Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
of democracy but had suffered the lawyers to have their way. The
Enlightenment had long since been submerged by Whiggish ambitions, and
since the days of the Abolition Movement there had been no serious
consideration of political theory. The success of the Jacksonian
revolution had brought about its undoing. The abstract principle of
democracy having won common acceptance, it was assumed to be competent
to shift for itself. But unfortunately a supposedly democratic state
was functioning under a Constitution designed to thwart democracy,
and, interpreted by lawyers, it buttressed the rights of property far
more securely than the rights of man. Within this fundamental law
capitalism had long been entrenching itself. Its stronghold could not
be taken by frontal attack and its flanks were protected by the courts
that had assumed the high prerogative of voiding statutory enactments
by judicial decree. As a result in no other country was capitalism so
safeguarded from hostile attack; it plowed its fields and gathered its
harvests secure from disturbance.
Unfortunately the political state did not realize that it was not
in reality the democracy it professed to be. The most intelligent
liberalism of the times, failing to take into account the economic
basis of politics, was satisfied to spend its energy in Civil Service
Reform and similar tinkering with the political machinery, convinced
that it was only necessary to recover the old aristocratic sense of
responsibility in political agents to perfect a democratic government.
Not till another generation did liberalism come to understand that the
democratic program was still largely unfulfilled, and set about in all
earnestness to complete it; but that did not happen till the philosophy
of democracy had been far more adequately explored and the simple faith
of Jacksonianism had been instructed by the experience of other lands.
Popular discontent with the drift toward plutocracy was intensified
by the successive economic crises that marked the transition from
agrarianism to capitalism. The gospel of progress, it seems, had
not taken due account of the price that must be paid in social
disturbances, and the breakdowns of 1873-1879 and 1887-1896 with their
harsh dislocations aroused a spirit of revolt that issued in broad
popular movements. Those movements spun the thread of liberalism that
runs through the years from the Gilded Age to the World War--a thread
woven of the earlier liberalism that came from the frontier, and the
new collectivistic theories that came from Europe. In the eighties and
nineties it was still largely native agrarian, but in the early years
of the new century it drew heavily on the proletarian philosophies of
Europe--seeking to apply old-world experience to American problems.
Through it all runs increasingly a note of sobering realism. After a
hundred years political romanticism was slowly dying in America.
Part One: The Middle Border Rises
Chapter I • The Plight of the Farmer
I • Democratic Reactions to Plutocracy
The Middle Border was the first to recover from the heady romanticisms
of Whiggery. The malady of preëmption and exploitation quickly ran
its course there and after the first enthusiasm of settlement had
subsided--the staking of claims, the scramble over townsites, the
bidding for railway lines--the farmer settled down amidst his corn
and wheat and cattle and hogs to learn what sort of living the
prairies might provide. With his feet on the sobering earth he was no
middle-class adventurer, no buccaneer lying in wait for the golden
argosies of Spain, but a sober realist kept sane by wind and weather
and kept honest by his daily occupation of tilling and reaping.
As the first wave of settlers spread over the prairies a mood of
buoyant hopefulness colored their dreams. The earlier conquest of the
Inland Empire had entailed exhausting labor in preliminary clearings,
and the stumpage from great forests remained for years to obstruct
clean tillage; but here in the Middle Border were treeless fields
of black soil, level, uncluttered by stones, inviting the plow. For
ages the prairie grass had been growing there, tall as a horseman
in the bottoms and plentiful on the uplands; and as the unmarked
seasons passed, the potash from the decaying vegetation added a richer
fertility to the soil. In natural productiveness it was the fairest
portion of America, and as the land-hungry settlers made their pitch
there, filing on broad homesteads and building their cabins, a mood
of buoyant expectation filled the land. It was not the flamboyant
spirit of the Gilded Age, but the hopefulness of those who within a few
short years were to transform a wilderness into the world’s granary.
In his wistful account of the glamour that lay upon the prairies in
those first pioneer years--a glamour that soon passed like the morning
dews--Hamlin Garland was no frontier romantic but a sober historian.
But as the seventies gave place to the eighties a subtle change came
over the mood of the Middle Border. Disappointment and disillusion
settled upon a land that before had smiled in the spring sunshine.
The harvest was not fulfilling the expectations of the seedtime.
The changed mood came in part from the harsh toil and meager living
that were the necessary price the frontiersman must pay for his
small winnings. It is no holiday job to subdue an untamed land and
wrest abundance and comfort from a virgin soil. Only for the young
who can project their hopes into the future is it endurable; for the
middle-aged and the old it is a heart-breaking task. The history of
the western frontier is a long drab story of hardship and privation
and thwarted hopes, of men and women broken by the endless toil, the
windows of their dreams shuttered by poverty and the doors to an
abundant life closed and barred by narrow opportunity. It is true that
the prairies took no such toll as the forests had taken; the mean and
squalid poverty through which Lincoln passed was not so common in the
Middle Border as it had been along the earlier frontier. Nevertheless
a fierce climate and a depressing isolation added their discomforts
to a bleak existence. The winds were restless on the flat plains, and
the flimsy wooden houses, stark and mean, unprotected by trees and
unrelieved by shrubbery, were an ill defense against their prying
fingers. In winter the blizzards swept out of the North to overmaster
the land, and in summer the hot winds came up from the Southwest to
sear the countrysides that were rustling with great fields of corn.
Other enemies appeared, as it were, out of a void. Endless flights of
grasshoppers descended like a plague of locusts, and when they passed
the earth was bare and brown where the young wheat had stood. Armies
of chinch-bugs came from nobody knew where, and swarming up the tender
corn-stalks left them sucked dry and yellow. It is nature’s way, to
destroy with one hand what it creates with the other; and for years the
western farmers were fighting plagues that had possessed the prairies
before the settlers came.
The disillusion of the Middle Border deepened into gloom as the
widespread economic depression of the times added its discouragements.
A period of falling prices was curtailing industry and forcing down the
market values of all produce. From such depressions a debtor community
always suffers most severely, for falling produce-prices mean rising
money-values and a shifting standard of value for deferred payments.
The farms of the Middle Border were heavily encumbered to provide
tools and livestock and buildings, and the earnings were consumed by
the interest that went East to the mortgage-holders. Debt was a luxury
the farmer could ill afford, and when the debt was silently augmenting
by the rising value of the dollar he was forced to consider his
situation. The plight into which he had fallen was graphically summed
up in the phrase “ten-cent corn and ten per cent interest”--a phrase
that was to become a spark to all the tinder that was gathering from
frontier hardships and disappointments. Falling market-values were at
the bottom of his troubles. The prices of his staples were sinking
below the cost of production. With four-cent eggs, five-cent butter,
ten-cent corn, and fifty-cent wheat, with more hogs and cattle than
the stockyards would take, and with debts contracted at interest-rates
fixed by a higher scale of values, the economic position of the Middle
Border was becoming desperate, and in the later eighties a sullen
bitterness took possession of the land. As the farmer sat by the
kitchen stove and stoked the fire with great ears of corn that were
cheaper than coal, he had ample time to contemplate his lot. Ungathered
crops for which there was no market would not pay interest. There was
coming to be “too much hog in the dollar,” as one commentator remarked
quaintly. The Middle Border, all too clearly, was strangling from its
own productiveness.
It was easy for newspaper critics, armed with the wisdom of the
Board of Trade, to point out that overproduction was the trouble
with the western farmer, and that so vast a development of staple
crops resulting from sowing the prairie states to corn and wheat was
certain to bring on disastrous market slumps. It was true. Production
had outrun consumption; quantity output had brought on a glut. But
it was also true--as the armchair critics were not so careful to
point out--that other causes contributed equally to the deflation
of the western farmer, the result of which was to despoil him of
the last moiety of his earnings. He was in the grip of a complex
middleman organization that gouged him at every turn. The gap between
producer and consumer was widening to a chasm. The railways charged
twenty cents a bushel cartage for wheat from the Mississippi to
Chicago, and fifty-two and a half cents to the Atlantic seaboard.
The elevator companies fixed monopoly tolls, swindled the farmer in
their grain-gradings, and combined to force down the market price at
harvest time and raise it after the crop came under their control. The
“Livestock Ring,” managed by the railways, controlled the Union Stock
Yards at Chicago and squeezed the marginal profits from the farmer’s
cattle and hogs.[734] When on the other hand he bought implements or
groceries or household goods he was at the mercy of a non-competitive
market, protected by patent-rights and tariffs, to which were added
extortionate transportation and middleman charges.
It was his own fault, of course. Due to his own political slackness
the farmer had allowed himself to become the common drudge of society.
All the exploiting classes had their hands in his pockets. His was the
only considerable economic group that exerted no organized pressure to
control the price he sold for or the price he paid. While capitalism
had been perfecting its machinery of exploitation he had remained
indifferent to the fact that he himself was the fattest goose that
capitalism was to pluck. He had helped indeed to provide the rope
for his own hanging. He had voted away the public domain to railways
that were now fleecing him; he took pride in the county-seat towns
that lived off his earnings; he sent city lawyers to represent him
in legislatures and in Congress; he read middle-class newspapers and
listened to bankers and politicians and cast his votes for the policy
of Whiggery that could have no other outcome than his own despoiling.
And now in the middle eighties he began to feel the rope about his
neck, and realized the predicament he was in. It was not alone the
local middlemen, or even the railways--he had come to believe--that
were to blame. It was the money-power of the East, the grip of Wall