stock ever since it left the earlier frontier to follow up the valleys
of western Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, into western New
York, into Ohio, into Iowa, and out to the arid plains of western Kansas
and Nebraska; nor do I overlook the peculiar industrial conditions of
the prairie States. But I desire to insist upon the other truth, also,
that these westward immigrants, keeping for generations in advance of
the transforming industrial and social forces that have wrought so vast
a revolution in the older regions of the East which they left, could not
but preserve important aspects of the older farmer type. In the arid
West these pioneers have halted and have turned to perceive an altered
nation and changed social ideals. They see the sharp contrast between
their traditional idea of America, as the land of opportunity, the land
of the self-made man, free from class distinctions and from the power of
wealth, and the existing America, so unlike the earlier ideal. If we
follow back the line of march of the Puritan farmer, we shall see how
responsive he has always been to _isms_, and how persistently he has
resisted encroachments on his ideals of individual opportunity and
democracy. He is the prophet of the "higher law" in Kansas before the
Civil War. He is the Prohibitionist of Iowa and Wisconsin, crying out
against German customs as an invasion of his traditional ideals. He is
the Granger of Wisconsin, passing restrictive railroad legislation. He
is the Abolitionist, the Anti-mason, the Millerite, the Woman
Suffragist, the Spiritualist, the Mormon, of Western New York. Follow
him to his New England home in the turbulent days of Shays' rebellion,
paper money, stay and tender laws, and land banks. The radicals among
these New England farmers hated lawyers and capitalists. "I would not
trust them," said Abraham White, in the ratification convention of
Massachusetts, in 1788, "though every one of them should be a Moses."
"These lawyers," cried Amos Singletary, "and men of learning and moneyed
men that talk so finely and gloss over matters so smoothly to make us
poor illiterate people swallow the pill, expect to get into Congress
themselves! They mean to get all the money into their hands, and then
they will swallow up all us little folk, like the Leviathan, Mr.
President; yea, just as the whale swallowed up Jonah."
If the voice of Mary Ellen Lease sounds raucous to the New England man
to-day, while it is sweet music in the ears of the Kansas farmer, let
him ponder the utterances of these frontier farmers in the days of the
Revolution; and if he is still doubtful of this spiritual kinship, let
him read the words of the levelers and sectaries of Cromwell's army.
The story of the political leaders who remained in the place of their
birth and shared its economic changes differs from the story of those
who by moving to the West continued on a new area the old social type.
In the throng of Scotch-Irish pioneers that entered the uplands of the
Carolinas in the second quarter of the eighteenth century were the
ancestors of Calhoun and of Andrew Jackson. Remaining in this region,
Calhoun shared the transformations of the South Carolina interior. He
saw it change from the area of the pioneer farmers to an area of great
planters raising cotton by slave labor. This explains the transformation
of the nationalist and protectionist Calhoun of 1816 into the
state-sovereignty and free-trade Calhoun. Jackson, on the other hand,
left the region while it was still a frontier, shared the frontier life
of Tennessee, and reflected the democracy and nationalism of his people.
Henry Clay lived long enough in the kindred State of Kentucky to see it
pass from a frontier to a settled community, and his views on slavery
reflected the transitional history of that State. Lincoln, on the other
hand, born in Kentucky in 1809, while the State was still under frontier
conditions, migrated in 1816 to Indiana, and in 1830 to Illinois. The
pioneer influences of his community did much to shape his life, and the
development of the raw frontiersman into the statesman was not unlike
the development of his own State. Political leaders who experienced the
later growth of the Northwest, like Garfield, Hayes, Harrison, and
McKinley, show clearly the continued transformations of the section. But
in the days when the Northwest was still in the gristle, she sent her
sons into the newer West to continue the views of life and the policies
of the half-frontier region they had left.
To-day, the Northwest, standing between her ancestral connections in the
East and her children in the West, partly like the East, partly like the
West, finds herself in a position strangely like that in the days of the
slavery struggle, when her origins presented to her a "divided duty."
But these issues are not with the same imperious "Which?" as was the
issue of freedom or slavery.
Looking at the Northwest as a whole, one sees, in the character of its
industries and in the elements of its population, it is identified on
the east with the zone of States including the middle region and New
England. Cotton culture and the negro make a clear line of division
between the Old Northwest and the South. And yet in important historical
ideals--in the process of expansion, in the persistence of agricultural
interests, in impulsiveness, in imperialistic ways of looking at the
American destiny, in hero-worship, in the newness of its present social
structure--the Old Northwest has much in common with the South and the
Far West.
Behind her is the old pioneer past of simple democratic conditions, and
freedom of opportunity for all men. Before her is a superb industrial
development, the brilliancy of success as evinced in a vast population,
aggregate wealth, and sectional power.
FOOTNOTES:
[222:1] _Atlantic Monthly_, April, 1897. Published by permission.
[238:1] For this information I am indebted to Professor F. W. Blackmar,
of the University of Kansas.
IX
CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE WEST TO AMERICAN DEMOCRACY[243:1]
Political thought in the period of the French Revolution tended to treat
democracy as an absolute system applicable to all times and to all
peoples, a system that was to be created by the act of the people
themselves on philosophical principles. Ever since that era there has
been an inclination on the part of writers on democracy to emphasize the
analytical and theoretical treatment to the neglect of the underlying
factors of historical development.
If, however, we consider the underlying conditions and forces that
create the democratic type of government, and at times contradict the
external forms to which the name democracy is applied, we shall find
that under this name there have appeared a multitude of political types
radically unlike in fact.
The careful student of history must, therefore, seek the explanation of
the forms and changes of political institutions in the social and
economic forces that determine them. To know that at any one time a
nation may be called a democracy, an aristocracy, or a monarchy, is not
so important as to know what are the social and economic tendencies of
the state. These are the vital forces that work beneath the surface and
dominate the external form. It is to changes in the economic and social
life of a people that we must look for the forces, that ultimately
create and modify organs of political action.
For the time, adaptation of political structure may be incomplete or
concealed. Old organs will be utilized to express new forces, and so
gradual and subtle will be the change that it may hardly be recognized.
The pseudo-democracies under the Medici at Florence and under Augustus
at Rome are familiar examples of this type. Or again, if the political
structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by
growth, the expansive forces of social and economic transformation may
rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French Revolution. In
all these changes both conscious ideals and unconscious social
reorganization are at work.
These facts are familiar to the student, and yet it is doubtful if they
have been fully considered in connection with American democracy. For a
century at least, in conventional expression, Americans have referred to
a "glorious Constitution" in explaining the stability and prosperity of
their democracy. We have believed as a nation that other peoples had
only to will our democratic institutions in order to repeat our own
career.
In dealing with Western contributions to democracy, it is essential that
the considerations which have just been mentioned shall be kept in mind.
Whatever these contributions may have been, we find ourselves at the
present time in an era of such profound economic and social
transformation as to raise the question of the effect of these changes
upon the democratic institutions of the United States. Within a decade
four marked changes have occurred in our national development; taken
together they constitute a revolution.
First, there is the exhaustion of the supply of free land and the
closing of the movement of Western advance as an effective factor in
American development. The first rough conquest of the wilderness is
accomplished, and that great supply of free lands which year after year
has served to reinforce the democratic influences in the United States
is exhausted. It is true that vast tracts of government land are still
untaken, but they constitute the mountain and arid regions, only a small
fraction of them capable of conquest, and then only by the application
of capital and combined effort. The free lands that made the American
pioneer have gone.
In the second place, contemporaneously with this there has been such a
concentration of capital in the control of fundamental industries as to
make a new epoch in the economic development of the United States. The
iron, the coal, and the cattle of the country have all fallen under the
domination of a few great corporations with allied interests, and by the
rapid combination of the important railroad systems and steamship lines,
in concert with these same forces, even the breadstuffs and the
manufactures of the nation are to some degree controlled in a similar
way. This is largely the work of the last decade. The development of the
greatest iron mines of Lake Superior occurred in the early nineties, and
in the same decade came the combination by which the coal and the coke
of the country, and the transportation systems that connect them with
the iron mines, have been brought under a few concentrated managements.
Side by side with this concentration of capital has gone the combination
of labor in the same vast industries. The one is in a certain sense the
concomitant of the other, but the movement acquires an additional
significance because of the fact that during the past fifteen years the
labor class has been so recruited by a tide of foreign immigration that
this class is now largely made up of persons of foreign parentage, and
the lines of cleavage which begin to appear in this country between
capital and labor have been accentuated by distinctions of nationality.
A third phenomenon connected with the two just mentioned is the
expansion of the United States politically and commercially into lands
beyond the seas. A cycle of American development has been completed. Up
to the close of the War of 1812, this country was involved in the
fortunes of the European state system. The first quarter of a century of
our national existence was almost a continual struggle to prevent
ourselves being drawn into the European wars. At the close of that era
of conflict, the United States set its face toward the West. It began
the settlement and improvement of the vast interior of the country. Here
was the field of our colonization, here the field of our political
activity. This process being completed, it is not strange that we find
the United States again involved in world-politics. The revolution that
occurred four years ago, when the United States struck down that ancient
nation under whose auspices the New World was discovered, is hardly yet
more than dimly understood. The insular wreckage of the Spanish War,
Porto Rico and the Philippines, with the problems presented by the
Hawaiian Islands, Cuba, the Isthmian Canal, and China, all are
indications of the new direction of the ship of state, and while we thus
turn our attention overseas, our concentrated industrial strength has
given us a striking power against the commerce of Europe that is already
producing consternation in the Old World. Having completed the conquest
of the wilderness, and having consolidated our interests, we are
beginning to consider the relations of democracy and empire.
And fourth, the political parties of the United States, now tend to
divide on issues that involve the question of Socialism. The rise of the
Populist party in the last decade, and the acceptance of so many of its
principles by the Democratic party under the leadership of Mr. Bryan,
show in striking manner the birth of new political ideas, the
reformation of the lines of political conflict.
It is doubtful if in any ten years of American history more significant
factors in our growth have revealed themselves. The struggle of the
pioneer farmers to subdue the arid lands of the Great Plains in the
eighties was followed by the official announcement of the extinction of
the frontier line in 1890. The dramatic outcome of the Chicago
Convention of 1896 marked the rise into power of the representatives of
Populistic change. Two years later came the battle of Manila, which
broke down the old isolation of the nation, and started it on a path the
goal of which no man can foretell; and finally, but two years ago came
that concentration of which the billion and a half dollar steel trust
and the union of the Northern continental railways are stupendous
examples. Is it not obvious, then, that the student who seeks for the
explanation of democracy in the social and economic forces that underlie
political forms must make inquiry into the conditions that have produced
our democratic institutions, if he would estimate the effect of these
vast changes? As a contribution to this inquiry, let us now turn to an
examination of the part that the West has played in shaping our
democracy.
From the beginning of the settlement of America, the frontier regions
have exercised a steady influence toward democracy. In Virginia, to take
an example, it can be traced as early as the period of Bacon's
Rebellion, a hundred years before our Declaration of Independence. The
small landholders, seeing that their powers were steadily passing into
the hands of the wealthy planters who controlled Church and State and
lands, rose in revolt. A generation later, in the governorship of
Alexander Spotswood, we find a contest between the frontier settlers and
the property-holding classes of the coast. The democracy with which
Spotswood had to struggle, and of which he so bitterly complained, was a
democracy made up of small landholders, of the newer immigrants, and of
indented servants, who at the expiration of their time of servitude
passed into the interior to take up lands and engage in pioneer farming.
The "War of the Regulation," just on the eve of the American Revolution,
shows the steady persistence of this struggle between the classes of the
interior and those of the coast. The Declaration of Grievances which the
back counties of the Carolinas then drew up against the aristocracy that
dominated the politics of those colonies exhibits the contest between
the democracy of the frontier and the established classes who
apportioned the legislature in such fashion as to secure effective
control of government. Indeed, in a period before the outbreak of the
American Revolution, one can trace a distinct belt of democratic
territory extending from the back country of New England down through
western New York, Pennsylvania, and the South.[248:1]
In each colony this region was in conflict with the dominant classes of
the coast. It constituted a quasi-revolutionary area before the days of
the Revolution, and it formed the basis on which the Democratic party
was afterwards established. It was, therefore, in the West, as it was in
the period before the Declaration of Independence, that the struggle for
democratic development first revealed itself, and in that area the
essential ideas of American democracy had already appeared. Through the
period of the Revolution and of the Confederation a similar contest can
be noted. On the frontier of New England, along the western border of
Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and in the communities beyond
the Alleghany Mountains, there arose a demand of the frontier settlers
for independent statehood based on democratic provisions. There is a
strain of fierceness in their energetic petitions demanding
self-government under the theory that every people have the right to
establish their own political institutions in an area which they have
won from the wilderness. Those revolutionary principles based on
natural rights, for which the seaboard colonies were contending, were
taken up with frontier energy in an attempt to apply them to the lands
of the West. No one can read their petitions denouncing the control
exercised by the wealthy landholders of the coast, appealing to the
record of their conquest of the wilderness, and demanding the possession
of the lands for which they have fought the Indians, and which they had
reduced by their ax to civilization, without recognizing in these
frontier communities the cradle of a belligerent Western democracy. "A
fool can sometimes put on his coat better than a wise man can do it for
him,"--such is the philosophy of its petitioners. In this period also
came the contests of the interior agricultural portion of New England
against the coast-wise merchants and property-holders, of which Shays'
Rebellion is the best known, although by no means an isolated instance.
By the time of the constitutional convention, this struggle for
democracy had affected a fairly well-defined division into parties.
Although these parties did not at first recognize their interstate
connections, there were similar issues on which they split in almost all
the States. The demands for an issue of paper money, the stay of
execution against debtors, and the relief against excessive taxation
were found in every colony in the interior agricultural regions. The
rise of this significant movement wakened the apprehensions of the men
of means, and in the debates over the basis of suffrage for the House of
Representatives in the constitutional convention of 1787 leaders of the
conservative party did not hesitate to demand that safeguards to the
property should be furnished the coast against the interior. The outcome
of the debate left the question of suffrage for the House of
Representatives dependent upon the policy of the separate States. This
was in effect imposing a property qualification throughout the nation as
a whole, and it was only as the interior of the country developed that
these restrictions gradually gave way in the direction of manhood
suffrage.
All of these scattered democratic tendencies Jefferson combined, in the
period of Washington's presidency, into the Democratic-Republican party.
Jefferson was the first prophet of American democracy, and when we
analyse the essential features of his gospel, it is clear that the
Western influence was the dominant element. Jefferson himself was born
in the frontier region of Virginia, on the edge of the Blue Ridge, in
the middle of the eighteenth century. His father was a pioneer.
Jefferson's "Notes on Virginia" reveal clearly his conception that
democracy should have an agricultural basis, and that manufacturing
development and city life were dangerous to the purity of the body
politic. Simplicity and economy in government, the right of revolution,
the freedom of the individual, the belief that those who win the vacant
lands are entitled to shape their own government in their own
way,--these are all parts of the platform of political principles to
which he gave his adhesion, and they are all elements eminently
characteristic of the Western democracy into which he was born.
In the period of the Revolution he had brought in a series of measures
which tended to throw the power of Virginia into the hands of the
settlers in the interior rather than of the coastwise aristocracy. The
repeal of the laws of entail and primogeniture would have destroyed the
great estates on which the planting aristocracy based its power. The
abolition of the Established Church would still further have diminished
the influence of the coastwise party in favor of the dissenting sects of
the interior. His scheme of general public education reflected the same
tendency, and his demand for the abolition of slavery was characteristic
of a representative of the West rather than of the old-time aristocracy
of the coast. His sympathy with the Western expansion culminated in the
Louisiana Purchase. In short, the tendencies of Jefferson's legislation
were to replace the dominance of the planting aristocracy by the
dominance of the interior class, which had sought in vain to achieve its
liberties in the period of Bacon's Rebellion.
Nevertheless, Thomas Jefferson was the John the Baptist of democracy,
not its Moses. Only with the slow setting of the tide of settlement
farther and farther toward the interior did the democratic influence
grow strong enough to take actual possession of the government. The
period from 1800 to 1820 saw a steady increase in these tendencies. The
established classes in New England and the South began to take alarm.
Perhaps no better illustration of the apprehensions of the old-time
Federal conservative can be given than these utterances of President
Dwight, of Yale College, in the book of travels which he published in
that period:--
The class of pioneers cannot live in regular society. They are
too idle, too talkative, too passionate, too prodigal, and too
shiftless to acquire either property or character. They are
impatient of the restraints of law, religion, and morality,
and grumble about the taxes by which the Rulers, Ministers,
and Schoolmasters are supported. . . . After exposing the
injustice of the community in neglecting to invest persons of
such superior merit in public offices, in many an eloquent
harangue uttered by many a kitchen fire, in every blacksmith
shop, in every corner of the streets, and finding all their
efforts vain, they become at length discouraged, and under the
pressure of poverty, the fear of the gaol, and consciousness
of public contempt, leave their native places and betake
themselves to the wilderness.
Such was a conservative's impression of that pioneer movement of New
England colonists who had spread up the valley of the Connecticut into
New Hampshire, Vermont, and western New York in the period of which he
wrote, and who afterwards went on to possess the Northwest. New England
Federalism looked with a shudder at the democratic ideas of those who
refused to recognize the established order. But in that period there
came into the Union a sisterhood of frontier States--Ohio, Indiana,
Illinois, Missouri--with provisions for the franchise that brought in
complete democracy.