Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
plaything for the Philistines. From the beginning--the scholars
discovered--democracy and property had been at bitter odds; the
struggle invaded the Constitutional Convention, it gave form to the
party alignment between Hamilton and Jefferson, Jackson and Clay, and
then during the slavery struggle, sinking underground like a lost
river, it nevertheless had determined party conflicts down to the
present. In this ceaseless conflict between the man and the dollar,
between democracy and property, the reasons for persistent triumph of
property were sought in the provisions of the organic law, and from
a critical study of the Constitution came a discovery that struck
home like a submarine torpedo--the discovery that the drift toward
plutocracy was not a drift away from the spirit of the Constitution,
but an inevitable unfolding from its premises; that instead of having
been conceived by the fathers as a democratic instrument, it had been
conceived in a spirit designedly hostile to democracy; that it was, in
fact, a carefully formulated expression of eighteenth-century property
consciousness, erected as a defense against the democratic spirit that
had got out of hand during the Revolution, and that the much-praised
system of checks and balances was designed and intended for no other
end than a check on the political power of the majority--a power
acutely feared by the property consciousness of the times.
It was a startling discovery that profoundly stirred the liberal
mind of the early years of the century; yet the really surprising
thing is that it should have come as a surprise. It is not easy to
understand today why since Civil War days intelligent Americans
should so strangely have confused the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, and have come to accept them as complementary
statements of the democratic purpose of America. Their unlikeness is
unmistakable: the one a classical statement of French humanitarian
democracy, the other an organic law designed to safeguard the minority
under republican rule. The confusion must be charged in part to the
lawyers who had taken over the custodianship of the Constitution, and
in part to the florid romantic temper of the middle nineteenth century.
When the fierce slavery struggle fell into the past, whatever honest
realism had risen from the passions of the times was buried with the
dead issue. The militant attacks on the Constitution so common in
Abolitionist circles after 1835, and the criticism of the Declaration
that was a part of the southern argument, were both forgotten, and with
the Union reëstablished by force of arms, the idealistic cult of the
fundamental law entered on a second youth. In the blowsy Gilded Age
the old myths walked the land again, wrapped in battle-torn flags and
appealing to the blood shed on southern battlefields. It was not till
the advent of a generation unblinded by the passions of civil war that
the Constitution again was examined critically, and the earlier charge
of the Abolitionists that it was designed to serve property rather
than men, was heard once more. But this time with far greater weight
of evidence behind it. As the historians dug amongst the contemporary
records they came upon a mass of fact the Abolitionists had been
unaware of. The evidence was written so plainly, in such explicit and
incontrovertible words--not only in _Elliott’s Debates_, but in the
minutes of the several State Conventions, in contemporary letters
and memoirs, in newspapers and pamphlets and polite literature--that
it seemed incredible that honest men could have erred so greatly in
confusing the Constitution with the Declaration.
With the clarification of its philosophy the inflowing waters of
liberalism reached flood-tide; the movement would either recede or pass
over into radicalism. On the whole it followed the latter course,
and the years immediately preceding 1917 were years when American
intellectuals were immersing themselves in European collectivistic
philosophies--in Marxianism, Fabianism, Syndicalism, Guild Socialism.
New leaders were rising, philosophical analysts like Thorstein Veblen
who were mordant critics of American economics. The influence of
socialism was fast sweeping away the last shreds of political and
social romanticism that so long had confused American thinking. The
doctrine of economic determinism was spreading widely, and in the light
of that doctrine the deep significance of the industrial revolution
was revealing itself for the first time to thoughtful Americans. In
its reaction to industrialism America had reached the point Chartist
England had reached in the eighteen-forties and Marxian Germany in the
eighteen-seventies. That was before a mechanistic science had laid its
heavy discouragements on the drafters of democratic programs. Accepting
the principle of economic determinism, liberalism still clung to its
older democratic teleology, convinced that somehow economic determinism
would turn out to be a fairy godmother to the proletariat and that
from the imperious drift of industrial expansion must eventually issue
social justice. Armed with this faith liberalism threw itself into
the work of cleaning the Augean stables, and its reward came in the
achievements of President Wilson’s first administration.
Then the war intervened and the green fields shriveled in an afternoon.
With the cynicism that came with post-war days the democratic
liberalism of 1917 was thrown away like an empty whiskey-flask. Clever
young men began to make merry over democracy. It was preposterous, they
said, to concern oneself about social justice; nobody wants social
justice. The first want of every man, as John Adams remarked a hundred
years ago, is his dinner, and the second his girl. Out of the muck of
the war had come a great discovery--so it was reported--the discovery
that psychology as well as economics has its word to say on politics.
From the army intelligence tests the moron emerged as a singular
commentary on our American democracy, and with the discovery of the
moron the democratic principle was in for a slashing attack. Almost
overnight an army of enemies was marshaled against it. The eugenist
with his isolated germ theory flouted the perfectional psychology of
John Locke, with its emphasis on environment as the determining factor
in social evolution--a psychology on which the whole idealistic
interpretation was founded; the beardless philosopher discovered
Nietzsche and in his pages found the fit master of the moron--the
biological aristocrat who is the flower that every civilization
struggles to produce; the satirist discovered the flatulent reality
that is middle-class America and was eager to thrust his jibes at the
complacent denizens of the Valley of Democracy. Only the behaviorist,
with his insistence on the plasticity of the new-born child, offers
some shreds of comfort to the democrat; but he quickly takes them away
again with his simplification of conduct to imperious drives that
stamp men as primitive animals. If the mass--the raw materials of
democracy--never rises much above sex appeals and belly needs, surely
it is poor stuff to try to work up into an excellent civilization, and
the dreams of the social idealist who forecasts a glorious democratic
future are about as substantial as moonshine. It is a discouraging
essay. Yet it is perhaps conceivable that our current philosophy--the
brilliant coruscations of our younger intelligentsia--may indeed not
prove to be the last word in social philosophy. Perhaps--is this
_lèse-majesté_--when our youngest liberals have themselves come to
the armchair age they will be smiled at in turn by sons who are still
cleverer and who will find their wisdom as foolish as the wisdom of
1917 seems to them today. But that lies on the knees of the gods.
Footnotes
[812] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[813] See J. Allen Smith, _The Spirit of American Government_; W. A.
White, _The Old Order Changeth_.
[814] Representative books are: C. A. Beard, _An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution_ (1913) and _The Economic Basis of
Politics_ (1922); Walter Lippmann, _Public Opinion_ (1922).
[815] See Bertrand Russell, _Proposed Roads to Freedom_ (1919); Richard
Roberts, _The Unfinished Programme of Democracy_ (1920).
[816] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[817] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[818] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[819] Lecture notes.--_Publisher._
[820] _Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, New York, 1920, p. 1.
[821] _The Financier_, New York, c. 1912, p. 250.
[822] _Ibid._, p. 409.
[823] _Ibid._, p. 479.
[824] _The Financier_, p. 432.
[825] _Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub_, p. 87.
[826] When this was written of course _The American Tragedy_, _A Book
about Myself_, Dreiser’s poems, _Moods Cadenced and Declaimed_, and his
further books of travel had not been published.--_Publisher._
[827] Randolph Bourne, _History of a Literary Radical_, p. 203.
[828] _The Financier_, p. 660.
[829] Stuart P. Sherman, _On Contemporary Literature_, New York, 1923,
p. 94. In the syllabus Professor Parrington says: “The most intelligent
estimates of Dreiser are in Randolph Bourne, _History of a Literary
Radical_; H. L. Mencken, _Prefaces_; and Carl Van Doren, _Contemporary
American Novelists_. All other commentators are stupid.”
[830] Published as Number Five of _University of Washington Chapbooks_,
1927.--_Publisher._
[831] The notes that follow are from the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[832] Cabell omitted, as there is a fuller discussion of him
given.--_Publisher._
[833] From the syllabus.--_Publisher._
[834] For a statement of the reaction of a young intellectual to the
war, see Randolph Bourne, _Untimely Papers_, 1919.
[835] For a criticism of Nicholson, see Randolph Bourne, _The History
of a Literary Radical_, p. 128.
[836] See Mr. Cabell’s criticism in _Beyond Life_, pp. 301-307.
[837] For a review see the _Nation_, March 19, 1924.
[838] Sinclair Lewis omitted, as fuller material has been
given.--_Publisher._
[839] From the third section in the syllabus, which deals with “A New
Romance.”--_Publisher._
[840] See Cabell’s review of _Messer Marco Polo_ in _Straws and
Prayer-Books_, pp. 52-59. The writer’s full name is Brian Oswald
Donn-Byrne.
[841] For a striking characterization of Hergesheimer, see _The
Bookman_, May, 1922 For an appreciation, see Cabell, _Straws and
Prayer-Books_, pp. 195-221.
[842] See remarks on Miss Cather in the introduction to the text
edition of Ole Rölvaag’s _Giants in the Earth_, which follows these
syllabus notes.--_Publisher._
[843] Introduction to the text edition of Rölvaag’s _Giants in the
Earth_. Copyright 1929 by Harper and Brothers, by whose permission it
is reprinted here.--_Publisher._
[844] Lecture notes. This subject was not included in the contents, but
contains some matter of interest.--_Publisher._
[845] This was apparently not intended as the introduction to Part I of
Book Three, but covers much of the ground indicated there.--_Publisher._
Bibliography
[Professor Parrington left no bibliography apart from the works
mentioned in the text. It has been possible to formulate one with
some certainty by reference to his personal library, theses written
under his supervision, and the record of the books he borrowed from
the University of Washington Library. In the two earlier volumes the
bibliography is rigidly selective. Needless to say, I have not presumed
such knowledge of his intentions. All the pertinent material which it
is known that he used is included.--E. H. Eby.]
Book I: Part I
I. The American Scene. For history of the period see Allan Nevins,
_The Emergence of Modern America, 1865-1878_ (in the series _A History