Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
judgment, yet it is a judgment that his friend Henry Holt quite frankly
implied.[641]
He had come to America in the hope of getting on in the world. He had
a strong regard for social position. His standards were severe and
his sympathies so narrow as to lay him open to the frequent charge of
snobbery. He would mingle in none but good society, and it was easier
in America than in England to gain entrance to good society. Until he
had made his mark he would not go back; but when as a distinguished
editor he ventured to return, and found himself accepted by the best
people, his hatred for the English social system oozed away, and the
eager delight he experienced in upper-class society was an unconscious
testimony to the value he had set upon a system from which as a young
man he had been excluded. Godkin was too English to make himself
over into an American, too natively aristocratic to be a democrat.
A disciple of John Stuart Mill, he lacked the complete intellectual
integrity of Mill that brushed aside all caste prejudices and personal
ambitions, as he lacked his vast intellectual accumulation. Godkin’s
liberalism was founded on Mill, but it was never quite Mill.
The philosophy to which, as a disciple of the Bentham-Mill-Grote
school, the young Godkin gave his allegiance, was a Utilitarian
adaptation of _laissez faire_--the doctrine that the greatest happiness
of the greatest number is the ultimate social objective, and that such
objective can be attained only through the completest liberty under
the sway of reason and justice. As presented by John Stuart Mill it
was a singularly persuasive philosophy that awakened a response in
every generous mind. Liberty, he insisted, is the thing chiefly to be
desired, for where men are free they will shape social organisms to
their needs. Man is both an economic and a political animal, and the
difficult problem of the political philosopher is to keep the one from
trespassing upon the rights of the other. The economic man, under the
drive of the acquisitive instinct, regards the political state as an
ally in the present business of acquisition; and the political man
looks upon business as subject to strict regulation and control in
the interests of the state. To prevent this meddlesome interference
of each with the other, Mill laid down the principle of liberty in
terms as uncompromising as those of the Physiocrats. The “sole
end,” he asserted, “for which mankind are warranted, individually or
collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their
number, is self-protection,” and “the only purpose for which power
can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community,
against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either
physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.”[642]
From this excellent school the young Godkin emerged a political
theorist of no mean ability; somewhat too dogmatic, perhaps, a
bit overconfident of the finality of his logic, but with a shrewd
dialectic, quick to separate reality from pretense, severe upon all
flummery and buncombe. That his philosophy was sharply opposed to
the current tendencies of American political life he saw clearly: to
Whiggery with its ambitious paternalisms; to centralization with its
glorification of a Bismarckian state. His thought was erected on a
foundation of _laissez faire_, and he sharply differentiated economics
and politics. As a realist he recognized differences in individual
capacity, but he was keenly suspicious of any attempt on the part
of government to compensate for such differences. Any interference
with natural law, he was convinced, entailed greater evils than
benefits. Economic competition is a struggle between individuals,
and government must content itself with its proper rôle of policeman
to keep the peace. With Mill he refused to recognize the state as a
separate entity. He never confused the personnel of government with
“what is called ‘the state’”; and as he contemplated the honesty and
capacity of the several members who administered government in a given
commonwealth, he was disinclined to entrust them with regulative
powers. Disinterested honesty and capacity, it seemed, too rarely
got into office, governments were too little acquainted with common
morality, to justify hopes of equalizing the inequality of nature by
political means.
To the sound philosophical equipment brought from England Godkin added
a very considerable understanding of American political history. The
ten years spent here before the founding of the _Nation_, had been
employed in getting at home upon the new scene. He had carefully
checked the findings of de Tocqueville and was convinced that the
French critic had gone far astray in his interpretation of the great
American experiment. In his analysis of democratic tendencies he had
fallen into the fallacy of _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, with the
result that he had got the cart before the horse; and in an article
published in the _North American Review_ of January, 1865, Godkin
entered the lists in defense of America against the criticisms of
English Tories founded on such fallacies. In its emphasis on historical
realism “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy” is a surprisingly modern
study that might almost have been written by one of our younger
historians. It is an interpretation of our political development in
terms of environment, and it traces the rise of democracy to the
leveling influence of decentralization. For a hundred and fifty
years, he pointed out, old-world habits and customs, the spirit of
aristocracy, prevailed in the closely grouped settlements along the
Atlantic seaboard, where physical conditions restrained the tendency
to social disruption; but with the breaking through of the Appalachian
barrier, and the influx of new waves of immigration, the conditions
were prepared for a vast movement of decentralization. It was the
Inland Empire that made possible the democratic revolution in America.
“How was it,” he asks, “that that democratic tide, which within the
last fifty years, has overwhelmed everything, during the previous
hundred and fifty years gave so few signs of rising?” And his reply to
the question antedates Professor Turner’s theory of the frontier by
thirty years:
If we inquire what are those phenomena of American society which it
is generally agreed distinguish it from that of older countries,
we shall find ... that by far the larger number of them may be
attributed in a great measure to what, for want of a better name,
we shall call “the frontier life” led by a large proportion of the
inhabitants, and to the influence of this portion on manners and
legislation, rather than to political institutions, or even to the
equality of conditions. In fact, we think that these phenomena,
and particularly those of them which excite most odium in Europe,
instead of being the effect of democracy, are partly its cause, and
that it has been to their agency more than aught else, that the
democratic tide in America has owed most of its force and violence.
The agency which, in our opinion, gave democracy its first great
impulse in the United States, which has promoted its spread ever
since, and has contributed most powerfully to the production of
those phenomena in American society which hostile critics set down
as peculiarly democratic, was neither the origin of the Colonists,
nor the circumstances under which they came to the country, nor
their religious belief; but the great change in the distribution of
the population, which began soon after the Revolution, and which
continues its operation up to the present time.[643]
Godkin was thirty-four when he entered upon his life work of pouring
a stream of fresh and free thought upon the ways of the Gilded Age.
It was somewhat in the spirit of Matthew Arnold that he interpreted
the function of criticism. “The highest allegiance of every man,” he
wrote Norton in 1865, “is due to liberty and civilization, or rather
civilization and liberty”;[644] and the creed of the _Nation_, which
Godkin unconsciously modified as culture dispossessed liberty in his
affections, may be summed up in the words democracy, individualism,
morality, culture, to the end of a free life in a humane and
well-ordered society. Throughout the Gilded Age this transplanted
English liberal was the high priest of criticism in America. His
caustic intelligence played ironically about the current shibboleths
and fetishes, reducing them to shreds and patches. He could discover
little that was good in the Gilded Age, in its tariffs and land grants,
its _Crédit Mobilier_ and other scandals, its buccaneer plutocracy,
its undisciplined proletarianism, its bitter agrarianism; and he was
prompted to a severity of judgment that easier-going natures thought
harsh. Enemies sprang up in his every footprint; but too much was at
stake, he believed, to temper his criticism to flabby minds, and he
laid about him with what he considered a fine impartiality.
It was a cold plunge into a dirty pool, and a nature less robust would
have scrambled out quickly. His realism was a profound discouragement
to his idealism, and his native aristocracy of temperament closed
his mind to the virtues of certain homely American liberalisms. As
an intellectual he distrusted all Jacksonian frontier freedoms.
The doctrine of liberty did not appear to advantage in the garb of
agrarians and proletarians; Thaddeus Stevens and Terence V. Powderly
were an ungainlier breed of libertarians than Gladstone and Mill; with
such leadership it seemed to Godkin that liberty was running away
with civilization and a smash-up was likely. It was the duty of the
_Nation_, therefore, to arouse the culture of America to its political
obligations, to the end that the custodianship of liberty should be
taken over by the intelligence of America. It proved a discouraging
job, and slowly on the horizon of his mind rose the shadow of the doubt
that had troubled de Tocqueville and Cooper and Fisher Ames--must a
democracy prove a leveling influence that destroys a fine individuality
and a generous social culture? Careless of his trusteeship, was not
the American democrat throwing his heritage to the demagogue and the
spoilsman?
As he watched the scrambling heedlessness of the times his liberalism
oozed away, his democratic faith lost its sanctions, and he slowly
drifted to the right and the dead-sea of pessimism. The mass was too
powerful in America, and the mass was shot through with the spirit of
selfish leveling. The democracy had been distorted by the frontier,
and the sense of responsibility, of individual duty, was well-nigh
atrophied. The vulgar West threw its crudity upon all America. “I do
not like the western type of man,” Godkin confessed to Norton; and to
another friend who praised California, he wrote, “No scenery or climate
I had to share with western people would charm me.” He never spared
his mordant adjectives in commenting privately on all America west of
the Hudson River. In his gloomy later years he found consolation in
Brahmin culture. For years he lived in Cambridge, and in the company
of Lowell and Norton he felt at home. Here were democratic gentlemen
worthy of his ideal. If all America were only like Cambridge his faith
in a cultivated liberalism would be justified. In those years he called
himself “an American of the _vieille roche_,” which being interpreted,
meant a liberal of the Brahmin school.
The immediate problems on which Godkin was called to pass judgment
brought him into the thick of the struggles of the Gilded Age. As
an editor he confronted the bitter antagonisms that sprang from
the rivalries of the farmer, the wage-earner, and the industrial