Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
with a group of poets and essayists, who though they have long been
reckoned ghosts are nevertheless well worth knowing. Even echoes imply
substance somewhere.
V. L. P.
_Seattle, February 22, 1926._
Introduction
The present volume is the second in a proposed study of the main
tendencies of American thought as expressed in our literature. In
the preceding volume I have considered the incoming into America of
certain old-world ideals and institutions, and the subjection of
those ideals and institutions to the pressure of a new environment,
from which resulted the overthrow of the principles of monarchy and
aristocracy, and the setting up of the principle of republicanism.
In the present study I purpose considering certain new growths that
sprang up in the land thus cleared--what particular forms they assumed
and why they assumed such forms. The delimitations of the period
to be treated of are fixed by two wars that disturbed the normal
unfolding of national experience: the War of 1812 that hastened the
development of nineteenth-century ideals, and the Civil War that
uprooted certain of the crasser growths of those vigorous years. The
half century that lay between these dramatic episodes was a period of
extravagant youth, given over to a cult of romanticism that wrought as
many marvels as Aaron’s rod. In the South, in New England, and on the
western frontier, it laid hold of men’s minds, consuming the stubble
of eighteenth-century harvests, sweeping away the drab realisms of
a cautious past, and offering in their stead more alluring ideals.
Revolutions, greater and lesser, trod on each other’s heels; the common
adventure led into unexplored paths; and the final outcome for which it
was all preparing was the emergence of a new middle class that in the
succeeding half century was to subdue America to middle-class ends.
Such drastic overturnings of the customary and familiar, such swift
ruptures with the past, quite evidently do not come from trivial
causes. Men do not put off the old before the new is ready; and if in
those credulous years they turned romantic and refused to heed the
counsels of experience, it was because the soil had been new-plowed for
the growing of such crops as their fathers had not known. The grapes
from which the wine of romance is vinted, it must not be forgotten, are
rooted in the common earth. The loveliest romantic dreams spring from
a parentage that is humbly prosaic. There is no more fruitful source
of romantic hope than a fluid economics that overflows all narrow
preëmptions and sweeps away the restrictions that hamper free endeavor.
With fresh economic realms to conquer, the dullest plodder discovers
a stimulus in anticipation that sets him upon creating a Utopia. The
breaking up of the static, the bold adventuring upon new worlds, is the
fertile soil in which romance springs most luxuriantly. It needs no
uncommon eyes, surely, to discover in the swift changes that came to
America in the wake of the second English war, the seed-bed of those
ebullient romanticisms which in politics and economics, in theology
and literature, turned away so contemptuously from the homespun past.
Of a sudden America was becoming a new world with potentialities
before undreamed of; and this new America was no longer content with
the narrow ways of a more cautious generation. The older America of
colonial days had been static, rationalistic, inclined to pessimism,
fearful of innovation, tenacious of the customary. It conceived of
human nature as evil, and accounting men incurably wicked, it opened no
doors to Utopian dreams of a golden future. The round of daily life was
confined within a narrow domestic economy, with few and rare changes in
social status. Growth in population came mainly from natural increase.
Exploitation was laborious, and such wealth as was laid by was gained
in shop and field, in fisheries and shipping. With its expectations
cramped by a drab agrarianism, it was content to remain primitively
self-sufficient, not given to seeking riches by speculative short-cuts,
clinging to the habitual, distrustful of change.
During the thirty-odd years between the Peace of Paris and the end
of the War of 1812 that older America was dying. The America that
succeeded was a shifting, restless world, youthfully optimistic,
eager to better itself, bent on finding easier roads to wealth
than the plodding path of natural increase. It conceived of human
nature as acquisitive, and accounting acquisitiveness a cardinal
virtue, it set out to inquire what opportunities awaited it in the
unexploited resources of the continent. The cautious ways of earlier
generations were become as much out of date as last year’s almanac. New
commonwealths were rising in the wilderness; immigration from war-torn
Europe was pouring in; wild lands were daily coming on the market.
Money was to be made by the enterprising, and the multitude of the
enterprising was augmenting with the expansion of the settlements. The
ideal of a static society having been put away, progress was assumed
to be the first law of nature, and innovation was accepted as the sign
and seal of progress. It was our first great period of exploitation,
and from it emerged, as naturally as the cock from the mother egg, the
spirit of romance, gross and tawdry in vulgar minds, dainty and refined
in the more cultivated. But always romance. The days of realism were
past, and it was quietly laid away with the wig and smallclothes of an
outgrown generation.
Unfortunately economic romance is more imperious in its demands than
literary romance. Its dreams follow objective desires, and in America
of those days of new beginnings the desires of diverse economic groups
conducted straight to antagonistic imperialisms. The major interests
of the three great sections of the country differentiated more and
more sharply. The East was discovering its Utopia in an industrial
capitalistic order. With the flocking of immigrants to the factories
began the extraordinary expansion of the cities and the movement of
centralization that was eventually to transform America from a rural
to an urban society, supplanting the farmer by the business man and
disintegrating the traditional psychology. The new manufacturing and
the new finance were subjecting an agrarian people to the dislocations
and readjustments implied in the industrial revolution, the outcome of
which no man could foresee. The reaction of this new industrialism upon
the South was immediate. With the improvements in textile manufacturing
came greater demands upon the new southern staple, and an agriculture
that had long been static with its traditional crops of indigo, rice,
and tobacco, began to look forward confidently to a Utopia founded on
cotton, and conceived an imperialistic dream of expanding fields of
white bolls and black slaves, reaching into Mexico and embracing the
West Indies. The new South left off apologizing for slavery and hoping
for its ultimate extinction. Slavery had become enormously profitable
and it proposed to exploit the negro as frankly as New England was
exploiting the Irish immigrant, but more humanely if possible, in
something of the patriarchal spirit.
Meanwhile in the Inland Empire was arising an economics that looked
with little favor on the imperialisms of eastern capitalism or southern
slavery; an economics equalitarian in temper, decentralizing in
impulse; nourished on the idealism of the Declaration of Independence,
but interpreting it to mean the natural right of every free citizen to
satisfy his acquisitive instinct by exploiting the national resources
in the measure of his shrewdness. Democratic in professions, it was
middle-class in spirit and purpose. Discovering the inflowing tide of
immigration to be favorable to speculation, it sought its Utopia in
county-seat towns where land holdings mounted in value with every new
wave. No narrow horizons bounded a realm that stretched to the Pacific
and into the remote Northwest, and no stodgy ways of money-getting
could satisfy men whose imaginations ranged through such spaces. This
country was theirs to do with as they chose, and if eastern capitalism
or southern slavery interfered with their inalienable rights, their
Sharp’s rifles were at hand for defense. In the vast territory drained
by the Mississippi--the “Valley of Democracy,” a recent writer has
chosen to call it--was conceived what may be accounted the most
romantic dream that ever visited the native mind of America. It
impressed de Tocqueville, who discovered the poetry of America in this
romance of a moving frontier, in the vision that led the pioneer on his
conquering way westward, hewing at an interminable wilderness that was
matched only by his ambitions.
Such swift expansions, such mounting romanticisms of temper, must
inevitably provide themselves with correspondent philosophies to phrase
the new aspirations. The nineteenth century was not content to think in
the narrower terms of the eighteenth, but must refashion its thought to
suit the romantic style. The modes which it came to accept were for the
most part of European origin, adapted to new-world needs. From France
and England, and later from Germany, came variant schools of romantic
theory that at bottom were a common glorification of the ideal of
individualism; and this very diversity of interpretation made possible
in America an appeal to different classes and diverse interests, the
sum total of which was a many-sided contribution to social theory, but
a contribution which carried within it the seeds of later conflict.
The first stage in the romanticization of American thought resulted
from the naturalization of French revolutionary theory. Its devious
progress through the country can be traced fairly accurately. Landing
first in Virginia in the early seventeen-seventies, it met with a
hospitable reception from the generous planter society and spread
widely there the fashion of Physiocratic agrarianism. Traveling thence
westward into the Inland Empire it domesticated itself in frontier log
cabins under the guise of an assertive individualism, to issue later
as the coonskin democracy of the Jacksonian revolution. Eventually
reaching New England, the last haven and refuge of eighteenth-century
realism, it disarmed Yankee antagonism by assuming the dress of
Unitarianism and preached the doctrine of human perfectibility with
such conviction as to arouse the conscience of New England to an
extraordinary enthusiasm for reforming man and society. And coming
finally to New York it inoculated the mind of the emerging proletariat
with its doctrine of the rights of man, with Fourieristic and other
Utopias, and turmoiled contemporary politics with equalitarian Locofoco
programs. No other philosophy assumed so many and such attractive
disguises, or wrought such changes in American ideals, as this French
romanticism with its generous humanitarian impulses. The ground was
ready for the seed it was to sow, and if in the judgment of a hostile
philosophy the crop turned out to be tares, increasing thousands
believed it to be excellent wheat, to the growing of which America was
to be dedicated henceforth.
The rival philosophy, which came to view with increasing dislike the
doctrines of French romanticism, was of English middle class origin
and sprang from the long struggle of that class to loose the hands of
the landed gentry from control of the state. Phrased persuasively by
Adam Smith, it embodied the principle of liberalism as that principle
was understood by men of affairs. It conceived of a social Utopia that
must result if economic forces were given free play; if governmental