[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 95 (Monday, June 12, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8132-S8133]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                       UNION COLLEGE COMMENCEMENT

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, yesterday at Union College in 
Schenectady, NY, I was privileged to deliver the commencement address 
on the occasion of the bicentennial anniversary of that institution's 
charter. The elements, however, did not cooperate. As the thunder began 
to rumble, I cut my address short. But as this morning's Albany Times 
Union noted, my parting promise to the gathered was: ``I'll put the 
rest in the Congressional Record.''
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full text of my 
address be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                   Union College Commencement Address

                  (By Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan)

       In a world made up of some 192 nations, of which a scant 51 
     existed a half century ago, and of these only eight having 
     existed for a whole century without having their form of 
     government changed by violence, it is a rare experience to 
     graduate from a college founded a full two centuries ago in a 
     new and novel nation with tiny resources and doubtful 
     prospects which not only endures to this day, but stands now 
     pre-eminent among the nations of the world.
       It is a matter worth reflection. And a setting designed for 
     just that, by an architect trained at the court of Louis XVI. 
     Union College was, of course, the first educational 
     institution chartered by New York State. It promptly broke 
     with the past creating, as Roger G. Kennedy has written, ``a 
     scientific, almost polytechnical course, in defiance of the 
     classical curriculum then almost universal in America.'' This 
     was so very much in the spirit of the new republic, evoked in 
     The Federalist papers published up and down the Hudson 
     Valley, not a dozen years earlier.
       We do well to consult those incomparable essays from time 
     to time, and not simply because the new Speaker of the House 
     of Representatives admonishes that we ought. The first thing 
     to note, or so it seems to me, is the conscious, proclaimed 
     assertion of the Founders that they had discovered what 
     Madison termed ``a new science of politics'' based upon 
     principles--uniformities--in human behavior which made 
     possible the reintroduction of republican government nearly 
     two millennia after Caesar had ended the experiment. Given 
     what Madison termed ``the fugitive and turbulent existence of 
     ancient republics,'' who could dare to suggest that a modern 
     republic could fare better? Well, Madison could. And why? 
     Because careful study had produced new knowledge. To cite 
     Martin Diamond:
       ``This great new claim rested upon a new and aggressively 
     more `realistic' idea of human nature. Ancient and medieval 
     thought and practice were said to have failed disastrously by 
     clinging to illusions regarding how men ought to be. Instead, 
     the new science would take man as he actually is, would 
     accept as primary in his nature the self-interestedness and 
     passion displayed by all men everywhere and, precisely on 
     that basis, would work out decent political solutions.''
       Until that time, with but a few exceptions, the whole of 
     political thought turned on ways to inculcate virtue in a 
     small class that governed. But, wrote Madison, ``if men were 
     angels, no government would be necessary.'' We would have to 
     work with the material at hand. Not pretty, but something far 
     more important: predictable. Thus, men could be relied upon 
     to be selfish; nay, rapacious. Very well. ``Ambition must be 
     made to counteract ambition.'' Whereupon we derive the 
     central principle of the Constitution, the various devices 
     which in Madison's formulation, offset ``by opposite and 
     rival interests, the defect of better motives.'' (See Daniel 
     Patrick Moynihan, ``Came The Revolution'', Harcourt Brace 
     Jovanovich, New York, 1988, pgs. 302-303.)
       The American revolution and the new nation emerged from a 
     crisis of legitimacy in the old European order. The Founders 
     genius was to adapt to that order rather than seeking to 
     abolish all traces of it. As, for example, the French 
     revolutionaries did when they changed the names of the days 
     of the week and declared 1792 to be L'annee Une. Year One.
       There is a striking parallel between these political 
     revolutions of the late 18th century and the economic 
     revolutions of our time. In the course of the past half-
     century the United States essentially has learned to manage 
     an industrial economy. This learning followed a crisis of 
     legitimacy in the old economic order which unlike the Soviet 
     Union, for example, we did not abolish but did, in fact, 
     transform.
       1945 was, of course, the 150th anniversary of the founding 
     of Union College. It was also the year that World War II came 
     to an end. V-J Day was September 2; Union celebrated its 
     Sesquicentennial two weeks later. I was in the Navy then, (as 
     was Joseph Hinchey) and remember those days. The great 
     question here at home was whether the end of the war would 
     mean the resumption of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and 
     generally speaking, the crisis of capitalism which had 
     brought on the war, or was widely held to have done. 
     [[Page S8133]] 
       Just what does it mean to speak of a ``crisis in 
     capitalism?'' If the term seems puzzling today, it would not 
     have been then. Then it meant going from 3.2 percent 
     unemployment in 1929 to 24.9 percent in 1933, and averaging 
     about 18 percent for the remainder of the decade. Stop and 
     imagine for a moment searching for a job--let alone your 
     first job--when one-fourth of the labor force is unemployed. 
     This was the worst experience, worldwide, in the history of 
     industrial economies. At the height of the Depression 13 
     million workers were unemployed in the United States.
       It seemed, moreover, to be just the latest swing in a 
     steadily amplifying cycle of boom and bust. We have almost 
     lost this memory. The Panic of 1893. The Panic of 1908. The 
     Crash of 1919, of 1929, of 1938. Already, at the beginning of 
     this century, it was widely held that free enterprise 
     capitalism just couldn't work. A great socialist movement 
     began. George R. Lunn, the first socialist Mayor in New York, 
     was elected here in Schenectady in 1911. Not untypically, he 
     came out of the Midwest and was an ordained Presbyterian 
     minister--having received his Doctor of Divinity degree from 
     Union. In 1912, an ambitious Harvard graduate, Walter 
     Lippmann, came here to be the Mayor's executive secretary. 
     This seemingly was where the future lay. And, of course, 
     there was soon a Communist Party in the United States, 
     actively supported by ``Moscow gold,'' as it was sometimes 
     and not inaccurately termed. For Communists the end of the 
     age of capitalism was assumed to be instantly at hand. There 
     was thunder on the right, as well; and as the Depression 
     settled in, a great crisis of confidence in the vital center.
       Then knowledge appeared which changed everything. It began 
     with measurement; just what were these business cycles that 
     so often turned into disaster? Obviously, not the ancient 
     rhythm of winter, spring, summer, and fall. But what? A nice 
     place to start is the foundation of the National Bureau of 
     Economic Research at Columbia University, the only 
     institution of higher learning in New York older than Union. 
     C. Wesley Mitchell, who was director of the Bureau for near 
     to half a century (1920-45), put it nicely:
       ``Our best hope for the future lies in the extension to 
     social organization of the methods that we already employ in 
     our most progressive fields of effort. In science and in 
     industry . . . we do not wait for catastrophe to force new 
     ways upon us. . . . We rely, and with success, upon 
     quantitative analysis to point the way; and we advance 
     because we are constantly improving and applying such 
     analysis.''
       Then theory. Principally by John Maynard Keynes in England 
     refuting the assumption of classical economics that markets 
     automatically return to an equilibrium, with all resources 
     employed. An economy could settle in at high levels of 
     unemployed people and underutilized capital.
       Next practice. During World War II, here in the United 
     States, the new economics performed surpassingly well, 
     notably as regards inflation which actually declined during 
     the war years.
       Finally, there was law. In the Employment Act of 1946, 
     Congress declared it to be:
       ``The continuing policy and responsibility of the Federal 
     Government . . . to promote maximum employment, production 
     and purchasing power.''
       Note the genius of that language. The by now century-old 
     dispute over capitalism had been a dispute over ownership, 
     with the left calling for public ownership as against 
     private. Of a sudden, we changed the terms of the debate. Now 
     we were talking about employment, production, purchasing 
     power. And measuring progress in an Annual Economic Report of 
     the President, prepared by the new Council of Economic 
     Advisers.
       Before 1929 the average business cycle contraction lasted 
     nearly 21 months following an average expansion of slightly 
     more than 25 months. About even. Over the past fifty years, 
     however, the average recovery has lasted 50 months, with 
     contractions shortened to an average of 11 months. A very 
     different world. In all this half century, the largest 
     decline in output was 2.2 percent, in 1982. Compare that with 
     a drop of 9.9 percent in 1930; followed by 7.7 percent in 
     1931; followed by 14.8 percent in 1932. As of now, for 
     example, we are in our 10th post-war expansion which reached 
     its 50th month in May. During the half century period, the 
     size of our economy has quadrupled, and real income per 
     person has more than doubled.
       Is our world transformed? Well, yes it is. And it would do 
     us no harm to take note between bouts of self-abasement. The 
     legitimacy of a free enterprise society, with free labor and 
     free markets is acknowledged across the globe.
       Now then, are our troubles behind us? Assuredly not; 
     obviously not. My colleague and friend, Senator Bill Bradley, 
     observes that ``the fragile ecology of our social environment 
     is as threatened as that of our natural environment.'' (I 
     would say vastly more so.) He continues:
       ``The market is governed by the logic of economic self-
     interest, while government is the domain of laws with all 
     their coercive authority. Civil society, on the other hand, 
     is the sphere of our most basic humanity.''
       True enough. Marine Corps Major Stephen Ganyard recently 
     called attention to the passage in The Theory of Moral 
     Sentiments (1759) by Adam Smith, who had something to do with 
     all this market business, in which he writes that in our 
     actions we cannot ``prefer ourselves so shamelessly and 
     blindly to others,'' even if that is the natural inclination 
     of our feelings. (As Madison would have thought.) In our 
     time, Joseph Schumpeter has explained, in Eugene D. 
     Genovese's words, ``the ways in which capitalism relentlessly 
     destroys the pre-capitalist institutions and values necessary 
     for its social and political stability.'' Consider, if you 
     will, the state of the American family. Or note that in 
     Washington today the talk is less about how the economy can 
     create jobs but how a dependent population can be induced to 
     take them. But surely that only strengthens the case for a 
     ``science of politics'' that seeks, however so often in vain, 
     to understand the world which we inherit but which we also in 
     some measure create.
       And so, then, on to the Third Century.
       

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