Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of an Apollo and the wit of an Irishman, was the son of a Philadelphia
cigar-maker and much of his early income was drawn from sailors’
groggeries along the waterfront; Tweed was a stolid New Yorker, and
Drew was a York State country boy.
What was happening in New York was symptomatic of the nation. If
the temple of Plutus was building in Wall Street, his devotees were
everywhere. In Chicago, rising higgledy-piggledy from the ashes of the
great fire, Phil Armour and Nelson Morris were laying out stockyards
and drawing the cattle and sheep and hogs from remote prairie farms
to their slaughter-houses. In Cleveland, Mark Hanna was erecting his
smelters and turning the iron ore of Michigan into dollars, while
John D. Rockefeller was squeezing the small fry out of the petroleum
business and creating the Standard Oil monopoly. In Pittsburgh, Andrew
Carnegie was applying the Bessemer process to steel-making and laying
the foundations of the later steel trust. In Minneapolis, C. C.
Washburn and Charles A. Pillsbury were applying new methods to milling
and turning the northern wheat into flour to ship to the ends of the
earth. In San Francisco, Leland Stanford and Collis P. Huntington were
amassing huge fortunes out of the Southern Pacific Railway and bringing
the commonwealth of California to their feet. Everywhere were boom-town
and real-estate promoters, the lust of speculation, the hankering after
quick and easy wealth.
In the great spaces from Kansas City to Sacramento the frontier
spirit was in the gaudiest bloom. The experiences of three centuries
of expansion were being crowded into as many decades. In the fifties
the highway of the frontier had run up and down the Mississippi River
and the golden age of steamboating had brought a motley life to Saint
Louis; in the seventies the frontier had passed far beyond and was
pushing through the Rocky Mountains, repeating as it went the old
frontier story of swagger and slovenliness, of boundless hope and
heroic endurance--a story deeply marked with violence and crime and
heart-breaking failure. Thousands of veterans from the disbanded
armies, northern and southern alike, flocked to the West to seek their
fortunes, and daily life there soon took on a drab note from the alkali
of the plains; yet through the drabness ran a boisterous humor that
exalted lying to a fine art--a humor that goes back to Davy Crockett
and the Ohio flatboatmen. Mark Twain’s _Roughing It_ is the epic of
this frontier of the Pony Express, as _Life on the Mississippi_ is the
epic of the preceding generation.
The huge wastefulness of the frontier was everywhere, East and West.
The Gilded Age heeded somewhat too literally the Biblical injunction to
take no thought for the morrow, but was busily intent on squandering
the resources of the continent. All things were held cheap, and
human life cheapest of all. Wild Bill Hickok with forty notches on
his gun and a row of graves to his credit in Boot Hill Cemetery, and
Jesse James, most picturesque of desperadoes, levying toll with his
six-shooter on the bankers who were desecrating the free spirit of the
plains with their two per cent. a month, are familiar heroes in Wild
West tales; but the real plainsman of the Gilded Age, the picturesque
embodiment of the last frontier, was Captain Carver, the faultless
horseman and faultless shot, engaged in his celebrated buffalo hunt
for the championship of the prairies. Wagering that he could kill
more buffalo in a day than any rival hero of the chase, he rode forth
with his Indian marker and dropping the miles behind him he left an
endless trail of dead beasts properly tagged, winning handsomely when
his rival’s horse fell dead from exhaustion. It was magnificent. Davy
Crockett’s hundred and five bears in a season was but ’prentice work
compared with Captain Carver’s professional skill. It is small wonder
that he became a hero of the day and his rifle, turned now to the
circus business of breaking glass balls thrown from his running horse,
achieved a fame far greater than Davy’s Betsy. With his bold mustaches,
his long black hair flying in the wind, his sombrero and chaps and
top-boots, he was a figure matched only by Buffalo Bill, the last of
the great plainsmen.
Captain Carver was picturesque, but what shall be said of the thousands
of lesser Carvers engaged in the same slaughter, market-hunters who
discovered a new industry in buffalo-killing? At the close of the
Civil War the number on the western plains was estimated at fifteen
millions. With the building of the Union Pacific Railroad they were
cut asunder into two vast herds, and upon these herds fell the hunters
with the new breech-loading rifles, shooting for the hide market that
paid sixty-five cents for a bull’s hide and a dollar and fifteen cents
for a cow’s. During the four years from 1871 to 1874 nearly a million
head a year were slain from the southern herd alone, their skins ripped
off and the carcasses left for the coyotes and buzzards. By the end
of the hunting-season of 1875 the vast southern herd had been wiped
out, and with the building of the Northern Pacific in 1880 the smaller
northern herd soon suffered the same fate. The buffalo were gone with
the hostile Indians--Sioux and Blackfeet and Cheyennes and a dozen
other tribes.[504] It was the last dramatic episode of the American
frontier, and it wrote a fitting climax to three centuries of wasteful
conquest. But the prairies were tamed, and Wild Bill Hickok and Captain
Carver and Buffalo Bill Cody had become romantic figures to enthrall
the imagination of later generations.[505]
It was an abundant harvest of those freedoms that America had long
been struggling to achieve, and it was making ready the ground for
later harvests that would be less to its liking. Freedom had become
individualism, and individualism had become the inalienable right
to preëmpt, to exploit, to squander. Gone were the old ideals along
with the old restraints. The idealism of the forties, the romanticism
of the fifties--all the heritage of Jeffersonianism and the French
Enlightenment--were put thoughtlessly away, and with no social
conscience, no concern for civilization, no heed for the future of the
democracy it talked so much about, the Gilded Age threw itself into the
business of money-getting. From the sober restraints of aristocracy,
the old inhibitions of Puritanism, the niggardliness of an exacting
domestic economy, it swung far back in reaction, and with the discovery
of limitless opportunities for exploitation it allowed itself to get
drunk. Figures of earth, they followed after their own dreams. Some
were builders with grandiose plans in their pockets; others were
wreckers with no plans at all. It was an anarchistic world of strong,
capable men, selfish, unenlightened, amoral--an excellent example of
what human nature will do with undisciplined freedom. In the Gilded Age
freedom was the freedom of buccaneers preying on the argosies of Spain.
III • Politics and the Fairy Godmother
Certainly the Gilded Age would have resented such an interpretation
of its brisk activities. In the welter of change that resulted from
the application of the machine to the raw materials of a continent,
it chose rather to see the spirit of progress to which the temper of
the American people was so responsive. Freedom, it was convinced,
was justifying itself by its works. The eighteenth century had been
static, the nineteenth century was progressive. It was adaptable,
quick to change its ways and its tools, ready to accept whatever
proved advantageous--pragmatic, opportunist. It was not stifled by
the dead hand of custom but was free to adapt means to ends. It
accepted progress as it accepted democracy, without questioning the
sufficiency of either. The conception accorded naturally with a
frontier psychology. Complete opportunism is possible only amongst a
people that is shallow-rooted, that lives in a fluid society, scantily
institutionalized, with few vested interests. In a young society it is
easy, in a maturing society it becomes increasingly difficult.
Dazzled by the results of the new technique of exploitation applied on
a grand scale to unpreëmpted opportunities, it is no wonder the Gilded
Age thought well of its labors and confused the pattern of life it
was weaving with the pattern of a rational civilization. It had drunk
in the idea of progress with its mother’s milk. It was an inevitable
frontier interpretation of the swift changes resulting from a fluid
economics and a fluid society in process of settling into static ways.
It served conveniently to describe the changes from the simplicities
of social beginnings to the complexities of a later order. It was made
use of following the War of 1812 to explain the stir resulting from
the westward expansion and the great increase in immigration; but it
was given vastly greater significance by the social unsettlements
that came with the industrial revolution. With the realization of the
dramatic changes in manner of living--the added conveniences of life,
release from the laborious round of the domestic economy, ease of
transportation--that resulted from the machine order, it was inevitable
that the idea of progress should have been on every man’s tongue. The
increase of wealth visible to all was in itself a sufficient sign of
progress, and as the novelty of the industrial change wore off and the
economy of America was more completely industrialized, it was this
augmenting wealth that symbolized it.
In such fashion the excellent ideal of progress that issued from
the social enthusiasms of the Enlightenment was taken in charge by
the Gilded Age and transformed into a handmaid of capitalism. Its
duties were narrowed to the single end of serving profits and its
accomplishments came to be exactly measured by bank clearings. It
was unfortunate but inevitable. The idea was too seductive to the
American mentality not to be seized upon and made to serve a rising
order. Exploitation was the business of the times and how better could
exploitation throw about its activities the sanction of idealism than
by wedding them to progress? It is a misfortune that America has never
subjected the abstract idea of progress to critical examination.
Content with the frontier and capitalistic interpretations it has
confused change with betterment, and when a great idealist of the
Gilded Age demonstrated to America that it was misled and pointed out
that the path of progress it was following was the highway to poverty,
he was hooted from the market-place.
Having thus thrown the mantle of progress about the Gold Dust twins,
the Gilded Age was ready to bring the political forces of America
into harmony with the program of preëmption and exploitation. The
situation could hardly have been more to its liking. Post-war America
was wholly lacking in political philosophies, wholly opportunist. The
old party cleavage between agriculture and industry had been obscured
and the logic of party alignment destroyed by the struggle over
slavery. Democrat and Whig no longer faced each other conscious of the
different ends they sought. The great party of Jefferson and Jackson
was prostrate, borne down by the odium of slavery and secession. In
the North elements of both had been drawn into a motley war party,
momentarily fused by the bitterness of conflict, but lacking any common
program, certain indeed to split on fundamental economic issues. The
Whig Republican was still Hamiltonian paternalistic, and the Democrat
Republican was still Jeffersonian _laissez faire_, and until it was
determined which wing should control the party councils there would be
only confusion. The politicians were fertile in compromises, but in
nominating Lincoln and Johnson the party ventured to get astride two