Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
how can such leadership be hoped for in a rough and tumble democracy
that loves the noisiest demagogue? Of this very considerable group of
belated Federalists James Russell Lowell was the most distinguished
representative. In the middle seventies he had come to believe that
America was suffering from too much democracy, and that competent
government could be had only by working back to the responsible
Federalism of earlier times, with leadership reclaimed by the better
elements of society. To the economics of the problem--the antagonistic
interests of capitalist, proletarian, and farmer, with their struggles
to control the political state--he gave no serious thought, but he
viewed with instinctive suspicion the mounting ambitions of labor and
he foresaw only evil from the bitter unrest of the farmers.
A second very considerable group, of which George William Curtis may
be taken as spokesman, rejected all such antiquated Federalistic hopes
as the foolish dreams of defeatists. They held fast to their faith
in democracy, but they were convinced that more adequate democratic
machinery must be provided. The root of the evil, they had come to
believe, was political and must be sought in the vicious Jacksonian
spoils system. With every change of administration to turn over the
country to hungry partisans to devour, was not democracy but the
negation of democracy? Government would not function satisfactorily
until a trained civil service was provided, and the need of the hour,
they pointed out, was an honest civil service reform. A third group,
very much smaller than the others, of which Edwin Lawrence Godkin was
the spokesman, was inclined to trace the plentiful evils of the times
to an unwise paternalism, asserting that the real source of the common
political scoundrelism was the lauded American System devised by Henry
Clay, as a result of which government was seduced from its proper
business of keeping the peace and was turned into a fairy godmother to
shower gifts on favored interests. The only cure for the evil was to
divorce business and politics and reëstablish in practice the police
theory of government.
In the thinking of all three groups little consideration was given
to the social consequences of the venture on which America had
entered with the vigor of thoughtless youth. Concerning the ultimate
consequences of the collision between a shambling democracy and an
ambitious industrialism, few troubled themselves greatly. To find
those who confronted the problem frankly and realistically, one must
search out obscure men, labor leaders for the most part, or _déclassé_
radicals like Wendell Phillips. The middle-class mind refused to
see what its feet were stumbling over. In consequence the Gilded
Age produced no critics of industrialism comparable to the great
English critics--Carlyle, Kingsley, Ruskin, Morris, Tawney; no social
philosophers like the great continental expounders of proletarian
ideals--Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Sorel; no left-wing economists like
the great French school--Louis Blanc, Bastiat, Proudhon. The genteel
culture of America was no better than bankrupt in presence of brutal
reality, quite unequipped to interpret the sprawling America that was
transforming itself before its eyes into something it hated but did
not understand. The time for searching criticism had not come, and
would not come until the Industrial Revolution had created in America
a proletariat such as swarmed in the English black country and amongst
the hovels of continental cities. Nevertheless such criticism as there
was must be taken into consideration, and for our present purpose it
will suffice to single out three spokesmen--a grizzled warrior of the
earlier renaissance who had the courage to face unpleasant fact, and
two critics who brought to bear on political themes the best culture of
the time. With these may be conveniently grouped certain novelists who
more or less casually suffered their pens to deal with social problems.
I • The New England Conscience and Capitalism--Wendell Phillips
Social criticism was by no means a new thing in America. For half a
century it had filled all ears with its strident clamors, and from it
had issued the motley group of reform movements that had been cheered
or mocked at by thousands. From Channing and Cooper down to Parke
Godwin and Horace Greeley it had been mustering its forces, vivid and
picturesque figures for the most part--men and women like Fanny Wright,
George Henry Evans, and Hinton R. Helper; ardent souls who beyond the
dun horizon discovered a golden morrow that only awaited the rising
of a new sun, and who lectured and wrote and argued till pretty much
all America had caught something of their contagious enthusiasm. In
this work New England came eventually to take the lead, and the golden
forties were a time when in many an obscure Yankee head programs of
reform were fermenting like a vat of malt. But unfortunately an excess
of eagerness wore out the first enthusiasm, and when the shackles had
been loosened from the negro bondmen the militancy of the New England
leadership subsided and the tired New England conscience went on
vacation.
But in these slothful times the conscience of one great New Englander
was not tired, though he gave it no rest while life lasted. Wendell
Phillips was a soldier of Puritan soul who did not lay down his arms
in ’65, but for nearly a score of years warred upon the injustices of
the Gilded Age as he had warred before upon the obscenities of negro
slavery. No sooner was the cause of abolitionism won--a cause to which
he had sacrificed much in ease and the good opinion of Beacon Street,
but from which he had gained more in self-respect and the decent
opinion of mankind--than he turned to whatever new work offered. The
lovers of justice, he knew very well, can indulge themselves in no
vacations, for the devil is on the job day and night, and while the
assailants sleep he is at work repairing any breaches in the walls of
his citadel. When conscience is tired he counts on gaining his greatest
victories.
The love of freedom has always been a dangerous possession in
Massachusetts, given to exploding in unforeseen moments and unexpected
places. No one could have foretold--certainly not he himself--that
Wendell Phillips would put away all his Brahmin loyalties and devote
forty-seven years to an unresting attack on the diverse Toryisms from
which he and his class had hitherto prospered. Son of the first mayor
of the city and a distinguished member of the Boston gentry, he was a
patrician in the fullest Boston sense. All the loyalties of his caste
summoned him to uphold the Brahmin authorities, but something deep
within him, a loyalty to other and higher ideals, held him back. When a
frock-coated mob laid its hands on Garrison to lynch him for abolition
propaganda, he drew back; he refused to follow the Mayor and the
Colonel of his regiment and other gentlemen if they betrayed the Boston
for which their grandfathers had fought. An instinctive love of justice
held him back. A fierce indignation flamed up within him at the wrong
done a citizen of Massachusetts for exercising his natural right of
free speech, and in that wild hour he discovered that he was a child of
’76 with the mentality of a revolutionist. His conscience was aroused
and he proceeded to put it in the safe keeping of Ann Terry Greene,
a brilliant young woman of radical mind, who quickened his sense of
social justice as Maria White was to quicken Lowell’s. There was to
be no backsliding in his case. From the December day in 1837 when he
replied to Attorney-General Austin’s slanders of the Revolutionary
fathers in Faneuil Hall, to the end of a life filled with enormous
labors--a life daily stabbed by Tory hornets, and that at the last is
said to have inspired the remark of Judge Hoar that he did not attend
the funeral of Wendell Phillips but he approved of it[621]--he followed
his conscience into many an unpopular cause and spoke for those for
whom few were willing to speak.
The story of his anti-slavery labors belongs to an earlier time and
need not be recounted here. His devotion to abolitionism equaled
Garrison’s and his services were as great. It is rather the nineteen
years that remained to him after Appomattox that are of present
concern--what later battles he fought and how he bore himself in those
battles. It was a difficult time for Puritan liberalism, face to face
with a new age that had forgotten the old liberalisms. The Grand Army
of Abolitionism had disbanded and new armies of other causes had
not yet been recruited. Garrison and Edmund Quincy and Whittier had
laid aside their arms, and Lowell had long since settled back into a
comfortable Brahminism; the long struggle had left them drained of
their energy. But for Wendell Phillips the battle was not over; it was
unending and he was enlisted for life. At a vast meeting that marked
the formal close of the abolition movement he took leave of his old
associates with these words: “We will not say ‘Farewell,’ but ‘all
hail.’ Welcome, new duties! We sheathe no sword. We only turn the front
of the army upon a new foe.”[622] He had long spoken for prohibition,
woman’s rights, the abolition of capital punishment, and he now joined
heartily with the courageous women engaged in such reform work. But
more provocative business was at hand, and more dangerous--causes
that touched the northern pocketbook as abolitionism had touched the
southern. The banker’s exploitation of the national currency, and the
manufacturer’s exploitation of factory labor--these were issues that a
cautious man who was careful of his good name would not meddle with.
But Wendell Phillips was never cautious and his good name had long
since been flung to the wolves. And so in the evening of his days,
with a courage that took little counsel of expediency, he embarked on
a campaign that had for its ultimate objective the impregnable citadel
of State Street. He would destroy capitalistic exploitation in all its
works. It was as hopeless a battle as King Arthur’s “last, dim, weird
battle of the west,” and entered upon as courageously.
How he came to hold the heretical views on money and labor that he
expounded from the lecture platform cannot easily be traced. Perhaps
they came from the radical fringe that envelops every great social
movement; perhaps they were the inevitable expression of his left-wing
temper. A man who had fought all Tory programs for thirty years must
eventually come to hate the ways of capitalism, and so confirmed a
democrat as Wendell Phillips would be certain to espouse the doctrine
of thorough. One who had passed through the fires of abolition
nullification, who had spoken of the Union as “built i’ the eclipse
and rigged with curses dark,” who had repudiated his citizenship and
equaled Garrison in contempt for a slave-protecting Constitution,
would have pretty well cleared his mind of conventional respect for
capitalistic law and order. He was not impressed by political cant. He
had taken the measure of existing law and order and was casting about
for a juster law and a more generous order.
In these later years, as a program of social reconstruction took shape
in his mind, he was coming to essential agreement with the program of
socialism. With the Marxians he based his thinking upon economics, and
his final objective came to be the substitution of coöperation for the
profit-motive. As ardently as Horace Greeley he asserted the rights
of labor. As early as 1860-1861 he had come to recognize a similarity
in the economic status of the wage-slave and the bond-slave, and in
1865, in a speech on the eight-hour movement, he accepted as true the
southern thesis that in western civilization all labor, whether bond or