preservative influence of the negro, whose presence has always called
out resistance to change on the part of the whites, the forces of
social and industrial transformation are at work. The old tidewater
aristocracy has surrendered to the up country democrats. Along the line
of the Alleghanies like an advancing column, the forces of Northern
capital, textile and steel mills, year after year extend their invasion
into the lower South. New Orleans, once the mistress of the commerce of
the Mississippi Valley, is awakening to new dreams of world commerce.
On the southern border, similar invasions of American capital have
been entering Mexico. At the same time, the opening of the Panama Canal
has completed the dream of the ages of the Straits of Anian between
Atlantic and Pacific. Four hundred years ago, Balboa raised the flag
of Spain at the edge of the sea of the West and we are now preparing
to celebrate both that anniversary, and the piercing of the continent.
New relations have been created between Spanish America and the United
States and the world is watching the mediation of Argentina, Brazil
and Chili between the contending forces of Mexico and the Union. Once
more alien national interests lie threatening at our borders, but we no
longer appeal to the Monroe Doctrine and send our armies of frontier
men to settle our concerns off hand. We take council with European
nations and with the sisterhood of South America, and propose a remedy
of social reorganization in place of imperious will and force. Whether
the effort will succeed or not, it is a significant indication that
an old order is passing away, when such a solution is undertaken by
a President of Scotch-Irish stock, born in the fiery state of South
Carolina.
If we turn to the Northern border, where we are about to celebrate
a century of peace with England, we see in progress, like a belated
procession of our own history the spread of pioneers, the opening of
new wildernesses, the building of new cities, the growth of a new and
mighty nation. That old American advance of the wheat farmer from the
Connecticut to the Mohawk, and the Genesee, from the great valley of
Pennsylvania to the Ohio Valley and the prairies of the Middle West, is
now by its own momentum and under the stimulus of Canadian homesteads
and the high price of wheat, carried across the national border to the
once lone and vast plains where the Hudson Bay dog trains crossed the
desolate snows of the wild North Land. In the Pacific Northwest the
era of construction has not ended, but it is so rapidly in progress
that we can already see the closing of the age of the pioneer. Already
Alaska beckons on the North, and pointing to her wealth of natural
resources asks the nation on what new terms the new age will deal with
her. Across the Pacific looms Asia, no longer a remote vision and a
symbol of the unchanging, but borne as by mirage close to our shores
and raising grave questions of the common destiny of the people of this
Ocean. The dreams of Benton and of Seward of a regenerated Orient, when
the long march of Westward civilization should complete its circle,
seem almost to be in process of realization. The age of the Pacific
Ocean begins, mysterious and unfathomable in its meaning for our own
future.
Turning to view the interior, we see the same picture of change. When
the Superintendent of the Census in 1890 declared the frontier line
no longer traceable, the beginning of the rush into Oklahoma had just
occurred. Here where the broken fragments of Indian nations from the
East had been gathered and where the wilder tribes of the Southwest
were being settled, came the rush of the land hungry pioneer. Almost
at a blow the old Indian territory passed away, populous cities came
into being and it was not long before gushing oil wells made a new
era of sudden wealth. The farm lands of the Middle West taken as free
homesteads or bought for a mere pittance, have risen so in value that
the original owners have in an increasing degree either sold them in
order to reinvest in the newer cheap lands of the West, or have moved
into the town and have left the tillage to tenant farmers. The growth
of absentee ownership of the soil is producing a serious problem in the
farmer centers of the granger and the populist. Along the Old Northwest
the Great Lakes are becoming a new Mediterranean Sea joining the realms
of wheat and iron ore, at one end with the coal and furnaces of the
forks of the Ohio, where the most intense and wide-reaching center of
industrial energy exists. City life like that of the East, manufactures
and accumulated capital, seem to be reproducing in the center of the
Republic the tendencies already so plain on the Atlantic Coast.
Across the Great Plains where buffalo and Indian held sway successive
industrial waves are passing. The old free range gave place to the
ranch, the ranch to the homestead and now in places in the arid lands
the homestead is replaced by the ten or twenty acre irrigated fruit
farm. The age of cheap land, cheap corn and wheat, and cheap cattle
has gone forever. The federal government has undertaken vast paternal
enterprises of reclamation of the desert.
In the Rocky Mountains where at the time of Civil War, the first
important rushes to gold and silver mines carried the frontier backward
on a march toward the East, the most amazing transformations have
occurred. Here, where prospectors made new trails, and lived the wild
free life of mountain men, here where the human spirit seemed likely
to attain the largest measure of individual freedom, and where fortune
beckoned to the common man, have come revolutions wrought by the demand
for organized industry and capital. In the regions where the popular
tribunal and the free competitive life flourished, we have seen law and
order break down in the unmitigated collision of great aggregations
of capital, with each other and with organized socialistic labor. The
Cripple Creek strikes, the contests at Butte, the Gold-field mobs, the
recent Colorado fighting, all tell a similar story,--the solid impact
of contending forces in regions where civic power and loyalty to the
state have never fully developed. Like the Grand Canon, where in the
dazzling light in the huge geologic history is written so large that
none may fail to read it, so in the Rocky Mountains the dangers of
modern American industrial tendencies have been exposed.
As we crossed the Cascades on our way to Seattle, one of the passengers
was moved to explain his feelings on the excellence of Puget Sound in
contrast with the remaining visible Universe. He did it well in spite
of irreverent interruptions from those fellow travellers who were
unconverted children of the East, and at last he broke forth on the
passionate challenge, "Why should I not love Seattle! It took me from
the slums of the Atlantic Coast, a poor Swedish boy with hardly fifteen
dollars in my pocket. It gave me a home by the bountiful sea; it spread
before my eyes a vision of snow capped peaks and smiling fields; it
brought abundance and a new life to me and my children and I love it, I
love it! If I were a multi-millionaire I would charter freight cars and
carry away from the crowded tenements and noisome alleys of the eastern
cities and the Old World the toiling masses, and let them loose in our
vast forests and ore-laden mountains to learn what life really is!" And
my heart was stirred by his words and by the whirling spaces of woods
and peaks through which we passed. But as I looked and listened to this
passionate outcry, I remembered, the words of Tallyrand, the exiled
Bishop of Autun, in Washington's administration. Looking down from an
eminence not far from Philadelphia upon a wilderness which is now in
the heart of that huge industrial society where population presses
on the means of life, even the cold-blooded and cynical Tallyrand,
gazing on those unpeopled hills and forests, kindled with the vision
of coming clearings, the smiling farms and grazing herds that were to
be, the populous towns that should be built, the newer and finer social
organization that should there arise. And then I remembered the hall in
Harvard's museum of social ethics through which I pass to my lecture
room when I speak on the history of the Westward movement. That hall is
covered with an exhibit of the work in Pittsburgh steel mills, and of
the congested tenements. Its charts and diagrams tell of the long hours
of work, the death rate, the relation of typhoid to the slums, the
gathering of the poor of all Southeastern Europe to make a civilization
at that center of American industrial energy and vast capital that
is a social tragedy. As I enter my lecture room through that hall,
I speak of the young Washington leading his Virginia frontiersmen
to the magnificent forest at the forks of the Ohio. Where Braddock
and his men, "carving a cross on the wilderness rim," were struck by
the painted savages in the primeval woods, huge furnaces belch forth
perpetual fires and Huns and Bulgars, Poles and Sicilians struggle for
a chance to earn their daily bread, and live a brutal and degraded
life. Irresistibly there rushed across my mind the memorable words of
Huxley:
"Even the best of modern civilization appears to me to exhibit a
condition of mankind which neither embodies any worthy ideal nor
even possesses the merit of stability. I do not hesitate to express
the opinion that, if there is no hope of a large improvement of the
condition of the greater part of the human family; if it is true
that the increase of knowledge, the winning of a greater dominion
over Nature, which is its consequence, and the wealth which follows
upon that dominion, are to make no difference in the extent and the
intensity of Want, with its concomitant physical and moral degradation,
among the masses of the people, I should hail the advent of some
kindly comet, which would sweep the whole affair away, as a desirable
consummation."
But if there is disillusion and shock and apprehension as we come to
realize these changes, to strong men and women there is challenge and
inspiration in them too. In place of old frontiers of wilderness, there
are new frontiers of unwon fields of science, fruitful for the needs of
the race; there are frontiers of better social domains yet unexplored.
Let us hold to our attitude of faith and courage, and creative zeal.
Let us dream as our fathers dreamt and let us make our dreams come true.
"Daughters of Time, the hypocritic days,
Bear diadems and fagots in their hands
To each they offer gifts after his will
Bread, kingdoms, stars and sky that hold them all.
I, in my pleached garden watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes,
Hastily took a few herbs and apples,
And the day turned and departed, I too late,
Under her solemn fillet, saw the scorn!"
What were America's "morning wishes?" From the beginning of that long
westward march of the American people America has never been the home
of mere contented materialism. It has continuously sought new ways and
dreamed of a perfected social type.
In the fifteenth century when men dealt with the New World which
Columbus found, the ideal of discovery was dominant. Here was placed
within the reach of men whose ideas had been bounded by the Atlantic,
new realms to be explored. America became the land of European dreams,
its Fortunate Islands were made real, where, in the imagination of old
Europe, peace and happiness, as well as riches and eternal youth, were
to be found. To Sir Edwin Sandys and his friends of the London Company,
Virginia offered an opportunity to erect the Republic for which they
had longed in vain in England. To the Puritans, New England was the
new land of freedom, wherein they might establish the institutions of
God, according to their own faith. As the vision died away in Virginia
toward the close of the seventeenth century, it was taken up anew by
the fiery Bacon with his revolution to establish a real democracy in
place of the rule of the planter aristocracy, that formed along the
Coast. Hardly had he been overthrown when in the eighteenth century,
the democratic ideal was rejuvenated by the strong frontiersmen, who
pressed beyond the New England Coast into the Berkshires and up the
valleys of the Green Mountains of Vermont, and by the Scotch Irish
and German pioneers who followed the Great Valley from Pennsylvania
into the Upland South. In both the Yankee frontiersmen and the
Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the South, the Calvinistic conception of
the importance of the individual, bound by free covenant to his fellow
men and to God, was a compelling influence, and all their wilderness
experience combined to emphasize the ideals of opening new ways, of
giving freer play to the individual, and of constructing democratic
society.
When the backwoodsmen crossed the Alleghanies they put between
themselves and the Atlantic Coast a barrier which seemed to separate
them from a region already too much like the Europe they had left,
and as they followed the courses of the rivers that flowed to the
Mississippi, they called themselves "Men of the Western Waters," and
their new home in the Mississippi Valley was the "Western World." Here,
by the thirties, Jacksonian democracy flourished, strong in the faith
of the intrinsic excellence of the common man, in his right to make his
own place in the world, and in his capacity to share in government. But
while Jacksonian democracy demanded these rights, it was also loyal
to leadership as the very name implies. It was ready to follow to the
uttermost the man in whom it placed its trust, whether the hero were
frontier fighter or president, and it even rebuked and limited its own
legislative representatives and recalled its senators when they ran
counter to their chosen executive. Jacksonian Democracy was essentially
rural. It was based on the good fellowship and genuine social feeling
of the frontier, in which classes and inequalities of fortune played
little part. But it did not demand equality of condition, for there
was abundance of natural resources and the belief that the self made
man had a right to his success in the free competition which western
life afforded, was as prominent in their thought as was the love of
democracy. On the other hand, they viewed governmental restraints
with suspicion as a limitation on their right to work out their own
individuality.
For the banking institutions and capitalists of the East they had an
instinctive antipathy. Already they feared that the "money power" as
Jackson called it, was planning to make hewers of wood and drawers of
water of the common people.
In this view they found allies among the labor leaders of the East, who
in the same period began their fight for better conditions of the wage
earner. These Locofocos were the first Americans to demand fundamental
social changes for the benefit of the workers in the cities. Like
the Western pioneers they protested against monopolies and special
privilege. But they also had a constructive policy, whereby society
was to be kept democratic by free gifts of the public land, so that
surplus labor might not bid against itself, but might find an outlet in
the West. Thus to both the labor theorist and the practical pioneer,
the existence of what seemed inexhaustible cheap land and unpossessed
resources was the condition of democracy. In these years of the
thirties and forties, Western democracy took on its distinctive form.
Travellers like De Tocqueville and Harriet Martineau, came to study
and to report it enthusiastically to Europe. Miss Martineau pictures
the American "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," she adds, and she adjures the American people
to "give perpetual and earnest heed to one point, to cherish their high
democratic hope, their faith in man. The older they grow the more must
they reverence the dreams of their youth."
Side by side with this westward marching army of individualistic
liberty-loving democratic back woodsmen, went a more northern stream
of pioneers, who cherished similar ideas, but added to them the desire
to create new industrial centers, to build up factories, to build
railroads, and to develop the country by founding cities and extending
prosperity. They were ready to call upon legislatures to aid in this,
by subscriptions to stock, grants of franchises, promotion of banking
and internal improvements. Government was not to them so much a
necessary evil as it was a convenience for promoting their industrial
aims. These were the Whig followers of that other Western leader, Henry
Clay, and their early strength lay in the Ohio Valley, and particularly
among the well-to-do. In the South their strength was found among the
aristocracy of the Cotton Kingdom.
Both of these Western groups, Whigs and Democrats alike, had one common
ideal: the desire to leave their children a better heritage than they
themselves had received, and both were fired with devotion to the ideal
of creating in this New World a home more worthy of mankind. Both were
ready to break with the past, to boldly strike out new lines of social
endeavor, and both believed in American expansion.
Before these tendencies had worked themselves out, three new forces
entered. In the sudden extension of our boundaries to the Pacific
Coast, which took place in the forties, the nation won so vast a
domain that its resources seemed illimitable and its society seemed
able to throw off all its maladies by the very presence of these vast
new spaces. At the same period the great activity of railroad building
to the Mississippi Valley occurred, making these lands available and
diverting attention to the task of economic construction. The third
influence was the slavery question which, becoming acute, shaped the
American ideals and public discussion for nearly a generation. Viewed
from one angle, this struggle involved the great question of national
unity. From another it involved the question of the relations of labor
and capital, democracy and aristocracy. It was not without significance
that Abraham Lincoln became the very type of American pioneer
democracy, the first adequate and elemental demonstration to the world
that that democracy could produce a man who belonged to the ages.
After the war, new national energies were set loose, and new
construction and development engaged the attention of the Westerners as
they occupied prairies and Great Plains and mountains. Democracy and
capitalistic development did not seem antagonistic.
Any survey of Western forces which have affected American ideals,
would be sadly defective which failed to take account of the profound
influence of immigration. Whether we consider the enthusiasts who came
to find in the wilderness the freedom to institute their experiments
in religion, or the masses who broke from their Old World habits and
customs and turned to America as the land of promise, there is the same
note of hope and aspiration. On the dullest faces of the steerage a new
light falls as the American gateway is entered. We shall not comprehend
the element that are shaping and are to shape our destiny, without due
realization of the immigrant's dream.
With the passing of the frontier, Western social and political ideals
took new form. Capital began to consolidate in even greater masses, and
increasingly attempted to reduce to system and control the processes
of industrial development, but of the age of free competition, there
came the greatest private fortunes and the most stupendous combination
of economic interests in few hands that the world has ever seen. Labor
with equal step organized its forces to destroy the old competitive
system, it is not strange that the Western pioneers took alarm for
their ideals of democracy as the outcome of the free struggle for the
national resources became apparent. Prophesied by the Granger movement,
these new tendencies came fully into the light with the Populists
and from them the new gospel passed to Bryan Democracy, Roosevelt
Republicanism and the Progressives.
It was a new gospel, for the Western radical became convinced that he
must sacrifice his ideal of individualism and free competition in order
to maintain his ideal of democracy. Under this conviction the Populist
revised the pioneer conception of government. He saw in government no
longer something outside of him, but the people themselves shaping
their own affairs. He demanded therefore an extension of the powers
of governments in the interest of his historic ideal of democratic
society. He demanded not only free silver, but the ownership of the
agencies of communication and transportation, the income tax, the
postal savings bank, the provision of means of credit for agriculture,
the construction of more effective devices to express the will of the
people, primary nominations, direct elections, initiative, referendum
and recall. In a word, capital, labor, and the Western pioneer, all
deserted the ideal of competitive individualism in order to organize
their interests in more effective combinations. The disappearance of
the frontier, the closing of the era which was marked by the influence
of the West as a form of society, brings with it new problems of social
adjustment, new demands for considering our past ideals and our present
needs.
Let us recall the conditions of the foreign relations along our
borders, the dangers that wait us if we fail to unite in the solution
of our domestic problems. Let us recall those internal evidences of the
destruction of our old social order. If we take to heart this warning,
we shall do well also to recount our historic ideals, to take stock of
those purposes, and fundamental assumptions that have gone to make the
American spirit and the meaning of America in world history. First of
all, there was the ideal of discovery, the courageous determination to
break new paths, indifference to the dogma that because an institution
or a condition exists, it must remain. All American experience has gone
to the making of the spirit of innovation; it is in the blood and will
not be repressed.
Then, there was the ideal of democracy, the ideal of a free self
directing people, responsive to leadership in the forming of
programmes, and their execution, but insistent that the procedure
should be that of free choice, not of compulsion.
But there was also the ideal of individualism. This democratic society
was not a disciplined army, where all must keep step and where the
collective interests destroyed individual will and work. Rather it
was a mobile mass of freely circulating atoms, each seeking its own
place and finding play for its own powers and for its own original
initiative. We cannot lay too much stress upon this point, for it was
at the very heart of the whole American movement. The world was to be
made a better world by the example of a democracy in which there was
freedom of the individual in which there was the vitality and mobility
productive of originality and variety.
Bearing in mind the far-reaching influence of the disappearance of
unlimited resources open to all men for the taking, and considering
the recoil of the common man when he saw the outcome of the completive
struggle for these resources as the supply came to its end over most of
the nation, we can understand the reaction against individualism and
in favor of drastic assertion of the powers of government. Legislation
is taking the place of the free lands as the means of preserving the
ideal of democracy. But at the same time it is endangering the other
pioneer ideal of creative and competitive individualism. Both were
essential and constituted what was best in America's contribution to
history and to progress. Both must be preserved if the nation would
be true to its past, and would fulfill its highest destiny. It would
be a grave misfortune if these people so rich in experience, in self
confidence and aspiration, in creative genius, should turn to some Old
World discipline of socialism or plutocracy, or despotic rule, whether
by people or by dictator. Nor shall we be driven to these alternatives.
Our ancient hopes, our courageous faith, our underlying good humor
and love of fair play will triumph in the end. There will be give and
take in all directions. There will be disinterested leadership, under
loyalty to the best American ideals. Nowhere is this leadership more
likely to arise than among the men trained in the Universities, aware
of the promise of the past and the possibilities of the future. The
times call for new ambitions and new motives.