Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Declaration of Independence, and promulgated to recall the American
people to their heritage of idealism. The Locofoco party, the Freesoil
party, the early Republican party, the Greenback party, the Populist
party, the Progressive party, however they differed in immediate
programs, have had a common objective, namely, to set man above
property as the great object of governmental concern, and preserve in
America the democratic principle of equal opportunity.
Despite the fact that they failed in their immediate objectives they
served the larger purpose of reminding the major parties that America
professes to be a democratic country, and that party platforms must be
brought to square with that fact. Thus interpreted the history of party
struggle since 1790 falls into three broad phases: the Jeffersonian
movement that established the ideal of political democracy; the
Jacksonian movement that established equalitarianism crudely in
practice; and the successive third-party movements that attempted, in
successive reactions, to regain such ground as had been lost, to extend
the field, and to perfect the machinery of democratic government. Since
the rise of the slavery controversy the major parties, allied with
masterful economic groups, have persistently ignored the Declaration
of Independence, and repudiated in practice the spirit of democracy.
To prevent if possible so grave a treason to our traditional ideals,
to assert the rights of the common man against the encroachments of
a class, has been therefore the common mission of the third-party
movements. The significance of their somewhat scanty success is
something the thoughtful American may interpret as he will.
Since Civil War days, discontent has been endemic in the Middle Border,
and it has broken out in three great political upheavals: the Greenback
movement of the seventies; the Populist movement of the eighties and
nineties; and the Non-Partisan League movement of the second decade
of the present century. Issuing from a profound resentment at the
exploitation from which the farmer suffered, they mark a persistent
drift away from the old Jacksonian individualism and an advance toward
a socialized conception of the political state. Disciplined by hard
times the farmers were learning a lesson from capitalistic Whiggery;
if the political state had proved serviceable to business why should
it not prove serviceable to agriculture? Why should not a democratic
state consider the producers as well as the middleman? Why should it
not provide a national currency, a national system of transportation,
a democratic banking system, a standard system of grain-grading,
public elevators, crop insurance, and the like? Why should the farmer
be squeezed at every turn by private companies who did badly what the
state could do well? By 1917, in short, the Middle Border had got far
from the simple individualism of earlier days and was well advanced
toward state socialism; and it was only the ruthless opposition of the
business interests, that had no wish to see their private preserves
thus rudely invaded, that put a stop to the movement.
Back of all these agrarian programs was the greater problem of the
popular control of the political state. How could the undisciplined
majority hold in check the disciplined minority? How could poverty meet
wealth on an equal footing? The control of politics had fallen into
the hands of the machine, and the machine served property interests.
Legislatures were bought and sold like corner lots; senatorships went
to the highest bidder; judges were more responsive to the wishes of
bankers than to those of farmers. To break the power of the machine
there must be an extension of democratic control, and to that end
new machinery must be provided. Hence the vast agrarian concern
with political machinery. From the agrarian agitation--supplemented
by proletarian and middle-class recruits--has come the Australian
ballot, the Initiative and the Referendum, the Recall, the Direct
Primary, and popular election of Senators. The only important agrarian
principle that has not been adopted is the principle of proportional
representation. If agrarianism lost its great battle over the currency,
it won the battle over the income tax. Nullified by a scandalous court
decision after it had been long accepted, the income tax was finally
established by the tedious method of constitutional amendment--an
outcome that owed much to the Middle Border. In casting up the accounts
of American democracy, the largest sums must be credited to the Middle
Border, as in earlier years they were credited to the Jacksonian
frontier. Whether the new machinery is useful or merely cumbersome,
there is much disagreement, but it is agrarian in origin and it came
from an honest attempt to democratize American politics.[764]
Footnotes
[764] The Contents here calls for a third section on the “Populistic
Program” (see p. xxxiv for details) and a fourth on “William Jennings
Bryan.”--_Publisher._
Chapter III • Literature and the Middle Border[765]
III • Hamlin Garland and the Middle Border
It was not till the end of the eighties that the bitterness of the
frontier began to creep into literature. Its slackness and drab
poverty had got into the pages of _The Hoosier Schoolmaster_, as its
neighborliness had got into Riley; but in these earlier studies there
was no brooding sense of social injustice, of the wrongs done the
Middle Border by unjust laws, of the hardships that are increased
by the favoritism of government. In the year 1887, however, came a
significant change of temper. Three very different writers--Harold
Frederic, Joseph Kirkland, and Hamlin Garland--turned to the theme of
farm life, and dealt with it in a mordantly realistic vein. It was the
first conscious literary reaction to the subjection of agriculture to
capitalistic exploitation and it was marked by the bitterness of a
decaying order.
_Seth’s Brother’s Wife_, by Harold Frederic, is a drab tale of farm
life in upper York State, as bitter as any tale of the western border.
It is a story of defeat, of flight from country to town. The blight
of failure is upon the farming community--a blight that embitters old
and young; and the sketches of country louts, of soured lives, of
broken men and women, do not make pleasant reading. No gentle idyllic
light rests on the landscape such as Sarah Orne Jewett discovers on
the fields and villages of New England. Sabrina Fairchild, an old maid
embittered by the family failure, yet clinging to the family pride
and hopeful that the family prestige will be restored, is a pathetic
and desolate figure, gaunt and sharp-tongued; at mortal feud with
another pathetic old woman, who with her husband had emigrated from
Massachusetts years before, and held herself proudly above the mean and
vulgar neighborhood in which they had settled. The slack servants,
gossipy and impudent, the petty lives, the grasping ways unrelieved by
any grace or beauty, and set in a world of petty machine politics, make
a drab and unattractive picture. Harold Frederic quite evidently hates
this countryside that bred him. He will not, like Hamlin Garland, take
up the battle for it against the town. He sees no hope in political
programs; he is no Populistic agrarian fighting for justice; he wants
only to escape from it to the city, where life may be lived more
generously. The “trail of the serpent is over it all,” he remarks,
“rich and poor, big and little. The nineteenth century is a century of
cities; they have given their own twist to the progress of the age--and
the farmer is almost as far out of it as if he lived in Alaska. Perhaps
there may have been a time when a man could live in what the poet calls
daily communion with Nature and not starve his mind and dwarf his soul,
but this isn’t the century ... get out of it as soon as you can.”[766]
Much less bitter and hopeless is _Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring
County_ (1887), by Joseph Kirkland, son of Matilda Kirkland, who a
generation before had written sketches of the Michigan frontier.
In the preface the author points out that his study is “a palpable
imitation of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd,’” an “attempt
to reproduce, on American soil, the unflinching realism ... of life
down in actual contact with the soil itself.” It is a tale of pioneer
days in Illinois, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and
it draws a full-length portrait of the son of a Pennsylvania immigrant
who struggles up from mean beginnings to prosperity. The niggardliness
of frontier life is drawn unsparingly--the harsh struggle for
subsistence--but there is no outcry against governmental favoritisms or
the law’s injustice. It is nature that must be fought and conquered,
and the battle needs strong men who must subdue their finer natures
and more generous impulses to the work of acquisition. Zury Prouder
is a masterful fellow who bends every energy to the business of
accumulation. He makes one hand wash the other, and by dint of saving
and squeezing and trading and foreclosing he slowly amasses wealth and
power. He is a thrifty farmer as well as a shrewd trader, but his soul
is seared by the frontier meanness--squeezed into land and stock and
mortgages, consumed with the passion for grabbing. It was a reaction
from the skimpiness of his youth. The bitterness of poverty had
entered his heart as a boy, and his life took shape from the youthful
resolve--
“Dad, I’m goin’ t’own a mortgage ’fore I die; mind what I say.”
“Hope ye will, Zury,” his father replies. “Yew’ll have a holt of
the right eend of the poker then; ’n’ t’other feller he’ll have a
holt o’ the hot part, same’s we’ve got naow.”
“You bet! An’ it’ll sizzle his hands, tew, afore I’ll ever let up
on him.”
But Kirkland will not let Zury remain a crabbed and hard-fisted son of
the frontier. As the frontier hardships grow less the soul that has
been seared by poverty is awakened to more generous impulses. Late
in life Zury is taken in hand by a Boston woman who had come out as
a schoolteacher years before, and whom Zury had given up for a bride
with a rich farm, but to whom he eventually returns. Under her care
the plates of mail are stripped from his heart, his better nature
expands, and the meanest man in Spring County ripens into a kindly and
lovable old age. What poverty and hardship had warped and twisted, love
straightens out and ennobles; the meanness of the frontier is washed
away as the rich soil yields a more abundant life. It is not a great
book, but it is vigorous and honest, and its earlier chapters contain
some admirable bits of realism. As one of the first stories of the
western farmer it is secure of a place in the history of our American
fiction.
It was this same year, 1887, that Hamlin Garland, alone and brooding
over his studies at the Boston Public Library, wrote his first sketches
of life in the Middle Border. The romance was fading from the prairies
when he took up his pen. The Golden West of Mark Twain and the bucolic
West of Whitcomb Riley had both slipped into the past and the day that
was rising was to bring its discouragements that seared men’s hopes
as the hot winds seared the fields of rustling corn. The burdens of
the western farmer were heavy on his shoulders and he could foresee
no time when they would be lighter. Depression had settled on the
Middle Border, and Hamlin Garland returning to the familiar fields
from his Boston studies felt the depression in every fiber of his
being. This was his land and his people. The blight laid upon men and
women and children by the drab pioneer life was a familiar fact to
him. The Garlands and the McClintocks had suffered from it as their
neighbors suffered, and a rebellious wrath filled his heart as he