Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
instance of a real desire to help the poor and helpless--to lift
the world to a higher level. It is what I should like to do
myself--and what I shall hope some day to do....”
“Then you really think it a misfortune to be rich?” she
ejaculated....
“Yes, if wealth entails the loss of human sympathies, as in nine
cases out of ten it seems to do, I regard it as a misfortune.
If it means, as in this country it seems to mean, the loss of
vital contact with humanity, the contraction of one’s mental and
spiritual horizon, a callous insensibility to social wrongs and
individual sorrows, a brutal induration in creature comforts and
mere animal well-being, the loss of that divine discontent and
noble aspiration which alone makes us human--if it means this
or any part of it, it is the greatest calamity which can befall
a man. And it is because Christ foresaw that these were the
natural effects of great wealth, and the security and ease which
it engenders, that he declared that it was easier for a camel to
pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the
kingdom of heaven.”[679]
That is all. There is no dramatic justification of Warburton’s views;
they are without motive and foundation. _Social Strugglers_ does not
advance far along the path of the new realism.
As the years drew nearer the new century, the business man usurped
an ever larger place in American fiction; the romance which had been
sought in the deeds of 1776 was now discovered in the achievements of
enterprise. It was the unconscious testimony of literature to the hold
which business had got on the imagination of Americans. In the golden
days of the “full dinner-pail,” following the great victory of ’96,
the Captain of Industry reached the apogee of his fame. The voice of
detraction had not yet been lifted against him; the muckraker had not
yet set forth on his devastating career. To young reporters on city
papers looking ambitiously towards fiction as the goal of success,
what could offer greater appeal than the unwritten romance of Wall
Street and the Stock Exchange? They had described it for the daily
news columns, they had seen it extolled on the editorial page, why not
dramatize it in fiction? Here was the real interest of America--the
only reality that signified; yet the novelists had stupidly overlooked
it, because they lacked the journalist’s sense of news values, his
_flair_.
Of the abundant crop of fiction which resulted from this discovery, no
more characteristic examples need be sought than _The Short Line War_
(1899) and _Calumet “K”_ (1901), written in collaboration by Samuel
Merwin and H. K. Webster. Their popular success was immediate and
maintained surprisingly. The former ran to six editions, the last in
1909; the latter, to twelve editions, the last so late as 1915. They
are brisk stories, all action stripped of descriptive superfluities,
with plenty of newspaper punch: dramatizations of hustle and bluff
and the tricks of a cut-throat game. Charlie Bannon, hero of _Calumet
“K”_, is the boss who does things, who is on the job, who takes long
shots and “makes good”--a “movie” hero of efficiency. He has no time
nor inclination to think, possesses no philosophy, asks no questions
and is troubled by no doubts or scruples; his fertile brain and cool
nerve make him a first-class fighting man, and he fights as the good
soldier should on orders from above. The hero of _The Short Line War_,
Jim Weeks, is another Bannon with the same fertile brain, cool nerve,
calm tenacity of purpose, quick decisiveness, and the same lack of
intellectual interests. In war it is sound strategy to strike quick and
hard; and the Captain of Industry, let it be clearly known, is a war
captain. To play the game hard, to beat the other fellow by whatever
means serve, that is the ideal of a competitive _bourgeoisie_: not to
be too nice about the law, for everybody knows that the law is the
chief weapon of the strong; not to cherish foolish idealisms, for
everybody knows that success alone pays. No more heartless, brutal,
anarchistic books could be conceived--a mad philosophy for a mad world.
The broad movement towards a realistic portrayal of the economic city
produced its eddies and minor currents, which at times brought such
a commotion of the waters as to appear like the main current. Such
was the flood of political novels which came with the new century
and lasted well upwards of a decade. These were a by-product of the
muckraking movement--a part of the propaganda of the group of young
insurgents within the Republican party who were bent on rescuing the
party from control of the old bosses, and who prepared the way for the
more significant movement of Progressivism which followed. Such studies
as Francis Churchill Williams’s _J. Devlin--Boss_ (1901), and Elliott
Flower’s _The Spoilsmen_ (1903), were early examples; and Winston
Churchill’s _Coniston_ and _Mr. Crewe’s Career_ were probably the most
notable. They were journalistic for the most part, _exposés_ of the
“Boss” and the evils of the political machine. The “Boss” is painted in
various guises, as brutal, cunning, thoroughly vicious, or as a man
who plays the game with the same unsocial conscience that marks the
capitalist. Most frequently Lincoln Steffens is followed and the human
side of the “Boss” is “played up” equally with his political cunning.
It is the characteristic journalistic touch--a bit cheap but immensely
effective. As the movement of naturalism gained headway it became
increasingly apparent that the “Boss” was only a part of the “System,”
and the political novel merged in the economic. These brisk studies
constitute, however, a suggestive episode in our history--the literary
echo of our political history between the years 1900 and 1910.
Little in the way of social analysis was to be expected from a group
of clever journalists. They were reporters of fact, transcribers of
externals. They note the social unrest, but it is little more than
an undertone of the chorus of prosperity--a snarl of inconsequential
criticism. It is the sting of a troublesome mosquito that is brushed
off by the Captain of Industry who is too busy with big projects
to bother about insects. Such is Will Payne’s _Mr. Salt_ (1903)--a
sympathetic study of a coal-baron who is caught in the panic of ’93
but pulls out and rises higher. To provide dramatic contrast there is
the ineffective idealist who is growly and surly--“The whole thing is
rotten--the whole business scheme. It’s just a gold brick game operated
by Salt and his kind. I’d like to stick a fuse to it and touch it
off.”[680] It is feeble enough--this protest. The rebel joins wildly
in the great strike, is struck down by the hand of the law, rebels and
strikes again and gets nowhere. Only a bitter, ineffective hate rankles
in his heart, while Salt goes on triumphantly to greater power and a
sort of moral regeneration through love--a regeneration that does not
interfere with his keeping the title-deeds to his loot. An earlier
study--_The Money Captain_ (1898)--seemed to give promise of honester
work than this. It is the story of a struggle between a corrupt
gas-magnate and an enterprising editor whose _exposé_ puts the magnate
afoul of the law as interpreted by the magnate’s judges, and who is
saved from disaster by the timely death of the “duke.” At the end is a
touch of prophecy, quite startling in its forecast. These money-kings
with their strong prehensile fingers are the spawn of a common
plebeian America; the world of the makers is vulgarly democratic;
but there follows the age of the spenders, and that shall be finely,
altruistically aristocratic. The death of the hero “expunged from his
fortune that color of greedy vulgarity and left its gold untarnished.”
Dexter, for all his success, was a figure in the common democratic
foreground of business; he was intimately and solely of the great
everyday warp and woof of toil. He bore all his fruit at once--when
he died. An heirship was required to give the fortune value....
In a way it was fine and beautiful--all that huge accumulation of
pillage coming to the white, firm hands of this pretty, amiable
capable, goodhearted woman. The sudden substitution of her graceful
and gracious figure for the swart and iron figure of the duke was
like an apt transformation scene, prophetic of the future.[681]
These earlier books are mere preliminary sketches--first studies
in economic backgrounds, hesitating between admiration and
censure--satisfied to exploit the “human interest” in the dour figure
of the money-grabber. The clever newspaper men did not know enough
to do better, more realistic work; they saw the daily activities of
business but they understood little of economics, less of sociology.
And the new realism was soon to yield itself captive to sociology--to
inscribe the name of Zola boldly on its pennant and go forth to
conquer. It was Frank Norris who wrote the pronunciamiento of the new
school, boldly, magnificently, with immense faith in the finality of
his own conclusions. _The Responsibilities of the Novelist_ was to
become the textbook of the young naturalists.
Footnotes
[621] See Charles Edward Russell, _The Story of Wendell Phillips_, p.
53.
[622] Quoted in Martyn, _Wendell Phillips: The Agitator_, p. 372.
[623] See _Speeches_, Second Series, p. 139.
[624] Quoted in Martyn, _op. cit._, pp. 412-413.
[625] _Speeches_, Second Series, p. 176.
[626] _Ibid._, p. 167.
[627] _Ibid._, pp. 152-153.
[628] _Ibid._, p. 154.
[629] See _Ibid._, pp. 356-359.
[630] See _Ibid._, p. 347.
[631] Edward Cary, _George William Curtis_, p. 78.
[632] See _Ibid._, pp. 25-26.
[633] See _Ibid._, pp. 180-181.
[634] See _Harper’s Weekly_, Sept. 20, 1873.
[635] _Orations and Addresses_, “Machine Politics and the Remedy,” Vol.
II, pp. 157-159.
[636] See _Ibid._, p. 160.
[637] J. H. Wilson, _The Life of Charles A. Dana_, p. 466.
[638] Ogden, _Life and Letters of Edwin Lawrence Godkin_, Vol. I, p. 11.
[639] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 17.
[640] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 140.
[641] _Nation_, July 8, 1915, p. 47.
[642] _On Liberty_, Chapter I.
[643] “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy,” in _Problems of Modern
Democracy_, pp. 25-26, 30-31.
[644] Ogden, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 48.
[645] _Nation_, January 30, 1873, p. 68.
[646] See “Public Opinion and the Currency,” _Ibid._, February 27,
1873; “The Political Situation in 1896,” in _Problems of Modern
Democracy_.
[647] See “On Gold and Silver,” _Ibid._, July 6, 1876.
[648] _Ibid._, May 25, 1876.
[649] _Ibid._, June 1, 1876.
[650] “The Issue of the Campaign,” _Ibid._, July 2, 1896.
[651] “The Platform of Revolution,” _Ibid._, July 16, 1896.
[652] _Ibid._, January 19, 1893.
[653] _Ibid._, April 10, 1873.
[654] “The Watered Stock Hallucination,” _Ibid._, October 9, 1873.
[655] “Prosperity’s Advance Orator,” _Ibid._, June 18, 1896.
[656] “The Chicago Platform,” _Ibid._, July 16, 1896.
[657] “The Platform of Revolution,” _Ibid._, July 23, 1896.
[658] Ogden, _op. cit._, Vol. II, pp. 238-239.
[659] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 199.
[660] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 217.
[661] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 243.
[662] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 237.
[663] Vol. II, Chapter 13, p. 128.
[664] Chapter 4, p. 78.
[665] Vol. II, pp. 58-59.
[666] In his original scheme Professor Parrington included Tourgée’s
_A Fool’s Errand_, but the text shows that he decided against its
inclusion.--_Publisher._
[667] William Roscoe Thayer, _Life and Letters of John Hay_, Vol. II,
pp. 5-6.
[668] Chapter V.
[669] Thayer, _op. cit._, Vol. I., pp. 6-7.
[670] _Ibid._, Vol. II, p. 15.
[671] _Ibid._, Vol. I, p. 321.
[672] _Ibid._, p. 414.