They changed their nations without winning elections or exercising hereditary or military authority, but how they did so was very different.
These men changed their nations without winning elections or exercising hereditary or military authority, but how they did so was very different.
N ational holidays occasion our reflecting on what our nation values and what it chooses to honor. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is an unusual figure to have his own national holiday. He never held political office. He died before his 40th birthday. As a black man, he was a member of a minority group much despised and oppressed during his time; as a Christian minister, he was ordained into a vocation out of fashion in our own.
Reverend King had important and lasting political victories, yet for most of his public life he was at odds with government. He was jailed by state governments and placed under police surveillance by the FBI. He was a critic of the Vietnam War while it was still broadly popular and was being prosecuted by the same Democratic administration that had signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
He was never firmly associated with a political party. In the 1950s, given the Democrats’ status as the long-standing party of southern segregationists, black leaders such as Reverend King’s father were more aligned with Republicans. Reverend King himself, like Frederick Douglass early in his career, took more of a “pox on both houses” view, albeit more out of disappointment in Republicans. As he explained when he declined to follow his father’s example in endorsing Eisenhower in 1956:
I am not taking any public position in this election. In private opinion I find something to be desired from both parties. The Negro has been betrayed by both the Democratic and Republican Party. The Democrats have betrayed us by capitulating to the whims and caprices of the southern dixiecrats. The Republicans have betrayed us by capitulating to the blatent hypocrisy of conservative right wing northerners. This coalition of southern dixiecrats and right wing northern Republicans defeats every move toward liberal legislation in Congress. So we confront the problem of choosing the lesser of two evils. At this point I might say however, that I feel that the Negro must remain an independent voter, not becoming unduly tied to either party. He should seek to vote for the party which is more concerned with the welfare of all the people.
In a 1958 speech, Reverend King told his audience:
I’m not here to tell you how to vote. That isn’t my concern. I’m not a politician. I have no political ambitions. I don’t think the Republican party is a party full of the almighty God nor is the Democratic party. They both have weaknesses. And I’m not inextricably bound to either party. I’m not concerned about telling you what party to vote for. But what I’m saying is this, that we must gain the ballot and use it wisely.
Frederick Douglass gradually abandoned the nonpartisan stance he had held between 1856 and 1865, eventually becoming a loyal-enough Republican to be given an ambassadorship in 1889. Reverend King, by contrast, kept his distance from power. In 1958, he wrote to a biographer of Richard Nixon that he thought Nixon more sincere about civil rights than Dwight Eisenhower, but with the caution that Nixon “has one of the most magnetic personalities that I have ever confronted,” and “has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere.”
Reverend King was publicly assumed to prefer Nixon to John F. Kennedy for much of the 1960 campaign, but he focused on registering voters rather than endorsing candidates. When Kennedy made a call to the Dixiecrat governor of Georgia to get King out of a hard-labor prison sentence for a protest, King’s father endorsed JFK. Reverend King himself spoke favorably of Kennedy but stopped short of endorsement.
In 1964, due to Lyndon Johnson’s support for the Civil Rights Act and Barry Goldwater’s opposition to it, Reverend King came off the sidelines. As he wrote later in his autobiography,
I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy. While I had followed a policy of not endorsing political candidates, I felt that the prospect of Senator Goldwater being President of the United States so threatened the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that I could not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represented.
Yet, Reverend King’s alliance with LBJ and his party was as short-lived as his respect for Nixon. By 1967, he burned his bridges with the Johnson White House over Vietnam:
In late 1966 King’s last phone call to Johnson was made to discuss Vietnam. In the months that followed, Johnson attempted to meet with King on two occasions, but King canceled both engagements. Johnson was bewildered and asked his aides to find out why King was avoiding him. On 4 April 1967, the answer was revealed to Johnson in a speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” that King delivered at New York’s Riverside Church in conjunction with Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. In his speech, King said that he was moved to “break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart” against the war in Vietnam, and in a devastating indictment of Johnson’s policies, King called the United States government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” . . . Shocked by King’s address and feeling personally betrayed, Johnson caved in to [J. Edgar] Hoover’s pressure and asked his press secretary to distribute the FBI’s information about King’s ties with alleged Communist Stanley Levison to reliable reporters.
As I wrote last year, we do not have a national holiday for Reverend King because of his more radical stances, but because of his embodiment of mainstream American and Christian principles and his application of them to make vast progress on civil rights. When he departed from those principles, he was just as apt to be wrong as any other man. That said, his capacity for alienating himself from the centers of power at the pinnacle of his own prominence is part of his distinctively American story, too.
One can contrast Reverend King with another of modern history’s most consequential figures, from the land of King’s namesake: Otto von Bismarck. Like Reverend King, the “Iron Chancellor” left behind a record of swift and dramatic accomplishments, thought impossible by his contemporaries, that changed the face of his nation.
In less than a decade, between the short span from September 1862 to March 1871, Bismarck transformed Prussia from merely one of 39 German states — universally recognized as subordinate to Austria, let alone France — to the seat of the German Empire, the largest and most powerful state on the European continent. He faced down Prussian liberals who wanted the legislature to control the king through the power of the purse. He led Prussia into three wars, defeating Denmark, Austria, and France. He accomplished the unification of Germany, a goal that had eluded generations, by exploiting and exacerbating the divisions among the great powers of Europe after the Crimean War (1853–56). No nation in Europe could afford or tolerate a unified Germany, yet, when it happened, neither Britain nor Russia nor Austria nor Italy stood with France in opposing its rise.
When all that was done, Bismarck effectively dictated the constitution of the Second Reich, imprinting it with his own personality and excluding rival centers of power. For two decades thereafter, he controlled the tempo and balance of great-power rivalries on the continent while waging culture war at home against Catholics and Jews and inventing the modern welfare state.
Like Reverend King, Bismarck did these things despite the apparent weakness of his formal position. His hereditary title marked him as only a minor member of the Prussian nobility. He was only ever elected by a small constituency in Prussia, and never had more than a badly outnumbered faction on his side in any parliamentary body. He had no military experience and no direct control over the army. He never served in a job from which he could not be dismissed summarily by the king without notice. When he finally fell from power, that is precisely what happened.
And yet, how did these two men do it? Therein lies so much of the difference between the two men and their nations. Reverend King was almost exclusively a public man: He spoke, he wrote, he preached, he persuaded, and he led by example. Drawing on Scripture and the nation’s founding political ideals, he pricked the conscience of leaders and the public alike. By nonviolent organizing, he resisted injustice and suffered the consequences of standing against the force of the state. His persistence never gained him power, but it led, over the course of a decade, to a sufficient change in the minds and hearts of a democratic people that their elected representatives voted to dismantle the apparatus of legal segregation and secure in law the guarantees of civil and voting rights that were Reverend King’s core objective.
Bismarck, by contrast, was an inside man. He was a poor public orator and never moved the mass of the German people except by success. His most famous speech, when he was appointed chancellor of Prussia, warned that Germany would be unified only by “iron and blood”; the resulting controversy almost ended his career. He was brilliant, witty, shrewd, and devious, but he often got his way by bullying the weak and deceiving or emotionally manipulating the strong.
For his entire public career, all the formal power exercised by Bismarck came from a single source: the favor of the crown. Even as chancellor of the German Empire (a position defined in a constitution he wrote), he was merely a servant of Wilhelm I, who appointed him when Wilhelm was king of Prussia and retained him when Bismarck had made him Kaiser. Bismarck’s influence likely would not have lasted as long had Wilhelm not lived to be 90 years old, or had the Kaiser been a more assertive personality. Instead, he was so frequently worn down by Bismarck’s histrionic threats to resign that Wilhelm once complained that it was hard to be Kaiser under Bismarck. Bismarck survived under the next Kaiser, Frederick III, only because the new monarch was dying of throat cancer and could not muster the energy to reorganize the government.
A man like Reverend King would never have accomplished much in a state ruled as Germany was in the 19th century, in which popular opinion had no mechanism for imposing its will on the government. Bismarck, while he would doubtless have found a way to influence in the American system, would never have been able to reshape the entire nation and its constitutional order around himself for a period of decades given the United States Constitution and its regular, meaningful elections.
In the long run, this constitutional structure makes a great difference. The American system was strengthened and enriched, and its democratic legitimacy and moral authority fortified, by the influence of a man of the cloth who was always on the outside. The German system forged by Bismarck proved unable to survive without him on the inside. With him in power, democratic and rule-of-law institutions were stunted. Without his personality, there was neither a check on the monarch nor adequate supervision of the military, leading the German Empire into the folly of 1914, from which Germany and its neighbors have never entirely recovered. What followed was even worse. Germany ended up partitioned again and took decades to restore a proper sense of itself as a nation.
We celebrate Reverend King today for what he said and did, and how that changed America. But we also celebrate the fact that America made his career possible and allowed his accomplishments to endure.