Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
In a moment of special irritation Edwin Lawrence Godkin called the
civilization of the seventies a chromo civilization. Mark Twain, with
his slack western standards, was equally severe. As he contemplated
the slovenly reality beneath the gaudy exterior he dubbed it the
Gilded Age. Other critics with a gift for pungent phrase have flung
their gibes at the ways of a picturesque and uncouth generation. There
is reason in plenty for such caustic comment. Heedless, irreverent,
unlovely, cultivating huge beards, shod in polished top-boots--the last
refinement of the farmer’s cowhides--wearing linen dickeys over hickory
shirts, moving through pools of tobacco juice, erupting in shoddy and
grotesque architecture, cluttering its homes with ungainly walnut
chairs and marble-topped tables and heavy lambrequins, the decade of
the seventies was only too plainly mired and floundering in a bog of
bad taste. A world of triumphant and unabashed vulgarity without its
like in our history, it was not aware of its plight, but accounted its
manners genteel and boasted of ways that were a parody on sober good
sense.
Yet just as such comments are, they do not reach quite to the heart of
the age. They emphasize rather the excrescences, the casual lapses, of
a generation that underneath its crudities and vulgarities was boldly
adventurous and creative--a generation in which the democratic freedoms
of America, as those freedoms had taken shape during a drab frontier
experience, came at last to spontaneous and vivid expression. If its
cultural wealth was less than it thought, if in its exuberance it was
engaged somewhat too boisterously in stamping its own plebeian image on
the work of its hands, it was only natural to a society that for the
first time found its opportunities equal to its desires, a youthful
society that accounted the world its oyster and wanted no restrictions
laid on its will. It was the ripe fruit of Jacksonian leveling, and
if it ran to a grotesque individualism--if in its self-confidence it
was heedless of the smiles of older societies--it was nevertheless
by reason of its uncouthness the most picturesque generation in our
history; and for those who love to watch human nature disporting itself
with naïve abandon, running amuck through all the conventions, no other
age provides so fascinating a spectacle.
When the cannon at last had ceased their destruction it was a strange
new America that looked out confidently on the scene. Something had
been released by the upheavals of half a century, something strong and
assertive that was prepared to take possession of the continent. It did
not issue from the loins of war. Its origins must be sought elsewhere,
further back in time. It had been cradled in the vast changes that
since 1815 had been reshaping America: in the break-up of the old
domestic economy that kept life mean and drab, in the noisy enthusiasms
of the new coonskin democracy, in the romanticisms of the California
gold rush, in the boisterous freedoms discovered by the forties and
fifties. It had come to manhood in the battles of a tremendous war,
and as it now surveyed the continent, discovering potential wealth
before unknown, it demanded only freedom and opportunity--a fair race
and no favors. Everywhere was a welling-up of primitive pagan desires
after long repressions--to grow rich, to grasp power, to be strong and
masterful and lay the world at its feet. It was a violent reaction
from the narrow poverty of frontier life and the narrow inhibitions
of backwoods religion. It had had enough of skimpy, meager ways, of
scrubbing along hoping for something to turn up. It would go out and
turn it up. It was consumed with a great hunger for abundance, for the
good things of life, for wealth. It was frankly materialistic and if
material goods could be wrested from society it would lay its hands
heartily to the work. Freedom and opportunity, to acquire, to possess,
to enjoy--for that it would sell its soul.
Society of a sudden was become fluid. With the sweeping-away of the
last aristocratic restraints the potentialities of the common man
found release for self-assertion. Strange figures, sprung from obscure
origins, thrust themselves everywhere upon the scene. In the reaction
from the mean and skimpy, a passionate will to power was issuing from
unexpected sources, undisciplined, confused in ethical values, but
endowed with immense vitality. Individualism was being simplified to
the acquisitive instinct. These new Americans were primitive souls,
ruthless, predatory, capable; single-minded men; rogues and rascals
often, but never feeble, never hindered by petty scruple, never given
to puling or whining--the raw materials of a race of capitalistic
buccaneers. Out of the drab mass of common plebeian life had come
this vital energy that erupted in amazing abundance and in strange
forms. The new freedoms meant diverse things to different men and each
like Jurgen followed after his own wishes and his own desires. Pirate
and priest issued from the common source and played their parts with
the same picturesqueness. The romantic age of Captain Kidd was come
again, and the black flag and the gospel banner were both in lockers
to be flown as the needs of the cruise determined. With all coercive
restrictions put away the democratic genius of America was setting out
on the road of manifest destiny.
Analyze the most talked-of men of the age and one is likely to find
a splendid audacity coupled with an immense wastefulness. A note of
tough-mindedness marks them. They had stout nippers. They fought
their way encased in rhinoceros hides. There was the Wall Street
crowd--Daniel Drew, Commodore Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Russell
Sage--blackguards for the most part, railway wreckers, cheaters and
swindlers, but picturesque in their rascality. There was the numerous
tribe of politicians--Boss Tweed, Fernando Wood, G. Oakey Hall, Senator
Pomeroy, Senator Cameron, Roscoe Conkling, James G. Blaine--blackguards
also for the most part, looting city treasuries, buying and
selling legislative votes like railway stock, but picturesque in
their audacity. There were the professional keepers of the public
morals--Anthony Comstock, John B. Gough, Dwight L. Moody, Henry Ward
Beecher, T. De Witt Talmage--ardent proselytizers, unintellectual,
men of one idea, but fiery in zeal and eloquent in description of the
particular heaven each wanted to people with his fellow Americans.
And springing up like mushrooms after a rain was the goodly company
of cranks--Virginia Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, “Citizen” George
Francis Train, Henry Bergh, Ben Butler, Ignatius Donnelly, Bob
Ingersoll, Henry George--picturesque figures with a flair for publicity
who tilled their special fields with splendid gestures. And finally
there was Barnum the Showman, growing rich on the profession of
humbuggery, a vulgar greasy genius, pure brass without any gilding, yet
in picturesque and capable effrontery the very embodiment of the age. A
marvelous company, vital with the untamed energy of a new land. In the
presence of such men one begins to understand what Walt Whitman meant
by his talk of the elemental.
Created by a primitive world that knew not the machine, they were
marked by the rough homeliness of their origins. Whether wizened or
fat they were never insignificant or commonplace. On the whole one
prefers them fat, and for solid bulk what generation has outdone them?
There was Revivalist Moody, bearded and neckless, with his two hundred
and eighty pounds of Adam’s flesh, every ounce of which “belonged
to God.” There was the lyric Sankey, afflicted with two hundred and
twenty-five pounds of human frailty, yet looking as smug as a banker
and singing “There were ninety and nine” divinely through mutton-chop
whiskers. There was Boss Tweed, phlegmatic and mighty, overawing
rebellious gangsters at the City Hall with his two hundred and forty
pounds of pugnacious rascality. There was John Fiske, a philosophic
hippopotamus, warming the chill waters of Spencerian science with his
prodigious bulk. There was Ben Butler, oily and puffy and wheezy,
like Falstaff larding the lean earth as he walked along, who yearly
added more flesh to the scant ninety-seven pounds he carried away from
Waterville College. And there was Jim Fisk, dressed like a bartender,
huge in nerve as in bulk, driving with the dashing Josie Mansfield down
Broadway--prince of vulgarians, who jovially proclaimed, “I worship in
the Synagogue of the Libertines,” and who on the failure of the Erie
coup announced cheerfully, “Nothing is lost save honor!”
Impressive as are the fat kine of Egypt, the lean kine scarcely
suffer by contrast. There were giants of puny physique in those days.
There was Uncle Dan’l Drew, thin as a dried herring, yet a builder of
churches and founder of Drew Theological Seminary, who pilfered and
cheated his way to wealth with tobacco juice drooling from his mouth.
There was Jay Gould, a lone-hand gambler, a dynamo in a tubercular
body, who openly invested in the devil’s tenements as likely to
pay better dividends, and went home to potter lovingly amongst his
exotic flowers. And there was Oakey Hall, clubman and playwright,
small, elegant, and unscrupulous; and Victoria Woodhull who stirred
up the Beecher case, a wisp of a woman who enraged all the frumpy
blue-stockings by the smartness of her toilet and the perfection of her
manners; and little Libby Tilton with her tiny wistful face and great
eyes that looked out wonderingly at the world--eyes that were to go
blind with weeping before the candle of her life went out. It was such
men and women, individual and colorful, that Whitman and Mark Twain
mingled with, and that Herman Melville--colossal and dynamic beyond
them all--looked out upon sardonically from his tomb in the Custom
House where he was consuming his own heart.
They were thrown up as it were casually out of the huge caldron of
energy that was America. All over the land were thousands like them,
self-made men quick to lay hands on opportunity if it knocked at the
door, ready to seek it out if it were slow in knocking, recognizing no
limitations to their powers, discouraged by no shortcomings in their
training. When Moody set out to bring the world to his Protestant God
he was an illiterate shoe salesman who stumbled over the hard words
of his King James Bible. Anthony Comstock, the roundsman of the Lord,
was a salesman in a dry-goods shop, and as careless of his spelling
as he was careful of his neighbors’ morals. Commodore Vanderbilt, who
built up the greatest fortune of the time, was a Brooklyn ferryman,
hard-fisted and tough as a burr-oak, who in a lifetime of over eighty
years read only one book, _Pilgrim’s Progress_, and that after he was
seventy. Daniel Drew was a shyster cattle-drover, whose arid emotions
found outlet in periodic conversions and backslidings, and who got on
in this vale of tears by salting his cattle and increasing his--and
the Lord’s--wealth with every pound of water in their bellies--from
which cleverness is said to have come the Wall Street phrase,
“stock-watering.” Jim Fisk was the son of a Yankee peddler, who,
disdaining the unambitious ways of his father, set up for himself in a
cart gilded like a circus-wagon and drove about the countryside with
jingling bells. After he had made his pile in Wall Street he set up his
own opera house and proposed to rival the Medici as a patron of the
arts--and especially of the artists if they were of the right sex. A
surprising number of them--Moody, Beecher, Barnum, Fisk, Comstock, Ben
Butler--came from New England; Jay Gould was of Connecticut ancestry;
but Oakey Hall was a southern gentleman; Fernando Wood, with the face