American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  At the turn of the century, the most defiant of the icon-smashing economists was a scholar named Thorstein Veblen. Almost peasantlike in appearance, with his round face, hair parted in the middle, heavy brows and mustache, and rough country clothes, Veblen had seemed almost reclusive until he shocked academia with a series of writings culminating in The Theory of the Leisure Class in 1899 and The Theory of Business Enterprise five years later. Born on the Wisconsin frontier in 1857, Veblen had come easily by the burning scorn for pecuniary enterprise that marked most of his work. Both his grandfathers had run afoul of lawyers, government officials, and other “predators” in Norway and the United States. As a boy, Veblen had to cope with a dominant Yankee culture that regarded Norwegian immigrants as inferiors, and he grew up in a rural culture and national epoch filled with hatred and fear of merchants and lawyers and bankers, both in the country trading towns and in the nation’s power centers. Although his family prospered as the years passed, Veblen himself underwent long stretches of poverty as a graduate student and more humiliating years of underemployment before he won academic positions—though never academic tenure, even after he gained fame. Among other accomplishments, he turned the Horatio Alger myth upside down.

  No one had ever read a book quite like The Theory of the Leisure Class. In heavy, polysyllabic language that gave off a whiff of academic respectability, he struck out at the most sacred of idols.

  The leisure class’s addiction to sports: “Chicane, falsehood, brow-beating, hold a well-secured place in the method of procedure of any athletic contest and in games generally.”

  Upper-class dress: “Much of the charm that invests the patent-leather shoe, the stainless linen, the lustrous cylindrical hat, and the walking-stick … comes of their pointedly suggesting that the wearer cannot when so attired bear a hand in any employment that is directly and immediately of any human use. Elegant dress serves its purpose of elegance not only in that it is expensive, but also because it is the insignia of leisure.”

  Pets and other sacred cows: “The dog ... is the filthiest of the domestic animals in his person and the nastiest in his habits. For this he makes up in a servile, fawning attitude toward his master, and a readiness to inflict damage and discomfort on all else.” “The utility of the fast horse lies largely in his efficiency as a means of emulation; it gratifies the owner’s sense of aggression and dominance to have his own horse outstrip his neighbor’s.” Cats: well, cats were “less wasteful” than dogs and horses and might “even serve a useful end.”

  Such wicked and scathing thoughts stimulated interest in Veblen’s examination that became increasingly a vivisection and produced the titles of his major works—The Instinct of Workmanship, The Higher Learning in America, The Vested Interests and the Common Man, The Engineers and the Price System, Absentee Ownership. The overarching theme of these works was the subordination in capitalistic America of industry to business, of the industrial arts to pecuniary gain, of rational use to conspicuous waste, of genuine human values to money values, of function to ownership. In his turgid and repetitive treatment of this theme Veblen dealt with a host of other subjects, ranging from the subordination of women to the nature of science, the philosophical failings of pragmatism, the most subtle psychological and anthropological aspects of American culture.

  But Veblen’s writings always stopped short of presenting a system or program as an alternative to the pecuniary culture that he so despised. He had a lifelong interest in Marxism and delighted in picturing university presidents as captains of education modeled on captains of industry. Like Marx, he focused on the cultural incidence of industrialism and the machine process; like Marx, he held to an economic theory of history and a technological theory of economics; like Marx, he saw the alliance between vested interests and vested ideas. But he differed with Marxist thought in significant ways, and in any event refused to accept the glittering ideas and programs that socialists and communists were offering Americans during the progressive era.

  What instead? Nothing. In later years, he proposed some kind of utopian technocracy under the leadership of rationalist engineers, but his power analysis was naive, his political program quixotic, and some of his proposals almost authoritarian. On the cardinal issues of freedom and economic planning, Lev Dobriansky concluded, Veblen’s power philosophy offered no enlightenment. Ultimately his devastating analyses would help clear the ground of much intellectual rubbish, but Veblen had few solutions for those American thinkers and actors who were struggling with the knotty problems of making economic means serve human ends.

  If toward the close of the nineteenth century economists as well as historians were failing to grasp the relation of political democracy and economic power, who could master the problem? Some would have pointed to a man widely viewed as a historian—and who so viewed himself—but who was in fact far more. This was Henry Adams—social critic, political analyst, closet theologian, untitled cultural anthropologist.

  It seemed that Clio herself had carefully prepared Adams for this exacting task. History was stitched into his very fiber. He could not forget that he was descended from two first families and if he happened to, he was reminded by an Irish gardener who said to him, when a child, “You’ll be thinkin’ you’ll be President too!” He had known most of the intellectual and political leaders of the middle and late years of the century. Although he remarked that Harvard had provided him no education for leadership—only for moderation, restraint, mesure—he had a continuing close-up view of the foibles, frailties, and follies of men in office. And he had devoted himself to history, producing brilliant, massive studies of the United States and of particular leaders such as Albert Gallatin, whose democratic ideas and actions he admired as much as he disliked Jefferson’s.

  By turn of century, Henry Adams had long since ensconced himself in his Washington mansion, alongside a similar edifice built by his friend John Hay. There he entertained diplomats and politicians, counseled ambassadors and statesmen, and observed the rise and fall of politicos with a sardonic eye. He shared his writings with a small circle, corresponded with a few historians, even accepted the presidency of the American Historical Association. His brothers too were doing history—Charles Francis still into railroads, Brooks into such theories of history as the rhythmic oscillation of societies between barbarism and civilization.

  Who better than Henry Adams—author of Democracy, analyst of the physics and psychology of power, perceptive observer of the role of women in history, morbid analyst of human nature—could solve the mysteries of the subtle interplay of political ambition and corruption, pecuniary motivation, sexual desire and jealousy, conflict of leaders, and lofty ideals? He was fascinated by political and economic power wielders without being in the least bedazzled by them—he considered himself superior to them. He was a student of the history of history, having studied his Marx and his Hegel and his Darwin. He swallowed none of the philosophical theories of history wholesale; indeed he was as critical of most of the established historians, conservative or radical, as he was of the political establishment. And he was a thoroughly modern historian, conscious of the power of the machine and the dynamics of the workshop. Surely Henry Adams could penetrate the citadels of power.

  It was not to be. When Adams finally pulled together his notions of history, they emerged as a pretentious grand theory that sought to apply to the study of history the work of William Kelvin and other scientists on physical energy. Adams leaped at Kelvin’s suggestion that modern biologists were “coming once more to a firm acceptance of something beyond mere gravitational, chemical, and physical forces; and that unknown thing is a vital principle.” Adams saw “vitalism” as the social energy of history, subject to physical laws, and requiring a whole new approach to the study of social organization and evolution. It was a theory so dense and inchoate that even Adams’s friend William James said privately to a friend, “If you can understand it all you can do much better than I.”

  A crucial tes
t of the theory was its applicability to the understanding of men and events, and here it failed. Presidents, he said, illustrated the effect of unlimited power on limited minds. Theodore Roosevelt displayed such restless agitation and chronic excitement during the first year of his presidency as to make a friend tremble. Adams concluded that “power is poison” and its “effect on Presidents had been always tragic.” Adams left the matter there. A long-term observer of “trusts,” he wrote that they were unscrupulous and revolutionary, “troubling all the old conventions and values, as the screws of ocean steamers must trouble a school of herring,” tearing society to pieces and trampling it underfoot. All he could see was a contest between the trusts, with their organized “schools, training, wealth and purpose,” and the forces behind Roosevelt, their cohesion slight, their training irregular, their objects vague. Adams professed neutrality on the matter—and he offered no keys to solving the problems of either presidential or corporate power in a democracy.

  How could the nation’s foremost analyst of politics end up with such a bleak and constricted theory of society? Perhaps because of his own desire for power, magnified by his sense of lacking it, both the desire and the lack sharpened by his knowledge of the Presidents and power-wielders in his own family. Himself a small, balding, sensitive man, increasingly snobbish and even anti-Semitic as he grew older, he displayed a fascination with physical power, as he haunted the great industrial exhibitions of the time, standing transfixed before the huge dynamos at work. He was equally fascinated by political power, even as he despised the men who wielded it. Adams’s impotence in his analysis of power symbolized the collective impotence of the fourth generation of Adamses, as Henry sat in his mansion staring out the window at the White House, Brooks Adams dallied with “laws” of civilization and decay, and Charles complained of New England winters and wrote Henry that “while I am not tired, I am bored.” The three brothers were living on into the twentieth century amid the ghosts of the nineteenth.

  Even more, Henry Adams’s failure of analysis symbolized the intellectual tragedy of a nation unable to come to grips with the nature and implications of a powerful and expanding industrial machine challenging the pretensions of a “government by the people.” But now different persons with different questions were offering differing sets of answers—and displays of artistic expression—in the many-chambered mansion of American democracy.

  Art: “All That Is Holy Is Profaned”

  In Greenwich Village—in the dingy rooming houses that had once been fashionable brownstones, in the dank art studios converted from stables, in the little cafes and tearooms dotting the crooked streets—rebellions in the arts and literature, in manners and morals, broke out during the first decade of the twentieth century. This tiny area in lower Manhattan had long seemed to hold a mystic attraction for free spirits: Tom Paine had lived here, and later Edgar Allan Poe, and still later Frank Norris and Henry James and Stephen Crane. In one of their ceaseless flights uptown from the huddling masses that occupied lower Manhattan, New York’s social elites had abandoned this area, leaving their brownstones and their elegant Greek Revival houses and their shady little backyards. Now an exotic breed of artists, writers, bohemians, anarchists, and radical feminists moved in to take advantage of the low rents, while the Italian-American community looked on in wonderment.

  The rebels and their causes were wondrous to onlookers. Artists were rebelling against the pastoral landscapes and sentimental domestic portraits favored by the established art institutes. Writers were repudiating the genteel tradition of The Century, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Weekly. Young intellectuals and aesthetes just out of college classrooms were turning against professors who promulgated old-fashioned morality, political conservatism, and Victorian values. Novelists were angry at established publishing houses that wanted sentimental writings lacking any sense of the grit and squalor of everyday city life. Cultural nationalists attacked the European grip on belles lettres. Behind these risings lay an intellectual revolution against bourgeois values and the corporate power of industrial capitalism.

  The transcending ethic of Greenwich Village was liberation. “Everybody was freeing themselves and the world,” a Village writer recalled, “and everybody was freeing the world faster than everybody else.” Nowhere had the early ideas of Sigmund Freud been more happily, more greedily, embraced. Carl Jung even visited the Village in 1912 and lectured at the Liberal Club. Villagers endlessly discussed the meaning of their dreams, outdated morality, sexual permissiveness, and personal liberation, when they were not debating Marxism, socialism, trade unionism, bossism, pacifism, birth control, educational reform, abolition of prostitution, or Havelock Ellis’s notions of sexual liberation.

  The Village was, to be sure, far more a broker of ideas than a generator of them. Its rebellions drew from myriad intellectual and artistic sources. Villagers followed the writings of the European philosophers and social critics, visited the great men abroad, talked with Europeans who made the fabled Village their first stop on arrival. Nietzsche’s assaults on Christian morality and middle-class culture, Henri Bergson’s faith in relativity and intuition, Shaw’s and Ibsen’s acid portraits of bourgeois greed and hypocrisy fueled the Villagers’ iconoclasm. James’s and John Dewey’s relativism and pragmatism gave sanction to their own skepticism and experimentation.

  Everyone knew everyone else in the Village. On the street you might run into the long-arrived literary man William Dean Howells or the just-arriving Sinclair Lewis, the dancer Isadora Duncan, the ebullient young radicals John Reed and Max Eastman, the novelist Theodore Dreiser, the precocious young critic Randolph Bourne. If you stayed long enough, you saw everybody: one boardinghouse, on Washington Square South, was home at various times to Norris, Crane, O. Henry, Dreiser, Reed, Eugene O’Neill, Alan Seeger, Zona Gale. You came to know the eccentrics too, like the young man of respectable Chicago family who called himself a bastard and everyone he met a “bourgeois pig.”

  The best place to meet people in the Village, if you wanted hours of uninhibited talk, was the fabled salon of Mabel Dodge Luhan. A vibrant and imposing woman, with cool, dark gray eyes and a voice “like a viola, soft, caressing, mellow,” Luhan threw herself into everything—art, politics, feminism, union struggles. In her salon you could meet Big Bill Haywood in from the labor wars, the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, Lincoln Steffens, British socialists, visiting feminists. She boasted of her salon as a ferment of “Socialists, Trade-Unionists, Anarchists, Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, Old Friends, Psychoanalysts, I.W.W.s, Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern-Artists, Clubwomen, Women’s-place-is-in-the-home Women”—and even clergymen.

  Luhan and John Reed had a passionate love affair, after which he called her a “keen, cold, amorous” woman who demanded continuous change and excitement. Surely she wanted change; everyone in the Village seemed to want change, change for its own sake. Luhan wrote:

  Melt, You Women!

  Melt to August—grow ON and Ripen

  Give Yourselves Up!

  That is the only way to be Alive,

  That is what you want, isn’t it?

  To be alive?

  Life lies in the Change,

  Try it and see.

  “Constant revolutionizing of production,” Marx had written sixty years earlier in the Communist Manifesto, “uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” Villagers saw themselves as rebels against the system; Marxists saw them as a zany, fleeting expression of it.

  Nothing seemed more volatile in the first decade than the visual arts. Nor was there a more obvious target for rebels. A small number of powerful institutions seem
ed to control the public outlets of artistic expression at century’s end: the National Academy of Design and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. These custodians of “high art” insisted upon the romantic landscape, the still life, the portrait of the celebrated, and best of all, the painting that told a moral story or epitomized a historical moment. “Organized by the urban elite, dominated by ladies of high society, staffed by professionally trained personnel, housing classic works of European art donated by wealthy private collectors,” according to Alan Trachtenberg, the museums “established as a physical fact the notion that culture filtered downward from a distant past, from overseas, from the sacred founts of wealth and private power.”

  Now the establishment scented rebellion. Said the director of the Metropolitan, an appointee of J. P. Morgan, “There is a state of unrest all over the world in art as in all other things. It is the same in literature, as in music, in painting and in sculpture. And I dislike unrest.” The chief source of “unrest” in American art was the movement toward a new realism. Its precursors were Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins.

  “When I select a thing,” Homer once said, “I paint it exactly as it appears.” Born in 1836 in Maine, Homer was retained by Harper’s Weekly to record Civil War battlefield scenes, resulting in such graphic paintings as Rainy Day in Camp and Sharpshooter on Picket Duty. Years of painting lyrical pastoral scenes followed his war work, but when in 1883 Homer reestablished himself in his beloved Maine, he found in the violent power of the sea an enduring theme for his now-darkened temperament. Vigorous paintings in the 1880s and 1890s such as The Life Line, The Herring Net, Undertow, and The Gulf Stream depicted men and women pitted against boiling waters, at war with brooding and furious nature.