Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
refuses confinement in the strait-jacket of any set formula, yet
escapes the emasculation awaiting mere enthusiasm; for it can separate
foes from friends and recognize the point where compromise means
surrender.
If my analysis thus far is to any purpose it will suggest what these
main objectives that Parrington never completed were to have been. The
unfinished Book Two was to chronicle three parties of revolt against
the plutocracy born of the Gilded Age. Of these rebellions the first
was engendered on the Middle Border, where the farmers, beset by hard
times, struck out against the source of their ills. As the agrarians
diagnosed the situation, these economic maladjustments were brought on
by a currency manipulated for the benefit of creditors, and further
enhanced by capitalistic control of the political machine. One of the
last of Parrington’s completed units deals with the economic phase of
the revolt; the next section was to record the farmer’s effort to
democratize the government. Through pressure of third-party movements
the farmers tried to inject such reforms as the initiative and
referendum, the recall, the direct primary, and the income tax; until,
seduced by Bryan’s oratory, they joined with the Democrats in an attack
upon the intrenchments of capitalism. As Parrington saw it, these
agrarian descendants of Jefferson, lacking the intellectual leadership
which the South had contributed in earlier days, at a tactical
disadvantage, and already a minority economic group, were fated to lose
their last great uprising.
Also out of the valley of the Mississippi came a literature of the
Middle Border. Such writers as Edward Eggleston and E. W. Howe had
already initiated a realism that revealed the drabness of frontier
life and suggested its smoldering discontent, although the pastoral
note fathered by the genial and romantic James Whitcomb Riley did not
lack its prose children. Notably did Meredith Nicholson, William Allen
White, and Booth Tarkington[479] portray the village neighborliness,
its wholesomeness, its spirit of democracy, until they cast such a fog
of sentiment over the scene as to blur all the realities. But the true
spirit of Populism is represented in the impassioned work of Hamlin
Garland, whose “admirable realism and passionate democracy” Parrington
depicts in a chapter that he completed.
The second chorus of dissent came from the very citadels of plutocracy,
for the wage-earners, unable to escape slavery by flight to an
unshackled frontier that no longer existed, were brought to bay. The
doctrine of class war, which had been ignored since the eighteenth
century, was revived by the German socialists and given an added
plausibility by the employers’ unscrupulous use of injunction, black
list, and lockout. T. V. Powderly, who found a solution to the labor
problem in syndicalism, organized the Knights of Labor. Although this
union had a promising inception, it was soon wrecked, while the craft
unionism recommended by Samuel Gompers forged to the front because of
its middle-class ideology and spirit of compromise. On the other hand
the left wing of the labor cause embraced various brands of socialism.
The tragic flare-up of the Haymarket riot, which resulted in a “red”
scare and persecution of the humane Governor Altgeld, served Parrington
as a dramatic illustration of the obloquy that descended upon the
leaders of socialism, Daniel De Leon, Eugene V. Debs, and Victor
Berger. Needless to say, Parrington had planned a vindication of them
horn of his desire to see more justice in the world.
There were echoes of this proletarian strife manifested in the world
of letters. Certain writers following Edward Bellamy joined the quest
for a socialistic Utopia. Parrington had completed his passage on
Bellamy, but of the party formed to agitate for principles advanced in
_Looking Backward_ and of the other writers of Utopian novels, such as
Tourgée, he left no treatment. A second set of writers were grouped
together by reason of their common concern over the darkening future
of American civilization. Edwin Markham, his humanitarian sympathies
aroused, penned an indictment of wage exploitation in his “The Man with
the Hoe” that caused no little concern in its day and spurred defenders
of the existing economic system to offer liberal prizes for an equally
convincing reply. The emergence of naturalism, seen in Stephen
Crane[480] and Frank Norris,[480] was also a response to the darkening
social outlook. Parrington defined naturalism as “a pessimistic realism
that sets man in a mechanical world.” He traced this pessimistic
determinism to the machine industrialism so overwhelming in its power
as to impress man with his own impotence, to the centralization of
wealth, which causes a caste regimentation of society, and finally to
the great city, which reduces the inhabitant to an infinitesimal unit
of a vast beehive. Other writers, equally oppressed by this state of
affairs, concentrated on the phenomena of the city. It was here that
Parrington intended to discuss Henry B. Fuller, Harold Frederic, Robert
Grant, and Edith Wharton.[481]
The third party of revolt was a hesitant one--the South, still
convalescing from the Civil War and further weakened by divisions in
its counsels. Though burdened by parochial creeds, weakened by lack of
intellectual leadership, the agrarian South, largely plebeian, joined
the Middle Border in its uprising. The middle-class South, represented
by Henry W. Grady, proposed a surrender to the Yankee principle of
industrial exploitation, while the remnant of the old aristocracy
resisted the new and clung to the traditions of the past. Thomas Nelson
Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Murfree, and George Washington Cable
attended to these romantic traditions of the plantation, the negro, the
mountaineer, and the creole; while Sidney Lanier[482] became the poet
of southern landscape and sunrise. Far more significant in Parrington’s
eye was the rebirth of a southern intelligentsia represented in letters
by Ellen Glasgow, W. W. Woodward, the debunker, and James Branch
Cabell,[483] the ironic romanticist. Professor Parrington, who had
been among the first to appreciate Cabell, admired the competence of
his style and the effectiveness of his ironic commentary on American
civilization.
Book Three was to present the movement of liberalism from 1903 to
1917, and the reaction to it following the war. Parrington called
this period of liberalism the “great stock-taking venture.” These
liberals announced that the democratic hopes of earlier days had not
been fulfilled, that the Constitution is not a democratic instrument
nor was it intended to be, and that while Americans were professing to
create a democracy, they had been creating in fact a plutocracy. They
then determined upon a new program based on their discovery of the
relations between economics and politics. Such relations made necessary
the control of property by the collective will, and to that end they
endeavored to squeeze the Hamiltonian state into a Jeffersonian
mold.[484]
The muckrakers of 1903 to 1910 attacked the plutocracy where its joints
creaked. In effect this group of writers from Henry D. Lloyd to Charles
Edward Russell, Gustavus Meyers, and A. M. Simons popularized economics
and made the liberals conscious of what was going on behind the closed
doors of the directors’ meetings. On the other hand, the movement of
Progressivism, engaged in the hopeless task of directing the political
machinery to democratic ends, was typified by Robert La Follette,
Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Only one, La Follette, remained
true to the colors; the other two compromised, then surrendered, and
the hopes of liberalism went down in a tragic _débâcle_.
In the realm of letters this liberalism found expression in three major
groups of writers. A set of intellectuals turned critical began to
scrutinize the economic, political, and social institutions of America.
Of these critics Parrington considered Randolph Bourne and Charles A.
Beard[485] the most important. Another set turned to fiction, shifting
their point of view from liberalism to radicalism, from politics to
economics. Winston Churchill[486] had discovered the emptiness of
the profit motive with its resultant destruction of beauty, freedom,
and creative craftsmanship. Similarly Robert Herrick[486] became a
pathologist of the city, investigated its ethics, and then rebelled
at the predatory egoism which ruled its life to the destruction of
all ethical integrity. At his best Jack London[487] wrote of the
revolution, though later selling out to bigger and better royalties;
while Upton Sinclair became the revolutionary sleuth spying upon the
indecencies of the capitalist system. Perhaps these novelists were too
seriously engaged in social criticism and reform propaganda to become
great craftsmen, yet they were to Parrington important writers, because
they were in touch with deep currents of American thought.
Still a third set of writers turned to a realistic technique
appropriate to the times, yet avoided the weakness inherent in direct
propaganda. The poets Masters,[488] Sandburg, Frost, and Robinson,
Parrington chose for consideration as realists with an art, an
underlying criticism of conditions, and a philosophy that set them
above the other poets of the time. For the same reasons he had planned
a section on Huneker. Theodore Dreiser,[489] because of his massive
documentation, his deterministic philosophy, and his sense of the
inevitable tragedy inherent in life, Parrington labeled a modern,
meaning by this that Dreiser most adequately and most thoroughly
represented modern America.
The last section of the book was to be a consideration of the post-war
reaction to the liberalism of the preceding period. The economic
democracy which liberals had marked for their goal was now attacked
by the younger intellectuals. H. L. Mencken turned to farce and
burlesque for methods adequate to express his contempt of American
democracy. Biologists pointed to the inescapable laws of heredity as a
refutation of the liberals’ hopes for social improvement; while some
psychologists, discovering morons, ruled out all equalitarian Utopias.
Parrington could find little sympathy in his heart for a return to
the spirit of aristocracy. This narrow, doctrinaire biology, denied
by the more careful biologists and the behaviorists who assert that
environment is determining, cannot rule out all environmental changes.
As long as the _milieu_ is an effective force in molding the organism,
room is left for social betterment by social readjustments. A disputed
psychology dealing in primitive sex drives, gland secretions, and
intelligence scores is no more conclusive on the subject.
The attack on industrialism is nearer to the heart of Parrington’s
ideals, because it proved to him that liberalism is not by any
means dead. Such a comprehensive movement enlisting first-class
minds--intellectuals, poets, novelists, dramatists--revealed clearly
to him the increasing criticism of a dehumanized economics, and such
criticism proceeds from an implicit liberalism.
The attack on the middle class is seen best in Zona Gale,[490] Evelyn
Scott, and particularly in Sinclair Lewis,[491] whom Parrington
rated the chief of our younger satirists. This satire is a searching
criticism of the _bourgeois_ ideals and habitat, its tyrannical
herd-mind, its poverty-stricken materialism. By its nature this
satire clearly suggests a set of new ideals which grow out of a free
individualism rather than a political or economic socialism. The
emphasis is shifted by implication from externalities to things of the
spirit. This is more clearly seen in the new philosophies just now