YOUTH
It has been said already, in speaking of Father Hecker's childhood,
that he had been consciously under the influence of supernatural
impressions from a very early period. It seems probable, therefore,
that at least during the few years which preceded his juvenile plunge
into politics he must have been devout and prayerful, though
doubtless in his own spontaneous way. Such were his mother's
characteristics, and we find her son writing to her, when his
aspirations after the perfect life had led him to the threshold of
the church, that she, of all persons, ought most to sympathize with
him, for he is about doing that which will aid him to be what she has
always desired to see him. But his devotions probably bore small
resemblance to those of the ordinary religiously minded boy, either
Catholic or Protestant. He has said that often at night, when lying
on the shavings before the oven in the bake-house, he would start up,
roused in spite of himself by some great thought, and run out upon
the wharves to look at the East River in the moonlight, or wander
about under the spell of some resistless aspiration. What does God
desire from me? How shall I attain unto Him? What is it He has sent
me into the world to do? These were the ceaseless questions of a
heart that rested, meanwhile, in an unshaken confidence that time
would bring the answer.
But these were early days, days when the influence of his mother,
never wholly shaken off, was still dominant and pervasive in all that
concerned him. There came a period, however, beginning in all
likelihood about his fourteenth, and lasting until his twentieth year
or thereabouts, in which he certainly lost hold on all distinctively
Christian doctrines. With such a mind as his, and such a training,
this was almost inevitable. His intellect, while it hungered
incessantly after supernatural truth, kept nevertheless a persistent
hold upon the verities of the natural order, and could not rest until
it had synthetized them into a coherent whole. That was his life-long
characteristic. During the years of painful ill health which preceded
his death, he often said that he was unlike the Celt, who takes to
the supernatural as if by instinct. "But I am a Saxon and cling to
the earthy" he would say; "I want an explicit and satisfactory reason
why any innocent pleasure should not be enjoyed." He attributed this
to his racial peculiarities. Others may differ with him and credit it
to his nature, taken in its human and rational integrity.
Furthermore, he was always singularly independent and self-poised. He
could not endure being hindered of anything that was his, except by
an authority which had legitimated to his intelligence its right to
command. He could obey that readily and entirely, as his life from
infancy clearly witnesses; but he never knew a merely arbitrary
master.
Such a nature, fed on the mingled truth and error characteristic of
orthodox Protestantism, was certain to reject it sooner or later,
impelled by hunger for the whole Divine gift of which that teaching
contains fragments only. The soul of Isaac Hecker was one athirst for
God from the first dawn of its conscious being. Upon Him, its Creator
and Source, it never lost hold, and never ceased to cry out for Him
with longing and aspiration, even during that bitter and protracted
period of his youth when his mind, entangled in the maze of
philosophic subjectivism, seemed in danger of rejecting theism
altogether. But the underpinning of his faith, so far as that
professed to be Christian and to come by hearing--to have an
intellectual basis, that is--began to slip away almost as soon as he
left his mother's knee. It is possible that very little stress was
ever laid upon distinctively Christian doctrines in her teaching. To
adore God the Creator, to listen to His voice in conscience, to live
honestly and purely as in His sight--the heritage she transmitted to
him probably contained little more than this. Like most others reared
in heresy who afterwards attain to the true knowledge of the
Incarnation, he had to seek for it with almost as great travail of
mind as if he had been born a pagan. It cannot be too strongly
insisted on, however, that his struggles were merely intellectual,
and, when they began to take a definite turn, shaped themselves into
the natural result of a metaphysic as repugnant to common sense as it
is to Christian philosophy. To this fact, so important in certain of
its bearings, we have ample testimony in the private diaries kept
before his conversion, from which we shall make extracts later on.
They find a later confirmation in some most interesting memoranda,
jotted down, after conversation with him at intervals during the last
years of his life, by one whom he admitted to an unusually close
intimacy. He was always singularly reserved concerning matters purely
personal; his confidences, when they touched his own soul, seldom
seemed entirely voluntary, and were quickly checked. Occasionally
they were taken by surprise, as when the course of talk insensibly
turned toward internal ways; and again they were deliberately angled
for with a hook so well concealed that it secured a prize before he
was aware. From these notes we shall here make a few quotations
bearing on the point made above--i.e., that his difficulties prior to
his entrance into the church were neither moral nor spiritual, but
intellectual. Of him, if of any man, it was always true that his
heart was naturally Christian. The first of these extracts, bearing
as it does on a topic constantly in his thoughts, affords a good
enough example of what was meant in saying that his confidences were
sometimes taken by surprise:
"There are some for whom the predominant influence is the external
one, authority, example, precept, and the like. Others in whose lives
the interior action of the Holy Spirit predominates. In my case, from
my childhood God influenced me by an interior light and by the
interior touch of His Holy Spirit."
At another time he said:
"While I was a youth, and in early manhood, I was preserved from
certain sins and certain occasions of sin, in a way that was peculiar
and remarkable. I was also at the same time, and, indeed, all the
time, conscious that God was preserving me innocent with a view to
some future providence. Mind, all this was long before I came into
the church."
And again:
"Many a time before my conversion God gave me grace to weep over
those words: 'And all those who love His coming.' I did not believe
in His coming, but I loved it honestly and longed to believe it. I
had learned much of the Bible from my mother and had read it often
and much myself."
This consciously supernatural character of his inner life from the
first, should be kept closely united in the reader's mind with that
other idea of his adhesion to "guileless nature" which was such a
favorite theme with Father Hecker. No one could be more emphatic than
he in asserting the necessity of the supernatural for the attainment
of man's destiny. How could it be otherwise, when he considered that
destiny to be the elevation of man above all good merely human, and
by means far beyond the compass of his natural powers? Still, this
was undoubtedly a conclusion of his riper years, a result arrived at
after a certain intense if not very prolonged experience in
contemporary Utopias, in futile endeavors to raise man above his own
level while remaining on it, whether by socialistic schemes or social
politics.
In an article called "Dr. Brownson and the Workingman's Party Fifty
Years Ago," published in _The Catholic World_ of May, 1887, Father
Hecker has himself made some interesting references to his
experiences in the latter field, and upon these we shall draw heavily
for our own account of this period of his life, supplementing them
with whatever bears upon the subject in the memoranda already
referred to.
Concerning the inception of this party, to which all three of the
young Heckers belonged in 1834, we have a better statement in Dr.
Brownson's _Convert_ than we know of elsewhere. Brownson was for a
time actively interested in it, and in 1829 established a journal in
support of its principles somewhere in Western New York. From him we
learn that it was started in 1828 by Robert Dale Owen, Robert L.
Jennings, George H. Evans, Fanny Wright, and a few other
doctrinaires, foreign-born without exception, in the hope of getting
control of political power so as to use it for establishing purely
secular schools. Their advocacy of anti-Christian and free-love
doctrines had so signally failed among adult Americans that the
slower but surer method of educating the children of the country
without religion had dawned upon them as more certain to succeed.
"We hoped," writes Dr. Brownson, "by linking our cause with the
ultra-democratic sentiment of the country, which had had from the
time of Jefferson and Tom Paine something of an anti-Christian
character; by professing ourselves the bold and uncompromising
champions of equality; by expressing a great love for the people and
a deep sympathy with the laborer, whom we represented as defrauded
and oppressed by his employer; by denouncing all proprietors as
aristocrats, and by keeping the more unpopular features of our plan
as far in the background as possible, to enlist the majority of the
American people under the banner of the Workingman's party; nothing
doubting that, if we could once raise that party to power, we could
use it to secure the adoption of our educational system."
This party, however, both as an engine in politics and as a fitting
embodiment of his private views, Dr. Brownson soon abandoned. He was
not truly radical, in the evil sense of that word, at any period of
his career, and the theories of the leaders soon became insupportable
to his moral sense. But he remained true to the cause of the
workingmen while abandoning the organization which assumed to voice
their needs and their wishes. Probably these more ulterior aims of
their leaders were never fully appreciated by the rank and file of
those who followed them. Yet the genesis of the present purely
secular school system, against whose workings and results nearly all
Christian denominations are too late beginning to protest, is clearly
traceable to the propaganda carried on half a century ago by men and
women whose only half-veiled warfare against Christianity, property,
and marriage was then an offence in the nostrils of our people at
large. It is fair to predict that this generation, or another which
shall succeed it, will yet have the good sense to regret, and the
courage to atone for, the fact that hatred to the Catholic Church,
and a desire to cripple her hands where her own children were
concerned, should have been a more powerful agent in dragging them
and theirs into the abyss of secularism than was their love of
Christianity in deterring them from it.
Father Hecker's account of his own youthful connection with the
"Workingman's Democracy," although written with the direct intention
of placing his estimate of Dr. Brownson on record, has too many
strictly autobiographic touches in it to be here omitted. Such
passages, bearing on long past personal history, are fewer than we
could wish them among his papers, published or unpublished. The five
articles on Dr. Brownson, beginning in _The Catholic World_ of April,
1887, and concluding in November of the same year, contain almost the
only matters relative to his personal history which he ever put into
print. Concerning the party, of which Dr. Brownson says that he had
ceased to be a recognized leader at this time, although he still
threw his influence as a speaker into all its projects for social
reform, Father Hecker writes:
"We called ourselves the genuine Democracy, and in New York City were
for some years a separate political body, independent of the
'regular' Democracy, and voting our own ticket. I have before me the
files of our newspaper organ, the _Democrat,_ the first number of
which appeared March 9, 1836, published by Windt & Conrad, 11
Frankfort Street. In its prospectus the _Democrat_ promises to
contend for 'Equality of Rights, often trampled in the dust by
Monopoly Democrats,' to battle 'with an aristocratic opposition
powerful in talent and official entrenchment, and mighty in money and
facilities for corruption.' 'In the course of this duty it will not
fail fearlessly and fully to assert the inalienable rights of the
people['] against 'vested rights' and 'vested wrongs.' It claims to
be the 'instructive companion' of the mechanics' and workingmen's
leisure, 'the promotion of whose interests will ever form a leading
feature of the _Democrat.'_ And in the editorial salutatory it speaks
thus:
"'We are in favor of government by the people. Our objects are the
restoration of equal rights and the prostration of those
aristocratical usurpations existing in the state of monopolies and
exclusive privileges of every kind, the products of corrupt and
corrupting legislation. . . . At this moment we are the only large
nation on the face of the earth where the mass of the people govern
in theory--where they may govern in reality, if they will--where the
real taxes of government, although too heavy, are but trifling, and
where a majority of the population depend on their own labor for
support; yet such is the condition of that large class that the
fruits of their toil are inadequate to sustain themselves in comfort
and rear their families as the young citizens of a republic ought to
be reared.
"'. . . He is very shortsighted, however, who thinks that a majority
of the people, where universal suffrage exists, will submit long to a
state of toil and mendicity. The majority would soon learn to
exercise its political rights, and command its representatives to
carry the laws abolishing primogeniture and entails one step further,
and stop all devises of land and prohibit it from being an article of
sale. (In a foot-note of the editorial:) We actually heard these and
several such propositions discussed by a number of apparently very
intelligent mechanics, after the adjournment of a meeting called to
consider the subject of wages, rents, etc.'
"At that time the main question was the condition of the public
finances, and our agitation was directed chiefly against granting
charters to private banks of circulation. We condemned these as
monopolies, for we were hostile to all monopolies--that is to say, to
the use of public funds or the enjoyment of public exclusive
privileges by any man or association or class of men for their
private profit."
We interrupt our direct quotation from this article in order to
relate one of the humors of the period, so far as these brothers were
concerned, in the words of the late Mr. George Hecker:
"When we were bakers the money in common use was the old-fashioned
paper issued by private banks under State charters. We were regularly
against it. So we bought a hand printing-press and set it up in the
garret of our establishment. All the bills we received from our
customers, some thousands sometimes every week, we smoothed out and
put in a pile, and then printed on their backs a saying we took from
Daniel Webster (though I believe it was not quite authentic): 'Of all
the contrivances to impoverish the laboring classes of mankind, paper
money is the most effective. It fertilizes the rich man's field with
the poor man's sweat.' They tried to punish us for defacing money,
but we beat them. We didn't deface it; we only printed something on
the back of it. Isaac and I often worked all night putting up
handbills for our meetings, for in those days there were no
professional bill-posters."
Father' Hecker's acquaintance with Dr. Brownson, which had so
powerful an effect upon his future career, began in 1834, when
Brownson was invited to lecture in New York in favor of the
principles and aims of this party. Isaac was then in his fifteenth
year. Among the conversations recorded in the memoranda we find this
reference to their earliest interview:
"I first met Dr. Brownson in New York, in our house. I was then
reading the Washington _Globe,_ Benton's speeches, Calhoun's, etc.
The elder Blair was its editor; its motto was, 'The world is governed
too much'--a motto in whose spirit there could be no great movement
except in the way of revolution. After the establishment of the
American Government the principle expressed in that motto could only
be abandoned or pushed into revolution and anarchy.
"I put this question to Brownson: 'How can I become certain of the
objective reality of the operations of my soul?' He answered: 'If you
have not yet reached that period of mental life, you will do so
before many years.'
"It is a great humiliation for me to admit that I was ever in a state
in which I doubted the actual validity of the testimony of my own
faculties, and the reality of the phenomena of my mental existence. I
had begun my mental life in politics, and in a certain sense in
religion; but to my philosophical life I was yet unborn."
In the article on the "Workingman's Party," already quoted from,
Father Hecker, after mentioning that Dr. Brownson continued to
lecture before the New York members of the party for several years,
goes on as follows:
"If it be asked why a man like Dr. Brownson, a born philosopher,
should have thus busied himself with the solution of the most
practical of problems by undertaking to abolish inequality among men,
the answer is plain. The true philosopher will not confine himself to
abstract theories. But, furthermore, Brownson at this epoch of his
life had lost his grip on the philosophy that leads men to trust in a
supernatural happiness to be enjoyed in a future state; and the man
who does not look to the hope of a future state of beatitude for the
chief solace of human misery must look to this life as its end. If a
man does not seek beatitude in God he seeks it in himself and his
fellow-men--in the highest earthly development of our better nature
if he becomes a socialist of one school, and in the lusts of the
animal man if he becomes a socialist of the brutal school. The man
who has any sympathy in his heart and is not guided by Catholic
ethics, if he reasons at all on public affairs, will become a
socialist of some school or other. Says Dr. Brownson in _The
Convert,_ p. 101:
"The end of man, as disclosed by my creed of 1829, is obviously an
earthly end, to be attained in this life. Man was not made for God,
and destined to find his beatitude in the possession of God his
Supreme Good, the Supreme Good itself. His end was happiness--not
happiness in God, but in the possession of the good things of this
world. Our Lord had said, 'Be not anxious as to what ye shall eat, or
what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed; for after
all these things do the heathen seek.' I gave Him a flat denial, and
said, Be anxious; labor especially for these things, first for
yourselves, then for others. Enlarging, however, my views a little, I
said, Man's end for which he is to labor is the well-being and
happiness of man in this world--is to develop man's whole nature, and
so to organize society and government as to secure all men a paradise
on the earth. This view of the end to labor for I held steadily and
without wavering from 1828 till 1842, when I began to find myself
tending unconsciously towards the Catholic Church.'
"The reader will have seen by the extracts given that we were a party
full of enthusiasm. I was but fifteen when our party called Dr.
Brownson to deliver the lectures above mentioned. But my brothers and
I had long been playing men's parts in politics. I remember when
eleven years of age, or a year or two older, being tall for my years,
proposing and carrying through a series of resolutions on the
currency question at our ward meetings. As our name indicates--
'Workingman's Democracy'--we were a kind of Democrats. As to the Whig
party, it received no great attention from us. At that time its
chances of getting control of this State or of the United States were
remote. Our biggest fight was against the 'usages of the party' as in
vogue in the so-called regular Democracy embodied in the Tammany Hall
party. This organization undertook to absorb us when we had grown too
powerful to be ignored. They nominated a legislative ticket made up
half of their men and half of ours. This move was to a great extent
successful; but many of us who were purists refused to compromise,
and ran a stump ticket, or, as it was then called, a rump ticket. I
was too young to vote, but I remember my brother George and I posting
political handbills at three o'clock in the morning; this hour was
not so inconvenient for us, for we were bakers. We also worked hard
on election day, keeping up and supplying the ticket booths,
especially in our own ward, the old Seventh. I remember that one of
our leaders was a shoemaker named John Ryker, and that we used to
meet in Science Hall, Broome Street.
"If this was the high state of my enthusiasm, so was it that of us
all. Our political faith was ardent and active. But if we had been
tested on our religious faith we should not have come off creditably;
many of us had not any religion at all. I remember saying once to my
brother John that the only difference between a believer and an
infidel is a few ounces of brains. . . . We were a queer set of
cranks when Dr. Brownson brought to us his powerful and eloquent
advocacy, his contribution of mingled truth and error. He delivered
his first course of lectures in the old Stuyvesant Institute in
Broadway, facing Bond Street--the same hall used a little afterwards
by the Unitarian Society while they were building a church for Mr.
Dewey in Broadway opposite Eighth Street, the very same society now
established in Lexington Avenue, with Mr. Collyer as minister. The
subsequent courses were delivered in Clinton Hall, corner of Nassau
and Beekman, the site now occupied by one of our modern mammoth
buildings. I forget how much we were charged admission, except that a
ticket for the whole course cost three dollars. There was no great
rush, but the lectures drew well and abundantly paid all expenses
including the lecturer's fee. The press did not take much notice of
the lectures, for the Workingman's party had no newspapers expressly
in its favor, except the one I have already quoted from. But he was
one of the few men whose power is great enough to advertise itself.
Wherever he was he was felt. His tread was heavy and he could make
way for himself.
"Dr. Brownson was then in the very prime of manhood. He was a
handsome man, tall, stately, and of grave manners. His face was
clean-shaved. The first likeness of him that I remember appeared in
the _Democratic Review._ It made him look like Proudhon, the French
Socialist. This was all the more singular because at that time he was
really the American Proudhon, though he never went so far as _'La
propriété, c'est le vol.'_ As he appeared on the platform and
received our greeting he was indeed a majestic man, displaying in his
demeanor the power of a mind altogether above the ordinary. But he
was essentially a philosopher, and that means that he could never be
what is called popular. He was an interesting speaker, but he never
sought popularity. He never seemed to care much about the reception
his words received, but he exhibited anxiety to get his thoughts
rightly expressed and to leave no doubt about what his convictions
were. Yet among a limited class of minds he always awakened real
enthusiasm--among minds, that is, of a philosophical tendency. He
never used manuscript or notes; he was familiar with his topic, and
his thoughts flowed out spontaneously in good, pure, strong, forcible
English. He could control any reasonable mind, for he was a man of
great thoughts and never without some grand truth to impart. But to
stir the emotions was not in his power, though he sometimes attempted
it; he never succeeded in being really pathetic.
"It must be remembered that although Dr. Brownson was technically
classed among the reverends, he was not commonly so called. It may be
said that he was still reckoned among the Unitarian ministry, owing
mostly to his connection with Dr. Channing, of Boston, who took a
great interest in the Workingman's party. But I do not think he was
advertised by us as reverend or publicly spoken of as a clergyman. He
may have been yet hanging on the skirts of the Unitarian movement.
But his career had become political, and his errand to New York was
political. He had given up preaching for some years, and embarked on
the stormy waves of social politics, and had by his writings become
an expositor of various theories of social reform, chiefly those of
French origin. So that the dominant note of his lectures was not by
any means religious, but political. He was at that time considered as
identified with the Workingman's party, and came to New York to speak
as one of our leaders. The general trend of his lectures was the
philosophy of history as it bears on questions of social reform. At
bottom his theories were Saint-Simonism, the object being the
amelioration of the condition of the most numerous classes of society
in the speediest manner. _This was the essence to our kind of
Democracy._ And Dr. Brownson undertook in these lectures to bring to
bear in favor of our purpose the life-lessons of the providential men
of human history. Of course, the life and teachings of our Saviour
Jesus Christ were brought into use, and the upshot of the lecturer's
thesis was that Christ was the big Democrat and the Gospel was the
true Democratic platform!
"We interpreted Christianity as altogether a social institution, its
social side entirely overlapping and hiding the religious. Dr.
Brownson set out to make, and did make, a powerful presentation of
our Lord as the representative of the Democratic side of
civilization. For His person and office he and all of us had a
profound appreciation and sympathy, but it was not reverential or
religious; the religious side of Christ's mission was ignored. Christ
was a social Democrat, Dr. Brownson maintained, and he and many of us
had no other religion but the social theories we drew from Christ's
life and teaching; that was the meaning of Christianity to us, and of
Protestantism especially."
In penning the reminiscences just given Father Hecker probably had in
mind the whole period lying between his fourteenth year and his
twenty-first. In the autumn of 1834, when he first made acquaintance
with Orestes Brownson, Isaac Hecker was not yet fifteen, while the
reform lecturer was in his early thirties. But the boy who began at
once, as he has told us, to put philosophical questions, and to seek
a test whereby to determine the validity of his mental processes, was
already well known to the voters of his ward, not merely as an
overgrown and very active lad, always on hand at the polling booths,
and ready for any work which might be entrusted to a boy, but also as
a clear and persuasive speaker on various topics of social and
political reform.
Politics of the kind into which the young Heckers threw themselves so
ardently were not very different in their methods fifty years ago
from what they are to-day. Reform politics are always the reverse of
what are called machine politics. The meetings of which Father Hecker
speaks were spontaneous gatherings of determined and earnest men,
young and old, held sometimes in public halls, sometimes, when
elections were close at hand, in the open street. Often they were
dominated by leaders better able to formulate theories than to bring
about practical remedial measures. The inception of all great parties
has something of this character. It generally happens that principles
are dwelt upon with an exclusive devotion more or less prejudicial to
immediate practical ends. This is why young men, and even striplings,
provided they are energetic and persuasive, will be listened to with
attention at such eras. Men are seeking for enlightenment, and hence
views are taken for what they seem to be worth rather than out of
respect for the source they spring from. Imagine, then, this tall,
fair, strong-faced boy of fourteen, mounted, perhaps, on one of his
own flour-barrels, dogmatizing the principles of social democracy,
posing as a spontaneous political reformer before a crowded street
full of men twice and thrice his years, but bound together with him
by the sympathies common to the wage-earning classes. It is true that
Isaac Hecker and his brothers, of whom the eldest had but recently
attained to the dignity of a voter, although still poor and
hard-working, had already, by virtue of sheer industry and pluck,
passed over to the class of wage-payers. But they were not less
ardent reformers after than before that transition. Isaac at all
events, was consistent and unchanged throughout his life in the
political principles he adopted among the apprentices and journeymen
of New York over half a century ago. There was little room for vulgar
self-conceit in a nature so frank and sincere as his. What he had to
learn, as well as what he had to teach, always dwarfed merely
personal considerations to their narrowest dimensions in his mind.
Hence his impulsive candor, the clearness of his views, and the
straightforward simplicity of his speech at once attracted notice,
and although so young, he went speedily to the front in the local
management of his party. In the article already quoted from, he tells
us that after 1834 the managers left all future engagements of
lecturers to his brother John and himself. It was doubtless this fact
which led directly to that lasting and fruitful intimacy with Dr.
Brownson which then began. His was the strongest purely human
influence, if we except his mother's, which Isaac Hecker ever knew.
And these two were on planes so different that it is hardly fair to
compare them with each other.
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