Subjected to such refinements his realism in the end became little more

than technique--a meticulous transcription of New England conventions,

the casual action submerging itself in an endless stream of talk. No

doubt Howells was true to what he saw; certainly no one has ever fixed

more exactly the thin substance of the Age of Innocence. Nevertheless

the fidelity of his observation, the refinement of his prose style,

and the subtlety of his humor that plays lambently about the edges

of his words, do not compensate for the slightness of his materials.

The record he has left is not that of a great soul brooding over the

meaning of life, puzzled, uncertain, yet tender toward the victims that

fate has seized and crushed. He was restrained by too many inhibitions

to deal frankly with natural human passions. He felt deeply and

tenderly, but he was too diffident to let himself go. It is likely

that Howells never realized the inadequacy of his temperament and the

futility of his method to any serious realism. Even in his acutest

study _A Hazard of New Fortunes_, which comes upon brutal economic

reality, the story is entangled in a mass of minute detail and never

quite breaks through. The indecisions, the repetitions, the whimsical

descriptions, the drifting talk, are all true to life, but they are

not essential or vital truth. The real issue toward which the story

moves--the problem of social justice and the contrasting systems of

wage-slavery, bond-slavery, and social democracy--is obscured in a

welter of asides and never quite reaches the front of the stage. He is

more effective in such works as _Indian Summer_, when he deals with

characters on vacation who play whimsically with love, and in _April

Hopes_, when he dwells fondly on the infinitely eloquent trivialities

of young love-making. In such studies the minute fidelity to word and

gesture, the humorous playing with invisible scruple, is a pleasant

substitute for solider material.

Howells had real gifts, of which he made the most. Refinement, humor,

sympathy--fidelity to external manner and rare skill in catching the

changing expression of life--a passion for truth and a jealous regard

for his art: he had all these qualities, yet they were not enough

to make him a great realist. He belonged to the Age of Innocence

and with its passing his works have been laid away. He has had no

followers to keep his method alive. If one may hazard an explanation

of the lot that has befallen him, it would be this. Howells the

artist mistook his calling. He was not by temperament a novelist. He

lacked the sense of drama, a grasp of the rough fabric of life, the

power to deal imaginatively with the great and tragic realities. His

genius was rather that of a whimsical essayist, a humorous observer

of the illogical ways of men. He was an eighteenth-century spirit--a

subtler Goldsmith--set down in another age and an uncongenial world.

In his later years he must have come to realize this, for more and

more he turned to the essay form. There his quiet humor and shrewd

observation fitted his sinuous prose style to a nicety. In such sketchy

autobiography as _My Literary Passions_, and more whimsically in such

genial travel essays as _Certain Delightful English Towns_, his refined

art arrived at its most perfect expression. Not an original genius like

Mark Twain, far from a turbulent soul like Herman Melville, Howells

was the reporter of his generation--the greatest literary figure of a

drab negative age when the older literary impulse was slackening, and

the new was slowly displacing it. He marks the transition between the

earlier idealism and the later naturalism. A humane and lovable soul,

he was the embodiment of all that was kindly and generous in an America

that was not wholly given over to the ways of the Gilded Age--an

America that loved beauty and served culture even amidst the turmoil of

revolution.

Footnotes

[730] _Literary and Social Silhouettes_, p. 73.

[731] The first subsection of this chapter in the Contents is entitled

“William James and Pragmatism.” None of this appears in the manuscript,

and it seems likely that Professor Parrington planned to transfer the

subject to a later part of the book. The numbering is, however, left as

it is given in the Contents.--_Publisher._

[732] “Civilization at its highest pitch was the master passion of his

mind, and his preoccupation with the international aspects of character

and custom issued from the conviction that the rawness and rudeness

of a young country were not incapable of cure by contact with more

developed forms.” Pelham Edgar, _Henry James, Man, Author_, pp. 40-41.

[733] Quoted in “The Social Consciousness of William Dean Howells,”

_New Republic_, Vol. 26, p. 193.

Book Two • The Old and the New: Storm Clouds

The quarter-century between the panic of 1873 that rudely disturbed

the revelry of the Great Barbecue, and the campaign of 1896 that

broke the agrarian opposition to capitalism, was marked by a fierce

agrarian attempt to nullify in America the law of concentration. The

silent drift toward plutocracy was too evident to escape comment even

in the Gilded Age, and the ideal of plutocracy was too repugnant to a

people drenched in Jeffersonian and Jacksonian prejudices to escape

bitter hostility. The pursuit of wealth was an accepted democratic

right, but it was assumed to be a fair race and no favors. The use

of the political state by greater wealth to lay handicaps on lesser

wealth had not been in the reckoning, and the law of progress that

diminished the number of beneficiaries from the national policy of

preëmption and exploitation had not been so interpreted. Something was

wrong with a progress that augmented poverty as it increased wealth,

and with the alarmist cry in their ears--the rich are growing richer

and the poor poorer--the untutored democracy of the seventies and the

eighties turned to question the drift of tendency that quite evidently

was transforming a democratic people into a vast engulfing plutocracy.

An older agrarian America was confronted by a younger capitalistic

one, and the conflict of ideals and purposes was certain to bring on a

bitter debate.

In the fierce struggle that turmoiled the politics of three decades

the democracy went into battle as ill-equipped intellectually as it

had been a hundred years before in the struggle over the Constitution.

It was reaping the harvest of the long Jacksonian slackness that,

content with the vote, had given no thought to the ultimate program

of democracy but had suffered the lawyers to have their way. The

Enlightenment had long since been submerged by Whiggish ambitions, and

since the days of the Abolition Movement there had been no serious

consideration of political theory. The success of the Jacksonian

revolution had brought about its undoing. The abstract principle of

democracy having won common acceptance, it was assumed to be competent

to shift for itself. But unfortunately a supposedly democratic state

was functioning under a Constitution designed to thwart democracy,

and, interpreted by lawyers, it buttressed the rights of property far

more securely than the rights of man. Within this fundamental law

capitalism had long been entrenching itself. Its stronghold could not

be taken by frontal attack and its flanks were protected by the courts

that had assumed the high prerogative of voiding statutory enactments

by judicial decree. As a result in no other country was capitalism so

safeguarded from hostile attack; it plowed its fields and gathered its

harvests secure from disturbance.

Unfortunately the political state did not realize that it was not

in reality the democracy it professed to be. The most intelligent

liberalism of the times, failing to take into account the economic

basis of politics, was satisfied to spend its energy in Civil Service

Reform and similar tinkering with the political machinery, convinced

that it was only necessary to recover the old aristocratic sense of

responsibility in political agents to perfect a democratic government.

Not till another generation did liberalism come to understand that the

democratic program was still largely unfulfilled, and set about in all

earnestness to complete it; but that did not happen till the philosophy

of democracy had been far more adequately explored and the simple faith

of Jacksonianism had been instructed by the experience of other lands.

Popular discontent with the drift toward plutocracy was intensified

by the successive economic crises that marked the transition from

agrarianism to capitalism. The gospel of progress, it seems, had

not taken due account of the price that must be paid in social

disturbances, and the breakdowns of 1873-1879 and 1887-1896 with their

harsh dislocations aroused a spirit of revolt that issued in broad

popular movements. Those movements spun the thread of liberalism that

runs through the years from the Gilded Age to the World War--a thread

woven of the earlier liberalism that came from the frontier, and the

new collectivistic theories that came from Europe. In the eighties and

nineties it was still largely native agrarian, but in the early years

of the new century it drew heavily on the proletarian philosophies of

Europe--seeking to apply old-world experience to American problems.

Through it all runs increasingly a note of sobering realism. After a

hundred years political romanticism was slowly dying in America.

Part One: The Middle Border Rises

Chapter I • The Plight of the Farmer

I • Democratic Reactions to Plutocracy

The Middle Border was the first to recover from the heady romanticisms

of Whiggery. The malady of preëmption and exploitation quickly ran

its course there and after the first enthusiasm of settlement had

subsided--the staking of claims, the scramble over townsites, the

bidding for railway lines--the farmer settled down amidst his corn

and wheat and cattle and hogs to learn what sort of living the

prairies might provide. With his feet on the sobering earth he was no

middle-class adventurer, no buccaneer lying in wait for the golden

argosies of Spain, but a sober realist kept sane by wind and weather

and kept honest by his daily occupation of tilling and reaping.

As the first wave of settlers spread over the prairies a mood of

buoyant hopefulness colored their dreams. The earlier conquest of the

Inland Empire had entailed exhausting labor in preliminary clearings,

and the stumpage from great forests remained for years to obstruct

clean tillage; but here in the Middle Border were treeless fields

of black soil, level, uncluttered by stones, inviting the plow. For

ages the prairie grass had been growing there, tall as a horseman

in the bottoms and plentiful on the uplands; and as the unmarked

seasons passed, the potash from the decaying vegetation added a richer

fertility to the soil. In natural productiveness it was the fairest

portion of America, and as the land-hungry settlers made their pitch

there, filing on broad homesteads and building their cabins, a mood

of buoyant expectation filled the land. It was not the flamboyant

spirit of the Gilded Age, but the hopefulness of those who within a few

short years were to transform a wilderness into the world’s granary.

In his wistful account of the glamour that lay upon the prairies in

those first pioneer years--a glamour that soon passed like the morning

dews--Hamlin Garland was no frontier romantic but a sober historian.

But as the seventies gave place to the eighties a subtle change came

over the mood of the Middle Border. Disappointment and disillusion

settled upon a land that before had smiled in the spring sunshine.

The harvest was not fulfilling the expectations of the seedtime.

The changed mood came in part from the harsh toil and meager living

that were the necessary price the frontiersman must pay for his

small winnings. It is no holiday job to subdue an untamed land and

wrest abundance and comfort from a virgin soil. Only for the young

who can project their hopes into the future is it endurable; for the

middle-aged and the old it is a heart-breaking task. The history of

the western frontier is a long drab story of hardship and privation

and thwarted hopes, of men and women broken by the endless toil, the

windows of their dreams shuttered by poverty and the doors to an

abundant life closed and barred by narrow opportunity. It is true that

the prairies took no such toll as the forests had taken; the mean and

squalid poverty through which Lincoln passed was not so common in the

Middle Border as it had been along the earlier frontier. Nevertheless

a fierce climate and a depressing isolation added their discomforts

to a bleak existence. The winds were restless on the flat plains, and

the flimsy wooden houses, stark and mean, unprotected by trees and

unrelieved by shrubbery, were an ill defense against their prying

fingers. In winter the blizzards swept out of the North to overmaster

the land, and in summer the hot winds came up from the Southwest to

sear the countrysides that were rustling with great fields of corn.

Other enemies appeared, as it were, out of a void. Endless flights of

grasshoppers descended like a plague of locusts, and when they passed

the earth was bare and brown where the young wheat had stood. Armies

of chinch-bugs came from nobody knew where, and swarming up the tender

corn-stalks left them sucked dry and yellow. It is nature’s way, to

destroy with one hand what it creates with the other; and for years the

western farmers were fighting plagues that had possessed the prairies

before the settlers came.

The disillusion of the Middle Border deepened into gloom as the

widespread economic depression of the times added its discouragements.

A period of falling prices was curtailing industry and forcing down the

market values of all produce. From such depressions a debtor community

always suffers most severely, for falling produce-prices mean rising

money-values and a shifting standard of value for deferred payments.

The farms of the Middle Border were heavily encumbered to provide

tools and livestock and buildings, and the earnings were consumed by

the interest that went East to the mortgage-holders. Debt was a luxury

the farmer could ill afford, and when the debt was silently augmenting

by the rising value of the dollar he was forced to consider his

situation. The plight into which he had fallen was graphically summed

up in the phrase “ten-cent corn and ten per cent interest”--a phrase

that was to become a spark to all the tinder that was gathering from

frontier hardships and disappointments. Falling market-values were at

the bottom of his troubles. The prices of his staples were sinking

below the cost of production. With four-cent eggs, five-cent butter,

ten-cent corn, and fifty-cent wheat, with more hogs and cattle than

the stockyards would take, and with debts contracted at interest-rates

fixed by a higher scale of values, the economic position of the Middle

Border was becoming desperate, and in the later eighties a sullen

bitterness took possession of the land. As the farmer sat by the

kitchen stove and stoked the fire with great ears of corn that were

cheaper than coal, he had ample time to contemplate his lot. Ungathered

crops for which there was no market would not pay interest. There was

coming to be “too much hog in the dollar,” as one commentator remarked

quaintly. The Middle Border, all too clearly, was strangling from its

own productiveness.

It was easy for newspaper critics, armed with the wisdom of the

Board of Trade, to point out that overproduction was the trouble

with the western farmer, and that so vast a development of staple

crops resulting from sowing the prairie states to corn and wheat was

certain to bring on disastrous market slumps. It was true. Production

had outrun consumption; quantity output had brought on a glut. But

it was also true--as the armchair critics were not so careful to

point out--that other causes contributed equally to the deflation

of the western farmer, the result of which was to despoil him of

the last moiety of his earnings. He was in the grip of a complex

middleman organization that gouged him at every turn. The gap between

producer and consumer was widening to a chasm. The railways charged

twenty cents a bushel cartage for wheat from the Mississippi to

Chicago, and fifty-two and a half cents to the Atlantic seaboard.

The elevator companies fixed monopoly tolls, swindled the farmer in

their grain-gradings, and combined to force down the market price at

harvest time and raise it after the crop came under their control. The

“Livestock Ring,” managed by the railways, controlled the Union Stock

Yards at Chicago and squeezed the marginal profits from the farmer’s

cattle and hogs.[734] When on the other hand he bought implements or

groceries or household goods he was at the mercy of a non-competitive

market, protected by patent-rights and tariffs, to which were added

extortionate transportation and middleman charges.

It was his own fault, of course. Due to his own political slackness

the farmer had allowed himself to become the common drudge of society.

All the exploiting classes had their hands in his pockets. His was the

only considerable economic group that exerted no organized pressure to

control the price he sold for or the price he paid. While capitalism

had been perfecting its machinery of exploitation he had remained

indifferent to the fact that he himself was the fattest goose that

capitalism was to pluck. He had helped indeed to provide the rope

for his own hanging. He had voted away the public domain to railways

that were now fleecing him; he took pride in the county-seat towns

that lived off his earnings; he sent city lawyers to represent him

in legislatures and in Congress; he read middle-class newspapers and

listened to bankers and politicians and cast his votes for the policy

of Whiggery that could have no other outcome than his own despoiling.

And now in the middle eighties he began to feel the rope about his

neck, and realized the predicament he was in. It was not alone the

local middlemen, or even the railways--he had come to believe--that

were to blame. It was the money-power of the East, the grip of Wall

Street, that was strangling him--a power that controlled the government

at Washington, that manipulated the currency system, and that was

engaged in a scheme to augment its holdings by forcing up the value of

the dollar and automatically increasing the value of the indebtedness

it had gathered in its vaults. Clearly it was high time for the

deflated farmer to get into politics on his own account if he were to

save himself from beggary, and so during the Gilded Age began a great

agrarian revolt against capitalism that was to turmoil the next quarter

of a century--a revolt that was to mark the last effective organization

of the farmers to combat the new order, the last flare-up of an

old-fashioned agrarian America before it was submerged by the middle

class.

II • The Farmer Considers Politics

By the early seventies it was becoming clear to the Middle Border

that the policy of Whiggery took no account of the needs of the

farmer. Government was indifferent to him, whether at the capital of

his state or at Washington, and governmental programs--whether in

the matter of protective tariffs and land-grants, in its unconcern

at monopoly extortion, or in the contraction of the currency with

a view to the resumption of specie payments--ran so counter to his

interests that the dullest began to question the fairness of the

state. It had ceased to concern itself with the welfare of the whole.

The combination of paternalism and _laissez faire_ that marked the

Whiggery of the times could be interpreted by the suspicious farmer,

indeed, only as a surrender of government to capitalism. It had lost

all pretense of fairness in the distribution of governmental favors,

and withheld or granted aid with the single objective of furthering

the interests of powerful groups. It sanctioned the use of the state

by business interests for purposes of exploitation, and declined to

exercise its power in the interests of the consumer. It granted tariffs

and subsidies, yet refused to regulate the monopoly power it had

created. It was no longer a government of the people but a government

of business, concerned for the interests of exploitation, and if the

farmer were to gain a hearing he must first make himself feared.

Of necessity, therefore, the agrarian program entailed a political

struggle of great bitterness. There would be no adequate relief granted

until the farmers had wrested control of government from the class that

was exploiting them. The battle between agrarianism and capitalism,

in consequence, from the outset was a struggle for control of the

political state, that beginning in single commonwealths was eventually

carried to the federal government. Hope of effective aid from state

governments quickly proved illusory, for when the Illinois farmers

passed a law to curb the railways the federal courts set aside their

enactment and bade the farmers--to use a later phrase--go home and slop

the hogs. They must not meddle with matters beyond their comprehension.

In consequence of such slaps in the face the farmers fell to perfecting

their organizations and arousing class consciousness until there issued

from the long debates of the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliance the great

movement of Populism that proposed to reach as far as Washington,

install there the representatives of the producing classes, and

refashion the political state in accordance with the democratic needs

of the plain people.

So ambitious a program needed time, not only for the farmers to

organize but to clarify their policy. They were ill equipped for a

serious struggle. With the rise of capitalism agriculture had been

steadily falling in social prestige. As a result of the decline of the

landed squirearchy in the North and the overthrow of the plantation

economy in the South, agriculture had lost its traditional leaders

who had furnished the brains and supplied the spokesmen in earlier

political struggles. In the seventies agriculture was no longer

reckoned a pursuit peculiarly suitable to gentlemen. The business

man had risen in social prestige as the farmer declined, and instead

of being recruited from the natural leaders of society agriculture

suffered a draining-off of the more energetic and capable to the

cities, leaving the farms in the hands of the less ambitious, who were

supplemented in the seventies and eighties by European peasants who

settled great portions of the Middle Border. With this loss of social

prestige came a new urban contempt for farm life that expressed itself

in “Hayseed” cartoons, and in the heedlessness of politicians who were

quick to transfer allegiance from a decaying to a rising order.

The farmers of the Middle Border, drawn from many commonwealths

and with a high percentage of aliens, were far from a homogeneous

class-conscious group like the southern planters. Race, language,

and cultural antecedents held them apart, intensifying the aloofness

that was a common characteristic of the frontier. Week-days they

stuck to their plows and Sundays, unlike the New England farmer, they

were little given to churchgoing. The landholdings were commonly a

homestead of a hundred and sixty acres, often running to an entire

section of six hundred and forty acres. Much land was held idle by

speculators, with the result that the isolation of the farmer--dwelling

convenient to his fields rather than to neighbors--deepened the

suspicious individualism that was an obsession of the agrarian mind,

and unfitted him for effective coöperative effort. No political or

social philosophy answerable to his needs was at hand, no intellectual

leaders like Jefferson or John Taylor to adapt old-world theory to

the conditions of the Middle Border, no commanding figure like Old

Hickory to marshal the scattered hosts. The Physiocratic theory with

its prestige of distinguished advocates and its elaborate social

economics had never taken root in the Middle Border; although certain

of its prejudices--that the farmer is the sole producer and the sterile

middleman must somehow be got rid of--had taken possession of the

western mind and largely influenced the ultimate program. But if the

western farmer inherited no ready-made philosophy he was daily prodded

by harsh reality. He got up and went to bed under the prick of economic

necessity, and this made of him a realist and an opportunist, eager

to apply homely remedies to homely ills. With the discipline got from

hard times he was not easily gulled by bright young city lawyers with

their handbooks of capitalistic economics. The new agrarianism of the

prairies, in consequence, was a hard-headed, homespun theory, fashioned

on the farms, intended to serve the producer rather than the middleman.

It had behind it none of the high authority of the schools, and

naturally it was mocked and scoffed at by all the spokesmen--editors,

lawyers, bankers, scholars, intellectuals--of the prosperous middle

class. The farmer had to make his way against the embattled prejudices

and contempt of the rest of America.

But before he could become a power in political councils he must

organize and use his voting strength as a unit; and as early as the

late sixties the work of organization was got under way. It began

as a social movement with the Grange that spread widely through the

South and Middle West and even gained foothold in the East, bringing

together in social groups the farmer families of the neighborhood. It

professed to stand outside politics and strove to awaken an interest

in coöperative buying and selling, but the community gatherings were

certain to find politics waiting for them at the schoolhouse door,

and after the program of coöperation had been discussed the talk ran

easily into political debate. From the Grange issued in the eighties

the Farmers’ Alliance, more consciously political in its objective,

active in arousing the farmers to political action; and with the hard

times that came with the turn of the decade the different groups merged

in the broad movement of Populism--a militant political uprising with

a definite party program and organization. The flare-up came swiftly

and in the first years of the nineties the prairies were aflame and

even the cotton-fields of the South were fired. Populism swept from

township to township, a militant agrarian movement, providing its

own leaders--Tom Watson in Georgia, General Weaver in Iowa, Ignatius

Donnelly in Minnesota, sockless Jerry Simpson in Kansas, with Hamlin

Garland, and B. O. Flower, and other intellectuals rallying to the

farmers’ standard. It set up the banner of agrarian democracy, summoned

its followers and drilled them for the battles that lay ahead. Huge

meetings gathered of the farmers of a county and day-long they listened

to speeches that came straight from the hay-fields and the corn-rows,

speeches that were an echo of the daily experience of the farmer and

the farmer’s wife.

It was Mary Ellen Lease of Kansas who struck from the common bitterness

a phrase that embodied the militant spirit of Populism. Week after week

she traveled the prairie country urging the farmers to “raise less corn

and more hell,” and at her call the sunburned faces settled into grim

purpose. The farmers had become class-conscious. They were enlisted in

a class struggle. They used the vocabulary of realism, and the unctuous

political platitudes and sophistries of county-seat politicians rolled

off their minds like water from a duck’s back. They were fighting

a great battle--they believed--against Wall Street and the eastern

money-power; they were bent on saving America from the plutocracy;

and they swept over the county-seat towns, burying the old machine

politicians under an avalanche of votes, capturing state legislatures,

electing Congressmen and Senators, and looking forward to greater

power. In 1896 Populism gained control of the Democratic party and

entered on its great campaign to establish the principle of democracy

at Washington. It was the last mortal struggle between agrarianism

and capitalism, and to understand it one must turn back to the long

agitation over the money question.

III • The Greenback Movement

If in the early nineties the currency question had come to overshadow

the questions of the tariff and railway regulation, it was because that

problem lay at the heart of the struggle between the rival agrarian and

capitalistic economies. The control of the national monetary system

by the bankers was vital to the smooth functioning of a capitalistic

order, and to assure such control it was desirable that monetary

standards and emissions of currency be removed from the sphere of

political action and lodged in the hands of business. The problem was

difficult, for the right to “coin money and to regulate the value

thereof” were functions of sovereignty specifically recognized in the

Constitution; and it was a series of moves designed to transfer such

functions to private groups that brought on a long political debate

over systems of currency.

The intellectual background against which the struggle was set may be

sketched briefly. Despite the long battle over the Bank in Jackson’s

time, little serious thinking on the principles of money and currency

had been done in America. Financiers and economists alike followed the

current English school, and since the appearance of the famous Bullion

Report of 1811 that school had adhered to the intrinsic-value theory

of money. While accepting banknotes as a useful medium of exchange,

the English classical economists held that only coin is real money,

and that the issue of notes must bear a definite ratio to the amount

of coin and bullion in the vaults. Money is not a creature of the law.

Government cannot create it. Rather it is a convenient token of labor

done, and the stamp of the mint is only a certification of weight

and fineness. There are but two ways, indeed, in which government

can acquire money--through taxation and by borrowing. The “natural

operation of the specie standard” was reckoned one of the fundamental

“laws of trade,” and for government to tamper with it--setting aside

the intrinsic-value principle by the emission of irredeemable paper

money--was to violate the sanctity of contracts, cheat creditors,

increase prices, and disorder business. The law of supply and demand

answered all the needs of money regulation.

This was no more than the application of the current theory of

_laissez faire_ to the problem of currency. But between the Bullion

Report of 1811 and the Parliamentary Bank Act of 1844, English theory

and practice had undergone two important modifications: the vast

development of credit had suggested a free use of banknotes based on

securities other than coin or bullion, and the bimetallic standard had

been superseded by the gold standard. By the terms of the Act of 1844

all banknotes were to be issued against securities and gold and silver

coin and bullion in the bank vaults. The margin of issue was fixed at

fourteen million pounds sterling. The total amount of banknotes thus

“issued on the Credit of such Securities, Coin and Bullion,” might not

be increased, but within the limits set the Bank was free to increase

or decrease issues at will. The Act further provided that “whereas

it is necessary to limit the Amount of Silver Bullion on which it

shall be lawful ... to issue Bank of England notes,” it should “not

be lawful for the Bank of England to retain in ... said Bank at any

time an Amount of Silver Bullion exceeding One Fourth Part of the Gold

Coin and Bullion.”...[735] That gold should eventually have thrust

silver aside was natural. In addition to its convenience as a commodity

for international shipment, it was less in quantity, not widely

dispersed or popularly held, and therefore more easily controlled

by the money-brokers. With the function of government restricted to

coining such gold as came to the mint, the whole business of currency

emissions, with the attendant power of inflation and deflation of

credit, would lie in the hands of the bankers who became the custodians

of the national monetary system.

During the bitter discussions of currency policies that followed the

dislocations of the Civil War, the two most authoritative spokesmen in

America on the subject were Senator John Sherman of Ohio, for years

Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, and David A. Wells,

statistician, special Commissioner of the Revenue Bureau, and a scholar

deservedly distinguished as an economist. In their views on the

currency question both were followers of the classical English school.

In two speeches in the Senate, of January 27, 1869, and January 24,

1870, the former stated his position definitely. “Let us,” he said,

“recognize as an axiom that nothing but coin is real money before we

undertake to deal with the currency”; and in another place, narrowing

his definition in terms of the English Bank Act, he asserted, “We must

... recognize the immutable law of currency; and that is, there is but

one true standard, and that standard is gold.”[736] The weakness of

paper money, he believed, was its instability; the ratio of exchange

with gold fluctuates too greatly to make it a safe or convenient medium

of business. “Last year the fluctuation in paper money amounted to

forty-five per cent. Gold, however, remained as stable as the eternal

hills, because it was not only the product of labor, but it was labor

and value itself.”[737] One may make of such an assertion what one

will, but it is clear that John Sherman thought ill of the greenbacks,

and wanted substituted for them a system of banknotes.

It is impossible [he argued] to give a currency issued by

a Government the flexibility to meet the movement of the

exchanges.... It must have a flexibility which will enable it to be

increased in certain periods of the year, and to flow back again

into the vaults of the bank at others. I am convinced ... that in

time it will be wise to retire our United States notes and all

forms of Government circulation, and depend upon notes issued by

private corporations.[738]

Brief as these passages are, they suffice to make clear Sherman’s

position. He accepted without question the English theory and practice,

and he wished to shape American legislation in conformity with them.

The experience of the Civil War, and--shall we add--his intimate

connections with Wall Street,[739] had confirmed him in his preference

for a _laissez-faire_ policy in currency matters. He would establish

the gold standard, encourage the issue of banknotes, and turn over the

custodianship of the national currency to private interests.

The position of David A. Wells was essentially similar. Wells wrote

much and skillfully and he seems to have been the chief authority on

whom such intellectuals as Godkin and Dana relied for materials for

their editorials on the currency question. Indirectly, therefore,

through the medium of editors and newspaper writers his opinions came

to have wide influence. During the discussion of resumption of specie

payments in the seventies his pen was particularly active. Amongst

other things he then wrote _The Cremation Theory of Specie Resumption_,

in which he advocated a policy of progressive contraction by the

expedient of burning annually a fixed sum in greenbacks; _Robinson

Crusoe’s Money_, an exposition of the bullion theory of money for

popular reading, illustrated by Nast and containing some witty thrusts

at such well-known expansionists as Ben Butler, Wendell Phillips, Henry

C. Carey, and Senator O. P. Morton; _Contraction_, in which he defended

the thesis, “He who is not in favor of contracting the currency is

not in favor of paying it, and he who is not in favor of paying it

is a repudiator”; and certain other papers later gathered into his

_Practical Economics_ (1885).

Wells was an uncompromising bullionist and his theory of money is as

simple as the doctrine of _laissez faire_ on which it rests. Honest

money represents labor and therefore possesses intrinsic value. The

experience of the ages has demonstrated that of all commodities gold

and silver are the most convenient for the purpose and in consequence

they have come to be accepted universally as real money. Every dollar’s

worth of gold represents a dollar’s worth of labor, always and

everywhere, measured by the test of the world’s needs. It is foolish

for politicians and theorists to worry their poor heads over the supply

of money, or attempt to predetermine the quantity best suited to the

needs of business. The amount of money in circulation will always be

regulated by the law of supply and demand. There is limitless gold

locked up in the treasure-house of nature, and just so much is unlocked

by human labor as the immediate needs of the world require. Gold can

neither be inflated nor deflated, for, “There is one and the same law

governing alike the supply of gold and of wheelbarrows. They are both

tools or commodities, and the country will have and use all of either

that it can use profitably.”[740] Let government keep its hands off

and money will regulate itself. “The value of the gold dollar is fixed

and cannot be altered. The value of the paper dollar is constantly

fluctuating.”[741] That business conditions would be seriously affected

by the withdrawal of the greenbacks, or that injustice would be done

to debtors, Wells refused to believe. When the poison is withdrawn

from the system a state of health reëstablishes itself. “I also count

as an absurdity the idea that the business of the country is likely

to be unfavorably affected by a deficiency of currency consequent

upon contraction in the manner proposed.”[742] The gold to take its

place would be provided automatically by the infallible law of supply

and demand. Thus triply armed with the logic of economic theory Wells

pronounced for deflation, immediate and drastic:

I desire the federal government to get out of and abandon forever

and as soon as possible this whole business of creating and issuing

paper money, be it redeemable or irredeemable, for I believe as

long as the federal government continues to recognize anything as

money except hard matter-of-fact “labor representing” gold and

silver, just so long the country will not have [a] stable and

unfluctuating currency....[743]

Such neat logic was out of date on the day that Wells penned it.

The needs of business had outgrown the bullion theory of money and

credit was taking the place of a metallic currency. The fiction of a

gold standard would be adhered to till another seismic dislocation

proved its utter inadequacy to a world in confusion and it would be

unofficially abandoned. Yet it was such logic that prevailed in America

in post-war days, bringing acute distress upon the country as a whole

and particular hardship to the Middle Border; and it prevailed because

the banking interests followed a selfish and narrow policy marked out

for them by the English theory and practice.

The financing of the war had been wasteful and slovenly beyond all

precedent, and it had been fiercely criticized by the agrarians. It was

a system, said the militant Greenbacker, Thaddeus Stevens, the like

of which “no human folly had ever before witnessed.”[744] When the

war was over and the reorganization of the public finances was up for

settlement, the bankers were shrewd enough to make the confusion serve

their interests. Their great objective was to get back once more the

control of the national credit that the war had taken from them. The

National Bank Act of 1863--foolishly opposed by shortsighted state-bank

advocates who were jealous of local rights--had been the first great

step. By the provisions of the act the national banks were permitted to

issue currency on the security of government bonds, in such quantities

as they chose, on highly favorable terms, and the result was to drive

out of circulation the wild-cat issues of state banks. But the crux of

the problem was the question of the greenbacks that the necessities of

the war had forced upon the government. The greenbacks were reckoned

political money, the control of issues of which lay wholly with

Congress. At any moment, responding to popular demand, Congress might

deflate the bankers by the emission of new bills. At the time of first

issue the financial interests had succeeded in vitiating the greenbacks

by writing into the bill a repudiation of the issue by the government

itself, and no sooner was the war over than they set about the business

of retiring them. Their objective was the same end that English bankers

had reached in 1844.

In the reorganization three broad policies were insisted upon by the

banking interests: the speedy retirement of the greenbacks, in order

to take government out of the credit market, the refunding of all

debts on a gold basis, and an immediate return to specie payments. The

result was a drastic policy of deflation that brought further turmoil

to the country. In ten years the money in circulation was reduced

from somewhat over $2,100,000,000 to a little over a billion, or from

fifty-eight dollars per capita in 1865 to seventeen dollars per capita

in 1876.[745] The inevitable results followed, a swift appreciation in

the value of the dollar and the automatic increase in the debt of the

country, both public and private, with the fall of commodity prices.

Within a decade, measured in commodity values, the liabilities of the

American people were nearly doubled by the simple device of changing

the standard of deferred payments. Gold might remain as stable as

the eternal hills, but somehow all other commodities were shrinking

daily. “Them steers,” Solon Chase indeed said aptly, “while they grew

well, shrank in value as fast as they grew.” This remarkable result

was brought about, it is well to remember, by the plea for honest

money and the plighted faith of the nation. Keeping the public faith,

it would seem, meant permitting the creditors to change the terms of

their payments after the contract was made. “Who are these reasoners,”

cried Thaddeus Stevens, in disgust, “who talk so learnedly of the

laws of finance and the morality of human dealings, whose consciences

are so raw and stick out so far from their excited coverings that no

pharmaceutist can heal their inward wound?”[746]

As a debtor community the Middle Border felt the pinch of deflation

acutely, and in consequence the money question was thrust sternly upon

agrarian attention. On this issue it came finally to fight its great

battle, pitting its homespun experience against the authority of the

bankers and the teaching of the schools. To the bankers’ argument that

note issues should be taken out of politics and lodged in the hands

of business men, it replied that the issue of currency was a function

of sovereignty, and to surrender it to private corporations, as was

done by the National Bank Act, was undemocratic. The monetary system

of the nation must not become the football of class interests. To the

argument of the bullionists that gold was the only fixed and stable

standard for deferred payments, it replied that the gold standard was

too narrow a base on which to erect a monetary system for an expanding

country, that it was notoriously susceptible to manipulation, and that

it had been devised by Lombard Street in the interests of capitalism.

Since the days of the great struggle over the Bank a remarkable

change had come over the agrarian mind in its thinking on monetary

affairs. In their distrust of all banks and bank-issues Jackson and

Benton had swung sharply back to the bullion theory of money. They

were militant hard-money men. But in the intervening years a new and

revolutionary conception had been slowly making its way to recognition.

In the minds of obscure economists the quantitative theory of money

had risen to challenge the bullion theory. In unorthodox pamphlets and

newspaper discussion it was being pointed out that the value of money

is dependent on the amount in circulation, that gold and silver are

commodities fluctuating in value like other commodities, and that it

is the plain duty of the state to regulate the per capita circulation

in accordance with business needs. To allow the bankers to erect a

monetary system on gold is to subject the producer to the money-broker

and measure deferred payments by a yardstick that lengthens or shortens

from year to year. The only safe and rational currency is a national

currency based on the national credit, sponsored by the state,

flexible, and controlled in the interests of the people as a whole.[747]

By far the most suggestive of these obscure pamphleteers was Eleazar

Lord, a New York banker, who for thirty-five years was a propagandist

for a new currency system and who watched the bungling of the war

finance with acute concern.[748] With the undemocratic nature of

banknotes he was not concerned. As a banker he accepted them as

desirable and wished to establish them on a sound national basis. He

was in ardent sympathy with the patriotic nationalism of Henry C.

Carey. The loose system of state-bank issues seemed to him chaotic

and he was earnest in espousal of a common national system. Lord was

an acute and stimulating thinker on monetary matters. He was one of

the first Americans to understand the significance of credit, and he

was realist enough to foresee that the system of the future would

be a credit system. This was the clue to his dissatisfaction with

the bullion theory of money, which he attacked with vigor, and to

his acceptance of the quantitative theory.[749] He had the scantest

respect for Sherman’s dogma that gold is as stable as the eternal hills

because it is “labor and value itself,” or for Wells’s belief that the

law of supply and demand automatically produces gold enough to meet

the needs of business. He would treat gold and silver as commodities

varying in price with supply and demand, and make no attempt to

relate the money scale to their fluctuations. For years, he said,

America accepted the English “standard of currency, their aristocratic

definition of wealth, and their distinction between capital and

credit,” to its disaster.

The so-called specie basis, whenever there is a foreign demand

for coin, proves to be a mere fiction, a practical humbug; and

whenever, by an excess of imports, this pretended basis is exported

to pay foreign debts, the bank-notes are withdrawn from circulation

or become worthless, the currency for the time is annihilated,

prices fall, business is suspended, debts remain unpaid, panic and

distress ensue, men in active business fail, bankruptcy, ruin, and

disgrace reign.[750]

To provide a safe, flexible, and convenient currency, Lord proposed a

system of national banknotes, based on the wealth of the country and

responsive to the needs of a business world founded on credit.

Necessity must teach us whether we can and must have a currency of

purely representative value, wholly disconnected from the precious

metals, as a basis and standard, or prolong the conflict between

coin and paper, commerce and exchange. The existing theory on the

subject is too firmly fixed by education, prescription, prejudice

and interest, to be overthrown.... Such words as _safe, secured,

national, uniform, economical, inalienable_, when predicated of

any thing but gold as currency, are to the specie-paying theorist

mere sounds devoid of significance.... Credit must triumph. Can any

one blame the well-meaning theorist if he manifests some degree of

doubt and alarm in view of the extent to which the actual use of

credit, and of the confidence in the use of credit, has already

attained?[751]

In the writings of these obscure economists are to be found the seeds

of the later agrarian program. Some of them were clear-headed and able

men, but they underestimated the power of the banking group. They

failed to realize that in a capitalistic society no monetary system

would be tolerated that was not to the bankers’ liking, and that if

it were to their liking they would easily convince the public that

it was the only honest and just system. It was this lesson that the

Greenbackers and Free Silver men were to learn. No sooner was the issue

joined between paper money and the gold standard than a scurrilous

hue and cry was raised by the “sound-money” men. The bitter dispute

that marked American politics for more than a score of years is a

classic example of the distortion of fact for partisan ends that seems

to be an inevitable consequence of referring a matter of policy to a

democratic electorate. Denunciation took the place of exposition, and

hysteria of argument; and in this revel of demagoguery the so-called

educated classes--lawyers and editors and business men--were perhaps

the most shameless purveyors of humbuggery. Stripped of all hypocrisy

the main issue was this: Should the control of currency issues--with

the delegated power of inflation and deflation--lie in the hands of

private citizens or with the elected representatives of the people?

It is a question on which wide disagreement may well exist, for it

involves important differences of social and political theory. But

the significant thing is that throughout the years when the subject

was debated in every newspaper and on every stump the real issue was

rarely presented for consideration. The bankers did not dare to present

it, for too much was at stake and once it was clearly understood by a

suspicious electorate their case was lost. Hence the strategy of the

money group was to obscure the issue, an end they achieved by dwelling

on the single point of inflation and charging the agrarians with a

dishonest policy of repudiation.

Certainly in the minds of many conscientious men the fear of

repudiation was very real and acute, and their fears made timid souls

panicky. The newspapers took their cue from this bogey and beat the

drums so loudly in the cause of “honest money” that all hope of

calm discussion was lost. The issue became so distorted from class

feeling that later historians find it difficult to view the question

dispassionately. So late as 1916 Joseph Gilpin Pyle in his _Life

of James J. Hill_ could still speak of the Greenback movement as a

vicious scheme of “inflation, the boon of the demagogue and the dream

of the great debtor class in this new country,” who “increased ... by

the opening up of the West on borrowed capital, welcomed any measure

that might give them a specious justification for discharging their

obligations with something worth less than what they had promised to

pay.” Describing the genesis of the free silver movement, he said:

Hence grew up a formidable coalition between mine owners, debtors

unable or unwilling to pay, ambitious politicians, honest theorists

led captive by barren and unpractical abstractions, and a host of

men too ignorant to inform themselves, too impassioned by what they

heard to wish to know the truth.[752]

Obviously it was not so simple--or so wicked--as that. To determine

the justice of the charge of repudiation certain facts must be borne

in mind. The gist of the money problem pressing so heavily on the

Middle Border was the question of stabilizing the currency with a view

to stabilizing prices. Under the prick of war-necessities a sharp

inflation of prices had taken place. With the drastic contraction of

the currency following the war, prices fell as sharply. From 1873 to

1896 a world-wide appreciation in the value of gold, aggravated by

recurrent economic crises, further depressed the market values of

commodities, rendering the question of the solvency of the Middle

Border increasingly doubtful. Falling prices are only the obverse of

rising money-values, and to stop the one it was proposed to cheapen

the other, either through the issue of greenbacks as proposed by the

Greenback party, or through the free coinage of silver as proposed in

the plank of the Democratic platform of 1896. It was not a question of

repudiation in favor of debtors, but a question of correcting an unjust

deflation that favored the creditor class.

IV • Greenbackism and Peter Cooper

The opposition to the program and methods of the rising plutocracy was

not confined to the farmers of the Middle Border. It was nourished by

a widespread distrust of banks and bank-currencies that was a heritage

of the Jacksonian struggle. Amongst the leaders of the Greenback

movement were many eastern men, some of wide industrial experience,

whose economic views and prejudices were a hold-over from the days

of John Taylor, and who discovered in the post-war finances the same

class manipulations of public credit that marked the funding operations

of Washington’s administration. Men as dissimilar as Horace Greeley,

Thaddeus Stevens, Wendell Phillips, Henry C. Carey, and Peter Cooper,

made common cause with the western farmers in seeking to wrest control

of government from the bankers, and establish what they conceived

to be a just democratic economy. Picturesque militants grown old in

warfare, they were of an earlier generation, inheritors of the ideals

of simpler times before production for consumption had been superseded

by consumption for profit, ardent equalitarians who would not see their

hopes frustrated and America become a plutocracy without a struggle.

Greeley, Carey, and Phillips have been considered elsewhere; Stevens

was the last of the rugged equalitarians who followed their principles

to the bitter end; and Peter Cooper was an unregenerate Jeffersonian

who dedicated his last years to combating Wall Street, accepting in

1876, at the age of 85, nomination for the presidency by the National

Independent Party, commonly called the Greenback Party.

Like Thaddeus Stevens an ironmaster, grown wealthy by a long life

of useful and adventurous industry, builder of the first American

locomotive that made possible the success of the Baltimore and Ohio

railway, Peter Cooper was the most picturesque figure in New York City

in the seventies. With Bryant he shared the distinction of being the

patriarch of Broadway. Bred up amidst stern and harsh conditions, at a

period when, he said, within his “own recollection unmarried white men

could be sold for debt in the State of Connecticut,”[753] he was not

hardened by the struggle for subsistence. A tender social conscience

mellowed an old-fashioned probity and gave character and dignity to

a simple rugged nature. Transparently honest, with a certain innate

austerity softened by a homely courtesy, he was not a reed to sway

in every vagrant breeze, but a great oak with fibers toughened by

the storms of years. Like Horace Greeley, whom he much resembled in

honest kindliness, he carried the burdens of his country on his heart,

and in the midst of abundant prosperity still reckoned himself his

brother’s keeper. By “nature and temperament a radical reformer,” his

strongest instinct was a quick sense of justice. He was oppressed by

the poverty and misery he saw about him, and he gave so generously to

all good causes that he was known to his generation as “the greatest

philanthropist in the world.” His chief accomplishment was the founding

of Cooper Union for free instruction in “practical art and science,”

on which he expended a fortune.[754] But he was not one to salve his

conscience with a gift of superfluous wealth. His heart was as open as

his pocketbook, and he must explore to its hidden sources the infection

that was breeding social injustice in the new world. His private

interests never blinded him to his larger duties, but he gave his time

and strength as readily as his money to whatever cause he espoused.

Such a man was morally incapable of the buccaneering exploitation

that marked the Gilded Age. Between Peter Cooper and Jim Fisk was an

impassable gulf; they were products of different worlds and different

economies. The speculative middleman who thrust himself between the

producer and the consumer, with no sense of responsibility to either,

but concerned only with immediate profit, was a figure to excite the

wrath of an older-fashioned industrialist who had been taught that the

only just reward is the reward that comes from productive labor; and

in the days of the great barbecue Peter Cooper became deeply concerned

for the future of America. It was the new breed of bankers with their

control of the money system that were to blame, he came to believe, and

he would have reckoned himself false to the obligations of citizenship

if he failed to protest against their selfish manipulation of the

public credit. He had watched the callous juggling of the national

finances by the money-lenders during the Civil War, and had seen a debt

of some three billions nearly doubled in the decade after Appomattox

by the bond-holders. The new system of National Banks that issued

from the emergencies of war had come to control the financial policy

of the country, and to Peter Cooper it seemed that their purpose was

to perpetuate a debt that enabled them to tax the productive labor

of America and to squeeze wealth from a calculating expansion and

contraction of the currency. To surrender to such mercenaries the

sovereign power of issuing and regulating money seemed to him the

abdication of sovereignty, and in so far as he could he felt called in

honor to prevent it.

It needed rare courage and complete self-sacrifice to take up the gage

of battle and in his old age to renew the war that Andrew Jackson

had engaged in forty years before. His good name and his honorable

career could not save him from the gibes of politicians or the caustic

criticism of honest men. It was a losing fight at best. The struggle

had been venomous in Jackson’s day when the money-power was in its

infancy; and now that the banking interests had grown mighty it was

as hopeless as the charge of the Light Brigade. The cause had been

lost on the day when Congress wrote into the bill establishing a legal

tender for war purposes the single word “except,” thereby invalidating

the greenback for interest payments on bonds and duties on imports--an

act that “drew tears from the eyes of Thaddeus Stevens”; and the

bankers who could assert their control in war times had no intention a

dozen years later of suffering that control to pass from hands that had

grown enormously stronger.

Yet Peter Cooper refused to consider the outlook hopeless. With all

the resources he could command he threw himself into the struggle. He

scattered “more than a million of documents” broadcast--most of the

matter of which he wrote; he appealed to Congress and the President,

he challenged candidates, he cited the opinions of the Fathers, and

when he was buried under an avalanche of votes--as Horace Greeley

had been four years before--he preserved his faith in the “people’s

cause” and to the last day of his life kept up the great battle. “I

always have been, am, and ever shall be with the poor toilers and

producers; therefore I desire Congress to legislate for the poor as

well as for the rich, who can take care of themselves,”[755] he wrote

in his ninety-second year, and the spirit that stirred in his old veins

appears from such a comment as this:

I consider the persistent class legislation of Congress since

the war, a worse despotism than that of Great Britain before the

Revolution; because it reduces the laboring classes to periodic

distress and starvation, that are worse than any despotism ever

was; for monopolizing corporations, whether in the shape of banks

or railroads, have no soul.[756]

Peter Cooper’s political philosophy was simple and transparent. His

teachers were Albert Gallatin, Henry C. Carey, and George William

Curtis, and from them he drew three major ideas that had emerged from

three generations of American experience: the need for a national

monetary system based on legal tender; the necessity for a protective

tariff; and the need for an effective civil service. The first was

an adaptation of the old agrarian dislike of banknotes; the second

came out of Clay’s American System as it had been elaborated by Henry

C. Carey in the fifties; and the third issued from the Civil Service

Reform movement of the seventies. The exigencies of the political

situation, however, thrust into the foreground the money question,

and nine-tenths of his writings deal with that pregnant issue. As an

ardent Jacksonian he was deeply suspicious of the rising money-power,

with its corporations and monopolies, its land-grants and railways and

banks, for behind them he saw the specter of aristocracy. “In America,”

he said in 1882, “we have no aristocrats except those who have sprung

up in a night--as toad-stools do in a dung-hill.”[757] But class

legislation must end in creating classes, and at another time he said,

“There is fast forming in this country an aristocracy of wealth--the

worst form of aristocracy that can curse the prosperity of any

country.... Such an aristocracy is without soul and without patriotism.

Let us save our country from this, its most potent, and, as I hope, its

last enemy.”[758]

His deep interest in political measures was quickened by an anxious

concern at the hard times that resulted from the policy of drastic

currency deflation. That matters were going ill in America during the

middle seventies every fool knew, and Peter Cooper was only giving

expression to the common knowledge in describing to President Hayes, in

a letter dated August 6, 1876, the “appalling” economic situation. That

it was equally bad in England he did not point out.

More than two hundred thousand men, within the last few weeks, have

joined in “strikes” on the various railroad lines, the workshops

and the mines of the country, on account of the further reduction

in their wages, already reduced to the living point. That some of

these strikes have been attended with lawless and unjustifiable

violence, only shows the intensity of the evils complained of,

and the despair of the sufferers. For four years past, since the

“panic of 1873,” millions of men and women, in this hitherto rich

and prosperous country, have been thrown out of employment, or

living on precarious and inadequate wages, have felt embittered

with a lot, in which neither economy nor industry, nor a cheerful

willingness to work hard, can bring any alleviation. Is it to be

wondered at, that _enforced idleness_ has made tramps of so many of

our laboring population, or induced them to join the criminal and

dangerous classes?[759]

After pointing out the disastrous effects of such hard times on mining,

railways, real estate, and the western farmers, he asserted that the

bankers, although they also were embarrassed, were “very patient with

their troubles ... for they know, that _money is appreciating in value

all the time_.” He then uncovers the kernel of his thought--that it is

a sovereign duty of government to provide an adequate national currency.

This bondage has its manifold centre and its secret force in more

than two thousand banks, that are scattered through the country.

All these banks, are organized expressly to loan out their own

money and the money of all those, who will entrust them with

deposits. These loans are made to men, whose business-lives will

soon become dependent on money, borrowed from corporations, that

have a special interest of their own. Such a power of wealth,

under the control of the selfish instincts of mankind, will always

be able to control the action of our Government, unless that

Government is directed by strict principles of justice and of

the public welfare. The banks will favor a course of special and

partial legislation, in order to increase their power ... they will

never cease to ask for more, as long as there is more, that can be

wrung from the toiling masses of the American people.

Such a power should never be allowed to go out from the entire and

complete control of the people’s Government. The struggle with this

money-power, intrenched in the special privileges of banks, has

been going on from the beginning of the history of this country.

It has engaged the attention of our wisest and most patriotic

statesmen. Franklin, Jefferson, Webster, Calhoun, Jackson, have all

spoken of the danger of such a power and the necessity of guarding

against it.[760]

The solution he offered for the vexing monetary problem accorded with

that of the Greenback Party,[761] namely, refusal to recharter those

banks “_deceitfully styled national_” and the retirement of all bank

currency; the abandonment of the policy of currency contraction; the

issue of legal-tender notes to the amount last found necessary for the

functions of industry and business; the rejection of a specie basis,

the notes to be interconvertible with government bonds bearing interest

at 3.65 per cent; issued on demand in any amount in exchange for

legal-tender notes; and the establishment of a Postal Savings Bank. No

man ever believed more ardently in the sufficiency of his program than

Peter Cooper. It was a suggestive proposal, that only a knave would

call the visionary scheme of a fool. He was tireless in explanation and

argument, the quality of which may be judged from the following passage

from a letter to Hayes and Tilden written during the campaign of 1877:

The worth or exchangeable value of gold is as uncertain as other

products of human labor, such as wheat or cotton. The exchangeable

value of anything depends on its _convertibility into something

else_ that has value _at the option of the individual_. This

rule applies to paper money as to anything else. But how shall

Government give an exchangeable value to a paper currency? Can

it be done by a standard which is beyond its control and which

naturally fluctuates, while the sign of exchange indicated by the

paper remains the same?...

... we must trust our Government with this _whole function_ of

providing the standards and measures of exchange, as we trust

it with the weights and measures of trade.... We must require

the Government to make this currency, at all times, and, at the

option of the individual, _convertible_. But the currency must be

convertible into something over which the Government has entire

control, and to which it can give a definite as well as a permanent

value. This is its own _interest-bearing bonds_. These are, in

fact, a mortgage upon the embodied wealth of the whole country.

The reality of their value is as sound and as permanent as the

Government itself, and the degree of their value can be determined

exactly by the rate of interest the Government may think proper to

fix.[762]

The Jeffersonianism of Peter Cooper, like the Jeffersonianism of the

Middle Border, had taken a bias from the confident nationalism that

during the fifties so deeply colored American thought. To assure

an adequate national economy, superior in its self-sufficiency to

European--and especially English--policies, was a persuasive program

that Henry C. Carey devoted his later life to formulating, and that

men like Horace Greeley and Peter Cooper disseminated amongst their

wide agrarian following. That such a program implied a paternalistic

government did not trouble them. Peter Cooper accepted paternalism as

a necessary governmental function. He would have the state build and

own the great western railway systems; he would use the national domain

for the benefit of the settler; he would not turn over the state to

plunderers nor the resources of the nation to speculators. An honest

man with a sensitive social conscience, he would have no hand in the

great barbecue that wasted more than it consumed; but the times were

heedless of the counsels of honest men, and he was loved and laughed

at and ignored. Like Franklin in the Constitutional Convention, he had

outlived his generation and was thrust aside by the new economy that

was taking over the custodianship of America.[763]

Footnotes

[734] See Nevins, _The Emergence of Modern America_, pp. 163-164

[735] _The Statutes at Large: 7 & 8 Victoriae_, Vol. 84, pp. 188-189.

[736] _Speeches and Reports on Finance and Taxation_, pp. 188, 190.

[737] _Ibid._, p. 233.

[738] “Speech of January 24, 1870,” _ibid._, pp. 225-226.

[739] This laid him open to frequent and often bitter attack. See,

among many, Mrs. Marion Todd, _Pizzaro and John Sherman_, Chicago, 1891.

[740] _Practical Economics_, p. 54.

[741] _The Cremation Theory of Specie Resumption_, p. 10.

[742] _Ibid._, p. 10.

[743] _Ibid._, p. 13.

[744] J. A. Woodburn, _The Life of Thaddeus Stevens_, p. 573.

[745] _Ibid._, p. 573.

[746] _Ibid._, pp. 573-574.

[747] See, amongst many, _Homo’s Letters on a National Currency_,

Washington, 1817; _Currency Explosions, their Cause and Cure_, New

York, 1858; _Our Currency: Some of Its Evils, and the Remedies for

them_, by a Citizen of North Carolina, Raleigh, 1861.

[748] His titles are: _Credit, Currency and Banking_, New York, 1828;

_A Letter on the National Currency_, New York, 1861; _Six Letters on

the Necessity and Practicability of a National Currency, etc._, New

York, 1862; and _National Currency: A Review of the National Banking

Law_, New York, 1863.

[749] From what source Lord, and the other amateur economists, derived

their theory is not clear. It is possible, of course, to assume that

it was from Ricardo and the English economists. For an analysis and

rejection of the quantity theory, see J. Lawrence Laughlin, _The

Principles of Money_, Chapter VIII.

[750] _A Review of the National Banking Law_, p. 8.

[751] _Ibid._, p. 34.

[752] Vol. I, p. 485.

[753] _Ideas for a Science of Good Government_, p. iii.

[754] _Political and Financial Opinions of Peter Cooper_, p. 23.

[755] _Ideas for a Science of Good Government_, p. 272.

[756] _Ibid._, p. 271.

[757] _Ibid._, p. 261.

[758] _Ibid._, p. 123.

[759] _Ibid._, p. 117-118.

[760] _Ibid._, pp. 109-110.

[761] See _Ibid._, pp. 59-60.

[762] _The Political and Financial Opinions of Peter Cooper_, pp. 22-23.

[763] In his original plan Professor Parrington included here a

discussion entitled “Bimetallism: A heritage of Jacksonian democracy;

Ignatius Donnelly, ‘Coin’ Harvey,” but from the references in the next

chapter it seems evident that as he worked out his plan he decided to

omit this.--_Publisher._

Chapter II • The Democracy of the Age of Innocence

I • Capitalistic Encroachments

With its heritage of Jacksonianism it was natural for the agrarian

movement to attempt to carry further the exploration of the democratic

principle, seeking to complete the program that had been left

unfulfilled by the Fathers. There were few as yet who questioned

the finality of democracy as a political system or its adequacy to

all social needs. The growing evils of American life were traced

unhesitatingly to an imperfect democratic control of the forces of

exploitation. If the plutocracy were making gains at the expense of the

plain people it was due to defective governmental machinery, and the

immediate problem was the readjustment of that machinery. There must be

an extension of democratic control over the economics of society. The

great principle of _laissez faire_, that had proved so useful in the

earlier struggle against aristocratic paternalisms, was become a shield

and buckler for the plutocracy that was rising from the freedoms of a

let-alone policy. To curb the ambitions of that plutocracy and preserve

the democratic bequest for the common benefit of all, was therefore the

immediate problem of the times.

To this end two things remained to be achieved: to wrest possession

of the government from the hands of the plutocracy that was befouling

it, and to use it for democratic rather than plutocratic ends. The

difficulties in the way were many. Entrenched behind the checks and

balances of a complex constitution the plutocracy could not easily be

dislodged from power; even if it were driven out of the legislative

and executive branches of government it would find aid and succor in

the judiciary, where a masterful corporation law was interpreted by a

bench tender toward all property rights, and jealous of its sovereign

prerogative of reviewing all legislative enactments. A surprising

change had come over the attitude of the governing class towards

democracy. Having gained control of the machinery of government the

plutocracy found no cause to quarrel with a situation wholly to its

liking. It had mastered the gentle art of guiding the majority will,

and secure--as it believed--in its control of the political state,

it counted on an indefinite continuation of the policy of preëmption

and exploitation. From such a group, whether in Wall Street or at

Washington, no new theories of government were to be expected. Business

men wanted to be let alone. They clung to the anarchism of the

Enlightenment and were stout in defense of the principle of individual

initiative. So late as 1916 a group of confirmed individualists

reissued Spencer’s _Man Versus the State_, with an introduction by

Elihu Root, to combat the rising spirit of governmental control. They

regarded the American system of government as adequate and final, and

wanted no subversive changes. The Constitution had been completed by

the post-war enactments that fixed the status of the negro, and for a

generation thereafter--except for the silent changes wrought by the

judiciary--it remained static. East of the Allegheny Mountains popular

interest in political theory had come to an end. A group of academic

thinkers like John W. Burgess and Woodrow Wilson, an occasional

intellectual like Brooks Adams, isolated radicals like Johann Most

and small Marxian groups in Chicago and New York, and leaders of the

new proletarian movement like Terence V. Powderly, were still acutely

concerned about political theory; but these men and their theories

counted for little in the stodgy mass of capitalistic America. The

political phase had passed over into the economic; politics was wholly

divorced from reality.

But throughout the Middle Border and on to the Pacific Coast the

spirit of political democracy was alive and vigorous. There the older

frontier Jacksonianism still lingered. For upwards of a half a century

creative political thinking in America was largely western agrarian,

and from this source came those democratic ideas that were to provide

the staple of a later liberalism. The conscious objective of this great

movement was to complete the work begun by Jacksonianism, and create a

political machinery that should enable the democracy to withstand the

shock of the Industrial Revolution. Many thinkers contributed to the

work--U’Ren of Oregon, Jerry Simpson of Kansas, Tom Watson of Georgia,

“Coin” Harvey of Arkansas, General Weaver of Iowa, Ignatius Donnelly

of Minnesota, Henry D. Lloyd of Chicago, to name a handful out of the

mass--homespun realists who have been forgotten by a later generation,

but whose labors were given to the necessary work of refashioning

the political machinery of America, and whose program provided the

materials for the later Progressive party. They were commoners, men of

the people, unversed in the dogmas of the schools, idealists who drew

their inspiration from the Declaration of Independence; they spoke

for an older America that feared the rising plutocracy, and they were

casting about for ways and means to cut its claws. From their labors

came the Greenback Movement, the Farmers’ Alliance, Populism; and from

them came in turn the Progressive Movement that reaped what they had

sown.

II • Third-Party Movements

It is, perhaps, not extreme to interpret the political history of

America since 1790 as largely a struggle between the spirit of the

Declaration of Independence and the spirit of the Constitution, the one

primarily concerned with the rights of man, the other more practically

concerned with the rights of property. The humanitarian idealism of the

Declaration has always echoed as a battle-cry in the hearts of those

who dream of an America dedicated to democratic ends. It cannot be long

ignored or repudiated, for sooner or later it returns to plague the

councils of practical politics. It is constantly breaking out in fresh

revolt. When the major parties have grown callous and indifferent to

the wishes of the common people, it has reformulated its principles in

third-party platforms. Without its freshening influence our political

history would have been much more sordid and materialistic. With the

exception of such sporadic outbursts as Antimasonry and Knownothingism,

the third-party movements of the nineteenth century were democratic

movements, inspired by a sense of social justice, founded on the

Declaration of Independence, and promulgated to recall the American

people to their heritage of idealism. The Locofoco party, the Freesoil

party, the early Republican party, the Greenback party, the Populist

party, the Progressive party, however they differed in immediate

programs, have had a common objective, namely, to set man above

property as the great object of governmental concern, and preserve in

America the democratic principle of equal opportunity.

Despite the fact that they failed in their immediate objectives they

served the larger purpose of reminding the major parties that America

professes to be a democratic country, and that party platforms must be

brought to square with that fact. Thus interpreted the history of party

struggle since 1790 falls into three broad phases: the Jeffersonian

movement that established the ideal of political democracy; the

Jacksonian movement that established equalitarianism crudely in

practice; and the successive third-party movements that attempted, in

successive reactions, to regain such ground as had been lost, to extend

the field, and to perfect the machinery of democratic government. Since

the rise of the slavery controversy the major parties, allied with

masterful economic groups, have persistently ignored the Declaration

of Independence, and repudiated in practice the spirit of democracy.

To prevent if possible so grave a treason to our traditional ideals,

to assert the rights of the common man against the encroachments of

a class, has been therefore the common mission of the third-party

movements. The significance of their somewhat scanty success is

something the thoughtful American may interpret as he will.

Since Civil War days, discontent has been endemic in the Middle Border,

and it has broken out in three great political upheavals: the Greenback

movement of the seventies; the Populist movement of the eighties and

nineties; and the Non-Partisan League movement of the second decade

of the present century. Issuing from a profound resentment at the

exploitation from which the farmer suffered, they mark a persistent

drift away from the old Jacksonian individualism and an advance toward

a socialized conception of the political state. Disciplined by hard

times the farmers were learning a lesson from capitalistic Whiggery;

if the political state had proved serviceable to business why should

it not prove serviceable to agriculture? Why should not a democratic

state consider the producers as well as the middleman? Why should it

not provide a national currency, a national system of transportation,

a democratic banking system, a standard system of grain-grading,

public elevators, crop insurance, and the like? Why should the farmer

be squeezed at every turn by private companies who did badly what the

state could do well? By 1917, in short, the Middle Border had got far

from the simple individualism of earlier days and was well advanced

toward state socialism; and it was only the ruthless opposition of the

business interests, that had no wish to see their private preserves

thus rudely invaded, that put a stop to the movement.

Back of all these agrarian programs was the greater problem of the

popular control of the political state. How could the undisciplined

majority hold in check the disciplined minority? How could poverty meet

wealth on an equal footing? The control of politics had fallen into

the hands of the machine, and the machine served property interests.

Legislatures were bought and sold like corner lots; senatorships went

to the highest bidder; judges were more responsive to the wishes of

bankers than to those of farmers. To break the power of the machine

there must be an extension of democratic control, and to that end

new machinery must be provided. Hence the vast agrarian concern

with political machinery. From the agrarian agitation--supplemented

by proletarian and middle-class recruits--has come the Australian

ballot, the Initiative and the Referendum, the Recall, the Direct

Primary, and popular election of Senators. The only important agrarian

principle that has not been adopted is the principle of proportional

representation. If agrarianism lost its great battle over the currency,

it won the battle over the income tax. Nullified by a scandalous court

decision after it had been long accepted, the income tax was finally

established by the tedious method of constitutional amendment--an

outcome that owed much to the Middle Border. In casting up the accounts

of American democracy, the largest sums must be credited to the Middle

Border, as in earlier years they were credited to the Jacksonian

frontier. Whether the new machinery is useful or merely cumbersome,

there is much disagreement, but it is agrarian in origin and it came

from an honest attempt to democratize American politics.[764]

Footnotes

[764] The Contents here calls for a third section on the “Populistic

Program” (see p. xxxiv for details) and a fourth on “William Jennings

Bryan.”--_Publisher._

Chapter III • Literature and the Middle Border[765]

III • Hamlin Garland and the Middle Border

It was not till the end of the eighties that the bitterness of the

frontier began to creep into literature. Its slackness and drab

poverty had got into the pages of _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, as its

neighborliness had got into Riley; but in these earlier studies there

was no brooding sense of social injustice, of the wrongs done the

Middle Border by unjust laws, of the hardships that are increased

by the favoritism of government. In the year 1887, however, came a

significant change of temper. Three very different writers--Harold

Frederic, Joseph Kirkland, and Hamlin Garland--turned to the theme of

farm life, and dealt with it in a mordantly realistic vein. It was the

first conscious literary reaction to the subjection of agriculture to

capitalistic exploitation and it was marked by the bitterness of a

decaying order.

_Seth’s Brother’s Wife_, by Harold Frederic, is a drab tale of farm

life in upper York State, as bitter as any tale of the western border.

It is a story of defeat, of flight from country to town. The blight

of failure is upon the farming community--a blight that embitters old

and young; and the sketches of country louts, of soured lives, of

broken men and women, do not make pleasant reading. No gentle idyllic

light rests on the landscape such as Sarah Orne Jewett discovers on

the fields and villages of New England. Sabrina Fairchild, an old maid

embittered by the family failure, yet clinging to the family pride

and hopeful that the family prestige will be restored, is a pathetic

and desolate figure, gaunt and sharp-tongued; at mortal feud with

another pathetic old woman, who with her husband had emigrated from

Massachusetts years before, and held herself proudly above the mean and

vulgar neighborhood in which they had settled. The slack servants,

gossipy and impudent, the petty lives, the grasping ways unrelieved by

any grace or beauty, and set in a world of petty machine politics, make

a drab and unattractive picture. Harold Frederic quite evidently hates

this countryside that bred him. He will not, like Hamlin Garland, take

up the battle for it against the town. He sees no hope in political

programs; he is no Populistic agrarian fighting for justice; he wants

only to escape from it to the city, where life may be lived more

generously. The “trail of the serpent is over it all,” he remarks,

“rich and poor, big and little. The nineteenth century is a century of

cities; they have given their own twist to the progress of the age--and

the farmer is almost as far out of it as if he lived in Alaska. Perhaps

there may have been a time when a man could live in what the poet calls

daily communion with Nature and not starve his mind and dwarf his soul,

but this isn’t the century ... get out of it as soon as you can.”[766]

Much less bitter and hopeless is _Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring

County_ (1887), by Joseph Kirkland, son of Matilda Kirkland, who a

generation before had written sketches of the Michigan frontier.

In the preface the author points out that his study is “a palpable

imitation of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd,’” an “attempt

to reproduce, on American soil, the unflinching realism ... of life

down in actual contact with the soil itself.” It is a tale of pioneer

days in Illinois, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and

it draws a full-length portrait of the son of a Pennsylvania immigrant

who struggles up from mean beginnings to prosperity. The niggardliness

of frontier life is drawn unsparingly--the harsh struggle for

subsistence--but there is no outcry against governmental favoritisms or

the law’s injustice. It is nature that must be fought and conquered,

and the battle needs strong men who must subdue their finer natures

and more generous impulses to the work of acquisition. Zury Prouder

is a masterful fellow who bends every energy to the business of

accumulation. He makes one hand wash the other, and by dint of saving

and squeezing and trading and foreclosing he slowly amasses wealth and

power. He is a thrifty farmer as well as a shrewd trader, but his soul

is seared by the frontier meanness--squeezed into land and stock and

mortgages, consumed with the passion for grabbing. It was a reaction

from the skimpiness of his youth. The bitterness of poverty had

entered his heart as a boy, and his life took shape from the youthful

resolve--

“Dad, I’m goin’ t’own a mortgage ’fore I die; mind what I say.”

“Hope ye will, Zury,” his father replies. “Yew’ll have a holt of

the right eend of the poker then; ’n’ t’other feller he’ll have a

holt o’ the hot part, same’s we’ve got naow.”

“You bet! An’ it’ll sizzle his hands, tew, afore I’ll ever let up

on him.”

But Kirkland will not let Zury remain a crabbed and hard-fisted son of

the frontier. As the frontier hardships grow less the soul that has

been seared by poverty is awakened to more generous impulses. Late

in life Zury is taken in hand by a Boston woman who had come out as

a schoolteacher years before, and whom Zury had given up for a bride

with a rich farm, but to whom he eventually returns. Under her care

the plates of mail are stripped from his heart, his better nature

expands, and the meanest man in Spring County ripens into a kindly and

lovable old age. What poverty and hardship had warped and twisted, love

straightens out and ennobles; the meanness of the frontier is washed

away as the rich soil yields a more abundant life. It is not a great

book, but it is vigorous and honest, and its earlier chapters contain

some admirable bits of realism. As one of the first stories of the

western farmer it is secure of a place in the history of our American

fiction.

It was this same year, 1887, that Hamlin Garland, alone and brooding

over his studies at the Boston Public Library, wrote his first sketches

of life in the Middle Border. The romance was fading from the prairies

when he took up his pen. The Golden West of Mark Twain and the bucolic

West of Whitcomb Riley had both slipped into the past and the day that

was rising was to bring its discouragements that seared men’s hopes

as the hot winds seared the fields of rustling corn. The burdens of

the western farmer were heavy on his shoulders and he could foresee

no time when they would be lighter. Depression had settled on the

Middle Border, and Hamlin Garland returning to the familiar fields

from his Boston studies felt the depression in every fiber of his

being. This was his land and his people. The blight laid upon men and

women and children by the drab pioneer life was a familiar fact to

him. The Garlands and the McClintocks had suffered from it as their

neighbors suffered, and a rebellious wrath filled his heart as he

contemplated the Middle Border--the barnyards where tired men did the

evening chores, the ungainly houses where tired women stood over hot

stoves, the fertile acres that produced more than the markets consumed.

It was a life without grace or beauty or homely charm--a treadmill

existence that got nowhere. If this were the Valley of Democracy

then the democracy was a mean thing and hopeless, and having himself

escaped from it he would do what he could to help others escape. In

the completeness of his disillusion the glamour of romance was swept

away and he proposed to set down in honest plain words the manner of

life lived by these Middle Border folk, and the sort of earnings won by

their toil. He would speak frankly out of the common bitter experience.

The way to truth was the way of realism.

To a later generation that never knew the pioneer hardships of the

Middle Border, Hamlin Garland seems strangely remote and old-fashioned;

yet his intellectual antecedents are both ancient and honorable. At

bottom he is an idealist of the old Jeffersonian breed, an earnest

soul devoid of humor, who loves beauty and is mightily concerned about

justice, and who, discovering little beauty and finding scant justice

in the world where fate first set him, turned rebel and threw in his

lot with the poor and the exploited. As a young man, consumed with a

desire to speak for his people, he espoused a somber realism, for only

by and through the truth could he hope to dislodge from men’s minds the

misconceptions that stood in the way of justice. The Middle Border had

no spokesman at the court of letters and if he could gain a hearing

there he must not betray his father’s household by glossing ungainly

reality; he must depict the life of the western farmer as it was lived

under the summer sun and the winter cold, what harvests were brought to

crib and what sort of wealth was finally gathered.

And yet in the light of his total work one hesitates to call Garland a

realist. Perhaps more justly he might be called a thwarted romantic,

and his early rebellious realism be traced to its source in a

passionate refusal to be denied the beauty that should be a portion of

any rational way of living; for when later he found himself in a land

of nobler horizons, unsoiled as yet by crude frontier exploitation,

when he looked out upon vast mountain ranges and felt the warm sun on

the gray plains, he discovered there the romance of his dreams and

fell to describing the strange splendors with the gusto of a naïve

romantic. _Main-Travelled Roads_ and _Prairie Folks_ are the protest

of one oppressed with the meanness of a world that takes such heavy

toll of human happiness; _Her Mountain Lover_ is the expression of

a frank romantic who glories in the nobility of nature’s noblemen;

and _The Captain of the Gray-Horse Troop_ is a tale in which romance

is justified by ethics and the hero discovers in the protection of a

weaker race the deepest satisfactions of life. Beauty is excellent, but

beauty should walk hand in hand with service--not art for art’s sake,

but art subdued to the higher good of humanity.

Between these extremes of a stark realism and an ethical romanticism,

stand two books, separated by many years and great changes, that embody

in more finished form the theme which after all was the master passion

of Garland’s life--the Middle Border and the rebellions it bred. _Rose

of Dutcher’s Coolly_ is a full-length portrait of an idealist in revolt

against the narrowness of farm life, and _A Son of the Middle Border_

is an idyll of the past, autobiography done in mellower years when the

passions of youth have been subdued to less exigent demands. These

books, together with the sketches of _Main-Travelled Roads_ and the

militant critical theory of _Crumbling Idols_, contain pretty much the

whole of Hamlin Garland that after years have cared to remember--the

saga of the Middle Border in the days of its great rebellion when the

earlier hopes of boundless prosperity were turning to ashes in the

mouth.

The striking originality of Garland’s work, that sets it apart from

other studies of the local-color school, sprang from the sincerity of

his reaction to environment. His intellectual development followed the

needs of his ardent, inquisitive nature. After quitting the little

Academy at Osage, Iowa, he went forth in quest of an education that

should explain to him the meaning of life as he had known it. In this

search he was singularly fortunate. He was his own mentor and he took

what he needed. Boston had long been the Mecca of his dreams and when

he found himself there--having made a pious pilgrimage as Howells had

done a generation earlier--he threw himself upon his studies with

ascetic zeal. Fortunately he enrolled in the Boston Public Library

instead of at Harvard, and his formless radicalisms there found food

in plenty. Though he lived in Boston some ten years and made friends,

he never penetrated the inner literary sanctuary. A somewhat forlorn

outsider, unknown and unvouched for, he found no welcome as Howells and

Twain had found, and he never entered the pleasant circles where Holmes

and Lowell and Fields and Norton and Aldrich and Howells held sway.

Perhaps that fact unconsciously determined his scornful rejection

of the Boston genteel in literature; at any rate his denial of the

sovereignty of the New England literary rulers left him free to follow

other masters who seemed to him more significant. In his bleak little

room his ear had caught the greater voices then sounding in Europe

and America. His masters were men of intellectual horizons unbounded

by Beacon Street and Harvard Square: Taine and Ibsen and Björnson,

Turgenev and Tolstoi, Zola and Millet, Darwin and Spencer and Fiske,

Walt Whitman and Henry George, and the later Howells with his deeper

sociological concern and graver realism. His three great masters came

finally to be Whitman, Spencer, and Henry George. To these greater

names should be added that of Edward Eggleston, who had been his

boyhood idol, and that of Joseph Kirkland, who did much to stimulate

and guide his earliest sketches. He did not absorb all these men had

to give. He could not stretch his provincial mind suddenly to compass

the intellectual realm of his masters. But something he got and that

something, woven into the fabric of his thinking, was to make him

free. It was the best school of the times, and from his studies Hamlin

Garland emerged an uncompromising radical, one of a group of eager

young men who gathered about B. O. Flower, and in the sympathetic pages

of the _Arena_ published their divers radicalisms to a hostile world.

He was ready to proclaim new social and literary creeds, ready to go

forth to do battle for democratic justice and a democratic art.

The gist of Garland’s new literary creed is set forth in _Crumbling

Idols_, written in the earliest years of the nineties, when Chicago was

preparing the setting for the World’s Fair, and gathered into book form

in 1894. It is realism modified by the local-color school, by French

impressionism, and by Whitman--intensely individualistic, ardently

social, and militantly democratic. It would sweep away every fetish of

great reputations and authoritative schools, and insist that the artist

confront the life that he knows and tell of it truthfully. Following

the French example he calls this iconoclastic realism, Veritism. “The

_theory_ of the veritist,” he says, “is, after all, a statement of his

passion for truth and for individual expression,” and he then goes on:

Art, I must insist, is an individual thing,--the question of one

man facing certain facts and telling his individual relations to

them. His first care must be to present his own concept. This is,

I believe, the essence of veritism. “Write of those things of

which you know most, and for which you care most. By so doing you

will be true to yourself, true to your locality, and true to your

time.”[767]

But Veritism in the hands of a disciple of Taine, Whitman, Henry

George, and Herbert Spencer must take on ethical values and serve the

common well-being. All art, he insists, is “sociologic,” and realism is

harsh because it is hopeful.

Because the fictionist of to-day sees a more beautiful and

peaceful future social life, and, in consequence, a more beautiful

and peaceful literary life, therefore he is encouraged to deal

truthfully and at close grapple with the facts of his immediate

present. His comment virtually amounts to satire or prophesy, or

both. Because he is sustained by love and faith in the future, he

can be mercilessly true. He strikes at thistles, because he knows

the unrotted seed of loveliness and peace needs but sun and the air

of freedom to rise to flower and fragrance.

The realist or veritist is really an optimist, a dreamer. He sees

life in terms of what it might be, as well as in terms of what it

is; but he writes of what is, and, at his best, suggests what is

to be, by contrast.... He aims to hasten the age of beauty and

peace by delineating the ugliness and warfare of the present; but

ever the converse of his picture rises in the mind of the reader.

He sighs for a lovelier life. He is tired of warfare and diseased

sexualism, and Poverty the mother of Envy. He is haggard with

sympathetic hunger, and weary with the struggle to maintain his

standing place on this planet, which he conceives was given to all

as the abode of peace. With his hate in his heart and this ideal

in his brain the modern man writes his stories of life. They are

not always pleasant, but they are generally true, and always they

provoke thought.[768]

It is an excellent self-portrait of the young realist of that early

time when all the rebellions of his blood cried out for expression--the

troubled years between 1887 and 1893 when the Border was rising and

the son of the Border found the flames of his discontent fanned by

many winds. From such roots came the most acrid tales that had as yet

fruited in American fiction. Few as were the stories of _Main-Travelled

Roads_ and _Prairie Folks_, they constitute a landmark in our literary

history, for they were the first authentic expression and protest of an

agrarian America then being submerged by the industrial revolution. No

other man in our literature had known so intimately the Middle Border

as Hamlin Garland--its restless swarmings from the old hive, never

pausing long enough to gather the honey of the new fields, its heedless

venturings for the reputed gold that lay beyond the farthest sunsets.

He had responded to the spell that kept the pioneer moving West; the

allurement of the untamed prairie, the poetry of dawn and twilight. But

the poignant spell had been broken for him by the drab realities that

lay between the dawn and the twilight--the crushing round of toil that

took such heavy toll of men’s development and women’s happiness. He was

familiar with the blight as well as the bloom of the frontier. He had

seen his uncle David McClintock broken by the Border--the great wistful

man with the soul of a musician; he had seen his mother fail under the

burden--the cheerful, uncomplaining wife, joining with her rich voice

in the pioneer’s song of “O’er the hills in legions, Boys!” And after

the disillusion of his final defeat on the bleak Dakota plains--by

1883 woodland and meadow were pretty much alienated from the public

domains and only plains and deserts and mountain valleys and forests

remained--his eyes were opened at last. “I clearly perceived,” he said

afterwards, “that our Song of Emigration had been, in effect, the hymn

of fugitives!” So he turned his face to the East to seek the land of

desire in Boston.

That chapter of his life was ended. He had learned that the old

romantic tales of the Border were lies to him, whatever they may have

been to earlier generations; but he had yet to naturalize himself in

the realm of ideas, and analyze the experiences of his youth in the

light of current social liberalisms. He had begun that work in 1883

on his raw Dakota claim where his leisure hours were given to Taine’s

theory of literary determinism, and Henry George’s new gospel of

single-tax; and he carried it rapidly forward during three years of

eager reading. During those quiet months in Boston when he was making

himself at home in the world of contemporary thought, he sketched the

first of the stories of western life which later he gathered together

in _Main-Travelled Roads_ and _Prairie Folks_. “You’re the first actual

farmer in American fiction,” said his friend Kirkland, “now tell the

truth about it.” This handful of short stories, fierce in the repressed

passion of the writer’s heart, was Garland’s reply to the old romantic

myths of the West. In these acrid pages life is not bucolic, it does

not chew the cud of contentment “knee-deep in June,” but it is stained

with dust and sweat, lacerated by raw nerves, depressed by a sense of

economic failure.

Of the lives of these labor-burdened men and women he intended to tell

the whole truth. But, as he confessed later, he could not. “Even my

youthful zeal faltered in the midst of a revelation of the lives led by

the women on the farms of the middle border. Before the tragic futility

of their suffering, my pen refused to shed its ink. Over the hidden

chamber of their maternal agonies I drew the veil.” It was hard for

him to view it all with the calm detachment of the objective realist;

the Border life was too deeply and intimately personal to him, it had

marked him too harshly. And yet in the sense of conveying the spirit of

reality he succeeded greatly, and these earliest tales remain notable

work which later years have not forgotten. The subdued words of the

Prologue offer the fittest of commentaries on the spirit in which they

were done.

The Main-travelled road in the West (as everywhere) is hot and

dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with mud in fall and

spring, and in winter the winds sweep across it; but it does

sometimes cross a rich meadow where the songs of the larks and

bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled. Follow it far enough, it may

lead past a bend in the river where the water laughs eternally

over its shallows. Mainly it is long and weariful, and has a dull

little town at one end and a home of toil at the other. Like the

main-travelled road of life it is traversed by many classes of

people, but the poor and the weary predominate.

_Main-Travelled Roads_, in its harsh objectivity, belonged to the

earlier eighties, to the time when the spirit of unrest was still

obscurely fermenting in the western mind, before it had clarified in

definite agrarian movements and measures. It is clouded by doubt and

harassed by uncertainty. No hope offers a way out of the weary tangle.

Its psychology is that of the first mood of dejection that came with

the failure of western agriculture with its virgin fields, its new

machinery, and its specialized crops, to adjust itself to the new

capitalistic order. The simple agrarian mind had not learned to play

the new game. The sons of the Middle Border were children of the Gilded

Age as truly as Colonel Sellers or Commodore Vanderbilt; they were

plungers and speculators in land and crops; but they were no match for

the Main Street plungers and speculators; and when bankruptcy instead

of riches rewarded their hardships, they were embittered. Out of that

very natural bitterness sprang the movement of Populism that proposed

to take government out of the hands of Main Street and make it serve

agriculture. It was the understanding of this fact that made Howells

so sympathetic a critic of Garland. But he would encourage the artist

rather than the reformer.

... these stories are full of the bitter and burning dust, the foul

and trampled slush, of the common avenues of life, the life of the

men who hopelessly and cheerlessly make the wealth that enriches

the alien and the idler, and impoverishes the producer.

If any one is still at a loss to account for that uprising of the

farmers of the West which is the translation of the Peasants’ War

into modern and republican terms, let him read _Main-Travelled

Roads_, and he will begin to understand.... The stories are full of

those gaunt, grim, sordid, pathetic, ferocious figures, whom our

satirists find so easy to caricature as Hayseeds, and whose blind

groping for fairer conditions is so grotesque to the newspapers and

so menacing to the politicians. They feel that something is wrong,

and they know that the wrong is not theirs. The type caught in Mr.

Garland’s book is not pretty; it is ugly and often ridiculous; but

it is heart-breaking in its rude despair.[769]

Too soon, however, the will to remain objective weakened and his work

took on a different note. “Obscurely forming in my mind,” he says of

the year 1889, “were two great literary concepts--that truth was a

higher quality than beauty, and that to spread the reign of justice

should everywhere be the design and intent of the artist. The merely

beautiful in art seemed petty, and success at the cost of the happiness

of others a monstrous egotism.”[770] With this ethical conception of

art he returned in 1889 to the old home, after a six years’ absence,

to experience a poignant reaction to the change that had come over

the Border. “Another dry year was upon the land and the settlers were

deeply disheartened,” he wrote later. “The holiday spirit of eight

years before had entirely vanished. In its place was a sullen rebellion

against government and against God.”[771]

Every house I visited had its individual message of sordid struggle

and half-hidden despair.... All the gilding of farm life melted

away. The hard and bitter realities came back upon me in a flood.

Nature was as beautiful as ever. The soaring sky was filled with

shining clouds, the tinkle of the bobolink’s fairy bells rose from

the meadow, a mystical sheen was on the odorous grass and waving

grain, but no splendor of cloud, no grace of sunset, could conceal

the poverty of these people; on the contrary, they brought out,

with a more intolerable poignancy, the gracelessness of these

homes, and the sordid quality of the mechanical routine of these

lives. I perceived beautiful youth becoming bowed and bent. I saw

lovely girlhood wasting away into thin and hopeless age. Some of

the women I had known had withered into querulous and complaining

spinsterhood, and I heard ambitious youth cursing the bondage of

the farm. “Of such pain and futility are the lives of the average

man and woman of both city and country composed,” I acknowledged to

myself with candor, “Why lie about it?”[772]

In such a mood the call of social justice was too insistent to be

denied. “With William Morris and Henry George I exclaimed, ‘Nature

is not to blame. Man’s laws are to blame’!” And so the young man of

twenty-nine threw himself into the agrarian cause. He took the platform

with Mary Ellen Lease and was glad of the farmers’ approval of the

new doctrine of less corn and more hell. Under the urging of his

friend Flower he planned to put the Populist movement into fiction and

wrote _A Spoil of Office_. The familiar Iowa backgrounds are in the

story--the harsh lives and bent weary figures of men and women--but

there is also an idealized heroine who suggests what life may become

when injustice is done away with and the blighting toil is lessened--a

figure who, as Grange lecturer and Farmers’ Alliance speaker, may

have been suggested by Mary Ellen Lease. Much inferior as it is to

_Main-Travelled Roads_--a social tract rather than a work of art--we

cannot well spare it from our Middle Border literature, for it has

captured and preserves for later times the spirit of the passionate

uprising of the farmers, and it recalls the vast hopes that fermented

in that revolt--not well grounded, perhaps, but warm and human. “The

heart and center of this movement,” says Ida Wilbur, “is a demand for

justice, not for ourselves alone, but for the toiling poor wherever

found.... It is no longer a question of legislating for the farmer; it

is a question of the abolition of industrial slavery.”[773] There are

echoes of an older and simpler America in these pages, of discontents

that were put down but not removed--Jacksonianisms, Greenbackisms,

anti-monopolistic crusades. Yet they look forward to a time when beauty

and well-being shall be the common portion of those who do the work

of the world. The way, alas, is “long and weary, and thousands and

millions of us must die on the road, I am afraid,” says the heroine;

but go forward they must, along other paths than the path of capitalism.

Less significant is _Jason Edwards: An Average Man_ (1891), that is an

elaboration of the note, “The air is full of revolt against things as

they are.” It is a single-tax reply to the question of a young girl,

“Are there any happy people in the world--any working people, I mean?

Are they all cross and tired and worried and full of care, as we are

here?” The story is two chapters in the life of a workingman--his

struggle in Boston as a mechanic, and his struggle in Minnesota,

whither he flees for a refuge on a homestead. Defeat awaits him in

the end, and the conclusion is an illustration of Henry George’s

thesis that poverty is the entail of land rent. In this and in other

studies done under the influence of B. O. Flower, whose appetite for

reform literature was insatiable, Hamlin Garland had ceased to be an

objective realist and turned propagandist, bringing down on his head

the criticisms of conservative readers. One of his friends went so far

as to expostulate over the folly of his course. “It is a mistake for

you to be associated with cranks like Henry George and writers like

Whitman,” he said. “It is a mistake to be published in the _Arena_.

Your book should have been brought out by one of the old established

firms. If you will fling away your radical notions and consent to amuse

the governing classes, you will succeed.”[774]

It is the agrarian background of Garland’s mind that makes him seem

old-fashioned to a generation that has forgotten the agrarian roots

of our past growth. He was so deeply colored by this earlier native

America that he never outgrew it; and when the Populistic revolt had

died down, when this last organized agrarian rebellion against the

exploiting middle class had become only an episode in our history,

he had outlived his day. He was too deeply stirred by Whitman’s

romantic faith in democracy, too narrowly a disciple of Henry George’s

Jeffersonian economics, to fit into an industrializing America. Despite

his discipleship to European realism he refused to go with the group

of young left-wing naturalists who were boldly venturing on new ways

of fiction. He would not follow the path of naturalism. Of Norris’s

_McTeague_ he said, “What avail is this study of sad lives? for it

does not even lead to a notion of social betterment.”[775] He could

not bring himself to accept the major criteria of naturalism as they

were exemplified in the work of Zola and Strindberg and Hauptmann.

A native Jeffersonian, inspired by Whitman and instructed by Henry

George and Herbert Spencer, would reject the somber, mechanistic

background of naturalist thought. He had learned his science of the

Victorian evolutionists, with their grandiose conception of a far-flung

beneficent progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, and

the backgrounds of his mind were radiant with promise. Neither a

mechanistic science nor a regimented industrialism had risen in his

outlook to bank the fires of his hope. No impersonal determinism had

chilled his belief in man as a free-will agent in a moral universe.

The vast bleak chemical cosmos that bewildered Theodore Dreiser

did not rise before him to dwarf the individual nor overwhelm his

aspirations. Like a French romantic of a hundred years before, he

remained a confirmed optimist who believed that the future will correct

the mistakes of the past, and the peace and beauty for which the

human race longs lie immediately ahead. The art of the young man was

becoming old-fashioned in the world of Stephen Crane; his ideals were

Victorian in the days of Mark Hanna. And so after the agrarian revolt

had failed and America lay fat and contented in the lap of McKinley

prosperity, he found himself a man without a country, an alien in

an industrializing order, and he turned away to the newer West and

the romance he had always sought. While America was driving towards

regimentation he traveled backward in time to recover a vanishing world

of individualism, and the distance rapidly widened between them.

In those romantic wanderings through Colorado and California and

into the far Northwest he found a new interest in the frontiersman’s

exploitation of the Indian, and in _The Captain of the Gray-Horse

Troop_ and _The Eagle Heart_ he has wedded his social ethics to French

romanticism, and endowed man in a state of nature with exalted social

responsibilities. The old theme is dressed in new clothes and Captain

Curtis of the Gray-Horse Troop becomes an Indian agent fighting the

lawless and cruel encroachment of the frontiersmen upon the Indian

rights; but the theme remains. Garland hated the frontier as fiercely

as Cooper hated it, and like him he loved the clean free spaces; but

when after his long and somewhat futile rambles he returned to the

Middle Border, he found there a new light upon the familiar fields and

in that light he wrote his saga of the Garlands and the McClintocks.

This was to be his great bequest to American letters. To have sought

the spirit of the Middle Border in its hopes and its defeat, to have

written the history of the generation that swept across the western

prairies, is to compress within covers a great movement and a great

experience--one of the significant chapters in our total American

history.

Footnotes

[765] In Professor Parrington’s plan the section given here was to be

preceded by a first section on “Edward Eggleston and Frontier Realism,”

and a second on “Whitcomb Riley and Folk Romance.”--_Publisher._

[766] Chapter IV, pp. 26-27.

[767] Chapter III, p. 35.

[768] Chapter IV, pp. 51-53.

[769] Introduction to _Main-Travelled Roads_.

[770] _A Son of the Middle Border_, Chapter XXVIII, p. 374.

[771] _Ibid._, Chapter XXIX.

[772] _Ibid._, Chapter XXVIII, pp. 364-365.

[773] _Ibid._, p. 245.

[774] _A Son of the Middle Border_, Chapter XXXI, p. 417.

[775] _Critic_, Vol. 42, pp. 216-218.

Part Two: Proletarian Hopes[776]

Footnotes

[776] The first chapter of this section was to have been “Plutocracy

and the Workingman,” the second “The Rise of the Left.” For the

contents see p. xxxv.--_Publisher._

Chapter III • The Quest of Utopia

From the welter of unrest of the later years of the century, with

its labor struggles, its agrarian bitterness, its concern over the

exhaustion of the public lands and a pinching monetary system, its

acute distrust of monopolies and corporate power, sprang a very natural

eagerness to forecast the future and blaze new roads that might

lead to the democratic Canaan. Whither the main-traveled road would

lead, discerning idealists knew only too well. To bog down in a mire

of plutocracy would be a sorry ending to the great experiment; yet

the mud was deepening with every mile of advance and unless another

highway appeared the situation was unpromising. The crux of the problem

seemed to reside in an extension of the powers of the political state,

converting to social ends powers that hitherto had been serving private

gain. The plutocracy was pointing the way. If the political state were

fairly dedicated to democratic ends, why should not society go forward

toward a true commonwealth, founded on a social economy and dedicated

to common justice and the common well-being? There was need only to

subordinate private interests to collective interests, and substitute

coöperation for the present mad scramble of selfish individualism.

In elaboration of this pregnant thought a surprising number of social

romances appeared during the last quarter of the century, that were

native counterparts of the greater studies in collectivism by European

thinkers. A recent study lists forty-eight titles of Utopian romances

written between 1884 and 1900.[777] Of these several are communistic,

and the rest are socialistic; yet in keeping with the American temper

none openly makes use of the terms, and few apply the Marxian doctrine

of the class war. Their appeal was directed primarily to the middle

class of small business and professional men, and they were content to

rely on political means to achieve economic ends. Troubled as was the

American mind by the rise of a cutthroat exploitation, it was not yet

ready to entertain ideas of direct action or trust the proletariat to

enforce its will by mass strength. In one story, to be sure--Ignatius

Donnelly’s _Caesar’s Column_ (1890)--there is a gloomy picture of the

downfall of civilization caused by the class struggles; but the temper

of Donnelly had lost its genial optimism through his long immersion in

under-dog contests and had grown mordant and gloomy.

1 • Edward Bellamy and “Looking Backward”

When in 1888 Edward Bellamy published _Looking Backward_ he gave a huge

impetus to the Utopian romance. Third in the list of titles collected

by Mr. Forbes, it was to have a wide influence on the thought of the

times. It made instant appeal and successive editions were issued

to meet the popular demand. Not since _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ had an

American novel reached so many readers, and Bellamy became at once

a national figure, the prophet of a new industrial order. There is

abundant evidence to the effect produced upon thoughtful readers. E. C.

Stedman, the first critic of the times, spoke of it as a “remarkable

and fascinating novel”; Frances E. Willard called it “a revelation and

an evangel”; and Howells remarked on “the extraordinary effect which

Mr. Bellamy’s romance has had with the public.” More significant still,

_Looking Backward_ speedily became the source and inspiration for a

series of social organizations that beginning at Boston soon spread

over the country. _The Nationalist_ was established as the organ of

the movement and thousands of eager men and women threw themselves

into the work of reshaping American society to conform to the new

social ideal. No doubt the enthusiasm was naïve, no doubt it sprang

from a social inexperience that underestimated the complexity of the

problem, yet the sources, clearly, were a sharp distrust of private

capitalism and an idealistic faith in coöperation. In a pronouncement

of the Boston “Nationalist Club,” January 9, 1889, the cause was rested

on two fundamental truths--“The principle of competition is ... the

application of the brutal law of the survival of the strongest and most

cunning”; and, “The principle of the Brotherhood of Humanity is one of

the eternal truths that govern the world’s progress on lines which

distinguish human nature from brute nature.”[778]

It is not easy to trace the origins of Bellamy’s interest in

collectivism or the sources of his thought. A journalist and lawyer,

he had studied in Germany, where presumably he had come in contact

with Marxian socialism. Writing in the _Nationalist_ for May, 1889, he

commented thus on the origins of _Looking Backward_:

I never had, previous to the publication of the work, any

affiliations with any class or sect of industrial or social

reformers nor, to make my confession complete, any particular

sympathy with undertakings of the sort. It is only just to myself

to say, however, that this should not be taken to indicate any

indifference to the miserable condition of the mass of humanity,

seeing that it resulted rather from a perception all too clear

of the depth and breadth of the social problem and a consequent

skepticism as to the effectiveness of the proposed solutions which

had come to my notice.

In undertaking to write _Looking Backward_ I had, at the outset, no

idea of attempting a serious contribution to the movement of social

reform. The idea was of a mere literary fantasy, a fairy tale of

social felicity. There was no thought of contriving a house which

practical men might live in, but merely of hanging in mid-air, far

out of the reach of the sordid and material world of the present, a

cloud-palace for an ideal humanity.[779]

That the impulse did not come from the Marxians is sufficiently

clear from his explanation of the idea of an industrial army. “The

idea of committing the duty of maintaining the community to an

industrial army, precisely as the duty of protecting it is entrusted

to a military army,” came to him, he said, from the object-lesson

of European militarism. But however little he owed to the Marxians

it is clear that Bellamy--the literary amateur who had dabbled in

Hawthornesque fantasies--possessed a warm social conscience and a

vigorous inquiring mind; and once his attention had been drawn to the

evils of industrialism he would respond with the same direct competence

that marked the thinking of Henry George. Nine years before _Looking

Backward_ he had dealt with a sociological theme. In 1879 he wrote _The

Duke of Stockbridge, A Romance of Shay’s Rebellion_, for the _Berkshire

Courier_, which was reissued in book form in 1900. It was a hasty piece

of work that falls off greatly in the latter part; yet in its sympathy

for the agrarian rebels and its probing of the economic sources of

the post-Revolutionary unrest, it was far removed from the temper of

Federalist historians. It is an account of the tyranny of property

rule--of the exploitation of the debtor farmer by the creditor

gentleman made possible by the economic maladjustments resulting

from the war. A bitter discontent is in the hearts of the common

people. Hatred of lawyers and courts and process-servers, has taken

the place of hatred of Tories. Soldiers who had conquered Cornwallis

were returning home only to be conquered by writs and imprisoned by

sheriffs. The exactions of a brutal law fell upon helpless victims;

taxes outran incomes and there was no money to pay. Economic injustice

was daily whetting the edge of class bitterness. The animus of Shays’s

Rebellion is compressed into a few paragraphs that suggest how clearly

Bellamy had analyzed the social struggle.

“I use ter think ez there wuzn’t no sech varmint ez a tory; but

I didn’t know nothin’ ’bout lawyers and sheriffs them times. I

calc’late ye could cut five tories aout o’ one lawyer an’ make a

dozen skunks aout o’ what wuz left over.”

“I hearn as haow Squire Woodbridge says taxes is ten times what

they wuz afore the war, an’ its sartin that there ain’t one

shillin’ inter folks’ pockets ter pay ’em with where there wuz ten

on ’em in them days.... It seems darn curis, bein’ as we fit ag’in

the red coats jest ter git rid o’ taxes.”[780]

So felt the agrarian. Now for the gentleman:

“That is the trouble nowadays, ... these numskulls must needs

have matters of government explained to them, and pass their own

judgment on public affairs. And when they cannot understand them,

then, forsooth, comes a rebellion. I think none can deny seeing in

these late troubles the first fruits of those pestilent notions of

equality, whereof we heard so much from certain quarters, during

the late war of independence. I would that Mr. Jefferson and some

of the other writers of disturbing democratic rhetoric might have

been here in the State the past winter, to see the outcome of their

preaching.”[781]

Nine years after _Looking Backward_ Bellamy published _Equality_, a

critical examination of economic history with a view to creating an

adequate social economics. The earlier work had drawn the outlines

of the democratic society of the future, the later supplied a

justification and a commentary. The great theme involved a twofold

problem: an analysis of the failure of social justice under private

capitalism, and a defense of the working of social capitalism. The two

threads are closely interwoven, and the effect is heightened by the

contrasts resulting from setting the two social orders over against

each other. Innumerable questions, touching diverse phases, are

propounded and answered. The apologist of private capitalism is pursued

into every stronghold of his logic; he is assailed by a hundred vivid

analogies which seek to lay bare the folly of a social system that

breeds waste only to breed poverty, that puts a premium upon greed and

yet takes away the security of possession, that bids the workers fight

each other instead of uniting for the common welfare. But men must see

a better before they will leave a worse, and so there is drawn the

picture of another commonwealth that must arise when men shall put off

the ass’s head from their shoulders, and set intelligently to work.

America is moving towards such a commonwealth, Bellamy is persuaded,

and yet how slow it is to grasp the meaning of democracy! It holds

back from its own good, loath to probe the depths of the revolutionary

philosophy of liberty, equality, fraternity. Julian West awakes in this

new world; his eyes are opened; the ass’s head is gone; he knows for

the first time the goodness of life in a rational society. And when

in a hideous nightmare he returned to the old Boston he had lived in

before he fell asleep, he tasted for the first time the full iniquity

of the old pigsty arrangement. “I have been in Golgotha,” he cried, “I

have seen Humanity hanging on a cross!” It is knowledge of the good

that must destroy the evil.