A New Birth of Marriage: Love, Politics, and the Vision of the Founders

By Brandon Dabling

A New Birth of Marriage provides a history of the changes to marriage throughout the American experience and a theoretical argument for the goodness of the traditional American family in fostering private happiness and the public good.

A New Birth of Marriage argues that the American Founders placed marriage as the cornerstone of republican liberty. The Founders’ vision of marriage relied on a liberalized form of marital unity that honored human equality, rights, and the beauty of intimate marital love. This vision of marriage remained largely healthy in the culture until the Progressive Era and persisted in law until the 1960s. A New Birth of Marriage vindicates the Founders’ understanding of marriage and argues that a prudential return toward this understanding is vital to America’s political health and Americans’ private happiness.

Brandon Dabling argues that Founders at the state and national level shaped marriage law to reflect five vital components of marital unity: the equality and complementarity of the sexes, consent and permanence in marriage, exclusivity in marriage, marital love, and a union oriented toward procreation and childrearing. Devoting a chapter to each of these principles, A New Birth of Marriage gives a thorough account of how each tenet has been challenged and stands now vindicated in American political thought. The book provides a philosophical and political case for the beauty and vitality of each of these components to the nature of marriage and will appeal to students and scholars of marriage, family, the American founding, democracy, and liberalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780268201968

Brandon Dabling

Brandon Dabling is an independent researcher. He has written many articles on American marriage law.

Book preview

A New Birth of Marriage

A NEW BIRTH OF

Marriage

Love, Politics,

and the Vision of the Founders

BRANDON DABLING

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Notre Dame

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948736

ISBN: 978-0-268-20197-5 (Hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20199-9 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20196-8 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

For my mother and father, who first showed me the courage and beauty of marital love.

CONTENTS

Introduction:

How Autonomy Conquered Love

CHAPTER 1.Statecraft and the Background of American Marriage

CHAPTER 2.The Founding of American Marriage

CHAPTER 3.Coverture and Divorce Law through the Progressive Era

CHAPTER 4.Tocqueville’s Democratic Woman in the Early Republic

CHAPTER 5.Divorce and Enduring Consent

CHAPTER 6.Polygamy, Despotism, and Marital Unity

CHAPTER 7.Free Love and Marital Love: John Humphrey Noyes and Nathaniel Hawthorne

CHAPTER 8.As Long as You Both Shall Choose: Marriage in the Progressive Era

Conclusion:

A New Birth of Marriage

Notes

Index

Introduction

How Autonomy Conquered Love

Untutored courage was useless in the face of educated bullets.

—Gen. George S. Patton

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one’s self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne

The American conception of marriage was anchored and animated by the principle of marital unity throughout the country’s first 150 years. As a matter of law, this marital vision persisted until the 1960s. While it is true that liberalism refined marital unity, this unity remained the institution’s unmistakable core. Marital unity and the republican family were so widely respected during the founding period that most Americans thought it no more necessary to justify them than to justify the wheel’s place in the modern economy.¹ Marriage and family were central to their vision of liberty, even if they were not the central themes of their political treatises. While most national and state framers spoke relatively little of the family, what they did leave us is remarkably coherent and consistent and speaks to the family’s essential nature. Marriage and family life built upon the principle of marital unity was universally understood to be indispensable to human and political flourishing.

The Founders’ prudential understanding of marriage and its role in public life provides the essential elements of a robust natural law argument in defense of marital unity as marriage’s central feature. This argument was refined and even supplemented as various episodes challenged the Founders’ conception. Romanticism prodded Americans to think more deeply about how marital unity spoke to people’s deepest desires to love and be loved. The nineteenth-century free love movement challenged the relationship between exclusivity and marital belonging. Utah polygamy asked Americans to think about why monogamy was vital to union. The arguments for the good of marital unity were refined, strengthened, and vindicated in these contests of opinions. But the structure and essential core of marriage was there from the beginning.

James Wilson and John Witherspoon alone offer complete arguments for marriage’s political importance. Only Wilson makes a serious attempt to square it with the nation’s commitment to the political liberalism of the Declaration of Independence. But to say the Founders wrote relatively little on marriage is not to say they wrote nothing or nothing consequential. Wilson offers a compelling defense of the founding’s joining of liberalism’s rights-based vision of the individual with ancient Greek and Christian understandings of marriage as a comprehensive union and community of goods. Wilson’s argument alone makes the era’s thought on marriage impossible to responsibly ignore.

Other lawmakers, jurists, and thinkers at the national and state levels offer their insights in private letters to family and friends, political writings, and especially in the logic of marriage laws that stressed lifelong commitment and marital unity. Considering their sum, we see a more complete picture of these thinkers’ vision. Benjamin Franklin likened single men to the odd Half of a Pair of Scissors and said it was the Man and Woman united that make the compleat human Being.² Thomas Jefferson counseled his granddaughter that it is marriage that best secures enduring peace and love and that it is in the love of one’s family that heartfelt happiness is known.³ Even the rationalist Thomas Paine saw marriage as the harbor of human life and the creator of a world filled with the superior cares of family and enduring love.⁴

The Founders thought marriage and family were vital to maintaining free society. John Adams wrote that the foundations of national morality must be laid in private families.⁵ Alexander Hamilton and James Madison thought that Americans’ intense devotion to family would help guarantee political liberty by demanding a private space in which family life could flourish.⁶ Mercy Otis Warren, a leading female intellectual and historian from the era, wrote that the family tempered materialistic excess and fostered public happiness.⁷ Statements along these lines can be found in the annals of nearly every prominent Founder, and not one offers sentiments to the contrary; these women and men shared an understanding of the vital role of marriage and family life in securing individual and public happiness.⁸ Even the sober-minded and rarely sentimental General George Washington said that life with his wife Martha was his source of real happiness and felicity, explicitly esteeming it above his command over the revolutionary army.⁹ This sentiment was evident to the admiring guests who visited his Mount Vernon home and was undoubtedly on Virginia governor Henry Lee’s mind when he crafted his famous, albeit often truncated, words offered at Washington’s funeral: "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen, he was second to none in the humble and endearing scenes of private life."¹⁰ These statements should guide our thoughts when we consider the Founders’ view of marriage and its role in the political regime.

THE MEANING OF THE FOUNDERS’ MARITAL REGIME TODAY

Conservatives and Progressives today say the founding’s vision of marriage provides the moral principles and contours for thinking about the institution. These different understandings have resulted in two irreconcilable models of love and marriage. At the heart of these models’ disagreement—and the heart of this book—is the question of to what degree and in which ways liberalism should shape marriage. The first model sees marital unity as marriage’s heart. Liberalism modifies previous iterations of marital unity by requiring mutual consent and equality between husband and wife. It sees marriage as the comprehensive and complementary union of a man and a woman for life. It is the devotion to living united with one’s husband or wife in all material, emotional, spiritual, and sexual matters. It is open to the vulnerabilities of love and life—the doom of care and troubled joy¹¹ that are always linked with tying oneself to another. It is inextricably bound to risk and vulnerability. Call this vision of marriage liberalized marital unity.¹² Call this love courageous love, with marital love being its natural culmination. The second model grows out of a hyper-Lockean misreading of the founding. It likewise stresses love, but it is a love fashioned for the safety of expressive individualism. It tries to protect the individual from the risk that inevitably comes from joining one’s life to another. It aims to mitigate pain by hedging commitments and providing easy, unilateral exits from marriage. Seeing the beauty of marital unity, this model speaks of love and spiritual union unlimited by legal forms or social stigmas, but its devotion to individualism tends to destroy the communal sacrifices love requires. Love becomes shallow, hedged, and inward-facing. It is a love devoted to attaining individual adults’ immediate desires. Call this vision of union liberationist marriage. Call this love liberationist love.¹³

The conflict between courageous and liberationist love is the central question in today’s marriage wars. Courageous love argues that individual flourishing is more likely to take place within communities that properly honor marital unity and—in the least—do not erect barriers to its attainment. Liberationist love argues that individual happiness can only occur where individuals are liberated from marriage’s communal elements (i.e., public requirements and shared norms) so that they may achieve an expressive authenticity in a pure relationship. The courageous love embraced during the American founding was primarily backed by the Christian ethic of comprehensive and enduring marital love, which shared much with ancient Greek and Roman understandings of durable love and marriage. Courageous love’s committed culmination was found in marital love and marital unity, oftentimes bound by God but always by community. Courageous love valued individual happiness but stressed that individuals and society would most likely obtain this happiness when seeking it indirectly through the virtues courageous love required. Therefore, it recognized that happiness in love was earned rather than given, and society therefore erected public norms and laws that reinforced marital unity as being essential to this path. Liberationist love’s most powerful modern articulation is tied to a certain formulation of individual rights. Liberationists argue that liberalism requires that individuals be fully free to direct their lives without consideration for arbitrary (i.e., nonmaterial) public restraints or goods. As all individuals are equal to one another, all legitimate associations must be governed by contract, and all contracts must be freely shaped by their adult participants. Should these contracts fail to obtain their desired ends, the parties are free to dissolve the union, according to the contract’s terms.

The conflict between courageous and liberationist love was at the heart of the US Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). The court emphatically embraced liberationist love when it wrote that marriage’s millennia-old man-woman criterion was inconsistent with the central meaning of the fundamental right to marry.¹⁴ Whether same-sex couples can share in marital unity or courageous love is not the question that concerns the court. The court is beyond this point. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy says that the nature of marriage is that, through its enduring bond, two persons together can find other freedoms, such as expression, intimacy, and spirituality.¹⁵ This is the natural endpoint for liberationist love, or at least a meaningful landmark along the way. Citing a brief provided by the American Historical Association (AHA), the court argues that marriage has long been evolving, shedding its nonessential features (e.g., the focus on procreation and marital permanence) until liberating its ever-present beating heart—the personal and sexual bond between two consenting adults. The AHA brief is signed by the leading historians of the American family, including Nancy Cott, Michael Grossberg, Stephanie Coontz, Linda Kerber, and Hendrik Hartog. It amounts to the full embrace of the liberationist model and argues that this was always American marriage’s effectual truth. The basis of marriage is voluntary consent between the couple, their free choice of one another for love being its sole enduring feature. Procreation, it says, was never essential to state licensing schemes, and it is not vital to marriage’s meaning today.¹⁶ Supporting this idea, the brief mistakenly cites James Wilson as saying that consent was always American marriage’s sole indispensable element.¹⁷ Any features indicating a more binding or unitive standard were but vestigial remnants of a rejected model.

The AHA brief is correct that mutual consent was essential to the Founders’ vision of marriage, but it neglects the other elements they thought vital to marriage and political cohesion. No Founder is more explicit on this point than Wilson, who said that marriage formed a community of goods and sacrifices that amounted to marital unity. This is the central meaning of marriage in America as a historical, moral, and political matter. Marital unity is marriage’s beating heart—the very thing that makes love meaningful, society prosperous, and liberal government possible.

The Founders and their immediate successors were more attuned than today’s society to the necessary link between human flourishing, political health, and marital unity. They knew that courageous love is the love upon which thriving families and societies are built. Courageous love requires a political and social structure that supports marital unity in both law and culture. The law cannot be neutral on marriage and family. Political happiness and human happiness (or even stability) depend on society’s view and practice of healthy marital norms that support the enduring comprehensive union of husband and wife. Any community pursuing the first two goods must remove obstacles to the last. The Founders’ vision asked that husband and wife see themselves as a united one.¹⁸ Their laws required that each make material sacrifices for the union. They rejected easy divorce as tempting individuals to withhold devotion or leave a spouse prematurely. In this, the Founders offer an enduring vision of marriage’s nature that strengthens political liberty and protects individual rights. The Founders’ marital vision firmly embraces liberalism’s compatibility with marital unity.

RAPPACCINI’S GHOST:

HOW LIBERATIONISM CONQUERED LOVE

Human beings are coupling beings, but they are also tempted by passions and prone to fears that tear them from meaningful union. To love or rely on love is to be vulnerable, and yet love’s enemies have made a systematic effort to make it safer and more controlled—to move from courageous love to liberationist love. It has been a fullscale attack on marital unity. The liberationists, in this regard, are Niccolò Machiavelli’s sons and daughters. Machiavelli’s prince knows that it is best to be loved and feared. Yet if forced to choose, it is always preferable to be feared. Fear is a reliable human motive. It is constant. Love is fleeting and often fickle. Human virtue is undependable. Stable politics requires stable incentive structures. People must be made to fear if they will be made to behave.

Liberationist love is Machiavelli’s effectual political truth applied to dating and marriage. It is love hedged by fear. Nathaniel Hawthorne brilliantly demonstrates the shallowness of liberationist love in his short story Rappaccini’s Daughter. He is emphatic that dating and marital relationships rooted in fear will never last, will never flourish, and will never be fully happy. The story recounts a young heartbreak-prone man studying at the University of Padua. Giovanni Guasconti lives in a gloomy room overlooking a mysterious garden cared for by Doctor Giacomo Rappaccini. Giovanni is quickly taken in by a particular shrub. Displayed in a marble vase, it sprouts abundant purple blossoms. Its luminous beauty contrasts with the sickly, emaciated gardener who takes great care for his plants but is sure always to keep his distance. Rappaccini’s coldness is set against his daughter’s warmth. Beatrice walks among the plants, embracing their foliage and speaking their praise. Approaching the purpled shrub, she exclaims, Yes, my sister, my splendor, it shall be Beatrice’s task to nurse and serve thee; and thou shalt reward her with thy kisses and perfumed breath, which to her is as the breath of life!¹⁹

Giovanni begins falling for the young woman, but a family friend, Baglioni, warns him away. Baglioni tells him that the doctor works in vegetable poisons for the body and the heart and has instructed his daughter in his science. His words are to no effect. She has a simplicity and sweetness that makes Giovanni trust and desire her. That night, he watches as she hugs the shrub, picks its flowers, and places them in her bosom. Observing this mysterious being, he notices a drop of water fall from the flower and land on a reptile below. The creature contorts itself and soon dies. Was this girl truly innocent? He watches as she looks at an insect with childish delight, only to see it die. The whole scene shocks Giovanni, who makes a sudden move, alerting Beatrice to his presence (985). Then, scarcely knowing what he was doing, Giovanni threw down [a] bouquet of flowers into her arms. Beatrice is flattered, but she cannot stay. As she leaves, he thinks he sees the flowers wither in her hands.

Arriving home one night, Giovanni finds a private entrance to the garden. He learns that most of the garden is an artificial and monstrous creation. He knows instantly it is the work of Rappaccini. Fortunately (perhaps), he sees Beatrice and asks her to explain her father’s science. Beatrice recoils: There are many flowers here, and those not the least brilliant, that shock and offend me, when they meet my eye. But, pray, Signor, do not believe these stories about my science. Believe nothing of me save what you see with your own eyes. Struck by the moment and the purity of her heart, Giovanni cannot resist. No Signora, you demand too little of me. Bid me believe nothing, save what comes from your own lips. She looks into his eyes and detects an uneasy suspicion, but still grants his wish. Forget whatever you may have fancied in regard to me. . . . But the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are true from the depths of the heart outward. Those you may believe! The moment strikes him with the light of truth itself, and yet he fears to breathe her in. Still, her character was too real, not to make itself familiar at once. The two begin meeting every day and soon appear to fall in love. They feel safe and even inspired together, and yet it is clear that she is withholding something from him. No bother. By all appreciable signs, they loved; they had looked love, with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered by the way (991–92).

Baglioni again entreats Giovanni not to sip from Beatrice’s poison, but he can no longer take the paranoid interventions. Giovanni remembers Beatrice’s initial bidding in the garden. You know not the Signora Beatrice. You cannot, therefore, estimate the wrong—the blasphemy, I may even say—that is offered to her character by a light or injurious word (997). His strong words belie his shaken confidence. Baglioni’s fears have penetrated his heart. Noticing his opening, Baglioni says that he can save him. He gives Giovanni a silver vial, which he says contains an antidote to the most virulent poisons (998).

The two part ways, but Baglioni’s words continue to work on Giovanni. He casts his mind back to when he first saw Beatrice. Did her breath kill the insect? Did the water from her sister-flower kill the reptile? Did the bouquet he gave her wilt from the mere touch of her hand? And yet—does not his heart know her goodness? He decides that he will see her, but that he will devise a test to put his mind at ease. He buys another bouquet, only to learn that he too has become poisonous! Convinced that Beatrice is her father’s vile apprentice, he leaves for their daily rendezvous in anger. She is the only being whom my breath may not slay! Would that it might!

It is clear to Beatrice that there is a darkness between them. Walking through the garden, the two approach the purple-flowered shrub. Beatrice now reveals the secret she has been holding back. The shrub drew its first breath the moment she drew hers. She was her father’s biological child, the shrub the child of his science. She grew with the plant. It was her sister, and she loved it with human affection: for alas! Hast thou not suspected it? There was an awful doom . . . , the effect of my father’s fatal love of science—which estranged me from all society of my kind.²⁰ She had not realized her awful fate until she met Giovanni and he showed her what the world of love could offer outside the garden and her father’s science.

Giovanni erupts with anger. If she knew how miserable her existence was, how could she force it upon him? Yes, poisonous thing! . . . Thou hast filled my veins with poison! Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome, and deadly a creature as thyself,—a world’s wonder of hideous monstrosity! Now—if our breath be happily as fatal to ourselves as to all others—let us join our lips in one kiss of unutterable hatred, and so die! (1002). Beatrice cries out for the Holy Virgin to pity her, but Giovanni scoffs at her prayer. He rages on, and it is soon more than she can bear. She admits that she is poisonous, but says she never meant to hurt him—only to love him. For, Giovanni—believe it—though my body be nourished with poison, my spirit is God’s creature, and craves love as its daily food. But my father!—he has united us in this fearful sympathy. Yes; spurn me!—tread upon me!—kill me! Oh, what is death, after such words as thine? But it was not I. Not for a world of bliss would I have done it! (1003). He realizes the cruel yet intimate fate they share. She alone knows what he is experiencing. He resolves to save Beatrice so they can enter a normal and happier life together. He retrieves Baglioni’s silver vial. Shall we not quaff it off together and thus be purified from evil? She grabs the vial, and presses it against her lips. Rappaccini then enters the garden and calls, My daughter . . . thou art no longer lonely in the world! . . . My science, and the sympathy between thee and him, have so wrought within his system, that he now stands apart from common men, as thou dost, daughter of my pride and triumph, from ordinary women. Pass on, then, through the world, most dear to one another, and dreadful to all besides! (1004).

It was too late. Dying before her father, she asks, Wherefore didst thou inflict this miserable doom upon thy child? He responds, Miserable! . . . What mean you, foolish girl? Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvelous gifts, against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy? . . . Misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none? This is the aim of Rappaccini’s science: to protect his daughter from the turmoil of the heart until there is someone who will certainly keep it safe—until he has removed the accidental from the equation. Rappaccini’s quest for rational control has come at a heavy price. The moment Giovanni is deemed worthy is the moment Rappaccini watches his daughter sink to the ground. Dying before him, she cries, I would fain have been loved, not feared. Then, turning to her young love, she delivers one final blow: Farewell, Giovanni! . . . Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine? (1005). She dies, and Hawthorne concludes that as her life had been nourished with poison, the only possible antidote was death.

Rappaccini’s science was to create human connection and love without the tears—to join two hearts together without making them vulnerable to human suffering. It wanted liberationist love. Hawthorne shows that such love mocks the real thing. Hawthorne and the Founders insist that love be prudent, wise, and not thrown by romantic fits. But real love is always courageous love. It is always risky love. Rational liberationist love is always hedged out of fear that a more complete devotion would jeopardize one’s safety or restrain expressive individualism. It is but another kind of self-love. Meaningful love must be courageous love. It must be directed toward marital love and toward the democratic arts that reinforce it. Hawthorne points to these arts by carving out the practical space between the imaginary philosophical high (i.e., formless spiritual love) and the unmoored low (e.g., everyday debauchery).²¹ He is a defender of the democratic beautiful still yearning for virtue. He is a general in America’s new birth of love and marriage—a true son of the Founding Fathers.

Rappaccini tried to make his daughter strong and independent without subjecting her to pain. Rappaccini is a man of science, and he abhors all things that lie outside rational control. The world of science and the world of human love are at odds with each other because one can never make love fully safe without simultaneously destroying it. Love can never be fully rational because it involves trustfully binding oneself to another person in all things—the good and the bad, the known and the unknown. A man chooses to uproot his life and move to a new city to pursue marrying his girlfriend, not knowing whether she will break his heart a few months down the road. A woman marries a man not knowing whether he will be diagnosed with cancer in the next five years. Love and marriage bind her to him and that future. Love always involves the most painful risks. It is always risky love. Human beings must act in a world of limited information, lest their fears paralyze them and leave them safe but with flattened and loveless souls.

Machiavelli instructs the prince that it is " safer to be feared than loved. Human beings will always disappoint, including those you trust and even love. It is because Machiavelli knows that humans are generally ungrateful, fickle, pretenders and dissemblers" that he is unwilling to establish a politics based on reciprocal trust, love, or virtue.²² People will remain loyal while you are good to them, life is pleasant, and danger is far removed. But should their comfort be jeopardized, they will turn on you, leaving you weak and soon destroyed. The only path to safety and independent strength comes from establishing a ruling relationship based on fear. You can count on people to act according to self-preservation and self-interest more often than you can count on them to return love for love and virtue for virtue.

Hawthorne does not address whether Machiavelli is wise to found a new politics on fear, but he is confident that no private relationship capable of love or human flourishing can be built on so low a foundation. Rappaccini strives to make his daughter fierce, strong, and independent, but doing so prevents people from getting close to her. The medicine that keeps her from life’s sorrows is the poison that keeps her from its greatest joys. Giovanni is not the product of any particular science, but he too suffers from a self-imposed affliction born out of fear of the relational intimate. The evidence of Beatrice’s goodness was rooted in something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.²³ This should have been enough to spur him on in the face of the unknown, and yet he proves his fickleness by constantly taking guidance from his fears. The tragedy is not that the silver vial proves poisonous to Beatrice, but that Giovanni and Rappaccini never realize that the primacy of safety is incompatible with human love. The safety they seek only belongs to the dead, those no longer capable of loving or suffering.

Applied to marriage, the liberationists’ will for rational control leads to relationships governed by fear. It leads to liberationist love. This fear may manifest itself in several ways, but it will always destroy union. The fear of choosing wrongly in marriage may create politics that make easy divorce readily accessible, and it may lead to individuals failing to marry altogether. The fear of a spouse changing for the worse may cause a husband not to be fully open with his wife, or it may lead another to refuse to have children. Fear in relationships is nearly always isolating, which in turn harms personal and social bonds. It stresses independence and personal strength at the expense of loving unity. Fear, safety, and independence in marriage are inextricably bound together. Fear, as Aristotle reminds, is not bad in itself. It is right to fear fearful things and to take proper precautions in their presence. It is only when we allow fear to subvert the moral order of goods that it becomes corrosive.

A person urging a soldier’s wrongful retreat always has two weapons at his disposal. The first is to remind the soldier of the battle’s danger. Show him images of others’ suffering. Speak to him about how he might die or go through life maimed. Bring to the forefront of his mind the terrible cost he will bear in fighting. The second weapon is less materialistic but more insidious. Convince him that his cause is not worth the fight. Talk to him about how he has been deluded and manipulated. Place doubt in his mind about the cause’s justness. Teach him that honor is illusory or that there is no good apart from safety. If the soldier lets these arguments penetrate his heart, he will abandon the cause and those who fight with him. He will leave because he has submitted to cowardice and its subversion of moral goods. He will have become confused. The failure will be one of heart and mind, the two irrevocably intertwined.

The modern American has