II. [The Essay--Huneker]
III. [Theodore Dreiser--A Modern[501]]
Part III
Reaction
I. [The War and Liberalism: The reaction developed a many-sided
attack on the liberalisms of the preceding period.
The older intellectuals had abandoned French equalitarian
democracy, but set as their goal economic democracy;
the younger intellectuals attacked the principle of democracy,
the ideal of industrialism, the culture of the
middle class]
II. [The Attack on Democracy: A return to the eighteenth
century spirit of aristocracy. Purveyors of current disgusts]
I. [Philosophical: H. L. Mencken--a Nietzschean critic. A
cynic who grows witty over American failure]
II. [Biological: The falsity of the perfectionist philosophy derived
from Locke. Not environment but heredity--the
isolated germ existence before birth]
III. [Psychological: The discovery of morons. Primitive drives--sex,
hunger--keep men children. Nevertheless behaviorism
a denial of the aristocracy of the biological argument,
holding with Locke that environment is determining]
III. [The Attack on Industrialism: A comprehensive movement
that enlists first-class minds--intellectuals, poets,
novelists, dramatists]
IV. [The Attack on the Middle Class: Sinclair Lewis;[502] Zona
Gale;[503] Evelyn Scott]
V. [New Philosophies]
I. [Economics: Denial of the finality of economic law: A pragmatic
view--Mitchell]
II. [Political Theory: A decline of the program of industrial
democracy]
III. [Science: A rejection of the law of causality and a weakening
of the authority of science]
VI. [New Literary Fashions]
I. [In fiction, impressionism and expressionism--Sherwood
Anderson[503]]
II. [In biography: The impressionism of psychography]
III. [In war fiction:[503] A brutal realism and frank pacifism]
Addenda 323
Naturalism in American Fiction 323
1. Stephen Crane 328
2. Frank Norris 329
“McTeague” 330
“Vandover and the Brute” 332
“The Octopus” 332
Sidney Lanier 334
The Incomparable Mr. Cabell 335
The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism 346
Jack London: The Novelist of the Proletariat 352
Upton Sinclair 353
Theodore Dreiser: Chief of American Naturalists 354
Sinclair Lewis: Our Own Diogenes 360
Sherwood Anderson: A Psychological Naturalist 372
A New Romance 372
1917-1924 373
I. The Small Town in Fiction 373
William Allen White: A Son of the Middle Border 374
Booth Tarkington: The Dean of American Middle-Class Letters 375
Dorothy Canfield (Fisher) 375
II. The Realistic Small Town and the New Naturalism 376
Zona Gale--The Transition from Romance to Realism 377
Donn Byrne 377
Robert Nathan 378
Joseph Hergesheimer: A Sophisticated Romantic 379
III. Certain Other Writers 381
Edith Wharton--The Genteel Tradition and the New Plutocracy 381
Willa Cather: Epics of Women 382
IV. Some War Books 384
John Dos Passos 384
E. E. Cummings 385
Thomas Boyd 385
Laurence Stallings 385
V. Youth in Revolt--Certain Purveyors of the Hectic 385
F. Scott Fitzgerald 386
Stephen Vincent Benét and Floyd Dell 386
Ben Hecht 386
Ole Rölvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_ 387
The Short Story 397
A Chapter in American Liberalism 401
Bibliography 415
Index 421
Footnotes
[493] This is given in full, as Professor Parrington left it, with
those parts not completed by him in brackets. Some revision has been
made for the parts he completed, but notes have been added to the text
to show his original intention. For some of the bracketed headings
after Part II of Book II some material is given in the Addenda from
other work of Parrington’s.--_Publisher._
[494] See “Naturalism in American Fiction,” in the Addenda--lecture
notes including Crane and Norris.
[495] See Addenda for lecture notes on Lanier.
[496] See Addenda for magazine article on Cabell.
[497] See “A Chapter in American Liberalism,” the last of the Addenda.
[498] See _Ibid._
[499] See Addenda, “The Problem Novel and the Diversion from
Naturalism.”
[500] See Addenda for brief notes.
[501] See Addenda for notes of lecture on Dreiser.
[502] See Addenda for reprint of pamphlet on Lewis.
[503] See Addenda for brief notes.
Book One • Changing America
When America laid aside its arms after Appomattox and turned back
to the pursuits of peace it was well advanced toward the goal set
by Alexander Hamilton three-quarters of a century before. The great
obstacle that had withheld its feet hitherto had been swept from its
path. A slave economy could never again thwart the ambitions of the
capitalistic economy. The jealous particularism that for a generation
had obstructed the inevitable drift toward a coalescing national unity
had gone down in defeat. The agrarian South was no longer master in
the councils of government; the shaping of the future had fallen to
other hands and the unfolding of the new order could go forward without
southern let or hindrance.
Other obstacles were falling away of themselves. North as well as
South, the traditional domestic economy was already a thing of the
past. An easier way to wealth, and one enormously more profitable,
had been discovered. The future lay in the hands of the machine that
was already dispossessing the tool. In the hurry of the war years
the potentialities of the factory system had been explored and the
ready resources of liquid capital had been greatly augmented. From
the smoke of the great conflict an America had emerged unlike any the
earlier generations had known. An ambitious industrialism stood on the
threshold of a continental expansion that was to transfer sovereignty
in America from a landed and mercantile aristocracy to the capable
hands of a new race of captains of industry. Only the western farmers,
newly settled in the Middle Border and spreading the psychology of the
frontier through the vast prairie spaces of a greater Inland Empire,
remained as a last stumbling-block. Other battles with agrarianism must
be fought before capitalism assumed undisputed mastery of America;
but with the eventual overthrow of the agrarian hosts in their last
stronghold the path would lie broad and straight to the goal of an
encompassing industrialism, with politicians and political parties
its willing servants. There would be no more dissensions in the
household. With southern Jeffersonians and western agrarians no longer
sitting as watch dogs to the Constitution, the political state would
be refashioned to serve a new age, and the old dream of a coalescing
national economy become a reality. The American System was in the way
of complete establishment.
Other changes impended, and greater. The enthronement of the machine
was only the outward and visible sign of the revolution in thought that
came with the rise of science. As a new cosmos unfolded before the
inquisitive eyes of scientists the old metaphysical speculations became
as obsolete as the old household economy. A new spirit of realism was
abroad, probing and questioning the material world, pushing the realm
of exact knowledge into the earlier regions of faith. The conquest of
nature was the great business of the day, and as that conquest went
forward triumphantly the solid fruits of the new mastery were gathered
by industrialism. Science and the machine were the twin instruments
for creating a new civilization, of which the technologist and the
industrialist were the high priests. The transcendental theologian was
soon to be as extinct as the passenger pigeon.
With the substitution of the captain of industry for the plantation
master as the custodian of society, the age of aristocracy was at an
end and the age of the middle class was established. A new culture,
created by the machine and answering the needs of capitalism, was to
dispossess the old culture with its lingering concern for distinction
and its love of standards--a culture that should eventually suffice
the needs of a brisk city world of machine activities. But that would
take time. In the meanwhile--in the confused interregnum between
reigns--America would be little more than a welter of crude energy, a
raw unlovely society where the strife of competition with its prodigal
waste testified to the shortcomings of an age in process of transition.
The spirit of the frontier was to flare up in a huge buccaneering
orgy. Having swept across the continent to the Pacific coast like a
visitation of locusts, the frontier spirit turned back upon its course
to conquer the East, infecting the new industrialism with a crude
individualism, fouling the halls of Congress, despoiling the public
domain, and indulging in a huge national barbecue. It submerged the
arts and created a new literature. For a time it carried all things
before it, until running full tilt into science and the machine, its
triumphant progress was stopped and America, rejecting individualism,
began the work of standardization and mechanization. It is this world
in transition from an aristocratic to a middle-class order, turmoiled
by the last flare-up of the frontier spirit, shifting from a robust
individualism to a colorless standardization, which the chapters
that follow must deal with. A confused and turbulent scene, but not
without its fascination to the American who would understand his
special heritage--perhaps the most characteristically native, the most
American, in our total history.
Part One: The Gilded Age
Chapter I • the American Scene
I • Free America
The pot was boiling briskly in America in the tumultuous post-war
years. The country had definitely entered upon its freedom and was
settling its disordered household to suit its democratic taste.
Everywhere new ways were feverishly at work transforming the
countryside. In the South another order was rising uncertainly on
the ruins of the plantation system; in the East an expanding factory
economy was weaving a different pattern of industrial life; in
the Middle Border a recrudescent agriculture was arising from the
application of the machine to the rich prairie soil. All over the land
a spider web of iron rails was being spun that was to draw the remotest
outposts into the common whole and bind the nation together with steel
bands. Nevertheless two diverse worlds lay on the map of continental
America. Facing in opposite directions and holding different faiths,
they would not travel together easily or take comfort from the yoke
that joined them. Agricultural America, behind which lay two and a
half centuries of experience, was a decentralized world, democratic,
individualistic, suspicious; industrial America, behind which lay
only half a dozen decades of bustling experiment, was a centralizing
world, capitalistic, feudal, ambitious. The one was a decaying order,
the other a rising, and between them would be friction till one or the
other had become master.
Continental America was still half frontier and half settled country.
A thin line of homesteads had been thrust westward till the outposts
reached well into the Middle Border--an uncertain thread running
through eastern Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, overleaping the Indian
Territory and then running west into Texas--approximately halfway
between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Behind these outposts was still
much unoccupied land, and beyond stretched the unfenced prairies till
they merged in the sagebrush plains, gray and waste, that stretched to
the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Beyond the mountains were other
stretches of plains and deserts, vast and forbidding in their alkali
blight, to the wooded coast ranges and the Pacific Ocean. In all this
immense territory were only scattered settlements--at Denver, Salt Lake
City, Sacramento, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere--tiny
outposts in the wilderness, with scattered hamlets, mining camps, and
isolated homesteads lost in the great expanse. On the prairies from
Mexico to Canada--across which rumbled great herds of buffalo--roved
powerful tribes of hostile Indians who fretted against the forward
thrust of settlement and disputed the right of possession. The urgent
business of the times was the subduing of this wild region, wresting
it from Indians and buffalo and wilderness; and the forty years that
lay between the California Gold Rush of ’49 and the Oklahoma Land Rush
of ’89 saw the greatest wave of pioneer expansion--the swiftest and
most reckless--in all our pioneer experience. Expansion on so vast a
scale necessitated building, and the seventies became the railway age,
bonding the future to break down present barriers of isolation, and
opening new territories for later exploitation. The reflux of the great
movement swept back upon the Atlantic coast and gave to life there
a fresh note of spontaneous vigor, of which the Gilded Age was the
inevitable expression.
It was this energetic East, with its accumulations of liquid capital
awaiting investment and its factories turning out the materials needed
to push the settlements westward, that profited most from the conquest
of the far West. The impulsion from the frontier did much to drive
forward the industrial revolution. The war that brought devastation to
the South had been more friendly to northern interests. In gathering
the scattered rills of capital into central reservoirs at Philadelphia
and New York, and in expanding the factory system to supply the needs
of the armies, it had opened to capitalism its first clear view of
the Promised Land. The bankers had come into control of the liquid
wealth of the nation, and the industrialists had learned to use the
machine for production; the time was ripe for exploitation on a scale
undreamed-of a generation before. Up till then the potential resources
of the continent had not even been surveyed. Earlier pioneers had only
scratched the surface--felling trees, making crops, building pygmy
watermills, smelting a little iron. Mineral wealth had been scarcely
touched. Tools had been lacking to develop it, capital had been
lacking, transportation lacking, technical methods lacking, markets
lacking.
In the years following the war, exploitation for the first time was
provided with adequate resources and a competent technique, and busy
prospectors were daily uncovering new sources of wealth. The coal
and oil of Pennsylvania and Ohio, the copper and iron ore of upper
Michigan, the gold and silver, lumber and fisheries, of the Pacific
Coast, provided limitless raw materials for the rising industrialism.
The Bessemer process quickly turned an age of iron into an age of steel
and created the great rolling mills of Pittsburgh from which issued the
rails for expanding railways. The reaper and binder, the sulky plow and
the threshing machine, created a large-scale agriculture on the fertile
prairies. Wild grass-lands provided grazing for immense herds of cattle
and sheep; the development of the corn-belt enormously increased the
supply of hogs; and with railways at hand the Middle Border poured into
Omaha and Kansas City and Chicago an endless stream of produce. As the
line of the frontier pushed westward new towns were built, thousands
of homesteads were filed on, and the speculator and promoter hovered
over the prairies like buzzards seeking their carrion. With rising
land-values money was to be made out of unearned increment, and the
creation of booms was a profitable industry. The times were stirring
and it was a shiftless fellow who did not make his pile. If he had been
too late to file on desirable acres he had only to find a careless
homesteader who had failed in some legal technicality and “jump his
claim.” Good bottom land could be had even by latecomers if they were
sharp at the game.
This bustling America of 1870 accounted itself a democratic world. A
free people had put away all aristocratic privileges and conscious
of its power went forth to possess the last frontier. Its social
philosophy, which it found adequate to its needs, was summed up
in three words--preëmption, exploitation, progress. Its immediate
and pressing business was to dispossess the government of its rich
holdings. Lands in the possession of the government were so much
idle waste, untaxed and profitless; in private hands they would be
developed. They would provide work, pay taxes, support schools,
enrich the community. Preemption meant exploitation and exploitation
meant progress. It was a simple philosophy and it suited the simple
individualism of the times. The Gilded Age knew nothing of the
Enlightenment; it recognized only the acquisitive instinct. That much
at least the frontier had taught the great American democracy; and in
applying to the resources of a continent the lesson it had been so well
taught the Gilded Age wrote a profoundly characteristic chapter of
American history.
II • Figures of Earth
In a moment of special irritation Edwin Lawrence Godkin called the
civilization of the seventies a chromo civilization. Mark Twain, with
his slack western standards, was equally severe. As he contemplated
the slovenly reality beneath the gaudy exterior he dubbed it the
Gilded Age. Other critics with a gift for pungent phrase have flung
their gibes at the ways of a picturesque and uncouth generation. There
is reason in plenty for such caustic comment. Heedless, irreverent,
unlovely, cultivating huge beards, shod in polished top-boots--the last
refinement of the farmer’s cowhides--wearing linen dickeys over hickory
shirts, moving through pools of tobacco juice, erupting in shoddy and
grotesque architecture, cluttering its homes with ungainly walnut
chairs and marble-topped tables and heavy lambrequins, the decade of
the seventies was only too plainly mired and floundering in a bog of
bad taste. A world of triumphant and unabashed vulgarity without its
like in our history, it was not aware of its plight, but accounted its
manners genteel and boasted of ways that were a parody on sober good
sense.
Yet just as such comments are, they do not reach quite to the heart of
the age. They emphasize rather the excrescences, the casual lapses, of
a generation that underneath its crudities and vulgarities was boldly
adventurous and creative--a generation in which the democratic freedoms
of America, as those freedoms had taken shape during a drab frontier
experience, came at last to spontaneous and vivid expression. If its
cultural wealth was less than it thought, if in its exuberance it was
engaged somewhat too boisterously in stamping its own plebeian image on
the work of its hands, it was only natural to a society that for the
first time found its opportunities equal to its desires, a youthful
society that accounted the world its oyster and wanted no restrictions
laid on its will. It was the ripe fruit of Jacksonian leveling, and
if it ran to a grotesque individualism--if in its self-confidence it
was heedless of the smiles of older societies--it was nevertheless
by reason of its uncouthness the most picturesque generation in our
history; and for those who love to watch human nature disporting itself
with naïve abandon, running amuck through all the conventions, no other
age provides so fascinating a spectacle.
When the cannon at last had ceased their destruction it was a strange
new America that looked out confidently on the scene. Something had
been released by the upheavals of half a century, something strong and
assertive that was prepared to take possession of the continent. It did
not issue from the loins of war. Its origins must be sought elsewhere,
further back in time. It had been cradled in the vast changes that
since 1815 had been reshaping America: in the break-up of the old
domestic economy that kept life mean and drab, in the noisy enthusiasms
of the new coonskin democracy, in the romanticisms of the California
gold rush, in the boisterous freedoms discovered by the forties and
fifties. It had come to manhood in the battles of a tremendous war,
and as it now surveyed the continent, discovering potential wealth
before unknown, it demanded only freedom and opportunity--a fair race
and no favors. Everywhere was a welling-up of primitive pagan desires
after long repressions--to grow rich, to grasp power, to be strong and
masterful and lay the world at its feet. It was a violent reaction
from the narrow poverty of frontier life and the narrow inhibitions
of backwoods religion. It had had enough of skimpy, meager ways, of
scrubbing along hoping for something to turn up. It would go out and
turn it up. It was consumed with a great hunger for abundance, for the
good things of life, for wealth. It was frankly materialistic and if
material goods could be wrested from society it would lay its hands
heartily to the work. Freedom and opportunity, to acquire, to possess,
to enjoy--for that it would sell its soul.
Society of a sudden was become fluid. With the sweeping-away of the
last aristocratic restraints the potentialities of the common man
found release for self-assertion. Strange figures, sprung from obscure
origins, thrust themselves everywhere upon the scene. In the reaction
from the mean and skimpy, a passionate will to power was issuing from
unexpected sources, undisciplined, confused in ethical values, but
endowed with immense vitality. Individualism was being simplified to
the acquisitive instinct. These new Americans were primitive souls,
ruthless, predatory, capable; single-minded men; rogues and rascals
often, but never feeble, never hindered by petty scruple, never given
to puling or whining--the raw materials of a race of capitalistic
buccaneers. Out of the drab mass of common plebeian life had come
this vital energy that erupted in amazing abundance and in strange
forms. The new freedoms meant diverse things to different men and each
like Jurgen followed after his own wishes and his own desires. Pirate
and priest issued from the common source and played their parts with
the same picturesqueness. The romantic age of Captain Kidd was come
again, and the black flag and the gospel banner were both in lockers
to be flown as the needs of the cruise determined. With all coercive
restrictions put away the democratic genius of America was setting out
on the road of manifest destiny.
Analyze the most talked-of men of the age and one is likely to find
a splendid audacity coupled with an immense wastefulness. A note of
tough-mindedness marks them. They had stout nippers. They fought
their way encased in rhinoceros hides. There was the Wall Street
crowd--Daniel Drew, Commodore Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Russell
Sage--blackguards for the most part, railway wreckers, cheaters and
swindlers, but picturesque in their rascality. There was the numerous
tribe of politicians--Boss Tweed, Fernando Wood, G. Oakey Hall, Senator
Pomeroy, Senator Cameron, Roscoe Conkling, James G. Blaine--blackguards
also for the most part, looting city treasuries, buying and
selling legislative votes like railway stock, but picturesque in
their audacity. There were the professional keepers of the public
morals--Anthony Comstock, John B. Gough, Dwight L. Moody, Henry Ward
Beecher, T. De Witt Talmage--ardent proselytizers, unintellectual,
men of one idea, but fiery in zeal and eloquent in description of the
particular heaven each wanted to people with his fellow Americans.
And springing up like mushrooms after a rain was the goodly company
of cranks--Virginia Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, “Citizen” George
Francis Train, Henry Bergh, Ben Butler, Ignatius Donnelly, Bob
Ingersoll, Henry George--picturesque figures with a flair for publicity
who tilled their special fields with splendid gestures. And finally
there was Barnum the Showman, growing rich on the profession of
humbuggery, a vulgar greasy genius, pure brass without any gilding, yet
in picturesque and capable effrontery the very embodiment of the age. A
marvelous company, vital with the untamed energy of a new land. In the
presence of such men one begins to understand what Walt Whitman meant
by his talk of the elemental.
Created by a primitive world that knew not the machine, they were
marked by the rough homeliness of their origins. Whether wizened or
fat they were never insignificant or commonplace. On the whole one
prefers them fat, and for solid bulk what generation has outdone them?
There was Revivalist Moody, bearded and neckless, with his two hundred
and eighty pounds of Adam’s flesh, every ounce of which “belonged
to God.” There was the lyric Sankey, afflicted with two hundred and
twenty-five pounds of human frailty, yet looking as smug as a banker
and singing “There were ninety and nine” divinely through mutton-chop
whiskers. There was Boss Tweed, phlegmatic and mighty, overawing
rebellious gangsters at the City Hall with his two hundred and forty
pounds of pugnacious rascality. There was John Fiske, a philosophic
hippopotamus, warming the chill waters of Spencerian science with his
prodigious bulk. There was Ben Butler, oily and puffy and wheezy,
like Falstaff larding the lean earth as he walked along, who yearly
added more flesh to the scant ninety-seven pounds he carried away from
Waterville College. And there was Jim Fisk, dressed like a bartender,
huge in nerve as in bulk, driving with the dashing Josie Mansfield down
Broadway--prince of vulgarians, who jovially proclaimed, “I worship in
the Synagogue of the Libertines,” and who on the failure of the Erie
coup announced cheerfully, “Nothing is lost save honor!”
Impressive as are the fat kine of Egypt, the lean kine scarcely
suffer by contrast. There were giants of puny physique in those days.
There was Uncle Dan’l Drew, thin as a dried herring, yet a builder of
churches and founder of Drew Theological Seminary, who pilfered and
cheated his way to wealth with tobacco juice drooling from his mouth.
There was Jay Gould, a lone-hand gambler, a dynamo in a tubercular
body, who openly invested in the devil’s tenements as likely to
pay better dividends, and went home to potter lovingly amongst his
exotic flowers. And there was Oakey Hall, clubman and playwright,
small, elegant, and unscrupulous; and Victoria Woodhull who stirred
up the Beecher case, a wisp of a woman who enraged all the frumpy
blue-stockings by the smartness of her toilet and the perfection of her
manners; and little Libby Tilton with her tiny wistful face and great
eyes that looked out wonderingly at the world--eyes that were to go
blind with weeping before the candle of her life went out. It was such
men and women, individual and colorful, that Whitman and Mark Twain
mingled with, and that Herman Melville--colossal and dynamic beyond
them all--looked out upon sardonically from his tomb in the Custom
House where he was consuming his own heart.
They were thrown up as it were casually out of the huge caldron of
energy that was America. All over the land were thousands like them,
self-made men quick to lay hands on opportunity if it knocked at the
door, ready to seek it out if it were slow in knocking, recognizing no
limitations to their powers, discouraged by no shortcomings in their
training. When Moody set out to bring the world to his Protestant God
he was an illiterate shoe salesman who stumbled over the hard words
of his King James Bible. Anthony Comstock, the roundsman of the Lord,
was a salesman in a dry-goods shop, and as careless of his spelling
as he was careful of his neighbors’ morals. Commodore Vanderbilt, who
built up the greatest fortune of the time, was a Brooklyn ferryman,
hard-fisted and tough as a burr-oak, who in a lifetime of over eighty
years read only one book, _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and that after he was
seventy. Daniel Drew was a shyster cattle-drover, whose arid emotions
found outlet in periodic conversions and backslidings, and who got on
in this vale of tears by salting his cattle and increasing his--and
the Lord’s--wealth with every pound of water in their bellies--from
which cleverness is said to have come the Wall Street phrase,
“stock-watering.” Jim Fisk was the son of a Yankee peddler, who,
disdaining the unambitious ways of his father, set up for himself in a
cart gilded like a circus-wagon and drove about the countryside with
jingling bells. After he had made his pile in Wall Street he set up his
own opera house and proposed to rival the Medici as a patron of the
arts--and especially of the artists if they were of the right sex. A
surprising number of them--Moody, Beecher, Barnum, Fisk, Comstock, Ben
Butler--came from New England; Jay Gould was of Connecticut ancestry;
but Oakey Hall was a southern gentleman; Fernando Wood, with the face
of an Apollo and the wit of an Irishman, was the son of a Philadelphia
cigar-maker and much of his early income was drawn from sailors’
groggeries along the waterfront; Tweed was a stolid New Yorker, and
Drew was a York State country boy.
What was happening in New York was symptomatic of the nation. If
the temple of Plutus was building in Wall Street, his devotees were
everywhere. In Chicago, rising higgledy-piggledy from the ashes of the
great fire, Phil Armour and Nelson Morris were laying out stockyards
and drawing the cattle and sheep and hogs from remote prairie farms
to their slaughter-houses. In Cleveland, Mark Hanna was erecting his
smelters and turning the iron ore of Michigan into dollars, while
John D. Rockefeller was squeezing the small fry out of the petroleum
business and creating the Standard Oil monopoly. In Pittsburgh, Andrew
Carnegie was applying the Bessemer process to steel-making and laying
the foundations of the later steel trust. In Minneapolis, C. C.
Washburn and Charles A. Pillsbury were applying new methods to milling
and turning the northern wheat into flour to ship to the ends of the
earth. In San Francisco, Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington were
amassing huge fortunes out of the Southern Pacific Railway and bringing
the commonwealth of California to their feet. Everywhere were boom-town
and real-estate promoters, the lust of speculation, the hankering after
quick and easy wealth.
In the great spaces from Kansas City to Sacramento the frontier
spirit was in the gaudiest bloom. The experiences of three centuries
of expansion were being crowded into as many decades. In the fifties
the highway of the frontier had run up and down the Mississippi River
and the golden age of steamboating had brought a motley life to Saint
Louis; in the seventies the frontier had passed far beyond and was
pushing through the Rocky Mountains, repeating as it went the old
frontier story of swagger and slovenliness, of boundless hope and
heroic endurance--a story deeply marked with violence and crime and
heart-breaking failure. Thousands of veterans from the disbanded
armies, northern and southern alike, flocked to the West to seek their
fortunes, and daily life there soon took on a drab note from the alkali
of the plains; yet through the drabness ran a boisterous humor that
exalted lying to a fine art--a humor that goes back to Davy Crockett
and the Ohio flatboatmen. Mark Twain’s _Roughing It_ is the epic of
this frontier of the Pony Express, as _Life on the Mississippi_ is the
epic of the preceding generation.
The huge wastefulness of the frontier was everywhere, East and West.
The Gilded Age heeded somewhat too literally the Biblical injunction to
take no thought for the morrow, but was busily intent on squandering
the resources of the continent. All things were held cheap, and
human life cheapest of all. Wild Bill Hickok with forty notches on
his gun and a row of graves to his credit in Boot Hill Cemetery, and
Jesse James, most picturesque of desperadoes, levying toll with his
six-shooter on the bankers who were desecrating the free spirit of the
plains with their two per cent. a month, are familiar heroes in Wild
West tales; but the real plainsman of the Gilded Age, the picturesque
embodiment of the last frontier, was Captain Carver, the faultless
horseman and faultless shot, engaged in his celebrated buffalo hunt
for the championship of the prairies. Wagering that he could kill
more buffalo in a day than any rival hero of the chase, he rode forth
with his Indian marker and dropping the miles behind him he left an
endless trail of dead beasts properly tagged, winning handsomely when
his rival’s horse fell dead from exhaustion. It was magnificent. Davy
Crockett’s hundred and five bears in a season was but ’prentice work
compared with Captain Carver’s professional skill. It is small wonder
that he became a hero of the day and his rifle, turned now to the
circus business of breaking glass balls thrown from his running horse,
achieved a fame far greater than Davy’s Betsy. With his bold mustaches,
his long black hair flying in the wind, his sombrero and chaps and
top-boots, he was a figure matched only by Buffalo Bill, the last of
the great plainsmen.
Captain Carver was picturesque, but what shall be said of the thousands
of lesser Carvers engaged in the same slaughter, market-hunters who
discovered a new industry in buffalo-killing? At the close of the
Civil War the number on the western plains was estimated at fifteen
millions. With the building of the Union Pacific Railroad they were
cut asunder into two vast herds, and upon these herds fell the hunters
with the new breech-loading rifles, shooting for the hide market that
paid sixty-five cents for a bull’s hide and a dollar and fifteen cents
for a cow’s. During the four years from 1871 to 1874 nearly a million
head a year were slain from the southern herd alone, their skins ripped
off and the carcasses left for the coyotes and buzzards. By the end
of the hunting-season of 1875 the vast southern herd had been wiped
out, and with the building of the Northern Pacific in 1880 the smaller
northern herd soon suffered the same fate. The buffalo were gone with
the hostile Indians--Sioux and Blackfeet and Cheyennes and a dozen
other tribes.[504] It was the last dramatic episode of the American
frontier, and it wrote a fitting climax to three centuries of wasteful
conquest. But the prairies were tamed, and Wild Bill Hickok and Captain
Carver and Buffalo Bill Cody had become romantic figures to enthrall
the imagination of later generations.[505]
It was an abundant harvest of those freedoms that America had long
been struggling to achieve, and it was making ready the ground for
later harvests that would be less to its liking. Freedom had become
individualism, and individualism had become the inalienable right
to preëmpt, to exploit, to squander. Gone were the old ideals along
with the old restraints. The idealism of the forties, the romanticism
of the fifties--all the heritage of Jeffersonianism and the French
Enlightenment--were put thoughtlessly away, and with no social
conscience, no concern for civilization, no heed for the future of the
democracy it talked so much about, the Gilded Age threw itself into the
business of money-getting. From the sober restraints of aristocracy,
the old inhibitions of Puritanism, the niggardliness of an exacting
domestic economy, it swung far back in reaction, and with the discovery
of limitless opportunities for exploitation it allowed itself to get
drunk. Figures of earth, they followed after their own dreams. Some
were builders with grandiose plans in their pockets; others were
wreckers with no plans at all. It was an anarchistic world of strong,
capable men, selfish, unenlightened, amoral--an excellent example of
what human nature will do with undisciplined freedom. In the Gilded Age
freedom was the freedom of buccaneers preying on the argosies of Spain.
III • Politics and the Fairy Godmother
Certainly the Gilded Age would have resented such an interpretation
of its brisk activities. In the welter of change that resulted from
the application of the machine to the raw materials of a continent,
it chose rather to see the spirit of progress to which the temper of
the American people was so responsive. Freedom, it was convinced,
was justifying itself by its works. The eighteenth century had been
static, the nineteenth century was progressive. It was adaptable,
quick to change its ways and its tools, ready to accept whatever
proved advantageous--pragmatic, opportunist. It was not stifled by
the dead hand of custom but was free to adapt means to ends. It
accepted progress as it accepted democracy, without questioning the
sufficiency of either. The conception accorded naturally with a
frontier psychology. Complete opportunism is possible only amongst a
people that is shallow-rooted, that lives in a fluid society, scantily
institutionalized, with few vested interests. In a young society it is
easy, in a maturing society it becomes increasingly difficult.
Dazzled by the results of the new technique of exploitation applied on
a grand scale to unpreëmpted opportunities, it is no wonder the Gilded
Age thought well of its labors and confused the pattern of life it
was weaving with the pattern of a rational civilization. It had drunk
in the idea of progress with its mother’s milk. It was an inevitable
frontier interpretation of the swift changes resulting from a fluid
economics and a fluid society in process of settling into static ways.
It served conveniently to describe the changes from the simplicities
of social beginnings to the complexities of a later order. It was made
use of following the War of 1812 to explain the stir resulting from
the westward expansion and the great increase in immigration; but it
was given vastly greater significance by the social unsettlements
that came with the industrial revolution. With the realization of the
dramatic changes in manner of living--the added conveniences of life,
release from the laborious round of the domestic economy, ease of
transportation--that resulted from the machine order, it was inevitable
that the idea of progress should have been on every man’s tongue. The
increase of wealth visible to all was in itself a sufficient sign of
progress, and as the novelty of the industrial change wore off and the
economy of America was more completely industrialized, it was this
augmenting wealth that symbolized it.
In such fashion the excellent ideal of progress that issued from
the social enthusiasms of the Enlightenment was taken in charge by
the Gilded Age and transformed into a handmaid of capitalism. Its
duties were narrowed to the single end of serving profits and its
accomplishments came to be exactly measured by bank clearings. It
was unfortunate but inevitable. The idea was too seductive to the
American mentality not to be seized upon and made to serve a rising
order. Exploitation was the business of the times and how better could
exploitation throw about its activities the sanction of idealism than
by wedding them to progress? It is a misfortune that America has never
subjected the abstract idea of progress to critical examination.
Content with the frontier and capitalistic interpretations it has
confused change with betterment, and when a great idealist of the
Gilded Age demonstrated to America that it was misled and pointed out
that the path of progress it was following was the highway to poverty,
he was hooted from the market-place.
Having thus thrown the mantle of progress about the Gold Dust twins,
the Gilded Age was ready to bring the political forces of America
into harmony with the program of preëmption and exploitation. The
situation could hardly have been more to its liking. Post-war America
was wholly lacking in political philosophies, wholly opportunist. The
old party cleavage between agriculture and industry had been obscured
and the logic of party alignment destroyed by the struggle over
slavery. Democrat and Whig no longer faced each other conscious of the
different ends they sought. The great party of Jefferson and Jackson
was prostrate, borne down by the odium of slavery and secession. In
the North elements of both had been drawn into a motley war party,
momentarily fused by the bitterness of conflict, but lacking any common
program, certain indeed to split on fundamental economic issues. The
Whig Republican was still Hamiltonian paternalistic, and the Democrat
Republican was still Jeffersonian _laissez faire_, and until it was
determined which wing should control the party councils there would be
only confusion. The politicians were fertile in compromises, but in
nominating Lincoln and Johnson the party ventured to get astride two
horses that would not run together. To attempt to make yoke-fellows of
democratic leveling and capitalistic paternalism was prophetic of rifts
and schisms that only the passions of Reconstruction days could hold in
check.
In 1865 the Republican party was no other than a war machine that had
accomplished its purpose. It was a political mongrel, without logical
cohesion, and it seemed doomed to break up as the Whig party had broken
up and the Federalist party had broken up. But fate was now on the side
of the Whigs as it had not been earlier. The democratic forces had lost
strength from the war, and democratic principles were in ill repute.
The drift to centralization, the enormous development of capitalism,
the spirit of exploitation, were prophetic of a changing temper that
was preparing to exalt the doctrine of manifest destiny which the Whig
party stood sponsor for. The middle class was in the saddle and it was
time to bring the political state under its control. The practical
problem of the moment was to transform the mongrel Republican party
into a strong cohesive instrument, and to accomplish that it was
necessary to hold the loyalty of its Democratic voters amongst the
farmers and working-classes whilst putting into effect its Whig program.
Under normal conditions the thing would have been impossible, but
the times were wrought up and blindly passionate and the politicians
skillful. The revolt of Andrew Johnson came near to bringing the party
on the rocks; but the undisciplined Jacksonians were overthrown by
the appeal to the Bloody Flag and put to flight by the nomination of
General Grant for the presidency. The rebellion of the Independent
Republicans under Horace Greeley in 1872 was brought to nothing by
the skillful use of Grant’s military prestige, and the party passed
definitely under the control of capitalism, and became such an
instrument for exploitation as Henry Clay dreamed of but could not
perfect. Under the nominal leadership of the easy-going Grant a loose
rein was given to Whiggish ambitions and the Republican party became a
political instrument worthy of the Gilded Age.
The triumph of Whiggery was possible because the spirit of the Gilded
Age was Whiggish. The picturesque embodiment of the multitude of
voters who hurrahed for Grant and the Grand Old Party was a figure
who had grown his first beard in the ebullient days before Secession.
Colonel Beriah Sellers, with his genial optimism and easy political
ethics, was an epitome of the political hopes of the Gilded Age. With
a Micawber-like faith in his country and his government, eager to
realize on his expansive dreams and looking to the national treasury to
scatter its fructifying millions in the neighborhood of his speculative
holdings, he was no other than Uncle Sam in the boisterous days
following Appomattox. The hopes that floated up out of his dreams were
the hopes of millions who cast their votes for Republican Congressmen
who in return were expected to cast their votes for huge governmental
appropriations that would insure prosperity’s reaching certain
post-office addresses. Citizens had saved the government in the
trying days that were past; it was only fair in return that government
should aid the patriotic citizen in the necessary work of developing
national resources. It was paternalism as understood by speculators and
subsidy-hunters, but was it not a part of the great American System
that was to make the country rich and self-sufficient? The American
System had been talked of for forty years; it had slowly got on its
feet in pre-war days despite the stubborn planter opposition; now
at last it had fairly come into its own. The time was ripe for the
Republican party to become a fairy godmother to the millions of Beriah
Sellerses throughout the North and West.
It is plain as a pikestaff why the spirit of Whiggery should have taken
riotous possession of the Gilded Age. With its booming industrial
cities America in 1870 was fast becoming capitalistic, and in every
capitalistic society Whiggery springs up as naturally as pigweed
in a garden. However attractive the disguises it may assume, it is
in essence the logical creed of the profit philosophy. It is the
expression in politics of the acquisitive instinct and it assumes as
the greatest good the shaping of public policy to promote private
interests. It asserts that it is a duty of the state to help its
citizens to make money, and it conceives of the political state as
a useful instrument for effective exploitation. How otherwise? The
public good cannot be served apart from business interests, for
business interests are the public good and in serving business the
state is serving society. Everybody’s eggs are in the basket and they
must not be broken. For a capitalistic society Whiggery is the only
rational politics, for it exalts the profit-motive as the sole object
of parliamentary concern. Government has only to wave its wand and
fairy gifts descend upon business like the golden sands of Pactolus.
It graciously bestows its tariffs and subsidies, and streams of wealth
flow into private wells.
But unhappily there is a fly in the Whiggish honey. In a competitive
order, government is forced to make its choices. It cannot serve
both Peter and Paul. If it gives with one hand it must take away
with the other. And so the persuasive ideal of paternalism in the
common interest degenerates in practice into legalized favoritism.
Governmental gifts go to the largest investments. Lesser interests are
sacrificed to greater interests and Whiggery comes finally to serve the
lords of the earth without whose good will the wheels of business will
not turn. To him that hath shall be given. If the few do not prosper
the many will starve, and if the many have bread who would begrudge the
few their abundance? In Whiggery is the fulfillment of the Scriptures.
Henry Clay had been a prophetic figure pointing the way America was to
travel; but he came a generation too soon. A son of the Gilded Age, he
was doomed to live in a world of Jacksonian democracy. But the spirit
of Henry Clay survived his death and his followers were everywhere in
the land. The plain citizen who wanted a slice of the rich prairie
land of Iowa or Kansas, with a railway convenient to his homestead,
had learned to look to the government for a gift, and if he got his
quarter-section and his transportation he was careless about what the
other fellow got. A little more or less could make no difference to a
country inexhaustible in resources. America belonged to the American
people and not to the government, and resources in private hands paid
taxes and increased the national wealth. In his favorite newspaper,
the _New York Tribune_, he read daily appeals for the adoption of a
patriotic national economy, by means of which an infant industrialism,
made prosperous by a protective tariff, would provide a home market for
the produce of the farmer and render the country self-sufficient. Money
would thus be put in everybody’s pocket. Protection was not robbing
Peter to pay Paul, but paying both Peter and Paul out of the augmented
wealth of the whole.
The seductive arguments that Horace Greeley disseminated amongst the
plain people, Henry Carey purveyed to more intelligent ears. The most
distinguished American economist of the time, Carey had abandoned
his earlier _laissez-faire_ position, and having convinced himself
that only through a close-knit national economy could the country
develop a well-rounded economic program, he had become the most ardent
of protectionists. During the fifties and later he was tireless in
popularizing the doctrine of a natural harmony of interests between
agriculture and manufacturing, and to a generation expanding rapidly
in both fields his able presentation made great appeal. It was but a
step from protectionism to governmental subsidies. Beriah Sellers and
Henry Clay had come to be justified by the political economists. (Note
that amongst Carey’s converts were such different idealists as Wendell
Phillips and Peter Cooper.)
IV • The Great Barbecue
Horace Greeley and Henry Carey were only straws in the wind that
during the Gilded Age was blowing the doctrine of paternalism about
the land. A Colonel Sellers was to be found at every fireside talking
the same blowsy doctrine. Infectious in their optimism, naïve in their
faith that something would be turned up for them by the government if
they made known their wants, they were hoping for dollars to be put
in their pockets by a generous administration at Washington. Congress
had rich gifts to bestow--in lands, tariffs, subsidies, favors of all
sorts; and when influential citizens made their wishes known to the
reigning statesmen, the sympathetic politicians were quick to turn
the government into the fairy godmother the voters wanted it to be.
A huge barbecue was spread to which all presumably were invited. Not
quite all, to be sure; inconspicuous persons, those who were at home
on the farm or at work in the mills and offices, were overlooked; a
good many indeed out of the total number of the American people. But
all the important persons, leading bankers and promoters and business
men, received invitations. There wasn’t room for everybody and these
were presumed to represent the whole. It was a splendid feast. If the
waiters saw to it that the choicest portions were served to favored
guests, they were not unmindful of their numerous homespun constituency
and they loudly proclaimed the fine democratic principle that what
belongs to the people should be enjoyed by the people--not with petty
bureaucratic restrictions, not as a social body, but as individuals,
each free citizen using what came to hand for his own private ends,
with no questions asked.
It was sound Gilded Age doctrine. To a frontier people what was more
democratic than a barbecue, and to a paternalistic age what was more
fitting than that the state should provide the beeves for roasting.
Let all come and help themselves. As a result the feast was Gargantuan
in its rough plenty. The abundance was what was to be expected of a
generous people. More food, to be sure, was spoiled than was eaten, and
the revelry was a bit unseemly; but it was a fine spree in the name of
the people, and the invitations had been written years before by Henry
Clay. But unfortunately what was intended to be jovially democratic was
marred by displays of plebeian temper. Suspicious commoners with better
eyes than manners discovered the favoritism of the waiters and drew
attention to the difference between their own meager helpings and the
heaped-up plates of more favored guests. It appeared indeed that there
was gross discrimination in the service; that the farmers’ pickings
from the Homestead Act were scanty in comparison with the speculators’
pickings from the railway land-grants. The _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal
and the Whisky Ring scandal and divers other scandals came near to
breaking up the feast, and the genial host--who was no other than the
hero of Appomattox--came in for some sharp criticism. But after the
more careless ones who were caught with their fingers where they didn’t
belong, had been thrust from the table, the eating and drinking went
on again till only the great carcasses were left. Then at last came
the reckoning. When the bill was sent in to the American people the
farmers discovered that they had been put off with the giblets while
the capitalists were consuming the turkey. They learned that they were
no match at a barbecue for more voracious guests, and as they went home
unsatisfied, a sullen anger burned in their hearts that was to express
itself later in fierce agrarian revolts.
What reason there was for such anger, how differently rich and poor
fared at the democratic feast, is suggested by the contrast between
the Homestead Act and the Union Pacific land-grant. Both were war-time
measures and both had emerged from the agitations of earlier decades.
By the terms of the former the homesteader got his hundred and sixty
acres at the price of $1.25 an acre; by the terms of the latter the
promoters got a vast empire for nothing. It was absurd, of course, but
what would you have? The people wanted the railway built and Collis P.
Huntington was willing to build it on his own terms. The government was
too generous to haggle with public-spirited citizens, and too Whiggish
to want to discourage individual enterprise. Ever since the cession of
California there had been much talk of a continental railway to tie the
country together. In the first years the talk in Congress had all been
of a great national venture; the road must be built by the nation to
serve the common interests of the American people. But unfortunately
sectional jealousies prevented any agreement as to the route the survey
lines were to run, and the rising capitalism was becoming powerful
enough to bring into disfavor any engagement of the government in a
work that promised great rewards. Under its guidance political opinion
was skillfully turned into the channel of private enterprise. The
public domain backed by the public credit, it was agreed, must pay for
the road, but the government must not seek to control the enterprise
or look to profit from it directly; the national reward would come
indirectly from the opening-up of vast new territories.
The definite shift in policy came about the year 1855. In 1837 Stephen
A. Douglas had been the driving force behind the state enterprise of
building the Illinois Central Railway. In 1853 he proposed that the
Pacific Railroad should be built by private enterprise. With the change
promptly came a request for a patriotic land-grant. The government was
expected to provide the road, it appeared, but private enterprise was
to own it and manage it in the interest of speculators rather than
the public. For old-fashioned souls like Thomas A. Benton, who still
remembered the Jeffersonian concern for the common well-being, it was a
bitter mess to swallow.
I would have preferred [he said] that Congress should have made the
road, as a national work, on a scale commensurate with its grandeur
and let out the use of it to companies, who would fetch and carry
on the best terms for the people and the government. But that hope
has vanished ... a private company has become the resource and
the preference. I embrace it as such, utterly scouting all plans
for making private roads at national expense, of paying for the
use of roads built with our land and money, of bargaining with
corporations or individuals for the use of what we give them.[506]
With this speech the old Jeffersonianism pulled down its flag and the
new Whiggery ran up its black banner. The Gilded Age had begun and Old
Bullion Benton had outlived his time. In the tumultuous decades that
followed there was to be no bargaining with corporations for the use
of what the public gave; they took what they wanted and no impertinent
questions were asked. The hungriest will get the most at the barbecue.
A careless wastefulness when the supply is unlimited is perhaps natural
enough. There were hard-headed men in the world of Beriah Sellers who
knew how easy it was to overreach the simple, and it was they who got
most from the common pot. We may call them buccaneers if we choose, and
speak of the great barbecue as a democratic debauch. But why single
out a few, when all were drunk? Whisky was plentiful at barbecues,
and if too liberal potations brought the Gilded Age to the grossest
extravagancies, if when it cast up accounts it found its patrimony
gone, it was only repeating the experience of a certain man who went
down to Jericho. To create a social civilization requires sober heads,
and in this carousal of economic romanticism sober heads were few--the
good Samaritan was busy elsewhere.
The doctrine of preëmption and exploitation was reaping its harvest.
The frontier spirit was having its splurge, and progress was already
turning its face in another direction. Within the next half-century
this picturesque America with its heritage of crude energy--greedy,
lawless, capable--was to be transformed into a vast uniform
middle-class land, dedicated to capitalism and creating the greatest
machine-order known to history. A scattered agricultural people,
steeped in particularistic jealousies and suspicious of centralization,
was to be transformed into an urbanized factory people, rootless,
migratory, drawn to the job as by a magnet. It was to come about the
more easily because the American farmer had never been a land-loving
peasant, rooted to the soil and thriving only in daily contact with
familiar acres. He had long been half middle-class, accounting unearned
increment the most profitable crop, and buying and selling land as
if it were calico. And in consequence the vigorous individualism
that had sprung from frontier conditions decayed with the passing of
the frontier, and those who had lost in the gamble of preëmption and
exploitation were added to the growing multitude of the proletariat. It
was from such materials, supplemented by a vast influx of immigrants,
that was fashioned the America we know today with its standardized
life, its machine culture, its mass psychology--an America to which
Jefferson and Jackson and Lincoln would be strangers.
V • Folk Heroes
Perhaps one cannot penetrate more directly to the heart of the Gilded
Age than in taking account of certain of its heroes, figures of earth
whom it accounted great in its generation, and to whom its admiration
flowed out in unstinted measure. It is our own secret desires we
attribute to our gods, and if from the muck of the times a queer lot of
heroes was singled out, if an undisciplined generation rioting in its
new freedoms chose to honor men who had scrambled upward in uncouth
ways, it only suggests that such figures were a composite picture of
the secret desires of an age vastly concerned with getting on. From a
host of striking personalities two must suffice to suggest the spirit
of the times, authentic folk-heroes of the Gilded Age, fashioned out
of the commonest stuff and realizing such greatness as multitudes
of Americans were then dreaming of; and over against them a third
figure, a mordant intellectual, who sardonically swam with the stream
of tendency and in serving all the gods of the Gilded Age gained for
himself a brilliant career.
1 • General Grant
Greatest of all the heroes of the age was the victor of Appomattox.
His fame was in all men’s mouths, and his reputation was substantial
enough to withstand the attacks of enemies and the gross shortcomings
of his own character. It was not for any singular or remarkable
qualities of mind or personality that General Grant was taken to the
heart of his generation, but rather because he was so completely a
product of the times, so strikingly an embodiment of its virtues and
weaknesses. In his spectacular career were the sharp contrasts that
appealed to a plebeian people wanting in fine and discriminating
standards of appraisal. He had come up from the people and the marks
of his origins--the slovenly manners and uncritical force of frontier
folk-ways--were stamped on him as indelibly as they were stamped on his
fellow soldiers who proclaimed his greatness. To a later generation he
seems an odd and unaccountable figure for the high rôle of national
hero, yet he was as native and homespun as Lincoln, like him sprung
from the common stock and learning his lessons from harsh experience,
a figure blown to huge dimensions by the passions of civil war. A
generation that discovered something praiseworthy in the “smartness”
of Jim Fisk, in the burly acquisitiveness of Commodore Vanderbilt, or
in the clever humbuggery of Barnum the Showman, certainly would judge
with no very critical eyes the claims to greatness of a grim leader of
armies who succeeded where so many before had failed.
General Grant was no conventional military hero. It was not the gold
stars on his epaulets that dazzled his generation. The people of
the North had seen too many gold stars rise and set on the military
horizon, they had been stricken too sorely by the bitter struggle,
to be caught by military popinjays. They had gone through the fire
and any hero of theirs must himself have passed through the fire. It
was something veracious in the man, something solid and unyielding
in the soldier, something plain as an old shoe in the field marshal
of bloody battles, that caught the imagination of the North and made
Grant a hero--this together with a certain gift of pungent phrase,
befitting the leader of democratic hosts, that served to spread his
fame amongst the common people. Vicksburg did much for his reputation,
but the demand for “unconditional surrender,” sent to a Confederate
leader, did far more. The words fixed his character in the popular
mind. Here at last was a fighting man who instead of planning how to
fall back, as other generals did, thought only of going ahead; so the
popular judgment shut its eyes to his dull plebeian character and set
a wreath on his brows. It rested there somewhat grotesquely. In spite
of a deep unconscious integrity and a stubborn will that drove him
forward along whatever path his feet were set on, he was the least
imposing of military heroes. Short, stooped, lumpish in mind and body,
unintellectual and unimaginative, devoid of ideas and with no tongue
to express the incoherent emotions that surged dully in his heart, he
was a commonplace fellow that no gold braid could set off. He hated war
and disliked soldiering, yet accepting life with a stolid fatalism he
fought his bloody way to ultimate victory.
Graduated from West Point after four sterile years of drill, quite
uneducated and unread even in his profession, he served for a time at
different army posts, went through the Mexican War--which he looked
upon as a stupid imperialistic debauch--as quartermaster without
gaining distinction, and eventually, oppressed by the eventless routine
of garrison life, he fell into the habit of solitary drinking and was
dismissed from the service. Misfortune that it seemed, it was his
making. Only as a volunteer could he have risen so quickly to high
command; as a captain or major in the regular army he would have been
detailed as drill-master to the raw troops and have had no chance.
Nevertheless hard times came with his dismissal. Indolent by nature and
inclined to drift, he was as incompetent a man in practical affairs as
one could find in a frontier township. But with a wife and children to
support he must turn his hand to something, so he tried his luck at
farming, selling real estate, and various odd jobs, yet all the time
growing poorer and seedier, till the war came and picking him up flung
him to mountain heights of popularity and reputation. Thereafter till
his death he was accounted the greatest American of his generation. No
accumulating evidence of his well-meaning but witless incapacity in
civic and political affairs could pluck from his brows the wreath that
had been thrust upon him.
In his spectacular career Grant was an embodiment of the dreams of all
the Beriah Sellerses of the Gilded Age. He was a materialistic hero
of a materialistic generation. He was dazzled by wealth and power,
and after years of bitter poverty he sat down in the lap of luxury
with huge content. He took what the gods sent, and if houses and fast
horses and wines and cigars were showered upon him he accepted them as
a child would accept gifts from a fairy godmother. He had had enough
of skimping meanness; with his generation he wanted to slough off the
drabness of the frontier; he wanted the good things of life that had
so long been denied him, and he was not scrupulous about looking a
gift horse in the mouth. He sought out the company of rich men. He was
never happier than when enjoying the luxury of Jay Cooke’s mansion in
Philadelphia or riding with A. T. Stewart in Central Park. As he grew
fat and stodgy the vulgar side of his plebeian nature was thrown into
sharper relief. He accepted gifts with both hands, and he seems never
to have suspected the price that would be exacted of the President
for the presents to the General. He never realized how great a bill
was sent to the American people for the wine he drank or the cigars
he smoked with his wealthy hosts; yet if the wine had been molten
gold and the cigars platinum they would have been far cheaper. In
return for a few boxes of choice Havanas, Jay Cooke laid his hands on
millions of western lands for the Northern Pacific Railway. It was the
way of the Gilded Age, and Grant was only doing what all his friends
and associates were doing. If he accepted a fifty-thousand-dollar
house in Philadelphia, his comrade General Sherman accepted a
hundred-thousand-dollar house at Washington. Such gifts were not
bribes; they were open and aboveboard; it was the free and easy way of
the times. What the age was careless about is the fact that it is hard
to refuse a reasonable request from one’s fairy godmother, and what the
General never understood is that if one is President such a godmother
is certain to be a very dangerous member of the family.
There was far too much of that sort of thing all about him for Grant to
serve as President with credit to himself or profit to the country.
Honest himself, he was the source of more dishonesty in others than
any other American President. His eight years in the White House
marked the lowest depths--in domestic affairs at least--to which any
American administration has fallen. They were little better than a
national disgrace. All the festering evils of post-war times came to a
head and pock-marked the body politic from head to foot. Scandal and
corruption whispered all about him, the hands of his closest advisers
were dirty; yet he stubbornly refused to hear the whispers or see the
dirt. In judging men and policies he was no more than a child. He could
never distinguish between an honest man and a rascal. He was loyal to
his friends and open-handedness he regarded as a mark of friendship.
In the end it turned out that like the thieves of Jericho his blatant
followers despoiled him of pretty nearly everything.
In what must pass for his political views Grant was as naïvely
uninformed as a Wyoming cowboy. Utterly wanting in knowledge of
political principles, he was a fit leader for the organized mob
that called itself the Republican party, whose chief objective was
the raiding of the treasure-box of which it was the responsible
guardian. He had been nominally a Democrat and the first vote he cast
for President he cast for Buchanan. After Lincoln’s death he turned
naturally to President Johnson and was one of his supporters till the
wily Radical group got his ear and carried him over to the rival camp.
They wanted his reputation to hide under, and they took possession of
it with no great credit to the General’s reputation. Thereafter he
was a Republican of the Whig wing. It was where he belonged. He was
swayed politically by his emotional reactions and it was natural for
him to drift into the opulent camp of money and power. His frontier
democracy sloughed away and with his generation he went over easily
to a buccaneer capitalism. No social conscience obtruded itself to
give him trouble. His millionaire friends were Whig Republicans and
with his respect for rich men, his admiration for material success,
he found himself in congenial company amongst the Whig group. About
the only political policy he ever interested himself in was the policy
of a protective tariff, and his Whig associates took care that his
interest did not wane. Yet so completely did the naïve General reflect
the spirit of the Gilded Age that his noisy followers, conspiring to
confuse in the public mind southern reconstruction and capitalistic
expansion, and hiding a precious set of rascals in the folds of the
bloody flag, came near to making him President for a third term. The
General was bitterly disappointed at their failure, and the General’s
wife, who liked to live in the White House, was even more disappointed.
To millions of Americans Grant was an authentic hero, to Mark Twain he
was a very great man, and to Jay Cooke he was a pawn to be used in the
noble strategy of fortune-seeking. What a comedy it all seems now--yet
one that leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.
Yet to dismiss the stolid General thus is scarcely to do justice to
the substantial core of the man. There remains the work written in
pain during his last days, the two volumes of _Memoirs_ that in their
plain directness--as uninspired, says a late biographer, as “a bale
of hay”--laid bare his honest simplicity and rugged meagerness. No
blackguard and no charlatan could have written such pages. If General
Grant was not the great man so many thought, he was a native growth
from American soil, endowed like his age with a dogged will and a
plodding energy, and he gave his country what he had. Though the
branches of the tree were ungainly and offered too hospitable shelter
to unseemly birds of the night, the gnarly trunk was sound at the heart.
2 • Jay Cooke
Another hero of the times likewise was flung up as it were casually out
of obscurity and reaped an amazing harvest from the gigantic struggle.
In those difficult years the name of Jay Cooke--“the financier of the
Civil War,” as his biographer calls him--became as familiar to the
people of the North as the names of Grant and Lincoln, and was often
joined with theirs as that of one of the saviors of the Union. He was
the first great American banker, and good fortune sent him into the
world at a moment when his skill in brokerage found opportunity for
free play. The war was as great a godsend to Jay Cooke as it was to
Grant, for alone amongst our money-lenders he realized the problems
and foresaw the profits in a popular system of war financing. He was
a pioneer in exploring all the potentialities of the banker’s trade,
and in his dramatic exploitation of salesmanship and his skillful
manipulation of money and credit he marked out the highway our later
financiers have traveled. Jay Cooke occupies too significant a place in
the history of American capitalism to be overlooked in casting up the
accounts of the Gilded Age.
Of Yankee-Puritan stock, he was born in the frontier hamlet of
Sandusky, Ohio, when the Western Reserve was at the beginning of
its development. His father was a country lawyer of Federalist-Whig
affinities, proficient in high-flown western oratory, who liked to
be much in the neighborhood eye. He was a pushing, self-confident
fellow, highly patriotic, soberly moral, fearing God and loving
his country, who felt that the government he supported so heartily
should serve him and his town with equal heartiness. His readiness
in florid speech won him a single term in Congress, and he used his
position as a heaven-sent opportunity to promote a government road
from Sandusky--which it seems was not prospering as its inhabitants
had expected it would--deep into the Indian country. It was a good
Clay-Whig scheme of internal improvement; it would open up a rich
timber country, and be highly profitable to the real-estate promoters
of Sandusky. Cradled thus in speculation and faith in a benevolent
government, his three sons grew up native Whigs, with vigorous
Puritan-Yankee minds, who found no difficulty in reconciling the
interests of God and Mammon. Eager to get on “the right side of
fortune,” they went into the three professions of banking, journalism,
and the law. The eldest, Pitt, found the law little to his liking;
the youngest, Henry, labored diligently at journalism, at Sandusky
and later at Columbus, where he was part owner of the _Ohio State
Journal_ and “boss” of young William Dean Howells, who was likewise
seeking to rise through the medium of journalism. It was the family
itch for politics that took him to Columbus, and although the venture
was financially unsuccessful it brought him influential connections.
He was useful to Governor Salmon P. Chase, afterwards to be Lincoln’s
Secretary of the Treasury, and to John Sherman, who was later to become
a great influence on financial policies at Washington. His reward came
in the shape of an appointment to do the government binding, reputed to
be worth $25,000--a commission that allowed him to unload his paper on
some investors who speedily lost the $20,000 they put into it.
Henry Cooke’s Whiggery was justifying itself, yet to both Pitt and
Henry it soon became clear that Jay had hit upon the true road
to wealth. At twelve years of age he had begun his career in his
father’s store at Sandusky, and with characteristic enterprise he
put in some side lines and became “quite a capitalist.” At fourteen
he ventured so far as St. Louis to help in a general store, and at
the age of seventeen he went to Philadelphia and took a place in a
broker-banker’s office. That was in 1839, a golden time for brokers,
when every business man must keep a sharp eye on the table of banknote
discounts and see to it that bad paper was worked off. Into this world
of discounts and premiums the young clerk plunged with immense zest.
“The business I am engaged in is of the most respectable kind and the
house is the first in the city,”[507] he wrote to Pitt Cooke. “He
was ambitious, industrious, and faithful to each day’s duties,” his
biographer reports of him. His quick mind ran to calculations and his
slender sensitive fingers seemed made for telling money. He was soon
the admiration of the office, an expert in detecting counterfeits,
a walking table of “wild-cat” currency, with a genius for smelling
out possible commissions. Every art of extracting profits from
note-shaving, gold-juggling, delayed payments, and other devices known
to the world of brokerage, he speedily made himself master of. When he
reached his majority he was entered a member of the firm, and before
he was thirty he aided his partners--“noble” fellows he called them,
of honest Puritan extraction--in squeezing huge commissions out of the
financing of the Mexican War. “It was a grand time for brokers and
private banking,” he remarked; and late in life he wrote glowingly of
his cleverness in twice overreaching the Secretary of the Treasury. It
was quite legal and the patriotic banker was vastly pleased to report,
“So we victimized him again.”[508] He was the brains of the company
and under his guidance the business piled up profits at an astonishing
rate. During the panic of 1854 he wrote: “We use our money at 1½ to 3
per cent. per month from day to day and frequently it pays ⅛ to ¼ a
day. We have done a noble business since 1st of January; profits up
to 1st July $135,000.”[509] On the reorganization of the firm in 1858
he withdrew, and three years later, on January 1, 1861, he opened the
doors of what was soon to become the greatest banking-house in America,
Jay Cooke and Company of Philadelphia.
He was then in his fortieth year and his private fortune he reckoned at
$150,000. But with the breaking-out of the war, opportunity knocked at
the door of the new bank. Ardently patriotic, Jay Cooke was anxious to
do his bit for the cause, but he seems never to have thought of going
to the front. He came of fighting Revolutionary stock, but love of the
battlefield had died out of the family. His father had been drafted
for the War of 1812, but hired a substitute who was unfortunate enough
to be killed, and none of the three sons got nearer the front than the
Treasury Department at Washington. It was there that the battles of the
Cooke brothers were fought. Henry Cooke went to Washington to attend
the inauguration of the new administration, and twenty-one days later
Jay Cooke modestly proposed a plan for mobilizing the resources of the
firm in defense of the country. On March 25, he wrote to his brother:
What we wish to do with the Treasury is to have the Department
allow us to make the frequent transfers that are made from point
to point instead of giving the business to Adams and Company
[Express]. We can make those transfers and the Department when
flush can give us 30, 60, 90 or 120 days time, as it is no loss to
them, and the interest in the meantime would be clear profit and to
be divided.[510]
When the magnitude of the task in which the country was engaged became
clear to him he was no longer content with a single banking-house at
Philadelphia. A branch at Washington under the shadow of the Treasury
was highly desirable, and Henry Cooke was the man for the business.
A born lobbyist, a close friend of John Sherman--who was looking out
for a profitable opening in some war business for a brother--and of
Secretary of the Treasury Chase, he let no grass grow under his feet.
The war loans had not been taken freely and in July, Jay Cooke wrote
to Chase suggesting a close alliance between the Treasury and two
Philadelphia firms, Jay Cooke and Company and Drexel and Company.
We would wish to make our business mostly out of the Treasury
operations and we feel sure that we could by having a proper
understanding with yourself greatly help you in the management of
your vast negotiations.... We could not be expected to leave our
comfortable homes and positions here without some great inducement
and we state frankly that we would, if we succeeded, expect a
fair commission from the Treasury in some shape for our labor and
talent. If you feel disposed to say to us ... that you will give us
the management of the loans to be issued by the government during
the war, allowing us a fair commission on them, ... we are ready to
throw ourselves into the matter heartily....[511]
It was quite an amazing proposal and one that Secretary Chase dared
not accept. Bankers and brokers in New York and Boston would scarcely
approve a monopoly of loan-commissions granted to two Philadelphia
houses. But Jay Cooke would not acknowledge defeat. He cultivated the
acquaintance of the Secretary, lent him money, entertained his family,
presented him with gifts, and gave him sound advice. He took the
harassed servant of the people to his warm and generous heart and was
vigilant in keeping him out of the clutches of Copperhead profiteers.
His opportunity came in October, 1861, when in competition with other
brokers he undertook the sale of a new bond-series. His success was
so great that he won the complete confidence of Secretary Chase,
and it was only a matter of time when he should secure his coveted
monopoly. In February, 1862, he opened the branch house at Washington,
immediately opposite the Treasury building, and Henry Cooke soon made
its offices an indispensable club for Congressmen and government
employees. He was charmingly cordial and during the next ten years he
knew everybody and every political move at the Capital. With the same
bland and deacon-like appearance as his brother, he was master of the
art of ingratiating himself into the confidence of influential men,
and successive Secretaries of the Treasury--Chase and Fessenden and
McCulloch--were easily induced to look with partial eye upon the firm
of Jay Cooke and Company. When Grant returned to Washington after the
war he was soon like a brother to Henry Cooke, and when the General
had tasted the quality of cigars kept for his use at Jay Cooke’s
Philadelphia home, his heart warmed to the kindly banker.
Meanwhile the firm was discovering innumerable ways to help win the
war; amongst others Henry Cooke put through a congressional franchise
for a street railway at Washington, and the new cars were soon carrying
citizens and soldiers to and fro, to their great content and the
company’s great profit. He was hourly in and out of the Treasury and
he knew as much about the government business as the Secretary. The
interests of the firm extended with amazing rapidity; other banks
came under their control and their agents were everywhere. Their
later successes in selling bonds were a revelation to older-fashioned
brokers. On the day that Richmond fell the “financier of the Civil
War” marked out the lines of a pretentious country house that was to
cost a million dollars and to become a show place of America, where
Secretaries of the Treasury, Presidents, and great men from every walk
of life were to find a welcome release from their cares. “As rich as
Jay Cooke” had become a common saying from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The gigantic war had been no ill wind to the money-teller of 1861.
In certain aspects Jay Cooke may be reckoned the first modern American.
He was the first to understand the psychology of mass salesmanship.
It was his fertile brain that created the syndicate and conceived and
executed the modern American “drive.” Under his bland deacon-like
exterior was the mind of a realist. He assumed that every man has his
price, but he knew that few men like to acknowledge the fact even
to themselves; so he was at immense pains to cover our poor human
nakedness with generous professions. If he were to lure dollars from
old stockings in remote chimney-corners he must “sell” patriotism to
his fellow Americans; and to do that successfully he must manufacture
a militant public opinion. The soldier at the front, he announced
in a flood of advertisements, must be supported at the rear. It
was every loyal American’s war, and patriotism demanded that idle
dollars--in greenbacks--should be lent to the boys in blue, and a
grateful government would return them, both principal and interest, in
gold. To induce slacker dollars to become fighting dollars he placed
his agents in every neighborhood, in newspaper offices, in banks, in
pulpits--patriotic forerunners of the “one-minute men” of later drives.
They also served their country, he pointed out, who sold government
bonds on commission. He subsidized the press with a lavish hand, not
only the metropolitan dailies but the obscurest country weeklies. He
employed an army of hack-writers to prepare syndicated matter and he
scattered paying copy broadcast. His “hired friends” were everywhere.
In a hundred delicate ways he showed his appreciation of patriotic
coöperation in the bond-sales--gifts of trout caught with his own
hand, baskets of fruit from his own garden. He bought the pressings
of whole vineyards and cases of wine flowed in an endless stream to
strategic publicity-points. Rival brokers hinted that he was debauching
the press, but the army of greenbacks marching to the front was his
reply. It all cost a pretty penny, but the government was liberal with
commissions and when all expenses were deducted perhaps two millions
of profits remained in the vaults of the firm, to be added to the many
other millions which the prestige of the government agency with its
free advertising brought in its train.
With such prestige and with the greatest fluid resources as yet
accumulated by any American, it was inevitable that the Rothschild of
the North should play a bold part in the speculations of the Gilded
Age. Jay Cooke vastly enjoyed the game and it was idle to expect him
to sit back quietly when others were playing for high stakes. In those
halcyon days promoters were as thick as flies about a dead carcass;
wild-cat railroads had succeeded wild-cat banks as short-cuts to
wealth; and in an unlucky moment Jay Cooke was tempted. He had expected
to be made Secretary of the Treasury by President Grant, but failing
of appointment in spite of countless boxes of twenty-five-cent cigars
provided for the General’s pleasure, he determined to back the Northern
Pacific Railway enterprise. The company had been chartered in July,
1864, receiving a congressional grant of 12,800 acres of public land
for every mile of track laid in the states, and double that amount in
the territories. As the proposed line would run almost entirely through
territories the grand total was reckoned at 47,360,000 acres.[512]
Early land-sales were at the rate of $6 an acre. At such valuation the
prospective value of the grant through the territories was $153,600 for
every mile of track, yet in portions of an earlier line absorbed by the
company the road had been built for $8,225 a mile, and a stretch of 112
miles at the rate of $9,500.[513] To be sure there were great stretches
of unsalable land, but in compensation the company was free to run
its surveys so as to embrace choice mineral deposits, virgin timber,
water-power, and town sites.
As Jay Cooke contemplated the possibilities his buoyant temperament
took fire, and he dreamed of empire-building. He quickly rationalized
the project into a great patriotic undertaking that would carry the
blessings of civilization to the farthest Northwest. He would lay open
to the poor man the rich wheat lands of the Dakotas, the mineral wealth
of the Rockies, the vast timber resources of the Puget Sound territory.
He would annex western Canada by benevolent absorption. It was a dream
worthy of the Gilded Age and Jay Cooke was chief amongst the Beriah
Sellerses of the day. He threw himself into the project with boundless
optimism, and proved again his right to be called a great financier.
He proposed to sell the Northern Pacific as he had sold government
bonds. He had learned that to catch the little fish he must first
catch the big fish, for the shilling is timid till the pound shows the
way. He must create confidence, cost what it would, and to that end
he opened a huge pool and created a special syndicate. Stocks, jobs,
cash, influence, were distributed judiciously where they would do good.
In the language of stock-jobbing much “sweetening” was used.[514] And
there was need of much “sweetening,” for the times were inauspicious.
Jay Cooke drove the publicity work with his old vigor, but sales were
slow, and as the great patriotic venture showed signs of lagging he
turned for help to a sympathetic government.
His engineer had made a careful estimate of the prospective cost of
the road, which including rolling-stock, terminals, a branch line
to Portland, and interest on bonds during the construction, came to
$42,638 a mile for the entire line.[515] But the financier was not
satisfied “with the magnificent property the government has given us,”
and made ready to buy from Congress a revision of the terms of the
charter, which amongst other things would widen the land-grant belt
through the territories to 120 miles, convey a second right-of-way
zone from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, and permit the company
to hypothecate the whole before the terms of the contract were
fulfilled. It was an audacious proposal even to a generation used to
audacious proposals. There was bitter opposition, for the rumblings
of the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal were already disturbing the halls of
Congress; but his lobbyists used “the company’s money freely” to bring
in the common breed of Congressmen, and the Cooke brothers employed
their well-practiced skill to take care of such important persons as
Speaker Blaine of the House, Vice-President Colfax of the Senate, and
President Grant. The matter was handled with great delicacy in the case
of the latter--“the glorious honest man,” the banker called him. “He
sent a fishing-rod and creel to the President’s little son Jesse, for
which he was duly thanked in a childish hand.” He invited the General
to a day’s fishing-trip, and together the heroes whipped the trout
stream in the most charming comradeship. “It may be thought,” remarks
his biographer, “that such machinations were unbecoming in a man of
Mr. Cooke’s moral dimensions.”[516] But surely delicate “machinations”
were not unbecoming to such “moral dimensions.” “We let the other
side do most of the talking,” wrote the deacon-like Henry Cooke, who
kept the Sabbath as strictly as his brother, “and we do the voting.”
The President’s cabinet was bitterly divided on the issue, but wheels
turn on well-greased axles and delicate attentions have their reward.
The bill was signed and the building of the Northwest empire could go
forward.
Unfortunately, however, black days were pressing hard on the great
success. The money of the company ran in fructifying streams
through Europe and America but the expected crop was short. Thirty
papers were subsidized in Germany; agents lived in ducal palaces;
commissions, stocks, bonuses, were plowed in for manure; but the crop
of bond-sales was still scanty. Ugly rumors were abroad. There was talk
of a congressional investigation, and when General Banks offered a
resolution of inquiry Jay Cooke was hurt to the quick. An investigation
he regarded as no other than persecution of legitimate business, and he
wrote to his brother: “He ought to be expelled from Congress for such
outrageous attacks upon the great interests of the country.... If I
get at him I will give him a piece of my mind, and no mistake, for his
impertinence and foolishness.”[517] Then the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal
broke and in a panic he wrote to Henry Cooke denouncing the proposal to
stop payment on the interest-coupons of the Union Pacific.
Now I want you to go to the Attorney General at once and tell him
how wrong this whole procedure is. This whole persecution of the
Union Pacific is nonsense, and is damaging our credit abroad.
If the government sets the example of enjoining the payment of
interest coupons, who will buy a bond abroad? The whole thing
is wrong, ill advised and scandalous.... Williams ought to make
a public apology for such an attack and instruct the lawyers to
desist from anything of the kind. The bonds are long since in the
hands of innocent holders, and, if they were not, they could never
reach them in this way. Some wily speculators have put the idea
into the heads of the government lawyers and they, without knowing
anything of its effect upon business, have made this attack. It
will damage us hundreds of millions unless withdrawn at once. No
man of sense would buy a railroad bond or anything else in this
country if such legal proceedings are to be permitted under the
sanction of the highest officer of the government.[518]
Jay Cooke’s ethics were simple. Whatever helped bond-sales was
patriotic and right; whatever hurt them was wicked and immoral. Let
government take care of business and business will take care of the
country. That the newspapers could not see this great truth, but often
indulged in wild demagoguery, was painful to one who had been generous
to them. “It is too bad,” he wrote of a certain attack, “that these
newspapers are permitted by the law thus to interfere with great public
works.”[519] But the black days were at hand. The _Crédit Mobilier_
scandal was a whirlwind reaped from the sowings of the Gilded Age. With
the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war bond-sales stopped short in
Europe and the firm of Jay Cooke and Company was broken. September 18,
1873, the New York house suspended payment; the house of cards tumbled
to pieces; and a panic swept the country. The crash was as spectacular
as the rise; it had been built on credit and when credit was shaken it
fell.
Because he had amassed a great fortune Jay Cooke was regarded by his
fellow Americans as an intelligent man whose opinions were entitled
to heedful consideration. A national figure in finance must become a
national figure in the public councils; and this added function he
assumed with the utmost seriousness. As the power behind the United
States Treasury he regarded himself as responsible for the program
of the Treasury; and he made use of his immense publicity-machine to
shape public opinion in regard to taxation, funding, and the currency.
His “views” of those questions were as simple as a child’s primer. In
brief they were: no taxes for the extinction of the debt; consolidate
the debt and fund it in a form attractive to capital; retire the
greenbacks and return at once to specie payments. Like others who
had made money out of the war he did not take kindly to the idea of
returning a part of it in taxes to pay off a debt that was highly
profitable to him as a broker and banker. The men of ’65 had fought and
suffered to secure the blessings of liberty to their posterity, and it
was only fair that posterity should help pay the bills. To popularize
this pregnant thought he subsidized a pamphlet contributed by one of
his hack-writers, entitled _Our National Debt a National Blessing_;
but the Hamiltonian argument overshot the mark and aroused bitter
opposition. In this as in his attitude towards currency-contraction
and funding he was thinking exclusively in terms of the money-lender.
Very likely he was probably not so much self-seeking as ignorant.
Intellectually he was poverty-stricken and outside the narrow realm of
brokerage and banking he was only a child. He read nothing, thought
little and was unconcerned with social or economic principles. His
business life was regulated by a set of ready-made formulas, in which
ideas played no part. William Cullen Bryant rightly judged him in the
following comment:
We counsel Mr. Jay Cooke in all good will, not to abandon his
proper vocation of dealing in stocks and government securities, for
the sake of giving lectures on political economy--a subject which
he does not understand. We do not say that he might not understand
it if he had given it his attention, but that he has evidently
never done, and knows no more of the matter than Red Jacket knew of
Greek. We advise all who have any money to invest to take Mr. Jay
Cooke’s seven-thirty bonds, and eschew his political economy. His
seven-thirties are first rate, his political economy is a tissue of
mistakes.[520]
Any program that lay outside the bounds of his formulas he regarded
as dangerous radicalism, and any policy that threatened to reduce his
commissions he regarded as unchristian. He bitterly disliked Secretary
Boutwell of the Treasury, who rejected his guidance, and he wrote to
his brother:
I observe ... that Boutwell is to leave the Treasury. I think that
if he does not propose to do any better than he has in the past it
will be a grand move for Grant to put some more practical person in
his place. A man who has no more breadth of thought ... and no more
spunk than to let the country drift along without even an attempt
at funding the debt, and who insists upon keeping up an enormous
taxation for the foolish object of paying off rapidly a debt that
no one wants paid off, excepting gradually, it will be a great
benefit to have replaced by some one who will take an opposite
course.[521]
A month later one of the causes of the hostility was suggested by a
member of the firm:
All of our transactions with Boutwell have shown conclusively that
he will never permit one dollar to be made out of the business of
the Treasury, if he can possibly prevent it. With all his friendly
feelings I cannot remember a single dollar that we have made
directly or indirectly out of his administration of the Treasury,
...[522]
Against the Greenback movement his hostility was bitter. He regarded
it as an attempt to repudiate the “plighted faith” of the nation, and
in 1867 he issued a pamphlet, written to order, aimed at combating
the movement. In the opinion of a subsidized admirer it was “able,
unanswerable and timely,” calculated to do immense good in a country
where universal suffrage encourages the “attempts of demagogues to
excite the poor against the rich, labor against capital, and all
who haven’t money against the banks who have it.”[523] How deeply
the members of the firm felt in presence of any threat to the money
interests is suggested in a letter from Henry Cooke of October 12, 1867.
You know how I have felt for a long time past in regard to the
course of the ultra infidelic radicals like Wade, Sumner, Stevens,
_et id omne genus_. They were dragging the Republican party into
all sorts of isms and extremes. Their policy was one of bitterness,
hate, and wild agrarianism without a single Christian principle to
give it consistency, except the sole idea of universal suffrage....
These reckless demagogues have had their day and the time has come
for wiser counsels. With Wade uttering agrarian doctrines in Kansas
and fanning the flame of vulgar prejudices, trying to array labor
against capital and pandering to the basest passions; with Butler
urging wholesale conscription throughout the South and wholesale
repudiation throughout the North so far as the national debt is
concerned; with Stevens joining hands with the traitor Vallandigham
and advocating the idea of a flood of irredeemable paper money
sufficient in volume to drown the whole country; with Pomeroy and
Wade and Sprague and a host of others clamoring for the unsexing of
woman and putting the ballot in her hand ... what wonder it is that
the accumulated load was too heavy for any party to carry and that
it broke down under it?[524]
There can be little doubt that the spectacular career of Jay Cooke
quite dazzled his contemporary fellow citizens. Nothing like it
had before appeared in America. The greatest salesman that the
rising middle class had yet produced, a financier who understood
the psychology of mass appeal, a propagandist of truly heroic
proportions, he was reckoned no other than a magician by all the lesser
money-grabbers of the Gilded Age. From nothing he built up a vast
fortune. Scrupulous in all religious duties, a kind husband, a generous
friend, benevolent in all worthy charities, simple and democratic
in his tastes, ardently patriotic, uncreative and unintellectual,
he exemplified all the substantial middle-class virtues of a people
newly given to the worship of a sterile money economy. To call him
a vulgarian and the chronicle of his life nauseous would scarcely be
charitable. The record of his days has been laid before us, naked and
mean, by his biographer, who has done his best to construct a hero
from the poor materials. No doubt he was a hero of his generation--and
perhaps of ours also.
3 • Charles A. Dana
If General Grant and Jay Cooke were naïve heroes, ignorant as the
generation that delighted to honor them, Charles A. Dana, the
journalist of the Gilded Age, was a disillusioned intellectual who
after immersing himself in the golden dreams of the forties, put
away all Utopian hopes and made use of his brains to serve himself.
Disappointed with idealism, he turned materialist and dedicated to
capitalistic exploitation the abilities that before had been given to
a venture in coöperative living. A brilliant fellow, playing the new
game in Gilded Age fashion and winning a brilliant success, he was a
conspicuous victim of the bankruptcy of idealism that is the price of
all wars, and his later triumph as editor of the _New York Sun_ only
served to measure the greatness of his fall. The career of Dana is a
cynical commentary on the changing spirit of America from the days of
Brook Farm to the days of Mark Hanna.
A child of the Puritan frontier, Dana early crossed over into New
York State and became a shop-boy in the backwoods village of Buffalo
at a time when the Indian trade was important enough to justify him
in learning Algonquin. In these early manhood days he was living in
the midst of the coonskin democracy, and falling in with the frontier
spirit he became an ardent Jacksonian. He was eager for an education
and quitting Buffalo he went to Harvard, but his eyes failing him after
two years, he joined the Brook Farm community where he speedily became
one of the chief counselors, and was deeply concerned for the success
of the experiment. In those generous years he was a militant idealist,
widely read in socialist literature and warmly espousing associationism
as a cure for the evils of competition. Upon quitting Brook Farm after
the burning of the Phalanstery he joined Greeley and for fifteen years
was one of the directing minds on the _Tribune_. In 1848 he went abroad
as foreign correspondent, saw much of the revolutions of that great
year, studied the temper of the French and German people, analyzed
the popular leaders and programs with singular acuteness, and found
his sympathies warmly enlisted in the cause of the lower classes. He
was then thirty-nine, and his active mind had gathered up all the
diverse radicalisms--Jacksonian, Utopian, European proletarian--of
his revolutionary generation. Shrewdly observant and with a sensitive
social conscience, he was amply equipped to become such another critic
of the Industrial Revolution as England had bred from its bitter
experience.
But the war intervened, and after the war a dun twilight gathered about
the hopes of the forties. Few generous enthusiasms survived those
years of struggle and Dana in his editorial rooms underwent successive
changes of heart. The realist slowly dispossessed the idealist and
then the cynic swallowed up the realist. The last forty years of his
life were spent undoing the work of his earlier years. His political
philosophy went to pieces and the policy of the _Sun_ became a mere
hodge-podge of jingo programs, an irrational bundle of personal
prejudices and private interests. His reaction from associationism
carried him over to a stark and ruthless individualism. He saw all
about him the strong and capable as the masters of the earth, with
social justice an outcast and mendicant begging from house to house.
The millennium to which belongs the ideal of social democracy which
he had earlier served, he could no longer make out from any present
bend in the road, and putting away his faith he went with the masters.
The reaction began during the _Tribune_ days with his espousal of the
American System--the first outcropping of the middle-class qualities
of his mind--and thereafter he drifted steadily to the right and the
Dismal Swamp of exploitation. With augmenting wealth and the sense
of power that came from the great success of the _Sun_ he became the
apologist and defender of capitalism, phrasing with clever vivacity all
the sophistries of Gilded Age argument. Professing to be a Democrat, he
made much of states rights and governmental _laissez faire_. He would
countenance no interference with the principle of free competition,
but would reduce the government to the rôle of policeman to keep the
peace. He professed to believe that the dry bones of Manchesterism were
a living democratic faith. He ridiculed the proposal for pure-food
legislation, civil service reform, the control of monopolies,
professing to see in every such move the insidious beginnings of an
un-American bureaucracy. No social pretext justified in his eyes the
regulation of business enterprise. Centralization of economic power he
accepted as in the nature of things, and the popular denunciation of
trusts he called “the greatest humbug of the hour.” His argument was
simple and to the Gilded Age wholly satisfactory.
The objects of trade being to buy as cheap as possible, to sell
as dear as possible, and to get control of the market as far as
possible, the formation for these purposes of these gigantic and
widely extended partnerships is just as natural and regular as the
partnership of two shoemakers or of two blacksmiths.[525]
Thus far Dana must be reckoned a belated disciple of the Manchester
school. The days of transcendental and Utopian idealism were past and
he knew it. The Gilded Age had traveled far from such naïve enthusiasms
and it was time to face reality. But his realism was only a gesture
to cover his surrender to capitalism. It was not honest. When his
principle of individualism trod on his own toes he threw it aside with
no compunctions. He was a _laissez-faire_ Democrat only when a free
field favored business, but when business desired government assistance
he made no scruple to turn Whig. Accepting the principle of private
exploitation under the drive of the acquisitive instinct, and content
with the social ethics of Captain Kidd, he would weaken government or
strengthen government as business profits dictated. In these later
years he became cynically class-conscious, while professing to deny
the existence of classes. He would disarm the government as against
the capitalist, but he would triple-arm it against the farmer and
workingman. He was shrill in his demands for a high protective tariff
for the manufacturers, huge grants of public lands for speculative
railway companies, and a monetary system in the control of the bankers.
But for the economic demands of the western farmers he had only
contempt--the agrarians were flying in the face of economic law as
economic law was understood by the high priests of capitalism. When
he talked about “honest money” he laid his brains on the shelf. He
would have no other money than the gold standard, and to achieve that
object he never suffered candor to weaken his plea. He bitterly opposed
the income tax and when the Democratic platform of 1896 suggested the
reorganization of the Supreme Court to reverse the decision on its
constitutionality, he turned demagogue and indulged in talk about
“the destruction of the independence of the judiciary.” When it was
proposed that the railways be nationalized he protested that he could
not “imagine anything more absurd, unpatriotic, and dangerous”--on
the assumption no doubt that railways existed to pay dividends on
their stock. “Still more alarming” to him was the “clearly implied
approval of lawless violence contained in the denunciation of what is
denominated in the [Democratic] platform ‘government by injunction.’
Veiled in the language of moderation, the wild light of anarchy shines
through.”[526] He urged upon government the necessity of holding the
labor unions in strict control, he was eloquent in defense of the
individual laborer’s sacred right of “free contract,” and he was loud
in applause of President Cleveland’s lawless suppression of the Pullman
strike. When it came to Bryan and Populism he lost his head and became
quite maudlin.
Dana was no fool to be deceived by his own insincerity. On the
contrary he was highly intelligent and knew perfectly well what he
was about. Having gone over to capitalism, he would fight its battles
with whatever weapons came to hand, and like a son of New England
he would cover his breast with a shield of morality. He became the
chief journalistic exponent of the “lawless violence” he was fond of
attributing to other social classes. He turned into a flaming jingo
imperialist, talked patriotically about “adequate” coast defenses,
demanded a great navy, and was the loudest spokesman of the blowsy
doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” He was always peering through his
glasses to discover some fresh territory to annex--Haiti, Cuba,
Mexico--and so late as 1887 he was still calling for the annexation
of Canada. Naturally he approved President Cleveland’s Venezuelan
proclamation and he probably would have enjoyed a tussle with the
British lion. In his morality he was quite as truculent as in his
patriotism and in his advocacy of capitalism. Perhaps it was a salve
to a conscience that could not have been easy. He hated political
corruption and he attacked the sordid looting that marked President
Grant’s administration with gusto. He took sardonic delight in giving
the widest publicity to the classic corruptionist phrase of the
day--“He understands addition, division, and silence.” He erected into
a fetish the cry “Turn the rascals out!” yet while helping to pry
loose one set of rascals from their spoils he was busily providing
another set with his demand for subsidies and tariffs. It was a
situation that must have amused the cynical Dana. He had long since
left off worrying about the damned human race. It was more sensible to
pile up one’s plate at the barbecue and send the bill to the American
people. He had made a huge success and what mattered it if his old
Brook Farm associates, Ripley and Curtis, no longer spoke to him when
they met?
Footnotes
[504] See Allan Nevins, “The Taming of the West,” in _The Emergence of
Modern America_.
[505] It is the same story in the matter of the passenger pigeon. In
early days the flights of these birds ran to untold millions. The last
great nesting was at Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878, covering a strip
forty miles long and from three to ten miles wide. Upon the nests fell
the market-hunters and a million and a half squabs were shipped to New
York by rail, besides the thousands wasted. Within a generation the
passenger pigeon had become extinct. See W. B. Mershon, _Outdoor Life
and Recreation_, February, 1929, p. 26 ff.
[506] Quoted in J. P. Davis, _The Union Pacific Railway_, pp. 67-68.
[507] E. P. Oberholtzer, _Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War_, Vol.
I, p. 52.
[508] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 81 and 83.
[509] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 85.
[510] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 132-133.
[511] See _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 143-144.
[512] See _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 97-98.
[513] C. E. Russell, _Stories of Great Railroads_, p. 19.
[514] The list of his “beneficiaries,” some of whom were drawn
in delicately and some realistically, included, according to his
biographer, Vice-President Colfax, Speaker Blaine and James A. Garfield
of the House, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and Governor Geary
of Pennsylvania, General Horace Porter, President Grant’s private
secretary, Senators John Sherman, William Windom, and Ben Wade,
Delegate Garfielde of Washington Territory, Bayard Taylor. Amongst
the papers were Henry Ward Beecher’s _Christian Union_, Greeley’s
_Tribune_, the _Philadelphia Press_, the _Washington Chronicle_, the
_London Times_.
[515] See Oberholtzer, Vol. II, p. 154.
[516] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 176.
[517] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 322.
[518] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 409.
[519] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 411.
[520] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 643-644.
[521] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 267-268.
[522] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 269.
[523] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 56 note.
[524] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 28.
[525] See James Harrison Wilson, _The Life of Charles A. Dana_, p. 479.
[526] See _Ibid._, p. 491.
Chapter II • The Culture of the Seventies
It was in the seventies that good taste reached its lowest ebb. Not
only in America, but in England as well, where rebels like William
Morris were contemptuously rejecting a machine civilization. A
veritable _débâcle_ of the arts was in process, the lesser as well
as the greater, in New York and Boston as well as in Chicago and San
Francisco, from which literature could not wholly escape; and that
_débâcle_ was an expression of profound changes taking place at the
bases of society. The dignified culture of the eighteenth century,
that hitherto had been a conserving and creative influence throughout
the Jeffersonian revolution, was at last breaking up. The disruptive
forces that swept out of the great West, bringing the frontier spirit
to every threshold, and the factory economy that displaced the wares of
the craftsman with the products of the machine, were destroying that
earlier culture and providing no adequate substitute. Distinction of
manners and dress was gone, dignity and repose were gone, traditional
standards were gone; and in their stead a bumptious restlessness, a
straining for originality and individuality that exuded in a shoddy and
meaningless grotesque. It was not without justification that Godkin
contemptuously applied the phrase, “a chromo civilization,” to the
works of that singular generation dwelling between worlds, the one
dead, the other seeming powerless to be born.
How much was lost in the break-up of the excellent culture of the
eighteenth century the children of the seventies neither knew nor
cared. Generations of growth had gone to its shaping. It had been
formed by the needs of men and women conscious of the ties that linked
them with the past. It was bound back upon the rich cultural life of
medieval times, and in the aristocratic eighteenth century it had come
to flower in forms of fine distinction and dignity. Touch that century
on any side--dress, architecture, furniture, manners, letters--and
the same note of refinement, of grace, of balanced harmonious form,
is everywhere evident. The culture of the times of the Coffee House
Wits was all of a piece, held together by an inner pervasive unity.
The formality of the wig and the heroic couplet was symbolic of a
generation that loved dignity, and the refinement of the Chippendale
sideboard, wrought in slender Honduras mahogany, was the expression of
a society that cultivated the graces of life. But when the tie-wig and
smallclothes disappeared before the social revolutions of the end of
the century, when the gentleman was pushed from his place by the banker
and manufacturer, and broadcloth gave way to tweeds, the culture of the
eighteenth century was doomed; and until another culture should impose
its standards upon society and reëstablish an inner spiritual unity,
there would be only the welter of an unlovely transition.
In no other field is the sprawling formlessness of the seventies
more grotesquely suggested than in its architecture and in interior
decoration, which is a lesser form of architecture. Upon the buildings
of the times the hallmark of the Gilded Age is stamped in gaudy
colors. By the end of the thirties the fine traditions of colonial
craftsmanship were gone and the builders set forth on a foolish quest
for historical styles. Revivals followed on each other’s heels. The
Greek revival and the Gothic revival marked the successive decline of
the noble art of building, until at last, turning away from the past,
architecture erupted in what it conceived to be a new American style,
the expression of a free democratic people, but which later generations
reckon a sign and proof of cultural bankruptcy. It was the golden
age of the jig saw, of the brownstone front, of the veranda that ran
about the house like a spider web, of the mansard roof, the cupola,
the house of stilts. Flamboyant lines and meaningless detail destroyed
the structural unity of the whole; tawdry decoration supplanted beauty
of materials and a fine balance of masses. A stuffy and fussy riot of
fancy, restrained by no feeling for structural lines, supplied the lack
of creative imagination, and architecture sank to the level of the
jerry-builder. Bad taste could go no further.
With this decay of aristocratic culture and the attendant
disintegration of the earlier cultural unity, three diverse strands
of cultural impulse remained, each of an individual fabric that
could not easily be woven into a harmonious pattern: a decadent
Federalistic culture that occupied the seats of authority in New
England and wherever New England opinion was respected; the body of
social aspiration that had come from the French Enlightenment, from
which individual dreamers still drew nourishment; and the vigorous
individualism of the frontier that bit so deeply into the psychology
of the age. Behind these diverse impulses lay still another that would
eventually shoulder them aside and provide the pattern for the America
that was rising--the culture of an urbanized and mechanized society
that in its vast warrens of business was creating the psychology and
manners of a standardized, middle-class world of salesmanship.
I • New England in Decay
In one spot in America, at least, the disruption of the fine old
aristocratic culture would not be suffered without a protest. Brahmin
New England would cling to its traditional standards though all the
rest of America should go whoring after strange gods. The welter of the
seventies it looked upon with undisguised contempt. It would not follow
the way that other portions of the country were hastening. It would
have nothing to do with a bumptious frontier spirit that recognized no
obligations to the past--for the excellent reason that it had no past.
It had had its fill of the visionary Enlightenment that had come to
logical fruit in the vagaries of Thoreau and the grotesque vaporings
of Alcott. It had had more than its fill of the strident causes that
spawned like mushrooms in the rank soil of French romanticism. Emerson
it could forgive, for Emerson was a Brahmin, but it quietly ignored
his philosophic anarchism and chose to dwell on pleasanter aspects of
his teaching. Wendell Phillips it regarded as a common nuisance, but
Edmund Quincy it forgave, for after a season of vagrant wanderings he
returned to the placid ways of his ancestral Brahminism. Of all these
things, whether frontier or Utopian or what not, it had had enough,
and so it turned back lovingly to the culture of earlier times and
drew comfort from a dignified Federalism--enriched now by a mellow
Harvard scholarship that was on intimate terms with Dante and Chaucer
and Cervantes and Shakespeare--a Federalism that fitted the dignified
Brahmin genius as comfortably as an old shoe.
It was an excellent heritage--that old culture. Never richly creative,
never endowed with a fleshly paganism, it possessed nevertheless a
solidity got from long wrestling with the eternities, a pleasantly
acrid flavor got from crotchety old books, and a sober morality got
from much contemplation of the sinfulness of the children of Adam. It
was as native to New England as Boston brown bread, and it issued in
self-respecting and dignified character. Underneath all transcendental
and other eruptions it had lain unmoved like the granite foundations
of the New England fields; and now after those eruptions had subsided
it provided the solid footing on which the later culture might rear
its chaste temples. But unhappily the building days of New England
were over. Matters were going ill there. Emigration to the West was
draining the vitality from farm and village, and in Boston disastrous
changes were under way. The familiar places where Sam Adams and Josiah
Quincy had dwelt with their fellows were being invaded by immigrants
who brought with them another faith and discordant manners. The Roman
Catholic church grew strong as the Old North declined; the Irish brogue
displaced the Yankee on Boston Common; Faneuil Hall was given over to
alien fishmongers. The Brahmin remnant was absorbed in banking and
brokerage and railway investments. It still held the Boston purse but
it was fast losing the Boston vote. The capital of the Puritan fathers
was being destroyed by the Industrial Revolution that their descendants
had set on foot. New England was visibly falling into decay and the
years of its intellectual leadership in America were numbered.
The days of high thinking were over and the familiar home of
humanitarian causes was inhabited by other tenants. All that remained
of the golden forties was the quiet atmosphere of good breeding.
Unitarianism, that Theodore Parker had kept open-minded and militant,
settled into a staid and respectable orthodoxy, its pale negations
sufficing to soothe its placid congregations. Transcendentalism, that
had thrown a lovely mist about the lean New England character, was
evaporating in the rising sun of science; and the ardor of reform, that
had burned fiercely in the Puritan heart, subsided into a well-bred
interest in negro schools and foreign missions. The Abolition leaders
laid aside their pens, convinced that the last injustice had been
removed from American society. Their work was done and they turned
unwilling ears to calls for new crusades. The New England conscience
was tired. It had borne the burden and heat of a long day and was glad
to be released from its cares to set up monuments to its sacred dead
and to write the chronicles of its past. New England lost interest in
ideas and turned away from creative intellectual life to catalogue
its libraries and revere the men who had written those libraries. The
Enlightenment was over in Boston and the stir of reform passed to New
York and the West, where Amelia Bloomer and Elizabeth Cady Stanton
carried forward the great crusades for temperance and women’s rights,
and Henry George was preaching the gospel of a new social economics.
Whatever militants existed in New England were not likely to be
Brahmins and their labors did not roil the quiet waters. Clamorous
distractions no longer disturbed the calm of Federalistic culture, and
Cambridge and the Back Bay quietly appropriated the literary earnings
of Concord and lived pleasantly on its revenues.
The inevitable fruit of such thin soil was the genteel tradition, the
excellence of which in the seventies New England maintained in the
face of all frontier leveling and romantic liberalisms--a timid and
uncreative culture that lays its inhibitions on every generation that
is content to live upon the past. It was a penalty for backsliding.
The men of the preceding generation had got their cheeses made--and
excellent cheeses they were, with a fine native flavor. But the
transcendental cow had gone dry and with no fresh cows coming in the
Brahmins of the seventies were hard put to it to live an adequate
intellectual life. Translations and medieval scholarship were no better
than remainder biscuit after voyage. Ever since Lowell put away his
youthful radicalisms and turned bookman, Brahmin culture had been
undernourished. The story of intellectual New England after 1870 is
little more than a repetition of the story of New England after 1790--a
resurgence of the traditional Toryism that assumed an unquestioned
custodianship of all matters intellectual.