Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
fared at the democratic feast, is suggested by the contrast between
the Homestead Act and the Union Pacific land-grant. Both were war-time
measures and both had emerged from the agitations of earlier decades.
By the terms of the former the homesteader got his hundred and sixty
acres at the price of $1.25 an acre; by the terms of the latter the
promoters got a vast empire for nothing. It was absurd, of course, but
what would you have? The people wanted the railway built and Collis P.
Huntington was willing to build it on his own terms. The government was
too generous to haggle with public-spirited citizens, and too Whiggish
to want to discourage individual enterprise. Ever since the cession of
California there had been much talk of a continental railway to tie the
country together. In the first years the talk in Congress had all been
of a great national venture; the road must be built by the nation to
serve the common interests of the American people. But unfortunately
sectional jealousies prevented any agreement as to the route the survey
lines were to run, and the rising capitalism was becoming powerful
enough to bring into disfavor any engagement of the government in a
work that promised great rewards. Under its guidance political opinion
was skillfully turned into the channel of private enterprise. The
public domain backed by the public credit, it was agreed, must pay for
the road, but the government must not seek to control the enterprise
or look to profit from it directly; the national reward would come
indirectly from the opening-up of vast new territories.
The definite shift in policy came about the year 1855. In 1837 Stephen
A. Douglas had been the driving force behind the state enterprise of
building the Illinois Central Railway. In 1853 he proposed that the
Pacific Railroad should be built by private enterprise. With the change
promptly came a request for a patriotic land-grant. The government was
expected to provide the road, it appeared, but private enterprise was
to own it and manage it in the interest of speculators rather than
the public. For old-fashioned souls like Thomas A. Benton, who still
remembered the Jeffersonian concern for the common well-being, it was a
bitter mess to swallow.
I would have preferred [he said] that Congress should have made the
road, as a national work, on a scale commensurate with its grandeur
and let out the use of it to companies, who would fetch and carry
on the best terms for the people and the government. But that hope
has vanished ... a private company has become the resource and
the preference. I embrace it as such, utterly scouting all plans
for making private roads at national expense, of paying for the
use of roads built with our land and money, of bargaining with
corporations or individuals for the use of what we give them.[506]
With this speech the old Jeffersonianism pulled down its flag and the
new Whiggery ran up its black banner. The Gilded Age had begun and Old
Bullion Benton had outlived his time. In the tumultuous decades that
followed there was to be no bargaining with corporations for the use
of what the public gave; they took what they wanted and no impertinent
questions were asked. The hungriest will get the most at the barbecue.
A careless wastefulness when the supply is unlimited is perhaps natural
enough. There were hard-headed men in the world of Beriah Sellers who
knew how easy it was to overreach the simple, and it was they who got
most from the common pot. We may call them buccaneers if we choose, and
speak of the great barbecue as a democratic debauch. But why single
out a few, when all were drunk? Whisky was plentiful at barbecues,
and if too liberal potations brought the Gilded Age to the grossest
extravagancies, if when it cast up accounts it found its patrimony
gone, it was only repeating the experience of a certain man who went
down to Jericho. To create a social civilization requires sober heads,
and in this carousal of economic romanticism sober heads were few--the
good Samaritan was busy elsewhere.
The doctrine of preëmption and exploitation was reaping its harvest.
The frontier spirit was having its splurge, and progress was already
turning its face in another direction. Within the next half-century
this picturesque America with its heritage of crude energy--greedy,
lawless, capable--was to be transformed into a vast uniform
middle-class land, dedicated to capitalism and creating the greatest
machine-order known to history. A scattered agricultural people,
steeped in particularistic jealousies and suspicious of centralization,
was to be transformed into an urbanized factory people, rootless,
migratory, drawn to the job as by a magnet. It was to come about the
more easily because the American farmer had never been a land-loving
peasant, rooted to the soil and thriving only in daily contact with
familiar acres. He had long been half middle-class, accounting unearned
increment the most profitable crop, and buying and selling land as
if it were calico. And in consequence the vigorous individualism
that had sprung from frontier conditions decayed with the passing of
the frontier, and those who had lost in the gamble of preëmption and
exploitation were added to the growing multitude of the proletariat. It
was from such materials, supplemented by a vast influx of immigrants,
that was fashioned the America we know today with its standardized
life, its machine culture, its mass psychology--an America to which
Jefferson and Jackson and Lincoln would be strangers.
V • Folk Heroes
Perhaps one cannot penetrate more directly to the heart of the Gilded
Age than in taking account of certain of its heroes, figures of earth
whom it accounted great in its generation, and to whom its admiration
flowed out in unstinted measure. It is our own secret desires we
attribute to our gods, and if from the muck of the times a queer lot of
heroes was singled out, if an undisciplined generation rioting in its
new freedoms chose to honor men who had scrambled upward in uncouth
ways, it only suggests that such figures were a composite picture of
the secret desires of an age vastly concerned with getting on. From a
host of striking personalities two must suffice to suggest the spirit
of the times, authentic folk-heroes of the Gilded Age, fashioned out
of the commonest stuff and realizing such greatness as multitudes
of Americans were then dreaming of; and over against them a third
figure, a mordant intellectual, who sardonically swam with the stream
of tendency and in serving all the gods of the Gilded Age gained for
himself a brilliant career.
1 • General Grant
Greatest of all the heroes of the age was the victor of Appomattox.
His fame was in all men’s mouths, and his reputation was substantial
enough to withstand the attacks of enemies and the gross shortcomings
of his own character. It was not for any singular or remarkable
qualities of mind or personality that General Grant was taken to the
heart of his generation, but rather because he was so completely a
product of the times, so strikingly an embodiment of its virtues and
weaknesses. In his spectacular career were the sharp contrasts that
appealed to a plebeian people wanting in fine and discriminating
standards of appraisal. He had come up from the people and the marks
of his origins--the slovenly manners and uncritical force of frontier
folk-ways--were stamped on him as indelibly as they were stamped on his
fellow soldiers who proclaimed his greatness. To a later generation he
seems an odd and unaccountable figure for the high rôle of national
hero, yet he was as native and homespun as Lincoln, like him sprung
from the common stock and learning his lessons from harsh experience,
a figure blown to huge dimensions by the passions of civil war. A
generation that discovered something praiseworthy in the “smartness”
of Jim Fisk, in the burly acquisitiveness of Commodore Vanderbilt, or
in the clever humbuggery of Barnum the Showman, certainly would judge
with no very critical eyes the claims to greatness of a grim leader of
armies who succeeded where so many before had failed.
General Grant was no conventional military hero. It was not the gold
stars on his epaulets that dazzled his generation. The people of
the North had seen too many gold stars rise and set on the military
horizon, they had been stricken too sorely by the bitter struggle,
to be caught by military popinjays. They had gone through the fire
and any hero of theirs must himself have passed through the fire. It
was something veracious in the man, something solid and unyielding
in the soldier, something plain as an old shoe in the field marshal
of bloody battles, that caught the imagination of the North and made
Grant a hero--this together with a certain gift of pungent phrase,
befitting the leader of democratic hosts, that served to spread his
fame amongst the common people. Vicksburg did much for his reputation,
but the demand for “unconditional surrender,” sent to a Confederate
leader, did far more. The words fixed his character in the popular
mind. Here at last was a fighting man who instead of planning how to
fall back, as other generals did, thought only of going ahead; so the
popular judgment shut its eyes to his dull plebeian character and set
a wreath on his brows. It rested there somewhat grotesquely. In spite
of a deep unconscious integrity and a stubborn will that drove him
forward along whatever path his feet were set on, he was the least
imposing of military heroes. Short, stooped, lumpish in mind and body,
unintellectual and unimaginative, devoid of ideas and with no tongue
to express the incoherent emotions that surged dully in his heart, he
was a commonplace fellow that no gold braid could set off. He hated war
and disliked soldiering, yet accepting life with a stolid fatalism he
fought his bloody way to ultimate victory.
Graduated from West Point after four sterile years of drill, quite
uneducated and unread even in his profession, he served for a time at
different army posts, went through the Mexican War--which he looked
upon as a stupid imperialistic debauch--as quartermaster without
gaining distinction, and eventually, oppressed by the eventless routine
of garrison life, he fell into the habit of solitary drinking and was
dismissed from the service. Misfortune that it seemed, it was his
making. Only as a volunteer could he have risen so quickly to high
command; as a captain or major in the regular army he would have been
detailed as drill-master to the raw troops and have had no chance.
Nevertheless hard times came with his dismissal. Indolent by nature and
inclined to drift, he was as incompetent a man in practical affairs as
one could find in a frontier township. But with a wife and children to
support he must turn his hand to something, so he tried his luck at
farming, selling real estate, and various odd jobs, yet all the time
growing poorer and seedier, till the war came and picking him up flung
him to mountain heights of popularity and reputation. Thereafter till
his death he was accounted the greatest American of his generation. No
accumulating evidence of his well-meaning but witless incapacity in
civic and political affairs could pluck from his brows the wreath that
had been thrust upon him.
In his spectacular career Grant was an embodiment of the dreams of all
the Beriah Sellerses of the Gilded Age. He was a materialistic hero
of a materialistic generation. He was dazzled by wealth and power,
and after years of bitter poverty he sat down in the lap of luxury
with huge content. He took what the gods sent, and if houses and fast
horses and wines and cigars were showered upon him he accepted them as