, May 12, 1959, George F.

Kennan Papers, Folder 1-B-83, Box 8. back

19. Idem., Remarks to the Officer Staff of the Legation at Lisbon, en route to Moscow, June, 1944, George F.

Kennan Papers, Folder 9, Box 16. back

20. Reprinted in Idem., Memoirs 1925-1950, p. 559. back

21. Reprinted in Idem., American Diplomacy: Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p.

128. back

22. Quote in Idem., et al., Encounters With Kennan, p. 214. Kennan's call for self-containment can be found in

Idem., Democracy and the Student Left, Idem., America after Vietnam, Idem., et al., Encounters With

Kennan, Duchene, ed., The Endless Crisis, pp. 82-95, and George F. Kennan, At a Century's Ending: Reflections

1982-1995 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996), pp. 114-115 back

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