Chapter IV: • The Beginnings of Criticism (2)

From this excellent school the young Godkin emerged a political theorist of no mean ability; somewhat too dogmatic, perhaps, a bit overconfident of the finality of his logic, but with a shrewd dialectic, quick to separate reality from pretense, severe upon all flummery and buncombe. That his philosophy was sharply opposed to the current tendencies of American political life he saw clearly: to Whiggery with its ambitious paternalisms; to centralization with its glorification of a Bismarckian state. His thought was erected on a foundation of _laissez faire_, and he sharply differentiated economics and politics. As a realist he recognized differences in individual capacity, but he was keenly suspicious of any attempt on the part of government to compensate for such differences. Any interference with natural law, he was convinced, entailed greater evils than benefits. Economic competition is a struggle between individuals, and government must content itself with its proper rôle of policeman to keep the peace. With Mill he refused to recognize the state as a separate entity. He never confused the personnel of government with “what is called ‘the state’”; and as he contemplated the honesty and capacity of the several members who administered government in a given commonwealth, he was disinclined to entrust them with regulative powers. Disinterested honesty and capacity, it seemed, too rarely got into office, governments were too little acquainted with common morality, to justify hopes of equalizing the inequality of nature by political means.

To the sound philosophical equipment brought from England Godkin added a very considerable understanding of American political history. The ten years spent here before the founding of the _Nation_, had been employed in getting at home upon the new scene. He had carefully checked the findings of de Tocqueville and was convinced that the French critic had gone far astray in his interpretation of the great American experiment. In his analysis of democratic tendencies he had fallen into the fallacy of _post hoc ergo propter hoc_, with the result that he had got the cart before the horse; and in an article published in the _North American Review_ of January, 1865, Godkin entered the lists in defense of America against the criticisms of English Tories founded on such fallacies. In its emphasis on historical realism “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy” is a surprisingly modern study that might almost have been written by one of our younger historians. It is an interpretation of our political development in terms of environment, and it traces the rise of democracy to the leveling influence of decentralization. For a hundred and fifty years, he pointed out, old-world habits and customs, the spirit of aristocracy, prevailed in the closely grouped settlements along the Atlantic seaboard, where physical conditions restrained the tendency to social disruption; but with the breaking through of the Appalachian barrier, and the influx of new waves of immigration, the conditions were prepared for a vast movement of decentralization. It was the Inland Empire that made possible the democratic revolution in America. “How was it,” he asks, “that that democratic tide, which within the last fifty years, has overwhelmed everything, during the previous hundred and fifty years gave so few signs of rising?” And his reply to the question antedates Professor Turner’s theory of the frontier by thirty years:

If we inquire what are those phenomena of American society which it
is generally agreed distinguish it from that of older countries,
we shall find ... that by far the larger number of them may be
attributed in a great measure to what, for want of a better name,
we shall call “the frontier life” led by a large proportion of the
inhabitants, and to the influence of this portion on manners and
legislation, rather than to political institutions, or even to the
equality of conditions. In fact, we think that these phenomena,
and particularly those of them which excite most odium in Europe,
instead of being the effect of democracy, are partly its cause, and
that it has been to their agency more than aught else, that the
democratic tide in America has owed most of its force and violence.

The agency which, in our opinion, gave democracy its first great
impulse in the United States, which has promoted its spread ever
since, and has contributed most powerfully to the production of
those phenomena in American society which hostile critics set down
as peculiarly democratic, was neither the origin of the Colonists,
nor the circumstances under which they came to the country, nor
their religious belief; but the great change in the distribution of
the population, which began soon after the Revolution, and which
continues its operation up to the present time.[643]

Godkin was thirty-four when he entered upon his life work of pouring a stream of fresh and free thought upon the ways of the Gilded Age. It was somewhat in the spirit of Matthew Arnold that he interpreted the function of criticism. “The highest allegiance of every man,” he wrote Norton in 1865, “is due to liberty and civilization, or rather civilization and liberty”;[644] and the creed of the _Nation_, which Godkin unconsciously modified as culture dispossessed liberty in his affections, may be summed up in the words democracy, individualism, morality, culture, to the end of a free life in a humane and well-ordered society. Throughout the Gilded Age this transplanted English liberal was the high priest of criticism in America. His caustic intelligence played ironically about the current shibboleths and fetishes, reducing them to shreds and patches. He could discover little that was good in the Gilded Age, in its tariffs and land grants, its _Crédit Mobilier_ and other scandals, its buccaneer plutocracy, its undisciplined proletarianism, its bitter agrarianism; and he was prompted to a severity of judgment that easier-going natures thought harsh. Enemies sprang up in his every footprint; but too much was at stake, he believed, to temper his criticism to flabby minds, and he laid about him with what he considered a fine impartiality.

It was a cold plunge into a dirty pool, and a nature less robust would have scrambled out quickly. His realism was a profound discouragement to his idealism, and his native aristocracy of temperament closed his mind to the virtues of certain homely American liberalisms. As an intellectual he distrusted all Jacksonian frontier freedoms. The doctrine of liberty did not appear to advantage in the garb of agrarians and proletarians; Thaddeus Stevens and Terence V. Powderly were an ungainlier breed of libertarians than Gladstone and Mill; with such leadership it seemed to Godkin that liberty was running away with civilization and a smash-up was likely. It was the duty of the _Nation_, therefore, to arouse the culture of America to its political obligations, to the end that the custodianship of liberty should be taken over by the intelligence of America. It proved a discouraging job, and slowly on the horizon of his mind rose the shadow of the doubt that had troubled de Tocqueville and Cooper and Fisher Ames--must a democracy prove a leveling influence that destroys a fine individuality and a generous social culture? Careless of his trusteeship, was not the American democrat throwing his heritage to the demagogue and the spoilsman?

As he watched the scrambling heedlessness of the times his liberalism oozed away, his democratic faith lost its sanctions, and he slowly drifted to the right and the dead-sea of pessimism. The mass was too powerful in America, and the mass was shot through with the spirit of selfish leveling. The democracy had been distorted by the frontier, and the sense of responsibility, of individual duty, was well-nigh atrophied. The vulgar West threw its crudity upon all America. “I do not like the western type of man,” Godkin confessed to Norton; and to another friend who praised California, he wrote, “No scenery or climate I had to share with western people would charm me.” He never spared his mordant adjectives in commenting privately on all America west of the Hudson River. In his gloomy later years he found consolation in Brahmin culture. For years he lived in Cambridge, and in the company of Lowell and Norton he felt at home. Here were democratic gentlemen worthy of his ideal. If all America were only like Cambridge his faith in a cultivated liberalism would be justified. In those years he called himself “an American of the _vieille roche_,” which being interpreted, meant a liberal of the Brahmin school.

The immediate problems on which Godkin was called to pass judgment brought him into the thick of the struggles of the Gilded Age. As an editor he confronted the bitter antagonisms that sprang from the rivalries of the farmer, the wage-earner, and the industrial capitalist. Each group was seeking to enlist government on its side and use the political state for special and narrow ends. To a disciple of Mill all such attempts were no better than treason to democracy, and when such treason was justified by what he considered specious economic theory Godkin’s hostility was edged with acerbity. All the trenchant dogmas of his philosophy--his police theory of the state, his Ricardian _laissez faire_, his individualism--rushed to the attack of such impudent impostors. With no organized forces at his back he made war on every major group in America. He essayed to rally the scattered minority of the intellectuals and overthrow the citadel of economic power by appeal to reason. It was magnificent but it was scarcely war. The culture of the Gilded Age was undisciplined, lacking faith and unnurtured in philosophy, fastidious rather than vigorous--the poorest of material for shock troops. It applauded every clever thrust of its captain, but preferred to keep its own hands unsoiled. In consequence, to the end of his life Godkin was a leader without a following, little more than a voice crying in the wilderness.

For the rising plutocracy Godkin felt the scorn of a gentleman for the vulgar new-rich. Its hands were dirty, and it was soiling all American life. Its gospel of Whiggery, that under pretense of furthering prosperity had turned Congress into an auction room, was an insult to his Manchester liberalism. Just as surely as government meddles with subsidies and tariffs and grants, he pointed out, will it be defiled. Men are but indifferent honest, and if statesmen are not to become mere political hucksters they must stand apart from the temptations of business. The plea for a national economy had brought Congress to the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandals, and it would breed other scandals so long as it was heeded. The only cure for Whiggery was to destroy it. In a scathing leader he early paid his respects to the Whiggish system of governmental subsidies:

The remedy is simple. The Government must get out of the
“protective” business and the “subsidy” business and the
“improvement” and the “development” business. It must let trade,
and commerce, and manufactures, and steamboats, and railroads, and
telegraphs alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.
We care nothing about the wonderful stories we hear about what can
be achieved in the way of “promoting industry” by all these canal
and steamboat and railroad schemes. Were the material prospect
twice as tempting, the state could not profitably meddle with
them, because neither it nor any other government in the world
_can command the virtue necessary to carry them on_. This is not
a matter of speculation; we know it as a matter of experience. It
is almost as much as this Government can do to maintain order and
administer justice. It may one day be able to do a great deal more,
but not until a great change has occurred in the social condition
of the country. We have gone far enough, heaven knows, on the road
of “protection” and “promotion,” and have found at every step that
it leads straight to the bottomless pit; that for every hundred
dollars voted by these poor men to whom we pay scanty wages for
passing bills at Washington, we lessen, and perceptibly lessen, the
stock of individual honor, of self-respect, and of public spirit,
of a loyalty to ideals, to which far more than to any triumphs of
material industry, we must look for continued national greatness.
We are making money fast enough in all conscience; what needs
fostering just now is honesty.[645]

Godkin found it exceedingly difficult to foster the austere honesty that he desired in the body politic, and in his fury at the common political scoundrelism he came to ascribe much of the virus that was poisoning America to the party of western agrarians. He was rapidly drifting to the right and the defense of capitalism, and as the agrarian platform was slowly built up of successive planks--greenbacks, free silver, subtreasuries, railway regulation, the income tax--he turned upon it all the batteries of his wrath. Godkin never understood the American farmer, but he professed to understand economics and political science, and the agrarian platform aroused his implacable hostility. In his frequent discussions of the currency question, a question that for thirty years was a subject of passionate debate, he was at some disadvantage. Intellectually he was ill equipped to deal with it. Although a Ricardian he failed to grasp Ricardo’s quantitative principle of money or the function of paper currency. As a gold-standard advocate he accepted the English monetary system as it was given form by the Parliamentary Bank Act of 1844, and he would have no tampering with it. To Godkin money was a measure of value, and a fluctuating standard, implied in the quantitative theory, was as immoral as a fluctuating yardstick. The use of greenbacks--“rag money”--he reckoned a scheme by which dishonest debtors might cheat their creditors.[646] He was forced to regard gold and silver as commodities, fluctuating in price with supply and demand; but he looked upon them as possessing a stable natural value that placed them beyond political manipulation. Any attempt to disturb this natural value by artificial means he called dishonest.[647] He was almost indecent in the vehemence of his adjectives applied to the “dishonest money men.” He called the Greenbackers “communists,”[648] and speaking of the Grangers, he said, “There is nothing unnatural or deplorable in a Granger turning from one form of swindle to another.”[649]

By the middle nineties it was hard to distinguish Godkin’s views on the agrarian program from those of a Wall Street banker. In discussing free silver he abandoned economic principles and fell to mouthing like any newspaper writer. The currency question he regarded as a simple question of public morality. There was only one issue, the issue between honest and dishonest money. “The demand for free-silver coinage is a demand for a division of property,”[650] he said in the early days of the campaign of 1896, and a fortnight later he took extreme ground:

... the bold and wicked scheme of repudiation ... is presented
without a blush in the platform. Upon this question the campaign
must be fought. If the party of repudiators cannot be put down, the
republic cannot be preserved and is not worth preserving.[651]

Such pronouncements bear none of the earmarks of dispassionate criticism. It may seem severe to suggest that they are the comments of a very ignorant or shallow critic, blinded by his prejudices; yet it is true. The equipment of Manchester economics with which he had outfitted himself in the late forties, was no longer adequate in the nineties; yet he seems not to have been aware of the fact. The mid-Victorian still regarded himself as an authority on all economic questions, although he seems to have done no serious reading in economic theory for half a century, and was scarcely conscious how far he had drifted towards the right. The old liberal was fighting the battles of capitalism with weapons as antiquated as the old cap-and-ball musket. “The great trouble with all silverites and currency lunatics, North and South,” he said, “is that, when monetary crises arise, they cannot be got to go to the right quarter for information”--a comment that one might retort upon Godkin himself. The intellectual knew far less about money than “Coin” Harvey, whom he would have laughed at.

The same drift to the right is evident in the pronouncements on the Populist movement of the times. Writing on “The Kansas Situation,” when the farmers’ unrest was becoming militant, he remarked:

Such an unexpected outbreak as this of the last two or three
years shows at least that it is not only in the cities, where the
foreign-born swarm, that demagogues may thrive and the doctrine of
revolution be preached.[652]

The “ravings of the Farmers’ movement” he regarded as no more than a “vague and visionary discontent,” that was seeking political cures for its economic ills. The hard times from which the West was suffering were the result of economic law. It was not the currency or excessive railway rates that were the cause. The vast extension of railway systems had brought under cultivation too many acres, and the reduction of transportation costs would serve only to bring additional acres under cultivation, thereby increasing competition and forcing prices still lower. High railway rates were the surest safeguard against further extension of an industry much overdeveloped; and for state legislatures to attempt to fix railway tariffs by law--to attempt to control economic forces by statutes--was sheer folly. In discussing the celebrated Illinois railway legislation Godkin spoke in defense of the roads:

The locomotive is coming in contact with the framework of our
institutions. In this country of simple government, the most
powerful centralizing force which civilization has yet produced
has within the next score years, yet to assume its relation to
that political machinery which is to control and regulate it....
The corporations of course contested the validity of the law. If
the legislature could establish one rate at which they should do
the work of transportation, it could establish another. They were
fighting for their lives and property; it was against taxation
without representation.... An arbitrary power is claimed in the
supreme legislative body to decide on the reasonable rates of the
cost of private services. Just as three hundred years ago the price
of bread and labor was regulated by act of Parliament, so now the
cost of transportation is to be fixed by a jury of twelve men....
Thus far, therefore, the results of the Illinois railroad war must
be regarded as rather portentous than satisfactory.[653]

The “watered-stock hallucination,” that had taken possession of the agrarian mind and aroused such bitterness, he dismissed with a curious comment that did no great credit to his intelligence.

There is ... one difficulty in the way, which is the difficulty
common to many of the proposed reforms in railroad management--the
practice alleged has absolutely no existence except in the heated
brain of the agitators who have imagined it. There are no roads in
the United States on which any attempt has been made to increase
the freight earnings in proportion to the watered stock or
debt.[654]

The passions aroused by the campaign of ’96 swept Godkin from his moorings and left him adrift. He quickly convinced himself that the real issue at stake was the moral integrity of the nation. As he studied the platforms and leaders he found little comfort in either. For McKinley he had the contempt of the intellectual for a purveyor of heavy platitudes, and he flayed him in a two-column leader with his old skill.[655] But for Bryan, the “boy orator of the Platte,” his dislike passed the bounds of decency; and for the Chicago convention that put him in nomination--“the roaring mob” with its “Populistic, anarchistic platform”--his contempt outran his command of invective.

No such collection of inflammatory and reckless men ever put
themselves on exhibition in a national convention. Beside them
the Populists are lamb-like, and the socialists sucking doves.
The country has watched their mad proceedings with disgust and
shuddering, only impatient for the coming of November to stamp out
them and their incendiary doctrines.[656]

To what lengths his overheated brain carried him in those political dogdays, how starkly reactionary he had become, is suggested by his comment on the plank in the Democratic platform attacking the scandal of injunctions:

This blow at the courts shows how true are the instincts of the
revolutionaries. They know their most formidable enemies. Judicial
decisions have again and again drawn the fangs of confiscatory and
revolutionary legislation, and the courts have come more and more
to stand as the great bulwarks of property and personal rights.[657]

Godkin’s last years were not happy. The wave of imperialism that swept over England and America, with its Boer War and Spanish War, brought him acute concern. The world that he knew was slipping from its moorings, and he was fearful of the seas into which it was plunging. The conquest of the Philippines seemed to him a badge of national degradation. Writing in November, 1899, he said:

We are dragging wearily in the old way, killing half a dozen
Filipinos every week, and continually “near the end.” The folly of
ignorance and rascality we are displaying in the attempt to conquer
and have “subjects” would disgrace a trades union.[658]

As he watched the tedious process of subjugation he inclined to attribute to Kipling a large share of the current imperialism. “I think most of the current jingoism on both sides of the water is due to him,” he wrote a few weeks later. “He is the poet of the barrack-room cads,” a “most pernicious, vulgar person”; and his “White Man’s Burden,” cabled to America and printed on the front pages of the newspapers as a message to imperialist America, must have rubbed across Godkin’s raw nerves. The pious cant of Kipling’s imperialism was a bitter cup for a disillusioned liberal. The Jubilee with its fulsome laudation of “fat, useless royalty,” was fittingly commemorated by this noisy poet of imperialism, and Godkin turned away from it all in disgust.

But turn where he might he found no comfort. His old dreams of a free and enlightened democracy rising in America, were dead. Victorian liberalism had been laid away in the grave of John Stuart Mill, and only its ghost was walking in these latter times. Godkin’s last days were bitter, and the gloom that was settling upon him crept into his letters. It is a malady common amongst liberals, and how deeply it had struck in is revealed in such passages as these:

I am not sanguine about the future of democracy. I think we shall
have a long period of decline ... and then a recrudescence under
some other form of society.[659]

I do not know what the future of our modern civilization is to be.
But I stumble where I firmly trod.[660]

Things look very black. I think that while money-making will long
continue on a great scale, the government will shortly undergo
great changes which will be presided over not by men of light and
learning, but by capitalists and adroit politicians.[661]

I came here fifty years ago with high and fond ideals about
America.... They are now all shattered, and I have apparently to
look elsewhere to keep even moderate hopes about the human race
alive.[662]

The idealist is prone to be exigent in his demands upon civilization. He marks out a straight path to the goal of his hopes, and takes it greatly to heart when society chooses to follow other ways to other ends. Godkin’s mind was keenly critical, but his sympathies were narrow and his prejudices great. It is well to be a friend to civilization, but it is foolish to set up as a custodian; for civilization, like Topsy, will shift for itself. A just and liberal government is an excellent ideal, but it is one for which few amongst the mass of men greatly care; and because America chose to follow its own nose, because it would not become like the America of his dreams, Godkin allowed his heart to fill with bitterness. It is true that his recompense for long years of labor was scanty; the Gilded Age was not to be frightened from its fleshpots by his warnings. But long ago it was said, “Wisdom crieth in the streets and no man regardeth her,” and why should Godkin have become discouraged with civilization because certain blackguard years clove to their blackguardry, instead of mounting to the somewhat arid heights he pointed out? One must choose at the last between tolerance and pessimism, and Godkin chose pessimism.

It is difficult today to understand his great influence with cultivated readers of his generation. In part perhaps it was due to his crisp assurance. He put things so plumply, he wrote so brilliantly, that his readers were persuaded he must think as neatly. Yet his trenchant prose style cannot hide a certain slightness of matter. His later comments tended to become ever thinner and shriller--not criticism at all, but the sharp expression of aging prejudice. When he talked about the tariff he had Mill at his elbow; but when he talked about the agrarian or the proletarian movements he was little more than a blue-jay scolding at a world he disliked. Unlike his great master he did not go forward to meet new times; he did not reinterpret Victorian liberalism in the light of the lessons taught by the Industrial Revolution; but by standing still he did liberalism a real disservice.

IV • Fiction Considers the State of the Country

It was only a question of time before the novel would throw off the inhibitions of the genteel and turn to consider the state of the country. A changing social order would not fail of reflection in the pages of fiction, and as the novelists fell to scrutinizing the familiar scene, comparing the reality with the patriotic professions, it was certain that the workings of democracy would come in for sharp criticism. In the last decades of the century the problem novel spread swiftly, expanding the field of its inquiry, and seeking to understand the new ways. Making its first essays in the familiar field of the political, it soon turned to consider the economic problems arising out of the new industrialism, espousing either capitalism or labor as the social sympathies of the author might determine. The class passions of the times found a reflection in its pages, and in consequence the sociological novel became increasingly a repository of the social ideas of a perplexed and troubled generation.

1 • The Political Novel

Of the early political novels three are of sufficient interest to reward attention: _The Gilded Age_ (1873), _Democracy_ (1881), and _An American Politician_ (1884). The first, written by Mark Twain in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, is a satire of Gilded Age ways with particular attention to the political corruption of General Grant’s administration. The fictional disguise is slight. The actual Washington is presented vividly and familiar figures--Ben Butler, Oakes Ames, President Grant, Secretary Boutwell--move through the scene. The central figure, Senator Dillworthy, was modeled upon Senator Pomeroy of Kansas, who had recently lost a reëlection through an unlucky exposure of an attempt to bribe the Kansas legislature. The heroine, Laura Hawkins, is a western lobbyist who in order to put through a congressional steal under pretense of providing an industrial school for the freedmen, twists Congressmen about her fingers, turns adventuress and ends in tragedy. Out of the West comes the spirit of corruption that the respectable East is unable to withstand, until the itch of speculation infects the whole country. It is Colonel Sellers who embodies the slackness of frontier political morals, that in turn vitiates his political principles. The genial Colonel is quite frankly a Greenbacker.

The country is getting along very well, [he said] but our public
men are too timid. What we want is more money. I’ve told Boutwell
so. Talk of basing the currency on gold; you might as well base it
on pork. Gold is only one product. Base it on everything! You’ve
got to do something for the West. How am I to move my crops? We
must have improvements. Grant’s got the idea. We want a canal from
the James River to the Mississippi. Government ought to build
it.[663]

The analysis is not penetrating. The real sources of political corruption--the rapacious railway lobbyists that camped in brigades about the capitol building--are passed over, and attention is fastened on small steals--the Knobs University bill and the Columbus River Navigation scheme--that do not touch the real rascals of the day. The implication is unmistakable that the source of corruption is the Jacksonian West with its heritage of the spoils spirit. The Federalistic East is victimized by the rapacities of mid-western politicians with their religious cant, their talk of the rights of the people and the greatness of the plain democracy. Senator Dillworthy is fairly unctuous in his oily Christian spirit, and Brother Balaam is his fellow. The portraits, one suspects, need not be taken seriously as pictures of the chief apostles of preëmption and exploitation. To have sketched the real leaders of the great barbecue might have involved too many unpleasantries.

_Democracy_, written seven years later, is an inferior book in every way, less penetrating, less amusing, less creative. To essay to penetrate the dark places of political jobbery through the eyes of a society woman, too high-bred to turn lobbyist and inveigle secrets out of ambitious politicians, is sufficiently absurd, yet not uncharacteristic of the Henry Adams whose home was a distinguished salon and who in pottering about the political world of Washington deceived himself in thinking he had his finger on the web of intrigue. It is an amazing book for such a man to write. The attitude is that of the kid-gloved reformer who goes in for civil service reform, and who views the uncultivated West as the source of all political corruption. The hero, Senator Silas Ratcliffe of Peoria, Illinois, like Senator Dillworthy, is a past master in political organization who covers his dishonesty with religious cant. The economic sources of political corruption are ignored, and the evil is traced to the principle of democracy. Whatever political convictions are in the book are expressed by Representative Gore, a civil service reformer from Massachusetts, and quite evidently Henry Adams himself; and the conclusion is thus set forth:

“Do you yourself think democracy the best government, and universal
suffrage a success?”

Mr. Gore saw himself pinned to the wall, and he turned at bay with
almost the energy of despair:

“These are matters about which I rarely talk in society.... But
since you ask for my political creed, you shall have it. I only
condition that it shall be for you alone, never to be repeated
or quoted as mine. I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will
faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears
to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it.
Democracy asserts the fact that the masses are now raised to a
higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at
this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to
see the result. I grant it is an experiment, but it is the only
direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only
conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the
only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other step
is backward, and I do not want to repeat the past. I am glad to
see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be
neutral.”

“And supposing your experiment fails,” said Mrs. Lee; “suppose
society destroys itself with universal suffrage, corruption, and
communism.”

“... I have faith; not perhaps in the old dogmas, but in the new
ones.... faith in science; faith in the survival of the fittest.
Let us be true to our time, Mrs. Lee! If our age is to be beaten,
let us die in the ranks. If it is to be victorious, let us be first
to lead the column. Anyway, let us not be skulkers or grumblers.
There! have I repeated my catechism correctly? You would have it!
Now oblige me by forgetting it. I should lose my character at home
if it got out.”[664]

And the conclusion of the matter is thus summed up:

“I want to go to Egypt,” said Madelaine, still smiling faintly;
“democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces. Oh, what rest it would
be to live in the Great Pyramid and look out forever at the polar
star!”

Not a hint of the Industrial Revolution; not a hint of the sordid Whiggery that was fouling American politics; not a suggestion of any creative social philosophy on which to establish an adequate theory of democracy. A dreary place at best, with no faith in human nature and no trust in democratic machinery, but only a gentlemanly belief that an antiquated Federalism may somehow pull this venture in republicanism out of the bog in which Jacksonianism had mired it. No wonder Henry Adams would not set his name on the title-page, but left it an orphan to make its own way in the world. In his life of John Hay, William Roscoe Thayer has explained the situation thus:

The Adamses, the Hays, and Clarence King formed an inner circle,
which somebody named “The Five of Hearts,” and out of this came,
in 1882, a novel entitled _Democracy_, a strikingly clever satire
on Washington society. Its authorship was at once attributed to
them, but one after another denied it. If it was a joint product
no individual could monopolize the credit; and as it seems to have
been read chapter by chapter to the group, and discussed by them
all, it might be said, technically, to be a composite. Clarence
King is still commonly regarded as its author; and there are many
supporters of Hay; but I believe that only Mr. Adams possessed the
substance, and style, and the gift of Voltairean raillery which
distinguish it.[665]

Mr. Thayer is generous in his praise.

_An American Politician_ is even less consequential as a political study than _Democracy_. Marion Crawford was a professional romancer and in this naïve venture into a field little known to him he carried his complete romantic kit. The political theme is tied about with so many love strands as almost to strangle it. The hero, John Harrington, we are assured is a very remarkable man, a Bostonian with a Mayflower teapot in his family treasures, an idealist of primitive Puritan intensity. But we must take him upon hearsay. Nothing that he does or says suggests his greatness. Politically the book is reduced to a little glimpse of the methods of selecting a United States senator--an Irish ward boss with twenty votes in his belt, a gentlemanly railway attorney who handles offal skillfully with a handkerchief at his nose--set in between two set speeches by the hero. The rest is Newport and the Back Bay, not quite stupid yet with no distinction. The romancer does not move easily in an unfamiliar field, and he sends his hero forth to battle for righteousness with small intellectual equipment. His speeches are heavily oratorical and his political philosophy is naïve; it is pretty much George William Curtis, the sufficiency of civil service reform and the virtues of non-partisanship.

The unreality of the book is furthered by a conception worthy of Poe--a mysterious council of three that meets in London and directs political movements in America. We are dimly aware that the council is both ancient and honorable; that it goes back historically to post-Revolutionary days and is self-perpetuating; and its uncanny power has resulted from supreme intelligence supplemented by exact information gathered during many years. In its secret archives every public man in America is tagged and docketed; his political and financial affiliations are set down in detail; and on the basis of this knowledge the cryptic three send forth instructions that are faithfully carried out. The danger to America lies in sectionalism--North, South, and West struggling for supremacy in the national councils; and upon the three rests the self-imposed responsibility of saving America from itself. The idea is sufficiently absurd, as the book is absurd. Crawford was a cosmopolitan who knew little about American political conditions, and the crisis of the novel is the Hayes-Tilden _impasse_ of 1876. The influence of the novel, one may safely assume, was negligible.[666]

2 • The Economic Novel

The theme of these earlier novels was politics as revealed by the Gilded Age; on the other hand _The Bread-winners_ was one of the early economic novels. Like _Democracy_ it was an outcome of the discussions of the vivacious trio, John Hay, Clarence King, and Henry Adams. Written in 1882 by Hay, it was published anonymously in the _Century Magazine_ from August, 1883, to January, 1884. Hay never publicly acknowledged the authorship, and it was not until the edition of 1915 appeared with an introductory note by his son, that his name appeared on the title-page. It achieved a notable success--far beyond that of _Democracy_; was warmly praised and sharply criticized; was replied to in other novels; all of which goes to show that it fanned the coals that were smoldering in the industrial life of the day, threatening a general conflagration. It was the first recognition on the part of literature that a class struggle impended in America--a first girding of the loins of polite letters to put down the menace that looked out from the underworld of the proletariat; and as such it assumes importance as an historical document quite beyond its significance as a work of art.

The motive of _The Bread-winners_ is the defense of property against the “dangerous classes”; its immediate theme is a satire of labor unions. In an introductory note to the later edition, Clarence Leonard Hay explicitly denies this. “_The Bread-winners_,” he says, “is not directed against organized labor. It is rather a protest against the disorganization and demoralization of labor by unscrupulous leaders and politicians who, in the guise of helping the workingman, use his earnings to enrich themselves.” He then states the theme thus:

It is a defense of the right of an individual to hold property, and
a plea for the better protection of that property by law and order.
Civilization rests upon law, order, and obedience. The agitator
who preaches that obedience to lawful authority is a sin, and
patriotism an illusion, is more dangerous to society than the thief
who breaks in at night and robs the householder.

The editor thinks well of the American workingmen. At heart they are sound; their motives are honest; but their ignorance of fundamental economic principles too easily suffers them to fall victim to unscrupulous demagogues whose only object is their exploitation. To prevent such “disorganization and demoralization of labor,” which can bring only suffering and failure upon men ill prepared to endure them, is therefore the patriotic duty of the educated classes. The proletariat is groping blindly for leadership; it is stirring uneasily; if the educated classes do not offer an enlightened leadership, the laborer will follow low cunning to immoral ends and blind leaders of the blind will bring irretrievable disaster upon civilization. Selfish appeal will kindle envy and hate; the rich and prosperous will go down before brute force; the rights of property will be destroyed; law, order, and obedience will give place to anarchy.

Such, briefly developed, is Clarence Hay’s exposition of _The Bread-winners_; and the exposition seems to suggest the social views of John Hay. He probably had no antipathy to labor unions which are guided in their policy by “sound economic principles” and right “morality”--as the capitalist understands such things. But labor unions which follow their own leaders, which persist in thinking out a proletarian economy, which are bent on substituting a social morality for a property morality, which refuse to be led by the “educated classes,” he was bitterly hostile to. It is the unrest furthered by rebellious labor unions that he fears, and it is this that gives point and animus to his satire. That _The Bread-winners_ was conceived in a spirit of beneficent paternalism towards the proletariat, the present-day reader will have difficulty in discovering. It is too frank in defense of vested interests, it looks with too stern a disfavor upon all labor leaders who refuse to accept the finality of the present industrial order, it exudes too strong an odor of property-morality, to deceive an intelligent reader. Read today it is clearly a partisan defense of economic individualism, an attack upon the rising labor movement, a grotesque satire smeared with an unctuous morality--and because of this, a perfect expression of the spirit of upper-class America in those uneasy eighties with their strikes and lockouts and Haymarket riots.

The plot of the book is slight--it is the story of the oily machinations of Ananias Offitt, a professional agitator who lives off simple honest workmen whom he seduces, organizes a secret Brotherhood of the Breadwinners, urges on riot and robbery at the time of a great strike, is checkmated by the hero--a cultivated and elegant clubman by the name of Captain Arthur Farnham--betrays his tool, and in the end is murdered by him. Fortunately for the welfare of property interests there are “honest” workmen, men like Leopold Grosshammer, who rally to the support of law and order and eventually break the strike. The love-story is provided with two heroines, and the contrast between them emphasizes the class line which property draws. The upper-class heroine is as correct and colorless as Cooper’s Eve Effingham: the lower-class heroine is as vulgarly handsome and as brazen as “such people” are supposed to be. A high-school education has spoilt her for the factory or domestic service, filling her empty head with foolish ambitions, but it could not make a lady of her.

Hay was in Cleveland at the time of the great strike in 1877, and he was profoundly disturbed by the experience. Writing to his father-in-law, he said:

The prospects of labor and capital both seem gloomy enough.
The very devil seems to have entered into the lower classes of
workingmen, and there are plenty of scoundrels to encourage them
to all lengths.... I am thankful you did not _see_ and _hear_
what took place during the strikes. You were saved a very painful
experience of human folly and weakness, as well as crime.[667]

The crying evils of a buccaneer industrialism which lay behind the strikes, Hay ignored completely. To provide his idyllic background of contented labor before it is seduced by demagogues, he goes back to a decadent domestic economy. His “honest and contented workman” is a carpenter who works for another carpenter--not a factory-hand tending a machine; and when the demagogue comes with his specious appeal he is triumphantly refuted.

“What are we, anyhow?” continued the greasy apostle of labor. “We
are slaves; we are Roossian scurfs. We work as many hours as our
owners like; we take what pay they choose to give us; we ask their
permission to live and breathe.”

“Oh, that’s a lie,” Sleeny interrupted, with unbroken calmness.
“Old Saul Matchin and me come to an agreement about time and pay,
and both of us was suited. Ef he’s got his heel onto me, I don’t
feel it.”[668]

John Hay was convinced that an “educated leadership” alone could save American democracy. But unfortunately--despite his great reputation in diplomacy and statesmanship--his own education seems to have been faulty. He had lately risen into the exploiting class, and he accepted the ready-made opinions of that class. His biographer has admirably stated his position during the days of the strike riots when he was clarifying his views:

Those riots of 1877 burnt deep into Colonel Hay’s heart. Like
the rest of the world, he had theorized on the likelihood of war
between Capital and Labor; but he had reassured himself by the
comfortable assumption that under American conditions--equal
opportunity for all, high wages, equal laws, and the ballot-box--no
angry laboring class could grow up. The riots blew such vaporing
away: for they proved that the angry class already existed, that
the ballot-box instead of weakening strengthened it, and that not
only the politicians of both parties but also the constituted
authorities would avoid, as long as possible, grappling with it.

The event was too large to be dismissed as an outburst of temper:
it must be accepted as a symptom, a portent. Did it mean that
a cancer had attacked the body politic and would spread to the
vital organs? Was Democracy a failure,--Democracy--for more than
a century the dream of the down-trodden, the ideal of those who
loved mankind and believed in its perfectibility, the Utopia which
good men predicted should somehow turn out to be a reality? Hay
had sung his paean to liberty; Hay had throbbed at the efforts of
patriots in Spain and in France to overthrow their despots; he had
even exulted over the signs of democratization in England. Had he
been the victim of mirage? Was Democracy not the final goal of
human society, but only a half-way stage between the despotism of
Autocracy and the despotism of Socialism?

These questions he could not evade.... But he held, as did many of
his contemporaries, that the assaults on Property were inspired
by demagogues who used as their tools the loafers, the criminals,
the vicious,--Society’s dregs who have been ready at all times to
rise against laws and government. That you have property is proof
of industry and foresight on your part or your father’s; that you
have nothing, is a judgment on your laziness and vices, or on your
improvidence. The world is a moral world; which it would not be if
virtue and vice received the same rewards.[669]

John Hay, it must be recalled, had enjoyed a college education through the aid of relatives, he had been taken under the wing of Lincoln and become his private secretary, he had been thrust forward by influential politicians, and finally he had married wealth--were these things proofs of virtue in a moral world that rewards foresight and punishes improvidence? Or were they rather the marks of a skillful climber? John Hay was a charming and cultivated gentleman, but he was also a child of the Gilded Age, with the materialisms of his generation in his blood. The young man had been an Abolitionist and a political radical; the old man was a McKinley conservative whose chief claim to reputation lay in the “open-door” policy in China. The beginnings of this shift to conservatism seem to have coincided with his marriage to Miss Stone, daughter of a Cleveland capitalist whose interests were threatened by the great strike. He was temperamentally one of John Adams’s “natural aristocrats,” and having gained entrée into aristocratic circles he took the coloring of his new environment. A son of the frontier, he became a man of the world. Prosperity was necessary to him.

Professing a deep attachment to democratic institutions and hatred of all monarchical principles--in Spain and France--John Hay ceased to be a Lincoln democrat, and took his place amongst the ruling class, accepting the principles of the rising plutocracy. _The Bread-winners_ is a dramatization of the Federalistic principle that government exists for the protection of property. “Remembering the date when _The Bread-winners_ was written,” says his biographer, “we must regard it as the first important polemic in American fiction in defense of Property.”[670] John Hay had become a thoroughgoing Hamiltonian. In his younger days his sympathies had gone out to radical republicans everywhere, and he watched the rising tide of liberalism with great satisfaction. In his first visits to Europe he followed closely the liberal movements. He was a warm admirer of Castelar, eulogizing him as one of the heroic figures of modern times. In a lecture in 1869 on “The Progress of Democracy in Europe” he spoke with the zeal of an advanced liberal. But soon thereafter the ardor of his zeal lessened. On later trips to Europe he did not display a like sympathy with the program of the Social Democrats. As economic unrest crept into politics, as strikes and boycotts began to disturb his father-in-law’s business, he discovered less sympathy for revolutionary movements. Political revolutions sponsored by respectable middle-class leaders, were one thing; economic revolutions sponsored by the proletariat were quite another thing. A democracy that breeds more democracy is clearly dangerous. So much as has already been accomplished is excellent, of course; but nothing further must be attempted.

There is sound strategy in offensive epithets. And so, taking counsel of fear, he applied to the current economic unrest the words most offensive to polite American ears, and called it socialism, anarchism. Without pausing to weigh the demands of the farmer and the workingman, with no understanding of the meaning of the great proletarian movement then going forward in Europe, he appealed in defense of property to the specter of economic leveling before which every good American of the eighties recoiled in horror. As early as 1869, speaking of Castelar, he said: “He has too much sense and integrity to follow the lead of the Socialist fanatics.”[671] Commenting on the unsettled state of things in Paris in 1883, he wrote: “The laborers have had the mischief put into their heads by trade-unions.”[672] As he contemplated the agrarian unrest of the seventies and later, he discovered in Greenbackism and Populism only another form of this hateful socialism. It was the work of agitators who were plain rascals.

He was greatly disturbed in 1875 at the state of politics, “with half the Republicans and all the Democrats inflationists at heart, and carrying on a campaign on the bald issue whether the nation shall be a liar and a thief or not.”[673] And so late as 1900 he exclaimed petulantly: “This last month of Bryan, roaring out his desperate appeals to hate and envy, is having its effect on the dangerous classes. Nothing so monstrous has as yet been seen in our history.”[674] Unhappily even in free America with its equal opportunity, and equal laws, there had come to be “dangerous classes”--rather a good many of them, taking the populistic farmers and discontented wage-earners into the account--so many, indeed, that John Hay grew gloomy over the outlook. And the outlook was all the gloomier because of our form of government; for is not the ultimate test of our democratic institutions the test of whether they are adequate to protect the property and “civilization” of the few against the “hate and envy” of the discontented many?

That _The Bread-winners_ was a dishonest book Hay certainly could not have been brought to believe; nevertheless a Tory who covers his Tory purpose with a mantle of democracy can scarcely be reckoned intellectually sincere. The men of the seventies and eighties--cultivated and intelligent gentlemen like Godkin and Aldrich and Hay--were little more than demagogues in their fustian attacks on agrarian Greenbackers and militant labor unions; they feared and hated them too much to understand them, and they took advantage of their social position to cry them down. The “educated leadership” of the Gilded Age was a somewhat sorry thing; it was ethically bankrupt while appealing to high moral standards. The best of such leaders were second-rate men--mediocre minds cramped by a selfish environment, imbued with no more than a property-consciousness. Of such a world John Hay in his _Bread-winners_ was a distinguished spokesman and representative.[675]

3 • The Beginnings of the Sociological Novel

It was in the nineties that the sociological novel expanded into a great movement that in the next decade and a half was to engulf pretty much all American fiction and bring it into service to the social conscience. Such a development was in the nature of things. The artist would not sit forever in his ivory tower, content to carve his statuettes while the country without was turmoiled with revolution. Sooner or later he would venture forth and once he had been caught up in the swirl his art would take new forms and serve other purposes than the traditional genteel. Realism was in the air, the realism of Zola and the Russians, and from such a realism would come in America a more critical attitude towards the social revolution at work in the land.