rivals in building up the various railroads into a few great groups, a
process that had gone so far that before his death Mr. Harriman was
ambitious to concentrate them all under his single control. High finance
under the leadership of Mr. Morgan steadily achieved the consolidation
of the greater industries into trusts or combinations and effected a
community of interests between them and a few dominant banking
organizations, with allied insurance companies and trust companies. In
New York City have been centered, as never before, the banking reserves
of the nation, and here, by the financial management of capital and
speculative promotion, there has grown up a unified control over the
nation's industrial life. Colossal private fortunes have arisen. No
longer is the per capita wealth of the nation a real index to the
prosperity of the average man. Labor on the other hand has shown an
increasing self-consciousness, is combining and increasing its demands.
In a word, the old pioneer individualism is disappearing, while the
forces of social combination are manifesting themselves as never before.
The self-made man has become, in popular speech, the coal baron, the
steel king, the oil king, the cattle king, the railroad magnate, the
master of high finance, the monarch of trusts. The world has never
before seen such huge fortunes exercising combined control over the
economic life of a people, and such luxury as has come out of the
individualistic pioneer democracy of America in the course of
competitive evolution.
At the same time the masters of industry, who control interests which
represent billions of dollars, do not admit that they have broken with
pioneer ideals. They regard themselves as pioneers under changed
conditions, carrying on the old work of developing the natural resources
of the nation, compelled by the constructive fever in their veins, even
in ill-health and old age and after the accumulation of wealth beyond
their power to enjoy, to seek new avenues of action and of power, to
chop new clearings, to find new trails, to expand the horizon of the
nation's activity, and to extend the scope of their dominion. "This
country," said the late Mr. Harriman in an interview a few years ago,
"has been developed by a wonderful people, flush with enthusiasm,
imagination and speculative bent. . . . They have been magnificent
pioneers. They saw into the future and adapted their work to the
possibilities. . . . Stifle that enthusiasm, deaden that imagination and
prohibit that speculation by restrictive and cramping conservative law,
and you tend to produce a moribund and conservative people and country."
This is an appeal to the historic ideals of Americans who viewed the
republic as the guardian of individual freedom to compete for the
control of the natural resources of the nation.
On the other hand, we have the voice of the insurgent West, recently
given utterance in the New Nationalism of ex-President Roosevelt,
demanding increase of federal authority to curb the special interests,
the powerful industrial organizations, and the monopolies, for the sake
of the conservation of our natural resources and the preservation of
American democracy.
The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary federal activity in
limiting individual and corporate freedom for the benefit of society. To
that decade belong the conservation congresses and the effective
organization of the Forest Service, and the Reclamation Service. Taken
together these developments alone would mark a new era, for over three
hundred million acres are, as a result of this policy, reserved from
entry and sale, an area more than equal to that of all the states which
established the constitution, if we exclude their western claims; and
these reserved lands are held for a more beneficial use of their
forests, minerals, arid tracts, and water rights, by the nation as a
whole. Another example is the extension of the activity of the
Department of Agriculture, which seeks the remotest regions of the earth
for crops suitable to the areas reclaimed by the government, maps and
analyzes the soils, fosters the improvement of seeds and animals, tells
the farmer when and how and what to plant, and makes war upon diseases
of plants and animals and insect pests. The recent legislation for pure
food and meat inspection, and the whole mass of regulative law under the
Interstate Commerce clause of the constitution, further illustrates the
same tendency.
Two ideals were fundamental in traditional American thought, ideals that
developed in the pioneer era. One was that of individual freedom to
compete unrestrictedly for the resources of a continent--the squatter
ideal. To the pioneer government was an evil. The other was the ideal of
a democracy--"government of the people, by the people and for the
people." The operation of these ideals took place contemporaneously with
the passing into private possession of the free public domain and the
natural resources of the United States. But American democracy was based
on an abundance of free lands; these were the very conditions that
shaped its growth and its fundamental traits. Thus time has revealed
that these two ideals of pioneer democracy had elements of mutual
hostility and contained the seeds of its dissolution. The present finds
itself engaged in the task of readjusting its old ideals to new
conditions and is turning increasingly to government to preserve its
traditional democracy. It is not surprising that socialism shows
noteworthy gains as elections continue; that parties are forming on new
lines; that the demand for primary elections, for popular choice of
senators, initiative, referendum, and recall, is spreading, and that the
regions once the center of pioneer democracy exhibit these tendencies in
the most marked degree. They are efforts to find substitutes for that
former safeguard of democracy, the disappearing free lands. They are the
sequence to the extinction of the frontier.
It is necessary next to notice that in the midst of all this national
energy, and contemporaneous with the tendency to turn to the national
government for protection to democracy, there is clear evidence of the
persistence and the development of sectionalism.[321:1] Whether we
observe the grouping of votes in Congress and in general elections, or
the organization and utterances of business leaders, or the association
of scholars, churches, or other representatives of the things of the
spirit, we find that American life is not only increasing in its
national intensity but that it is integrating by sections. In part this
is due to the factor of great spaces which make sectional rather than
national organization the line of least resistance; but, in part, it is
also the expression of the separate economic, political, and social
interests and the separate spiritual life of the various geographic
provinces or sections. The votes on the tariff, and in general the
location of the strongholds of the Progressive Republican movement,
illustrate this fact. The difficulty of a national adjustment of railway
rates to the diverse interests of different sections is another
example. Without attempting to enter upon a more extensive discussion of
sectionalism, I desire simply to point out that there are evidences that
now, as formerly, the separate geographical interests have their leaders
and spokesmen, that much Congressional legislation is determined by the
contests, triumphs, or compromises between the rival sections, and that
the real federal relations of the United States are shaped by the
interplay of sectional with national forces rather than by the relation
of State and Nation. As time goes on and the nation adjusts itself more
durably to the conditions of the differing geographic sections which
make it up, they are coming to a new self-consciousness and a revived
self-assertion. Our national character is a composite of these
sections.[322:1]
Obviously in attempting to indicate even a portion of the significant
features of our recent history we have been obliged to take note of a
complex of forces. The times are so close at hand that the relations
between events and tendencies force themselves upon our attention. We
have had to deal with the connections of geography, industrial growth,
politics, and government. With these we must take into consideration the
changing social composition, the inherited beliefs and habitual attitude
of the masses of the people, the psychology of the nation and of the
separate sections, as well as of the leaders. We must see how these
leaders are shaped partly by their time and section, and how they are in
part original, creative, by virtue of their own genius and initiative.
We cannot neglect the moral tendencies and the ideals. All are related
parts of the same subject and can no more be properly understood in
isolation than the movement as a whole can be understood by neglecting
some of these important factors, or by the use of a single method of
investigation. Whatever be the truth regarding European history,
American history is chiefly concerned with social forces, shaping and
reshaping under the conditions of a nation changing as it adjusts to its
environment. And this environment progressively reveals new aspects of
itself, exerts new influences, and calls out new social organs and
functions.
I have undertaken this rapid survey of recent history for two purposes.
First, because it has seemed fitting to emphasize the significance of
American development since the passing of the frontier, and, second,
because in the observation of present conditions we may find assistance
in our study of the past.
It is a familiar doctrine that each age studies its history anew and
with interests determined by the spirit of the time. Each age finds it
necessary to reconsider at least some portion of the past, from points
of view furnished by new conditions which reveal the influence and
significance of forces not adequately known by the historians of the
previous generation. Unquestionably each investigator and writer is
influenced by the times in which he lives and while this fact exposes
the historian to a bias, at the same time it affords him new instruments
and new insight for dealing with his subject.
If recent history, then, gives new meaning to past events, if it has to
deal with the rise into a commanding position of forces, the origin and
growth of which may have been inadequately described or even overlooked
by historians of the previous generation, it is important to study the
present and the recent past, not only for themselves but also as the
source of new hypotheses, new lines of inquiry, new criteria of the
perspective of the remoter past. And, moreover, a just public opinion
and a statesmanlike treatment of present problems demand that they be
seen in their historical relations in order that history may hold the
lamp for conservative reform.
Seen from the vantage-ground of present developments what new light
falls upon past events! When we consider what the Mississippi Valley has
come to be in American life, and when we consider what it is yet to be,
the young Washington, crossing the snows of the wilderness to summon the
French to evacuate the portals of the great valley, becomes the herald
of an empire. When we recall the huge industrial power that has centered
at Pittsburgh, Braddock's advance to the forks of the Ohio takes on new
meaning. Even in defeat, he opened a road to what is now the center of
the world's industrial energy. The modifications which England proposed
in 1794 to John Jay in the northwestern boundary of the United States
from the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi, seemed to him, doubtless,
significant chiefly as a matter of principle and as a question of the
retention or loss of beaver grounds. The historians hardly notice the
proposals. But they involved, in fact, the ownership of the richest and
most extensive deposits of iron ore in America, the all-important source
of a fundamental industry of the United States, the occasion for the
rise of some of the most influential forces of our time.
What continuity and meaning are furnished by the outcome in present
times of the movements of minor political parties and reform agitations!
To the historian they have often seemed to be mere curious side eddies,
vexatious distractions to the course of his literary craft as it
navigated the stream of historical tendency. And yet, by the revelation
of the present, what seemed to be side eddies have not seldom proven to
be the concealed entrances to the main current, and the course which
seemed the central one has led to blind channels and stagnant waters,
important in their day, but cut off like oxbow lakes from the mighty
river of historical progress by the mere permanent and compelling forces
of the neglected currents.
We may trace the contest between the capitalist and the democratic
pioneer from the earliest colonial days. It is influential in colonial
parties. It is seen in the vehement protests of Kentucky frontiersmen in
petition after petition to the Congress of the Confederation against the
"nabobs" and men of wealth who took out titles to the pioneers' farms
while they themselves were too busy defending those farms from the
Indians to perfect their claims. It is seen in the attitude of the Ohio
Valley in its backwoods days before the rise of the Whig party, as when
in 1811 Henry Clay denounced the Bank of the United States as a
corporation which throve on special privileges--"a special association
of favored individuals taken from the mass of society, and invested with
exemptions and surrounded by immunities and privileges." Benton voiced
the same contest twenty years later when he denounced the bank as
a company of private individuals, many of them foreigners, and
the mass of them residing in a remote and narrow corner of the
Union, unconnected by any sympathy with the fertile regions of
the Great Valley in which the natural power of this Union, the
power of numbers, will be found to reside long before the
renewed term of the second charter would expire.
"And where," he asked, "would all this power and money center? In the
great cities of the Northeast, which have been for forty years and that
by force of federal legislation, the lion's den of Southern and Western
money--that den into which all the tracks point inward; from which the
returning track of a solitary dollar has never yet been seen."
Declaring, in words that have a very modern sound, that the bank tended
to multiply nabobs and paupers, and that "a great moneyed power is
favorable to great capitalists, for it is the principle of capital to
favor capital," he appealed to the fact of the country's extent and its
sectional divergences against the nationalizing of capital.
What a condition for a confederacy of states! What grounds for
alarm and terrible apprehension when in a confederacy of such
vast extent, so many rival commercial cities, so much
sectional jealousy, such violent political parties, such
fierce contests for power, there should be but one moneyed
tribunal before which all the rival and contending elements
must appear.
Even more vehement were the words of Jackson in 1837. "It is now plain,"
he wrote, "that the war is to be carried on by the monied aristocracy of
the few against the democracy of numbers; the [prosperous] to make the
honest laborers hewers of wood and drawers of water through the credit
and paper system."
Van Buren's administration is usually passed hastily over with hardly
more than mention of his Independent Treasury plan, and with particular
consideration of the slavery discussion. But some of the most important
movements in American social and political history began in these years
of Jackson and Van Buren. Read the demands of the obscure labor papers
and the reports of labor's open-air meetings anew, and you will find in
the utterances of so-called labor visionaries and the Locofoco champions
of "equal rights for all and special privileges for none," like Evans
and Jacques, Byrdsall and Leggett, the finger points to the currents
that now make the main channel of our history; you will find in them
some of the important planks of the platforms of the triumphant parties
of our own day. As Professor Commons has shown by his papers and the
documents which he has published on labor history, an idealistic but
widespread and influential humanitarian movement, strikingly similar to
that of the present, arose in the years between 1830 and 1850, dealing
with social forces in American life, animated by a desire to apply the
public lands to social amelioration, eager to find new forms of
democratic development. But the flood of the slavery struggle swept all
of these movements into its mighty inundation for the time. After the
war, other influences delayed the revival of the movement. The railroads
opened the wide prairies after 1850 and made it easy to reach them; and
decade after decade new sections were reduced to the purposes of
civilization and to the advantages of the common man as well as the
promotion of great individual fortunes. The nation centered its
interests in the development of the West. It is only in our own day that
this humanitarian democratic wave has reached the level of those earlier
years. But in the meantime there are clear evidences of the persistence
of the forces, even though under strange guise. Read the platforms of
the Greenback-Labor, the Granger, and the Populist parties, and you will
find in those platforms, discredited and reprobated by the major parties
of the time, the basic proposals of the Democratic party after its
revolution under the leadership of Mr. Bryan, and of the Republican
party after its revolution by Mr. Roosevelt. The Insurgent movement is
so clearly related to the areas and elements that gave strength to this
progressive assertion of old democratic ideals with new weapons, that it
must be regarded as the organized refusal of these persistent
tendencies to be checked by the advocates of more moderate measures.
I have dealt with these fragments of party history, not, of course, with
the purpose of expressing any present judgment upon them, but to
emphasize and give concreteness to the fact that there is disclosed by
present events a new significance to these contests of radical democracy
and conservative interests; that they are rather a continuing expression
of deep-seated forces than fragmentary and sporadic curios for the
historical museum.
If we should survey the history of our lands from a similar point of
view, considering the relations of legislation and administration of the
public domain to the structure of American democracy, it would yield a
return far beyond that offered by the formal treatment of the subject in
most of our histories. We should find in the squatter doctrines and
practices, the seizure of the best soils, the taking of public timber on
the theory of a right to it by the labor expended on it, fruitful
material for understanding the atmosphere and ideals under which the
great corporations developed the West. Men like Senator Benton and
Delegate Sibley in successive generations defended the trespasses of the
pioneer and the lumberman upon the public forest lands, and denounced
the paternal government that "harassed" these men, who were engaged in
what we should call stealing government timber. It is evident that at
some time between the middle of the nineteenth century and the present
time, when we impose jail sentences upon Congressmen caught in such
violations of the land laws, a change came over the American conscience
and the civic ideals were modified. That our great industrial
enterprises developed in the midst of these changing ideals is important
to recall when we write the history of their activity.
We should find also that we cannot understand the land question without
seeing its relations to the struggle of sections and classes bidding
against each other and finding in the public domain a most important
topic of political bargaining. We should find, too, that the settlement
of unlike geographic areas in the course of the nation's progress
resulted in changes in the effect of the land laws; that a system
intended for the humid prairies was ill-adjusted to the grazing lands
and coal fields and to the forests in the days of large-scale
exploitation by corporations commanding great capital. Thus changing
geographic factors as well as the changing character of the forces which
occupied the public domain must be considered, if we would understand
the bearing of legislation and policy in this field.[329:1] It is
fortunate that suggestive studies of democracy and the land policy have
already begun to appear.
The whole subject of American agriculture viewed in relation to the
economic, political, and social life of the nation has important
contributions to make. If, for example, we study the maps showing the
transition of the wheat belt from the East to the West, as the virgin
soils were conquered and made new bases for destructive competition with
the older wheat States, we shall see how deeply they affected not only
land values, railroad building, the movement of population, and the
supply of cheap food, but also how the regions once devoted to single
cropping of wheat were forced to turn to varied and intensive
agriculture and to diversified industry, and we shall see also how these
transformations affected party politics and even the ideals of the
Americans of the regions thus changed. We shall find in the
over-production of wheat in the provinces thus rapidly colonized, and in
the over-production of silver in the mountain provinces which were
contemporaneously exploited, important explanations of the peculiar
form which American politics took in the period when Mr. Bryan mastered
the Democratic party, just as we shall find in the opening of the new
gold fields in the years immediately following, and in the passing of
the era of almost free virgin wheat soils, explanations of the more
recent period when high prices are giving new energy and aggressiveness
to the demands of the new American industrial democracy.
Enough has been said, it may be assumed, to make clear the point which I
am trying to elucidate, namely that a comprehension of the United States
of to-day, an understanding of the rise and progress of the forces which
have made it what it is, demands that we should rework our history from
the new points of view afforded by the present. If this is done, it will
be seen, for example, that the progress of the struggle between North
and South over slavery and the freed negro, which held the principal
place in American interest in the two decades after 1850, was, after
all, only one of the interests in the time. The pages of the
Congressional debates, the contemporary newspapers, the public documents
of those twenty years, remain a rich mine for those who will seek
therein the sources of movements dominant in the present day.
The final consideration to which I ask your attention in this discussion
of social forces in American life, is with reference to the mode of
investigating them and the bearing of these investigations upon the
relations and the goal of history. It has become a precedent, fairly
well established by the distinguished scholars who have held the office
which I am about to lay down, to state a position with reference to the
relations of history and its sister-studies, and even to raise the
question of the attitude of the historian toward the laws of
thermodynamics and to seek to find the key of historical development or
of historical degradation. It is not given to all to bend the bow of
Ulysses. I shall attempt a lesser task.