American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  O Lord, remember the rich an’ remember the poor.

  Remember the bond an’ the free.

  And when you done rememberin’ all ’round,

  Then, O Lord, remember me.

  Almost every bright promise of the progressive era seemed to have a darker side. The huge production was sweated out of men and women working sixty hours a week at subsistence wages in factory, farm, and home; out of children crawling through tunnels thick with coal dust. Blacks were coming to feel so hopeless about the “promise of American democracy” that the National Colored Immigration and Commercial Association in 1903 petitioned President Roosevelt and Congress for $100 million to carry American Negroes to Liberia. The same schoolchildren who were merrily playing Prisoner’s Base, Follow My Leader, and King of the Rock on the school grounds were often subject to the leather strap and ruler not only for “misbehaving” but for failing to keep up with their lockstep lessons in McGuffey’s readers.

  Grown-ups also played their games. The annual report of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, Secretary, offered a list of outrageous pleasures that, Comstock hinted darkly, were indulged in by the rich: indecent playing cards, roulette layouts, lottery tickets, pool scorecards, gaming tables, dream books, dice, slot machines, watches with obscene pictures, “Articles for immoral use, of Rubber, etc.” Comstock reported that he had hired a horse and sleigh and driven through rural New England tracking down “devilish books” and “villainous” men.

  Women, lacking the vote, jobs, and opportunity, were even imprisoned in their dress. Wrote Kathleen Norris of the conventionally dressed woman of turn of century:

  “She wore a wide-brimmed hat that caught the breezes, a high choking collar of satin or linen, and a flaring gored skirt that swept the street on all sides. Her full-sleeved shirtwaist had cuffs that were eternally getting dirty, her stock was always crushed and rumpled at the end of the day, and her skirt was a bitter trial. Its heavy ‘brush binding’ had to be replaced every few weeks, for constant contact with the pavement reduced it to dirty fringe in no time at all. In wet weather the full skirt got soaked and icy. Even in fair weather its wearer had to bunch it in great folds and devote one hand to nothing else but the carrying of it.”

  The most pervasive and relentless change was still occurring in the industrializing cities, as work, work habits, and work environment responded to ceaseless innovation. Urbanization and innovation fortified each other. Hosts of inventors and experimenters of diverse talents and specialties cooperated and competed with one another on the industrial testing grounds in the big cities. The “ingenious Yankees”—now Irish and Italian and German and Jewish as well—endlessly tinkered on the job as they strove to lower costs and improve and speed production. Machines were becoming more dominant even as they became less visible—as pulleys and drive shafts gave way to covered wires and tubes, and as safety shields concealed the power apparatus.

  At fin de siècle, however, more than ever before during the nineteenth century, industrial innovation was becoming dependent on advances in science and basic technology. Decades earlier Karl Marx had contended that only in particular times in human history was science enlisted in key ways in the productive processes, even as science itself was dependent on intensive development of such processes. The very late nineteenth century was such a. time. Theoretical and practical developments in electricity exemplified change most dramatically, but new ideas burst forth in a variety of industrial fields.

  And what enkindling ideas they were! At century’s turn, Albert Michelson was working on the velocity of light, with the help of an “interferometer” he invented. Thomas L. Willson, a North Carolina chemist, was producing acetylene gas. Frank Austin Gooch was introducing the rotating cathode. Edward Acheson’s carborundum was tough enough to polish diamonds. Edward W. Morley determined the atomic weight of oxygen. Ohio physicist Wallace Sabine devised a reverberation equation vital to the study of acoustics. Americans were closely studying—and exploiting—pioneering work abroad: Guglielmo Marconi’s work on a wireless telegraph system; the discovery of X-rays by German chemist Wilhelm Roentgen; Lord Ernest Rutherford’s discovery of alpha and beta waves; Marie Curie’s identification of the elements polonium and radium; Max Planck’s quantum theory; Niels Bohr’s theory of atomic structure. Americans exported findings too: Michelson’s and Morley’s experiments served as a starting point for Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

  Inventors were doing the most outlandish things, especially up in the air and under the sea. Simon Lake in 1894 launched Argonaut I, a small, hand-powered submersible. Three years later, he created Argonaut II, a gasoline-powered submarine with wheels for rolling along the ocean floor; and a year after that, John Holland launched his cigar-shaped submarine, powered by gasoline on top of the water and by electricity below. After Hiram Maxim failed to conquer the air with a steam-powered flying machine and after astronomer Samuel Langley built the first successful engine-propelled model airplane, bicycle makers Orville and Wilbur Wright launched the world’s first successful manned flight in a motorized airplane, at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Down on earth, after Charles and Frank Duryea had operated the nation’s first successful gasoline-powered automobile, in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1893, a host of inventors were feverishly perfecting improvements: sliding gear transmissions, steering wheels to replace the tiller, pneumatic tires, automatic lubrication.

  Technology both stimulated and gained from advances in wide-ranging fields of science. Josiah Willard Gibbs at Yale and Charles Steinmetz at General Electric were working in sophisticated fields of mathematics. Geologists made key theoretical findings about glacial and other formations and practical ones about oil deposits. Astronomers were reaching farther out into the solar system, with the use of improved telescopes, photography, and a bolometer devised by Langley to detect extraterrestrial temperatures. Paleontologists—most notably Henry Fairfield Osborn at the American Museum of Natural History—were systematizing knowledge in the field through great finds of bones and fossil footprints. Anthropologists—especially Franz Boas and Clark Wissler—were taking sides between diffusionist theories stressing the geographical dispersion of Indian and other cultures, and “culture area” concepts focusing on interaction and integration within local cultures. In genetics, Thomas Hunt Morgan was doing notable work on heredity, embryology, and regeneration. Medicine abounded in advances in anesthesia, radium and X-ray therapy, prevention, surgery, and a concentrated fight against a number of diseases, especially tuberculosis.

  But the weather change of the late nineteenth century far transcended even these remarkable advances. In science, there was a shift from “normal,” systematic reliance on step-by-step progress within established paradigms to imaginative leaps into the unknown, thus returning to the revolutionary pattern of great scientific breakthroughs of the past. In philosophy there was a revolt against the formal, “rational” metaphysics of the time, an exploration of new ways of understanding human motivation, of new perceptions of the relation between thought and action. These intellectual revolutions in turn stimulated new thought in law, history, political science, economics, and sociology.

  The most transforming idea of the time was pragmatism, and it would become America’s single great contribution to the study of principles underlying knowledge and being. Like other changes in the American intellectual climate, the pragmatic movement seemed to arrive extrarationally, almost mysteriously—seemed to “have suddenly precipitated itself out of the air.” And no one so dominated and personified the pragmatic revolt as the author of these words, a most unrevolutionary-looking Harvard professor named William James.

  The Pulse of the Machine

  On a late January day in 1907, William James traveled by train from Boston to New York, took up his room at the Harvard Club on West 44th Street, and immediately plunged into the intellectual life of Gotham. He lunched, dined, and sometimes breakfasted out every day of his stay, with me
mbers of the Philosophical Club of New York and with eminent biologists, mathematicians, and literati. He capped his visit by dining with a company that included Norman Hapgood, Finley Peter Dunne, and Mark Twain. The last, he wrote to his brother Henry and his son William, “poor man, is only good for monologue, in his old age, or for dialogue at best, but he’s a dear little genius all the same.”

  Once again, James was captured by the heady intellectual beat of Manhattan. He was hardly a stranger to the city, having been born in the Astor House sixty-five years before, but in later life he had never managed to stay there more than a day and a half, he said, so repelled had he been by the “clangor, disorder, and permanent earthquake conditions.” Now, however, he seemed to find an “entirely new New York, in soul as well as in body, from the old one, which looks like a village in retrospect. The courage, the heaven-scaling audacity of it all, and the lightness withal” gave him a kind of “drumming background of life that I never felt before.” On 44th Street, “in the centre of the cyclone, I caught the pulse of the machine, took up the rhythm, and … found it simply magnificent.”

  James even found the subways magnificent, “powerful and beautiful, space devouring,” as he roared back and forth daily between the Harvard Club and Columbia University. There, at Teachers College, he was giving a series of lectures on pragmatism. Originally scheduled for Schermerhorn Hall, with its 250 seats, the lecture had to be moved to the chapel, where an audience of over a thousand greeted him.

  James’s listeners—many of them professional or amateur philosophers themselves—hardly expected anything new from their noted guest. He had given these lectures before, most recently at the Lowell Institute in Boston. They knew him to be the grandson of a multimillionaire businessman, the son of a well-known theologian, and the brother of the eminent novelist Henry James. They knew too that James had been heavily influenced by the half-legendary Charles Peirce of Cambridge, the amazingly versatile astronomer, physicist, mathematician, and logician who in 1878 had introduced something called “pragmatism” to the American lay public in an article in Popular Science Monthly called “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” After long bouts with bad health and deep depression, James himself had forged ahead, creating at Harvard the first American laboratory in psychology and helping gain recognition for the new science. Increasingly, he had immersed himself in philosophical study and was now the most celebrated philosophizer in America.

  At Teachers College that night, James neither surprised nor disappointed his audience. He delighted them with his platform style—much moving about, gesticulating, and general animation—in contrast with the stereotype of the Harvard philosophers who, like Josiah Royce, sat immobile in a chair and rolled out their dogmas in sonorous periods. But, most of all, James impressed his listeners with his pithy comments.

  “Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It ‘bakes no bread,’ as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives.” And now a new dawn was breaking upon philosophy.

  The lecturer drew a distinction between “rationalism” and “intellectualism” on one side and “sensationalism” and “empiricism” on the other. “Rationalism is always monistic. It starts from wholes and universals, and makes much of the unity of things. Empiricism starts from the parts, and makes of the whole a collection—is not averse therefore to calling itself pluralistic.”

  While the audience watched, fascinated, James chalked two columns on a blackboard, separating “rationalists” from “empiricists,” but with a new and provocative heading:

  THE TENDER-MINDED THE TOUGH-MINDED

  Rationalistic (going by “facts”), Empiricist (going by “principles”),

  Intellectualistic, Sensationalistic,

  Idealistic, Materialistic,

  Optimistic, Pessimistic,

  Religious, Irreligious,

  Free-willist, Fatalistic,

  Monistic, Pluralistic,

  Dogmatical Sceptical.

  Most of you, James assured his listeners, were a mixture of both tendencies, had a “hankering” for both, but also were vexedly caught between “an empirical philosophy that is not religious enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough….” The lecturer left no doubt where he stood. He rejected the world of philosophical absolutes, of the “transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school,” the philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet, Royce, of the absolutists who dwelt on “so high a level of abstraction that they never even try to come down.” He welcomed his listeners into the world “of concrete personal experience to which the street belongs,” multitudinous beyond imagination, “tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed,” contradictory, confused, gothic.

  In succeeding lectures, to bigger and bigger audiences, James spelled out his views with never-failing gusto and pungency: that pragmatism “unstiffened” old, absolutist theories; that new truths were “go-betweens,” “smoother-overs” of transitions from old theories to new facts; that when we say that this theory solves a problem more satisfactorily than that theory, this means more satisfactorily to ourselves; and—emphasized again and again—a theory must be tested by how it works in practice, as a practical matter; that “any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally.” And he limned the pragmatist in a few unforgettable phrases:

  “He turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.” Pragmatism meant “looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”

  That James’s ideas struck philosophical sparks had long been clear, and he did not need to wait long at Columbia. The New Yorkers, he wrote a friend, at the evening gatherings “compassed me about, they wagged their tongues at me”; neither side gave in. In particular, he provoked the theologians who preached the very absolutes—the Good, the Just, the Godly, the Pure, Beauty, Truth—that the tough-minded questioned. James was attacked as antireligious, though he had grown up in a religious family and had undergone a religious experience one evening alone in his dressing room when he suddenly was seized by a “horrible fear of my own existence”—an experience from which he had emerged “twice-born.” He believed in God, but it was a less-than-absolute, a finite God, a position that enabled him to accept evil along with the goodness of God, and to urge men to rely on their own minds and wills and not merely divine intervention. So James—author of The Varieties of Religious Experience—could cope with theologians and metaphysicians.

  But fellow philosophers and social theorists were a different matter. From Hugo Münsterberg, a onetime junior colleague and a German philosopher educated in the idealist tradition, came a polite but sharp comment: experience was not enough; he found reality in the fulfillment of will, as “transcendental power.” “And that is really my fundamental problem: why do I care for a moral deed or a true astronomical calculation if they do not bring any advantage to me?” Münsterberg asked in good Kantian fashion. Others accused James of caricaturing absolutism, of making pragmatism itself into a catchall absolute, even of lacking in “academic dignity.” James himself disliked the term “pragmatism” and all the baggage it had accumulated—he preferred the concept “humanism,” but it was too late—and he knew that Peirce himself felt that James carried pragmatism too far. P
eirce preferred his kind of pragmatism, which he labeled “pragmaticism.”

  If idealists, theological and lay, were repelled by aspects of pragmatism, the doctrine had special appeal to the practical men of law. Had not the very term, indeed, with its Greek root in pragma—“practical matter”—been extended by the Romans to mean “skilled in business, and especially experienced in matters of law”? Certainly it had a strong appeal to one lawyer who happened to be a Supreme Court justice. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., hardly needed instruction from James on pragmatism; in the early 1870s, Holmes had met regularly in Cambridge with Peirce’s Metaphysical Club, which also numbered such luminaries as Chauncey Wright and John Fiske, as well as James. He and James as young men had spent long evenings “twisting the tail of the Kosmos,” and had remained in touch mainly by mail in later years.

  “I heartily agree with much, but I am more sceptical than you are,” Holmes wrote James in thanking him for a copy of Pragmatism. “You would say that I am too hard or tough-minded,—I think none of the philosophers sufficiently humble.” Holmes had already responded to earlier writings of James on pragmatism. “For a good many years I have had a formula for truth which seems humbler than those you give … but I don’t know whether it is pragmatic or not. I have been in the habit of saying that all I mean by truth is what I can’t help thinking.... It seems to me that the only promising activity is to make my universe coherent and livable, not to babble about the universe.... To act affirms, for the moment at least, the worth of an end; idealizing seems to be simply the generalized and permanent affirmation of the worth of ends…. Man, like a tree in the cleft of a rock, gradually shapes his roots to his surroundings, and when the roots have grown to a certain size, can’t be displaced without cutting at his life….”