Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
wage, was unfree, held in the grip of a master, bought and sold in the
market;[623] and now that the shackles had been struck from the negro,
it remained to strike them from the wage-earner. To turn the negro from
a bond-slave to a wage-slave would be a sorry ending of abolitionism;
but such must be the inevitable outcome, he believed, unless all labor
should win freedom. The question of the hour for Wendell Phillips had
become the question of the relation of labor and capital.
In his thinking on the currency question--a question that became acute
in the seventies--he was soon caught up by the Greenback movement. It
may have been that his contact with Thaddeus Stevens helped to mold
his views on the money question; yet that he should have become a
Greenbacker was foreordained. He had no amiable illusions in regard to
State Street. As a tribune of the people he had long been intimately
acquainted with its ambitions, and he would not turn over the country
to its custodianship. He would have no bankers’ control of the national
currency, to augment or deflate as banking profits dictated. His
democratic sympathies recoiled from a class control of the common
medium of exchange, and in 1875 he offered a drastic solution of the
vexing question that brought down on his head all the wrath of State
Street. His plan provided for three things: the rejection of the
national banknote system; the issue of honest greenbacks, secured by
the wealth of the country, and receivable in payment for all debts
public and private--not dishonest greenbacks like the old, which the
government had repudiated at issue by refusing to accept them in
payment of custom dues; and finally the retirement of interest-bearing
bonds and the return to a cash basis for government business. How
deeply he felt in the notorious matter of credit manipulation is
suggested in the following passage with its echoes of an older America
that looked with suspicion on a consolidating capitalism.
Three times within a dozen years, [he said] capitalists with their
knives on the throat of the Government, have compelled it to
cheat its largest creditor, the people; whose claim, Burke said,
was the most sacred. First, the pledge that greenbacks should be
exchangeable with bonds was broken. Secondly, debts originally
payable in paper ... were made payable in gold. Thirdly, silver was
demonetized, and gold made the only tender. A thousand millions
were thus stolen from the people.[624]
At other times he went further. Speaking on the labor question in 1872,
he said:
I say, let the debts of the country be paid, abolish the banks, and
let the government lend every Illinois farmer (if he wants it), who
is now borrowing money at ten per cent., money on the half-value
of his land at three per cent. The same policy that gave a million
acres to the Pacific Railroad, because it was a great national
effort, will allow of our lending Chicago twenty millions of money,
at three per cent., to rebuild it.[625]
When we get into power, there is one thing we mean to do. If a
man owns a single house, we will tax him one hundred dollars. If
he owns ten houses of like value, we won’t tax him one thousand
dollars, but two thousand dollars.... We’ll double and treble and
quintuple and sextuple and increase tenfold the taxes.... We’ll
crumple up wealth by making it unprofitable to be rich.... You will
say, “Is that just?” My friends, it is safe. Man is more valuable
than money. You say, “Then capital will go to Europe.” Good
heavens, let it go! If other States wish to make themselves vassals
of wealth, so will not we. We will save a country equal from end
to end. Land, private property, all sorts of property, shall be so
dearly taxed that it shall be impossible to be rich; for it is in
wealth, in incorporated, combining, perpetuated wealth, that the
danger of labor lies.[626]
The mad wicked ravings of a demagogue, such talk was accounted by
sober financiers of Boston. But it was rather the talk of an honest
equalitarian who understood how incompatible was property rule and
the ideal of equality. The arch-enemy of a worthy civilization,
Wendell Phillips had become convinced, was private capitalism with its
dehumanizing profit-motive. There could be no adequate civilization,
no Christianity, until coöperation had displaced competition, and men
were become equal in economic rights as they were in franchise rights.
At a Labor-Reform Convention held at Worcester on September 4, 1871,
resolutions drafted by him were adopted--resolutions that reveal “just
where Mr. Phillips stood for the last thirteen years of his life.” In
this “full body of faith,” and in two later speeches--_The Foundation
of the Labor Movement_, and _The Labor Question_--the man who called
himself “a Jeffersonian democrat in the darkest hour,” wrote down as
the great objective of the labor party the principle that has long been
accepted as the cardinal plank of the Socialist platform.
We affirm, as a fundamental principle, that labor, the creator of
wealth, is entitled to all it creates.
Affirming this, we avow ourselves willing to accept the final
results of the operation of a principle so radical,--such as the
overthrow of the whole profit-making system, the extinction of
all monopolies, the abolition of privileged classes, universal
education and fraternity, perfect freedom of exchange, and ... the
final obliteration of that foul stigma upon our so-called Christian
civilization--the poverty of the masses.... _Resolved_,--That we
declare war with the wages system, which demoralizes alike the
hirer and the hired, cheats both, and enslaves the workingman; war
with the present system of finance, which robs labor, and gorges
capital, ... war with these lavish grants of the public lands to
speculating companies, and whenever in power, we pledge ourselves
to use every just and legal means to resume all such grants
heretofore made; war with the system of enriching capitalists by
the creation and increase of public interest-bearing debts. We
demand that every facility, and all encouragement, shall be given
by law to co-operation in all branches of industry and trade,
and that the same aid be given to co-operative efforts that has
heretofore been given to railroads and other enterprises....[627]
When he was about to take the platform on another occasion his wife is
reported to have said to him, “Wendell, don’t shilly-shally!” Certainly
in this pronouncement, and in the speeches supporting it, there is no
shilly-shallying. He will have no halfway measures, but goes straight
to the economic core of the problem. Pretty much all of Marxianism is
there, even to the class war. The capitalists had whetted their swords
and he would have labor put its sword likewise to the grindstone. If
the war were cruel, where did labor learn it--“learned it of capital,
learned it of our enemies.” In a world of economic concentration where
caste follows property accumulation he had come to rest his hopes
on the international solidarity of labor. The cause of democratic
justice was committed to the keeping of the workingman, and if he
were defeated in his hopes the future was black indeed. The American
Revolution and the French Revolution had prepared the way gloriously
for a greater event, the revolution of labor. He was not afraid
of revolution. In America he hoped the battle would be fought with
ballots, but if it must come to bullets, so be it. The Paris Commune
met with his heartiest approval: “I have not a word to utter--far be
it from me!--against the grandest declaration of popular indignation
which Paris wrote on the pages of history in fire and blood. I honor
Paris as the vanguard of the Internationals of the world.”[628] And in
the Phi Beta Kappa address, delivered in 1881 before all the assembled
conservatisms of Boston, the old warrior with seventy years upon his
head, went so far as to defend Russian Nihilism.
Nihilism is the righteous and honorable resistance of a people
crushed under an iron rule. Nihilism is evidence of life ...
the last weapon of victims choked and manacled beyond all other
resistance.... I honor Nihilism, since it redeems human nature from
the suspicion of being utterly vile, made up only of heartless
oppressors and contented slaves.... This is the only view an
American, the child of 1620 and 1776, can take of Nihilism. Any
other unsettles and perplexes the ethics of our civilization. Born
within sight of Bunker Hill, in a commonwealth which adopts the
motto of Algernon Sydney, _sub libertate quietem_ (“accept no peace
without liberty”); son of Harvard, whose first pledge was “Truth”;
citizen of a republic based on the claim that no government is
rightful unless resting on the consent of the people, and which
assumes to lead in asserting the rights of humanity,--I at least
can say nothing else and nothing less; no, not if every tile on
Cambridge roofs were a devil hooting my words![629]
“It was a delightful discourse,” said one gentleman, “but preposterous
from beginning to end.” The doctrine was strange to Harvard
ears--wicked and perverse. And strange and disconcerting also was his
roll-call of great and noble deeds done in America in which Harvard
scholarship had had no part. To an audience of Brahmin scholars it
was not kind to say, “The greatest things have not been done for the
world by its bookmen”; nor this, “It is not the masses who have most
disgraced our political annals. I have seen many mobs ... I never saw
or heard of any but well-dressed mobs, assembled and countenanced, if
not always led in person, by respectability and what called itself
education.”[630] It was a curious scene--that gathering in a Harvard
hall listening to a son of Harvard who had gone to school to other
teachers than those brought up on Brahmin culture. The liberalism of
the forties was speaking to a generation that was concerned about
other things than a just and humane civilization. Wendell Phillips
was hopelessly old-fashioned in America of the Gilded Age--a lone
Puritan in a land of Yankees. He used to speak of himself grimly as
“that Ishmael”; his home, he said, was the sleeping-car and his only
friends the brakeman and the porter. He spent his strength and his
earnings with generous prodigality, and when he died the only treasures
he had laid up were in heaven. He was the last survivor of the great
age of Puritan conscience, and the words he spoke of Theodore Parker
may well stand for his epitaph: “The child of Puritanism is not mere
Calvinism--it is the loyalty to justice which tramples under foot the
wicked laws of its own epoch.”
II • Morality and Politics--George William Curtis
A child of Puritan conscience also was George William Curtis, like
Wendell Phillips sprung from the Puritan gentry, but unlike him wanting
in a passionate Hebraism that sought justice in all the byways and
would not turn aside from pursuing it. A reformer but never a radical,
he was a gentleman who was a lifelong friend of civilization. An
idealist, he refused to serve the gross materialisms that swept so
many of his fellows from the old moorings, but throughout a long and
honorable career he preserved unshaken his early faith in republican
ideals and the way of liberty. As an abolitionist he faced hostile
audiences with admirable poise, and as a civil service reformer he
fought off the attacks of greasy politicians with quiet contempt. A
cultivated gentleman, high-bred if not heroic, was George William
Curtis.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, of excellent stock, living most of
his life in New York City whither his father had removed to engage in