_Literary History of Philadelphia_, 185
_Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, The_, 164
Livingston, Chancellor, 227
Locke, John, 197, 198, 199, 228, 282, 287, 305, 380, 381, 382, 420
Longfellow, Henry W., 319, 320, 439-441, 453, 465
Longstreet, Augustus Baldwin, 51, 162, 166-172, 176, 178
_Lord Byron’s Character and Writings_, 116
Loring, Commissioner Edward G., 360, 368, 411, 423
_Lost Occasion, The_, 367
Lovejoy, Elijah P., 246, 333
Lowell, Rev. Charles, 402, 463
----, Francis Cabot, 462
----, James Russell, 266, 314, 315, 351, 368, 436, 440, 460-472, 474
----, John, 461, 462
_Lucius Junius Brutus_, 284, 285
Lundy, Benjamin, 353
_Lyrical and other Poems_, 114
McDuffie, Governor George, 62, 81, 136, 168, 170
Madison, James, 6, 71, 196, 288, 305
_Magnalia Christi Americana_, 371
_Man the Reformer_, 396, 397
Mann, Horace, 399
_Manual of American Literature, A_, 438 n
Marcy, Governor William M., 244
_Mardi_, 260, 261, 262, 263
_Margaret Fuller, A Psychological Biography_, 427 n, 432
Marshall, John, 8, 20-27, 47, 94, 138, 197, 245, 300, 301, 302, 316,
473
_Martin Chuzzlewit_, 141
Martineau, Harriet, 351
Marx, Karl, 251, 467
Mason, Col. George, 277
_Massachusetts to Virginia_, 368
Masson, David, 466
Mather, Cotton, 202, 371, 391, 414, 428, 447
May, Samuel J., 351
Mayhew, Jonathan, 325, 326, 462
Mazzini, 428, 433
_Mellichampe_, 129
Melvill, Sir Richard, 260
Melville, Allan, 260, 261
----, Herman, ii, 58, 131, 183, 238, 258-267, 445, 449
----, Major Thomas, 260
_Memoirs and Letters of James Kent_, 198
_Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli_, 429, 430, 431, 434
_Menander to Philenia_, 288
Merriam, Charles A., 72 n, 94, 334 n
Metternich, Prince, 94
_Militia Company Drill, The_, 72
Mill, James, 428
----, John Stuart, 104, 472
Milton, John, 109, 366
_Minister’s Wooing, The_, 374
_Minutes and Debates of the Constitutional Convention_, 72
Mirabeau, Marquis de, 10, 293
_Moby Dick_, 131, 261, 262, 263
Modestinus, 117
_Monikins, The_, 227, 228, 229
Monroe, James, 71
Montesquieu, Charles, 73, 75, 76, 94, 306, 392, 393
Moore, Tom, 30, 111, 114, 185, 187, 200
_Moral Bully, The_, 453, 454
Morison, S. E., 341 n
Morley, John, 472
Morris, Gouverneur, 194, 196, 230, 280
----, Robert, 8, 21, 183, 195
----, William, 396, 406, 407, 408, 472
Morse, Jedidiah, 321
----, John T., 453
----, S. F. B., 50
Morton, Mrs. Sarah Wentworth, 288
Motley, John Lothrop, 83, 438
Mott, Lucretia, 35, 428
Napoleon, 240
_Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee_,
172, 174, 175
_Narrative of the Surprizing Works of God_, 445
Nathan, James, 428
_Nation, The_, 468, 470
_National Philanthropist, The_, 342
_Nature_, 390, 447
_Nature and Progress of Liberty_, 291
_Nebraska Question, The_, 420, 421-422, 424
Nemours, Du Pont de, 3, 10, 243
Nevins, Allan, 102 n, 242 n, 244, 245
_New England Chattels_, 102
_New Views of the Constitution of the United States_, 299
_New York Herald, The_, 102 n, 356-357
_Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay_, 135, 191, 192, 235
Niebuhr, Barthold Georg, 94
Nightingale, Florence, 107
_North American Review, The_, 111, 442
Norton, Andrews, 329, 454
----, Charles Eliot, 441, 460, 465, 470
Novalis, 430
Noyes, John Humphrey, 343-346, 355, 359
Oberholtzer, Ellis Paxson, 185
_Oceana, The_, 306, 307
_Old Cambridge_, 341 n
_Old-Town Folks_, 372, 373, 374
_One-Hoss Shay, The_, 453, 454
_Orations and Addresses_, 201
_Origin of Species, The_, 419
_Origin, History and Influence of Roman Legislation, The_, 116
_Ossian_, 31, 111, 186
Ossoli, Count, 428
Otis, Harrison Gray, 279, 353
----, James, 325
Owen, Robert, 30, 242, 349
Page, J. W., 102
----, Thomas Nelson, 28
Paine, Robert Treat, 113, 279, 288-295, 317, 329, 436, 452
----, Thomas, 11, 12, 22, 88, 96, 284, 288, 342, 356, 366
Papinian, 117
Parker, Theodore, 108, 115, 124, 171, 256, 297 n, 300, 311, 314,
315, 316 n, 319, 327, 329, 338, 342, 347, 351, 373, 398, 399,
414-425, 426, 430, 433, 439, 455, 456, 458
Parkinson, Richard, 215
Parkman, Francis, 438-439, 458
_Parson Turell’s Legacy_, 453
_Partisan, The_, 53, 134
_Partisan Leader, The_, 35, 36, 37
Pascal, 264
_Patrician and Plebeian in Virginia_, 7, 8
_Patrick Henry, Sketches of the Life and Character of_, 31-33
Paulding, James Kirke, 162, 163, 183, 190, 198, 200, 207, 212-221, 238
Peabody, Elizabeth, 443
----, Sophia, 443, 449
Peaslee, Mary, 364
Pendleton, L. B., 83, 86, 87, 91
----, Nancy, 47
_Perfectionist, The_, 343
Perry, Commodore, 50
Petigru, James Louis, 103, 110, 123, 168
Phillips, Wendell, 108, 256, 314, 333, 351, 420, 436, 458
_Phocion_, 287
Pickering, Timothy, 187, 296
Pierpont, John, 365
_Pierre, or the Ambiguities_, 261, 263, 264
Pike, Albert, 162
_Pilgrim’s Progress_, 129
Pinckney, General Charles Cotesworth, 110
Pindar, 402
_Pioneer, The_, 464 n
_Pioneers, The_, 216, 220, 224
Pitt, William, 170, 282
Plato, 252, 259, 264, 318, 381, 427
_Plea for Captain John Brown, A_, 413
Poe, Edgar Allan, 57-59, 127
_Poet of the Breakfast Table, The_, 455, 457, 458
_Poganuc People_, 372, 374
_Political Ethics_, 95
_Political Justice_, 331, 335, 336, 409-410
_Political Science Quarterly, The_, 250
Pope, Alexander, 31, 104, 114, 289, 290, 452, 466
_Port Folio, The_, 187
_Prairie, The_, 232
Prescott, W. H., 367, 438
_Present Age, The_, 395
_Present Crisis, The_, 464, 464 n
Prince, H. L., 154
_Professor at the Breakfast Table, The_, 455, 456
_Progress and Poverty_, 467
_Prometheus_, 463, 464, 464 n
_Prometheus Bound_, 402
_Pro-Slavery Argument_, 102
_Pro-Slavery Propaganda in American Fiction in the Fifties_, 102
_Prose Sketches and Poems_, 162
Pufendorf, Baron von, 117
_Puritan and his Daughter, The_, 215, 216
Quesnay, François, 3, 10, 11
Quincy, Edmund, 314, 343, 345, 331, 359, 436
----, Josiah, 276, 279, 329, 343, 368, 460, 462
Quinn, Arthur Hobson, 191 n
_Quodlibet_, 37, 51, 55, 56, 177
Rabelais, 262, 265
_Raciad, The_, 114
Radcliffe, Mrs. Ann, 111
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 307
Randolph, John of Roanoke, 8, 9, 26, 30, 31, 35, 57
Ranke, Leopold von, 437
_Rawle on the Constitution_, 299
_Rebellion, The_, 468 n
_Recollections of a Busy Life_, 249
_Recollections of the Last Ten Years, Passed in Occasional Residences
and Journeyings in the Valley of the Mississippi_, 163
_Recorder, The_, 201 n
_Red Book, The_, 48, 51
_Redskins, The_, 226 n, 229, 230, 231, 236
Reed, Amy Louise, 446, 448
_Religious History of New England: King’s Chapel Lectures_, 324 n, 327
_Rhymed Lesson, A_, 452 n
Ricardo, David, 241
_Richard Hurdis_, 128, 130
Richter, Jean Paul, 430
_Rights of Man, The_, 12
_Rights of Woman_, 331
Ripley, Dr. Ezra, 199, 402
----, George, 101, 108, 242, 347, 348, 349, 350
----, Sophia, 349
_Rise of the Dutch Republic, The_, 438
Rittenhouse, David, 185
_Rob of the Bowl_, 51, 53, 54
Robespierre, 398
_Robinson Crusoe_, 163
Robinson, William A., 255 n
Rogers, Dr., 199
_Romance of American History_, 140 n, 166
Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 11, 22, 242, 261, 264, 284, 318, 331, 345,
366, 390, 402, 413, 420, 430, 433, 434, 466
_Ruling Passion, The_, 290
Rusk, Ralph Leslie, 164, 165
Ruskin, John, 101, 406, 407
_Saint’s Rest_, 371
_Salmagundi_, 200, 206, 213
Sampson, Abbot, 101
Sanborn, F. B., 314
Sand, Georges, 429
Sargent, John O., 453
_Satanstoe_, 235
Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 58
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 382
Scollay, Priscilla, 260
Scott, Sir Walter, 28, 30, 47, 111, 120, 129, 171, 200, 216, 220, 371
_Scout, The_, 133
Scudder, H. E., 465
Sedgwick, Catherine M., 241
----, Henry M., 241
----, Theodore, Jr., 241
_Self-Portraiture in the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne_, 446, 448
_Seventh of March Speech, The_, 313, 314, 367, 368
Sewall, Jonathan, 351
----, Joseph, 276
----, Samuel, 364, 446
Seward, William Henry, 107
Shakespeare, 47, 129, 130
Shaw, Elizabeth, 259
Shays, Daniel, 276, 282, 284, 297, 340
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 111, 259, 381, 453
_Shooting Match, The_, 172
_Shoshonee Valley, The_, 163
Sibley, J. L., 467
Sidney, Algernon, 354, 420
“Sidney, Edward William,” 36
Simms, William Gilmore, ii, 37, 39, 47, 53, 54, 102, 110, 112,
125-136, 169, 190, 232, 474
_Sketches and Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett of West
Tennessee_, 173, 175, 176, 177
_Skipper Ireson’s Ride_, 370
_Slavery_, 333, 335
_Slavery in Massachusetts_, 412
_Social Destiny of Mankind, The_, 251
Socrates, 427
Solomon, 264, 265
_Song, The_, 172
_Songs of Labor_, 370
Sotheran, Charles, 254 n
_South Atlantic Quarterly, The_, 102 n
_Southern Plantation, The_, 102 n
_Southern Quarterly Review, The_, 39
_Southern Review, The_, 112, 114
Smith, Adam, vii, 3, 121, 241, 242, 243, 308, 400
----, Gerrit, 351, 359, 365
Smollett, Tobias, 128
_Snowbound_, 370
Sparks, Rev. Jared, 330, 367, 437
_Spectator, The_, 31
_Speech on the Compromise Measures_, 313
_Speech at New Haven_, 154
_Speech at Springfield_, 157, 159
_Speech in Wall Street_, 309 n
Spinoza, 264
_Spirit of the Sub-Treasury_, 122
Spotswood, Governor Alexander, 7, 45
Staël, Madame de, 381
Stansbury, Joseph, 186
Stanton, Theodore, 438 n
_State Rights Sentinel, The_, 171
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 200, 238
Stephen, Leslie, 461, 469
Stephens, Alexander H., 39, 56, 62, 64, 65, 69, 82-93, 94, 167, 302,
473
Sterne, Lawrence, 31, 33, 35
Stiles, Rev. Ezra, 199
Stoddard, Richard Henry, 200, 238
Story, Joseph, 83, 88, 93, 117, 197, 260, 297, 300-303, 304, 311
----, W. W., 301
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 107, 314, 371-378, 428
_Stranger in America, The_, 95
Strauss, David Friedrich, 417
Stuart, Moses, 367
_Studies in Psychology_, 446
_Sullivan’s Island_, 114
Sumner, Charles, 106, 351
_Swallow Barn_, 28, 41, 50, 51, 52, 172, 377
Swift, Jonathan, 228, 453
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 436, 466
Swinton, Mary, 115
Taine, Hippolyte, 466
Tandy, Jeannette Reid, 102
Tappan, Arthur, 351
----, Lewis, 351, 362
_Tariff, The_, 308 n
Taylor, John of Caroline, ii, 14-19, 20, 21, 29, 61, 90, 122, 123,
150, 153, 170, 217, 277, 299, 336
----, Zachary, 71
_Tempora Mutantur_, 470
_Tent on the Beach, The_, 369
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 47, 54
_Thanatopsis_, 239
_Thirty Years’ View_, 14, 151
_Thomas Carlyle and his Works_, 413
Thoreau, Henry David, 156, 258, 264, 266, 314, 319, 367, 389, 394,
400-413, 426, 433, 440, 449, 451, 458, 460
Thornton, W. T., 241
Ticknor, George, 116, 367, 437
_Timothy Flint, Pioneer, Missionary, Author, Editor_, 140, 141
Toombs, Robert, 39, 62, 86, 91
Tocqueville, Alexis de, vi
_Tour of the Prairies, A_, 211
_Transcendentalism in New England_, 348, 379, 380, 381
_Transcendentalist, The_, 384, 385
_Transient and Permanent in Christianity, On the_, 338
_Treatise on True Virtue, A_, 372
Trent, Professor William Peterfield, 39, 131
_Tribune, The_, 248, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 255
_Tristram Shandy_, 31, 47
Trollope, Mrs., 215
Tucker, Henry St. George, 299
----, Nathaniel Beverley, ii, 35-40, 41, 42, 47, 57, 119
Tuckerman, Henry T., 48, 238
Turner, J. M. W., 407
----, Nat, 355
Twain, Mark, 159, 172, 259, 366
Tweed, “Boss,” 471
Tyler, President John, 8, 116
_Typee_, 261
Ulpian, 117
_Uncle Robin in his Cabin in Virginia and Tom without one in Boston_,
102
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, 102, 376, 377, 441
_Unitarian Christianity most Favorable to Piety_, 330-331
Van Buren, Martin, 36, 55, 197, 203, 207, 217, 246
Vanderbilt, Commodore, 231, 474
Van Doren, Carl, 133
Van Rensselaer, Stephen, 194, 195, 231
Vattel, Emrich von, 117
_Virginians, The_, 54
Voet, 117
Voltaire, 382
_Vote Yourself a Farm_, 254
Waddell, Dr. Moses, 168
Wade, John Donald, 169, 170, 177 n
_Walden_, 400, 403, 405, 406, 407, 408, 413
Walker, Nathaniel, 327
----, Williston, 324, 324 n
Ware, Norman, 141
Washington, George, 7-8, 21, 48, 159, 194, 211, 265, 291, 292, 300,
301, 356, 437
_Waverley Novels_, 216
Weaver, Raymond, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 265
_Webster Address_, 424
Webster, Daniel, 37, 67, 69, 88, 90, 94, 116, 122, 144, 159, 177, 207
n, 227, 242, 246, 252, 278, 298, 299, 300, 301, 304-316, 317,
330, 335, 359, 367, 368, 387, 397, 398, 399, 412, 424, 458
Weed, Thurlow, 197
_Week, The_, 404, 406
Weems, “Parson,” 437
Weiss, John, 347, 412, 417 n, 422 n
Weld, Isaac, 215
Welles, Gideon, 64
Wendell, Barrett, 416 n, 427
Wertenbaker, Thomas J., 7, 8
_Western Monthly Magazine, The_, 164
_Western Souvenir, The; A Christmas and New Year’s Gift for 1829_, 164
_Westward Ho!_, 162, 163, 217, 220
Wette, Wilhelm Martin de, 417
Wharton, Edith, 435
_White Jacket_, 262
White, Maria, 351, 463, 465
Whitman, Walt, 127, 183, 222, 244, 264, 265, 366, 367
Whittier, John G., 244, 314, 315, 319, 351, 352, 359, 361-370, 377
----, Robert, 364
_Wieland_, 190
_Wilderness and the War-Path, The_, 165
Willard, President, 292
William IV, King, 452
_William Ellery Channing_, 330, 338
_William Gilmore Simms, Life of_, 39
Williams, Roger, 97, 327, 345, 379, 399
Willing, Mrs., 207 n
Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 200, 202, 238
Wilson, Henry, 469
_Windsor Forest_, 114
Winthrop, John, 124
----, Robert C., 47, 49
Wirt, William, 29, 30-35, 47, 48, 49, 56, 169
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 188, 189, 242, 331, 430, 432
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_, 432
_Woodcraft_, 131, 134
Woods, Leonard, 367
Woolsey, Theodore, 94
Wordsworth, William, 111, 381, 389, 453, 466
_Working Man’s Advocate, The_, 254
_World’s Fair, The_, 470
Wright, Fannie, 242, 244, 428
----, Henry C., 343, 358
_Wyandotté_, 235
Wythe, George, 25, 29, 142, 143
Yates, Robert, 72
_Yemassee, The_, 134, 135
Young, Edward, 31, 111, 254
The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America [Volume Three]
Vernon Louis Parrington
The sudden death of Professor Vernon Louis Parrington in England, June
16, 1929, cut tragically short his labors on the last volume of _Main
Currents in American Thought_. Of this third volume approximately the
first half had been completed, which, together with the outline of
the work and some scattered essays in sections otherwise undeveloped,
constitutes all that the author left. Unfinished it is, yet no
completion by another can be justified. That anyone could duplicate
his felicity of style, so unobtrusively individual, so sensitively
adjusted to the freighted thought, is hardly to be hoped for; and
more important, that another scholar could accurately reproduce his
interpretation is an assumption not to be warranted. The decision to
publish the author’s incomplete work is a tribute to his brilliance.
Nevertheless it is possible to know Professor Parrington’s chief
intentions, particularly when one understands, as his associates did,
his principles for organizing materials and his standards of value.
Students as well as associates first of all noticed beneath the
richness and complexity of his thought a constancy of purpose as clear
as the treatment of mass in a Gothic cathedral. Indeed it was through
a delight in architecture pursued as a hobby for many years that
Parrington expressed this desire for a unity, balanced, harmonious, and
properly proportioned.
This architectonic feeling, abundantly illustrated in his writing
habits, was carried over not only into his classroom procedure and
conversation, but also into his varied interests. Painting as well as
architecture had long intrigued him. Though few people knew it, he
wrote poetry distinguished for restraint in expression and clarity of
form; while in conversation he persistently sought the appropriate
phrase, spiced it with wit, salted it with homely realism; for no
gentleman of the eighteenth century was more conscious of the charms of
good discourse.
Professor Parrington’s classroom procedure had a reputation that
attracted students not much interested in literature and which appealed
to all ranges of intellect. The source of that popularity was the
personality of the teacher, together with his gift for presenting
ideas and evoking a response. By means of a Socratic cross-examination
Parrington made the student discover his intellectual deficiencies;
while the class, to its astonishment and delight, found the quest for
truth both elusive and exciting. Surprise and satisfied expectation
kept the easily bored from sinking into apathy, for there was no
telling from day to day just what Professor Parrington was going to do.
He paired every occasion with a fitting response; yet this flexibility
did not degenerate into an aimless drifting, since he persistently
simplified his main objectives and concentrated the material to be
studied, while expressing its meaning through a significant symbol
or a telling phrase. His classes in the eighteenth century, for
example, were given the concept of harmony, balance, and proportion.
They found it in architecture, they saw it in dress, they heard it in
conversation, they watched it work out in the heroic couplet, they
pursued it in Addison, Pope, and Swift; in short, they analyzed the
whole social structure of the age and discovered it everywhere. A
germinal idea, Parrington liked to call it, while he held it before the
class like a many-faceted crystal, slowly turning it around and around
so the student could see every face. As a result no student who had
taken the course ever forgot the significance of this architectonic
trilogy.
In writing habits there was a similar all-encompassing purpose. He
habitually began with his thesis--a phrase, a sentence, or a revealing
figure. This was examined and stripped of its implications as one
would peel an onion layer by layer. So imperious was the habit of this
procedure that his ability to write would be blocked until he had in
mind a perfectly crystallized concept expressible at the maximum in one
sentence. An example of this occurred shortly before he left on his
trip to England. He had been working on the period that Mark Twain had
labeled the “Gilded Age,” but found the title inadequate to his idea,
and, as a result, his writing did not get on. Another day some weeks
later there was an obvious satisfaction expressed in his bearing and an
exceptionally pronounced twinkle in his eye. “I have found the phrase,”
he said; “I will call it The Great Barbecue.” Similarly, the three
volumes of this work began in a single paragraph which by progressive
unfoldings he expanded to its present scope.
After having made a provisional outline, with each section condensed
into a single sentence, he began writing, completing a unit here or
there as circumstance and mood directed. When it was completed the
process of readjustment began. Each portion was inspected for its
length, which had to be fitted to its relative importance; an emphasis
here was shifted to balance an emphasis there; the mood of one part
was altered to make it harmonize with the mood of its neighbor. As
many as twelve times he rewrote a single section in this complex and
delicate effort for harmonious adjustment. Finally, he made from this
his finished outline.
Knowing Professor Parrington’s methods one can now understand the
problem he faced and the solution he found when bent on the task of
writing a history of American literature. Although he was by nature
partial to the claims of aesthetics, yet it was obvious to him that
such an approach was foredoomed to failure. All too few of the American
writers would deserve treatment on any aesthetic test, while many
who were undeniably significant could not possibly be left out even
though inferior artistically. Moreover, one only had to look at the
numerous attempts already made to see the failure of the belletristic
interpretation. What were these histories of American literature?
Sprawling lists of names arranged in a fashion that gave little save
conventionalized data and some dubious evaluations. Already there was
a widespread demand for a new interpretation growing out of these past
failures.
Professor Parrington found the first step to a solution when he
remembered the day he opened Taine’s _Histoire de la littérature
anglaise_. It had come as a new and inspiring discovery to find a
method that envisaged the literature of a people as the inevitable
outgrowth of their racial peculiarities, environment, and epoch. It is
true that the claim set up by Paine, that his method was scientific
and could account for every phenomenon, proved to be unfounded;
but nevertheless his work was epoch-making; it gave a unity and a
significance never before attained, and this was what attracted
Parrington. Nothing less unifying than Paine’s method was thinkable.
A second source of inspiration came from a close friend and colleague,
J. Allen Smith, another pioneer figure, who applied to the abstract
theorizings of political science the economic realities that underlie
and determine them. The method was so fruitful of results that it
quickly spread to a group of American political scientists, from whose
findings much of Parrington’s significant work received its first
flattering confirmation. Under such a stimulus Parrington was quick to
realize the fruitfulness of economic determinism when applied even to
literature.
A third idea completed the synthesis. When he envisaged American
literature as American thought, the trammel of the belletristic was
broken and he was free to reëvaluate American writers, to follow the
trail of their work wherever it led; for at last he had found a method
true to facts, yet one which would satisfy his insatiable demand for
a significant unity, balanced, harmonious, and properly proportioned.
The economic forces imprint their mark upon political, social, and
religious institutions; literature expresses the result in its thought
content.
But a technique, though vitally necessary, is not the end of the
story. There still remains, even for the most impartial scholar, the
final and, be it admitted, inescapable evaluation. Parrington was
too honest with himself to dodge the issue; he made his choice and
abided the result. In the foreword to the first volume he made his
confession: “The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate
the materials is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather
than Federalistic; and very likely in my search I have found what I
went forth to find, as others have discovered what they were seeking.
Unfortunately the _mens aequa et clara_ is the rarest of attributes,
and dead partisanships have a disconcerting way of coming to life
again in the pages of their historians. That the vigorous passions and
prejudices of the time I have dealt with may have found an echo in my
judgments is, perhaps, to be expected; whether they have distorted my
interpretation and vitiated my analysis is not for me to determine.”
Professor Parrington’s _Main Currents in American Thought_ has, then,
for its subject the adventures of American liberalism. To anyone alive
to the issue an adventurous story it is, as becomes more apparent
when the author’s own liberalism is completely understood. Those
sections where his sympathies are kindled, where he stamps his seal of
enthusiastic admiration, provide the clue which his treatment of Roger
Williams, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau,
Channing, and Theodore Parker assuredly verifies. All of his latent
enthusiasms burst into bloom until, as in his essay on Roger Williams,
nothing less than the cadence and passion of the Song of Solomon would
express it. “Running through his writings is a recurrent echo of the
Hebrew love-song that Puritan thought suffused with glowing mysticism:
‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the
lilies.... I will arise now, and go about the city in the streets, and
in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.’ But when he
went into the broad ways of Carolinian England, seeking the rose of
Sharon and the lily of the valley, he discovered only abominations. The
lover was tempted by false kisses; the Golden Image was set up in the
high places, and the voice of authority commanded to bow down to it.
And so as a Christian mystic Roger Williams became a Separatist, and
set his mind upon the new world where the lover might dwell with his
bride.”[477]
The liberalism of Parrington had this great virtue, which all too
many creeds lack: it was built on an obligation first to examine and
understand all points of view before exercising the right to condemn
them. Although he disliked the personalities and groaned at the dreary
pages of men like Cotton Mather, yet he was not satisfied until he got
at their marrow. And again there was an abiding sense of the humane
in Parrington before which all abstractions, generalizations, and
logical systems had to pass in review. He feared above all, as did the
sensitive Jefferson, the cancer of power. “Man,” he used to say, “has
never proved himself worthy of an unrestrained control of his fellows,
nor has any special group of men ever been dominant without injustice
to others.” Combined with this love of freedom was an urbanity and
a sense of personal integrity not subject to the interference of
outside forces in convention or mob--an integrity which so impressed
everyone having contact with the man, that he has been often called
an aristocrat. Parrington would not have objected to the label, nor
have seen it as contradictory to the principles of liberalism, since
in his opinion only liberalism expressing itself in a democratic
society provides for the free exercise of personal rights. Elevating
oneself by riding on the shoulders of others, a common device of the
pseudo-aristocrat, was to him but a vulgar gymnastic performance.
When he described Jefferson “with his aristocratic head set on a
plebeian frame”[478] he was unconsciously describing himself, for there
was a deep love of the soil in Parrington. One saw it, surprisingly, in
his hands. They were thick and sturdy, blunted at the ends as if from
too much delving into the black loam of his flower garden, where roses,
peonies, and crocuses were cherished companions, and the delight of his
leisure hours. He secretly suspected the apartment dweller as any true
farmer would; and though there was a twinkle in his eye when he called
New York a Babylon or spoke of its corrupting influence on scholar and
artist, yet there was a meaning implied more serious than the jest.
It was Parrington’s hope to vindicate this liberalism “stemming,” as
he said, “from the fruitful loins of the eighteenth century.” As he
diagnosed it, that era had two creative currents of thought: a hopeful,
vigorous liberalism, together with a sturdy realism which did not balk
at men’s selfishness or deny the economic basis of social forces.
Unfortunately the nineteenth-century liberal attended only to hopes
and neglected the realism, while the swelling forces of industrialism
accepted the economic realities but cynically brutalized them. Failure
was the inevitable result; the liberals despair while Babbitt, regnant,
infests the country with his blustering agents. In the unfinished
section of this last volume it was Parrington’s purpose to show this
parlous state of twentieth-century America, to discern the hopeful
gleam in the darkness, and to uncover the hidden forces working for a
more stable and just society. Parrington’s point of view then, was that
of a staunch and kindly liberalism, the motif in the three volumes,
the theme never absent from a page of the whole composition. It is a
liberalism not to be found in any program yet formulated by political
party or economic sect; it is rather a generous idealism that can
envisage a future richer in values, more humane in distribution of
favors than any known past. Wise to the ways of man, such a liberalism
refuses confinement in the strait-jacket of any set formula, yet
escapes the emasculation awaiting mere enthusiasm; for it can separate
foes from friends and recognize the point where compromise means
surrender.
If my analysis thus far is to any purpose it will suggest what these
main objectives that Parrington never completed were to have been. The
unfinished Book Two was to chronicle three parties of revolt against
the plutocracy born of the Gilded Age. Of these rebellions the first
was engendered on the Middle Border, where the farmers, beset by hard
times, struck out against the source of their ills. As the agrarians
diagnosed the situation, these economic maladjustments were brought on
by a currency manipulated for the benefit of creditors, and further
enhanced by capitalistic control of the political machine. One of the
last of Parrington’s completed units deals with the economic phase of
the revolt; the next section was to record the farmer’s effort to
democratize the government. Through pressure of third-party movements
the farmers tried to inject such reforms as the initiative and
referendum, the recall, the direct primary, and the income tax; until,
seduced by Bryan’s oratory, they joined with the Democrats in an attack
upon the intrenchments of capitalism. As Parrington saw it, these
agrarian descendants of Jefferson, lacking the intellectual leadership
which the South had contributed in earlier days, at a tactical
disadvantage, and already a minority economic group, were fated to lose
their last great uprising.
Also out of the valley of the Mississippi came a literature of the
Middle Border. Such writers as Edward Eggleston and E. W. Howe had
already initiated a realism that revealed the drabness of frontier
life and suggested its smoldering discontent, although the pastoral
note fathered by the genial and romantic James Whitcomb Riley did not
lack its prose children. Notably did Meredith Nicholson, William Allen
White, and Booth Tarkington[479] portray the village neighborliness,
its wholesomeness, its spirit of democracy, until they cast such a fog
of sentiment over the scene as to blur all the realities. But the true
spirit of Populism is represented in the impassioned work of Hamlin
Garland, whose “admirable realism and passionate democracy” Parrington
depicts in a chapter that he completed.
The second chorus of dissent came from the very citadels of plutocracy,
for the wage-earners, unable to escape slavery by flight to an
unshackled frontier that no longer existed, were brought to bay. The
doctrine of class war, which had been ignored since the eighteenth
century, was revived by the German socialists and given an added
plausibility by the employers’ unscrupulous use of injunction, black
list, and lockout. T. V. Powderly, who found a solution to the labor
problem in syndicalism, organized the Knights of Labor. Although this
union had a promising inception, it was soon wrecked, while the craft
unionism recommended by Samuel Gompers forged to the front because of
its middle-class ideology and spirit of compromise. On the other hand
the left wing of the labor cause embraced various brands of socialism.
The tragic flare-up of the Haymarket riot, which resulted in a “red”
scare and persecution of the humane Governor Altgeld, served Parrington
as a dramatic illustration of the obloquy that descended upon the
leaders of socialism, Daniel De Leon, Eugene V. Debs, and Victor
Berger. Needless to say, Parrington had planned a vindication of them
horn of his desire to see more justice in the world.
There were echoes of this proletarian strife manifested in the world
of letters. Certain writers following Edward Bellamy joined the quest
for a socialistic Utopia. Parrington had completed his passage on
Bellamy, but of the party formed to agitate for principles advanced in
_Looking Backward_ and of the other writers of Utopian novels, such as
Tourgée, he left no treatment. A second set of writers were grouped
together by reason of their common concern over the darkening future
of American civilization. Edwin Markham, his humanitarian sympathies
aroused, penned an indictment of wage exploitation in his “The Man with
the Hoe” that caused no little concern in its day and spurred defenders
of the existing economic system to offer liberal prizes for an equally
convincing reply. The emergence of naturalism, seen in Stephen
Crane[480] and Frank Norris,[480] was also a response to the darkening
social outlook. Parrington defined naturalism as “a pessimistic realism
that sets man in a mechanical world.” He traced this pessimistic
determinism to the machine industrialism so overwhelming in its power
as to impress man with his own impotence, to the centralization of
wealth, which causes a caste regimentation of society, and finally to
the great city, which reduces the inhabitant to an infinitesimal unit
of a vast beehive. Other writers, equally oppressed by this state of
affairs, concentrated on the phenomena of the city. It was here that
Parrington intended to discuss Henry B. Fuller, Harold Frederic, Robert
Grant, and Edith Wharton.[481]
The third party of revolt was a hesitant one--the South, still
convalescing from the Civil War and further weakened by divisions in
its counsels. Though burdened by parochial creeds, weakened by lack of
intellectual leadership, the agrarian South, largely plebeian, joined
the Middle Border in its uprising. The middle-class South, represented
by Henry W. Grady, proposed a surrender to the Yankee principle of
industrial exploitation, while the remnant of the old aristocracy
resisted the new and clung to the traditions of the past. Thomas Nelson
Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Murfree, and George Washington Cable
attended to these romantic traditions of the plantation, the negro, the
mountaineer, and the creole; while Sidney Lanier[482] became the poet
of southern landscape and sunrise. Far more significant in Parrington’s
eye was the rebirth of a southern intelligentsia represented in letters
by Ellen Glasgow, W. W. Woodward, the debunker, and James Branch
Cabell,[483] the ironic romanticist. Professor Parrington, who had
been among the first to appreciate Cabell, admired the competence of
his style and the effectiveness of his ironic commentary on American
civilization.
Book Three was to present the movement of liberalism from 1903 to
1917, and the reaction to it following the war. Parrington called
this period of liberalism the “great stock-taking venture.” These
liberals announced that the democratic hopes of earlier days had not
been fulfilled, that the Constitution is not a democratic instrument
nor was it intended to be, and that while Americans were professing to
create a democracy, they had been creating in fact a plutocracy. They
then determined upon a new program based on their discovery of the
relations between economics and politics. Such relations made necessary
the control of property by the collective will, and to that end they
endeavored to squeeze the Hamiltonian state into a Jeffersonian
mold.[484]
The muckrakers of 1903 to 1910 attacked the plutocracy where its joints
creaked. In effect this group of writers from Henry D. Lloyd to Charles
Edward Russell, Gustavus Meyers, and A. M. Simons popularized economics
and made the liberals conscious of what was going on behind the closed
doors of the directors’ meetings. On the other hand, the movement of
Progressivism, engaged in the hopeless task of directing the political
machinery to democratic ends, was typified by Robert La Follette,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Only one, La Follette, remained
true to the colors; the other two compromised, then surrendered, and
the hopes of liberalism went down in a tragic _débâcle_.
In the realm of letters this liberalism found expression in three major
groups of writers. A set of intellectuals turned critical began to
scrutinize the economic, political, and social institutions of America.
Of these critics Parrington considered Randolph Bourne and Charles A.
Beard[485] the most important. Another set turned to fiction, shifting
their point of view from liberalism to radicalism, from politics to
economics. Winston Churchill[486] had discovered the emptiness of
the profit motive with its resultant destruction of beauty, freedom,
and creative craftsmanship. Similarly Robert Herrick[486] became a
pathologist of the city, investigated its ethics, and then rebelled
at the predatory egoism which ruled its life to the destruction of
all ethical integrity. At his best Jack London[487] wrote of the
revolution, though later selling out to bigger and better royalties;
while Upton Sinclair became the revolutionary sleuth spying upon the
indecencies of the capitalist system. Perhaps these novelists were too
seriously engaged in social criticism and reform propaganda to become
great craftsmen, yet they were to Parrington important writers, because
they were in touch with deep currents of American thought.
Still a third set of writers turned to a realistic technique
appropriate to the times, yet avoided the weakness inherent in direct
propaganda. The poets Masters,[488] Sandburg, Frost, and Robinson,
Parrington chose for consideration as realists with an art, an
underlying criticism of conditions, and a philosophy that set them
above the other poets of the time. For the same reasons he had planned
a section on Huneker. Theodore Dreiser,[489] because of his massive
documentation, his deterministic philosophy, and his sense of the
inevitable tragedy inherent in life, Parrington labeled a modern,
meaning by this that Dreiser most adequately and most thoroughly
represented modern America.
The last section of the book was to be a consideration of the post-war
reaction to the liberalism of the preceding period. The economic
democracy which liberals had marked for their goal was now attacked
by the younger intellectuals. H. L. Mencken turned to farce and
burlesque for methods adequate to express his contempt of American
democracy. Biologists pointed to the inescapable laws of heredity as a
refutation of the liberals’ hopes for social improvement; while some
psychologists, discovering morons, ruled out all equalitarian Utopias.
Parrington could find little sympathy in his heart for a return to
the spirit of aristocracy. This narrow, doctrinaire biology, denied
by the more careful biologists and the behaviorists who assert that
environment is determining, cannot rule out all environmental changes.
As long as the _milieu_ is an effective force in molding the organism,
room is left for social betterment by social readjustments. A disputed
psychology dealing in primitive sex drives, gland secretions, and
intelligence scores is no more conclusive on the subject.
The attack on industrialism is nearer to the heart of Parrington’s
ideals, because it proved to him that liberalism is not by any
means dead. Such a comprehensive movement enlisting first-class
minds--intellectuals, poets, novelists, dramatists--revealed clearly
to him the increasing criticism of a dehumanized economics, and such
criticism proceeds from an implicit liberalism.
The attack on the middle class is seen best in Zona Gale,[490] Evelyn
Scott, and particularly in Sinclair Lewis,[491] whom Parrington
rated the chief of our younger satirists. This satire is a searching
criticism of the _bourgeois_ ideals and habitat, its tyrannical
herd-mind, its poverty-stricken materialism. By its nature this
satire clearly suggests a set of new ideals which grow out of a free
individualism rather than a political or economic socialism. The
emphasis is shifted by implication from externalities to things of the
spirit. This is more clearly seen in the new philosophies just now
arising, which deny the finality of economic law, turn in politics to
the ideal of a decentralized state, and in science to new syntheses
emphasizing the pragmatic and relative aspects of scientific law.
The latest literary fashions that Parrington intended to consider
embody a psychological emphasis seen in the impressionism of biography,
in the brutal but frank pacifism of war novels,[490] and most
significantly of all in the impressionism and expressionism of Sherwood
Anderson.[491] Parrington felt that there were rich potentialities
latent in these new methods although the writers of the new school
were themselves painfully at sea. In technique as well as in direct
statement there was to be seen, though obscurely, a renewed emphasis
upon individual integrity, the necessity for creative expression, and
the reaffirmation of what some may choose to call spiritual values.
In effect he believed that all is not lost. Through the influence of
science we are recovering the neglected realism of the past; we are
not only reaffirming it but making its acquaintance more intimately
than ever before. Weld that science to enlightened and humane
aspirations (Parrington believed that there was nothing in the findings
of science that prevented the union) and a revivified liberalism will
make the world a fit place to live in. It is by no means an easy
program, for it requires knowledge of fact, and ability to carry
knowledge into the sphere of effective action. It is made doubly
difficult by the untimely death of one of its chief proponents, yet in
the young men and women whom he liked to have around him there must
be, however obscurely, a feeling and a groping for the way out. They
will be guided and inspired by such utterance as Parrington’s diagnosis
of Sinclair Lewis, where he quarries out a vein of his own enduring
liberalism.
“Some lingering faith in our poor human nature he still clings to. In
the great American mass that human nature is certainly foolish and
unlovely enough. It is too often blown up with flatulence, corroded
with lust, on familiar terms with chicanery and lying; it openly
delights in hocus pocus and discovers its miracle-workers in Comstocks
and Aimee Semple McPhersons. But for all its pitiful flabbiness
human nature is not wholly bad, nor is man so helpless a creature of
circumstance as the cynics would have us believe. There are other and
greater gods than Mumbo Jumbo worshiped in America, worthier things
than hocus pocus; and in rare moments even Babbitt dimly perceives
that the feet of his idol are clay. There are Martin Arrowsmiths as
well as Elmer Gantrys, and human nature, if it will, can pull itself
out of the trap. Bad social machinery makes bad men. Put the banker
in the scullery instead of the drawing-room; exalt the test-tube and
deflate the cash register; rid society of the dictatorship of the
middle class; and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a
civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a
thing to be respected. For all his modernity and disillusion learned
from Pullman-car philosophers, Sinclair Lewis is still an echo of Jean
Jacques and the golden hopes of the Enlightenment--thin and far-off, no
doubt, but still an authentic echo.”
“Thin and far-off, no doubt,” is this contemporary liberalism, yet
Parrington found hints of it in the midst of the war fiasco that
culminated in reaction and despair. Death did not grant him the
opportunity to show what he found, but the young men who learned
from him the love of sound craftsmanship, who were inspired by his
enlightened dreams, will some day complete the monument. In the
meantime Vernon Louis Parrington would like to be held in memory as
he held his friend, J. Allen Smith--as a “scholar, teacher, democrat,
gentleman.”
E. H. Eby
_University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
March, 1930_
Footnotes
[477] Vol. I, p. 65.
[478] _Ibid._, p. 343.
[479] See Addenda for notes on these men.
[480] See Addenda for lecture notes on these writers.
[481] See Addenda for brief notes on these writers.
[482] See Addenda for brief notes on these writers.
[483] See Addenda for magazine article on Cabell.
[484] “A Chapter in American Liberalism,” which is included in the
Addenda, deals with this subject, with the muckraking movement, and
with post-war realism.
[485] See Addenda, “A Chapter in American Liberalism.”
[486] See “The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism,” in the
Addenda.
[487] See Addenda for notes on London.
[488] See Addenda, “Ole Rölvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_.”
[489] See Addenda for lecture notes on Dreiser.
[490] See Addenda for brief notes.
[491] See Addenda, “Sherwood Anderson: a Psychological Naturalist.”
Foreword
With the present volume I bring to a close my studies in the main
currents in American thought. The broad drifts of American opinion,
as I interpret that opinion, should now be sufficiently clear. The
volume immediately preceding the present one dealt with the romantic
revolution in America--one of the most stimulating experiences the
American mind has undergone--which was traced to twin forces: the
influence upon an expansive generation of French romantic thought, and
the spirit of robust individualism resulting from a fluid economics;
and the creative result was the spontaneous emergence in America of
a buoyant spirit of hopefulness that expressed itself in democratic
programs and faith in a benevolent progress. The present volume deals
with the slow decay of this romantic optimism in more thoughtful minds,
and the cause of that decay is traced to three sources: the stratifying
of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of a
mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which,
under the pressure of industrialism, the teachings of the physical
sciences, and the lessons of European intellectuals, is resulting in
the questioning of the ideal of democracy as it has been commonly held
hitherto, and the spread of a spirit of pessimism. The custodianship of
America by the middle class has brought unsuspected consequences in its
train.
Thus after three hundred years’ experience we have returned,
intellectually, to the point from which we set out, and the old
philosophy brought to the new world from the compact societies of
Europe, with its doctrine of determinism and its mood of pessimism,
has come back in changed form to color the thinking of our generation.
Emersonian optimism, that was the fullest expression of the romantic
faith, is giving way to Dreiserian pessimism, and the traditional
doctrine of progress is being subjected to analysis by a growing
skepticism. Our intellectual history thus conceived falls into three
broad phases: Calvinistic pessimism, romantic optimism, and mechanistic
pessimism. Between the first and the last lies the America of yesterday
that shaped the American mind and American institutions; and with
the submergence of that native world we are in the way of repeating
here the familiar history of Europe, with its coercive regimentations
reproduced on a larger scale and in more mechanical fashion. Once more
a gloomy philosophy stands on the threshold of the American mind.
Whether it will enter and take possession of the household, no one can
predict as yet. This much nevertheless is clear: an industrialized
society is reshaping the psychology fashioned by an agrarian world; the
passion for liberty is lessening and the individual, in the presence
of creature comforts, is being dwarfed; the drift of centralization is
shaping its inevitable tyrannies to bind us with. Whether the quick
concern for human rights, that was the noble bequest of our fathers
who had drunk of the waters of French romantic faith, will be carried
over into the future, to unhorse the machine that now rides men and to
leaven the sodden mass that is industrial America, is a question to
which the gods as yet have given no answer. Yet it is not without hope
that intelligent America is in revolt. The artist is in revolt, the
intellectual is in revolt, the conscience of America is in revolt.
* * * * *
It ought not to be necessary to add that in these volumes I have
not essayed to write a history of American literature--that rather
difficult task for which no scholar is as yet equipped. But I have
suffered so many gentle reproofs for failing to do what I did not set
out to do, that it may be well to repeat what I said in the Foreword
to Volume I, that I have been concerned in the present study with the
total pattern of American thought--the broad drift of major ideas--and
not with vagrant currents or casual variations. In particular I
have been repeatedly taken to task for a seeming slight put upon
certain of our artists, and it has been inferred that I slighted
them because I chose to ignore whatever did not fit into a rigid
scheme of economic determinism. Let me say in rebuttal that I hold
no brief for a rigid scheme of economic determinism. I recognize the
rich culture potentialities that inhere in individual variation from
type, and I realize that the arts are likely to receive their noblest
gifts from men who should be classed biologically as cultural sports
or variations from the cultural type. But in such a study as I have
undertaken, individual variation is significant not for its own sake,
but rather for the help it may offer in determining the type. After
due consideration I see no cause to apologize for my treatment of Poe,
for example, if indeed I have done so. I am content to have placed
him historically and culturally in relation to the whole, leaving the
fascinating problem of his variation from type to those who deal with
such problems.
V. L. P.
Introduction[492]
In the second volume of my studies I laid down the thesis that at the
beginning of our national existence two rival philosophies contended
for supremacy in America: the humanitarian philosophy of the French
Enlightenment, based on the conception of human perfectibility and
postulating as its objective an equalitarian democracy in which
the political state should function as the servant to the common
well-being; and the English philosophy of _laissez faire_, based on
the assumed universality of the acquisitive instinct and postulating
a social order answering the needs of an abstract “economic man,”
in which the state should function in the interests of trade. And I
pointed out further, with adequate backing up, I hope, that the first
of these antagonistic philosophies was accepted by the agrarian leaders
of America and found issue in the Jeffersonian program; that the
second came to dominate the thinking of the mercantile, capitalistic
America and took form in Hamiltonian Federalism. Unfortunately this
logical alignment of diverse economic groups was obscured by the
needs of practical politics, and in passing through the explosive
Jacksonian revolution both philosophies underwent subtle changes.
Jacksonianism imposed upon America the ideal of democracy to which
all must thereafter do lip service, but it lost its realistic basis
in a Physiocratic economics and wandered in a fog of political
equalitarianism; and the Whiggery that issued from Federalism turned
to the work of converting the democratic state into the servant of
property interests. Both political parties contented themselves with an
egoistic individualism that took no account of social ends, forgetful
of the humanitarian spirit that underlay the earlier democratic
program. The finer spirit of the Enlightenment was lost, and in
consequence the major parties chose to follow the economic interests of
master groups, heedless of all humanitarian issues.
But the spirit awakened by the earlier democratic enthusiasm could
not be kept in political strait-jackets. The Jacksonian revolution
overflowed all narrow party dikes, expressing itself in diverse
humanitarian and reform movements and quickening the minds of ardent
Americans with larger democratic aspirations. The noble idealism of
successive third parties that have sprung up reasserted the democratic
principles flouted by the major parties. The Locofoco movement, the
Free-soil Party, the early Republican Party, the Greenback Party, the
Populist Party, the Progressive Party, have had a common objective,
namely to carry further the movement inaugurated by the Jeffersonians
to make of America a land of democratic equality and opportunity--to
make government in America serve man rather than property. The
third-party movements have always been democratic movements, and though
they have failed in their immediate objectives they have served the
purpose of reminding the major parties--oftentimes rudely--that America
presumes to be a democratic country. Thus interpreted the history of
the political struggle in America since 1790 falls into three broad
phases: the Jeffersonian movement that asserted the ideal of political
democracy; the Jacksonian movement that established it crudely in
practice; and the successive third-party movements that attempted
to regain such ground as had been lost, to extend the field, and to
perfect the machinery of democratic government.
As a result of the long struggle the abstract principle of
democracy--during the period under consideration--was firmly
established in the popular mind; but as it fell under the successive
custodianship of different economic groups it came to receive strangely
diverse interpretations. Interpreted by the coonskin Jacksonians
it meant political equalitarianism; by the slave economy it meant
a Greek democracy; by the industrial economy it meant the right of
exploitation. It has changed service with each new master. Always the
principles of Jeffersonianism--of democracy as a humane social order,
serving the common well-being--have been lost out of the reckoning, and
except in so far as the tendency has been checked by the third-party
threat, democratic professions have been only a thin cover under
which the old class warfare has gone forward vigorously. In the
decades immediately following the Civil War democracy passed under the
custodianship of the middle class, who were busily engaged in creating
a plutocracy, and the major ideas of the earlier movement took on
a characteristic middle-class coloring. The idea of a beneficent
progress, which was the flower of the doctrine of human perfectibility,
came to be interpreted as material expansion with constantly augmenting
profits; and the idea of democracy came to be interpreted as the right
to use the government of the whole for the benefit of the few.
* * * * *
Considered historically perhaps the chief contribution of the
Progressive movement to the democratic cause is to be found in its
discovery of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the federal
Constitution. That so obvious a fact so long escaped recognition
was due to political causes easily understood. For a century the
Constitution had been a symbol of national unity, a cohesive
force amidst the drift of expansion, a counter influence to the
disintegrations of states-rights particularisms; and as such it had
appealed to the national loyalties of men in every commonwealth. To
criticize it was reckoned disloyal. The long process of interpretation
had remained in the hands of the lawyers and had been wholly
legalistic and antiquarian. In all this earlier commentary--except
for a small group of left-wing Abolitionists who repudiated the
entire instrument--no question as to the democratic spirit of the
Constitution was raised, no doubts as to its sufficiency as a
fundamental democratic law were suggested. The class divisions that
presided at its making were ignored, and the aristocratic spirit of
its creators was forgotten. But with the rising revolt against the
custodianship of government by financial and industrial interests came
a new critical interest in the fundamental law. Discovering that its
hands were tied the democracy began to question the reason for the
bonds that constrained its movements. The latent distrust was quickened
by what was regarded by many as judicial usurpations of power, such
as the act of the Supreme Court in declaring unconstitutional the
federal income-tax law, and the question of the desirability of an
eighteenth-century document that by its complexity unduly impeded the
functioning of the democratic will, was thrust into the foreground of
political debate. It was the struggle of 1789 over again.
The new school of criticism was historical rather than legalistic. It
was concerned primarily with origins--and it must take into account
the political theories and class interests of the eighteenth-century
gentlemen who framed the document. It refused to look upon the Fathers
as supermen, devoted unselfishly to high patriotic duty, but chose
to regard them as capable statesmen, saturated with aristocratic
prejudices, who fearful of losing control of the new venture in
republicanism, took care to shape an instrument that threw sharp
restrictions about the majority will.
* * * * *
The theme of the present volume is the industrialization of America
under the leadership of the middle class, and the consequent rise of a
critical attitude towards the ideals and handiwork of that class. It
concerns itself primarily with the spirit of realism that under the
constrictions of industrialism and with the spread of scientific modes
of thought emerged to question the ardent romanticisms of an earlier
age, and bring under doubt the excellence of a social order created by
the Industrial Revolution.
The field to be traversed is thus predetermined. The interpretation of
our literature since 1860 must be fitted into the broad lines of our
national experience and will follow the main divisions of development.
I. The conquest of America by the middle class and its
custodianship of democracy. The philosophy of the middle class.
II. The challenge of that overlordship by:
1. The older democratic agrarianism as expressed chiefly in the
third-party movements.
2. The new proletarian philosophy that came likewise out of the
ferment of the French Revolution, but that traveled a different
course--through Europe and the earlier continental Industrial
Revolution, and thence to America.
III. The intellectual revolution brought about by science with the
results:
1. The recovery of a spirit of realism.
2. The appropriation of science by the middle class.
IV. The rise of a detached criticism by the younger intellectuals.
In dealing with this material it will be necessary to follow sectional
lines in the earlier decades until the encompassing movement of
centralization finally obliterated them and produced a common national
spirit and purpose.
In the welter that is present-day America militant philosophies with
their clear-cut programs and assured faiths are wanting, and many feel,
as Matthew Arnold felt fourscore years ago, that they are dwelling
between worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. The old
buoyant psychology is gone and in the breakdown and disintegration of
the traditional individualism no new philosophies are rising. Builders
of Utopias are out of a job. Political and economic theory is in
charge of paymasters and is content with the drab rim of the familiar
landscape. Retainer-fees have blotted out for it the lovelier horizons
that earlier thinkers contemplated. Academic political scientists and
economists have largely joined the Swiss guards, and abdicated the high
prerogative of speculative thought. It is the men of letters--poets and
essayists and novelists and dramatists, the eager young intellectuals
of a drab generation--who embody the mind of present-day America; not
the professional custodians of official views. They at least decline
to block the path to the Promised Land with retainer-fees; they at
least are free souls, and in the measure of their abilities, free
thinkers. It is to them therefore that one must turn to discover the
intellectual currents of later America--to their aspirations as well
as to their criticisms. Literature at last has become the authentic
voice of this great shapeless America that means so much to western
civilization. Not theologians any longer, nor political philosophers,
nor industrial masters, nor bankers, are the spokesmen of this vibrant
life of a continent, but the intellectuals, the dreamers, the critics,
the historians, the men of letters, in short; and to them one may turn
hopefully for a revelation of American life.
The period dealt with in the present study marks the complete
triumph of the middle class and the final defeat of the traditional
agrarianism. The disintegration of the earlier romanticisms, both
native and imported, has run its course. The philosophy of Jefferson
and John Taylor, with its physiocratic bias, its antipathy to a money
economy, its love of local autonomy, has been buried in the potter’s
field.
* * * * *
Amidst all the turmoil and vague subconscious tendencies, certain ideas
slowly clarified: first, that the earlier democratic aspirations had
somehow failed, that an equalitarian philosophy adapted to frontier
conditions could not easily be carried over into a centralizing and
stratifying America and was doomed to eventual defeat; second, that
even in the supposed heyday of our democracy, we had never achieved a
democracy, but rather a careless individualism that left society at
the mercy of a rapacious middle class; third, that we must take our
bearings afresh and set forth on a different path to the goal. As these
convictions slowly rose into consciousness, a quick suspicion of our
earlier philosophies arose to trouble us. With the growing realism of
the times came a belief that our French romantic theories were mainly
at fault and we must somehow go back to the rationalistic eighteenth
century and start once more to recreate a democratic philosophy. The
crux of the matter seemed to lie in the romantic conception of human
nature. Rousseau and Godwin were the false prophets who led us astray,
and we must return to the solid realism of John Locke. In the light of
a realistic psychology, with its discovery of morons, and its study
of mob tendencies, it was no longer possible to take seriously that
attractive figment of the romantic imagination--man in the state of
nature, perfectible by following the light of reason, seeking justice.
Morons do not fit nicely into the older theory--they jar one’s faith in
human perfectibility. In the light of intelligence tests perhaps the
whole romantic theory of democracy was only a will-o’-the-wisp. With
the very foundations of our traditional philosophy turning to quicksand
under our feet, no wonder we are bedeviled by doubts and uncertainties.
Utopias no longer seem so near at hand as they did; plans and
specifications of the ideal commonwealth no longer seem simple matters
to be drawn by any competent social carpenter. Our jauntiness is gone,
speculation is less important than investigation, and in the spirit of
sober realism we are setting about the serious business of thinking.
In this thinking two major forces are at hand: economics and
psychology. In our economic realism we are returning to the spirit
of the eighteenth century, and adapting the determinism that marked
political thought from Harrington and John Adams to Webster and
Calhoun; but we are equipped with a psychological knowledge that those
earlier thinkers lacked. Wedding the new psychology to the older
economic determinism, we may hope in a spirit of sober realism to make
some progress in our thinking.
Yet not too hastily should we abandon our earlier faith: the
eighteenth-century conception of environment as a creative influence
in determining character is a vital idea not yet adequately explored.
Even morons may be traced back to adenoids or diets of salt pork
and whisky or to later machine labor, and aristocracies are still
seen to be economic. And aristocratic albinos may well breed mobs and
morons. Jefferson was not as foolish as many of his disciples have
been, and Jeffersonian democracy still offers hope. Education begins
to fail--except education to individualize and to summon forth the
potential intelligence of the younger generation.
Footnotes
[492] The Introduction, as will be readily seen by the reader, is
not complete, yet it undoubtedly contains the gist of what Professor
Parrington intended to include in it. He wrote several forms of some
parts, from which the Introduction as it stands has been pieced
together in logical order. It is probable that the last words he wrote
were the significant closing words here--“to summon forth the potential
intelligence of the younger generation.”--_Publisher._
Contents[493] [Volume Three]
Introduction: The Great Revolution xxiii
I. [A New America in the Making: Rise of capitalistic industrialism
submerging the older agrarianism, the Enlightenment,
the Jacksonian frontier]
II. [Aristocracy Dead: The principle of democracy accepted, yet
driving toward a plutocracy. A middle-class, urban
civilization]
III. [Cleavages: Western agrarianism; Eastern capitalism. The
South confused, bitter, hesitant. Expansion of the frontier
and the cities. The swift extension of the psychology of
the city]
IV. [Changing Patterns of Thought: (1) From the frontier came
the doctrine of preëmption, exploitation, progress; (2)
From the impact of science came the dissipation of the
Enlightenment and a spirit of realism; (3) From European
proletarian philosophies came a new social theory]
V. [Certain Drifts: to unity, to realism, to criticism]
Book I: Changing America
Changes in traditional economies after the Civil War. The rise of
American industrialism and the conquest of nature by science.
The age of the middle class. The last flare-up of the spirit of the
frontier 3
Part I
The Gilded Age
I. The American Scene 7
I. Free America: Half a continent awaiting preëmption; new
raw materials--oil, steel, copper, coal. A new technique
of exploitation--capital, transportation, machinery. Philosophy
embraced in three ideals: preëmption, exploitation,
progress 7
II. Figures of Earth: The flowering of Jacksonian frontier
spirit, simplified to the acquisitive instinct; a crude, dynamic
energy 10
III. Politics and the Fairy Godmother: The struggle within
the Republican Party; the gospel of Whiggery and the
triumph of the American System, Henry Clay 17
IV. The Great Barbecue: How capitalism and agrarianism
fared--the Homestead Act and railway grants. The shift
from governmental to private control 23
V. Folk Heroes 26
1. General Grant 27
2. Jay Cooke 31
3. Charles A. Dana 43
II. The Culture of the Seventies: With the decay of aristocratic
controls, a loss of unity. Three strands: aristocratic,
romantic, frontier 48
I. New England in Decay: The Genteel Tradition and the
drift away 50
1. Thomas Bailey Aldrich and the Genteel 54
2. The New England Scene: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps;
Harriet Beecher Stowe; Sarah Orne Jewett; Mary
Wilkins Freeman 60
II. The Afterglow of the Enlightenment--Walt Whitman 69
III. The Backwash of the Frontier--Mark Twain 86
III. Changing Theory: An agricultural people changing to an
urbanized people. The railways hasten economic development 102
I. Winds of Economic Theory: The conscription of economics:
The business man comes to the front 103
1. Henry C. Carey 105
2. Francis A. Walker 111
II. The Conscription of Political Theory: The democratic
and plutocratic trends. Development of the democratic
principle vs. the cult of the Constitution. New conception
of the political state 117
1. Theodore Woolsey 120
2. [John W. Burgess] 124
III. [The New Ally: The courts: the police power and the fourteenth
amendment; the injunction]
IV. [Buttressing the Democratic Theory]
1. A Democratic Economics--Henry George 125
2. [Supplementing the Democratic Political Theory--Henry
D. Lloyd]
IV. The Beginnings of Criticism: The pessimists skeptical of
democracy, the optimists calling for reform of the spoils
system. No competent critics of industrialism 137
I. The New England Conscience and Capitalism--Wendell
Phillips 140
II. Morality and Politics--George William Curtis 147
III. English Liberalism and Politics--Edwin Lawrence Godkin
and the _Nation_ 154
IV. Fiction Considers the State of the Country 168
1. The Political Novel: _The Gilded Age_; _Democracy_; _An
American Politician_ 169
2. [The Economic Novel: _The Bread-winners_] 173
3. The Beginnings of the Sociological Novel: H. H. Boyesen 179
Part II
New Patterns of Thought
I. Disintegration and Reintegration: Two forces creating
a new ideology, science and the machine. The decay of
the older theological, political mind, and the emergence
of an urban mind 189
I. The Victorian Mood--A genial optimism 193
1. Sociology and the Enlightenment: Condorcet,
Comte, and the gospel of progress 194
2. Biology and the Enlightenment: Spencer and the
philosophy of anarchism 197
3. The End of the Hopes of the Enlightenment 202
II. The School of Spencer--John Fiske 203
II. The Skepticism of the House of Adams: The flower of the
sturdy New England character. They fail to adjust to
the Gilded Age 212
I. Charles Francis Adams--The Business Failure 213
II. Henry Adams--Intellectual 214
III. Brooks Adams--Rebel 227
III. Victorian Realism: In the eighties realism begins to excite
interest and the movement gets under way, though the
American taste is still romantic. The psychology of the
dispersion marking America 237
I. [William James and Pragmatism]
II. Henry James and the Nostalgia of Culture 239
III. William Dean Howells and the Realism of the Commonplace 241
Book Two: The Old and the New: Storm Clouds
Part I
The Middle Border Rises
I. The Plight of the Farmer 259
I. Democratic Reactions to Plutocracy: The Middle Border
suffers. Two moods: Buoyancy, depression--the farmer
deflated. The economic problem 259
II. The Farmer Considers Politics: His intellectual
equipment--homespun theories derided by the schools. The
movement of organization: The Grange, The Alliance,
Populism. The flare-up of the nineties--the doctrine of
more corn and less hell 263
III. The Greenback Movement: The _laissez-faire_ theory
abandoned by English economists. American spokesmen: John
Sherman, David A. Wells, Eleazar Lord. Diverse theories
of money--the intrinsic-value theory and the quantitative
theory. The money question a heritage of the Civil War--a
debtor class and an appreciating standard of value 266
IV. Greenbackism and Peter Cooper 276
V. [Bi-metallism: A heritage of Jacksonian democracy: Ignatius
Donnelly, “Coin” Harvey]
II. The Democracy of the Age of Innocence 283
I. Capitalistic Encroachments: Due to inadequate democratic
machinery. The movement to democratize government.
Plutocracy content with the machine which it controlled;
hence radical proposals must issue from the
discontented. After 1870, with few exceptions, popular
democratic thinking done west of the Allegheny Mountains 283
II. Third-party Movements. A summary of democratic proposals
of previous movements 285
III. [The Populistic Program: Income tax; the initiative and
referendum; the recall; direct primary; Australian ballot;
popular election of Senators; sub-treasuries; proportional
representation]
IV. [William Jennings Bryan and the Last Battle]
III. Literature and the Middle Border 288
I. [Edward Eggleston and Frontier Realism]
II. [Whitcomb Riley and Folk Romance]
III. Hamlin Garland and the Middle Border. Joseph Kirkland,
Harold Frederic 288
Part II
Proletarian Hopes
I. [Plutocracy and the Workingman: Disruption of industry--strikes
and lockouts in the Gilded Age. Bitterness of
conflict. The discovery of the injunction]
I. [Industrialism and the American theory of freedom: Rise of
labor unions. Passing of the frontier. Incoming of German
Socialists and the recovery of the doctrine of class war
lost since the eighteenth century]
II. [The first solution--Syndicalism: T. V. Powderly and the
Knights of Labor]
III. [The second solution--craft unionism: Gompers and the
A. F. of L. A middle-class solution]
II. [The Rise of the Left]
I. [The Menace of Socialism: The Haymarket riot; Governor
Altgeld]
II. [Leaders of the Left: Daniel De Leon; Eugene Debs; Victor
Berger]
III. The Quest of Utopia 301
I. Edward Bellamy and _Looking Backward_ 302
II. [After Bellamy: “Nationalism”; Tourgée’s _Murvale Eastman_]
IV. [The Darkening Skies of Letters: The clouds gathering
on the “gay” horizon of American optimism. Changes in
the temper of scientific thought point to determinism.
A gloomier realism on the way, coming first from the
West] 316
I. [Edwin Markham and “The Man with a Hoe”]
II. [The Rise of Naturalism: Stephen Crane; Frank Norris[494]]
III. [Fiction Discovers the City]
Part III
The Hesitant South
I. [Two Worlds: The aristocratic clinging to the romance of
the past; the plebeian agrarian joining with the Middle
Border in its protest against plutocracy. Tom A. Watson.
The beginnings of industrialism that proposed to exploit
the cotton and iron of the South]
II. [The Romance of the Past: Thomas Nelson Page and the
plantation tradition; Joel Chandler Harris and the romance
of the negro; Mary Murfree and the romance of
the mountaineer; George Washington Cable and the
romance of the creole]
III. [Sidney Lanier--the poet of the South[495]]
IV. [Henry W. Grady and the Surrender to the Middle
Class]
V. [The Southern Intellectual: James Branch Cabell;[496]
Ellen Glasgow; W. W. Woodward]
Book Three: The New America
Part I
The Rise of Liberalism[497]
1. [Movements of Liberalism: Three periods: 1790-1912;
1820-1860; 1903-1917. Since 1870 three attitudes towards
democracy: (1) It has been achieved but the machine
needs closer attention--civil service reform; (2) It has
not been achieved because of the Constitution, but it must
be achieved through remodeling political machinery; (3)
No intelligent person desires it to be achieved. The movement
of liberalism (1903-1917) a great stock-taking
venture]
I. [Discoveries]
1. [That the democratic program has not been fulfilled]
2. [That the Constitution is not a democratic instrument,
and was not intended to be--the clash between
the Declaration and the Constitution]
3. [That while professing to create a democracy we have
been erecting a plutocracy]
II. [Conclusions]
1. [The rediscovery of the relations between economics
and politics]
2. [The necessity of subjecting property to the collective
will]
3. [To that end the need of democratizing the machinery
of government--political Progressivism. The application
of the Hamiltonian state to the Jeffersonian
program]
II. [Liberalism and the Journalists: The Muckraking Movement[498]]
I. [The Origins in the Nineties--Henry D. Lloyd’s _Wealth
vs. Commonwealth_]
II. [The Gathering Clan: Lawson’s _Frenzied Finance_; Ida
Tarbell; Ray Stannard Baker; _McClure’s_, _The American_,
_Hampton’s_]
III. [The Left Wing]
1. [Lincoln Steffens, _The Shame of the Cities_]
2. [Charles Edward Russell, _The Stories of Great Railroads_]
3. [Gustavus Myers, _Great American Fortunes_]
4. [A. M. Simons, _Social Forces in American History_]
III. [Liberalism and Politics: The Movement of Progressivism]
I. [Robert La Follette--The State and Industry]
II. [Theodore Roosevelt--Middle-Class Liberal]
III. [Woodrow Wilson]
Part II
Liberalism and Letters
I. [Liberalism and the Intellectuals: The movement becomes
critical]
I. [Walter E. Weyl--Radical]
II. [Thorstein Veblen--Social Economist]
III. [Charles A. Beard--Political Scientist[498]]
IV. [Herbert Croly--Political Critic]
V. [The Younger Intellectuals: Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck
Brooks, Waldo Frank]
II. [Liberalism and Fiction: A shift from liberalism to
radicalism--from politics to economics]
I. [Winston Churchill: From romance to syndicalism[499]]
II. [Robert Herrick: Academic radical[499]]
III. [Jack London: Revolutionist[500]]
IV. [Upton Sinclair: Social detective[500]]
III. [Liberalism and Realism]