especially in recent years by attacking the no-man's lands left
unexplored by the too sharp delimitation of spheres of activity. These
new conquests have been especially achieved by the combination of old
sciences. Physical chemistry, electro-chemistry, geo-physics,
astro-physics, and a variety of other scientic unions have led to
audacious hypotheses, veritable flashes of vision, which open new
regions of activity for a generation of investigators. Moreover they
have promoted such investigations by furnishing new instruments of
research. Now in some respects there is an analogy between geology and
history. The new geologist aims to describe the inorganic earth
dynamically in terms of natural law, using chemistry, physics,
mathematics, and even botany and zoology so far as they relate to
paleontology. But he does not insist that the relative importance of
physical or chemical factors shall be determined before he applies the
methods and data of these sciences to his problem. Indeed, he has
learned that a geological area is too complex a thing to be reduced to a
single explanation. He has abandoned the single hypothesis for the
multiple hypothesis. He creates a whole family of possible explanations
of a given problem and thus avoids the warping influence of partiality
for a simple theory.
Have we not here an illustration of what is possible and necessary for
the historian? Is it not well, before attempting to decide whether
history requires an economic interpretation, or a psychological, or any
other ultimate interpretation, to recognize that the factors in human
society are varied and complex; that the political historian handling
his subject in isolation is certain to miss fundamental facts and
relations in his treatment of a given age or nation; that the economic
historian is exposed to the same danger; and so of all of the other
special historians?
Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the thing
exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with the
difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not planted on
the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the midst and is itself a
part of the changing currents, the complex and interacting influences of
the time, deriving its significance as a fact from its relations to the
deeper-seated movements of the age, movements so gradual that often only
the passing years can reveal the truth about the fact and its right to a
place on the historian's page.
The economic historian is in danger of making his analysis and his
statement of a law on the basis of present conditions and then passing
to history for justificatory appendixes to his conclusions. An American
economist of high rank has recently expressed his conception of "the
full relation of economic theory, statistics, and history" in these
words:
A principle is formulated by _a priori_ reasoning concerning
facts of common experience; it is then tested by statistics
and promoted to the rank of a known and acknowledged truth;
illustrations of its action are then found in narrative
history and, on the other hand, the economic law becomes the
interpreter of records that would otherwise be confusing and
comparatively valueless; the law itself derives its final
confirmation from the illustrations of its working which the
records afford; but what is at least of equal importance is
the parallel fact that the law affords the decisive test of
the correctness of those assertions concerning the causes and
the effects of past events which it is second nature to make
and which historians almost invariably do make in connection
with their narrations.[333:1]
There is much in this statement by which the historian may profit, but
he may doubt also whether the past should serve merely as the
"illustration" by which to confirm the law deduced from common
experience by _a priori_ reasoning tested by statistics. In fact the
pathway of history is strewn with the wrecks of the "known and
acknowledged truths" of economic law, due not only to defective analysis
and imperfect statistics, but also to the lack of critical historical
methods, of insufficient historical-mindedness on the part of the
economist, to failure to give due attention to the relativity and
transiency of the conditions from which his laws were deduced.
But the point on which I would lay stress is this. The economist, the
political scientist, the psychologist, the sociologist, the geographer,
the student of literature, of art, of religion--all the allied laborers
in the study of society--have contributions to make to the equipment of
the historian. These contributions are partly of material, partly of
tools, partly of new points of view, new hypotheses, new suggestions of
relations, causes, and emphasis. Each of these special students is in
some danger of bias by his particular point of view, by his exposure to
see simply the thing in which he is primarily interested, and also by
his effort to deduce the universal laws of his separate science. The
historian, on the other hand, is exposed to the danger of dealing with
the complex and interacting social forces of a period or of a country,
from some single point of view to which his special training or interest
inclines him. If the truth is to be made known, the historian must so
far familiarize himself with the work, and equip himself with the
training of his sister-subjects that he can at least avail himself of
their results and in some reasonable degree master the essential tools
of their trade. And the followers of the sister-studies must likewise
familiarize themselves and their students with the work and the methods
of the historians, and cooperate in the difficult task.
It is necessary that the American historian shall aim at this equipment,
not so much that he may possess the key to history or satisfy himself in
regard to its ultimate laws. At present a different duty is before him.
He must see in American society with its vast spaces, its sections equal
to European nations, its geographic influences, its brief period of
development, its variety of nationalities and races, its extraordinary
industrial growth under the conditions of freedom, its institutions,
culture, ideals, social psychology, and even its religions forming and
changing almost under his eyes, one of the richest fields ever offered
for the preliminary recognition and study of the forces that operate and
interplay in the making of society.
FOOTNOTES:
[311:1] Annual address as the president of the American Historical
Association, delivered at Indianapolis, December 28, 1910. Reprinted by
permission from _The American Historical Review_, January, 1911.
[313:1] Van Hise, "Conservation of Natural Resources," pp. 23, 24.
[316:1] _Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1908, vii, p. 745.
[317:1] [Although the words of these early land debates are quoted above
in Chapter VI, they are repeated because of the light they cast upon the
present problem.]
[321:1] [I have outlined this subject in various essays, including the
article on "Sectionalism" in McLaughlin and Hart, "Cyclopedia of
Government."]
[322:1] [It is not impossible that they may ultimately replace the State
as the significant administrative and legislative units. There are
strong evidences of this tendency, such as the organization of the
Federal Reserve districts, and proposals for railroad administration by
regions.]
[329:1] [See R. G. Wellington, "Public Lands, 1820-1840"; G. M.
Stephenson, "Public Lands, 1841-1862"; J. Ise, "Forest Policy."]
[333:1] Professor J. B. Clark, in Commons, ed., "Documentary History of
American Industrial Society," I. 43-44.
XIII
MIDDLE WESTERN PIONEER DEMOCRACY[335:1]
In time of war, when all that this nation has stood for, all the things
in which it passionately believes, are at stake, we have met to dedicate
this beautiful home for history.
There is a fitness in the occasion. It is for historic ideals that we
are fighting. If this nation is one for which we should pour out our
savings, postpone our differences, go hungry, and even give up life
itself, it is not because it is a rich, extensive, well-fed and populous
nation; it is because from its early days America has pressed onward
toward a goal of its own; that it has followed an ideal, the ideal of a
democracy developing under conditions unlike those of any other age or
country.
We are fighting not for an Old World ideal, not for an abstraction, not
for a philosophical revolution. Broad and generous as are our
sympathies, widely scattered in origin as are our people, keenly as we
feel the call of kinship, the thrill of sympathy with the stricken
nations across the Atlantic, we are fighting for the historic ideals of
the United States, for the continued existence of the type of society in
which we believe, because we have proved it good, for the things which
drew European exiles to our shores, and which inspired the hopes of the
pioneers.
We are at war that the history of the United States, rich with the
record of high human purposes, and of faith in the destiny of the common
man under freedom, filled with the promises of a better world, may not
become the lost and tragic story of a futile dream.
Yes, it is an American ideal and an American example for which we fight;
but in that ideal and example lies medicine for the healing of the
nations. It is the best we have to give to Europe, and it is a matter of
vital import that we shall safeguard and preserve our power to serve the
world, and not be overwhelmed in the flood of imperialistic force that
wills the death of democracy and would send the freeman under the yoke.
Essential as are our contributions of wealth, the work of our
scientists, the toil of our farmers and our workmen in factory and
shipyard, priceless as is the stream of young American manhood which we
pour forth to stop the flood which flows like moulten lava across the
green fields and peaceful hamlets of Europe toward the sea and turns to
ashes and death all that it covers, these contributions have their
deeper meaning in the American spirit. They are born of the love of
Democracy.
Long ago in prophetic words Walt Whitman voiced the meaning of our
present sacrifices:
"Sail, sail thy best, ship of Democracy,
Of value is thy freight, 'tis not the Present only,
The Past is also stored in thee,
Thou holdest not the venture of thyself alone, not of the Western
Continent alone,
Earth's resume entire floats on thy keel, O ship, is steadied by
thy spars,
With thee Time voyages in trust, the antecedent nations sink or
swim with thee,
With all their ancient struggles, martyrs, heroes, epics, wars,
thou bear'st the other continents,
Theirs, theirs as much as thine, the destination-port triumphant."
Shortly before the Civil War, a great German, exiled from his native
land for his love of freedom, came from his new home among the pioneers
of the Middle West to set forth in Faneuil Hall, the "cradle of
liberty," in Boston, his vision of the young America that was forming in
the West, "the last depository of the hopes of all true friends of
humanity." Speaking of the contrast between the migrations to the
Mississippi Valley and those of the Old World in other centuries, he
said:
It is now not a barbarous multitude pouncing upon old and
decrepit empires, not a violent concussion of tribes
accompanied by all the horrors of general destruction, but we
see the vigorous elements--peaceably congregating and mingling
together on virgin soil--; led together by the irresistible
attraction of free and broad principles; undertaking to
commence a new era in the history of the world, without first
destroying the results of the progress of past periods;
undertaking to found a cosmopolitan nation without marching
over the dead bodies of slain millions.
If Carl Schurz had lived to see the outcome of that Germany from which
he was sent as an exile, in the days when Prussian bayonets dispersed
the legislatures and stamped out the beginnings of democratic rule in
his former country, could he have better pictured the contrasts between
the Prussian and the American spirit? He went on to say:
Thus was founded the _great colony of free humanity_, which
has not old England alone, but the _world_ for its mother
country. And in the colony of free humanity, whose mother
country is the world, they established the Republic of equal
rights where the title of manhood is the title to citizenship.
My friends, if I had a thousand tongues, and a voice as strong
as the thunder of heaven, they would not be sufficient to
impress upon your minds forcibly enough the greatness of this
idea, the overshadowing glory of this result. This was the
dream of the truest friends of man from the beginning; for
this the noblest blood of martyrs has been shed; for this has
mankind waded through seas of blood and tears. There it is
now; there it stands, the noble fabric in all the splendor of
reality.
It is in a solemn and inspiring time, therefore, that we meet to
dedicate this building, and the occasion is fitting to the time. We may
now see, as never before, the deeper significance, the larger meaning of
these pioneers, whose plain lives and homely annals are glorified as a
part of the story of the building of a better system of social justice
under freedom, a broader, and as we fervently hope, a more enduring
foundation for the welfare and progress under individual liberty of the
common man, an example of federation, of peaceful adjustments by
compromise and concession under a self-governing Republic, where
sections replace nations over a Union as large as Europe, where party
discussions take the place of warring countries, where the _Pax
Americana_ furnishes an example for a better world.
As our forefathers, the pioneers, gathered in their neighborhood to
raise the log cabin, and sanctified it by the name of home, the dwelling
place of pioneer ideals, so we meet to celebrate the raising of this
home, this shrine of Minnesota's historic life. It symbolizes the
conviction that the past and the future of this people are tied
together; that this Historical Society is the keeper of the records of a
noteworthy movement in the progress of mankind; that these records are
not unmeaning and antiquarian, but even in their details are worthy of
preservation for their revelation of the beginnings of society in the
midst of a nation caught by the vision of a better future for the world.
Let me repeat the words of Harriet Martineau, who portrayed the American
of the thirties:
I regard the American people as a great embryo poet, now
moody, now wild, but bringing out results of absolute good
sense; restless and wayward in action, but with deep peace at
his heart; exulting that he has caught the true aspect of
things past and the depth of futurity which lies before him,
wherein to create something so magnificent as the world has
scarcely begun to dream of. There is the strongest hope of a
nation that is capable of being possessed with an idea.
And recall her appeal to the American people to "cherish their high
democratic hope, their faith in man. The older they grow the more they
must reverence the dreams of their youth."
The dreams of their youth! Here they shall be preserved, and the
achievements as well as the aspirations of the men who made the State,
the men who built on their foundations, the men with large vision and
power of action, the lesser men in the mass, the leaders who served the
State and nation with devotion to the cause. Here shall be preserved the
record of the men who failed to see the larger vision and worked
impatiently with narrow or selfish or class ends, as well as of those
who labored with patience and sympathy and mutual concession, with
readiness to make adjustments and to subordinate their immediate
interests to the larger good and the immediate safety of the nation.
In the archives of such an old institution as that of the Historical
Society of Massachusetts, whose treasures run to the beginnings of the
Puritan colonization, the students cannot fail to find the evidence that
a State Historical Society is a Book of Judgment wherein is made up the
record of a people and its leaders. So, as time unfolds, shall be the
collections of this Society, the depository of the material that shall
preserve the memory of this people. Each section of this widely extended
and varied nation has its own peculiar past, its special form of
society, its traits and its leaders. It were a pity if any section left
its annals solely to the collectors of a remote region, and it were a
pity if its collections were not transformed into printed documents and
monographic studies which can go to the libraries of all the parts of
the Union and thus enable the student to see the nation as a whole in
its past as well as in its present.
This Society finds its special field of activity in a great State of the
Middle West, so new, as history reckons time, that its annals are still
predominantly those of the pioneers, but so rapidly growing that already
the era of the pioneers is a part of the history of the past, capable of
being handled objectively, seen in a perspective that is not possible to
the observer of the present conditions.
Because of these facts I have taken as the special theme of this address
the Middle Western Pioneer Democracy, which I would sketch in some of
its outstanding aspects, and chiefly in the generation before the Civil
War, for it was from those pioneers that the later colonization to the
newer parts of the Mississippi Valley derived much of their traits, and
from whom large numbers of them came.
The North Central States as a whole is a region comparable to all of
Central Europe. Of these States, a large part of the old
Northwest,--Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin; and their
sisters beyond the Mississippi--Missouri, Iowa and Minnesota--were
still, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the home of an
essentially pioneer society. Within the lifetime of many living men,
Wisconsin was called the "Far West," and Minnesota was a land of the
Indian and the fur traders, a wilderness of forest and prairie beyond
the "edge of cultivation." That portion of this great region which was
still in the pioneering period of settlement by 1850 was alone about as
extensive as the old thirteen States, or Germany and Austria-Hungary
combined. The region was a huge geographic mold for a new society,
modeled by nature on the scale of the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, the
upper Mississippi and the Missouri. Simple and majestic in its vast
outlines it was graven into a variety that in its detail also had a
largeness of design. From the Great Lakes extended the massive glacial
sheet which covered that mighty basin and laid down treasures of soil.
Vast forests of pine shrouded its upper zone, breaking into hardwood and
the oak openings as they neared the ocean-like expanses of the prairies.
Forests again along the Ohio Valley, and beyond, to the west, lay the
levels of the Great Plains. Within the earth were unexploited treasures
of coal and lead, copper and iron in such form and quantity as were to
revolutionize the industrial processes of the world. But nature's
revelations are progressive, and it was rather the marvelous adaptation
of the soil to the raising of corn and wheat that drew the pioneers to
this land of promise, and made a new era of colonization. In the unity
with variety of this pioneer empire and in its broad levels we have a
promise of its society.
First had come the children of the interior of the South, and with ax
and rifle in hand had cut their clearings in the forest, raised their
log cabins, fought the Indians and by 1830 had pushed their way to the
very edge of the prairies along the Ohio and Missouri Valleys, leaving
unoccupied most of the Basin of the Great Lakes.
These slashers of the forest, these self-sufficing pioneers, raising the
corn and live stock for their own need, living scattered and apart, had
at first small interest in town life or a share in markets. They were
passionately devoted to the ideal of equality, but it was an ideal which
assumed that under free conditions in the midst of unlimited resources,
the homogeneous society of the pioneers _must_ result in equality. What
they objected to was arbitrary obstacles, artificial limitations upon
the freedom of each member of this frontier folk to work out his own
career without fear or favor. What they instinctively opposed was the
crystallization of differences, the monopolization of opportunity and
the fixing of that monopoly by government or by social customs. The road
must be open. The game must be played according to the rules. There must
be no artificial stifling of equality of opportunity, no closed doors to
the able, no stopping the free game before it was played to the end.
More than that, there was an unformulated, perhaps, but very real
feeling, that mere success in the game, by which the abler men were able
to achieve preeminence gave to the successful ones no right to look down
upon their neighbors, no vested title to assert superiority as a matter
of pride and to the diminution of the equal right and dignity of the
less successful.
If this democracy of Southern pioneers, this Jacksonian democracy, was,
as its socialist critics have called it, in reality a democracy of
"expectant capitalists," it was not one which expected or acknowledged
on the part of the successful ones the right to harden their triumphs
into the rule of a privileged class. In short, if it is indeed true that
the backwoods democracy was based upon equality of opportunity, it is
also true that it resented the conception that opportunity under
competition should result in the hopeless inequality, or rule of class.
Ever a new clearing must be possible. And because the wilderness seemed
so unending, the menace to the enjoyment of this ideal seemed rather to
be feared from government, within or without, than from the operations
of internal evolution.
From the first, it became evident that these men had means of
supplementing their individual activity by informal combinations. One of
the things that impressed all early travelers in the United States was
the capacity for extra-legal, voluntary association.[343:1] This was
natural enough; in all America we can study the process by which in a
new land social customs form and crystallize into law. We can even see
how the personal leader becomes the governmental official. This power of
the newly arrived pioneers to join together for a common end without the
intervention of governmental institutions was one of their marked
characteristics. The log rolling, the house-raising, the husking bee,
the apple paring, and the squatters' associations whereby they protected
themselves against the speculators in securing title to their clearings
on the public domain, the camp meeting, the mining camp, the vigilantes,
the cattle-raisers' associations, the "gentlemen's agreements," are a
few of the indications of this attitude. It is well to emphasize this
American trait, because in a modified way it has come to be one of the
most characteristic and important features of the United States of
to-day. America does through informal association and understandings on
the part of the people many of the things which in the Old World are and
can be done only by governmental intervention and compulsion. These
associations were in America not due to immemorial custom of tribe or
village community. They were extemporized by voluntary action.
The actions of these associations had an authority akin to that of law.
They were usually not so much evidences of a disrespect for law and
order as the only means by which real law and order were possible in a
region where settlement and society had gone in advance of the
institutions and instrumentalities of organized society.
Because of these elements of individualistic competition and the power
of spontaneous association, pioneers were responsive to leadership. The
backwoodsmen knew that under the free opportunities of his life the
abler man would reveal himself, and show them the way. By free choice
and not by compulsion, by spontaneous impulse, and not by the domination
of a caste, they rallied around a cause, they supported an issue. They
yielded to the principle of government by agreement, and they hated the
doctrine of autocracy even before it gained a name.
They looked forward to the extension of their American principles to the
Old World and their keenest apprehensions came from the possibility of
the extension of the Old World's system of arbitrary rule, its class
wars and rivalries and interventions to the destruction of the free
States and democratic institutions which they were building in the
forests of America.