American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  What a marvelous idea for the elites: to be individually selfish was to be socially sane and right! For these men, too, needed their ideas to be validated by some measure of higher morality, especially in this era when religious doctrine so often seemed old-fashioned and inadequate. Spencer, to boot, argued in strong dramatic terms understandable to every man, thus making him, as Hofstadter said, “the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual, and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic.” In the last three decades of the century, Spencer’s American publisher, D. Appleton and Co., sold well over 300,000 copies of his writings. He was a philosopher, William James noted, who could be valued by those who had no other philosopher.

  No wonder economic elites clutched Spencer to their austere bosoms. But the remarkable aspect of the Vogue of Spencer was the extent to which he was accepted and celebrated in the academic and religious worlds. A host of teachers of a variety of subjects preached Spencerism; indeed, the discipline of “political economy” was virtually equated with the doctrine of laissez-faire. While the scholars differed with one another on practical applications, as theorists, “free competition and denial of state interference was their dogma, economic liberty their slogan.” They wrote books and pamphlets, testified before legislatures, pontificated in the press, lectured from their platforms. The message was simple: Social evolution meant social progress.

  By far the most famous and effective of the laissez-faire academics was William Graham Sumner of Yale. Brought up by his English immigrant father to venerate the Protestant economic values, especially thrift, Sumner divided his life between writing a systematic science of society and crusading for economic individualism inside his classroom and outside. The ‘‘strong” and the “weak,” he preached, were simply terms for “the industrious and the idle, the frugal and the extravagant.” If we do not like the survival of the fittest, he said, we will have the survival of the unfittest. Millionaires were the “product of natural selection”; hereditary wealth guaranteed the enterpriser that he might continue in his children the qualities that had enabled him to benefit the community. But millionaires should not be artificially aided by the government, any more than should the poor.

  Students flocked to Sumner’s courses, looking for debate. One of them, William Lyon Phelps, later remembered Sumner’s exchange with a dissenter:

  “Professor, don’t you believe in any government aid to industries?”

  “No! it’s root, hog, or die.”

  “Yes, but hasn’t the hog got a right to root?”

  “There are no rights. The world owes nobody a living.”

  “You believe, then, Professor, in only one system, the contract-competitive system?”

  “That’s the only sound economic system. All others are fallacies.”

  “Well, suppose some professor of political economy came along and took your job away from you. Wouldn’t you be sore?”

  “Any other professor is welcome to try. If he gets my job, it is my fault. My business is to teach the subject so well that no one can take the job away from me.”

  The most respectable men of God took up the tenets of Social Darwinism, though rarely did they utter the name of the controversial English biologist. No one, said Princeton’s clergyman-president James McCosh, was at liberty to deprive us of our property or to interfere with it; attempts to do so were “theft.” Love required the acquisition of property, said Williams’s clergyman-president, Mark Hopkins, and those who had done the most for our institutions had been men with a “strong desire of property.” In his renowned sermon Acres of Diamonds, Baptist clergyman Russell Conwell preached the gospel of success: “It is your duty to get rich. It is wrong to be poor.”

  Some of the most respectable journals preached laissez-faire. Occasionally, it was a laissez-faire that attacked business as well as the poor for demanding aid from government. “The Government must get out of the ‘protective’ business and the ‘subsidy’ business and the ‘improvement’ and the ‘development’ business,” wrote Edwin Lawrence Godkin of the Nation. “It must let trade, and commerce, and manufactures, and steamboats, and railroads, and telegraphs alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.” The government had as much as it could do, he added, just to maintain order and administer justice. Words like these were repeated in hundreds of dailies and weeklies.

  The dream of individual striving and success resonated most dramatically in the well-thumbed pages of boys’ stories about “rags to riches.” Perhaps the single most influential writer of the late nineteenth century was a small, slight, diffident man, cursed by ill health and blighted romances, named Horatio Alger, Jr., who wrote about heroes—economic heroes. Youngsters and oldsters totaling tens of millions devoured his 106 books and voluminous other writings. Rarely could it more properly be said of an author that to read one of his works was to read them all. Whether it was Ragged Dick—the first of Alger’s famous works—or Tony the Hero or Dan the Detective or Tattered Tom, whether the theme was Luck and Pluck or Strive and Succeed or Do and Dare or Brave and Bold or Paddle Your Own Canoe, Alger’s novels followed a set format: the boy-hero is born poor, leads an exemplary life, faces up to poverty, shows a lot of pluck, and ends up rich, though usually not very rich. Yet Alger often departed from the mythology of the self-made man. His heroes sometimes rise from the middle class, not from poverty; they seem to depend as much on luck as pluck; and his rich men are often not good people. More curiously, as Richard Huber pointed out, his heroes are not self-made men but self-made boys. And only one of his heroes, Tattered Tom, was a girl, and she a tomboy—probably a reflection both of the sexism of the time and of the near-certainty that Horatio Alger, Jr., was a homosexual.

  Others besides Alger, most notably William Makepeace Thayer, wrote success books, and rags-to-riches stories appeared in magazines as well as paperbacks. The most notable of the success magazines was Munsey’s. Frank Munsey himself not only read and printed Alger’s stories, wrote the same kind himself, and put the Alger stamp on every issue, but, according to Theodore Greene, “lived all his life in the fictional world” of Alger. He spent his life in a feverish search for what he called “riches, power, the world, the great big world,” and after perilous ups and downs that matched those of any Alger hero, he did indeed reach the top. There, however, he bought, merged, killed, and trivialized so many newspapers as to earn the obituary notice from a later editor, William Allen White: “Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manners of an undertaker.… May he rest in trust.”

  Young would-be heroes did not even need to wait to read books and magazines. Many of their schoolteachers shared the same ethic. And staring at them from the early pages of the McGuffey Reader were the lines:

  ... If you find your task is hard,

  Try, Try Again!

  Time will bring you your reward,

  Try, Try Again;

  All that other folks can do,

  Why, with patience, should not you: Only keep this rule in view;

  Try, Try Again.

  No one in America exemplified Horatio Alger’s type of hero better than Andrew Carnegie. He rose from near-poverty to enormous riches; he was industrious, neat, frugal, honest, lucky, and plucky; he was probably the biggest individual success of the late nineteenth century. And, by a fittingness all too rare in history, he was of all America’s great men the leading disciple of Herbert Spencer. “Before Spencer, all for me had been darkness,” Carnegie liked to say; “after him, all had become light—and right.” To Carnegie and many others, Spencer was the “master.”

  People wondered when the master might visit the United States. A hypochondriac, Spencer had an aversion both to travel and to noisy adulation. He finally responded to the entreaties less of Carnegie than of his American publishers and his mass of American champions, who far surpassed his British devotees in both numbers and enthusiasm. He made the crossing in August 1882 on one
of the finest Cunarders. By the time Spencer had been escorted by enthusiastic friends to Pittsburgh—where, despite a personal tour by Carnegie, he found the steel works stifling and the city repulsive—and then to a dozen other stops, he was physically exhausted and emotionally in a funk about the planned climax of the trip, a banquet at Delmonico’s where he was to be main speaker and guest of honor.

  On the evening of November 9, 1882, a stream of broughams and victorias and daumonts dropped their passengers in front of the wide entrances of Delmonico’s, the most fashionable restaurant in Manhattan, at Fifth Avenue and 26th Street. In its banquet hall were gathering over 150 of the most distinguished men in America: political leaders like Carl Schurz and ex-Secretary of State William M. Evarts, intellectual celebrities such as Sumner and John Fiske, religious luminaries such as Lyman Abbott and Henry Ward Beecher, publishers including the Appletons, university presidents, a brace of business leaders. Carnegie himself escorted Spencer to the dinner and delivered him over to the head table. Spencer made clear that he was too exhausted for small talk.

  When at 9:30 the bounteous meal was over, chairs pulled back, and cigars lighted, the distinguished audience was in for some surprises. Spencer, pulling himself together, spoke not on Social Darwinism but, rather, chided American businessmen that they worked too hard, passed their “damaged constitutions” on to their children, even started to turn gray ten years before their English counterparts did. Life was not for working but working for life, he said. Nor did the other speakers follow the Social Darwinist script. As Joseph Wall pointed out, “Schurz stressed Spencer’s moral and ethical probity, Carnegie stressed Spencer’s detestation of the military, Fiske announced that Spencer had contributed as much to religion as he had to science, while Henry Ward Beecher, carried away with his own rolling oratory, told the startled Spencer that they would meet once again beyond the grave in that great banquet hall in Heaven.” It was almost midnight and the air was dense with cigar smoke by the time Beecher rose to speak, but the world-famous pulpitarian spoke so brilliantly on the reconciliation of evolution and religion that men stood roaring their approval and waving their handkerchiefs at the conclusion.

  Little had been said that clarified the tenets of Social Darwinism. Perhaps it was not necessary. The hardheaded businessmen there knew what they believed—in the gospel of rugged individualism in general but in countless exceptions in practice. Carnegie would go on venerating Spencer and favoring tariffs. Other industrialists would favor competition in general but not in their own fields of business. They believed in economic individualism but also in corporate, collective capitalism. Many a man of public affairs there wanted laissez-faire, except when it hurt the rich—or himself.

  The delightful confusion of the evening was well expressed by Beecher during his remarks: “I had just as lief be descended from a monkey,” said he, turning to Spencer, “if I have descended far enough.”

  The Bitch-Goddess Success

  Hardly three weeks earlier, a quite different group of men had gathered at Delmonico’s to honor a man who was neither a captain of industry nor a world-famous intellectual, but a journalist: Henry George. Compared to Spencer’s hosts, the hundred or so men who lined up to greet George were a motley crowd, reflecting the vigorous and variegated mind of Gotham. Here were Perry Belmont, congressman and son of a longtime head of the national Democratic party; Felix Adler of the Ethical Culture Society; Thomas Kinsella, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and educational reformer; Roger Atkinson Pryor, Confederate soldier-politician turned Manhattan lawyer; David G. Croly, modernist editor who had actually spoken for miscegenation; Thomas G. Shearman, corporation lawyer, tax reformer, and defender of Henry Ward Beecher against charges of adultery; and the ubiquitous Beecher himself.

  The apolitical Delmonico’s did itself proud as usual, providing twenty-eight items of food and drink. The lion of the occasion hardly looked the part, with his slight build and scuffed shoes; but Henry George’s editorial growls had sounded across the Western world. He had indeed shown the kind of spunk and competitive drive that Spencer and Alger alike would have admired. Young George had left his middle-class home and school at thirteen to serve as an errand boy in a Philadelphia importing firm, then shipped out on long sea voyages as foremast boy. Between trips, a typesetting job drew him into the world of publishers and journalists. He drank deeply of his travel experiences—the life of the common sailor before the mast, the scramble for land in California, the horrifying contrast of wealth and poverty in Calcutta and New York. A voracious reader, he ranged through the works of French physiocrats and English classicists, American Whigs and Jeffersonians, religious prophets and radical intellectuals. For years, he lived hand to mouth as a California newspaper writer, shifting restlessly from job to job while he pursued his own success ethic—even as, opinionated and cantankerous, he quarreled incessantly with bosses and fellow workers.

  It was in the yeasty economic and journalistic milieus of California that George grappled with the problem of poverty. He himself was so down-and-out at one point, with a half-starved wife and child at home, that he accosted the first prosperous-looking man he saw on the street and asked him desperately for five dollars, which the stranger gave him; if he had not, George said later, he was ready to knock the man down. But soon in a series of newspaper articles and finally in Progress and Poverty, he propounded his long-fermenting ideas: that the ownership of land brings control over society; that every man has a natural “labor right” to land; that when he rents privately held land from others he is robbed of some of that labor right; that the solution is to regain the public right to rent through a single tax on land.

  Man’s right to himself, and to what he produced, George said, was accepted. “But man has also another right, declared by the fact of his existence—the right to the use of so much of the free gifts of nature as may be necessary to supply all the wants of that existence, and which he may use without interfering with the equal rights of anyone else; and to this he has a title as against all the world.”

  Recognition came to George only after he had moved back to New York and then traveled abroad. In England, he met the socialist H. M. Hyndman; Helen Taylor, the stepdaughter of the late John Stuart Mill; the political reformer John Bright; the rising radical Joseph Chamberlain. He did not meet Karl Marx. Highly sympathetic to the Irish cause, George hobnobbed with the leaders of the Irish Land League, who were in turn entranced by his views on land. His fame soared at home and abroad when he was arrested during a trip to Ireland; indeed, so many American Irish leaders attended the Delmonico’s banquet that at least one of the diners thought they were welcoming a fiery rebel from Ireland.

  George was perhaps the most arresting of a number of journalists whose ideas were agitating American opinion during the 1880s. Another inciter was Edward Bellamy, a struggling young editor who was beginning to taste success and fame during that decade of intellectual excitement. Raised in a western Massachusetts textile town, Bellamy attended Union College for a year, traveled abroad, studied law, worked for a time for the noted Springfield Union and the equally noted New York Evening Post, and then with his brother founded the Springfield Daily News. More and more drawn to social and political problems, Bellamy began publication in a country paper of The Duke of Stockbridge, a fictional treatment of Shays’s Rebellion. He had several more works of historical fiction to his credit by the time, in 1888, he published Looking Backward, which embodied an effort, he said later, to “reason out a method of economic organization” by which the republic might guarantee its citizens’ welfare “on a basis of equality corresponding to and supplementing their political equality.”

  The story of Julian West, a young Boston millionaire who fell asleep in 1887 and awoke in 2000, the novel pictured through his eyes an orderly, affluent, egalitarian, rational Boston of 2000, in contrast with the cruel, class-ridden, and altogether bleak city of the late nineteenth century. The novel gained in force from powerful metaphors—not
ably of capitalism as a prodigious coach pulled uphill by “masses of humanity” driven by hunger, and crowded on top by travelers who called down to the toilers, urging patience and hinting at possible compensation in the next world—and remarkable prophecies, including music piped into drawing rooms (by telephone) according to published programs. But mainly the book gained from its portrait of a new world in which equitable “credit cards”—Bellamy’s term—had taken the place of money, a Boston without taxes or army or navy, without lawyers or law schools, a utopia of hierarchy and harmony and benign regimentation, in which women as well as men enjoyed liberty, equality, and fraternity.

  Looking Backward was an instant hit. Not only did it sell by the tens of thousands, achieving finally a total sale of one million, but it produced a rash of Bellamy clubs formed to discuss the book and its implications. A decade later Bellamy wrote a sequel, Equality. Again the force of Bellamy’s ideas overcame his heavy dialogue. At the start of Equality, Julian West’s sweetheart Edith battered him with a cross-examination that Bellamy’s hero could not bear.

  She couldn’t understand, said twenty-first-century Edith of nineteenth-century Boston, the gap between people’s pretensions then and the “shockingly unequal conditions of the people, the contrasts of waste and want, the pride and power of the rich, the abjectness and servitude of the poor, and all the rest of the dreadful story.”

  “It is doubtful,” Julian acknowledged, “if there was ever a greater disparity between the conditions of different classes than you would find in a half hour’s walk in Boston, New York, Chicago, or any other great city of America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.”