The first powerful and conclusive remedy for the tyranny of the

machine ... is scratching. The word has become a sneer, a taunt,

a bitter reproach, but the test of the power and effectiveness of

the remedy is the fury with which it is assailed.... The machine

denounces scratchers as lustily as Laud denounced the Puritans,

or George III the rebellious Yankees, or slave-driving Democrats

Republican woolly heads.... The scratcher is the minute-man of

politics. He is always in light marching order. He has only to

consult his own knowledge and conscience, and with one stroke

his work is done. Fortunately, also, his stroke may be as secret

as his ballot. Those who do not choose to publish the fact need

not be known, and may smile serenely at the blind fury of those

whose plots are quietly foiled. This is the reason of the impotent

anger with which scratching is assailed. It cannot be reached....

Scratching is denounced as dishonorable. Oh, no! the secret ballot

is not dishonorable. The shot of the Middlesex farmer from behind a

tree was no more dishonorable than the immortal volley from behind

the breastworks of Bunker Hill.[635]

He then proceeded to lay open what seemed to him the core of the

problem:

But useful as scratching is as a corrective, it does not strike at

the heart of the machine, and it is therefore _only_ a corrective

and not a radical remedy. That remedy can be found only by finding

the source of the power of the machine, and that source is official

patronage. It is the command of millions of the public money spent

in public administration; the control of the vast labyrinth of

place, with its enormous emoluments; the system which makes the

whole Civil Service, to the least detail and most significant

position, the spoils of party victory; which perverts necessary

party organization into intolerable party despotism. It is upon

this that the hierarchy of the machine is erected. Strike at this

system strongly, steadily, persistently, and you shiver the machine

to pieces.[636]

Seeing his duty clearly, Curtis did not spare himself, but while most

of his fellows were seeking fame or wealth for themselves he gave

his time and strength without stint to the cause, and it was due to

his efforts more than to those of any other man that a reform in

the civil service was eventually brought about. He had to fight his

way against bitter opposition. It was charged that he was seeking

to create in America an undemocratic bureaucracy. His old friend

Charles A. Dana--from whom he had become estranged--was quite frank.

“Above all I do not believe,” he said, “in the establishment in this

country of the German bureaucratic system, with its permanent staff of

office-holders who are not responsible to the people, and whose tenure

of place knows no variation and no end except the end of life.”[637]

But it was the politicians who fought most bitterly, and when to civil

service reform he added the sin of bolting the party, throwing over

Blaine and supporting Cleveland, he was subjected to plentiful insults.

Nevertheless as the leader of the Mugwumps, preaching to a party-ridden

generation the gospel of independency, he did his country a real

service. He could not foresee, of course, how easily the menace of the

independent voter was to be met; how through the control of both party

machines and both nominees by the political bosses the independent

would have only the choice betwixt tweedledum and tweedledee, and in

disgust would largely refrain from voting. But the open and crying

political evils of the Gilded Age he saw clearly, and in seeking to

lessen them he proved himself a useful citizen as well as a cultivated

American.

III • English Liberalism and Politics--Godkin and “The Nation”

The severest critic of the Gilded Age was Edwin Lawrence Godkin,

founder of the _Nation_. More caustic than George William Curtis,

equipped with a complete social philosophy, and armed with perfect

self-assurance, he devoted thirty-five years to the task of instructing

America in the principles of government as those principles were

understood by John Stuart Mill. He was at once an idealist and a

realist, and the intellectual history of the critic is revealed in the

shift from the one to the other. To Godkin the English liberal--who

had studied the American experiment from overseas--as to Karl Schurz

the German liberal, America was the torchbearer of the democratic

faith; and any defection from the cause, any betrayal of that faith,

was a desecration of the temple of liberalism by its own priesthood.

Liberalism, he was persuaded, was the handmaid of civilization; the

hope of any rational progress, rested on the principle of free inquiry

and free endeavor. To Godkin, therefore, and to Schurz and the hundreds

of European liberals who sought refuge here following the _débâcle_ of

the revolutionary hopes of 1848, it was a matter of deep import that

America should remain true to its liberal tradition, trusting freedom,

refusing to repeat the unhappy experience of a Tory Europe. He would

say to America what John Wise had said nearly two centuries before:

“Ye have been called unto liberty, therefore hold your hold, brethren!

Pull up well upon the oars, you have a rich cargo, and I hope ...

day-light and good piloting will secure all.” But he would do more than

that; he would pull an oar himself; and with high hopes, at the age

of twenty-five, he cast in his lot with America to serve the cause in

whatever ways might offer.

Godkin came of an English Protestant strain that for seven centuries

had lived in County Wexford, at the extreme southeastern point of

Ireland. He was neither Scotch like the men of Ulster, nor Irish like

his neighbors of Kilkenny and Wicklow, but as English in blood and

temperament as Jonathan Swift. Educated at Queen’s College, Belfast, he

studied law for a time at Lincoln’s Inn, went through the revolutionary

years of 1848-1851 with their great hopes, and entered the field of

journalism as correspondent for the London _Daily News_ during the

Crimean War. In 1856 he came to America with the intention of entering

the law, but returned to journalism. During the Civil War he was

correspondent for the _Daily News_ of London, laboring to counteract

British Tory opinion that ran strongly pro-South, and marshal the

forces of English liberalism on the side of the North. Three months

after Appomattox he founded the _Nation_ as an organ of criticism,

through the columns of which he proposed to appeal to the intelligence

and the conscience of America in support of the principles of

Victorian liberalism.

For this excellent work of criticism Godkin was provided with a sound

equipment. Endowed with a vigorous intellect, he kept his mind free

from shifting fogs and rarely mistook immediate for ultimate ends.

His training had been in a distinguished tradition. His father was a

Presbyterian minister and journalist, and the strain of robust dissent

that contributed so richly to Victorian liberalism came to him as a

birthright. He was “brought up,” he said, “in the Mill-Grote school of

radicals.” “When I was in college,” he wrote in later years, “I and

the young men of my acquaintance were Liberals, in the English sense.

John Stuart Mill was our prophet, and Grote and Bentham were our daily

food.”[638] Already his heart was overseas; America as it had been

described by de Tocqueville was his “promised land,” the home of a free

democracy on which his hopes for civilization were fixed. His first

book, written at the early age of twenty-two, was a history of the

land Kossuth was striving to set free, and he there defined the word

democrat as he had come to interpret it--the democrats, he said, are

“all those whose hopes and sympathies are not bound up in a party or

class, but look for the welfare and progress of humanity as the goal of

their striving.”[639]

Thus he wrote in the aftermath of the revolutionary years of

1848-1851. But the glowing idealism of the young radical was to suffer

discouragements and setbacks from the experience of later years. One

suspects that his liberalism never possessed the whole of him, never

grew from within out, but was overlaid on a nature fundamentally

aristocratic that at heart preferred Tory to liberal ends. Though as

a young man he spread his canvas to the winds of liberalism, he was

always a little distrustful of the bellying sails and he never quite

liked the crew. There is a curious suggestiveness in his changing

attitude towards England and English society. He had quitted the old

world out of dislike for it, and a dozen years later he declined to go

back except as a “last extremity.” “It would be going back,” he said,

“into an atmosphere that I detest and a social system that I have hated

since I was fourteen years old.”[640] At the bottom of this repugnance

was an obstinate pride. He was ambitious, capable, and sensitive, and

a caste society that refused to open its doors to him he looked upon

as pernicious. To assert that his espousal of democracy was due to

his brusque rejection by a more distinguished mistress, is a severe

judgment, yet it is a judgment that his friend Henry Holt quite frankly

implied.[641]

He had come to America in the hope of getting on in the world. He had

a strong regard for social position. His standards were severe and

his sympathies so narrow as to lay him open to the frequent charge of

snobbery. He would mingle in none but good society, and it was easier

in America than in England to gain entrance to good society. Until he

had made his mark he would not go back; but when as a distinguished

editor he ventured to return, and found himself accepted by the best

people, his hatred for the English social system oozed away, and the

eager delight he experienced in upper-class society was an unconscious

testimony to the value he had set upon a system from which as a young

man he had been excluded. Godkin was too English to make himself

over into an American, too natively aristocratic to be a democrat.

A disciple of John Stuart Mill, he lacked the complete intellectual

integrity of Mill that brushed aside all caste prejudices and personal

ambitions, as he lacked his vast intellectual accumulation. Godkin’s

liberalism was founded on Mill, but it was never quite Mill.

The philosophy to which, as a disciple of the Bentham-Mill-Grote

school, the young Godkin gave his allegiance, was a Utilitarian

adaptation of _laissez faire_--the doctrine that the greatest happiness

of the greatest number is the ultimate social objective, and that such

objective can be attained only through the completest liberty under

the sway of reason and justice. As presented by John Stuart Mill it

was a singularly persuasive philosophy that awakened a response in

every generous mind. Liberty, he insisted, is the thing chiefly to be

desired, for where men are free they will shape social organisms to

their needs. Man is both an economic and a political animal, and the

difficult problem of the political philosopher is to keep the one from

trespassing upon the rights of the other. The economic man, under the

drive of the acquisitive instinct, regards the political state as an

ally in the present business of acquisition; and the political man

looks upon business as subject to strict regulation and control in

the interests of the state. To prevent this meddlesome interference

of each with the other, Mill laid down the principle of liberty in

terms as uncompromising as those of the Physiocrats. The “sole

end,” he asserted, “for which mankind are warranted, individually or

collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their

number, is self-protection,” and “the only purpose for which power

can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community,

against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either

physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”[642]

From this excellent school the young Godkin emerged a political

theorist of no mean ability; somewhat too dogmatic, perhaps, a

bit overconfident of the finality of his logic, but with a shrewd

dialectic, quick to separate reality from pretense, severe upon all

flummery and buncombe. That his philosophy was sharply opposed to

the current tendencies of American political life he saw clearly: to

Whiggery with its ambitious paternalisms; to centralization with its

glorification of a Bismarckian state. His thought was erected on a

foundation of _laissez faire_, and he sharply differentiated economics

and politics. As a realist he recognized differences in individual

capacity, but he was keenly suspicious of any attempt on the part

of government to compensate for such differences. Any interference

with natural law, he was convinced, entailed greater evils than

benefits. Economic competition is a struggle between individuals,

and government must content itself with its proper rôle of policeman

to keep the peace. With Mill he refused to recognize the state as a

separate entity. He never confused the personnel of government with

“what is called ‘the state’”; and as he contemplated the honesty and

capacity of the several members who administered government in a given

commonwealth, he was disinclined to entrust them with regulative

powers. Disinterested honesty and capacity, it seemed, too rarely

got into office, governments were too little acquainted with common

morality, to justify hopes of equalizing the inequality of nature by

political means.

To the sound philosophical equipment brought from England Godkin added

a very considerable understanding of American political history. The

ten years spent here before the founding of the _Nation_, had been

employed in getting at home upon the new scene. He had carefully

checked the findings of de Tocqueville and was convinced that the

French critic had gone far astray in his interpretation of the great

American experiment. In his analysis of democratic tendencies he had

fallen into the fallacy of _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, with the

result that he had got the cart before the horse; and in an article

published in the _North American Review_ of January, 1865, Godkin

entered the lists in defense of America against the criticisms of

English Tories founded on such fallacies. In its emphasis on historical

realism “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy” is a surprisingly modern

study that might almost have been written by one of our younger

historians. It is an interpretation of our political development in

terms of environment, and it traces the rise of democracy to the

leveling influence of decentralization. For a hundred and fifty

years, he pointed out, old-world habits and customs, the spirit of

aristocracy, prevailed in the closely grouped settlements along the

Atlantic seaboard, where physical conditions restrained the tendency

to social disruption; but with the breaking through of the Appalachian

barrier, and the influx of new waves of immigration, the conditions

were prepared for a vast movement of decentralization. It was the

Inland Empire that made possible the democratic revolution in America.

“How was it,” he asks, “that that democratic tide, which within the

last fifty years, has overwhelmed everything, during the previous

hundred and fifty years gave so few signs of rising?” And his reply to

the question antedates Professor Turner’s theory of the frontier by

thirty years:

If we inquire what are those phenomena of American society which it

is generally agreed distinguish it from that of older countries,

we shall find ... that by far the larger number of them may be

attributed in a great measure to what, for want of a better name,

we shall call “the frontier life” led by a large proportion of the

inhabitants, and to the influence of this portion on manners and

legislation, rather than to political institutions, or even to the

equality of conditions. In fact, we think that these phenomena,

and particularly those of them which excite most odium in Europe,

instead of being the effect of democracy, are partly its cause, and

that it has been to their agency more than aught else, that the

democratic tide in America has owed most of its force and violence.

The agency which, in our opinion, gave democracy its first great

impulse in the United States, which has promoted its spread ever

since, and has contributed most powerfully to the production of

those phenomena in American society which hostile critics set down

as peculiarly democratic, was neither the origin of the Colonists,

nor the circumstances under which they came to the country, nor

their religious belief; but the great change in the distribution of

the population, which began soon after the Revolution, and which

continues its operation up to the present time.[643]

Godkin was thirty-four when he entered upon his life work of pouring

a stream of fresh and free thought upon the ways of the Gilded Age.

It was somewhat in the spirit of Matthew Arnold that he interpreted

the function of criticism. “The highest allegiance of every man,” he

wrote Norton in 1865, “is due to liberty and civilization, or rather

civilization and liberty”;[644] and the creed of the _Nation_, which

Godkin unconsciously modified as culture dispossessed liberty in his

affections, may be summed up in the words democracy, individualism,

morality, culture, to the end of a free life in a humane and

well-ordered society. Throughout the Gilded Age this transplanted

English liberal was the high priest of criticism in America. His

caustic intelligence played ironically about the current shibboleths

and fetishes, reducing them to shreds and patches. He could discover

little that was good in the Gilded Age, in its tariffs and land grants,

its _Crédit Mobilier_ and other scandals, its buccaneer plutocracy,

its undisciplined proletarianism, its bitter agrarianism; and he was

prompted to a severity of judgment that easier-going natures thought

harsh. Enemies sprang up in his every footprint; but too much was at

stake, he believed, to temper his criticism to flabby minds, and he

laid about him with what he considered a fine impartiality.

It was a cold plunge into a dirty pool, and a nature less robust would

have scrambled out quickly. His realism was a profound discouragement

to his idealism, and his native aristocracy of temperament closed

his mind to the virtues of certain homely American liberalisms. As

an intellectual he distrusted all Jacksonian frontier freedoms.

The doctrine of liberty did not appear to advantage in the garb of

agrarians and proletarians; Thaddeus Stevens and Terence V. Powderly

were an ungainlier breed of libertarians than Gladstone and Mill; with

such leadership it seemed to Godkin that liberty was running away

with civilization and a smash-up was likely. It was the duty of the

_Nation_, therefore, to arouse the culture of America to its political

obligations, to the end that the custodianship of liberty should be

taken over by the intelligence of America. It proved a discouraging

job, and slowly on the horizon of his mind rose the shadow of the doubt

that had troubled de Tocqueville and Cooper and Fisher Ames--must a

democracy prove a leveling influence that destroys a fine individuality

and a generous social culture? Careless of his trusteeship, was not

the American democrat throwing his heritage to the demagogue and the

spoilsman?

As he watched the scrambling heedlessness of the times his liberalism

oozed away, his democratic faith lost its sanctions, and he slowly

drifted to the right and the dead-sea of pessimism. The mass was too

powerful in America, and the mass was shot through with the spirit of

selfish leveling. The democracy had been distorted by the frontier,

and the sense of responsibility, of individual duty, was well-nigh

atrophied. The vulgar West threw its crudity upon all America. “I do

not like the western type of man,” Godkin confessed to Norton; and to

another friend who praised California, he wrote, “No scenery or climate

I had to share with western people would charm me.” He never spared

his mordant adjectives in commenting privately on all America west of

the Hudson River. In his gloomy later years he found consolation in

Brahmin culture. For years he lived in Cambridge, and in the company

of Lowell and Norton he felt at home. Here were democratic gentlemen

worthy of his ideal. If all America were only like Cambridge his faith

in a cultivated liberalism would be justified. In those years he called

himself “an American of the _vieille roche_,” which being interpreted,

meant a liberal of the Brahmin school.

The immediate problems on which Godkin was called to pass judgment

brought him into the thick of the struggles of the Gilded Age. As

an editor he confronted the bitter antagonisms that sprang from

the rivalries of the farmer, the wage-earner, and the industrial

capitalist. Each group was seeking to enlist government on its side

and use the political state for special and narrow ends. To a disciple

of Mill all such attempts were no better than treason to democracy,

and when such treason was justified by what he considered specious

economic theory Godkin’s hostility was edged with acerbity. All the

trenchant dogmas of his philosophy--his police theory of the state, his

Ricardian _laissez faire_, his individualism--rushed to the attack of

such impudent impostors. With no organized forces at his back he made

war on every major group in America. He essayed to rally the scattered

minority of the intellectuals and overthrow the citadel of economic

power by appeal to reason. It was magnificent but it was scarcely war.

The culture of the Gilded Age was undisciplined, lacking faith and

unnurtured in philosophy, fastidious rather than vigorous--the poorest

of material for shock troops. It applauded every clever thrust of its

captain, but preferred to keep its own hands unsoiled. In consequence,

to the end of his life Godkin was a leader without a following, little

more than a voice crying in the wilderness.

For the rising plutocracy Godkin felt the scorn of a gentleman for the

vulgar new-rich. Its hands were dirty, and it was soiling all American

life. Its gospel of Whiggery, that under pretense of furthering

prosperity had turned Congress into an auction room, was an insult to

his Manchester liberalism. Just as surely as government meddles with

subsidies and tariffs and grants, he pointed out, will it be defiled.

Men are but indifferent honest, and if statesmen are not to become

mere political hucksters they must stand apart from the temptations of

business. The plea for a national economy had brought Congress to the

_Crédit Mobilier_ scandals, and it would breed other scandals so long

as it was heeded. The only cure for Whiggery was to destroy it. In a

scathing leader he early paid his respects to the Whiggish system of

governmental subsidies:

The remedy is simple. The Government must get out of the

“protective” business and the “subsidy” business and the

“improvement” and the “development” business. It must let trade,

and commerce, and manufactures, and steamboats, and railroads, and

telegraphs alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.

We care nothing about the wonderful stories we hear about what can

be achieved in the way of “promoting industry” by all these canal

and steamboat and railroad schemes. Were the material prospect

twice as tempting, the state could not profitably meddle with

them, because neither it nor any other government in the world

_can command the virtue necessary to carry them on_. This is not

a matter of speculation; we know it as a matter of experience. It

is almost as much as this Government can do to maintain order and

administer justice. It may one day be able to do a great deal more,

but not until a great change has occurred in the social condition

of the country. We have gone far enough, heaven knows, on the road

of “protection” and “promotion,” and have found at every step that

it leads straight to the bottomless pit; that for every hundred

dollars voted by these poor men to whom we pay scanty wages for

passing bills at Washington, we lessen, and perceptibly lessen, the

stock of individual honor, of self-respect, and of public spirit,

of a loyalty to ideals, to which far more than to any triumphs of

material industry, we must look for continued national greatness.

We are making money fast enough in all conscience; what needs

fostering just now is honesty.[645]

Godkin found it exceedingly difficult to foster the austere honesty

that he desired in the body politic, and in his fury at the common

political scoundrelism he came to ascribe much of the virus that was

poisoning America to the party of western agrarians. He was rapidly

drifting to the right and the defense of capitalism, and as the

agrarian platform was slowly built up of successive planks--greenbacks,

free silver, subtreasuries, railway regulation, the income tax--he

turned upon it all the batteries of his wrath. Godkin never understood

the American farmer, but he professed to understand economics and

political science, and the agrarian platform aroused his implacable

hostility. In his frequent discussions of the currency question, a

question that for thirty years was a subject of passionate debate,

he was at some disadvantage. Intellectually he was ill equipped to

deal with it. Although a Ricardian he failed to grasp Ricardo’s

quantitative principle of money or the function of paper currency. As

a gold-standard advocate he accepted the English monetary system as

it was given form by the Parliamentary Bank Act of 1844, and he would

have no tampering with it. To Godkin money was a measure of value,

and a fluctuating standard, implied in the quantitative theory, was

as immoral as a fluctuating yardstick. The use of greenbacks--“rag

money”--he reckoned a scheme by which dishonest debtors might cheat

their creditors.[646] He was forced to regard gold and silver as

commodities, fluctuating in price with supply and demand; but he looked

upon them as possessing a stable natural value that placed them beyond

political manipulation. Any attempt to disturb this natural value by

artificial means he called dishonest.[647] He was almost indecent

in the vehemence of his adjectives applied to the “dishonest money

men.” He called the Greenbackers “communists,”[648] and speaking of

the Grangers, he said, “There is nothing unnatural or deplorable in a

Granger turning from one form of swindle to another.”[649]

By the middle nineties it was hard to distinguish Godkin’s views on

the agrarian program from those of a Wall Street banker. In discussing

free silver he abandoned economic principles and fell to mouthing

like any newspaper writer. The currency question he regarded as a

simple question of public morality. There was only one issue, the

issue between honest and dishonest money. “The demand for free-silver

coinage is a demand for a division of property,”[650] he said in the

early days of the campaign of 1896, and a fortnight later he took

extreme ground:

... the bold and wicked scheme of repudiation ... is presented

without a blush in the platform. Upon this question the campaign

must be fought. If the party of repudiators cannot be put down, the

republic cannot be preserved and is not worth preserving.[651]

Such pronouncements bear none of the earmarks of dispassionate

criticism. It may seem severe to suggest that they are the comments of

a very ignorant or shallow critic, blinded by his prejudices; yet it is

true. The equipment of Manchester economics with which he had outfitted

himself in the late forties, was no longer adequate in the nineties;

yet he seems not to have been aware of the fact. The mid-Victorian

still regarded himself as an authority on all economic questions,

although he seems to have done no serious reading in economic theory

for half a century, and was scarcely conscious how far he had drifted

towards the right. The old liberal was fighting the battles of

capitalism with weapons as antiquated as the old cap-and-ball musket.

“The great trouble with all silverites and currency lunatics, North

and South,” he said, “is that, when monetary crises arise, they cannot

be got to go to the right quarter for information”--a comment that one

might retort upon Godkin himself. The intellectual knew far less about

money than “Coin” Harvey, whom he would have laughed at.

The same drift to the right is evident in the pronouncements on the

Populist movement of the times. Writing on “The Kansas Situation,” when

the farmers’ unrest was becoming militant, he remarked:

Such an unexpected outbreak as this of the last two or three

years shows at least that it is not only in the cities, where the

foreign-born swarm, that demagogues may thrive and the doctrine of

revolution be preached.[652]

The “ravings of the Farmers’ movement” he regarded as no more than a

“vague and visionary discontent,” that was seeking political cures for

its economic ills. The hard times from which the West was suffering

were the result of economic law. It was not the currency or excessive

railway rates that were the cause. The vast extension of railway

systems had brought under cultivation too many acres, and the reduction

of transportation costs would serve only to bring additional acres

under cultivation, thereby increasing competition and forcing prices

still lower. High railway rates were the surest safeguard against

further extension of an industry much overdeveloped; and for state

legislatures to attempt to fix railway tariffs by law--to attempt to

control economic forces by statutes--was sheer folly. In discussing the

celebrated Illinois railway legislation Godkin spoke in defense of the

roads:

The locomotive is coming in contact with the framework of our

institutions. In this country of simple government, the most

powerful centralizing force which civilization has yet produced

has within the next score years, yet to assume its relation to

that political machinery which is to control and regulate it....

The corporations of course contested the validity of the law. If

the legislature could establish one rate at which they should do

the work of transportation, it could establish another. They were

fighting for their lives and property; it was against taxation

without representation.... An arbitrary power is claimed in the

supreme legislative body to decide on the reasonable rates of the

cost of private services. Just as three hundred years ago the price

of bread and labor was regulated by act of Parliament, so now the

cost of transportation is to be fixed by a jury of twelve men....

Thus far, therefore, the results of the Illinois railroad war must

be regarded as rather portentous than satisfactory.[653]

The “watered-stock hallucination,” that had taken possession of the

agrarian mind and aroused such bitterness, he dismissed with a curious

comment that did no great credit to his intelligence.

There is ... one difficulty in the way, which is the difficulty

common to many of the proposed reforms in railroad management--the

practice alleged has absolutely no existence except in the heated

brain of the agitators who have imagined it. There are no roads in

the United States on which any attempt has been made to increase

the freight earnings in proportion to the watered stock or

debt.[654]

The passions aroused by the campaign of ’96 swept Godkin from his

moorings and left him adrift. He quickly convinced himself that the

real issue at stake was the moral integrity of the nation. As he

studied the platforms and leaders he found little comfort in either.

For McKinley he had the contempt of the intellectual for a purveyor

of heavy platitudes, and he flayed him in a two-column leader with

his old skill.[655] But for Bryan, the “boy orator of the Platte,” his

dislike passed the bounds of decency; and for the Chicago convention

that put him in nomination--“the roaring mob” with its “Populistic,

anarchistic platform”--his contempt outran his command of invective.

No such collection of inflammatory and reckless men ever put

themselves on exhibition in a national convention. Beside them

the Populists are lamb-like, and the socialists sucking doves.

The country has watched their mad proceedings with disgust and

shuddering, only impatient for the coming of November to stamp out

them and their incendiary doctrines.[656]

To what lengths his overheated brain carried him in those political

dogdays, how starkly reactionary he had become, is suggested by his

comment on the plank in the Democratic platform attacking the scandal

of injunctions:

This blow at the courts shows how true are the instincts of the

revolutionaries. They know their most formidable enemies. Judicial

decisions have again and again drawn the fangs of confiscatory and

revolutionary legislation, and the courts have come more and more

to stand as the great bulwarks of property and personal rights.[657]

Godkin’s last years were not happy. The wave of imperialism that swept

over England and America, with its Boer War and Spanish War, brought

him acute concern. The world that he knew was slipping from its

moorings, and he was fearful of the seas into which it was plunging.

The conquest of the Philippines seemed to him a badge of national

degradation. Writing in November, 1899, he said:

We are dragging wearily in the old way, killing half a dozen

Filipinos every week, and continually “near the end.” The folly of

ignorance and rascality we are displaying in the attempt to conquer

and have “subjects” would disgrace a trades union.[658]

As he watched the tedious process of subjugation he inclined to

attribute to Kipling a large share of the current imperialism. “I think

most of the current jingoism on both sides of the water is due to him,”

he wrote a few weeks later. “He is the poet of the barrack-room cads,”

a “most pernicious, vulgar person”; and his “White Man’s Burden,”

cabled to America and printed on the front pages of the newspapers as

a message to imperialist America, must have rubbed across Godkin’s raw

nerves. The pious cant of Kipling’s imperialism was a bitter cup for a

disillusioned liberal. The Jubilee with its fulsome laudation of “fat,

useless royalty,” was fittingly commemorated by this noisy poet of

imperialism, and Godkin turned away from it all in disgust.

But turn where he might he found no comfort. His old dreams of a free

and enlightened democracy rising in America, were dead. Victorian

liberalism had been laid away in the grave of John Stuart Mill, and

only its ghost was walking in these latter times. Godkin’s last days

were bitter, and the gloom that was settling upon him crept into his

letters. It is a malady common amongst liberals, and how deeply it had

struck in is revealed in such passages as these:

I am not sanguine about the future of democracy. I think we shall

have a long period of decline ... and then a recrudescence under

some other form of society.[659]

I do not know what the future of our modern civilization is to be.

But I stumble where I firmly trod.[660]

Things look very black. I think that while money-making will long

continue on a great scale, the government will shortly undergo

great changes which will be presided over not by men of light and

learning, but by capitalists and adroit politicians.[661]

I came here fifty years ago with high and fond ideals about

America.... They are now all shattered, and I have apparently to

look elsewhere to keep even moderate hopes about the human race

alive.[662]

The idealist is prone to be exigent in his demands upon civilization.

He marks out a straight path to the goal of his hopes, and takes it

greatly to heart when society chooses to follow other ways to other

ends. Godkin’s mind was keenly critical, but his sympathies were narrow

and his prejudices great. It is well to be a friend to civilization,

but it is foolish to set up as a custodian; for civilization, like

Topsy, will shift for itself. A just and liberal government is an

excellent ideal, but it is one for which few amongst the mass of men

greatly care; and because America chose to follow its own nose, because

it would not become like the America of his dreams, Godkin allowed his

heart to fill with bitterness. It is true that his recompense for long

years of labor was scanty; the Gilded Age was not to be frightened

from its fleshpots by his warnings. But long ago it was said, “Wisdom

crieth in the streets and no man regardeth her,” and why should Godkin

have become discouraged with civilization because certain blackguard

years clove to their blackguardry, instead of mounting to the somewhat

arid heights he pointed out? One must choose at the last between

tolerance and pessimism, and Godkin chose pessimism.

It is difficult today to understand his great influence with cultivated

readers of his generation. In part perhaps it was due to his crisp

assurance. He put things so plumply, he wrote so brilliantly, that his

readers were persuaded he must think as neatly. Yet his trenchant prose

style cannot hide a certain slightness of matter. His later comments

tended to become ever thinner and shriller--not criticism at all, but

the sharp expression of aging prejudice. When he talked about the

tariff he had Mill at his elbow; but when he talked about the agrarian

or the proletarian movements he was little more than a blue-jay

scolding at a world he disliked. Unlike his great master he did not go

forward to meet new times; he did not reinterpret Victorian liberalism

in the light of the lessons taught by the Industrial Revolution; but by

standing still he did liberalism a real disservice.

IV • Fiction Considers the State of the Country

It was only a question of time before the novel would throw off the

inhibitions of the genteel and turn to consider the state of the

country. A changing social order would not fail of reflection in

the pages of fiction, and as the novelists fell to scrutinizing the

familiar scene, comparing the reality with the patriotic professions,

it was certain that the workings of democracy would come in for sharp

criticism. In the last decades of the century the problem novel spread

swiftly, expanding the field of its inquiry, and seeking to understand

the new ways. Making its first essays in the familiar field of the

political, it soon turned to consider the economic problems arising out

of the new industrialism, espousing either capitalism or labor as the

social sympathies of the author might determine. The class passions

of the times found a reflection in its pages, and in consequence the

sociological novel became increasingly a repository of the social ideas

of a perplexed and troubled generation.

1 • The Political Novel

Of the early political novels three are of sufficient interest to

reward attention: _The Gilded Age_ (1873), _Democracy_ (1881), and

_An American Politician_ (1884). The first, written by Mark Twain

in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, is a satire of Gilded

Age ways with particular attention to the political corruption of

General Grant’s administration. The fictional disguise is slight.

The actual Washington is presented vividly and familiar figures--Ben

Butler, Oakes Ames, President Grant, Secretary Boutwell--move through

the scene. The central figure, Senator Dillworthy, was modeled upon

Senator Pomeroy of Kansas, who had recently lost a reëlection through

an unlucky exposure of an attempt to bribe the Kansas legislature.

The heroine, Laura Hawkins, is a western lobbyist who in order to put

through a congressional steal under pretense of providing an industrial

school for the freedmen, twists Congressmen about her fingers, turns

adventuress and ends in tragedy. Out of the West comes the spirit of

corruption that the respectable East is unable to withstand, until the

itch of speculation infects the whole country. It is Colonel Sellers

who embodies the slackness of frontier political morals, that in turn

vitiates his political principles. The genial Colonel is quite frankly

a Greenbacker.

The country is getting along very well, [he said] but our public

men are too timid. What we want is more money. I’ve told Boutwell

so. Talk of basing the currency on gold; you might as well base it

on pork. Gold is only one product. Base it on everything! You’ve

got to do something for the West. How am I to move my crops? We

must have improvements. Grant’s got the idea. We want a canal from

the James River to the Mississippi. Government ought to build

it.[663]

The analysis is not penetrating. The real sources of political

corruption--the rapacious railway lobbyists that camped in brigades

about the capitol building--are passed over, and attention is

fastened on small steals--the Knobs University bill and the Columbus

River Navigation scheme--that do not touch the real rascals of the

day. The implication is unmistakable that the source of corruption

is the Jacksonian West with its heritage of the spoils spirit. The

Federalistic East is victimized by the rapacities of mid-western

politicians with their religious cant, their talk of the rights of the

people and the greatness of the plain democracy. Senator Dillworthy is

fairly unctuous in his oily Christian spirit, and Brother Balaam is his

fellow. The portraits, one suspects, need not be taken seriously as

pictures of the chief apostles of preëmption and exploitation. To have

sketched the real leaders of the great barbecue might have involved too

many unpleasantries.

_Democracy_, written seven years later, is an inferior book in

every way, less penetrating, less amusing, less creative. To essay

to penetrate the dark places of political jobbery through the eyes

of a society woman, too high-bred to turn lobbyist and inveigle

secrets out of ambitious politicians, is sufficiently absurd, yet not

uncharacteristic of the Henry Adams whose home was a distinguished

salon and who in pottering about the political world of Washington

deceived himself in thinking he had his finger on the web of intrigue.

It is an amazing book for such a man to write. The attitude is that of

the kid-gloved reformer who goes in for civil service reform, and who

views the uncultivated West as the source of all political corruption.

The hero, Senator Silas Ratcliffe of Peoria, Illinois, like Senator

Dillworthy, is a past master in political organization who covers his

dishonesty with religious cant. The economic sources of political

corruption are ignored, and the evil is traced to the principle of

democracy. Whatever political convictions are in the book are expressed

by Representative Gore, a civil service reformer from Massachusetts,

and quite evidently Henry Adams himself; and the conclusion is thus set

forth:

“Do you yourself think democracy the best government, and universal

suffrage a success?”

Mr. Gore saw himself pinned to the wall, and he turned at bay with

almost the energy of despair:

“These are matters about which I rarely talk in society.... But

since you ask for my political creed, you shall have it. I only

condition that it shall be for you alone, never to be repeated

or quoted as mine. I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will

faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears

to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it.

Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to a

higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at

this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to

see the result. I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only

direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only

conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the

only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other step

is backward, and I do not want to repeat the past. I am glad to

see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be

neutral.”

“And supposing your experiment fails,” said Mrs. Lee; “suppose

society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and

communism.”

“... I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new

ones.... faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest.

Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee! If our age is to be beaten,

let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious, let us be first

to lead the column. Anyway, let us not be skulkers or grumblers.

There! have I repeated my catechism correctly? You would have it!

Now oblige me by forgetting it. I should lose my character at home

if it got out.”[664]

And the conclusion of the matter is thus summed up:

“I want to go to Egypt,” said Madelaine, still smiling faintly;

“democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces. Oh, what rest it would

be to live in the Great Pyramid and look out forever at the polar

star!”

Not a hint of the Industrial Revolution; not a hint of the sordid

Whiggery that was fouling American politics; not a suggestion of any

creative social philosophy on which to establish an adequate theory of

democracy. A dreary place at best, with no faith in human nature and no

trust in democratic machinery, but only a gentlemanly belief that an

antiquated Federalism may somehow pull this venture in republicanism

out of the bog in which Jacksonianism had mired it. No wonder Henry

Adams would not set his name on the title-page, but left it an orphan

to make its own way in the world. In his life of John Hay, William

Roscoe Thayer has explained the situation thus:

The Adamses, the Hays, and Clarence King formed an inner circle,

which somebody named “The Five of Hearts,” and out of this came,

in 1882, a novel entitled _Democracy_, a strikingly clever satire

on Washington society. Its authorship was at once attributed to

them, but one after another denied it. If it was a joint product

no individual could monopolize the credit; and as it seems to have

been read chapter by chapter to the group, and discussed by them

all, it might be said, technically, to be a composite. Clarence

King is still commonly regarded as its author; and there are many

supporters of Hay; but I believe that only Mr. Adams possessed the

substance, and style, and the gift of Voltairean raillery which

distinguish it.[665]

Mr. Thayer is generous in his praise.

_An American Politician_ is even less consequential as a political

study than _Democracy_. Marion Crawford was a professional romancer

and in this naïve venture into a field little known to him he carried

his complete romantic kit. The political theme is tied about with so

many love strands as almost to strangle it. The hero, John Harrington,

we are assured is a very remarkable man, a Bostonian with a Mayflower

teapot in his family treasures, an idealist of primitive Puritan

intensity. But we must take him upon hearsay. Nothing that he does

or says suggests his greatness. Politically the book is reduced to a

little glimpse of the methods of selecting a United States senator--an

Irish ward boss with twenty votes in his belt, a gentlemanly railway

attorney who handles offal skillfully with a handkerchief at his

nose--set in between two set speeches by the hero. The rest is Newport

and the Back Bay, not quite stupid yet with no distinction. The

romancer does not move easily in an unfamiliar field, and he sends

his hero forth to battle for righteousness with small intellectual

equipment. His speeches are heavily oratorical and his political

philosophy is naïve; it is pretty much George William Curtis, the

sufficiency of civil service reform and the virtues of non-partisanship.

The unreality of the book is furthered by a conception worthy of

Poe--a mysterious council of three that meets in London and directs

political movements in America. We are dimly aware that the council

is both ancient and honorable; that it goes back historically to

post-Revolutionary days and is self-perpetuating; and its uncanny

power has resulted from supreme intelligence supplemented by exact

information gathered during many years. In its secret archives every

public man in America is tagged and docketed; his political and

financial affiliations are set down in detail; and on the basis of this

knowledge the cryptic three send forth instructions that are faithfully

carried out. The danger to America lies in sectionalism--North, South,

and West struggling for supremacy in the national councils; and upon

the three rests the self-imposed responsibility of saving America

from itself. The idea is sufficiently absurd, as the book is absurd.

Crawford was a cosmopolitan who knew little about American political

conditions, and the crisis of the novel is the Hayes-Tilden _impasse_

of 1876. The influence of the novel, one may safely assume, was

negligible.[666]

2 • The Economic Novel

The theme of these earlier novels was politics as revealed by the

Gilded Age; on the other hand _The Bread-winners_ was one of the early

economic novels. Like _Democracy_ it was an outcome of the discussions

of the vivacious trio, John Hay, Clarence King, and Henry Adams.

Written in 1882 by Hay, it was published anonymously in the _Century

Magazine_ from August, 1883, to January, 1884. Hay never publicly

acknowledged the authorship, and it was not until the edition of 1915

appeared with an introductory note by his son, that his name appeared

on the title-page. It achieved a notable success--far beyond that of

_Democracy_; was warmly praised and sharply criticized; was replied to

in other novels; all of which goes to show that it fanned the coals

that were smoldering in the industrial life of the day, threatening

a general conflagration. It was the first recognition on the part of

literature that a class struggle impended in America--a first girding

of the loins of polite letters to put down the menace that looked

out from the underworld of the proletariat; and as such it assumes

importance as an historical document quite beyond its significance as a

work of art.

The motive of _The Bread-winners_ is the defense of property against

the “dangerous classes”; its immediate theme is a satire of labor

unions. In an introductory note to the later edition, Clarence Leonard

Hay explicitly denies this. “_The Bread-winners_,” he says, “is not

directed against organized labor. It is rather a protest against the

disorganization and demoralization of labor by unscrupulous leaders

and politicians who, in the guise of helping the workingman, use his

earnings to enrich themselves.” He then states the theme thus:

It is a defense of the right of an individual to hold property, and

a plea for the better protection of that property by law and order.

Civilization rests upon law, order, and obedience. The agitator

who preaches that obedience to lawful authority is a sin, and

patriotism an illusion, is more dangerous to society than the thief

who breaks in at night and robs the householder.

The editor thinks well of the American workingmen. At heart they are

sound; their motives are honest; but their ignorance of fundamental

economic principles too easily suffers them to fall victim to

unscrupulous demagogues whose only object is their exploitation. To

prevent such “disorganization and demoralization of labor,” which

can bring only suffering and failure upon men ill prepared to endure

them, is therefore the patriotic duty of the educated classes. The

proletariat is groping blindly for leadership; it is stirring uneasily;

if the educated classes do not offer an enlightened leadership, the

laborer will follow low cunning to immoral ends and blind leaders of

the blind will bring irretrievable disaster upon civilization. Selfish

appeal will kindle envy and hate; the rich and prosperous will go down

before brute force; the rights of property will be destroyed; law,

order, and obedience will give place to anarchy.

Such, briefly developed, is Clarence Hay’s exposition of _The

Bread-winners_; and the exposition seems to suggest the social views of

John Hay. He probably had no antipathy to labor unions which are guided

in their policy by “sound economic principles” and right “morality”--as

the capitalist understands such things. But labor unions which follow

their own leaders, which persist in thinking out a proletarian economy,

which are bent on substituting a social morality for a property

morality, which refuse to be led by the “educated classes,” he was

bitterly hostile to. It is the unrest furthered by rebellious labor

unions that he fears, and it is this that gives point and animus to

his satire. That _The Bread-winners_ was conceived in a spirit of

beneficent paternalism towards the proletariat, the present-day reader

will have difficulty in discovering. It is too frank in defense of

vested interests, it looks with too stern a disfavor upon all labor

leaders who refuse to accept the finality of the present industrial

order, it exudes too strong an odor of property-morality, to deceive

an intelligent reader. Read today it is clearly a partisan defense

of economic individualism, an attack upon the rising labor movement,

a grotesque satire smeared with an unctuous morality--and because of

this, a perfect expression of the spirit of upper-class America in

those uneasy eighties with their strikes and lockouts and Haymarket

riots.

The plot of the book is slight--it is the story of the oily

machinations of Ananias Offitt, a professional agitator who lives off

simple honest workmen whom he seduces, organizes a secret Brotherhood

of the Breadwinners, urges on riot and robbery at the time of a great

strike, is checkmated by the hero--a cultivated and elegant clubman by

the name of Captain Arthur Farnham--betrays his tool, and in the end

is murdered by him. Fortunately for the welfare of property interests

there are “honest” workmen, men like Leopold Grosshammer, who rally

to the support of law and order and eventually break the strike. The

love-story is provided with two heroines, and the contrast between them

emphasizes the class line which property draws. The upper-class heroine

is as correct and colorless as Cooper’s Eve Effingham: the lower-class

heroine is as vulgarly handsome and as brazen as “such people” are

supposed to be. A high-school education has spoilt her for the factory

or domestic service, filling her empty head with foolish ambitions, but

it could not make a lady of her.

Hay was in Cleveland at the time of the great strike in 1877, and

he was profoundly disturbed by the experience. Writing to his

father-in-law, he said:

The prospects of labor and capital both seem gloomy enough.

The very devil seems to have entered into the lower classes of

workingmen, and there are plenty of scoundrels to encourage them

to all lengths.... I am thankful you did not _see_ and _hear_

what took place during the strikes. You were saved a very painful

experience of human folly and weakness, as well as crime.[667]

The crying evils of a buccaneer industrialism which lay behind the

strikes, Hay ignored completely. To provide his idyllic background of

contented labor before it is seduced by demagogues, he goes back to

a decadent domestic economy. His “honest and contented workman” is a

carpenter who works for another carpenter--not a factory-hand tending

a machine; and when the demagogue comes with his specious appeal he is

triumphantly refuted.

“What are we, anyhow?” continued the greasy apostle of labor. “We

are slaves; we are Roossian scurfs. We work as many hours as our

owners like; we take what pay they choose to give us; we ask their

permission to live and breathe.”

“Oh, that’s a lie,” Sleeny interrupted, with unbroken calmness.

“Old Saul Matchin and me come to an agreement about time and pay,

and both of us was suited. Ef he’s got his heel onto me, I don’t

feel it.”[668]

John Hay was convinced that an “educated leadership” alone could save

American democracy. But unfortunately--despite his great reputation

in diplomacy and statesmanship--his own education seems to have been

faulty. He had lately risen into the exploiting class, and he accepted

the ready-made opinions of that class. His biographer has admirably

stated his position during the days of the strike riots when he was

clarifying his views:

Those riots of 1877 burnt deep into Colonel Hay’s heart. Like

the rest of the world, he had theorized on the likelihood of war

between Capital and Labor; but he had reassured himself by the

comfortable assumption that under American conditions--equal

opportunity for all, high wages, equal laws, and the ballot-box--no

angry laboring class could grow up. The riots blew such vaporing

away: for they proved that the angry class already existed, that

the ballot-box instead of weakening strengthened it, and that not

only the politicians of both parties but also the constituted

authorities would avoid, as long as possible, grappling with it.

The event was too large to be dismissed as an outburst of temper:

it must be accepted as a symptom, a portent. Did it mean that

a cancer had attacked the body politic and would spread to the

vital organs? Was Democracy a failure,--Democracy--for more than

a century the dream of the down-trodden, the ideal of those who

loved mankind and believed in its perfectibility, the Utopia which

good men predicted should somehow turn out to be a reality? Hay

had sung his paean to liberty; Hay had throbbed at the efforts of

patriots in Spain and in France to overthrow their despots; he had

even exulted over the signs of democratization in England. Had he

been the victim of mirage? Was Democracy not the final goal of

human society, but only a half-way stage between the despotism of

Autocracy and the despotism of Socialism?

These questions he could not evade.... But he held, as did many of

his contemporaries, that the assaults on Property were inspired

by demagogues who used as their tools the loafers, the criminals,

the vicious,--Society’s dregs who have been ready at all times to

rise against laws and government. That you have property is proof

of industry and foresight on your part or your father’s; that you

have nothing, is a judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your

improvidence. The world is a moral world; which it would not be if

virtue and vice received the same rewards.[669]

John Hay, it must be recalled, had enjoyed a college education through

the aid of relatives, he had been taken under the wing of Lincoln and

become his private secretary, he had been thrust forward by influential

politicians, and finally he had married wealth--were these things

proofs of virtue in a moral world that rewards foresight and punishes

improvidence? Or were they rather the marks of a skillful climber? John

Hay was a charming and cultivated gentleman, but he was also a child of

the Gilded Age, with the materialisms of his generation in his blood.

The young man had been an Abolitionist and a political radical; the old

man was a McKinley conservative whose chief claim to reputation lay

in the “open-door” policy in China. The beginnings of this shift to

conservatism seem to have coincided with his marriage to Miss Stone,

daughter of a Cleveland capitalist whose interests were threatened by

the great strike. He was temperamentally one of John Adams’s “natural

aristocrats,” and having gained entrée into aristocratic circles he

took the coloring of his new environment. A son of the frontier, he

became a man of the world. Prosperity was necessary to him.

Professing a deep attachment to democratic institutions and hatred of

all monarchical principles--in Spain and France--John Hay ceased to

be a Lincoln democrat, and took his place amongst the ruling class,

accepting the principles of the rising plutocracy. _The Bread-winners_

is a dramatization of the Federalistic principle that government

exists for the protection of property. “Remembering the date when _The

Bread-winners_ was written,” says his biographer, “we must regard

it as the first important polemic in American fiction in defense of

Property.”[670] John Hay had become a thoroughgoing Hamiltonian. In

his younger days his sympathies had gone out to radical republicans

everywhere, and he watched the rising tide of liberalism with great

satisfaction. In his first visits to Europe he followed closely the

liberal movements. He was a warm admirer of Castelar, eulogizing him

as one of the heroic figures of modern times. In a lecture in 1869 on

“The Progress of Democracy in Europe” he spoke with the zeal of an

advanced liberal. But soon thereafter the ardor of his zeal lessened.

On later trips to Europe he did not display a like sympathy with

the program of the Social Democrats. As economic unrest crept into

politics, as strikes and boycotts began to disturb his father-in-law’s

business, he discovered less sympathy for revolutionary movements.

Political revolutions sponsored by respectable middle-class leaders,

were one thing; economic revolutions sponsored by the proletariat were

quite another thing. A democracy that breeds more democracy is clearly

dangerous. So much as has already been accomplished is excellent, of

course; but nothing further must be attempted.

There is sound strategy in offensive epithets. And so, taking counsel

of fear, he applied to the current economic unrest the words most

offensive to polite American ears, and called it socialism, anarchism.

Without pausing to weigh the demands of the farmer and the workingman,

with no understanding of the meaning of the great proletarian movement

then going forward in Europe, he appealed in defense of property to the

specter of economic leveling before which every good American of the

eighties recoiled in horror. As early as 1869, speaking of Castelar, he

said: “He has too much sense and integrity to follow the lead of the

Socialist fanatics.”[671] Commenting on the unsettled state of things

in Paris in 1883, he wrote: “The laborers have had the mischief put

into their heads by trade-unions.”[672] As he contemplated the agrarian

unrest of the seventies and later, he discovered in Greenbackism and

Populism only another form of this hateful socialism. It was the work

of agitators who were plain rascals.

He was greatly disturbed in 1875 at the state of politics, “with

half the Republicans and all the Democrats inflationists at heart,

and carrying on a campaign on the bald issue whether the nation

shall be a liar and a thief or not.”[673] And so late as 1900 he

exclaimed petulantly: “This last month of Bryan, roaring out his

desperate appeals to hate and envy, is having its effect on the

dangerous classes. Nothing so monstrous has as yet been seen in

our history.”[674] Unhappily even in free America with its equal

opportunity, and equal laws, there had come to be “dangerous

classes”--rather a good many of them, taking the populistic farmers and

discontented wage-earners into the account--so many, indeed, that John

Hay grew gloomy over the outlook. And the outlook was all the gloomier

because of our form of government; for is not the ultimate test of

our democratic institutions the test of whether they are adequate to

protect the property and “civilization” of the few against the “hate

and envy” of the discontented many?

That _The Bread-winners_ was a dishonest book Hay certainly

could not have been brought to believe; nevertheless a Tory who

covers his Tory purpose with a mantle of democracy can scarcely

be reckoned intellectually sincere. The men of the seventies and

eighties--cultivated and intelligent gentlemen like Godkin and Aldrich

and Hay--were little more than demagogues in their fustian attacks

on agrarian Greenbackers and militant labor unions; they feared and

hated them too much to understand them, and they took advantage of

their social position to cry them down. The “educated leadership” of

the Gilded Age was a somewhat sorry thing; it was ethically bankrupt

while appealing to high moral standards. The best of such leaders were

second-rate men--mediocre minds cramped by a selfish environment,

imbued with no more than a property-consciousness. Of such a world

John Hay in his _Bread-winners_ was a distinguished spokesman and

representative.[675]

3 • The Beginnings of the Sociological Novel

It was in the nineties that the sociological novel expanded into

a great movement that in the next decade and a half was to engulf

pretty much all American fiction and bring it into service to the

social conscience. Such a development was in the nature of things. The

artist would not sit forever in his ivory tower, content to carve his

statuettes while the country without was turmoiled with revolution.

Sooner or later he would venture forth and once he had been caught up

in the swirl his art would take new forms and serve other purposes than

the traditional genteel. Realism was in the air, the realism of Zola

and the Russians, and from such a realism would come in America a more

critical attitude towards the social revolution at work in the land.

It was the city that played havoc with our older fictional methods,

as it played havoc with our traditional social philosophy. America

was late in discovering the import of the huge Babbitt warrens it had

been building with such fierce energy; but slowly the realities of the

economic city rose to challenge the respectability of the romantic

city. It was the discovery of this new lair of business that created

the school of sociological fiction. The older city of literature had

been a polite world wherein ladies and gentlemen drank tea and made

love and talked proper scandal--a pleasant background of clubs and

drawing-rooms, against which moved well-dressed figures. It was an echo

of Thackeray--the world of the West End and Beacon Street and Fifth

Avenue, too well-bred and prosperous to recognize slums or stockyards

or stock-gambling. But with the nineties the old complacency was

disturbed. A note of unrest crept into the current fiction. As the

_protégés_ of Mr. Howells looked out upon their world in search of

reality, they discovered that polite society was being undermined.

Too many social climbers were thrusting themselves forward; too much

vulgarity was displayed by the new-rich. The social primacy of the old

families was being challenged by western pork-packers. Here was a rich

field to harvest. _Le document humain_ was the latest cry of realism,

and so under the inspiration of M. Paul Bourget a new crop of realism

came to fruit--clever studies in feminine psychology--the last word

in contemporary reality. The social climber was analyzed mercilessly,

her shallow and silly ambitions revealed to the least petty maneuver;

her blighting influence upon an idealistic husband or her stimulus

to a money-grabbing mate, is traced shrewdly. Such are Boyesen’s

_Mammon of Unrighteousness_, Robert Grant’s _Unleavened Bread_, and

Edith Wharton’s _House of Mirth_--studies that were symptomatic of a

generation disturbed by the consciousness of a vulgar plutocracy rising

in its midst, and yet ignorant of the nature of the disease.

Nevertheless their vogue was brief. As economic unrest rose more

menacingly upon the horizon of the new century, realism quickly

tired of its Kate Van Schaaks and Selma Whites and Lily Barts, and

turned away to prospect for a richer vein. Psychology was losing its

fascination and social analysis was supplying a new inspiration; M.

Bourget was yielding authority to Émile Zola. Even so whole-hearted a

romantic as Mary Johnston was to turn from tales like _To Have and to

Hold_ to write _Hagar_, a novel of suffrage propaganda. There was to

be not less realism but more. The change may be summarized in the word

_background_. The old individualism had unconsciously insulated its

hero from economic contacts; he moved in a polite environment detached

from the larger play of social forces. An individualism so wanting

in sociological verity could make scant appeal to the new spirit of

sociology. That old world is dead. With the rise of the philosophy

of determinism came another mood. To the realism of environment that

conceived of the individual as a pawn on the chessboard of society,

M. Zola had given the name _naturalism_. It was realism wedded to a

deterministic sociology--the first reaction of a generation awakening

to the subjugating power of the mass, and bent on studying the

resultant phenomena in the clear light of science. The change was no

less than revolutionary. The new school thought in terms of group and

class and movement, rather than in terms of individuals each nursing

his petty hopes and fears. The individual counts for so little in the

enveloping stream of social tendency. Let us have no more shoddy

heroes, foolish little egoisms in an unreal world; but figures of

men and women, encompassed by the great stream, carried along on a

resistless current. If they prove to be little better than puppets the

novelist is not to blame, but society that reduces them to impotency.

So the emerging school abandoned Howells and James and followed Frank

Norris into the camp of the naturalists. Their work might be bad

art--as the critics love to reiterate--but it was the honest voice of a

generation bewildered and adrift.

The discovery of environment led imperceptibly to another

discovery--the economic basis of society; and this in turn led to the

rejection of the polite city of older literature. Once the eyes of the

novelist opened to the significance of the economic, the world of the

spenders became less significant than the world of the makers, the

drones became less interesting than the workers. If a novel were to be

true to American life, it must adjust its perspectives to the facts of

the great American game of money-chasing; it must shift its habitat

from Fifth Avenue to Wall Street, from the club to the factory. So the

business man entered the portals of fiction, no longer the stock figure

in broadcloth and top-hat who discarded business with his dirty collar

in order to shift into respectability; but bringing with him his talk

of deals and squeeze-outs, playing the great game of exploitation at

his mahogany desk--the central, dominating figure in a capitalistic

world. He was subjected to acute analysis--his philosophy, his ethics,

the machine of industrialism he was creating, the intricate system

of exploitation that he had elaborated, the jungle city that was his

lair where he fought his battles. The more acutely he was analyzed

the clearer it became that here was a figure greater than kings or

presidents--a figure that had taken our traditional American life in

his hands and was reshaping it to his ends; and that if realism were

to be true to its ideal it must paint him as he was without detraction

and without glorification. So of necessity the younger novelists turned

from polite society to economics, and fell to dramatizing the life of

the city jungle where business men fought their fierce battles.

The forerunner of the new school was a Norwegian-American, Hjalmar

Hjorth Boyesen. An essayist and philologist, for a number of years

professor of German at Columbia University, Boyesen began publishing

as early as 1874, and thereafter contributed freely to the several

fields of the essay, poetry, and fiction; but it was not until 1891

that he opened the new vein of realism which he worked industriously

the remaining four years of his life, the life brought to a premature

close in 1895. Three novels belong to this last phase of his work: _The

Mammon of Unrighteousness_ (1891), _The Golden Calf_ (1892), and _The

Social Strugglers_ (1893). The books made considerable stir upon their

publication, for they were the nearest approach to the Tolstoian type

of realism which till then had appeared in America. They contain in

germ many of the ideas which the later city realists were to amplify

and develop; but these ideas were still entangled in the mesh of the

current psychological realism and their sociological bearings obscured.

In consequence they largely failed of their purpose, and within a

decade they had fallen into oblivion. They are of interest today

chiefly as historical documents of the early nineties.

In the preface to _The Mammon of Unrighteousness_ Boyesen sets forth

his purpose thus:

My one endeavor in this book has been to depict persons and

conditions which are profoundly and typically American. I have

disregarded all romantic traditions, and simply asked myself in

every instance, not whether it was amusing but whether it was true

to the logic of reality--true in color and tone to the American

sky, the American soil, the American character.

This, very evidently, is the realism of _milieu_--an endeavor to catch

the reality of atmosphere; and as such it is of no great significance.

In his choice of “types,” moreover, he reflected the current taste.

The crude self-made millionaire who dimly conscious of failure founds

a university; the young idealist who fails because he is conscientious

and the young realist who succeeds because he has no scruples against

playing the game; and the aristocratic climber who marries to further

her social ambitions--these are the stock figures of the realism that

was to culminate in Robert Grant’s _Unleavened Bread_, nine years

later. But in the delineation of the character of Horace Larkin--the

hero of a book that does not realize its promise--the note of the

new realism is heard distinctly for the first time. The business

man frankly breaks with the old ethics and erects a new ethics in

conformity with his ambition; and it is the elaboration of the ethics

of the Will to Power that justifies one in regarding _The Mammon of

Unrighteousness_ as a first study in the new city realism.

Horace Larkin, like Herrick’s Van Harrington, is a Nietzschean who

learned his ethics not from the German philosopher, but from the world

of cut-throat business. It is the flower of the competitive system. The

old pretense that business is an uplifting and civilizing agency--that

trade breaks down barriers and carries in its shipments the gospel of

fraternity and good will--is flung out on the scrap heap. Horace Larkin

is no smug hypocrite. He faces the facts frankly; he will not deceive

others any more than himself.

He was a beast of prey, asserting his right of survival; nothing

more. If he succumbed to sentiment (and it is far easier to succumb

to it than to resist it) he would merely be eliminating himself

from the battle of existence as a potent and considerable force,

and consigning himself to the rear ranks. And he felt in every

fibre of his being that he was born for leadership.[676]

... nobody has a right to sacrifice himself to anybody else. If he

does he simply eliminates himself from the struggle for existence,

proves his unfitness to survive. It is natural for every strong man

to try to make every other life tributary to his own; but the man

who consents to make his life tributary to somebody else’s is from

Nature’s point of view a weak man.... She may allow him to exist

in a small way; but what is existence without predominance?...

The man who is in advance of the morality of his age is, for

practical purposes, a fool. It is no use quarreling with Fate; and

in the United States the average man is the Fate that rules us and

determines our place in the world.[677]

“The majority of our politicians are a low-lived lot, and many of

them corrupt. But they have the courage to be American--crudely and

uncompromisingly American--and that is, in my eyes, a virtue which

is not to be lightly rated.”

“And may I ask, Mr. Larkin, what do you mean by being American?”

“Being frankly, ably, enterprisingly plebeian. It is the plebeian

after all, who shall inherit the earth--”

“I beg your pardon. According to the Bible it is the meek.”

“I must differ with the Bible, then; for the meek, in my

experience, if they inherit anything, never manage to keep it.

It passes, sooner or later, into the hands of the strong, the

self-assertive, the grasping. But these, as you will admit, are

plebeian characteristics. A universally prosperous, comfortable,

impudent, and enterprising mob--that is the goal toward which

we are steering; and in my opinion it is a good and desirable

one.”[678]

This is a note that is to be heard more insistently as the new realism

went further in its probing. Armed with this conviction Horace Larkin

set forth as a conqueror, and it only adds to the dramatic fitness

of things that in his rise he came across a will to power stronger,

cleverer, than his own. Kate Van Schaak climbs upon his back to

rise with him; she buys him with her money and social position, and

having made the deal she realizes on the investment. She is mistress

henceforth, and the Nietzschean smiles at the irony of the situation.

In the third work Boyesen fails to maintain the level of _The Mammon

of Unrighteousness. Social Strugglers_ is simpler, more dramatic,

better told. It carries the reader forward more easily. But it belongs

with such novels of social analysis as Charles Dudley Warner’s _The

Golden House_--mildly critical of the vulgarizing influence of the

new-rich, mildly sympathetic with the slum workers--rather than to the

new realism. The heroine--daughter of a new-rich family that has come

to New York to climb socially--awakens to the realization of parting

ways: one the path of luxury which the four hundred travel, the other

the path of service which leads to the slums and settlement work. It is

a sentimental awakening, not an intellectual, induced by the hero, who

on the fringe of the four hundred is mildly discontented with the ways

of luxury. The vague idealism of the latter has been stirred by the

Toynbee Hall experiment in London, and the persuasiveness of the lover

rather than the conclusions of the thinker carries Maud Bulkley away

from her conventional moorings.

The movement of the book is little clogged with sociological

discussions; there is too little, indeed, to justify the conclusion.

Only once does Philip Warburton lift the curtain upon the idealism

which ostensibly is the determining factor in his life.

“I frankly confess that I am something of a red. I think the world

is out of gear, and I can perfectly well conceive of a civilization

far better than ours, without yet proposing any radical amendment

to human nature....”

There was to Maud something so wholly unexpected in this ebullition

that she scarcely knew what to say. She had never philosophized

concerning life and its problems; nay, she had never suspected that

to a person who had money enough, and the access to good society,

it could present any problems whatever. She knew that some terribly

disreputable, shaggy, and wild-faced foreigners came here from

Europe and proposed to turn our admirable civilization upside down;

but that a gentleman of Warburton’s culture and social standing

could sympathize with such criminals had never occurred to her as a

remote possibility....

After this disturbing introduction Warburton proceeds to disclose what

being “a red” means to him in the way of social revolutions:

“Have you ever heard of a London experiment known as Toynbee Hall?”

he asked....

“Yes: it’s a place in the slums, where young men of good family go

to live; isn’t that it?”

“Yes; and, do you know, that is to me the most beautiful modern

instance of a real desire to help the poor and helpless--to lift

the world to a higher level. It is what I should like to do

myself--and what I shall hope some day to do....”

“Then you really think it a misfortune to be rich?” she

ejaculated....

“Yes, if wealth entails the loss of human sympathies, as in nine

cases out of ten it seems to do, I regard it as a misfortune.

If it means, as in this country it seems to mean, the loss of

vital contact with humanity, the contraction of one’s mental and

spiritual horizon, a callous insensibility to social wrongs and

individual sorrows, a brutal induration in creature comforts and

mere animal well-being, the loss of that divine discontent and

noble aspiration which alone makes us human--if it means this

or any part of it, it is the greatest calamity which can befall

a man. And it is because Christ foresaw that these were the

natural effects of great wealth, and the security and ease which

it engenders, that he declared that it was easier for a camel to

pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the

kingdom of heaven.”[679]

That is all. There is no dramatic justification of Warburton’s views;

they are without motive and foundation. _Social Strugglers_ does not

advance far along the path of the new realism.

As the years drew nearer the new century, the business man usurped

an ever larger place in American fiction; the romance which had been

sought in the deeds of 1776 was now discovered in the achievements of

enterprise. It was the unconscious testimony of literature to the hold

which business had got on the imagination of Americans. In the golden

days of the “full dinner-pail,” following the great victory of ’96,

the Captain of Industry reached the apogee of his fame. The voice of

detraction had not yet been lifted against him; the muckraker had not

yet set forth on his devastating career. To young reporters on city

papers looking ambitiously towards fiction as the goal of success,

what could offer greater appeal than the unwritten romance of Wall

Street and the Stock Exchange? They had described it for the daily

news columns, they had seen it extolled on the editorial page, why not

dramatize it in fiction? Here was the real interest of America--the

only reality that signified; yet the novelists had stupidly overlooked

it, because they lacked the journalist’s sense of news values, his

_flair_.

Of the abundant crop of fiction which resulted from this discovery, no

more characteristic examples need be sought than _The Short Line War_

(1899) and _Calumet “K”_ (1901), written in collaboration by Samuel

Merwin and H. K. Webster. Their popular success was immediate and

maintained surprisingly. The former ran to six editions, the last in

1909; the latter, to twelve editions, the last so late as 1915. They

are brisk stories, all action stripped of descriptive superfluities,

with plenty of newspaper punch: dramatizations of hustle and bluff

and the tricks of a cut-throat game. Charlie Bannon, hero of _Calumet

“K”_, is the boss who does things, who is on the job, who takes long

shots and “makes good”--a “movie” hero of efficiency. He has no time

nor inclination to think, possesses no philosophy, asks no questions

and is troubled by no doubts or scruples; his fertile brain and cool

nerve make him a first-class fighting man, and he fights as the good

soldier should on orders from above. The hero of _The Short Line War_,

Jim Weeks, is another Bannon with the same fertile brain, cool nerve,

calm tenacity of purpose, quick decisiveness, and the same lack of

intellectual interests. In war it is sound strategy to strike quick and

hard; and the Captain of Industry, let it be clearly known, is a war

captain. To play the game hard, to beat the other fellow by whatever

means serve, that is the ideal of a competitive _bourgeoisie_: not to

be too nice about the law, for everybody knows that the law is the

chief weapon of the strong; not to cherish foolish idealisms, for

everybody knows that success alone pays. No more heartless, brutal,

anarchistic books could be conceived--a mad philosophy for a mad world.

The broad movement towards a realistic portrayal of the economic city

produced its eddies and minor currents, which at times brought such

a commotion of the waters as to appear like the main current. Such

was the flood of political novels which came with the new century

and lasted well upwards of a decade. These were a by-product of the

muckraking movement--a part of the propaganda of the group of young

insurgents within the Republican party who were bent on rescuing the

party from control of the old bosses, and who prepared the way for the

more significant movement of Progressivism which followed. Such studies

as Francis Churchill Williams’s _J. Devlin--Boss_ (1901), and Elliott

Flower’s _The Spoilsmen_ (1903), were early examples; and Winston

Churchill’s _Coniston_ and _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ were probably the most

notable. They were journalistic for the most part, _exposés_ of the

“Boss” and the evils of the political machine. The “Boss” is painted in

various guises, as brutal, cunning, thoroughly vicious, or as a man

who plays the game with the same unsocial conscience that marks the

capitalist. Most frequently Lincoln Steffens is followed and the human

side of the “Boss” is “played up” equally with his political cunning.

It is the characteristic journalistic touch--a bit cheap but immensely

effective. As the movement of naturalism gained headway it became

increasingly apparent that the “Boss” was only a part of the “System,”

and the political novel merged in the economic. These brisk studies

constitute, however, a suggestive episode in our history--the literary

echo of our political history between the years 1900 and 1910.

Little in the way of social analysis was to be expected from a group

of clever journalists. They were reporters of fact, transcribers of

externals. They note the social unrest, but it is little more than

an undertone of the chorus of prosperity--a snarl of inconsequential

criticism. It is the sting of a troublesome mosquito that is brushed

off by the Captain of Industry who is too busy with big projects

to bother about insects. Such is Will Payne’s _Mr. Salt_ (1903)--a

sympathetic study of a coal-baron who is caught in the panic of ’93

but pulls out and rises higher. To provide dramatic contrast there is

the ineffective idealist who is growly and surly--“The whole thing is

rotten--the whole business scheme. It’s just a gold brick game operated

by Salt and his kind. I’d like to stick a fuse to it and touch it

off.”[680] It is feeble enough--this protest. The rebel joins wildly

in the great strike, is struck down by the hand of the law, rebels and

strikes again and gets nowhere. Only a bitter, ineffective hate rankles

in his heart, while Salt goes on triumphantly to greater power and a

sort of moral regeneration through love--a regeneration that does not

interfere with his keeping the title-deeds to his loot. An earlier

study--_The Money Captain_ (1898)--seemed to give promise of honester

work than this. It is the story of a struggle between a corrupt

gas-magnate and an enterprising editor whose _exposé_ puts the magnate

afoul of the law as interpreted by the magnate’s judges, and who is

saved from disaster by the timely death of the “duke.” At the end is a

touch of prophecy, quite startling in its forecast. These money-kings

with their strong prehensile fingers are the spawn of a common

plebeian America; the world of the makers is vulgarly democratic;

but there follows the age of the spenders, and that shall be finely,

altruistically aristocratic. The death of the hero “expunged from his

fortune that color of greedy vulgarity and left its gold untarnished.”

Dexter, for all his success, was a figure in the common democratic

foreground of business; he was intimately and solely of the great

everyday warp and woof of toil. He bore all his fruit at once--when

he died. An heirship was required to give the fortune value....

In a way it was fine and beautiful--all that huge accumulation of

pillage coming to the white, firm hands of this pretty, amiable

capable, goodhearted woman. The sudden substitution of her graceful

and gracious figure for the swart and iron figure of the duke was

like an apt transformation scene, prophetic of the future.[681]

These earlier books are mere preliminary sketches--first studies

in economic backgrounds, hesitating between admiration and

censure--satisfied to exploit the “human interest” in the dour figure

of the money-grabber. The clever newspaper men did not know enough

to do better, more realistic work; they saw the daily activities of

business but they understood little of economics, less of sociology.

And the new realism was soon to yield itself captive to sociology--to

inscribe the name of Zola boldly on its pennant and go forth to

conquer. It was Frank Norris who wrote the pronunciamiento of the new

school, boldly, magnificently, with immense faith in the finality of

his own conclusions. _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_ was to

become the textbook of the young naturalists.

Footnotes

[621] See Charles Edward Russell, _The Story of Wendell Phillips_, p.

53.

[622] Quoted in Martyn, _Wendell Phillips: The Agitator_, p. 372.

[623] See _Speeches_, Second Series, p. 139.

[624] Quoted in Martyn, _op. cit._, pp. 412-413.

[625] _Speeches_, Second Series, p. 176.

[626] _Ibid._, p. 167.

[627] _Ibid._, pp. 152-153.

[628] _Ibid._, p. 154.

[629] See _Ibid._, pp. 356-359.

[630] See _Ibid._, p. 347.

[631] Edward Cary, _George William Curtis_, p. 78.

[632] See _Ibid._, pp. 25-26.

[633] See _Ibid._, pp. 180-181.

[634] See _Harper’s Weekly_, Sept. 20, 1873.

[635] _Orations and Addresses_, “Machine Politics and the Remedy,” Vol.

II, pp. 157-159.

[636] See _Ibid._, p. 160.

[637] J. H. Wilson, _The Life of Charles A. Dana_, p. 466.

[638] Ogden, _Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin_, Vol. I, p. 11.

[639] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 17.

[640] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 140.

[641] _Nation_, July 8, 1915, p. 47.

[642] _On Liberty_, Chapter I.

[643] “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy,” in _Problems of Modern

Democracy_, pp. 25-26, 30-31.

[644] Ogden, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 48.

[645] _Nation_, January 30, 1873, p. 68.

[646] See “Public Opinion and the Currency,” _Ibid._, February 27,

1873; “The Political Situation in 1896,” in _Problems of Modern

Democracy_.

[647] See “On Gold and Silver,” _Ibid._, July 6, 1876.

[648] _Ibid._, May 25, 1876.

[649] _Ibid._, June 1, 1876.

[650] “The Issue of the Campaign,” _Ibid._, July 2, 1896.

[651] “The Platform of Revolution,” _Ibid._, July 16, 1896.

[652] _Ibid._, January 19, 1893.

[653] _Ibid._, April 10, 1873.

[654] “The Watered Stock Hallucination,” _Ibid._, October 9, 1873.

[655] “Prosperity’s Advance Orator,” _Ibid._, June 18, 1896.

[656] “The Chicago Platform,” _Ibid._, July 16, 1896.

[657] “The Platform of Revolution,” _Ibid._, July 23, 1896.

[658] Ogden, _op. cit._, Vol. II, pp. 238-239.

[659] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 199.

[660] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 217.

[661] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 243.

[662] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 237.

[663] Vol. II, Chapter 13, p. 128.

[664] Chapter 4, p. 78.

[665] Vol. II, pp. 58-59.

[666] In his original scheme Professor Parrington included Tourgée’s

_A Fool’s Errand_, but the text shows that he decided against its

inclusion.--_Publisher._

[667] William Roscoe Thayer, _Life and Letters of John Hay_, Vol. II,

pp. 5-6.

[668] Chapter V.

[669] Thayer, _op. cit._, Vol. I., pp. 6-7.

[670] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 15.

[671] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 321.

[672] _Ibid._, p. 414.

[673] _Ibid._, p. 426.

[674] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 256.

[675] In his plan Professor Parrington included here H. F.

Keenan’s _The Money-Makers_, but apparently he decided against its

inclusion.--_Publisher._

[676] Chapter XXXI.

[677] Chapter XXXVI.

[678] Chapter XXXIII.

[679] Chapter VII.

[680] Chapter IX.

[681] _The Money Captain_, Chapter 22.

Part Two: New Patterns of Thought

Chapter I • Disintegration and Reintegration

The figures of the Gilded Age, colossal yet grotesque, belonged to an

America that was passing. Another world of thought and experience was

rising above the horizon--a world in which the divinities were science

and the machine--that was to disintegrate the traditional society of

the dispersion and reshape the plastic materials in new forms. The long

tide that for two centuries and a half had been running out had come

at last to the turn. For six generations the pattern of life had been

woven by the impulse of dispersion that in scattering men along a wide

frontier had disintegrated the philosophies and rejected the social

order brought from the old world, transforming America into such a

society of free men as the Enlightenment had dreamed of--decentralized,

individualistic, democratic. Dispersion, disintegration, individualism,

anarchism--such was the inevitable drift under the compulsions of a

fluid economics and frontier ways, of which the ultimate philosophical

expression had been Thoreau at Walden Pond, discovering in his bean

patch the same anarchistic principles that Godwin had learned of the

French naturists--of which the prophet had been Walt Whitman, dreaming

amidst the formless crowds of Manhattan his generous dreams of the

democratic brotherhood--and of which Jay Gould the sordid wrecker in

Wall Street was the prosaic reality.

Then had come the Industrial Revolution that in creating great cities

and in drawing men from the plow to the machine was to undo in a few

brief years the long work of the dispersion, repudiate the ideals of

the Enlightenment, and provide a new pattern for a consolidating urban

society. Thenceforward the drift was increasingly toward concentration,

with its compulsions to reintegration and conformity--the imperious

subjection of the individual to a standardizing order, the stripping

away of the slack frontier freedoms in the routine of the factory, the

substitution of the ideal of plutocracy for the ideal of Jacksonian

democracy. And this revolutionary work of the machine was hastened

by the new spirit of science that spread silently through the land,

effecting a revolution in men’s thinking as great as the machine was

effecting in men’s lives. Provincial America had been theological-

and political-minded; but with the staying of the dispersion and the

creation of an urban psychology, the ground was prepared for the

reception of new philosophies that came from the contemplation of

the laws of the material universe. The incoming of science had two

immediate results: the application of technology to industry that was

to further the Industrial Revolution; and the impact on speculative

thought of the newly discovered laws of science that was to create

a new philosophy. In the second of these twin influences lay an

intellectual revolution that was to disintegrate the old theological

cosmos, push far back the boundaries of space and time, reorient the

mind towards all ultimate problems, and bring into question all the

traditional faiths--political and social as well as theological and

philosophical. Out of science was to come a new spirit of criticism and

realism that was to set the pattern for later thought.

The story of disintegration and reintegration is a striking chapter

in American life, a story that runs through two generations--the

generation that came to maturity in the seventies, and the generation

that came to maturity in the nineties. Between 1870 and 1900 the

broad movement of thought passed through two sharply differentiating

and contradictory phases: the extension of the philosophy of the

Enlightenment, and the final rejection of the Enlightenment in

consequence of a more rigid application of the law of causality in

the light of a mechanistic universe. During the seventies biological

evolution was interpreted in the light of earlier philosophies that

had come out of the eighteenth century. It was reckoned a fulfillment

and justification of the ideals of the Enlightenment, sanctioning

the doctrine of progress that had risen from the conception of human

perfectibility by a teleological conception of cosmic progress,

glorifying the ideal of democratic individualism, and putting the seal

of scientific approval on the philosophy of anarchism that had been the

flower of two and a half centuries of the dispersion. And then in the

nineties the clouds drew over the brilliant Victorian skies. With the

substitution of physics for biology came a more somber mood that was

to put away the genial romanticism of Victorian evolution, substitute

a mechanistic conception for the earlier teleological progress, and

reshape its philosophy in harmony with a deterministic pessimism that

denied purpose or plan in the changing universe of matter. It was an

unconscious return to the dark spirit long before brought hither by

Puritanism from the complexities of English society--the spirit that

dominated Calvinistic dogma before it disintegrated in the freedoms

made possible by the great dispersion.

The great changes came swiftly because the machine had made ready

the soil. Farmers and bankers do not think alike; country and town

create different psychologies. A simple, decentralized America had

been content with theology and metaphysics, and the intellectual

history of New England for two hundred and forty years is not greatly

skimped by being compressed into three words, Calvinism, Unitarianism,

Transcendentalism. What was true of New England was true of America

generally, except for the lesser influence of metaphysics. So long

as society was mainly agricultural--and in those portions where the

frontier spirit lingered on into later days--the church would retain

its dominant influence and theology would still bound men’s thought.

But with the revolutions in economics and industry, with the rise of an

urban society, the mind of America was making ready for the reception

of science and the realism that was eventually to spring from science.

Venturesome pioneers had been at work long before, digging about under

the thick crust of theology. Even in theocratic Massachusetts Increase

and Cotton Mather had professed a zeal for scientific investigation,

and the latter was vastly proud of his membership in the Royal Society.

In the eighteenth century Franklin and Rittenhouse and William Bartram

were evidences of a new spirit, and at Yale College President Ezra

Stiles made a small beginning of scientific study that was swept away

by his successor Timothy Dwight. In the early decades of the nineteenth

century an interest in science was spreading widely, as _Silliman’s

Journal_ witnesses. Asa Gray, Le Conte, and Agassiz encouraged the

general interest in geology, and in the sixties and seventies Lewis H.

Morgan turned to anthropology and R. L. Dugdale stimulated sociology by

his significant study of the Jukes family.

Our present concern, however, is not with the contributions of America

to abstract science, but rather with the changing mental attitude that

resulted from familiarity with scientific methods--the shift from

deductive reasoning to inductive investigation, with the consequent

breakdown of theology and the slow drift from metaphysical idealism

to scientific materialism; and such a changing attitude concerns us

because of its enormous influence on the fabric of our later thinking,

the total body of our intellectual and cultural life. Considered in

this light the intellectual revolution that resulted when the mind of

America, long shaped by theological dogmas, turned away from those

dogmas to consider the new universe presented by science, cannot be

made too much of. With the pushing out of the frontiers of space and

time, the discovery of a vast impersonal cosmos that annihilated the

petty egocentric world of good and evil postulated by the theologians,

the substitution of universal energy for a beneficent providence,

the conception of a ceaseless flux and flow that took no account of

teleological ends, the assumption of universal law and universal

causality, the mind of America quitted its quiet theological retreats

and set forth on a great adventure that was to carry far and the

results of which were to unsettle what before had been sure.

In this great work we have been engaged since European science first

rose on our horizon a half-century and more ago. To speak exactly,

it is not so much science that has taken possession of the mind, as

certain postulates of science, certain philosophies presumably derived

from science and justified by science, which we have felt bound to

incorporate in our thinking as a hundred years before the conclusions

of the Enlightenment had been incorporated. In that earlier philosophy

of the Enlightenment the whole drift had been towards a dissolvent

individualism, a disintegration of the earlier integration. In the new

interpretation after 1870 the emphasis came to rest on the whole rather

than the parts: in sociology, upon the historical growth of human

societies; in biology, upon the evolution of the higher from lower

forms. The individual, thus conceived of socially and politically, is

no longer an isolated, self-determining entity, but a vehicle through

which is carried the stream of life, with a past behind and a future

before. He is a portion of the total scheme of things, tied by a

thousand invisible threads to the encompassing whole. From the parts to

the totality, from freedom to determinism--such has been the drift of

thought that science has laid upon us and from which there is no easy

escape.

With the advent of such a conception the long movement towards

philosophical anarchism was brought to a stop. The integrating

principle of unity must eventually shoulder aside the disintegrating

principle of individualism; order must supersede willfulness. In the

outcome a conception so coercive was to deny all the aspirations of

our traditional social philosophy, surrendering society to a new

regimentation and reducing the individual to an impotent victim of

things as they are. Out of it was to spring the passionate protests

of later rebels like Theodore Dreiser and Thorstein Veblen. Yet for

the moment the rigid determinism of the premise was overlooked and man

was accepted as the first-born and heir of God’s benevolent universe.

In the seventies the new postulates of science were looked upon as no

other than fresh sanctions for the Comtean principle of continuity--of

evolution from lower to higher in biology, of growth and progress in

sociology. It was this middle ground that Herbert Spencer came to

occupy in the minds of his American disciples--holding to the older

individualism with its implications of anarchism, yet creating a cosmic

philosophy that foreshadowed the eventual dwarfing of the individual.

I • The Victorian Mood

The sturdy optimism that was a genial hallmark of the Victorian,

was erected on more substantial foundations than a middle-class

prosperity arising out of the Industrial Revolution; it was founded on

a systematic philosophy, built of excellent materials and laid up with

nice mortar-work, to which many hands contributed and in the finality

of which many minds believed. Its master idea was the conception of

growth, a conception that by contrast with the ideal of the static

of earlier times, was profoundly revolutionary. Perhaps the most

stimulating suggestion that came out of the Enlightenment, it was

evolved by Turgot in France and by Price and Priestley in England,

from the psychology of John Locke. If the human mind at birth is an

empty vessel, wanting in innate ideas and waiting to be filled by sense

perceptions, or if--to accept the familiar figure--it is a clean slate

on which the finger of experience writes what it will, then it follows

from the philosophy of Locke that the shaping of the individual is

determined by the environment that cradles him. It is not an unfolding

from within but a molding from without. Hence the idea of growth, and

hence the vast preoccupation of the Enlightenment with sociology--or

the science of environment--the hand of the sculptor that models the

plastic clay. From such a conception the principle of progress was an

inevitable deduction.

1 • Sociology and the Enlightenment

It is convenient, if not quite exact, to trace the rise of the new

gospel to Condorcet, who in the midst of the Terror and whilst in

hiding from the Jacobins, wrote his stimulating _History of the

Progress of the Human Mind_[682]--a work that was early reprinted in

America and profoundly influenced Jefferson, who professed to find its

principles exemplified in the history of his native Virginia. Condorcet

was a humane and liberal spirit, a mathematician, a physicist, a

sociologist, one of those eager Revolutionary minds passionately

devoted to the creation of a more generous social order; and his

celebrated work deserves a distinguished place in the history of social

thought. He begins as a good Lockean with the psychology of sense

perception, on which he erects his entire superstructure. Here is his

opening paragraph:

Man is born with the faculty of receiving sensations; of perceiving

and distinguishing the simple sensations of which they are

composed; of retaining them, reproducing them, combining them; of

comparing these combinations; of grasping what they have in common

and what sets them apart; of fixing signs on all such objects

in order to reproduce them more clearly and to facilitate new

combinations.[683]

He then proceeds to trace the growth of the scientific attitude from

the time of Bacon, till it culminated in the rise of social science,

with the new politics of natural rights and the new conception of man

as perfectible. It is commonly believed that the philosophers of the

Enlightenment were speculative dreamers who created a fantastic natural

man that flouted the sober realism of experience. Such a notion is

grossly absurd. Condorcet was immersed in the scientific spirit of his

age; it was to science that he looked for guidance and he had acquired

a remarkable understanding of the data already gathered in western

Europe. When he set down the following passages, therefore, he was

writing not as a speculative dreamer, but as a sociologist who relied

solely on scientific inquiry to find a way out of the social mess into

which western civilization was plunged by the selfish stupidity of

rulers who were hostile to scientific truth.

After long errors, after having lost their way in incomplete or

vague theories, the publicists have finally come to recognize the

true rights of man, to deduce them from this single truth, that he

is a being endowed with sense perceptions (_un être sensible_),

capable of shaping a train of reasoning (_capable de former des

raisonnements_), and of acquiring moral ideas.[684]

Finally, we have seen a new doctrine appear.... It is that of the

indefinite perfectibility of the human species, a doctrine of which

Turgot, Price and Priestly, were the first and most distinguished

apostles; it belongs to the tenth epoch, in which we shall develop

it broadly.[685]

In such passages is contained the kernel of Condorcet’s philosophy, the

grounds of that hope for human betterment which awakened his generous

sympathies. The _Esquisse_ is a noble contribution to the work which

the heirs of the Enlightenment, from Turgot to Comte, so eagerly and

hopefully engaged in--the work of tracing scientifically the changes of

the past in order to forecast the path of the future. After dividing

the history of social evolution into nine periods, Condorcet projects

the outlines of the tenth which is still to come.

If man can predict, with almost complete assurance, the phenomena

of which he knows the laws; if, while they are still unknown in

him, from the experience of the past he can forecast, with much

probability, the events of the future; why should one regard as a

chimerical undertaking the attempt to trace with some likeness the

picture of the future destiny of the human species, in accordance

with the facts of its history (_d’après les résultats de son

histoire_)? The sole ground of faith in the natural sciences is

this idea, that the general laws, known or unknown, that rule the

phenomena of the universe, are necessary and constant; and on what

grounds would this principle be less true for the development of

the intellectual and moral faculties of man, than for the other

operations of nature? Finally, since opinions formed from the

experience of the past, in matters of the same kind, are the

sole rule of conduct for the wisest men, why should one deny the

philosopher the right to rest his conjectures on the same base,

provided he does not attribute to them a certainty beyond that

which springs from the number, the constancy and the exactness of

his observations?

Our hopes for the future state of the human species may be

reduced to these three important points: the destruction of

inequality between nations; the progress of equality amongst a

common people; finally, the growth of man towards perfection

(_le perfectionnement réel de l’homme_). May not all nations one

day approach the state of civilization to which have arrived the

most enlightened peoples, the freest, the most emancipated from

prejudice, such as the French and the Anglo-Americans? The vast

distance that divides these peoples from the servitude of nations

subject to kings, from the barbarism of African tribes, from the

ignorance of savages, must it not gradually disappear?[686]

Condorcet was an idealist, and the grand object towards which he was

working was an adequate social philosophy that should interpret justly

the evolution of civilization. True to the genius of the Enlightenment

he believed that in reason and in the moral sense man possessed the

keys to his own progress--that the general reason under the guidance

of humane feeling must assure a progressive amelioration of life that

will eventuate in the common well-being of men in a rational society.

The age of the Enlightenment, he believed, had “opened new paths to the

political and moral sciences,” and laid bare what to him were “the true

principles of social happiness.” The American Federalists, who were

prodigal of vituperative rhetoric in assailing all French theorists,

might have read the pages of Condorcet with profit.

The idea of progress with its corollary of a philosophy of history,

thus elaborated by Condorcet, was taken over by Saint-Simon, but

came to its most elaborate expression in the work of Auguste Comte.

The grandiose philosophy of history to which Comte gave the name

of Positivism, was an attempt to formulate the law of progress in

civilization; and his dynamic sociology, which emerged naturally

from his conception of history, was an attempt to apply that law to

society. That the principle of progress is the law of nature Comte

professed to discover in the unity of all natural processes and the

historical unfolding of all systems; there are no breaks and no fresh

beginnings, but everywhere and always, continuity. From this principle

emerged the Comtean law of historical evolution with its three phases:

the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific-industrial.

If continuity is the law of nature, such continuity presupposes an

objective--presumably benevolent; and in view of such continuity

towards a benevolent objective, it is only logical to endeavor to

dispose the forces of society in harmony with the teleological purpose,

and through the application of positive knowledge hasten the advent

of the Golden Age. Hence the grand science, hitherto neglected, is

sociology. Earlier generations had placed the Golden Age in a dim past;

Comtean philosophy, in harmony with the Enlightenment, placed it in

the future as the ultimate goal of an evolving society. To forecast

the lines along which such progress will move, to read the future as a

child of the past, became therefore a prime objective of the new school

of history. The tracing of social laws was the great business at hand,

and as the founder of a new social science Comte carried further and

systematized the work begun by the Physiocrats. Before Comte history

had been little more than chronicles, without pattern or meaning,

unconcerned with the sources of change and providing no basis for

forecast; after Comte history became an interpretation and a philosophy.

One would have supposed that Positivism would have appealed to

American intellectuals, as it appealed to liberal English thinkers

like Mill and Spencer. Not only has the American mind taken kindly

to sociology, but the history of America, as Woodbridge Riley has

pointed out, offers too pat an illustration of the Comtean law of

progress to be overlooked.[687] The three centuries of American

existence--the seventeenth with its theocracy, the eighteenth with its

abstract theories of political rights and its faith in constitutions,

and the nineteenth with its industrialism based on science--would

seem to be pages out of the Positivist philosophy of history. That

Comte made so slight an impression on the mind of New England was

due, no doubt, to the current influence of transcendentalism with its

metaphysical backgrounds. Although eager young intellectuals like John

Fiske might accept it while awaiting a more adequate evolutionary

philosophy, the country was not yet ripe for Positivism. When that

time came it was Spencer rather than Comte who became the master of

American intellectuals--Spencer and in a lesser degree John Stuart

Mill. Both Spencer and Mill had come under the influence of the French

sociological school, and it was through their writings that the new

social philosophy penetrated America.[688]

2 • Biology and the Enlightenment

The appeal of Spencer to the generation born after the Civil War was

extraordinary. Ardent young minds, for whom the candles of theology

were burnt out and who were seeking new light to their feet, were drawn

to him irresistibly. Young rebels who had thrown off the guidance of

their elders and were bent on discovering fresh paths through the

tangle of dead faiths--independent souls like Hamlin Garland and

Jack London and Theodore Dreiser who were to become leaders of the

realistic revolt against the genteel tradition in life and letters and

faith--went to school to him to prepare themselves for the great work

of freeing the American mind from the old theological inhibitions.

Young men in colleges no longer read _Butler’s Analogy_, as their

fathers had done before the war, but turned with zest to Spencer’s

_Data of Ethics_ to discover a more scientific theory of conduct.

Everywhere the influence of the great Victorian penetrated, and

wherever that influence spread the old theological prepossessions

disintegrated. It is probably no exaggeration to say that Spencer laid

out the broad highway over which American thought traveled in the later

years of the century.

If the supreme excellence of Comte, as has been suggested by Lester

F. Ward, was his insistence on the ultimate unity of all processes

of nature,[689] if before him the continuity of forces had been

inadequately understood, his intellectual kinship with Spencer

cannot fail to be remarked. The latter’s master conception, which he

arrived at independently of Darwin and which life-long he applied

systematically to the several fields of thought, was the master

creative conception of the nineteenth century--the conception of

pervasive unity and organic growth. In his well-known phrase it

was the law of continuous development from the homogeneous to the

heterogeneous, from the simple to the complex; and this principle he

found exemplified in the total history of nature and man. Here then

is the Comtean law of continuity, but vastly strengthened and given a

cosmic significance by deductions from the new science. Lamarck and

Darwin laid the foundations for Spencer’s philosophy, as Condorcet and

Saint-Simon had provided the backgrounds for Comte. Trained thus in

the new school of biology, Spencer erected his synthetic philosophy

upon the broadest foundations; the principle of organic evolution

sufficed to explain for him not only the history of civilization,

but the total history of life in a physical universe; and biology,

psychology, sociology, politics, ethics--all the congeries of ideals

and institutions and bodies of knowledge that shape civilization--were

but variant expressions of the development from the homogeneous to the

heterogeneous.

The final effect of the synthetic philosophy was not to overset but

to confirm the major postulates of the Enlightenment. In his social

theory are unforeseen confirmations of the glowing hopes of Turgot

and Condorcet. From his studies in biology Spencer had come to think

primarily in terms of the individual, and only secondarily in terms of

the species and the genus. Now variation is the mark of the individual,

for strictly considered, nature knows no duplication of life forms,

but always and everywhere individual differentiation; yet since

likenesses are far greater and more cohesive than unlikenesses, the

instinct of gregariousness impels individuals to associate in ever

larger groups, interacting through association and coöperation, whence

arises a human society that tends continuously to pass from the simple

to the complex. On these two major premises then--individual variation

and the instinct of association--Spencer established his social and

political theory; and when the elaborate data drawn from biology and

ethnology and psychology are stripped away, the underlying conceptions

reveal a curious likeness to the master principles of French romantic

philosophy. This likeness becomes more striking as he explores the

fields of sociology and politics; and his final deductions tally so

closely with earlier theory as to warrant a disciple of Jefferson in

becoming a disciple of Spencer.

There is no break between Condorcet and the synthetic philosophy.

The great Victorian completed the work of the Enlightenment. In

establishing his individualism on the principle of biological

variation, Spencer was only restating in scientific terms the earlier

metaphysical individualism; in establishing his psychology upon an

unbroken sequence “from the simple reflex action by which an infant

sucks, up to the elaborate reasoning of the adult man,” with its

corollary of continuously expanding powers, he was rebuilding on the

foundation of Locke a fresh argument for the doctrine of indefinite

development, or perfectibility; in establishing his sociology on

the organic principle of “natural development,” which shapes the

individual to social ends, with an accruing wealth of individuation

that is the final objective of true social life, he justified the

French enthusiasm for liberty as the great desideratum, but liberty

enriched and augmented by association in a free society; and finally,

in establishing his ethics on the principle that “increasing fullness

of life is the ‘end’ of evolution,” and the “highest conduct is that

which conduces to the greatest length, breadth, and completeness of

life”--that the ultimate criterion of social ethics is justice and that

“every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not

the equal freedom of any other man”--he rephrased the earlier Godwinian

principle that rational liberty under the reign of justice is the

ultimate end of society.[690]

That Spencer’s social theory should have been shot through with

older ideals is not surprising when one considers his origins and

training. Sprung from radical nonconformist stock, a congenital rebel,

extraordinarily self-sufficient and coming to intellectual maturity in

the tempestuous forties with their Benthamism, their Chartism, their

exigent democracy, he was molded by forces that in large part were a

reëmbodiment of the aspirations nullified by the Napoleonic wars and

the Tory reaction, and now come again to birth. As a consequence his

political theory, like Mill’s, was deeply affected by the revolutionary

heritage. He accepted the social contract as a “theoretical, though

not a historical, basis of political authority and institutions”;[691]

the doctrine of natural rights, which, with Jefferson, he interpreted

in terms of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;

and the theory of a constantly diminishing political state, on the

hypothesis that the ultimate form of society--as in Godwin’s _Political

Justice_--will, be anarchistic.

At least, such he conceives to be the forecast suggested by the law

of social evolution. As the coercive authority of the political

state diminishes, its place will be supplied by the cohesive force

of association, until voluntary coöperation extends to all the

necessary functions of society; and since the state tends to disappear

with the growth of a rational society, the great desideratum is an

adequate sociology rather than a political theory. The net result,

therefore, of Spencer’s wide studies was a fresh justification, based

on the findings of Victorian science, of the master principles of

eighteenth-century speculation; its individualism, its liberalism, its

passion for justice, its love of liberty and distrust of every form of

coercion. The power of the majority must be curbed equally with that

of the minority and he concluded his _The Man versus the State_ with

the well-known words, “The function of Liberalism in the past was

that of putting a limit to the powers of kings. The function of true

Liberalism in the future will be that of putting a limit to the powers

of Parliament.” In the scientific speculations of the great Victorian

the aspirations of romantic thought came to fresh vitality; embodied in

a comprehensive evolutionary system they were given a fresh currency.

Herbert Spencer completed the work begun by Locke a hundred and fifty

years before, and his _Synthetic Philosophy_ brought to conclusion the

greatest intellectual movement of modern times.

As the young intellectuals, trained in the school of Spencer, looked

out on the universe in the last quarter of the nineteenth century,

they discovered, amid all its complexities an encompassing unity, a

continuous growth, a creative purpose; and from such assumptions they

justified the theory of progress, cosmic in scope and plan, that opened

wide the doors to a vaster future. If in the backgrounds of their minds

lurked the conception of determinism, it gave them no concern, for a

benevolent determinism that shapes all things to a divine end, is no

monster to be feared. In the evolutionary science were the grounds of

a genial optimism that nothing could shake. If they had lost something

of the jauntiness of the transcendental faith that beheld God plowing

furrows at Brook Farm, they were armed with a scientific faith that

by tapping stones and comparing fishes they should find His plan in

an evolving series of life forms. Browning’s Fra Lippo was a good

Spencerian in his vigorous pronouncement: