Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
served to measure the greatness of his fall. The career of Dana is a
cynical commentary on the changing spirit of America from the days of
Brook Farm to the days of Mark Hanna.
A child of the Puritan frontier, Dana early crossed over into New
York State and became a shop-boy in the backwoods village of Buffalo
at a time when the Indian trade was important enough to justify him
in learning Algonquin. In these early manhood days he was living in
the midst of the coonskin democracy, and falling in with the frontier
spirit he became an ardent Jacksonian. He was eager for an education
and quitting Buffalo he went to Harvard, but his eyes failing him after
two years, he joined the Brook Farm community where he speedily became
one of the chief counselors, and was deeply concerned for the success
of the experiment. In those generous years he was a militant idealist,
widely read in socialist literature and warmly espousing associationism
as a cure for the evils of competition. Upon quitting Brook Farm after
the burning of the Phalanstery he joined Greeley and for fifteen years
was one of the directing minds on the _Tribune_. In 1848 he went abroad
as foreign correspondent, saw much of the revolutions of that great
year, studied the temper of the French and German people, analyzed
the popular leaders and programs with singular acuteness, and found
his sympathies warmly enlisted in the cause of the lower classes. He
was then thirty-nine, and his active mind had gathered up all the
diverse radicalisms--Jacksonian, Utopian, European proletarian--of
his revolutionary generation. Shrewdly observant and with a sensitive
social conscience, he was amply equipped to become such another critic
of the Industrial Revolution as England had bred from its bitter
experience.
But the war intervened, and after the war a dun twilight gathered about
the hopes of the forties. Few generous enthusiasms survived those
years of struggle and Dana in his editorial rooms underwent successive
changes of heart. The realist slowly dispossessed the idealist and
then the cynic swallowed up the realist. The last forty years of his
life were spent undoing the work of his earlier years. His political
philosophy went to pieces and the policy of the _Sun_ became a mere
hodge-podge of jingo programs, an irrational bundle of personal
prejudices and private interests. His reaction from associationism
carried him over to a stark and ruthless individualism. He saw all
about him the strong and capable as the masters of the earth, with
social justice an outcast and mendicant begging from house to house.
The millennium to which belongs the ideal of social democracy which
he had earlier served, he could no longer make out from any present
bend in the road, and putting away his faith he went with the masters.
The reaction began during the _Tribune_ days with his espousal of the
American System--the first outcropping of the middle-class qualities
of his mind--and thereafter he drifted steadily to the right and the
Dismal Swamp of exploitation. With augmenting wealth and the sense
of power that came from the great success of the _Sun_ he became the
apologist and defender of capitalism, phrasing with clever vivacity all
the sophistries of Gilded Age argument. Professing to be a Democrat, he
made much of states rights and governmental _laissez faire_. He would
countenance no interference with the principle of free competition,
but would reduce the government to the rôle of policeman to keep the
peace. He professed to believe that the dry bones of Manchesterism were
a living democratic faith. He ridiculed the proposal for pure-food
legislation, civil service reform, the control of monopolies,
professing to see in every such move the insidious beginnings of an
un-American bureaucracy. No social pretext justified in his eyes the
regulation of business enterprise. Centralization of economic power he
accepted as in the nature of things, and the popular denunciation of
trusts he called “the greatest humbug of the hour.” His argument was
simple and to the Gilded Age wholly satisfactory.
The objects of trade being to buy as cheap as possible, to sell
as dear as possible, and to get control of the market as far as
possible, the formation for these purposes of these gigantic and
widely extended partnerships is just as natural and regular as the
partnership of two shoemakers or of two blacksmiths.[525]
Thus far Dana must be reckoned a belated disciple of the Manchester
school. The days of transcendental and Utopian idealism were past and
he knew it. The Gilded Age had traveled far from such naïve enthusiasms
and it was time to face reality. But his realism was only a gesture
to cover his surrender to capitalism. It was not honest. When his
principle of individualism trod on his own toes he threw it aside with
no compunctions. He was a _laissez-faire_ Democrat only when a free
field favored business, but when business desired government assistance
he made no scruple to turn Whig. Accepting the principle of private
exploitation under the drive of the acquisitive instinct, and content
with the social ethics of Captain Kidd, he would weaken government or
strengthen government as business profits dictated. In these later
years he became cynically class-conscious, while professing to deny
the existence of classes. He would disarm the government as against
the capitalist, but he would triple-arm it against the farmer and
workingman. He was shrill in his demands for a high protective tariff
for the manufacturers, huge grants of public lands for speculative
railway companies, and a monetary system in the control of the bankers.
But for the economic demands of the western farmers he had only
contempt--the agrarians were flying in the face of economic law as
economic law was understood by the high priests of capitalism. When
he talked about “honest money” he laid his brains on the shelf. He
would have no other money than the gold standard, and to achieve that
object he never suffered candor to weaken his plea. He bitterly opposed
the income tax and when the Democratic platform of 1896 suggested the
reorganization of the Supreme Court to reverse the decision on its
constitutionality, he turned demagogue and indulged in talk about
“the destruction of the independence of the judiciary.” When it was
proposed that the railways be nationalized he protested that he could
not “imagine anything more absurd, unpatriotic, and dangerous”--on
the assumption no doubt that railways existed to pay dividends on
their stock. “Still more alarming” to him was the “clearly implied
approval of lawless violence contained in the denunciation of what is
denominated in the [Democratic] platform ‘government by injunction.’
Veiled in the language of moderation, the wild light of anarchy shines
through.”[526] He urged upon government the necessity of holding the
labor unions in strict control, he was eloquent in defense of the
individual laborer’s sacred right of “free contract,” and he was loud
in applause of President Cleveland’s lawless suppression of the Pullman
strike. When it came to Bryan and Populism he lost his head and became
quite maudlin.
Dana was no fool to be deceived by his own insincerity. On the
contrary he was highly intelligent and knew perfectly well what he
was about. Having gone over to capitalism, he would fight its battles
with whatever weapons came to hand, and like a son of New England
he would cover his breast with a shield of morality. He became the
chief journalistic exponent of the “lawless violence” he was fond of
attributing to other social classes. He turned into a flaming jingo
imperialist, talked patriotically about “adequate” coast defenses,
demanded a great navy, and was the loudest spokesman of the blowsy
doctrine of “Manifest Destiny.” He was always peering through his
glasses to discover some fresh territory to annex--Haiti, Cuba,
Mexico--and so late as 1887 he was still calling for the annexation
of Canada. Naturally he approved President Cleveland’s Venezuelan
proclamation and he probably would have enjoyed a tussle with the
British lion. In his morality he was quite as truculent as in his
patriotism and in his advocacy of capitalism. Perhaps it was a salve
to a conscience that could not have been easy. He hated political
corruption and he attacked the sordid looting that marked President
Grant’s administration with gusto. He took sardonic delight in giving
the widest publicity to the classic corruptionist phrase of the
day--“He understands addition, division, and silence.” He erected into
a fetish the cry “Turn the rascals out!” yet while helping to pry
loose one set of rascals from their spoils he was busily providing
another set with his demand for subsidies and tariffs. It was a
situation that must have amused the cynical Dana. He had long since
left off worrying about the damned human race. It was more sensible to
pile up one’s plate at the barbecue and send the bill to the American
people. He had made a huge success and what mattered it if his old
Brook Farm associates, Ripley and Curtis, no longer spoke to him when
they met?
Footnotes
[504] See Allan Nevins, “The Taming of the West,” in _The Emergence of
Modern America_.
[505] It is the same story in the matter of the passenger pigeon. In
early days the flights of these birds ran to untold millions. The last
great nesting was at Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878, covering a strip
forty miles long and from three to ten miles wide. Upon the nests fell
the market-hunters and a million and a half squabs were shipped to New
York by rail, besides the thousands wasted. Within a generation the
passenger pigeon had become extinct. See W. B. Mershon, _Outdoor Life
and Recreation_, February, 1929, p. 26 ff.
[506] Quoted in J. P. Davis, _The Union Pacific Railway_, pp. 67-68.
[507] E. P. Oberholtzer, _Jay Cooke, Financier of the Civil War_, Vol.
I, p. 52.
[508] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 81 and 83.
[509] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 85.
[510] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 132-133.
[511] See _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 143-144.
[512] See _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 97-98.
[513] C. E. Russell, _Stories of Great Railroads_, p. 19.
[514] The list of his “beneficiaries,” some of whom were drawn
in delicately and some realistically, included, according to his
biographer, Vice-President Colfax, Speaker Blaine and James A. Garfield
of the House, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and Governor Geary
of Pennsylvania, General Horace Porter, President Grant’s private
secretary, Senators John Sherman, William Windom, and Ben Wade,
Delegate Garfielde of Washington Territory, Bayard Taylor. Amongst
the papers were Henry Ward Beecher’s _Christian Union_, Greeley’s
_Tribune_, the _Philadelphia Press_, the _Washington Chronicle_, the
_London Times_.
[515] See Oberholtzer, Vol. II, p. 154.
[516] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 176.
[517] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 322.
[518] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 409.
[519] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 411.
[520] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 643-644.
[521] _Ibid._, Vol. II, pp. 267-268.
[522] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 269.
[523] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 56 note.
[524] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 28.
[525] See James Harrison Wilson, _The Life of Charles A. Dana_, p. 479.
[526] See _Ibid._, p. 491.
Chapter II • The Culture of the Seventies
It was in the seventies that good taste reached its lowest ebb. Not
only in America, but in England as well, where rebels like William
Morris were contemptuously rejecting a machine civilization. A
veritable _débâcle_ of the arts was in process, the lesser as well
as the greater, in New York and Boston as well as in Chicago and San
Francisco, from which literature could not wholly escape; and that
_débâcle_ was an expression of profound changes taking place at the