Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
that the majority was very likely to be the tool of the demagogue. He
saw no peculiar virtue or special intelligence in a coonskin cap, and
he discovered no advantage in log cabins and hard cider as a training
school for statesmen. He had watched the disgraceful campaign of 1840
with concern that gentlemen should stoop to the demagoguery that marked
that electoral debauch; and it confirmed him in the conviction that
“old-fashioned, high principled gentlemen” of an earlier age would
never have been guilty of such traffic in votes--men like Chancellor
Livingston who devoted his later years to raising Merino sheep, or John
Jay who after filling with dignity many high offices retired to his
estate to concern himself with new varieties of melons.
Hating all humbug, Cooper made it his business to free his mind from
the several varieties of cant that were overrunning America like
pigweed. “Had a suitable compound offered,” he said of _The American
Democrat_, “the title of this book would have been something like
‘Anti-cant.’” Roughly, the history of his essays in criticism falls
into two broad phases: the struggle to pull himself out of the bog
of eighteenth-century caste philosophy--from that stake-in-society
theory which his father upheld; and the struggle to escape the
fallacies of the nineteenth-century philosophy rising about him--from
the rude equalitarianism of Jacksonian democracy, and the materialism
of capitalistic exploitation. His abandonment of the principle of
gentleman-rule marks his definite break with the philosophy of
Federalism and the substitution of democracy. It cost him a prolonged
struggle, for the social-stake theory ran with many of his oldest
predilections, and the evidence of that struggle is scattered broadly
through the pages written in the late thirties; but having convinced
himself of the social wrong involved in the principle, he was tireless
in refutation. In _The American Democrat_ he laid down the principle
that “A government founded on the representation of property, however
direct or indirect, is radically vicious.... It is the proper business
of government to resist the corruptions of money, and not to depend
on them” (_On Property_, p. 141). But it is _The Monikins_, a strange
book much laughed at by the critics, rarely read and little understood,
that concerns itself most largely with the theory. Sadly bungled though
the satire quite obviously is, it is nevertheless a spirited attack on
the social-stake principle that reveals how far Cooper had traveled
from the doctrines of Hamilton and Webster, of Federalist and Whig.
Both England and America--Leaphigh and Leaplow--show meanly under his
caustic analysis, the former perhaps more meanly than the latter; their
institutions, societies, politics, manners, are an unlovely compound of
cant and hypocrisy; and the root of the common meanness he discovers
in human selfishness. He conceives of man as a queer mixture of good
and evil from whom much is not to be expected; something nearer to
Swift’s conception than William Ellery Channing’s; with too much of the
Monikin in him to pass for a child of God; prone to error even under
a republican system; insolent, tyrannical, loving fetishes, given to
brag, too poor-spirited to be free, gilding his fetters and belying
Locke’s saying that chains are an ill wearing. There are depths of
bitterness in _The Monikins_ that startle the reader. It is a tale of
doubt and disillusion, Gulliver-like in its fierceness of attack, that
strikes through all the shoddy romanticisms of the times and reduces
the current democracy to humbug. Subjected to such analysis the old
Federalist shibboleth of men of principle and property is no more than
the East wind in empty bellies. The possession of money does not change
human nature; rich as well as poor are driven by selfish interest, and
to give a loose to property power is to invite political disaster.
Your social-stake system supposes that he who has what is termed a
distinct and prominent interest in society, will be the most likely
to conduct its affairs wisely, justly, and disinterestedly. This
would be true, if those great principles which lie at the root of
all happiness were respected; but unluckily, the stake in question,
instead of being a stake in justice and virtue, is usually reduced
to be merely a stake in property.... Now, all experience shows
that the great property-incentives are to increase property, to
protect property, and to buy with property those advantages which
ought to be independent of property, viz., honors, dignities,
power and immunities. I cannot say how it is with men, but our
[Monikin] histories are eloquent on this head. We have had the
property-principle carried out thoroughly in our practice, and the
result has shown that its chief operation is to render property as
intact as possible, and the bones, and sinews, and marrow of all
who do not possess it, its slaves. (_The Monikins_, Chapter XXVII.)
But though Cooper might deny the validity of the eighteenth-century
social-stake theory, he saw no valid reason to abandon his
eighteenth-century economics. In his preference for a social order
founded on agriculture he was as confirmed a Physiocrat as Franklin or
Jefferson; and this preference determined his judgment on the economic
revolution under way in America. A people living close to the soil was
living more wholesomely, he believed, than a city people immersed in
trade and manufacture. For the capitalistic expansion that followed the
new fiscal system of the seventeen-nineties, he felt an instinctive
repugnance. Banking and the manipulation of credit seemed to him mean
and sordid, and the spirit of speculation that was overrunning the
land he believed was destructive of common morality. The activities
of Wall Street he looked upon with the eyes of an English squire. To
expect any sane progress from such worship of money, to assume that a
high and excellent civilization could result from such worship, seemed
to him plain madness. “God protect the country that has nothing but
commercial towns for capitals,” he wrote his wife in 1839 (Cooper,
_Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper_, Vol. II, p. 404), and the
comment found amplification in many a caustic passage in his novels of
criticism. A materialistic middle class with its gospel of progress
interpreted in terms of wasteful exploitation seemed to him the hateful
progeny of a period of “moral occultation”; and against this “Yankee”
philosophy he waged an unrelenting warfare. In _The Monikins_ he drew
a gloomy picture of the America of the thirties when the land had come
under a great moral eclipse; and in _Home as Found_ and _The Redskins_
he commented bitterly on the universal restlessness that was driving
thousands to the new West to seek their fortunes. The settlement of
the Inland Empire was no romance for him. The Great Migration seemed
to imply the break-up of the older America he loved; and the impact of
the frontier spirit upon the country seemed likely to destroy the last
excellence of an earlier age. It marked for Cooper the final triumph
of the acquisitive Yankee spirit, grasping and lawless in its crude
leveling.
From these germinal sources--his love of the dignified ways of the old
manorial families, his contempt for the middle class, his dislike of a
bumptious leveling, his hatred of brag and cant and enterprise--came
those sharp contrasts in his pictures that set the vulgar present
over against the dignified past. His criticism was in no small part
the reaction of a romantic to the unlovely works of an economic
revolution. From his loyalty to the old came that subtle romanticizing
of the eighteenth century that lends a charm to his tales, and from it
came also that vindictive hatred of the frontier that spurred him to
ill-balanced criticism. He could not like the new that was destroying
the old. Like Emerson he was a man without a party, but unlike him he
sought consolation in the past rather than the future. The excellence
he yearned for he found in that older world whose stable ways were as
yet unsettled by the romantic revolution, and from the meanness of the
present he stole away to find consolation in the dignity and worth of
honester times. The late eighteenth century became, therefore, his
romantic haven and City of Refuge to which he returned gladly. He
was always seeking to revitalize the old in an environment where, as
he lamented, “the eighteenth century may be set down as a very dark
antiquity.”
That Cooper unconsciously romanticized the past is only too evident.
Too often he accepted its self-proclaimed virtues as sober fact and
created a race of squires that never existed outside his pages.
Realist though he was in certain moods, he abandoned his realism in
the presence of the tie-wig gentry. His father was as graspingly
eighteenth century as Gouverneur Morris and saw to it that his own nest
was well feathered; yet the son failed to perceive that the dignified
professions of those old gentlemen were little more than splendid
gestures. He made the mistake of taking them at their face value.
Honest himself, he attributed an equal honesty to the older generation,
and he watched with unfeigned regret the disintegration of an order
that seemed to him the repository of much that was excellent. Fragments
of its ideals he clung to; its dignity, its concern for breeding
and manners, its fine distinction. Fragments also of its political
convictions: its concern for law and order, its belief that all just
law is founded in morality, its insistence that American government
is one of principles and not of men. He put his finger shrewdly on
certain fallacies of eighteenth-century theory, but he took too many
of its values at par. The twilight is a mighty sorcerer and Cooper was
bewitched by the half light that lingered softly on the familiar past.
This suffices to explain the grounds of the charge of aristocratic
leanings that Cooper was persistently brought under. His bold defense
of the landed gentry gave mortal enmity to the Jacksonians, and the
tactlessness with which he pointed out the crude provincialisms of
America--the bumptious plebeians he set over against the priggish
gentlemen--was rubbing salt on open sores. _Home as Found_ and _The
Redskins_ were onslaughts on the ways of the sacred majority that
America could not forgive him for. Yet no counter criticism ever moved
Cooper from his conviction that gentlemen of an earlier generation
possessed dignity, principles, character, far beyond the speculators
and politicians and “small-potato lawyers” of the present time of
“moral occultation”; and the difference in favor of the old he traced
to the economic basis of the tie-wig gentry. Believing with John Adams
that an aristocracy is implicit in every established society, he
frankly preferred a landed to a capitalistic aristocracy. Gentlemen of
the old school were neighborhood patriarchs. Secure in position and
possessions they disdained to keep an ear to the ground or court a
silly popularity. They were squires with a high sense of responsibility
to themselves and society. Their stake in the land was a stabilizing
influence in their lives; and their ample way of living, their
well-bred leisure, their courteous bearing learned from a cosmopolitan
experience, seemed to Cooper a desirable influence in a society lacking
refinement and exact standards. To supplant them with the new gentry of
Wall Street seemed to him plain folly, and he watched the decay of the
old families with a pathetic concern. The Anti-Rent novels are a long
defense of a thesis that comes to final expression in such a passage as
this from _The Redskins_:
I say that, in a country like this, in which land is so abundant