Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
no longer what they were, are likely to find themselves today in the
unhappy predicament of being treated as mourners at their own funerals.
When they pluck up heart to assert that they are not yet authentic
corpses, but living men with brains in their heads, they are pretty
certain to be gently chided and led back to the comfortable armchair
that befits senility. Their counsel is smiled at as the chatter of a
belated post-Victorian generation that knew not Freud, and if they
must go abroad they are bidden take the air in the garden where other
old-fashioned plants--mostly of the family _Democratici_--are still
preserved. It is not pleasant for them. It is hard to be dispossessed
by one’s own heirs, and especially hard when those heirs, in the
cheerful ignorance of youth, forget to acknowledge any obligations
to a hard-working generation that laid by a very substantial body of
intellectual wealth, the income from which the heirs are spending
without even a “Thank you.” If therefore the middle-aged liberal
occasionally grows irritable and indulges in caustic comment on the
wisdom of talkative young men it may be set down as the prerogative of
the armchair age and lightly forgiven.
Yet in sober fact there are the solidest reasons for such irritation.
The younger liberals who love to tweak the nose of democracy are
too much enamored of what they find in their own mirrors. They are
indisputably clever, they are spouting geysers of smart and cynical
talk, they have far outrun their fathers in the free handling
of ancient tribal totems--but they are afflicted with the short
perspective of youth that finds a vanishing-point at the end of its
own nose. There is no past for them beyond yesterday. They are having
so good a time playing with ideas that it does not occur to them to
question the validity of their intellectual processes or to inquire
into the origins of the ideas they have adopted so blithely. Gaily
engaged in smashing _bourgeois_ idols, the young intellectuals are too
busy to realize that it was the older generation that provided them
with a hammer and pointed out the idols to be smashed. It is the way of
youth.
Middle-aged liberals--let it be said by way of defense--at least know
their history. They were brought up in a great age of liberalism--an
age worthy to stand beside the golden forties of last century--and
they went to school to excellent teachers. Darwin, Spencer, Mill, Karl
Marx, Haeckel, Taine, William James, Henry George, were masters of
which no school in any age need feel ashamed; nor were such tutors and
undermasters as Ruskin, William Morris, Matthew Arnold, Lester Ward,
Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, to be dismissed as incompetent. To the
solution of the vexing problems entailed by industrialism--in America
as well as in Europe--was brought all the knowledge that had been
accumulating for a century. It was a time of reëvaluations when much
substantial thinking was done; when the flood of light that came with
the doctrine of biological evolution lay brilliant on the intellectual
landscape and the dullest mind caught some of the reflection. Few of
the young scholars attended the lectures of Friedrich Nietzsche, and
behavioristic psychology had not yet got into the curriculum; but Ladd
and James were inquiring curiously into the mechanism of the brain, and
animal psychology was preparing the way for the later Freudians. It was
the end of an age perhaps, the rich afterglow of the Enlightenment, but
the going down of the sun was marked by sunset skies that gave promise
of other and greater dawns.
To have spent one’s youth in such a school was a liberal education.
The mind opened of its own will. Intellectual horizons were daily
widening and the new perspectives ran out into cosmic spaces. The cold
from those outer spaces had not yet chilled the enthusiasms that were
a heritage from the Enlightenment, and the social idealism begotten by
the democratic nature school still looked confidently to the future.
They were ardent democrats--the young liberals of the nineties--and
none doubted the finality or sufficiency of the democratic principle,
any more than Mill or Spencer had doubted it. All their history and
all their biology justified it, and the business of the times was to
make it prevail in the sphere of economics as it prevailed in the
realm of the political. The cure for the evils of democracy was held
to be more democracy, and when industrialism had been brought under
its sway--when America had become an economic democracy--a just and
humane civilization would be on the threshold of possibility. To the
achievement of that great purpose the young liberals devoted themselves
and the accomplishments of the next score of years were the work of
their hands. Certain intellectuals had been democrats--Paine and
Jefferson and Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman and Melville--but they
were few in comparison with the skeptical Whigs who professed democracy
only to bind its hands. The Republican party had not been democratic
since former days--and as Henry Adams said in 1880, it was accounted
foolishness to believe in it in 1880. Autocracy was a toy to distract
the voting man from the business of money-getting.
It was from such a school--richer in intellectual content, one might
argue, than any the younger liberals have frequented--that the ferment
of twenty years ago issued; a school dedicated to the ideals of the
Enlightenment and bent on carrying through the unfulfilled program
of democracy. Democratic aspirations had been thwarted hitherto by
the uncontrolled play of the acquisitive instinct; the immediate
problem of democracy was the control of that instinct in the common
interest. Economics had controlled the political state to its narrow
and selfish advantage; it was for the political state to resume its
sovereignty and extend its control over economics. So in the spirit of
the Enlightenment the current liberalism dedicated itself to history
and sociology, accepting as its immediate and particular business a
reëxamination of the American past in order to forecast an ampler
democratic future. It must trace the rise of political power in America
in order to understand how that power had fallen into the unsocial
hands of economics. The problem was difficult. American political
history had been grossly distorted by partisan interpretation and
political theory had been dissipated by an arid constitutionalism. The
speculative thinker had long been dispossessed by the eulogist and
the lawyer, both of whom had subsisted on a thin gruel of patriotic
myths. Even the social historians, though dealing in materials rich in
suggestion, had been diffident in the matter of interpretation, without
which history is no more than the dry bones of chronicle. Inheriting
no adequate philosophy of historical evolution, the young school of
historians must first provide themselves with one, in the light of
which the American past should take on meaning, and the partisan
struggles, hitherto meaningless, should fall into comprehensible
patterns.
That necessary work was to engage them for years, but in the meanwhile,
as critical realists, their immediate business was with facts and the
interpretation of facts. John Fiske a few years before had essayed to
interpret the rise of democracy in America by analogy from biological
evolution, tracing the source of American democracy to the New England
town meeting, which he explained as a resurgence of ancient Teutonic
folk-ways. The theory was tenuous and it was not till Professor Turner
drew attention to the creative influence of the frontier on American
life that the historians were provided with a suggestive working
hypothesis. Before that hypothesis could be adequately explored,
however, and brought into just relations to a comprehensive philosophy
of history, the rise of liberalism was well under way, marked by a
rich ferment of thought that made the early years of the new century
singularly stimulating. That ferment resulted from pouring into the
vial of native experience the reagent of European theory--examining the
ways of American industrialism in the light of continental socialism;
and the result was an awakening of popular interest in social control
of economics, a widespread desire to bring an expanding industrialism
into subjection to a rational democratic program, that was to provide
abundant fuel to the social unrest that had burst forth in sporadic
flames for a generation. The great movement of liberalism that took
possession of the American mind after the turn of the century--a
movement not unworthy to be compared with the ferment of the eighteen
forties--was the spontaneous reaction of an America still only half
urbanized, still clinging to ideals and ways of an older simpler
America, to an industrialism that was driving its plowshare through
the length and breadth of the familiar scene, turning under the rude
furrows what before had been growing familiarly there. It was the first
reaction of America to the revolutionary change that followed upon the
exhaustion of the frontier--an attempt to secure through the political
state the freedoms that before had come from unpreëmpted opportunity.
For a quarter of a century following the great westward expansion
of the late sixties America had been drifting heedlessly towards a
different social order. The shambling frontier democracy that had
sufficed an earlier time was visibly breaking down in presence of the
imperious power of a centralizing capitalism. The railways were a
dramatic embodiment of the new machine civilization that was running
head on into a primitive social organism fashioned by the old domestic
economy, and the disruptions and confusions were a warning that the
country was in for vast changes. New masters, new ways. The rule of the
captain of industry had come. The farmers had long been in ugly mood,
but their great rebellion was put down in 1896, and never again could
they hope to wrest sovereignty from capitalism. The formal adoption
of the gold standard in 1900 served notice to the world that America
had put away its democratic agrarianism, that a shambling Jacksonian
individualism had had its day, and that henceforth the destiny of the
country lay in the hands of its business men. Capitalism was master
of the country and though for the present it was content to use the
political machinery of democracy it was driving towards an objective
that was the negation of democracy.
The immediate reaction to so broad a shift in the course of manifest
destiny was a growing uneasiness amongst the middle class--small
business and professional men--who looked with fear upon the program
of the captains of industry. Industrialization brought its jars and
upsets. The little fish did not enjoy being swallowed by the big, and
as they watched the movement of economic centralization encroaching
on the field of competition they saw the doors of opportunity closing
to them. It was to this great body of _petite bourgeoisie_ that
members of the lesser intellectuals--journalists, sociologists,
reformers--were to make appeal. The work was begun dramatically with
the spectacularly advertised _Frenzied Finance_, written by Thomas W.
Lawson, and appearing as a series in _McClure’s Magazine_ in 1903. The
immense popular success of the venture proved that the fire was ready
for the fat, and at once a host of volunteer writers fell to feeding
the flames. The new ten-cent magazines provided the necessary vehicle
of publicity, and enterprising editors were soon increasing their
circulations with every issue. As it became evident how popular was the
chord that had been struck, more competent workmen joined themselves to
the group of journalists: novelists--a growing army of them--essayists,