American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  “And yet,” says Edith, “it appears from all the books that meanwhile the Americans’ great boast was that they differed from all other and former nations in that they were free and equal. One is constantly coming across this phrase in the literature of the day.…”

  They were supposedly equal before the law, Julian said, but he had to admit that in fact rich and poor were not. But they were equal in “opportunities.” Edith leaped on this. It seemed, she said, that they all had an equal chance to make themselves unequal. Was there any way in which people were equal?

  “Yes, there was,” says Julian. “They were political equals. They all had one vote alike, and the majority was the supreme law-giver.”

  Then, asked Edith, why did not a majority of the poor put an end to their inequalities?

  “Because,” says Julian, “they were taught and believed that the regulation of industry and commerce and the production and distribution of wealth was something wholly outside of the proper province of government.”

  Then, asked Edith, “if the people did not think that they could trust themselves to regulate their own industry and the distribution of the product, to whom did they leave the responsibility?”

  “To the capitalists.”

  “And did the people elect the capitalists?”

  “Nobody elected them.”

  “By whom, then, were they appointed?”

  “Nobody appointed them.”

  “What a singular system!” To whom then were the capitalists accountable?

  They were accountable to nothing but their consciences, said Julian.

  “Their consciences! Ah, I see!” In the end she forced Julian to grant that the people surrendered their power to capitalists in the name of “individual liberty,” that they did not obtain such liberty, that capitalists used the government to quell the “quenchless blaze” of “greed and envy, fear, lust, hate, revenge, and every foul passion” of the poor and of the degraded “outcasts.” And he admitted that the capitalists controlled the political as well as the economic government by buying votes with money and with “fireworks, oratory, processions, brass bands, barbecues,” and the like. And the worst thing, Julian admitted, was that the poor were kept in such degradation as to be “not morally any better than the rich.”

  Rivaling George and Bellamy in the force of his protest against capitalism was still another journalist, Henry Demarest Lloyd. Brought up in a New York City family of radical Democratic sympathies, young Lloyd had plunged into the world of free traders, civil service reform, and anti-monopoly on his graduation from Columbia College in 1869. Hired by the Chicago Tribune as an editorialist, he moved steadily beyond political liberalism to a social radicalism that called for profound changes in the capitalistic system. In his writings, culminating in Wealth Against Commonwealth in 1894, he critically analyzed railroads and other corporations and championed small businessmen, consumers, and workers, including striking trade unionists. His repeated calls for social justice and his attacks on monopoly—especially the Standard Oil monopoly—brought him into virtually a personal confrontation with John D. Rockefeller.

  Lloyd’s power lay less in his ideas, which were not especially original, than in the analysis that supported them. Like a good journalist, he pored through the records of court and legislative investigations of great corporations, and conducted on-the-spot investigations of conditions of coal miners. An activist, he helped organize Milwaukee streetcar workers, and he succeeded in gaining commutation of the death sentence of convicted “anarchists.” Unlike certain other radicals, Lloyd would not trade liberty for equality. He “insisted that the rehabilitation of individual and economic liberty so essential to further democratic advances,” according to Chester Destler, “must result from the progressive, experimental harmonization of individualism with social cooperation.” For Lloyd, individual liberty was both means and end.

  Lloyd the social reformer, Bellamy the utopian, George the single-taxer—these were men of highly diverse personalities but also of striking similarities. Though men of ideas, they were not academic scholars; rather, they were largely self-taught, drawing their learning from books, experiences, and travels, especially their journeys to a Britain itself undergoing rapid social change. They came from deeply religious families. All three rose to success in the fiercely competitive world of American journalism. The lives of all three would become entangled in the climactic events of the 1890s. But what most typified them was what most divided them—their diverse solutions to the ills of capitalism and their largely separate followings.

  Fundamentally, they disagreed with one another. George saw Looking Backward as building a “castle in the air” but also tending toward governmental paternalism. The youthful Lloyd called George a “quack” and dismissed Bellamy as too utopian. For his part, Bellamy felt that George’s notion of nationalizing land first, rather than last, would antagonize so many interests at the start as to jeopardize any major reform. Bellamy must have known that Lloyd had little regard for Looking Backward and for Bellamy’s creed of “Nationalism” and following of “Nationalists.”

  “Mr. George,” Bellamy asked when the two happened to meet at a dinner, “why are you not a Nationalist?”

  “Because I am an individualist,” George replied.

  “I am a Nationalist,” said Bellamy, “because I am an individualist.”

  Each of these thinkers had his own following as well as ideas: George’s single-taxers, Bellamy’s nationalists, Lloyd’s trade unionists. Each was a kind of politico of protest as well as entrepreneur of ideas. Each operated on his own success ethic. Nor did any of the three ground himself in doctrines of Marxist socialism that had a common foundation. Bellamy saw the word socialist as suggesting “the red flag with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion.” Marxists viewed Bellamy as a utopian, always a dangerous breed of reformer. To George, Marx was the “prince of muddleheads.” Marx put down Progress and Poverty as an effort to save capitalism and George as “utterly backward” as a theorist. Lloyd rejected Marxist “determinism” and felt that the labor theory of value had too many exceptions.

  Thus the social rebels argued and divided. Nor were other voices more united. Washington Gladden, Congregational pastor and shaper of the new “social gospel,” favored trade unionism and public ownership of utilities but rejected socialism in favor of Christian compassion, love of justice, and social service. Ignatius Donnelly deserted conservative Republicanism to write a book proving the existence of a lost Atlantis, a second work contending that the earth had collided with a giant comet, a third demonstrating that Francis Bacon had written the works of Shakespeare, and a fourth—Caesar’s Column—that rivaled Looking Backward in theme and popularity. Then there were the communitarians—especially the Shakers—who wanted local reform but feared the grand national experiments of Bellamy and the rest. Their intellectual godfather, the Englishman William Morris, called Looking Backward a “horrible Cockney dream.”

  Once upon a time, New England could have been depended on to focus the nation’s intellectual concerns, to reinvigorate its founding ideas and ideals, to turn the needle of its moral compass to true north. And indeed, for a time after the Civil War, Boston at least opened up shop again for its old intellectual business. Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, and the literary giants of the past still adorned the drawing rooms of Beacon Hill and tramped the paths of Harvard Yard. Not only did Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once again preside as the “autocrat of the breakfast table,” but he and the giants and lesser luminaries still might converse at length—sometimes for eight hours straight over a long dinner—at the Saturday Club, without any lag or lapse in the brilliance of the discourse.

  Yet, if New England was not “in decay,” it was clearly slipping into a long and languid Indian summer. Of Thoreauian Utopianism and Enlightenment vagaries and frontier bumptiousness it had had enough, Vernon Parrington wrote, “and so it turned back lovingly to the cu
lture of earlier times and drew comfort from a dignified Federalism—enriched now by a mellow Harvard scholarship that was on intimate terms with Dante and Chaucer and Cervantes and Shakespeare—a Federalism that fitted the dignified Brahmin genius as comfortably as an old shoe.” The years of its intellectual leadership were coming to an end. Boston, said Henry Adams, had stopped believing in itself.

  Once supremely creative, New Englanders now concentrated on remembering, recording, observing—and criticizing. Mark Twain, as he was about to lecture before a Boston audience for the first time, described his prospective listeners as “4000 critics.”

  Above all, the spirit of reform seemed to be dying. Compared to the transcending and transforming issues of the past, the new ones—currency, tariffs, the debt, railroad land grants—seemed at once crass and complex. To the “terrible simplifiers” of New England, slavery had seemed a clear as well as a compelling issue; now, corruption and patronage offered less delectable indignation to the Puritan conscience. “Most of the old reformers were exhausted,” Van Wyck Brooks concluded. “They had no energy left for fresh campaigns, although Boston, prolific in causes, swarmed with friends of progress and new reformers rose with other movements, the cause of peace, the cause of woman’s suffrage, dietary reform and Darwinism, the cause of the short-skirts league and the short-haired woman who amused profane New York for a generation.”

  In some, nonetheless, the old flame of reform still burned. The magnificent Wendell Phillips, who had braved the mobs of old in his bitter attacks on slavery, now hurled his moral thunderbolts in support of penal reform, prohibition, woman’s suffrage, the labor movement, justice to Indians. Elizabeth Peabody—onetime pupil of Emerson, longtime secretary and amanuensis of William Ellery Channing, sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and of Horace Mann, a founder of the Brook Farm community— embraced a variety of reforms, from education to Indian rights. Nor could any cause be launched, from peace or suffrage to pure milk for babies, without Julia Ward Howe, of “Battle Hymn” fame, and her husband Samuel. Boston had its cynics, too. Charles A. Dana, once a devotee of the renowned utopian experiment Brook Farm, was becoming a foe of civil-service purification and everything else reformers seemed to believe in. And had Brook Farm itself not been used as a Union army camp during the war?

  For a decade or so after that war, Boston served as a place where the older, moneyed “men of letters” lingered, passing on their intellectual heritage and political ideas to younger men who would spend most of their lives in retreat from New England. Perhaps the most noted of these was the young Harvard historian Henry Adams. As bald, high-domed, and stocky as his illustrious President-ancestors, Henry, like his brothers Charles and Brooks, had to adjust his eighteenth-century heritage of intellectual independence and rocklike integrity to the realities of late nineteenth-century capitalism. Unlike Charles, who had ventured into that world and retreated from it in bitterness against the moneymaking, “bargaining crowd,” Henry had backed off from the start. At Harvard he taught medieval history, lecturing reluctantly to large classes that he tried to drive away, he boasted, with “foul and abusive” language. Leaving Cambridge for Washington in the late seventies, he retreated in his historical work to the Federalist-Jefferson era, while narrowly eyeing contemporary politicians in the nation’s capital; and in later years, amid much travel abroad, he retreated again, and most creatively, to the world of the twelfth century and its great cathedrals.

  All the while, he possessed an intense and morbid interest in politics, in power. Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, the heroine of his novel Democracy, wanted not merely an understanding of the source and mechanics of power; what “she wanted,” Adams writes, “is POWER” itself. Adams himself wanted more than power—he wanted an intellectual comprehension, which of course might command power. He explored the great dualisms—morality and power, politics and statesmanship, the pastoral and the industrial, science and religion, the individual and the democratic mass, material progress and moral decline. Above all, he turned away from the multiplicity and volatility and materialism of the world in which he lived, for the harmony and stability, the maternal love and cathedral serenity of the glory days of Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel. His choice was certain: the Virgin over the Dynamo.

  Henry James did not reject the multiplicity of American types—indeed, he lived off it—but he too fled Cambridge after a dozen years, much interrupted by travel, of writing reviews and stories for the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly. Drawn to Europe since his boyhood journeys there, he was relieved to desert America—its excessive egalitarianism that diluted individuality, the “flatness” of its democracy, the vulgarities of the Gilded Age, the materialism of the rich, the “bitch-goddess success.” Nor did he miss Boston, or, especially, its reformers; he caused a flap in the Athens of America when, in The Bostonians, he appeared to lampoon Elizabeth Peabody with a character, Miss Birdseye, whom he judged a humorless, confused, credulous, discursive old woman. Yet Parrington’s later assessment has stood up: James “was concerned only with nuances. He lived in a world of fine gradations and imperceptible shades.” At his best, he was “pragmatizing,” as James later said, even before his brother William explained this “way of thinking.” But neither from Boston nor London did Henry James discern the “figure in the carpet” of the American experiment.

  The void left in New England by these writers—and by countless others of the “best and brightest,” in John Hay’s words, who left for Michigan copper lodes or California gold mines or Pittsburgh steel works—was not redressed in any other region. New England indeed continued to influence intellectual life across the nation because of the heritage of Emerson, Hawthorne, & co., and because of the migration of its sons and daughters to other parts. As a publishing center, Boston could still reach into the hinterlands. William Dean Howells had come to Cambridge from a poor boyhood in Ohio via journalism and a campaign biography of Lincoln that helped bring a consulate in Venice, where he absorbed history and culture. He arrived in New England adoring Cambridge and all it stood for and, improbably, Cambridge loved this young man from the heartland—for his open, ingenuous manner, for his limpid writing and developing “realism,” and, not least, for his adoration of Cambridge. Adopted by the Brahmins and the whole Atlantic crowd, he quickly rose to its editorship.

  Even so, Howells would leave Boston and the Atlantic after a decade and a half. Before doing so, however, he managed to open up the Atlantic to writers who otherwise might have been ignored by the Brahmins. One of these was Samuel L. Clemens, a former Mississippi pilot and California journalist who had first won note for a short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Howells accepted his reminiscences, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” the reception of which encouraged the narrator, Mark Twain, to go on to the exciting adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Jim on the river of American history.

  For Twain, the great river was not history but life itself. She was indeed outside of history and of human control. She ran as she wished, changing course, moving villages from one side of the river to the other, following her natural freedom. Because the pilots were close to the river, Twain endowed them with mythical qualities: the pilots were childlike, brutish, spontaneous, and above all unfettered and independent.

  The river was serene and beautiful, despite its occasional perils. “It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up.… The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up way off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking.…”

  Only man—espe
cially his grasping, feuding, lynching representatives along the river—was vile: man and technology, whether guns or steamboats. Huck wishes to escape technology and regulation. He lights out for the Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” For him and for Jim, who is fleeing slavery, the raft means freedom. When the raft is smashed apart by a riverboat and when Huck discovers that Jim has been recaptured, the image of the river as freedom collides with that of society as cruel and confining. But Huck lives in that society, and when he is tempted to return Jim to slavery because he, Huck, must live by local rules and mores, “I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.” His decision for Jim’s liberty was a decision for his own—and for their equality and fraternity.

  “NOTICE,” Twain proclaimed at the start of Huck, “Persons trying to find a motive, moral, or plot in this narrative would be, respectively, prosecuted, banished, or shot.” Twain in fact offered a motive in the desire for freedom, a moral in the curse of “sivilization,” a plot in the protection and eventual liberation of Jim. The book reflected Twain’s own hope for people’s liberation—a hope tempered by his realization that the currents of change, symbolized by Jim’s freedom on the river even as the raft floats deeper and deeper into the slave lands, are remorseless. With the passing years, Twain’s hopes for freedom and individuality dwindled as industrial “sivilization” advanced.

  As the century neared its close, another novelist was exploring the external and internal forces that seemed to control human fate. Frank Norris’s McTeague pictured ordinary men and women caught and dragged down by their instinctual drives. Money plays a central role in that downfall. One character, overcome by her instinct for hoarding money, “makes love” to her gold coins. A dentist, told he can no longer practice because he lacks a license, degenerates into an animal run amok and murders his penny-pinching wife with his bare fists before he himself is trapped and killed in Death Valley.