the conquest of Western resources came from the midst of this society
and still profess its principles. John D. Rockefeller was born on a New
York farm, and began his career as a young business man in St. Louis.
Marcus Hanna was a Cleveland grocer's clerk at the age of twenty. Claus
Spreckles, the sugar king, came from Germany as a steerage passenger to
the United States in 1848. Marshall Field was a farmer boy in Conway,
Massachusetts, until he left to grow up with the young Chicago. Andrew
Carnegie came as a ten-year-old boy from Scotland to Pittsburgh, then a
distinctively Western town. He built up his fortunes through successive
grades until he became the dominating factor in the great iron
industries, and paved the way for that colossal achievement, the Steel
Trust. Whatever may be the tendencies of this corporation, there can be
little doubt of the democratic ideals of Mr. Carnegie himself. With
lavish hand he has strewn millions through the United States for the
promotion of libraries. The effect of this library movement in
perpetuating the democracy that comes from an intelligent and
self-respecting people can hardly be measured. In his "Triumphant
Democracy," published in 1886, Mr. Carnegie, the ironmaster, said, in
reference to the mineral wealth of the United States: "Thank God, these
treasures are in the hands of an intelligent people, the Democracy, to
be used for the general good of the masses, and not made the spoils of
monarchs, courts, and aristocracy, to be turned to the base and selfish
ends of a privileged hereditary class." It would be hard to find a more
rigorous assertion of democratic doctrine than the celebrated utterance,
attributed to the same man, that he should feel it a disgrace to die
rich.
In enumerating the services of American democracy, President Eliot
included the corporation as one of its achievements, declaring that
"freedom of incorporation, though no longer exclusively a democratic
agency, has given a strong support to democratic institutions." In one
sense this is doubtless true, since the corporation has been one of the
means by which small properties can be aggregated into an effective
working body. Socialistic writers have long been fond of pointing out
also that these various concentrations pave the way for and make
possible social control. From this point of view it is possible that the
masters of industry may prove to be not so much an incipient aristocracy
as the pathfinders for democracy in reducing the industrial world to
systematic consolidation suited to democratic control. The great
geniuses that have built up the modern industrial concentration were
trained in the midst of democratic society. They were the product of
these democratic conditions. Freedom to rise was the very condition of
their existence. Whether they will be followed by successors who will
adopt the exploitation of the masses, and who will be capable of
retaining under efficient control these vast resources, is one of the
questions which we shall have to face.
This, at least, is clear: American democracy is fundamentally the
outcome of the experiences of the American people in dealing with the
West. Western democracy through the whole of its earlier period tended
to the production of a society of which the most distinctive fact was
the freedom of the individual to rise under conditions of social
mobility, and whose ambition was the liberty and well-being of the
masses. This conception has vitalized all American democracy, and has
brought it into sharp contrasts with the democracies of history, and
with those modern efforts of Europe to create an artificial democratic
order by legislation. The problem of the United States is not to create
democracy, but to conserve democratic institutions and ideals. In the
later period of its development, Western democracy has been gaining
experience in the problem of social control. It has steadily enlarged
the sphere of its action and the instruments for its perpetuation. By
its system of public schools, from the grades to the graduate work of
the great universities, the West has created a larger single body of
intelligent plain people than can be found elsewhere in the world. Its
political tendencies, whether we consider Democracy, Populism, or
Republicanism, are distinctly in the direction of greater social control
and the conservation of the old democratic ideals.
To these ideals the West adheres with even a passionate determination.
If, in working out its mastery of the resources of the interior, it has
produced a type of industrial leader so powerful as to be the wonder of
the world, nevertheless, it is still to be determined whether these men
constitute a menace to democratic institutions, or the most efficient
factor for adjusting democratic control to the new conditions.
Whatever shall be the outcome of the rush of this huge industrial modern
United States to its place among the nations of the earth, the formation
of its Western democracy will always remain one of the wonderful
chapters in the history of the human race. Into this vast shaggy
continent of ours poured the first feeble tide of European settlement.
European men, institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American
wilderness, and this great American West took them to her bosom, taught
them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common man, trained
them in adaptation to the conditions of the New World, to the creation
of new institutions to meet new needs; and ever as society on her
eastern border grew to resemble the Old World in its social forms and
its industry, ever, as it began to lose faith in the ideals of
democracy, she opened new provinces, and dowered new democracies in her
most distant domains with her material treasures and with the ennobling
influence that the fierce love of freedom, the strength that came from
hewing out a home, making a school and a church, and creating a higher
future for his family, furnished to the pioneer.
She gave to the world such types as the farmer Thomas Jefferson, with
his Declaration of Independence, his statute for religious toleration,
and his purchase of Louisiana. She gave us Andrew Jackson, that fierce
Tennessee spirit who broke down the traditions of conservative rule,
swept away the privacies and privileges of officialdom, and, like a
Gothic leader, opened the temple of the nation to the populace. She gave
us Abraham Lincoln, whose gaunt frontier form and gnarled, massive hand
told of the conflict with the forest, whose grasp of the ax-handle of
the pioneer was no firmer than his grasp of the helm of the ship of
state as it breasted the seas of civil war. She has furnished to this
new democracy her stores of mineral wealth, that dwarf those of the Old
World, and her provinces that in themselves are vaster and more
productive than most of the nations of Europe. Out of her bounty has
come a nation whose industrial competition alarms the Old World, and the
masters of whose resources wield wealth and power vaster than the wealth
and power of kings. Best of all, the West gave, not only to the
American, but to the unhappy and oppressed of all lands, a vision of
hope, and assurance that the world held a place where were to be found
high faith in man and the will and power to furnish him the opportunity
to grow to the full measure of his own capacity. Great and powerful as
are the new sons of her loins, the Republic is greater than they. The
paths of the pioneer have widened into broad highways. The forest
clearing has expanded into affluent commonwealths. Let us see to it that
the ideals of the pioneer in his log cabin shall enlarge into the
spiritual life of a democracy where civic power shall dominate and
utilize individual achievement for the common good.
FOOTNOTES:
[243:1] _Atlantic Monthly_, January, 1903. Reprinted by permission.
[248:1] See chapter iii.
X
PIONEER IDEALS AND THE STATE UNIVERSITY[269:1]
The ideals of a people, their aspirations and convictions, their hopes
and ambitions, their dreams and determinations, are assets in their
civilization as real and important as per capita wealth or industrial
skill.
This nation was formed under pioneer ideals. During three centuries
after Captain John Smith struck the first blow at the American forest on
the eastern edge of the continent, the pioneers were abandoning settled
society for the wilderness, seeking, for generation after generation,
new frontiers. Their experiences left abiding influences upon the ideas
and purposes of the nation. Indeed the older settled regions themselves
were shaped profoundly by the very fact that the whole nation was
pioneering and that in the development of the West the East had its own
part.
The first ideal of the pioneer was that of conquest. It was his task to
fight with nature for the chance to exist. Not as in older countries did
this contest take place in a mythical past, told in folk lore and epic.
It has been continuous to our own day. Facing each generation of
pioneers was the unmastered continent. Vast forests blocked the way;
mountainous ramparts interposed; desolate, grass-clad prairies, barren
oceans of rolling plains, arid deserts, and a fierce race of savages,
all had to be met and defeated. The rifle and the ax are the symbols of
the backwoods pioneer. They meant a training in aggressive courage, in
domination, in directness of action, in destructiveness.
To the pioneer the forest was no friendly resource for posterity, no
object of careful economy. He must wage a hand-to-hand war upon it,
cutting and burning a little space to let in the light upon a dozen
acres of hard-won soil, and year after year expanding the clearing into
new woodlands against the stubborn resistance of primeval trunks and
matted roots. He made war against the rank fertility of the soil. While
new worlds of virgin land lay ever just beyond, it was idle to expect
the pioneer to stay his hand and turn to scientific farming. Indeed, as
Secretary Wilson has said, the pioneer would, in that case, have raised
wheat that no one wanted to eat, corn to store on the farm, and cotton
not worth the picking.
Thus, fired with the ideal of subduing the wilderness, the destroying
pioneer fought his way across the continent, masterful and wasteful,
preparing the way by seeking the immediate thing, rejoicing in rude
strength and wilful achievement.
But even this backwoodsman was more than a mere destroyer. He had
visions. He was finder as well as fighter--the trail-maker for
civilization, the inventor of new ways. Although Rudyard Kipling's
"Foreloper"[270:1] deals with the English pioneer in lands beneath the
Southern Cross, yet the poem portrays American traits as well:
"The gull shall whistle in his wake, the blind wave break in fire,
He shall fulfill God's utmost will, unknowing his desire;
And he shall see old planets pass and alien stars arise,
And give the gale his reckless sail in shadow of new skies.
"Strong lust of gear shall drive him out and hunger arm his hand
To wring food from desert nude, his foothold from the sand.
His neighbors' smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his
rest;
He shall go forth till south is north, sullen and dispossessed;
He shall desire loneliness and his desire shall bring
Hard on his heels, a thousand wheels, a people and a king.
"He shall come back on his own track, and by his scarce cool camp,
There shall he meet the roaring street, the derrick and the stamp;
For he must blaze a nation's way with hatchet and with brand,
Till on his last won wilderness an empire's bulwarks stand."
This quest after the unknown, this yearning "beyond the sky line, where
the strange roads go down," is of the very essence of the backwoods
pioneer, even though he was unconscious of its spiritual significance.
The pioneer was taught in the school of experience that the crops of one
area would not do for a new frontier; that the scythe of the clearing
must be replaced by the reaper of the prairies. He was forced to make
old tools serve new uses; to shape former habits, institutions and ideas
to changed conditions; and to find new means when the old proved
inapplicable. He was building a new society as well as breaking new
soil; he had the ideal of nonconformity and of change. He rebelled
against the conventional.
Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the
ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental
constraint. He came from a civilization based on individual competition,
and he brought the conception with him to the wilderness where a wealth
of resources, and innumerable opportunities gave it a new scope. The
prizes were for the keenest and the strongest; for them were the best
bottom lands, the finest timber tracts, the best salt-springs, the
richest ore beds; and not only these natural gifts, but also the
opportunities afforded in the midst of a forming society. Here were mill
sites, town sites, transportation lines, banking centers, openings in
the law, in politics--all the varied chances for advancement afforded in
a rapidly developing society where everything was open to him who knew
how to seize the opportunity.
The squatter enforced his claim to lands even against the government's
title by the use of extra-legal combinations and force. He appealed to
lynch law with little hesitation. He was impatient of any governmental
restriction upon his individual right to deal with the wilderness.
In our own day we sometimes hear of congressmen sent to jail for
violating land laws; but the different spirit in the pioneer days may be
illustrated by a speech of Delegate Sibley of Minnesota in Congress in
1852. In view of the fact that he became the State's first governor, a
regent of its university, president of its historical society, and a
doctor of laws of Princeton, we may assume that he was a pillar of
society. He said:
The government has watched its public domain with jealous eye,
and there are now enactments upon your statute books, aimed at
the trespassers upon it, which should be expunged as a
disgrace to the country and to the nineteenth century.
Especially is he pursued with unrelenting severity, who has
dared to break the silence of the primeval forest by the blows
of the American ax. The hardy lumberman who has penetrated to
the remotest wilds of the Northwest, to drag from their
recesses the materials for building up towns and cities in the
great valley of the Mississippi, has been particularly marked
out as a victim. After enduring all the privations and
subjecting himself to all the perils incident to his
vocation--when he has toiled for months to add by his honest
labor to the comfort of his fellow men, and to the aggregate
wealth of the nation, he finds himself suddenly in the
clutches of the law for trespassing on the public domain. The
proceeds of his long winter's work are reft from him, and
exposed to public sale for the benefit of his paternal
government . . . and the object of this oppression and wrong
is further harassed by vexatious law proceedings against him.
Sibley's protest in congress against these "outrages" by which the
northern lumbermen were "harassed" in their work of what would now be
called stealing government timber, aroused no protest from his
colleagues. No president called this congressman an undesirable citizen
or gave him over to the courts.
Thus many of the pioneers, following the ideal of the right of the
individual to rise, subordinated the rights of the nation and posterity
to the desire that the country should be "developed" and that the
individual should advance with as little interference as possible.
Squatter doctrines and individualism have left deep traces upon American
conceptions.
But quite as deeply fixed in the pioneer's mind as the ideal of
individualism was the ideal of democracy. He had a passionate hatred for
aristocracy, monopoly and special privilege; he believed in simplicity,
economy and in the rule of the people. It is true that he honored the
successful man, and that he strove in all ways to advance himself. But
the West was so free and so vast, the barriers to individual achievement
were so remote, that the pioneer was hardly conscious that any danger to
equality could come from his competition for natural resources. He
thought of democracy as in some way the result of our political
institutions, and he failed to see that it was primarily the result of
the free lands and immense opportunities which surrounded him.
Occasional statesmen voiced the idea that American democracy was based
on the abundance of unoccupied land, even in the first debates on the
public domain.
This early recognition of the influence of abundance of land in shaping
the economic conditions of American democracy is peculiarly significant
to-day in view of the practical exhaustion of the supply of cheap arable
public lands open to the poor man, and the coincident development of
labor unions to keep up wages.
Certain it is that the strength of democratic movements has chiefly lain
in the regions of the pioneer. "Our governments tend too much to
democracy," wrote Izard, of South Carolina, to Jefferson, in 1785. "A
handicraftsman thinks an apprenticeship necessary to make him acquainted
with his business. But our backcountrymen are of the opinion that a
politician may be born just as well as a poet."
The Revolutionary ideas, of course, gave a great impetus to democracy,
and in substantially every colony there was a double revolution, one for
independence and the other for the overthrow of aristocratic control.
But in the long run the effective force behind American democracy was
the presence of the practically free land into which men might escape
from oppression or inequalities which burdened them in the older
settlements. This possibility compelled the coastwise States to
liberalize the franchise; and it prevented the formation of a dominant
class, whether based on property or on custom. Among the pioneers one
man was as good as his neighbor. He had the same chance; conditions were
simple and free. Economic equality fostered political equality. An
optimistic and buoyant belief in the worth of the plain people, a
devout faith in man prevailed in the West. Democracy became almost the
religion of the pioneer. He held with passionate devotion the idea that
he was building under freedom a new society, based on self government,
and for the welfare of the average man.
And yet even as he proclaimed the gospel of democracy the pioneer showed
a vague apprehension lest the time be short--lest equality should not
endure--lest he might fall behind in the ascending movement of Western
society. This led him on in feverish haste to acquire advantages as
though he only half believed his dream. "Before him lies a boundless
continent," wrote De Tocqueville, in the days when pioneer democracy was
triumphant under Jackson, "and he urges forward as if time pressed and
he was afraid of finding no room for his exertions."
Even while Jackson lived, labor leaders and speculative thinkers were
demanding legislation to place a limit on the amount of land which one
person might acquire and to provide free farms. De Tocqueville saw the
signs of change. "Between the workman and the master," he said, "there
are frequent relations but no real association. . . . I am of the
opinion, upon the whole, that the manufacturing aristocracy which is
growing up under our eyes is one of the harshest which ever existed in
the world; . . . if ever a permanent inequality, of conditions and
aristocracy again penetrate into the world, it may be predicted that
this is the gate by which they will enter." But the sanative influences
of the free spaces of the West were destined to ameliorate labor's
condition, to afford new hopes and new faith to pioneer democracy, and
to postpone the problem.
As the settlers advanced into provinces whose area dwarfed that of the
older sections, pioneer democracy itself began to undergo changes, both
in its composition and in its processes of expansion. At the close of
the Civil War, when settlement was spreading with greatest vigor across
the Mississippi, the railways began their work as colonists. Their land
grants from the government, amounting altogether by 1871 to an area five
times that of the State of Pennsylvania, demanded purchasers, and so the
railroads pioneered the way for the pioneer.
The homestead law increased the tide of settlers. The improved farm
machinery made it possible for him to go boldly out on to the prairie
and to deal effectively with virgin soil in farms whose cultivated area
made the old clearings of the backwoodsman seem mere garden plots. Two
things resulted from these conditions, which profoundly modified pioneer
ideals. In the first place the new form of colonization demanded an
increasing use of capital; and the rapidity of the formation of towns,
the speed with which society developed, made men the more eager to
secure bank credit to deal with the new West. This made the pioneer more
dependent on the eastern economic forces. In the second place the farmer
became dependent as never before on transportation companies. In this
speculative movement the railroads, finding that they had pressed too
far in advance and had issued stock to freely for their earnings to
justify the face of the investment, came into collision with the pioneer
on the question of rates and of discriminations. The Greenback movement
and the Granger movements were appeals to government to prevent what the
pioneer thought to be invasions of pioneer democracy.
As the western settler began to face the problem of magnitude in the
areas he was occupying; as he began to adjust his life to the modern
forces of capital and to complex productive processes; as he began to
see that, go where he would, the question of credit and currency, of
transportation and distribution in general conditioned his success, he
sought relief by legislation. He began to lose his primitive attitude
of individualism, government began to look less like a necessary evil
and more like an instrument for the perpetuation of his democratic
ideals. In brief, the defenses of the pioneer democrat began to shift,
from free land to legislation, from the ideal of individualism to the
ideal of social control through regulation by law. He had no sympathy
with a radical reconstruction of society by the revolution of socialism;
even his alliances with the movement of organized labor, which
paralleled that of organized capital in the East, were only
half-hearted. But he was becoming alarmed over the future of the free
democratic ideal. The wisdom of his legislation it is not necessary to
discuss here. The essential point is that his conception of the right of
government to control social process had undergone a change. He was
coming to regard legislation as an instrument of social construction.
The individualism of the Kentucky pioneer of 1796 was giving way to the
Populism of the Kansas pioneer of 1896.
The later days of pioneer democracy are too familiar to require much
exposition. But they are profoundly significant. As the pioneer doctrine
of free competition for the resources of the nation revealed its
tendencies; as individual, corporation and trust, like the pioneer,
turned increasingly to legal devices to promote their contrasting
ideals, the natural resources were falling into private possession.
Tides of alien immigrants were surging into the country to replace the
old American stock in the labor market, to lower the standard of living
and to increase the pressure of population upon the land. These recent
foreigners have lodged almost exclusively in the dozen great centers of
industrial life, and there they have accented the antagonisms between
capital and labor by the fact that the labor supply has become
increasingly foreign born, and recruited from nationalities who arouse
no sympathy on the part of capital and little on the part of the
general public. Class distinctions are accented by national prejudices,
and democracy is thereby invaded. But even in the dull brains of great
masses of these unfortunates from southern and eastern Europe the idea
of America as the land of freedom and of opportunity to rise, the land
of pioneer democratic ideals, has found lodgment, and if it is given
time and is not turned into revolutionary lines it will fructify.
As the American pioneer passed on in advance of this new tide of
European immigration, he found lands increasingly limited. In place of
the old lavish opportunity for the settler to set his stakes where he
would, there were frantic rushes of thousands of eager pioneers across
the line of newly opened Indian reservations. Even in 1889, when
Oklahoma was opened to settlement, twenty thousand settlers crowded at
the boundaries, like straining athletes, waiting the bugle note that
should start the race across the line. To-day great crowds gather at the
land lotteries of the government as the remaining fragments of the
public domain are flung to hungry settlers.