The Anxious Triumph

by Donald Sassoon

  49. Charles Péguy, L’Argent (suite), in Charles Péguy, Oeuvres en prose 1909–1914, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade Gallimard, Paris 1961, p. 1,267.

  50. Thomas Jefferson, Writings, Memorial Edition, vol. 15, p. 23: http://etext.virginia.edu/jefferson/quotations/jeff1325.htm

  51. This is the orthodox position; for a dissenting view see Caroline Fohlin, ‘Universal Banking in Pre-World War I Germany: Model or Myth?’, Explorations in Economic History, vol. 36, no. 4, 1999, pp. 305–43.

  52. Noel Annan, ‘The Possessed’, New York Review of Books, 5 February 1976, cited in Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, Cambridge University Press 1981, p. 131.

  53. John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren’, in Essays in Persuasion in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. IX, Macmillan, London 1972, p. 329.

  54. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, Princeton University Press 1977, p. 9.

  55. Cited in Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, ‘Figures du romantisme anti-capitaliste: une tentative de typologie’, L’homme et la société, nos 73–4, 1984, p. 165: http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/homso_0018-4306_1984_num_73_1_2169

  56. Quoted in Turner, The Frontier in American History, p. 211. The sentiments expressed in the quote are certainly those of Émile Boutmy, but the quote itself cannot be traced in Boutmy’s main work on the subject: Éléments d’une psychologie politique du peuple américain, A. Colin, Paris 1902, see esp. pp. 48, 100, and 137.

  57. Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, vol. 4, Pagnerre, Paris 1848, p. 313.

  58. Ibid, vol. 3, pp. 318–19 (an error in this edition makes it p. 218 instead of 318).

  59. Mayer, ‘The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem’, p. 422.

  60. Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society, Cornell University Press 1997, p. 1.

  61. Ibid, pp. 11, 18.

  62. Henry George, public lecture, 1 April 1885: http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/georgecripov.html

  63. Henry George, Progress and Poverty, J. M. Dent and Sons, London 1879, p. 251.

  64. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 18–19.

  65. Beckert, ‘Emancipation and Empire’, p. 1,427.

  66. Foner, Reconstruction, p. 235.

  67. Steven Hahn, ‘Class and State in Postemancipation Societies: Southern Planters in Comparative Perspective’, American Historical Review, vol. 95, no. 1, February 1990, pp. 82, 92.

  68. Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie , 1850–1896, Cambridge University Press 2001, pp. 299–300.

  69. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, p. 13.

  70. Ibid, p. 323.

  71. Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, p. 19.

  72. Walt Whitman, ‘A Passage to India’ (1870), from Leaves of Grass.

  73. Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871): http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/whitman/vistas/vistas.html

  74. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, ‘De la littérature industrielle’, Revue des deux mondes, September 1839: http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/La_Litt%C3%A9rature_industrielle

  75. Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, p. 661.

  76. Charles Letourneau, L’évolution du commerce dans les diverses races humaines, Vigot Frères, Paris 1897, pp. 541, 547, 550.

  77. Simmel, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, p. 177.

  78. Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism, pp. 167, 171, 173–4, 181.

  79. Richard L. McCormick, ‘The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism’, American Historical Review, vol. 86, no. 2, April 1981, p. 256.

  80. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 385–7.

  81. Cited in Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, p. 308.

  82. Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 465–7.

  83. Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, p. 295.

  84. Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism, p. 152.

  85. Louis Galambos, The Public Image of Big Business in America, 1880–1940, Johns Hopkins University Press 1975, p. 120.

  86. Ibid, p. 126.

  87. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, pp. 50, 60.

  88. William Graham Sumner, The Challenge of Facts and Other Essays, ed. Albert Galloway Keller, Yale University Press 1914, p. 90.

  89. Ibid, p. 89.

  90. Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914, University of North Carolina Press 2002, pp. 149–50.

  91. Jean-Louis Beaucarnot, Les Schneider. Une dynastie, Hachette, Paris 1986, pp. 32–5.

  92. Bergeron (ed.), Les capitalistes en France, pp. 9–11.

  93. Porter, ‘Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business’, pp. 18–19.

  94. Ibid, p. 25.

  95. Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914, University of Chicago Press 1995 (1st ed. 1957), p. 94.

  96. Cited in Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, p. 52.

  97. Hays, The Response to Industrialism, p. 102.

  98. Ibid, p. 79.

  99. Ibid, pp. 72–3.

  100. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916, Free Press of Glenco, New York 1963, pp. 12–14.

  101. Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier, Random House, New York 2000, pp. xiii, 409; Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era, Hill and Wang, New York 1998, p. 30.

  102. John D. Rockefeller, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, Doubleday, Page & Company, New York 1909: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17090/17090–h/17090-h.htm, p. 144.

  103. Ibid, p. 64.

  104. George Bittlingmayer, ‘Did Antitrust Policy Cause the Great Merger Wave?’, Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 28, no. 1, April 1985, pp. 77–118.

  105. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Harvard University Press 1977, pp. 134–7.

  106. Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, p. 312.

  107. Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics, Cambridge University Press 1988, pp. 109–10.

  108. William E. Leuchtenburg, The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, Oxford University Press 2015, p. 32.

  109. Lewis L. Gould, Reform and Regulation: American Politics, 1900–1916, John Wiley and Sons, New York 1978, pp. 31–2, 65–9.

  110. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Little, Brown and Co., New York 1998, pp. 553–7.

  111. Philip Taft and Philip Ross, ‘American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome’, in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Roberts Gurr (eds), The History of Violence in America, Praeger, New York 1969, p. 299.

  112. Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, pp. 198– 200.

  113. Taft and Ross, ‘American Labor Violence’, p. 281.

  114. Stuart Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940, University of Chicago Press 1976, pp. 1–3.

  115. Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, p. 143.

  116. Gould, Reform and Regulation, pp. 20–21.

  117. Louis W. Koenig, Bryan: A Political Biography of William Jennings Bryan, Putnam’s Sons, New York 1971, p. 335.

  118. William Jennings Bryan, The First Battle: A Story of the Campaign of 1896, Kennikat Press, New York 1971, vol. 1, p. 203, and ibid, vol. 2, p. 319.

  119. Reported in The Times, 10 March 1914, and cited in Gould, Reform and Regulation, p. 10.

  120. Donald W. Rogers, Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880–1940, University of Illinois Press 2009, p. 172.

  121. Theodore Roosevelt, ‘Fourth
Annual Message’ to Congress, 6 December 1904: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29545

  122. George Gunton, ‘The Economic and Social Aspect of Trusts’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 3, no. 3, September 1888, esp. pp. 392–6.

  123. Roy, Socializing Capital, pp. 4–5.

  124. See US Bureau of Labor Statistics; for inflation calculation: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl; for average hourly earnings: http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iagauto.htm#iag31cesnsahourlyearnings.f.P

  125. Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921, State University of New York Press 1981, pp. 1, 6.

  126. Ibid, pp. 149–52.

  127. Ibid, p. 156.

  128. Ibid, pp. 167–8.

  129. Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America, pp. 105, 116–22.

  130. W. Bernard Carlson, ‘Technology and America as a Consumer Society, 1870–1900’, in Charles W. Calhoun (ed.), The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, Rowan & Littlefield, Lanham, MD 2007, p. 31.

  131. Carlson, ‘Technology and America as a Consumer Society, 1870–1900’, pp.31–2.

  132. Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America, p. 48.

  133. Ibid, pp. 41, 53.

  134. Foner, Reconstruction, p. 463.

  135. Klein, The Genesis of Industrial America, p. 134.

  136. Thomas K. McCraw, ‘American Capitalism’, in Thomas K. McCraw (ed.), American Capitalism: How Entrepreneurs, Companies, and Countries Triumphed in Three Industrial Revolutions, Harvard University Press 1997, pp. 320–21.

  137. Mira Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914, Harvard University Press 1970, pp. 9, 29, 37–44.

  138. Séverine Antigone Marin, ‘“L’américanisation du monde”? Étude des peurs allemandes face au “danger américain” (1897–1907)’, in Dominique Barjot, Isabelle Lescent-Giles, and Marc de Ferrière Le Vayer (eds), L’américanisation en Europe au XXe siècle, pp. 71–2.

  139. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, ‘De la nécessité de préparer une fédération Européenne’, L’Économiste français, 3 September 1898.

  140. Burton I. Kaufman, ‘The Organizational Dimension of United States Economic Foreign Policy, 1900–1920’, Business History Review, vol. 46, no. 1, Spring 1972, p. 19, quoting the report of the Industrial Commission appointed by Congress in 1902.

  10. Building the Nation

  1. My emphasis; see John Markoff, ‘Where and When Was Democracy Invented?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 41, no 4, October 1999, p. 666.

  2. Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, available in French at: http://www.rutebeuf.com/textes/renan01.html and in English at: http://ig.cs.tu-berlin.de/oldstatic/w2001/eu1/dokumente/Basistexte/Renan1882EN-Nation.pdf

  3. Thiesse, La création des identités nationales, p. 11.

  4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin, London 2003, p. 75.

  5. Carlo Cattaneo, Scritti filosofici, ed. Norberto Bobbio, Felice Le Monnier, Florence 1960, vol. 1, pp. 233–4.

  6. Massimo D’Azeglio, I miei ricordi, G. Barbèra, Florence 1891 (first published 1867), p. 4.

  7. Ibid, pp. 4–5.

  8. Pasquale Villari, ‘Di chi è la colpa? O sia la pace o la guerra’, Il Politecnico, September 1866, in Saggi di storia, di critica e di politica, Tipografia Cavour, Florence 1868, p. 421.

  9. Villari, Le Lettere meridionali ed altro scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia, p. 73.

  10. Giovanni Busino, ‘Vilfredo Pareto sociologo della borghesia e dello sviluppo capitalistico?’, Rivista Storica Italiana, vol. 83, no. 2, June 1971, pp. 398–400.

  11. Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, Fayard, Paris 1994, p. 408.

  12. David J. Lorenzo, Conceptions of Chinese Democracy, Johns Hopkins University Press 2013, p. 45.

  13. Sun Yat-sen, The Three Principles of the People, China Cultural Service, Taiwan 1981, p. 61.

  14. Ibid, p. 76.

  15. Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, pp. 409–10.

  16. Cited in Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War, Cambridge University Press 1993, p. 6.

  17. Theodor Herzl, The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, Gollancz, London 1958, p. 10.

  18. Herzl, The Jewish State, p. 68.

  19. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture, Cambridge University Press 1981, p. 160.

  20. Cited in Elon, Herzl, p. 69.

  21. See statistical appendix in Robert A. Kann, A History of the Habsburg Empire 1526–1918, University of California Press 1974, pp. 606– 8.

  22. Lucien Tesnière, ‘Statistique des langues de l’Europe’, in Antoine Meillet, Les langues dans l’Europe nouvelle, Payot, Paris 1928, p. 307.

  23. Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914, Princeton University Press 1995, pp. 174–5, 169.

  24. Ibid, p. 169.

  25. Ibid, p. 239.

  26. Ibid, p. 235.

  27. Gallup Poll: Religion: http://www.gallup.com/poll/1690/religion.aspx. David Voas and Mark Chaves maintain that there is a trend towards secularization in their ‘Is the United States a Counterexample to the Secularization Thesis?’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 121, no. 5, March 2016.

  28. Peter H. Lindert, Growing Public: Social Spending and Economic Growth since the Eighteenth Century, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press 2004, pp. 90–92, 95; this does not include those privately educated, hence the low figure for the UK.

  29. Jacques and Mona Ozouf, ‘Le thème du patriotisme dans les manuels primaires’, Le Mouvement Social, no. 49, October–December 1964, pp. 12–13.

  30. Suzanne Citron, Le mythe national: l’histoire de France revisitée, Éditions de l’Atelier, Ivry-sur-Seine 2008, p. 161.

  31. Anita Prazmowska, Ignacy Paderewski, Haus Publishing, London 2009, p. 25.

  32. On the non-Romantic views of Dmowski see Andrzej Walicki, ‘The Troubling Legacy of Roman Dmowski’, East European Politics and Societies, vol. 14, no. 1, Winter 2000, esp. pp. 14–21.

  33. Prazmowska, Ignacy Paderewski, p. 29.

  34. Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français, Éditions Complexe, Brussels 1985 (first published 1972), pp. 154–5, 173.

  35. Laurent Joly, ‘Les débuts de l’action française (1899–1914) ou l’élaboration d’un nationalisme antisémite’, Revue historique, no. 639, July 2006, p. 697.

  36. Ibid, p. 714.

  37. Ibid, p. 698.

  38. Anatoli Vichnevski, La faucille et le rouble. La modernisation conservatrice en URSS, Gallimard, Paris 2000, p. 322; Theodore R. Weeks, ‘National Minorities in the Russian Empire, 1897–1917’, in Anna Geifman (ed.), Russia under the Last Tsar: Opposition and Subversion, 1894–1917, Blackwell, Oxford 1999, p. 118.

  39. Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999, Yale University Press 2003, pp. 119–20; Daniel Beauvois, The Noble, the Serf and the Revizor: The Polish Nobility between Tsarist Imperialism and the Ukrainian Masses (1831–1863), Harwood, London 1991, p. 87.

  40. Spulber, Russia’s Economic Transitions, pp. 8–9.

  41. Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime, Croom Helm, London 1981, pp. 79–80, 84.

  42. Ibid, esp. Chapter 2.

  43. Robert M. Berdahl, ‘Conservative Politics and Aristocratic Landholders in Bismarckian Germany’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 44, no. 1, March 1972, pp. 14–16.

  44. Crook, The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches, pp. 37ff.

  45. M. J. Daunton, ‘“Gentlemanly” Capitalism and British Industry 1820–1914’, Past & Present, no. 122, February 1989, pp. 121–3.

  46. Ibid, pp. 122, 125.

  47. Samuel Clark, ‘Nobility, Bourgeoisie and the Industrial Revolution in Belgium’ in Past & Present, no. 105, November 1984, p. 105.

  48. Deirdre N. McC
loskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, University of Chicago Press 2006, pp. 470–71.

  49. This is where I agree with McCloskey, ibid, see esp. Chapter 38.

  50. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, p. 292. Piketty barely deals with the nineteenth century, partly because the data are so unreliable.

  51. David Hume, ‘Of Commerce’ (1752), in David Hume, Selected Essays, Oxford University Press 2008, p. 164.

  52. Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or The Two Nations, Penguin, London 1980, p. 96, capitals in the original.

  53. Masterman, The Condition of England, p. 85; public penury/private ostentation can be found on p. 30. Kenneth Galbraith’s own characterization is in The Affluent Society, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston 1998, p. 191.

  54. Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield), Selected Speeches, ed. T. E. Kebbel, Longmans, Green and Co., London 1882, vol. 2, pp. 524–5, 531–2.

  55. Paul Smith, Disraelian Conservatism and Social Reform, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1967, p. 44.

  56. Ibid, p. 7.

  57. Ibid, pp. 33–4.

  58. William Gladstone, ‘The Budget – Financial Statement’, The Times, report of 17 April 1863. Also, somewhat toned down in Hansard: The Budget – Financial Statement, Ways and Means, HC Deb, 16 April 1863, pp. 244–5: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1863/apr/16/the-budget-financial-statement-ways-and#S3V0170P0_18630416_HOC_22.

  59. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, p. 651.

  60. Alessandro Garelli, I Salarj e la classe operaja in Italia, Libreria Angelo Penato, Turin 1874, pp. 178 and 1.

  61. Ibid, p. 13.

  62. J. A. Hobson, ‘Free Trade and Foreign Policy’, Contemporary Review, vol. 74, August 1898, pp. 177–8.

  63. Speech reprinted in Winston Churchill, Liberalism and the Social Problem, Hodder and Stoughton, London 1909, pp. 363–4: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18419/18419-h/18419-h.htm; also cited in Geoffrey Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain, 1830–1990, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1994.

  64. Booth, In Darkest England: http://www.jesus.org.uk/vault/library/booth_darkest_england.pdf

  65. Andrew Mearns, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: An Inquiry into the Condition of the Abject Poor, James Clarke and Co., London 1883, pp. 18–19.