Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Garrison and Wendell Phillips he organized the militants of Boston
radicalism. His political principles were simple and uncompromising,
woven from the strands of English and French libertarianism of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--from Sidney, Locke, Rousseau,
the great leaders of the natural-rights school. One who accepted as
axiomatic the nobility of human nature and the perfectibility of man,
might be a political romantic, but he was certain to be a liberal.
Parker was a primitive democrat, whose democracy was bone of his bone
and flesh of his flesh. But the democracy that answered the needs of
his dream of the kingdom was, like Emerson’s and Channing’s, ethical
rather than political or economic--it was “the enactment of God’s
justice into human laws” (“The Nebraska Question,” in _Additional
Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 327). “The democratic idea has had but a slow
and gradual growth even in New England,” he pointed out; nevertheless
he was convinced that it was spreading, and “government becomes more
and more of all, by all and for all”[461] (_ibid._, p. 33). He hated
Federalism with an intensity equaling Jefferson’s, and ecclesiastical
Federalism that twisted the authority of the church to the side of
wealthy pewholders, using Scripture as a sanction for exploitation, he
denounced as scathingly as Garrison. The power of the political state
he feared, because he discovered the political state to be the friend
of the rich rather than the poor, of selfish advantage rather than of
God’s justice. With other Abolitionists he distrusted the machinery
of centralization that was being skillfully erected at Washington.
“Opposition to centralization of authority is very old in America,” he
remarked; “I hope it will be always young” (_ibid._, Vol. II, p. 29).
But he was no partisan to the rule of the majority, if it determined
contrary to his conscience. A transcendental individualist, he went
for the nullification of an immoral statute in the name of the Higher
Law.[462]
Parker was never blind to the economic basis of politics. He saw
so clearly, indeed, the close alliance between group interests and
governmental statutes, that his political activities were almost
wholly determined by that recognition. As a political critic he was
the shrewdest realist of his generation. He was one constituent whom
politicians talking for Buncombe could not befuddle. He was too deeply
read in American history, gifted with too keen historical insight,
to be impressed by the glittering rhetoric of the Rufus Choates. He
had his own views of the American government, and majestic appeals to
the Constitution left him cold. The Constitution, he asserted, “is
a provisional compromise between the ideal political principles of
the Declaration, and the actual selfishness of the people North and
South.” America was not a democracy. It had thrown off theocracy,
aristocracy, and monarchy, only to set in their places the “institution
of money--the master of all the rest.” The economic basis of society in
America he considered to be open and patent. In church and state, money
“is this day the strongest power of the nation.” He declined to be
deceived by party cries and platforms, either Whig or Democratic; both
parties served economics rather than justice.
So there is a party organization about the dollar as its central
nucleus and idea. The dollar is the germinal dot of the Whig party;
its motive is pecuniary.... It sneers at the poor; at the many;
has a contempt for the people. It legislates against the poor,
and for the rich ... the few who are born with the desire, the
talent, and the conventional position to become rich. “Take care
of the rich, and they will take care of the poor,” is its secret
maxim. Everything must yield to money.... With this party there
is no Absolute Right, no Absolute Wrong.... There is Expediency
and Inexpediency.... Accordingly a millionaire is reckoned by this
party as the highest production of Society. He is the Whig ideal;
he alone has attained “the measure of the stature of a perfect man.”
The Democratic party appeals to the brute will of the majority,
right or wrong; it knows no Higher Law.... There is ... no vital
difference between the Whig party and the Democratic party; no
difference in moral principle. The Whig inaugurates the Money got;
the Democrat inaugurates the Desire to get money. That is all the
odds.... There is only a hand rail between the two, which breaks
down if you lean on it, and the parties mix ... a Democrat is but
a Whig on time; a Whig is a Democrat arrived at maturity; his time
has come. A Democrat is a young Whig who will legislate for money
as soon as he has got it; the Whig is an old Democrat who once
hurrahed for the majority--“Down with money! there is a despot!
and up with the desire for it! Down with the rich, and up with
the poor!” The young man, poor, obscure, and covetous, in 1812
was a Democrat, went a-privateering against England; rich, and
accordingly “one of our eminent citizens,” in 1851 he was a Whig,
and went a-kidnapping against Ellen Crafts and Thomas Sims. (“The
Nebraska Question,” in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, pp. 331-335.)
The America of Parker’s day was fast becoming middle class and Parker
knew it, and like Lincoln he did not disapprove. Honest thrift he found
wholly desirable, and wealth if it were honestly got. But speculation
dissociated from creative work he regarded with old-fashioned distrust.
“If a man fully pay in efficient, productive toil and thought, he is
entitled to all he gets, one dollar or many million dollars ... and
if his estate be but what he has thus actually and honestly paid for
with service given, equivalent to the service received, what he can
virtuously keep or humanely apply and expend, then it will never be
too large.”[463] But he believed there were other gods, and greater,
than the god of getting on; social justice was more desirable than
unearned increment; and he set his face like flint against the common
materialism of America. “I come to build up piety and morality; to
pull down only what cumbers the ground,” he said; but he had learned
that the temples of State Street were not easily leveled; that they
would not fall without a mighty crash. A less courageous man would
have hesitated, but Parker was utterly fearless. Boston he knew “was
a Tory town.” “The Mother city of the Puritans is now the metropolis
of the Hunkers” (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 111). But the
spirit of ’76 was strong in him and he would “appeal from Boston drunk
with gold, and briefly mad with hate, to sober Boston in her hour to
come.” He would appeal from Whiggish Boston to Revolutionary Boston;
from State Street to Lexington common; from the Faneuil Hall of Rufus
Choate to the Faneuil Hall of Sam Adams. He would awaken the ancestral
idealism of Boston that slept uneasily under the spell of middle-class
ambitions--that had sold its Puritan heritage for southern trade
profits. Such an appeal Boston had never before listened to, ardent,
unsparing, the Hebraic and the Yankee vernacular curiously mingled; and
Boston writhed uncomfortably and pronounced the prophet ill-mannered.
When the Fugitive Slave Bill passed, the six New England states lay
fast asleep: Massachusetts slept soundly, her head pillowed on her
unsold bales of Cotton and of woolen goods, dreaming of “orders
from the South.” Justice came to waken her ... and she started in
her sleep, and being frightened, swore a prayer or two, then slept
again. But Boston woke,--sleeping, in her shop, with ears open, and
her eye on the market, her hand on her purse, dreaming of goods for
sale,--Boston woke broadly up, and fired a hundred guns for joy. O
Boston, Boston! if thou couldst have known, in that thine hour, the
things which belong unto thy peace! But no: they were hidden from
her eyes. She had prayed to her god, to Money; he granted her the
request, but sent leanness into her soul. (“The Boston Kidnapping,”
in _Additional Speeches_, Vol. I, p. 89.)
But he offended the Boston code of good breeding even more seriously.
He became personal. He named names. Before vast congregations, in
printed books, he pronounced judgment on Bostonians respected in
the Back Bay, mighty in State Street. Boston gentlemen had never
before suffered such tongue-lashings. How mercilessly he excoriated
Commissioner Loring, judge of probate and Harvard professor, for
soiling his hands in the Anthony Burns case! How neatly he pricked
the empty culture of Edward Everett for his pro-slavery ardor--“a
Cambridge professor of Greek, he studied the original tongue of the
Bible to learn that the Scripture says ‘slaves,’ where the English
Bible says only ‘servants’!” (_Additional Speeches_, Vol. II, p. 115.)
What an utterly devastating attack he made on the great Webster for
the latter’s subserviency to local economic interests! Much honest
realism underlies that criticism, and much honest American history. The
“Nebraska Address” and the “Webster Address” are notable historical
documents, incisive analyses--rare in those romantic days--done by
one who has kept a shrewd eye on current politics, and understands
the hidden springs of party policy. Into the Webster address he put
his vast knowledge, his power of analysis, his frank idealism. It was
“a sad and dreadful day” when duty bade Theodore Parker speak on the
man whose uncommon powers he had long admired; but he did his work
thoroughly, refusing to shut his eyes to ugly fact, refusing to indulge
in commonplace eulogy. It was the eighteenth-century economic realism
of Webster that stirred the wrath of the transcendentalist--that and
the lapses from integrity. Parker’s text was found in Webster’s dictum
that “the great object of government is the protection of property at
home, and respect and renown abroad”; and how starkly it runs counter
to his own ideal of government, “the enactment of God’s justice into
human laws,” is laid bare in page after page of scathing commentary.
To the exacting ethics of Parker, Webster was wanting in principles;
he followed expediency rather than justice; and how surely expediency
digs pitfalls for its own undoing he discovered tragic illustration of
in the career of the great senator. It is a hard fate for a politician,
accustomed to the cheap praise of the gullible public, to fall into the
hands of a critic who is honest and searching; and Webster had too many
weak points to emerge from such an analysis with credit. It is probably
the most critical examination of Webster’s career that has ever been
made, and withal just.
Surprisingly modern, far more so than Channing, was this brilliant
preacher--impulsive, colloquial, natural, whose every arrow was
pointed with a fact and feathered to fly true; concerned more with
righteousness than with policy; hating the dull commonplace and empty
dignity of Tory ways; careless of convention, somewhat spectacular,
with a keen relish for combat--a vital, vivid man, the apostle of
conscience, the advocate of every unpopular cause. He possessed an
amazing gift of words, yet he was too impatient, too practical, to
become an artist; preferring immediate ends to more lasting reputation,
and spending himself with a free prodigality. He was always the speaker
rather than the writer and his printed pages bear the unmistakable
marks of impetuous oral discourse. Emerson accounted him one of
the four great men of the age. Whether or not that judgment holds,
whether he was too eager a militant to become a great transcendental
philosopher, the historian sees in Theodore Parker one of the greatest,
if not the last, of the excellent line of Puritan preachers.
Footnotes