Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
historians, political scientists, philosophers, a host of heavy-armed
troops that moved forward in a frontal attack on the strongholds of the
new plutocracy. Few writers in the years between 1903 and 1917 escaped
being drawn into the movement--an incorrigible romantic perhaps, like
the young James Branch Cabell, or a cool patrician like Edith Wharton;
and with such popular novelists as Winston Churchill, Robert Herrick,
Ernest Poole, David Graham Phillips, Upton Sinclair, and Jack London
embellishing the rising liberalism with dramatic heroes and villains,
and dressing their salads with the wickedness of Big Business; with
such political leaders as Bob La Follette and Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson beating up the remotest villages for recruits; with such
scholars as Thorstein Veblen, Charles A. Beard, and John Dewey, and
such lawyers as Louis Brandeis, Frank P. Walsh, and Samuel Untermyer,
the movement gathered such momentum and quickened such a ferment as
had not been known before in the lands since the days of the Abolition
controversy. The mind and conscience of America were stirred to their
lowest sluggish stratum, and a democratic renaissance was all aglow on
the eastern horizon.
At the core it was a critical realistic movement that spread quietly
amongst intellectuals, but the nebulous tail of the comet blazed across
the sky for all to wonder at: and it was the tail rather than the core
that aroused the greatest immediate interest. Lincoln Steffens, Charles
Edward Russell, Ida Tarbell, Gustavus Myers, and Upton Sinclair were
read eagerly because they dealt with themes that many were interested
in--the political machine, watered stock, Standard Oil, the making of
great fortunes, and the like--and they invested their exposures with
the dramatic interest of a detective story. Up to 1910 it was largely
a muckraking movement--to borrow President Roosevelt’s picturesque
phrase; a time of brisk housecleaning that searched out old cobwebs
and disturbed the dust that lay thick on the antiquated furniture.
The Gilded Age had been slovenly and such a housecleaning was long
overdue. There was a vast amount of nosing about to discover bad
smells, and to sensitive noses the bad smells seemed to be everywhere.
Evidently some hidden cesspool was fouling American life, and as the
inquisitive plumbers tested the household drains they came upon the
source of infection--not one cesspool but many, under every city hall
and beneath every state capitol--dug secretly by politicians in the pay
of respectable business men. It was these cesspools that were poisoning
the national household, and there would be no health in America till
they were filled in and no others dug.
It was a dramatic discovery and when the corruption of American
politics was laid on the threshold of business--like a bastard on the
doorsteps of the father--a tremendous disturbance resulted. There was
a great fluttering and clamor amongst the bats and owls, an ominous
creaking of the machine as the wrenches were thrown into the well-oiled
wheels, and a fierce sullen anger at the hue and cry set up. To many
honest Americans the years between 1903 and 1910 were abusive and
scurrilous beyond decency, years when no man and no business, however
honorable, was safe from the pillory; when wholesale exposure had grown
profitable to sensation-mongers, and great reputations were lynched
by vigilantes and reputable corporations laid under indictment at the
bar of public opinion. Respectable citizens did not like to have their
goodly city held up to the world as “corrupt and contented”; they did
not like to have their municipal housekeeping brought into public
disrepute no matter how sluttish it might be. It was not pleasant for
members of great families to read a cynical history of the origins of
their fortunes, or for railway presidents seeking political favors to
find on the newsstand a realistic account of the bad scandals that had
smirched their roads. It was worse than unpleasant, it was hurtful to
business. And so quietly, and as speedily as could be done decently,
the movement was brought to a stop by pressure put on the magazines
that lent themselves to such harmful disclosures. Then followed a
campaign of education. Responding to judicious instruction, conducted
in the columns of the most respectable newspapers, the American public
was soon brought to understand that it was not the muck that was
harmful, but the indiscretion of those who commented in print on the
bad smells. It was reckoned a notable triumph for sober and patriotic
good sense.
So after a few years of amazing activity the muckraking movement came
to a stop. But not before it had done its work; not before the American
middle class had been indoctrinated in the elementary principles of
political realism and had rediscovered the social conscience lost
since the days of the Civil War. Many a totem had been thrown down by
the irreverent hands of the muckrakers, and many a fetish held up to
ridicule, and plutocracy in America would not recover its peace of
mind until at great cost the totems should be set up again and the
fetishes reanointed with the oil of sanctity. The substantial result
of the movement was the instruction it afforded in the close kinship
between business and politics--a lesson greatly needed by a people long
fed on romantic unrealities. It did not crystallize for the popular
mind in the broad principle of economic determinism; that remained
for certain of the intellectuals to apply to American experience.
But with its sordid object--service--it punished the flabby optimism
of the Gilded Age, with its object-lessons in business politics; it
revealed the hidden hand that was pulling the strings of the political
puppets; it tarnished the gilding that had been carefully laid on
our callous exploitation, and it brought under common suspicion the
captain of industry who had risen as a national hero from the muck of
individualism. It was a sharp guerilla attack on the sacred American
System, but behind the thin skirmish-line lay a volunteer army that was
making ready to deploy for a general engagement with plutocracy.
With the flood of light thrown upon the fundamental law by the
historians, the movement of liberalism passed quickly through
successive phases of thought. After the first startled surprise it
set about the necessary business of acquainting the American people
with its findings in the confident belief that a democratic electorate
would speedily democratize the instrument. Of this first stage the
late Professor J. Allen Smith’s _The Spirit of American Government_
(1907) was the most adequate expression, a work that greatly influenced
the program of the rising Progressive Party. But changes came swiftly
and within half a dozen years the movement had passed from political
programs to economic, concerned not so greatly with political democracy
as with economic democracy. Of this second phase Professor Beard’s
notable study, _An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution_ (1913),
was the greatest intellectual achievement. Underlying this significant
work was a philosophy of politics that set it sharply apart from
preceding studies--a philosophy that unsympathetic readers were quick
to attribute to Karl Marx, but that in reality derived from sources
far earlier and for Americans at least far more respectable. The
current conception of the political state as determined in its form
and activities by economic groups is no modern Marxian perversion of
political theory; it goes back to Aristotle, it underlay the thinking
of Harrington and Locke and the seventeenth-century English school,
it shaped the conclusions of Madison and Hamilton and John Adams, it
ran through all the discussions of the Constitutional Convention, and
it reappeared in the arguments of Webster and Calhoun. It was the
main-traveled road of political thought until a new highway was laid
out by French engineers, who, disliking the bog of economics, surveyed
another route by way of romantic equalitarianism. The logic of the
engineers was excellent, but the drift of politics is little influenced
by logic, and abstract equalitarianism proved to be poor material for
highway construction. In divorcing political theory from contact with
sobering reality it gave it over to a treacherous romanticism. In
seeking to avoid the bog of economics it ran into an arid desert.
To get back once more on the main-traveled road, to put away all
profitless romanticisms and turn realist, taking up again the method
of economic interpretation unused in America since the days of Webster
and Calhoun, became therefore the business of the second phase of
liberalism to which Professor Beard applied himself. The earlier
group of liberals were ill equipped to wage successful war against
plutocracy. Immersed in the traditional equalitarian philosophy, they
underestimated the strength of the enemies of democracy. They did
not realize what legions of Swiss Guards property can summon to its
defense. They were still romantic idealists tilting at windmills,
and it was to bring them to a sobering sense of reality that _The
Economic Interpretation of the Constitution_ was written. If property
is the master force in every society one cannot understand American
institutional development until one has come to understand the part
property played in shaping the fundamental law. Interpreted thus the
myths that had gathered about the Constitution fell away of themselves
and the document was revealed as English rather than French, the
judicious expression of substantial eighteenth-century realism that
accepted the property basis of political action, was skeptical of
romantic idealisms, and was more careful to protect title-deeds to
legal holdings than to claim unsurveyed principalities in Utopia. If
therefore liberalism were to accomplish any substantial results it
must approach its problems in the same realistic spirit, recognizing
the masterful ambitions of property, recruiting democratic forces to
overmaster the Swiss Guards, leveling the strongholds that property had
erected within the organic law, and taking care that no new strongholds
should rise. The problem confronting liberalism was the problem of the
subjection of property to social justice.
Yet interesting as was the muckraking tail of the comet, far more
significant was the core--the substantial body of knowledge gathered by
the scholars and flung into the scale of public opinion. The realities
of the American past had been covered deep with layers of patriotic
myths, provided in simpler days when the young Republic, suffering
from a natural inferiority complex, was building up a defense against
the acrid criticism of Tory Europe. Those myths had long since served
their purpose and had become a convenient refuge for the bats and owls
of the night; it was time to strip them away and apply to the past
objective standards of scholarship, and to interpret it in the light
of an adequate philosophy of history. To this work, so essential to
any intelligent understanding of the American experiment, a group of
historians and political scientists turned with competent skill, and
the solid results of their labor remained after the popular ferment
subsided, as a foundation for later liberals to build on.
The journalistic muckrakers had demonstrated that America was not in
fact the equalitarian democracy it professed to be, and the scholars
supplemented their work by tracing to its historical source the
weakness of the democratic principle in governmental practice. America
had never been a democracy for the sufficient reason that too many
handicaps had been imposed upon the majority will. The democratic
principle had been bound with withes like Samson and had become a