Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Footnotes
[527] _The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy, University of
California Chronicle_, Vol. XIII, Number 4.
[528] _Poetical Works_, Vol. I, p. 45.
[529] “At the Funeral of a Minor Poet,” _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 94.
[530] Ferris Greenslet, _Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, p. 215.
[531] _Ibid._, p. 200.
[532] _Poetical Works_, Vol. II, p. 72.
[533] Ferris Greenslet, _Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich_, pp. 168-169.
[534] _Ibid._, p. 176.
[535] _Ibid._, p. 205.
[536] Fred Lewis Pattee, _The Development of the American Short Story_,
pp. 171-172. See the entire chapter for a discussion of early realism
in the _Atlantic_.
[537] Preface, p. 5.
[538] Chapter VIII, p. 183.
[539] Chapter IX, p. 100.
[540] _Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett_, pp. 46-47.
[541] _Ibid._, pp. 38-39.
[542] _Ibid._, pp. 186-187.
[543] _Ibid._, p. 23.
[544] Chapter XXXV, p. 350.
[545] Chapter LVII, pp. 519-520.
[546] _Ibid._, p. 563.
[547] See Mabbott, _Short Stories by Walt Whitman_, Columbia University
Press, 1927.
[548] For his late views see Horace Traubel, _With Walt Whitman in
Camden_, Vol. I, p. 99, and elsewhere.
[549] Cleveland Rogers and John Black, _The Gathering of the Forces_,
Vol. I, p. 12.
[550] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 53, 54, 57.
[551] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 215.
[552] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 65.
[553] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 79-80.
[554] _Leaves of Grass_, inclusive edition ed. by Emory Halloway,
Garden City, N. Y., 1927. Hereafter called _Leaves_. “To the States,”
p. 8.
[555] _Ibid._, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” p. 297, ll. 21-23.
[556] Constance Mayfield Rourke, _Trumpets of Jubilee_, p 171.
[557] _Ibid._, p. 172.
[558] _Leaves_, “One’s-Self I Sing,” p. 1, ll. 1-2.
[559] _Autobiographia_, p. 73. See also _Democratic Vistas_, p. 74.
[560] _Leaves_, “Roaming in Thought,” p. 233.
[561] “Carlyle from the American Point of View,” in _Specimen Days,
Prose Works_, pp. 174-175.
[562] Rourke, _op. cit._, p. 173.
[563] _Leaves_, “Starting from Paumanok,” p. 14, ll. 22-26; p. 15, ll.
1, 13, 19, 22-23; p. 16, ll. 2, 5-11; p. 17, ll. 7-10.
[564] _Leaves_, p. 349, ll. 18-19.
[565] _Leaves_, p. 43, ll. 9-17.
[566] _Democratic Vistas, Prose Works_, pp. 254-255.
[567] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 174.
[568] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 285.
[569] _Leaves_, “Song of the Broad Axe,” p. 160, ll. 7, 14-20, 21-22;
p. 161, ll. 1-2, 6-7, 10.
[570] Traubel, _op. cit._, Vol. I, p. 101.
[571] _Ibid._, Vol. I, pp. 193, 215.
[572] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 223.
[573] _Ibid._ Vol. I, p. 363.
[574] See Norman Foerster, _American Criticism_, pp. 211-222; Lucy
Lockwood Hazard, _The Frontier in American Literature_, pp. 170-177.
[575] _Leaves_, “Thanks in Old Age,” p. 435.
[576] Lucy Lockwood Hazard, _The Frontier in American Literature_, p.
223.
[577] Vol. I, Chapter XXXIII, p. 237.
[578] Chapter 31.
[579] _The Connecticut Yankee_, N. Y., 1917, p. 107.
[580] _Ibid._, Chapter XIII, pp. 105-106.
[581] Cf. Whitman’s view, _The Gathering of the Forces_, Vol. II, pp.
284-286.
[582] See Chapter 33.
[583] W. D. Howells, _My Mark Twain_, p. 43.
[584] _Joan of Arc_, Chapter 37, p. 290.
[585] _The Mysterious Stranger_, p. 151.
Chapter III • Changing Theory
Unlike as were Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain,
they belonged equally to an America that was passing. In consequence
of the silent drift towards consolidation new philosophies were
preparing that were to rephrase the familiar American ideals and adapt
current political and economic theory to the needs of the new order.
For a decade or more the significance of that drift was obscured by
the last great wave of decentralization that swept across the prairie
commonwealths; but when the frontier had been pushed to the Pacific
Northwest and the free lands had passed into private ownership, the
movement of consolidation gathered momentum swiftly. Primarily economic
in its origins, it went forward on even foot with the industrial
revolution. The vast increase in population, the unprofitable expansion
of agriculture, the augmenting resources of liquid capital, the new
potentialities revealed by industrialism, were all engaged in the work
of transforming a scattered agricultural people into an urbanized
industrial people.
And then came the railways to hasten a movement that was implicit in
the nature of things. Effective nationality in America issued more
immediately from fluid communication than perhaps any other cause.
A depressing spirit of isolation--of provincial aloofness--had lain
like a heavy weight on the colonial mind. The barriers of distance
were made formidable by a rugged untamed country, and to open up free
communication was an arduous undertaking. Yet easy communication must
be provided if economic development were to go forward. In the early
years of the nineteenth century vast plans and great outlays of money
went into the work of linking the sundered portions of the country
by a system of waterways. The Erie canal, the great lakes, the Ohio
and the Mississippi, were creating their own America, picturesque and
individual, when the process of differentiation was rudely broken
across by the iron rails that ran East and West, disregarding natural
barriers and breaking down traditional frontiers. It was the railways
that tied the continent effectively together, providing the needed
transportation to make possible a national economic system. With the
laying of the Union Pacific rails in the late sixties the destiny of
America as a self-sufficient economic unity was fixed. Henceforth
for an indeterminate period the drift of tendency would be from the
outlying frontiers to industrial centers, and with that drift would
come far-reaching changes in the daily routine of life. The machine
would reach into the remotest villages to disrupt the traditional
domestic economy, and the division of labor would substitute for the
versatile frontiersman the specialized factory-hand. A new urban
psychology would displace the older agrarian, and with the new
psychology would come other philosophies in response to the changing
realities.
I • Winds of Economic Theory
So profound a revolution could not fail to dislocate the foundations
of all traditional schools of thought. Economic and political theory
were both thrown out of their earlier beds to flow in new channels.
By force of gravitation the main stream of economic theory--like the
main stream of political theory--poured into the broadening channels
of capitalism, and only the lesser vagrant currents followed the
old channels of agrarianism or the new channels of proletarianism.
There was much speculation on the disturbing phenomena of the great
change, and current economic theory was slow to settle into the
conformities of a school. It divided sharply, not only between the
advocates of capitalism and agrarianism, but between those who
accepted the classical English theory and those who believed that
economic conditions in America warranted an independent American
school. The first group of professional economists--Henry C. Carey,
Francis A. Walker, David A. Wells--made its appearance, and a very
considerable group of amateurs--free-lance economists and fireside
theorists--contributed to the speculation of the times in the measure
of their intelligence. These latter have received scant attention,
since the battle went against them; nevertheless they do not deserve
to be forgotten, for most often they were an expression of the social
conscience of the times--a homely protest against the exploitation
of farmer and workingman by the rising capitalism. But because they
essayed to turn the course of “manifest destiny” they were ignored
or roughly ridden down, and only one of them--Henry George--is still
widely influential.
In the primitive early days of America economic theory had been a
simple homespun product, woven on fireside looms, and following simple
domestic patterns. With the rise of industrialism it passed into the
keeping of stockbrokers and textile manufacturers and retail merchants
who were looked upon as authoritative expounders of the new science
of wealth. In his _Elements of Political Economy_, first published in
1837 and for forty years a standard textbook in American colleges,
Francis Wayland accepted this view and offered an apology for treating
of the subject at all. “It may possibly be urged,” he said, “that the
Author, having had no experience in mercantile business, should have
left this subject to be treated of by practical men.” In the days of
Henry Clay this view established itself in the halls of Congress, where
politicians who had never heard of Ricardo were on profitably intimate
terms with Nick Biddle, and respected the interests of influential
constituents far more than the principles of Manchesterism. With the
appearance of professional economists the breach between economic
theory and legislative votes widened to a chasm. Ignored by the
politicians except in so far as their views fell in with the current
paternalism, the economists retreated to the quiet of the schools and
there spun their webs quite harmlessly. Youthful undergraduates were
fed on a modified English classical theory in which the pessimism
of Ricardo and Malthus, bred of the bitter dislocations of English
industrial life, was diluted with an optimism more suited to the temper
of the new world.
The academic economists, it must be confessed, were in an unhappy
position, not unlike that of the earlier Calvinists. They lived as
remote from the realities of life as did those old ministers. Trained
in the orthodox English school they felt bound to defend _laissez
faire_; yet as members of universities dependent on wealthy patrons
they could not well offend powerful interests that wanted none of
their free-trade theory. On the whole they stuck pretty manfully
to their guns, and from Wayland to Sumner they upheld the abstract
principle of free competition; but what they could do in other ways
to appease the wrath of the protectionists they did heartily, and
the steady rapprochement of academic economic theory and capitalism
was foreordained in the nature of things academic. Agrarian and
proletarian economics were granted no hearing in the colleges. Other
schools than the English classical were not countenanced, Henry George
was ridiculed and the left-wing European economists--great thinkers
like Sismondi, Saint-Simon, Louis Blanc, Bastiat, Proudhon, Engels,
and Karl Marx--were pretty much ignored by professors of economics in
the America of the Gilded Age. Something of the intellectual sterility
of the genteel tradition descended upon our academic economists;
yet amongst them were vigorous and capable minds that must not be
overlooked.
1 • Henry C. Carey
Henry C. Carey, son of the vigorous Irish Republican, Matthew
Carey, who made _The American Museum_ one of the ablest of the
eighteenth-century American magazines, may perhaps be justly called
our first professional economist. The eighty-six years of his life
were filled with enormous labors in the twin fields of economics and
sociology. He did his own thinking from a basis of facts that he was
at great pains to gather and tabulate, and his intellectual unfolding
followed naturally the current material development of the mid-century.
His statistics, of which he was excessively fond, no doubt were as
unreliable as most statistics that economists love to dabble in, and
like other purveyors of columned figures and impressive charts he
certainly leaned too heavily on his knotty staff; but unlike academic
economists such as Francis Wayland he tried to keep his thinking in
contact with reality and in consequence his studies possess a solidity