Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
mechanistic science nor a regimented industrialism had risen in his
outlook to bank the fires of his hope. No impersonal determinism had
chilled his belief in man as a free-will agent in a moral universe.
The vast bleak chemical cosmos that bewildered Theodore Dreiser
did not rise before him to dwarf the individual nor overwhelm his
aspirations. Like a French romantic of a hundred years before, he
remained a confirmed optimist who believed that the future will correct
the mistakes of the past, and the peace and beauty for which the
human race longs lie immediately ahead. The art of the young man was
becoming old-fashioned in the world of Stephen Crane; his ideals were
Victorian in the days of Mark Hanna. And so after the agrarian revolt
had failed and America lay fat and contented in the lap of McKinley
prosperity, he found himself a man without a country, an alien in
an industrializing order, and he turned away to the newer West and
the romance he had always sought. While America was driving towards
regimentation he traveled backward in time to recover a vanishing world
of individualism, and the distance rapidly widened between them.
In those romantic wanderings through Colorado and California and
into the far Northwest he found a new interest in the frontiersman’s
exploitation of the Indian, and in _The Captain of the Gray-Horse
Troop_ and _The Eagle Heart_ he has wedded his social ethics to French
romanticism, and endowed man in a state of nature with exalted social
responsibilities. The old theme is dressed in new clothes and Captain
Curtis of the Gray-Horse Troop becomes an Indian agent fighting the
lawless and cruel encroachment of the frontiersmen upon the Indian
rights; but the theme remains. Garland hated the frontier as fiercely
as Cooper hated it, and like him he loved the clean free spaces; but
when after his long and somewhat futile rambles he returned to the
Middle Border, he found there a new light upon the familiar fields and
in that light he wrote his saga of the Garlands and the McClintocks.
This was to be his great bequest to American letters. To have sought
the spirit of the Middle Border in its hopes and its defeat, to have
written the history of the generation that swept across the western
prairies, is to compress within covers a great movement and a great
experience--one of the significant chapters in our total American
history.
Footnotes
[765] In Professor Parrington’s plan the section given here was to be
preceded by a first section on “Edward Eggleston and Frontier Realism,”
and a second on “Whitcomb Riley and Folk Romance.”--_Publisher._
[766] Chapter IV, pp. 26-27.
[767] Chapter III, p. 35.
[768] Chapter IV, pp. 51-53.
[769] Introduction to _Main-Travelled Roads_.
[770] _A Son of the Middle Border_, Chapter XXVIII, p. 374.
[771] _Ibid._, Chapter XXIX.
[772] _Ibid._, Chapter XXVIII, pp. 364-365.
[773] _Ibid._, p. 245.
[774] _A Son of the Middle Border_, Chapter XXXI, p. 417.
[775] _Critic_, Vol. 42, pp. 216-218.
Part Two: Proletarian Hopes[776]
Footnotes
[776] The first chapter of this section was to have been “Plutocracy
and the Workingman,” the second “The Rise of the Left.” For the
contents see p. xxxv.--_Publisher._
Chapter III • The Quest of Utopia
From the welter of unrest of the later years of the century, with
its labor struggles, its agrarian bitterness, its concern over the
exhaustion of the public lands and a pinching monetary system, its
acute distrust of monopolies and corporate power, sprang a very natural
eagerness to forecast the future and blaze new roads that might
lead to the democratic Canaan. Whither the main-traveled road would
lead, discerning idealists knew only too well. To bog down in a mire
of plutocracy would be a sorry ending to the great experiment; yet
the mud was deepening with every mile of advance and unless another
highway appeared the situation was unpromising. The crux of the problem
seemed to reside in an extension of the powers of the political state,
converting to social ends powers that hitherto had been serving private
gain. The plutocracy was pointing the way. If the political state were
fairly dedicated to democratic ends, why should not society go forward
toward a true commonwealth, founded on a social economy and dedicated
to common justice and the common well-being? There was need only to
subordinate private interests to collective interests, and substitute
coöperation for the present mad scramble of selfish individualism.
In elaboration of this pregnant thought a surprising number of social
romances appeared during the last quarter of the century, that were
native counterparts of the greater studies in collectivism by European
thinkers. A recent study lists forty-eight titles of Utopian romances
written between 1884 and 1900.[777] Of these several are communistic,
and the rest are socialistic; yet in keeping with the American temper
none openly makes use of the terms, and few apply the Marxian doctrine
of the class war. Their appeal was directed primarily to the middle
class of small business and professional men, and they were content to
rely on political means to achieve economic ends. Troubled as was the
American mind by the rise of a cutthroat exploitation, it was not yet
ready to entertain ideas of direct action or trust the proletariat to
enforce its will by mass strength. In one story, to be sure--Ignatius
Donnelly’s _Caesar’s Column_ (1890)--there is a gloomy picture of the
downfall of civilization caused by the class struggles; but the temper
of Donnelly had lost its genial optimism through his long immersion in
under-dog contests and had grown mordant and gloomy.
1 • Edward Bellamy and “Looking Backward”
When in 1888 Edward Bellamy published _Looking Backward_ he gave a huge
impetus to the Utopian romance. Third in the list of titles collected
by Mr. Forbes, it was to have a wide influence on the thought of the
times. It made instant appeal and successive editions were issued
to meet the popular demand. Not since _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ had an
American novel reached so many readers, and Bellamy became at once
a national figure, the prophet of a new industrial order. There is
abundant evidence to the effect produced upon thoughtful readers. E. C.
Stedman, the first critic of the times, spoke of it as a “remarkable
and fascinating novel”; Frances E. Willard called it “a revelation and
an evangel”; and Howells remarked on “the extraordinary effect which
Mr. Bellamy’s romance has had with the public.” More significant still,
_Looking Backward_ speedily became the source and inspiration for a
series of social organizations that beginning at Boston soon spread
over the country. _The Nationalist_ was established as the organ of
the movement and thousands of eager men and women threw themselves
into the work of reshaping American society to conform to the new
social ideal. No doubt the enthusiasm was naïve, no doubt it sprang
from a social inexperience that underestimated the complexity of the
problem, yet the sources, clearly, were a sharp distrust of private
capitalism and an idealistic faith in coöperation. In a pronouncement
of the Boston “Nationalist Club,” January 9, 1889, the cause was rested
on two fundamental truths--“The principle of competition is ... the
application of the brutal law of the survival of the strongest and most
cunning”; and, “The principle of the Brotherhood of Humanity is one of
the eternal truths that govern the world’s progress on lines which
distinguish human nature from brute nature.”[778]
It is not easy to trace the origins of Bellamy’s interest in
collectivism or the sources of his thought. A journalist and lawyer,
he had studied in Germany, where presumably he had come in contact
with Marxian socialism. Writing in the _Nationalist_ for May, 1889, he
commented thus on the origins of _Looking Backward_:
I never had, previous to the publication of the work, any
affiliations with any class or sect of industrial or social
reformers nor, to make my confession complete, any particular
sympathy with undertakings of the sort. It is only just to myself
to say, however, that this should not be taken to indicate any
indifference to the miserable condition of the mass of humanity,
seeing that it resulted rather from a perception all too clear
of the depth and breadth of the social problem and a consequent
skepticism as to the effectiveness of the proposed solutions which
had come to my notice.
In undertaking to write _Looking Backward_ I had, at the outset, no
idea of attempting a serious contribution to the movement of social
reform. The idea was of a mere literary fantasy, a fairy tale of
social felicity. There was no thought of contriving a house which
practical men might live in, but merely of hanging in mid-air, far
out of the reach of the sordid and material world of the present, a
cloud-palace for an ideal humanity.[779]
That the impulse did not come from the Marxians is sufficiently
clear from his explanation of the idea of an industrial army. “The
idea of committing the duty of maintaining the community to an
industrial army, precisely as the duty of protecting it is entrusted
to a military army,” came to him, he said, from the object-lesson
of European militarism. But however little he owed to the Marxians
it is clear that Bellamy--the literary amateur who had dabbled in
Hawthornesque fantasies--possessed a warm social conscience and a
vigorous inquiring mind; and once his attention had been drawn to the
evils of industrialism he would respond with the same direct competence
that marked the thinking of Henry George. Nine years before _Looking
Backward_ he had dealt with a sociological theme. In 1879 he wrote _The
Duke of Stockbridge, A Romance of Shay’s Rebellion_, for the _Berkshire
Courier_, which was reissued in book form in 1900. It was a hasty piece
of work that falls off greatly in the latter part; yet in its sympathy
for the agrarian rebels and its probing of the economic sources of
the post-Revolutionary unrest, it was far removed from the temper of
Federalist historians. It is an account of the tyranny of property
rule--of the exploitation of the debtor farmer by the creditor
gentleman made possible by the economic maladjustments resulting
from the war. A bitter discontent is in the hearts of the common
people. Hatred of lawyers and courts and process-servers, has taken
the place of hatred of Tories. Soldiers who had conquered Cornwallis
were returning home only to be conquered by writs and imprisoned by
sheriffs. The exactions of a brutal law fell upon helpless victims;
taxes outran incomes and there was no money to pay. Economic injustice
was daily whetting the edge of class bitterness. The animus of Shays’s
Rebellion is compressed into a few paragraphs that suggest how clearly
Bellamy had analyzed the social struggle.
“I use ter think ez there wuzn’t no sech varmint ez a tory; but
I didn’t know nothin’ ’bout lawyers and sheriffs them times. I
calc’late ye could cut five tories aout o’ one lawyer an’ make a
dozen skunks aout o’ what wuz left over.”
“I hearn as haow Squire Woodbridge says taxes is ten times what
they wuz afore the war, an’ its sartin that there ain’t one
shillin’ inter folks’ pockets ter pay ’em with where there wuz ten
on ’em in them days.... It seems darn curis, bein’ as we fit ag’in
the red coats jest ter git rid o’ taxes.”[780]
So felt the agrarian. Now for the gentleman:
“That is the trouble nowadays, ... these numskulls must needs
have matters of government explained to them, and pass their own
judgment on public affairs. And when they cannot understand them,