Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
hopes frustrated and America become a plutocracy without a struggle.
Greeley, Carey, and Phillips have been considered elsewhere; Stevens
was the last of the rugged equalitarians who followed their principles
to the bitter end; and Peter Cooper was an unregenerate Jeffersonian
who dedicated his last years to combating Wall Street, accepting in
1876, at the age of 85, nomination for the presidency by the National
Independent Party, commonly called the Greenback Party.
Like Thaddeus Stevens an ironmaster, grown wealthy by a long life
of useful and adventurous industry, builder of the first American
locomotive that made possible the success of the Baltimore and Ohio
railway, Peter Cooper was the most picturesque figure in New York City
in the seventies. With Bryant he shared the distinction of being the
patriarch of Broadway. Bred up amidst stern and harsh conditions, at a
period when, he said, within his “own recollection unmarried white men
could be sold for debt in the State of Connecticut,”[753] he was not
hardened by the struggle for subsistence. A tender social conscience
mellowed an old-fashioned probity and gave character and dignity to
a simple rugged nature. Transparently honest, with a certain innate
austerity softened by a homely courtesy, he was not a reed to sway
in every vagrant breeze, but a great oak with fibers toughened by
the storms of years. Like Horace Greeley, whom he much resembled in
honest kindliness, he carried the burdens of his country on his heart,
and in the midst of abundant prosperity still reckoned himself his
brother’s keeper. By “nature and temperament a radical reformer,” his
strongest instinct was a quick sense of justice. He was oppressed by
the poverty and misery he saw about him, and he gave so generously to
all good causes that he was known to his generation as “the greatest
philanthropist in the world.” His chief accomplishment was the founding
of Cooper Union for free instruction in “practical art and science,”
on which he expended a fortune.[754] But he was not one to salve his
conscience with a gift of superfluous wealth. His heart was as open as
his pocketbook, and he must explore to its hidden sources the infection
that was breeding social injustice in the new world. His private
interests never blinded him to his larger duties, but he gave his time
and strength as readily as his money to whatever cause he espoused.
Such a man was morally incapable of the buccaneering exploitation
that marked the Gilded Age. Between Peter Cooper and Jim Fisk was an
impassable gulf; they were products of different worlds and different
economies. The speculative middleman who thrust himself between the
producer and the consumer, with no sense of responsibility to either,
but concerned only with immediate profit, was a figure to excite the
wrath of an older-fashioned industrialist who had been taught that the
only just reward is the reward that comes from productive labor; and
in the days of the great barbecue Peter Cooper became deeply concerned
for the future of America. It was the new breed of bankers with their
control of the money system that were to blame, he came to believe, and
he would have reckoned himself false to the obligations of citizenship
if he failed to protest against their selfish manipulation of the
public credit. He had watched the callous juggling of the national
finances by the money-lenders during the Civil War, and had seen a debt
of some three billions nearly doubled in the decade after Appomattox
by the bond-holders. The new system of National Banks that issued
from the emergencies of war had come to control the financial policy
of the country, and to Peter Cooper it seemed that their purpose was
to perpetuate a debt that enabled them to tax the productive labor
of America and to squeeze wealth from a calculating expansion and
contraction of the currency. To surrender to such mercenaries the
sovereign power of issuing and regulating money seemed to him the
abdication of sovereignty, and in so far as he could he felt called in
honor to prevent it.
It needed rare courage and complete self-sacrifice to take up the gage
of battle and in his old age to renew the war that Andrew Jackson
had engaged in forty years before. His good name and his honorable
career could not save him from the gibes of politicians or the caustic
criticism of honest men. It was a losing fight at best. The struggle
had been venomous in Jackson’s day when the money-power was in its
infancy; and now that the banking interests had grown mighty it was
as hopeless as the charge of the Light Brigade. The cause had been
lost on the day when Congress wrote into the bill establishing a legal
tender for war purposes the single word “except,” thereby invalidating
the greenback for interest payments on bonds and duties on imports--an
act that “drew tears from the eyes of Thaddeus Stevens”; and the
bankers who could assert their control in war times had no intention a
dozen years later of suffering that control to pass from hands that had
grown enormously stronger.
Yet Peter Cooper refused to consider the outlook hopeless. With all
the resources he could command he threw himself into the struggle. He
scattered “more than a million of documents” broadcast--most of the
matter of which he wrote; he appealed to Congress and the President,
he challenged candidates, he cited the opinions of the Fathers, and
when he was buried under an avalanche of votes--as Horace Greeley
had been four years before--he preserved his faith in the “people’s
cause” and to the last day of his life kept up the great battle. “I
always have been, am, and ever shall be with the poor toilers and
producers; therefore I desire Congress to legislate for the poor as
well as for the rich, who can take care of themselves,”[755] he wrote
in his ninety-second year, and the spirit that stirred in his old veins
appears from such a comment as this:
I consider the persistent class legislation of Congress since
the war, a worse despotism than that of Great Britain before the
Revolution; because it reduces the laboring classes to periodic
distress and starvation, that are worse than any despotism ever
was; for monopolizing corporations, whether in the shape of banks
or railroads, have no soul.[756]
Peter Cooper’s political philosophy was simple and transparent. His
teachers were Albert Gallatin, Henry C. Carey, and George William
Curtis, and from them he drew three major ideas that had emerged from
three generations of American experience: the need for a national
monetary system based on legal tender; the necessity for a protective
tariff; and the need for an effective civil service. The first was
an adaptation of the old agrarian dislike of banknotes; the second
came out of Clay’s American System as it had been elaborated by Henry
C. Carey in the fifties; and the third issued from the Civil Service
Reform movement of the seventies. The exigencies of the political
situation, however, thrust into the foreground the money question,
and nine-tenths of his writings deal with that pregnant issue. As an
ardent Jacksonian he was deeply suspicious of the rising money-power,
with its corporations and monopolies, its land-grants and railways and
banks, for behind them he saw the specter of aristocracy. “In America,”
he said in 1882, “we have no aristocrats except those who have sprung
up in a night--as toad-stools do in a dung-hill.”[757] But class
legislation must end in creating classes, and at another time he said,
“There is fast forming in this country an aristocracy of wealth--the
worst form of aristocracy that can curse the prosperity of any
country.... Such an aristocracy is without soul and without patriotism.
Let us save our country from this, its most potent, and, as I hope, its
last enemy.”[758]
His deep interest in political measures was quickened by an anxious
concern at the hard times that resulted from the policy of drastic
currency deflation. That matters were going ill in America during the
middle seventies every fool knew, and Peter Cooper was only giving
expression to the common knowledge in describing to President Hayes, in
a letter dated August 6, 1876, the “appalling” economic situation. That
it was equally bad in England he did not point out.
More than two hundred thousand men, within the last few weeks, have
joined in “strikes” on the various railroad lines, the workshops
and the mines of the country, on account of the further reduction
in their wages, already reduced to the living point. That some of
these strikes have been attended with lawless and unjustifiable
violence, only shows the intensity of the evils complained of,
and the despair of the sufferers. For four years past, since the
“panic of 1873,” millions of men and women, in this hitherto rich
and prosperous country, have been thrown out of employment, or
living on precarious and inadequate wages, have felt embittered
with a lot, in which neither economy nor industry, nor a cheerful
willingness to work hard, can bring any alleviation. Is it to be
wondered at, that _enforced idleness_ has made tramps of so many of
our laboring population, or induced them to join the criminal and
dangerous classes?[759]
After pointing out the disastrous effects of such hard times on mining,
railways, real estate, and the western farmers, he asserted that the
bankers, although they also were embarrassed, were “very patient with
their troubles ... for they know, that _money is appreciating in value
all the time_.” He then uncovers the kernel of his thought--that it is
a sovereign duty of government to provide an adequate national currency.
This bondage has its manifold centre and its secret force in more
than two thousand banks, that are scattered through the country.
All these banks, are organized expressly to loan out their own
money and the money of all those, who will entrust them with
deposits. These loans are made to men, whose business-lives will
soon become dependent on money, borrowed from corporations, that
have a special interest of their own. Such a power of wealth,
under the control of the selfish instincts of mankind, will always
be able to control the action of our Government, unless that
Government is directed by strict principles of justice and of
the public welfare. The banks will favor a course of special and
partial legislation, in order to increase their power ... they will
never cease to ask for more, as long as there is more, that can be
wrung from the toiling masses of the American people.
Such a power should never be allowed to go out from the entire and
complete control of the people’s Government. The struggle with this
money-power, intrenched in the special privileges of banks, has
been going on from the beginning of the history of this country.
It has engaged the attention of our wisest and most patriotic
statesmen. Franklin, Jefferson, Webster, Calhoun, Jackson, have all
spoken of the danger of such a power and the necessity of guarding
against it.[760]
The solution he offered for the vexing monetary problem accorded with
that of the Greenback Party,[761] namely, refusal to recharter those
banks “_deceitfully styled national_” and the retirement of all bank
currency; the abandonment of the policy of currency contraction; the
issue of legal-tender notes to the amount last found necessary for the
functions of industry and business; the rejection of a specie basis,
the notes to be interconvertible with government bonds bearing interest
at 3.65 per cent; issued on demand in any amount in exchange for
legal-tender notes; and the establishment of a Postal Savings Bank. No
man ever believed more ardently in the sufficiency of his program than