Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
comment on the plank in the Democratic platform attacking the scandal
of injunctions:
This blow at the courts shows how true are the instincts of the
revolutionaries. They know their most formidable enemies. Judicial
decisions have again and again drawn the fangs of confiscatory and
revolutionary legislation, and the courts have come more and more
to stand as the great bulwarks of property and personal rights.[657]
Godkin’s last years were not happy. The wave of imperialism that swept
over England and America, with its Boer War and Spanish War, brought
him acute concern. The world that he knew was slipping from its
moorings, and he was fearful of the seas into which it was plunging.
The conquest of the Philippines seemed to him a badge of national
degradation. Writing in November, 1899, he said:
We are dragging wearily in the old way, killing half a dozen
Filipinos every week, and continually “near the end.” The folly of
ignorance and rascality we are displaying in the attempt to conquer
and have “subjects” would disgrace a trades union.[658]
As he watched the tedious process of subjugation he inclined to
attribute to Kipling a large share of the current imperialism. “I think
most of the current jingoism on both sides of the water is due to him,”
he wrote a few weeks later. “He is the poet of the barrack-room cads,”
a “most pernicious, vulgar person”; and his “White Man’s Burden,”
cabled to America and printed on the front pages of the newspapers as
a message to imperialist America, must have rubbed across Godkin’s raw
nerves. The pious cant of Kipling’s imperialism was a bitter cup for a
disillusioned liberal. The Jubilee with its fulsome laudation of “fat,
useless royalty,” was fittingly commemorated by this noisy poet of
imperialism, and Godkin turned away from it all in disgust.
But turn where he might he found no comfort. His old dreams of a free
and enlightened democracy rising in America, were dead. Victorian
liberalism had been laid away in the grave of John Stuart Mill, and
only its ghost was walking in these latter times. Godkin’s last days
were bitter, and the gloom that was settling upon him crept into his
letters. It is a malady common amongst liberals, and how deeply it had
struck in is revealed in such passages as these:
I am not sanguine about the future of democracy. I think we shall
have a long period of decline ... and then a recrudescence under
some other form of society.[659]
I do not know what the future of our modern civilization is to be.
But I stumble where I firmly trod.[660]
Things look very black. I think that while money-making will long
continue on a great scale, the government will shortly undergo
great changes which will be presided over not by men of light and
learning, but by capitalists and adroit politicians.[661]
I came here fifty years ago with high and fond ideals about
America.... They are now all shattered, and I have apparently to
look elsewhere to keep even moderate hopes about the human race
alive.[662]
The idealist is prone to be exigent in his demands upon civilization.
He marks out a straight path to the goal of his hopes, and takes it
greatly to heart when society chooses to follow other ways to other
ends. Godkin’s mind was keenly critical, but his sympathies were narrow
and his prejudices great. It is well to be a friend to civilization,
but it is foolish to set up as a custodian; for civilization, like
Topsy, will shift for itself. A just and liberal government is an
excellent ideal, but it is one for which few amongst the mass of men
greatly care; and because America chose to follow its own nose, because
it would not become like the America of his dreams, Godkin allowed his
heart to fill with bitterness. It is true that his recompense for long
years of labor was scanty; the Gilded Age was not to be frightened
from its fleshpots by his warnings. But long ago it was said, “Wisdom
crieth in the streets and no man regardeth her,” and why should Godkin
have become discouraged with civilization because certain blackguard
years clove to their blackguardry, instead of mounting to the somewhat
arid heights he pointed out? One must choose at the last between
tolerance and pessimism, and Godkin chose pessimism.
It is difficult today to understand his great influence with cultivated
readers of his generation. In part perhaps it was due to his crisp
assurance. He put things so plumply, he wrote so brilliantly, that his
readers were persuaded he must think as neatly. Yet his trenchant prose
style cannot hide a certain slightness of matter. His later comments
tended to become ever thinner and shriller--not criticism at all, but
the sharp expression of aging prejudice. When he talked about the
tariff he had Mill at his elbow; but when he talked about the agrarian
or the proletarian movements he was little more than a blue-jay
scolding at a world he disliked. Unlike his great master he did not go
forward to meet new times; he did not reinterpret Victorian liberalism
in the light of the lessons taught by the Industrial Revolution; but by
standing still he did liberalism a real disservice.
IV • Fiction Considers the State of the Country
It was only a question of time before the novel would throw off the
inhibitions of the genteel and turn to consider the state of the
country. A changing social order would not fail of reflection in
the pages of fiction, and as the novelists fell to scrutinizing the
familiar scene, comparing the reality with the patriotic professions,
it was certain that the workings of democracy would come in for sharp
criticism. In the last decades of the century the problem novel spread
swiftly, expanding the field of its inquiry, and seeking to understand
the new ways. Making its first essays in the familiar field of the
political, it soon turned to consider the economic problems arising out
of the new industrialism, espousing either capitalism or labor as the
social sympathies of the author might determine. The class passions
of the times found a reflection in its pages, and in consequence the
sociological novel became increasingly a repository of the social ideas
of a perplexed and troubled generation.
1 • The Political Novel
Of the early political novels three are of sufficient interest to
reward attention: _The Gilded Age_ (1873), _Democracy_ (1881), and
_An American Politician_ (1884). The first, written by Mark Twain
in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, is a satire of Gilded
Age ways with particular attention to the political corruption of
General Grant’s administration. The fictional disguise is slight.
The actual Washington is presented vividly and familiar figures--Ben
Butler, Oakes Ames, President Grant, Secretary Boutwell--move through
the scene. The central figure, Senator Dillworthy, was modeled upon
Senator Pomeroy of Kansas, who had recently lost a reëlection through
an unlucky exposure of an attempt to bribe the Kansas legislature.
The heroine, Laura Hawkins, is a western lobbyist who in order to put
through a congressional steal under pretense of providing an industrial
school for the freedmen, twists Congressmen about her fingers, turns
adventuress and ends in tragedy. Out of the West comes the spirit of
corruption that the respectable East is unable to withstand, until the
itch of speculation infects the whole country. It is Colonel Sellers
who embodies the slackness of frontier political morals, that in turn
vitiates his political principles. The genial Colonel is quite frankly
a Greenbacker.
The country is getting along very well, [he said] but our public
men are too timid. What we want is more money. I’ve told Boutwell
so. Talk of basing the currency on gold; you might as well base it
on pork. Gold is only one product. Base it on everything! You’ve
got to do something for the West. How am I to move my crops? We
must have improvements. Grant’s got the idea. We want a canal from
the James River to the Mississippi. Government ought to build
it.[663]
The analysis is not penetrating. The real sources of political
corruption--the rapacious railway lobbyists that camped in brigades
about the capitol building--are passed over, and attention is
fastened on small steals--the Knobs University bill and the Columbus
River Navigation scheme--that do not touch the real rascals of the
day. The implication is unmistakable that the source of corruption
is the Jacksonian West with its heritage of the spoils spirit. The
Federalistic East is victimized by the rapacities of mid-western
politicians with their religious cant, their talk of the rights of the
people and the greatness of the plain democracy. Senator Dillworthy is
fairly unctuous in his oily Christian spirit, and Brother Balaam is his
fellow. The portraits, one suspects, need not be taken seriously as
pictures of the chief apostles of preëmption and exploitation. To have
sketched the real leaders of the great barbecue might have involved too
many unpleasantries.
_Democracy_, written seven years later, is an inferior book in
every way, less penetrating, less amusing, less creative. To essay
to penetrate the dark places of political jobbery through the eyes
of a society woman, too high-bred to turn lobbyist and inveigle
secrets out of ambitious politicians, is sufficiently absurd, yet not
uncharacteristic of the Henry Adams whose home was a distinguished
salon and who in pottering about the political world of Washington
deceived himself in thinking he had his finger on the web of intrigue.
It is an amazing book for such a man to write. The attitude is that of
the kid-gloved reformer who goes in for civil service reform, and who
views the uncultivated West as the source of all political corruption.
The hero, Senator Silas Ratcliffe of Peoria, Illinois, like Senator
Dillworthy, is a past master in political organization who covers his
dishonesty with religious cant. The economic sources of political
corruption are ignored, and the evil is traced to the principle of
democracy. Whatever political convictions are in the book are expressed
by Representative Gore, a civil service reformer from Massachusetts,
and quite evidently Henry Adams himself; and the conclusion is thus set
forth:
“Do you yourself think democracy the best government, and universal
suffrage a success?”
Mr. Gore saw himself pinned to the wall, and he turned at bay with
almost the energy of despair:
“These are matters about which I rarely talk in society.... But
since you ask for my political creed, you shall have it. I only
condition that it shall be for you alone, never to be repeated
or quoted as mine. I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will
faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears
to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it.
Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to a
higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at
this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to
see the result. I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only
direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only
conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the
only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other step
is backward, and I do not want to repeat the past. I am glad to
see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be
neutral.”
“And supposing your experiment fails,” said Mrs. Lee; “suppose
society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and
communism.”
“... I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new
ones.... faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest.