Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
capitalist. Each group was seeking to enlist government on its side
and use the political state for special and narrow ends. To a disciple
of Mill all such attempts were no better than treason to democracy,
and when such treason was justified by what he considered specious
economic theory Godkin’s hostility was edged with acerbity. All the
trenchant dogmas of his philosophy--his police theory of the state, his
Ricardian _laissez faire_, his individualism--rushed to the attack of
such impudent impostors. With no organized forces at his back he made
war on every major group in America. He essayed to rally the scattered
minority of the intellectuals and overthrow the citadel of economic
power by appeal to reason. It was magnificent but it was scarcely war.
The culture of the Gilded Age was undisciplined, lacking faith and
unnurtured in philosophy, fastidious rather than vigorous--the poorest
of material for shock troops. It applauded every clever thrust of its
captain, but preferred to keep its own hands unsoiled. In consequence,
to the end of his life Godkin was a leader without a following, little
more than a voice crying in the wilderness.
For the rising plutocracy Godkin felt the scorn of a gentleman for the
vulgar new-rich. Its hands were dirty, and it was soiling all American
life. Its gospel of Whiggery, that under pretense of furthering
prosperity had turned Congress into an auction room, was an insult to
his Manchester liberalism. Just as surely as government meddles with
subsidies and tariffs and grants, he pointed out, will it be defiled.
Men are but indifferent honest, and if statesmen are not to become
mere political hucksters they must stand apart from the temptations of
business. The plea for a national economy had brought Congress to the
_Crédit Mobilier_ scandals, and it would breed other scandals so long
as it was heeded. The only cure for Whiggery was to destroy it. In a
scathing leader he early paid his respects to the Whiggish system of
governmental subsidies:
The remedy is simple. The Government must get out of the
“protective” business and the “subsidy” business and the
“improvement” and the “development” business. It must let trade,
and commerce, and manufactures, and steamboats, and railroads, and
telegraphs alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.
We care nothing about the wonderful stories we hear about what can
be achieved in the way of “promoting industry” by all these canal
and steamboat and railroad schemes. Were the material prospect
twice as tempting, the state could not profitably meddle with
them, because neither it nor any other government in the world
_can command the virtue necessary to carry them on_. This is not
a matter of speculation; we know it as a matter of experience. It
is almost as much as this Government can do to maintain order and
administer justice. It may one day be able to do a great deal more,
but not until a great change has occurred in the social condition
of the country. We have gone far enough, heaven knows, on the road
of “protection” and “promotion,” and have found at every step that
it leads straight to the bottomless pit; that for every hundred
dollars voted by these poor men to whom we pay scanty wages for
passing bills at Washington, we lessen, and perceptibly lessen, the
stock of individual honor, of self-respect, and of public spirit,
of a loyalty to ideals, to which far more than to any triumphs of
material industry, we must look for continued national greatness.
We are making money fast enough in all conscience; what needs
fostering just now is honesty.[645]
Godkin found it exceedingly difficult to foster the austere honesty
that he desired in the body politic, and in his fury at the common
political scoundrelism he came to ascribe much of the virus that was
poisoning America to the party of western agrarians. He was rapidly
drifting to the right and the defense of capitalism, and as the
agrarian platform was slowly built up of successive planks--greenbacks,
free silver, subtreasuries, railway regulation, the income tax--he
turned upon it all the batteries of his wrath. Godkin never understood
the American farmer, but he professed to understand economics and
political science, and the agrarian platform aroused his implacable
hostility. In his frequent discussions of the currency question, a
question that for thirty years was a subject of passionate debate,
he was at some disadvantage. Intellectually he was ill equipped to
deal with it. Although a Ricardian he failed to grasp Ricardo’s
quantitative principle of money or the function of paper currency. As
a gold-standard advocate he accepted the English monetary system as
it was given form by the Parliamentary Bank Act of 1844, and he would
have no tampering with it. To Godkin money was a measure of value,
and a fluctuating standard, implied in the quantitative theory, was
as immoral as a fluctuating yardstick. The use of greenbacks--“rag
money”--he reckoned a scheme by which dishonest debtors might cheat
their creditors.[646] He was forced to regard gold and silver as
commodities, fluctuating in price with supply and demand; but he looked
upon them as possessing a stable natural value that placed them beyond
political manipulation. Any attempt to disturb this natural value by
artificial means he called dishonest.[647] He was almost indecent
in the vehemence of his adjectives applied to the “dishonest money
men.” He called the Greenbackers “communists,”[648] and speaking of
the Grangers, he said, “There is nothing unnatural or deplorable in a
Granger turning from one form of swindle to another.”[649]
By the middle nineties it was hard to distinguish Godkin’s views on
the agrarian program from those of a Wall Street banker. In discussing
free silver he abandoned economic principles and fell to mouthing
like any newspaper writer. The currency question he regarded as a
simple question of public morality. There was only one issue, the
issue between honest and dishonest money. “The demand for free-silver
coinage is a demand for a division of property,”[650] he said in the
early days of the campaign of 1896, and a fortnight later he took
extreme ground:
... the bold and wicked scheme of repudiation ... is presented
without a blush in the platform. Upon this question the campaign
must be fought. If the party of repudiators cannot be put down, the
republic cannot be preserved and is not worth preserving.[651]
Such pronouncements bear none of the earmarks of dispassionate
criticism. It may seem severe to suggest that they are the comments of
a very ignorant or shallow critic, blinded by his prejudices; yet it is
true. The equipment of Manchester economics with which he had outfitted
himself in the late forties, was no longer adequate in the nineties;
yet he seems not to have been aware of the fact. The mid-Victorian
still regarded himself as an authority on all economic questions,
although he seems to have done no serious reading in economic theory
for half a century, and was scarcely conscious how far he had drifted
towards the right. The old liberal was fighting the battles of
capitalism with weapons as antiquated as the old cap-and-ball musket.
“The great trouble with all silverites and currency lunatics, North
and South,” he said, “is that, when monetary crises arise, they cannot
be got to go to the right quarter for information”--a comment that one
might retort upon Godkin himself. The intellectual knew far less about
money than “Coin” Harvey, whom he would have laughed at.
The same drift to the right is evident in the pronouncements on the
Populist movement of the times. Writing on “The Kansas Situation,” when
the farmers’ unrest was becoming militant, he remarked:
Such an unexpected outbreak as this of the last two or three
years shows at least that it is not only in the cities, where the
foreign-born swarm, that demagogues may thrive and the doctrine of
revolution be preached.[652]
The “ravings of the Farmers’ movement” he regarded as no more than a
“vague and visionary discontent,” that was seeking political cures for
its economic ills. The hard times from which the West was suffering
were the result of economic law. It was not the currency or excessive
railway rates that were the cause. The vast extension of railway
systems had brought under cultivation too many acres, and the reduction
of transportation costs would serve only to bring additional acres
under cultivation, thereby increasing competition and forcing prices
still lower. High railway rates were the surest safeguard against
further extension of an industry much overdeveloped; and for state
legislatures to attempt to fix railway tariffs by law--to attempt to
control economic forces by statutes--was sheer folly. In discussing the
celebrated Illinois railway legislation Godkin spoke in defense of the
roads:
The locomotive is coming in contact with the framework of our
institutions. In this country of simple government, the most
powerful centralizing force which civilization has yet produced
has within the next score years, yet to assume its relation to
that political machinery which is to control and regulate it....
The corporations of course contested the validity of the law. If
the legislature could establish one rate at which they should do
the work of transportation, it could establish another. They were
fighting for their lives and property; it was against taxation
without representation.... An arbitrary power is claimed in the
supreme legislative body to decide on the reasonable rates of the
cost of private services. Just as three hundred years ago the price
of bread and labor was regulated by act of Parliament, so now the
cost of transportation is to be fixed by a jury of twelve men....
Thus far, therefore, the results of the Illinois railroad war must
be regarded as rather portentous than satisfactory.[653]
The “watered-stock hallucination,” that had taken possession of the
agrarian mind and aroused such bitterness, he dismissed with a curious
comment that did no great credit to his intelligence.
There is ... one difficulty in the way, which is the difficulty
common to many of the proposed reforms in railroad management--the
practice alleged has absolutely no existence except in the heated
brain of the agitators who have imagined it. There are no roads in
the United States on which any attempt has been made to increase
the freight earnings in proportion to the watered stock or
debt.[654]
The passions aroused by the campaign of ’96 swept Godkin from his
moorings and left him adrift. He quickly convinced himself that the
real issue at stake was the moral integrity of the nation. As he
studied the platforms and leaders he found little comfort in either.
For McKinley he had the contempt of the intellectual for a purveyor
of heavy platitudes, and he flayed him in a two-column leader with
his old skill.[655] But for Bryan, the “boy orator of the Platte,” his
dislike passed the bounds of decency; and for the Chicago convention
that put him in nomination--“the roaring mob” with its “Populistic,
anarchistic platform”--his contempt outran his command of invective.
No such collection of inflammatory and reckless men ever put
themselves on exhibition in a national convention. Beside them
the Populists are lamb-like, and the socialists sucking doves.
The country has watched their mad proceedings with disgust and
shuddering, only impatient for the coming of November to stamp out
them and their incendiary doctrines.[656]
To what lengths his overheated brain carried him in those political
dogdays, how starkly reactionary he had become, is suggested by his