Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
in diplomacy and statesmanship--his own education seems to have been
faulty. He had lately risen into the exploiting class, and he accepted
the ready-made opinions of that class. His biographer has admirably
stated his position during the days of the strike riots when he was
clarifying his views:
Those riots of 1877 burnt deep into Colonel Hay’s heart. Like
the rest of the world, he had theorized on the likelihood of war
between Capital and Labor; but he had reassured himself by the
comfortable assumption that under American conditions--equal
opportunity for all, high wages, equal laws, and the ballot-box--no
angry laboring class could grow up. The riots blew such vaporing
away: for they proved that the angry class already existed, that
the ballot-box instead of weakening strengthened it, and that not
only the politicians of both parties but also the constituted
authorities would avoid, as long as possible, grappling with it.
The event was too large to be dismissed as an outburst of temper:
it must be accepted as a symptom, a portent. Did it mean that
a cancer had attacked the body politic and would spread to the
vital organs? Was Democracy a failure,--Democracy--for more than
a century the dream of the down-trodden, the ideal of those who
loved mankind and believed in its perfectibility, the Utopia which
good men predicted should somehow turn out to be a reality? Hay
had sung his paean to liberty; Hay had throbbed at the efforts of
patriots in Spain and in France to overthrow their despots; he had
even exulted over the signs of democratization in England. Had he
been the victim of mirage? Was Democracy not the final goal of
human society, but only a half-way stage between the despotism of
Autocracy and the despotism of Socialism?
These questions he could not evade.... But he held, as did many of
his contemporaries, that the assaults on Property were inspired
by demagogues who used as their tools the loafers, the criminals,
the vicious,--Society’s dregs who have been ready at all times to
rise against laws and government. That you have property is proof
of industry and foresight on your part or your father’s; that you
have nothing, is a judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your
improvidence. The world is a moral world; which it would not be if
virtue and vice received the same rewards.[669]
John Hay, it must be recalled, had enjoyed a college education through
the aid of relatives, he had been taken under the wing of Lincoln and
become his private secretary, he had been thrust forward by influential
politicians, and finally he had married wealth--were these things
proofs of virtue in a moral world that rewards foresight and punishes
improvidence? Or were they rather the marks of a skillful climber? John
Hay was a charming and cultivated gentleman, but he was also a child of
the Gilded Age, with the materialisms of his generation in his blood.
The young man had been an Abolitionist and a political radical; the old
man was a McKinley conservative whose chief claim to reputation lay
in the “open-door” policy in China. The beginnings of this shift to
conservatism seem to have coincided with his marriage to Miss Stone,
daughter of a Cleveland capitalist whose interests were threatened by
the great strike. He was temperamentally one of John Adams’s “natural
aristocrats,” and having gained entrée into aristocratic circles he
took the coloring of his new environment. A son of the frontier, he
became a man of the world. Prosperity was necessary to him.
Professing a deep attachment to democratic institutions and hatred of
all monarchical principles--in Spain and France--John Hay ceased to
be a Lincoln democrat, and took his place amongst the ruling class,
accepting the principles of the rising plutocracy. _The Bread-winners_
is a dramatization of the Federalistic principle that government
exists for the protection of property. “Remembering the date when _The
Bread-winners_ was written,” says his biographer, “we must regard
it as the first important polemic in American fiction in defense of
Property.”[670] John Hay had become a thoroughgoing Hamiltonian. In
his younger days his sympathies had gone out to radical republicans
everywhere, and he watched the rising tide of liberalism with great
satisfaction. In his first visits to Europe he followed closely the
liberal movements. He was a warm admirer of Castelar, eulogizing him
as one of the heroic figures of modern times. In a lecture in 1869 on
“The Progress of Democracy in Europe” he spoke with the zeal of an
advanced liberal. But soon thereafter the ardor of his zeal lessened.
On later trips to Europe he did not display a like sympathy with
the program of the Social Democrats. As economic unrest crept into
politics, as strikes and boycotts began to disturb his father-in-law’s
business, he discovered less sympathy for revolutionary movements.
Political revolutions sponsored by respectable middle-class leaders,
were one thing; economic revolutions sponsored by the proletariat were
quite another thing. A democracy that breeds more democracy is clearly
dangerous. So much as has already been accomplished is excellent, of
course; but nothing further must be attempted.
There is sound strategy in offensive epithets. And so, taking counsel
of fear, he applied to the current economic unrest the words most
offensive to polite American ears, and called it socialism, anarchism.
Without pausing to weigh the demands of the farmer and the workingman,
with no understanding of the meaning of the great proletarian movement
then going forward in Europe, he appealed in defense of property to the
specter of economic leveling before which every good American of the
eighties recoiled in horror. As early as 1869, speaking of Castelar, he
said: “He has too much sense and integrity to follow the lead of the
Socialist fanatics.”[671] Commenting on the unsettled state of things
in Paris in 1883, he wrote: “The laborers have had the mischief put
into their heads by trade-unions.”[672] As he contemplated the agrarian
unrest of the seventies and later, he discovered in Greenbackism and
Populism only another form of this hateful socialism. It was the work
of agitators who were plain rascals.
He was greatly disturbed in 1875 at the state of politics, “with
half the Republicans and all the Democrats inflationists at heart,
and carrying on a campaign on the bald issue whether the nation
shall be a liar and a thief or not.”[673] And so late as 1900 he
exclaimed petulantly: “This last month of Bryan, roaring out his
desperate appeals to hate and envy, is having its effect on the
dangerous classes. Nothing so monstrous has as yet been seen in
our history.”[674] Unhappily even in free America with its equal
opportunity, and equal laws, there had come to be “dangerous
classes”--rather a good many of them, taking the populistic farmers and
discontented wage-earners into the account--so many, indeed, that John
Hay grew gloomy over the outlook. And the outlook was all the gloomier
because of our form of government; for is not the ultimate test of
our democratic institutions the test of whether they are adequate to
protect the property and “civilization” of the few against the “hate
and envy” of the discontented many?
That _The Bread-winners_ was a dishonest book Hay certainly
could not have been brought to believe; nevertheless a Tory who
covers his Tory purpose with a mantle of democracy can scarcely
be reckoned intellectually sincere. The men of the seventies and
eighties--cultivated and intelligent gentlemen like Godkin and Aldrich
and Hay--were little more than demagogues in their fustian attacks
on agrarian Greenbackers and militant labor unions; they feared and
hated them too much to understand them, and they took advantage of
their social position to cry them down. The “educated leadership” of
the Gilded Age was a somewhat sorry thing; it was ethically bankrupt
while appealing to high moral standards. The best of such leaders were
second-rate men--mediocre minds cramped by a selfish environment,
imbued with no more than a property-consciousness. Of such a world
John Hay in his _Bread-winners_ was a distinguished spokesman and
representative.[675]
3 • The Beginnings of the Sociological Novel
It was in the nineties that the sociological novel expanded into
a great movement that in the next decade and a half was to engulf
pretty much all American fiction and bring it into service to the
social conscience. Such a development was in the nature of things. The
artist would not sit forever in his ivory tower, content to carve his
statuettes while the country without was turmoiled with revolution.
Sooner or later he would venture forth and once he had been caught up
in the swirl his art would take new forms and serve other purposes than
the traditional genteel. Realism was in the air, the realism of Zola
and the Russians, and from such a realism would come in America a more
critical attitude towards the social revolution at work in the land.
It was the city that played havoc with our older fictional methods,
as it played havoc with our traditional social philosophy. America
was late in discovering the import of the huge Babbitt warrens it had
been building with such fierce energy; but slowly the realities of the
economic city rose to challenge the respectability of the romantic
city. It was the discovery of this new lair of business that created
the school of sociological fiction. The older city of literature had
been a polite world wherein ladies and gentlemen drank tea and made
love and talked proper scandal--a pleasant background of clubs and
drawing-rooms, against which moved well-dressed figures. It was an echo
of Thackeray--the world of the West End and Beacon Street and Fifth
Avenue, too well-bred and prosperous to recognize slums or stockyards
or stock-gambling. But with the nineties the old complacency was
disturbed. A note of unrest crept into the current fiction. As the
_protégés_ of Mr. Howells looked out upon their world in search of
reality, they discovered that polite society was being undermined.
Too many social climbers were thrusting themselves forward; too much
vulgarity was displayed by the new-rich. The social primacy of the old
families was being challenged by western pork-packers. Here was a rich
field to harvest. _Le document humain_ was the latest cry of realism,
and so under the inspiration of M. Paul Bourget a new crop of realism
came to fruit--clever studies in feminine psychology--the last word
in contemporary reality. The social climber was analyzed mercilessly,
her shallow and silly ambitions revealed to the least petty maneuver;
her blighting influence upon an idealistic husband or her stimulus
to a money-grabbing mate, is traced shrewdly. Such are Boyesen’s
_Mammon of Unrighteousness_, Robert Grant’s _Unleavened Bread_, and
Edith Wharton’s _House of Mirth_--studies that were symptomatic of a
generation disturbed by the consciousness of a vulgar plutocracy rising
in its midst, and yet ignorant of the nature of the disease.
Nevertheless their vogue was brief. As economic unrest rose more
menacingly upon the horizon of the new century, realism quickly
tired of its Kate Van Schaaks and Selma Whites and Lily Barts, and
turned away to prospect for a richer vein. Psychology was losing its
fascination and social analysis was supplying a new inspiration; M.
Bourget was yielding authority to Émile Zola. Even so whole-hearted a
romantic as Mary Johnston was to turn from tales like _To Have and to
Hold_ to write _Hagar_, a novel of suffrage propaganda. There was to
be not less realism but more. The change may be summarized in the word