Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Curtis was never a Whig. The transcendentalism he had imbibed at Brook
Farm remained with him to color much of his thinking and restrain him
from an uncritical advocacy of capitalism. He never went over body
and soul to the new gospel of exploitation. He never lent a willing
ear to the seductive appeals of the American System. He early became
a free-trader and throughout his life was opposed to all tariffs and
grants and subsidies. Discovering in the principle of liberty the
cardinal principles of American democracy, he was disposed to accept
a wide application of _laissez faire_; yet when it opened the door to
extortion he was willing to curb an anti-social individualism. When in
the seventies it was proposed by the western farmers that a national
railroad should be built from Chicago to the Atlantic seaboard, Curtis
looked upon the proposal with sympathy as likely to rescue the farmer
from extortionate tolls.[634] Unlike Dana and Godkin, he declined
to grow bitter and lose his head over the economic proposals of the
western agrarians. In the sharp alignment between agrarianism and
capitalism he stood in the main outside both parties, and although
opposed to greenbackism he discussed the question with moderation and
good sense--a rare thing in those blatant times.
But it was political decency rather than capitalistic or agrarian
programs that he was chiefly concerned about. He looked to his
conscience as guide and as editor of _Harper’s Weekly_ he used his
influence to cleanse America of the corruption he abhorred. Week after
week he appealed to the American voter to turn rascals out of office
and put honest men in. The corrupt political machine was the source of
the evil, and the machine had grown powerful through its control of
patronage. There would be vicious government so long as politicians
could create a machine by means of the spoils system. Two remedies, he
believed, were necessary to cure the evil--independent voting and civil
service reform; and to the spread of these two ideas he devoted the
last twenty years of his life, thereby bringing on his head much abuse
and incurring eventually a break with the Republican party.
His troubles began with his proposal of independent voting. To that
party-ridden generation on whom the passions of war had fastened a
tyrannical machine, the scratching of the party ticket seemed no better
than treason. It was a Copperhead device to undo the results of the war
and reëstablish the rebel leaders at Washington, and it needed courage
to advocate it publicly. Curtis put the matter fairly in a speech to
Independent Republicans at New York in 1880:
The first powerful and conclusive remedy for the tyranny of the
machine ... is scratching. The word has become a sneer, a taunt,
a bitter reproach, but the test of the power and effectiveness of
the remedy is the fury with which it is assailed.... The machine
denounces scratchers as lustily as Laud denounced the Puritans,
or George III the rebellious Yankees, or slave-driving Democrats
Republican woolly heads.... The scratcher is the minute-man of
politics. He is always in light marching order. He has only to
consult his own knowledge and conscience, and with one stroke
his work is done. Fortunately, also, his stroke may be as secret
as his ballot. Those who do not choose to publish the fact need
not be known, and may smile serenely at the blind fury of those
whose plots are quietly foiled. This is the reason of the impotent
anger with which scratching is assailed. It cannot be reached....
Scratching is denounced as dishonorable. Oh, no! the secret ballot
is not dishonorable. The shot of the Middlesex farmer from behind a
tree was no more dishonorable than the immortal volley from behind
the breastworks of Bunker Hill.[635]
He then proceeded to lay open what seemed to him the core of the
problem:
But useful as scratching is as a corrective, it does not strike at
the heart of the machine, and it is therefore _only_ a corrective
and not a radical remedy. That remedy can be found only by finding
the source of the power of the machine, and that source is official
patronage. It is the command of millions of the public money spent
in public administration; the control of the vast labyrinth of
place, with its enormous emoluments; the system which makes the
whole Civil Service, to the least detail and most significant
position, the spoils of party victory; which perverts necessary
party organization into intolerable party despotism. It is upon
this that the hierarchy of the machine is erected. Strike at this
system strongly, steadily, persistently, and you shiver the machine
to pieces.[636]
Seeing his duty clearly, Curtis did not spare himself, but while most
of his fellows were seeking fame or wealth for themselves he gave
his time and strength without stint to the cause, and it was due to
his efforts more than to those of any other man that a reform in
the civil service was eventually brought about. He had to fight his
way against bitter opposition. It was charged that he was seeking
to create in America an undemocratic bureaucracy. His old friend
Charles A. Dana--from whom he had become estranged--was quite frank.
“Above all I do not believe,” he said, “in the establishment in this
country of the German bureaucratic system, with its permanent staff of
office-holders who are not responsible to the people, and whose tenure
of place knows no variation and no end except the end of life.”[637]
But it was the politicians who fought most bitterly, and when to civil
service reform he added the sin of bolting the party, throwing over
Blaine and supporting Cleveland, he was subjected to plentiful insults.
Nevertheless as the leader of the Mugwumps, preaching to a party-ridden
generation the gospel of independency, he did his country a real
service. He could not foresee, of course, how easily the menace of the
independent voter was to be met; how through the control of both party
machines and both nominees by the political bosses the independent
would have only the choice betwixt tweedledum and tweedledee, and in
disgust would largely refrain from voting. But the open and crying
political evils of the Gilded Age he saw clearly, and in seeking to
lessen them he proved himself a useful citizen as well as a cultivated
American.
III • English Liberalism and Politics--Godkin and “The Nation”
The severest critic of the Gilded Age was Edwin Lawrence Godkin,
founder of the _Nation_. More caustic than George William Curtis,
equipped with a complete social philosophy, and armed with perfect
self-assurance, he devoted thirty-five years to the task of instructing
America in the principles of government as those principles were
understood by John Stuart Mill. He was at once an idealist and a
realist, and the intellectual history of the critic is revealed in the
shift from the one to the other. To Godkin the English liberal--who
had studied the American experiment from overseas--as to Karl Schurz
the German liberal, America was the torchbearer of the democratic
faith; and any defection from the cause, any betrayal of that faith,
was a desecration of the temple of liberalism by its own priesthood.
Liberalism, he was persuaded, was the handmaid of civilization; the
hope of any rational progress, rested on the principle of free inquiry
and free endeavor. To Godkin, therefore, and to Schurz and the hundreds
of European liberals who sought refuge here following the _débâcle_ of
the revolutionary hopes of 1848, it was a matter of deep import that
America should remain true to its liberal tradition, trusting freedom,
refusing to repeat the unhappy experience of a Tory Europe. He would
say to America what John Wise had said nearly two centuries before:
“Ye have been called unto liberty, therefore hold your hold, brethren!
Pull up well upon the oars, you have a rich cargo, and I hope ...
day-light and good piloting will secure all.” But he would do more than
that; he would pull an oar himself; and with high hopes, at the age
of twenty-five, he cast in his lot with America to serve the cause in
whatever ways might offer.
Godkin came of an English Protestant strain that for seven centuries
had lived in County Wexford, at the extreme southeastern point of
Ireland. He was neither Scotch like the men of Ulster, nor Irish like
his neighbors of Kilkenny and Wicklow, but as English in blood and
temperament as Jonathan Swift. Educated at Queen’s College, Belfast, he
studied law for a time at Lincoln’s Inn, went through the revolutionary
years of 1848-1851 with their great hopes, and entered the field of
journalism as correspondent for the London _Daily News_ during the
Crimean War. In 1856 he came to America with the intention of entering
the law, but returned to journalism. During the Civil War he was
correspondent for the _Daily News_ of London, laboring to counteract
British Tory opinion that ran strongly pro-South, and marshal the
forces of English liberalism on the side of the North. Three months
after Appomattox he founded the _Nation_ as an organ of criticism,
through the columns of which he proposed to appeal to the intelligence
and the conscience of America in support of the principles of
Victorian liberalism.
For this excellent work of criticism Godkin was provided with a sound
equipment. Endowed with a vigorous intellect, he kept his mind free
from shifting fogs and rarely mistook immediate for ultimate ends.
His training had been in a distinguished tradition. His father was a
Presbyterian minister and journalist, and the strain of robust dissent
that contributed so richly to Victorian liberalism came to him as a
birthright. He was “brought up,” he said, “in the Mill-Grote school of
radicals.” “When I was in college,” he wrote in later years, “I and
the young men of my acquaintance were Liberals, in the English sense.
John Stuart Mill was our prophet, and Grote and Bentham were our daily
food.”[638] Already his heart was overseas; America as it had been
described by de Tocqueville was his “promised land,” the home of a free
democracy on which his hopes for civilization were fixed. His first
book, written at the early age of twenty-two, was a history of the
land Kossuth was striving to set free, and he there defined the word
democrat as he had come to interpret it--the democrats, he said, are
“all those whose hopes and sympathies are not bound up in a party or
class, but look for the welfare and progress of humanity as the goal of
their striving.”[639]
Thus he wrote in the aftermath of the revolutionary years of
1848-1851. But the glowing idealism of the young radical was to suffer
discouragements and setbacks from the experience of later years. One
suspects that his liberalism never possessed the whole of him, never
grew from within out, but was overlaid on a nature fundamentally
aristocratic that at heart preferred Tory to liberal ends. Though as
a young man he spread his canvas to the winds of liberalism, he was
always a little distrustful of the bellying sails and he never quite
liked the crew. There is a curious suggestiveness in his changing
attitude towards England and English society. He had quitted the old
world out of dislike for it, and a dozen years later he declined to go
back except as a “last extremity.” “It would be going back,” he said,
“into an atmosphere that I detest and a social system that I have hated
since I was fourteen years old.”[640] At the bottom of this repugnance
was an obstinate pride. He was ambitious, capable, and sensitive, and
a caste society that refused to open its doors to him he looked upon
as pernicious. To assert that his espousal of democracy was due to
his brusque rejection by a more distinguished mistress, is a severe