American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  [Ned Cobb on his labor as a boy]: quoted in Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974), p. 15.

  132–3 [Washington on living conditions of sharecroppers]: Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (Corner House, 1971; originally published 1900, 1901), pp. 112–16.

  134 [Ownership of land by black farmers]: Woodward, p. 205; Arnold H. Taylor, Travail and Triumph: Black Life and Culture in the South Since the Civil War (Greenwood Press, 1976), p. 72.

  [Pride of ex-slaves in owning land]: George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography (Greenwood Press, 1972), vol. 6, p. 192, quoted in Taylor, p. 69.

  [Conditions of white sharecroppers]: Shannon, p. 99.

  134–5 [Farm family’s income]: ibid., quoted at p. 115.

  [Woodward on the crop lien system]: Woodward, p. 180.

  [Otken on credit system]: quoted in Ransom and Sutch, p. 164.

  135–6 [Merchant-debtor relationship]: Goodwyn, p. 31; see also Thomas D. Clark, “The Furnishing and Supply System in Southern Agriculture Since 1865,”Journal of Southern History, vol. 12, no. 1 (February 1946), pp. 24–44.

  136 [“No cotton, no credit”]: Goodwyn, p. 31.

  [Matt Brown]: Clark, “Furnishing and Supply System,” pp. 41–42.

  Working Classes: The Conditions of Existence

  137 [Transformation of Lynn]: John T. Cumbler, Working-Class Community in Industrial America (Greenwood Press, 1979), quoted at p. 17.

  [Inside view of a tenement]: Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (Scribner’s, 1890), p. 43.

  [Death rate of children]: ibid., p. 36.

  138 [Death of a baby]: ibid., pp. 43–44.

  [Divisions between ethnic groups]: ibid., pp. 24–25.

  [Sweatshops]: John Dewitt Warner, “The ‘Sweating System’ in New York City,” Harper’s Weekly, vol. 39, no. 1990 (February 9, 1895), p. 135, as cited in Milton Meltzer, Bread—and Roses: The Struggle of American Labor, 1865–1915 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 41.

  139 [Testimony of Fannie Harris]: quoted in Robert W. Smuts, Women and Work in America (Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 43–44; on child labor, see also Jacob A. Riis, The Children of the Poor (Scribner’s, 1902).

  [Richardson]: Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day: The True Story of a New York Working Girl as Told by Herself (Century, 1905), as cited in Smuts, pp. 70–72, Richardson quoted on owner at p. 72.

  [“A few hard chairs”]: Rose Cohen, quoted in Katzman, p. 12.

  [Domestics’ grievances]: Helen Campbell, Prisoners of Poverty (Little, Brown, 1900), pp. 222–31, excerpted in Cott, pp. 322–26, quoted at pp. 323, 324.

  [Domestic work]: Smuts, pp. 79–80, quoted at p. 80.

  140 [Wage data]: Clarence D. Long, Wages and Earnings in the United States, 1860–1890 (Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 61–68, 109–10.

  [Incomes of the wealthy]: Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (Scribner’s, 1929), vol. 1, p. 348 (“Philip Danforth Armour”), and vol. 3, pp. 500, 503 (“Andrew Carnegie”); Jules Abels, The Rockefeller Billions (Macmillan, 1965), p. 179.

  [Life in a steel works]: Charles Rumford Walker, Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), p. 16; John A. Fitch, The Steel Workers (Russell Sage Foundation, 1911), Part 1.

  [Accidents in a steel mill]: Fitch, p. 64.

  141 [“I live in the mills”]: quoted in ibid., p. 201.

  [Home life in a mill town]: ibid., p. 203.

  [Homes of steel workers]: Stefan Lorant, Pittsburgh (Author’s Edition, Inc., 1980), p. 212.

  [Steel wages]: Fitch, ch. 12; see also Paul Underwood Kellogg, ed., Wage-Earning Pittsburgh (Survey Associates, 1914), ch. 3.

  [Social evils of the urban environment]: Riis, The Other Half, p. 3.

  142 [The Pullman experiment]: Stanley Buder, Pullman: An Experiment in Industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 41; and see also Meltzer, pp. 148–52.

  Social Class and Social Outcast

  142 [Aristotle on the class system as universal]: Aristotle, Politics, Benjamin Jowett, tr. (Modern Library, 1943), quoted at pp. 190, 191,192.

  [Postwar disparity in income]: Jeffrey G. Williamson and Peter H. Lindert, American Inequality: A Macroeconomic History (Academic Press, 1980), quoted at p. 75; see also J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (University of California Press, 1978), p. 208.

  143 [Myth of “rags to riches” in Pittsburgh]: John N. Ingham, The Iron Barons: A Social Analysisof an American Urban Elite, 1874–1965; (Greenwood Press, 1978), quoted at p. 5; see also, Gutman, op. cit.,ch. 4.

  [Social and cultural forces in the industrial working class, and their political implications]: see Melvin Rader, Marx’s Interpretation of History (Oxford University Press, 1979); John M. Maguire, Marx’s Theory of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1978); Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (University of Texas Press, 1979); Gutman, passim.

  [Gutman on transformations of working class]: Gutman, p. 15.

  144 [Eastern Europeans at Carnegie]: David Brody, Steel Workers in America: The Nonunion Era (Harvard University Press, 1960), ch. 5, esp. p. 96.

  [“Nothing job, nothing job”]: “Song of an Italian Workman,” Rochester (N.Y.) Post-Express, n.d., reprinted in Gutman, p. 31.

  145 [Caste and class and race in the United States]: Anthony de Reuck and Julie Knight, Caste and Race: Comparative Approaches (J. & A. Churchill, 1967); Celia S. Heller, ed., Structured Social Inequality (Macmillan, 1969); Reinhard Bendix and Seymour Martin Lipset, eds.,Class, Status, and Power (Free Press, 1953).

  [Dimensions of caste]: Max Weber, “Class, Status, Party,” reprinted in Bendix and Lipset, pp. 63–75.

  [Jewish upper class in Manhattan]: Stephen Birmingham, “Our Crowd”; The Great Jewish Families of New York (Harper & Row, 1967), passim; John Higham, Send These to Me (Atheneum, 1975), esp. ch. 8; John Higham, “Anti-Semitism in the Gilded Age: A Reinterpretation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 43, no. 4 (March 1957), pp. 559–78; see also Judith Rita Kramer and Seymour Leventman, Children of the Gilded Ghetto (Anchor Books, 1969).

  [Jewish aristocracy]: Birmingham, p. ix.

  146 [Hierarchy within the Jewish community]: ibid., pp. 154–55; and see also Nathan Glazer.American Judaism (University of Chicago Press, 1957).

  [Jews and the Statue of Liberty]: Birmingham, p. 128.

  [Ghetto to ghetto]: Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), chs. 1–3, quoted at p. 67.

  [East Side living and working conditions]: Howe, ch. 3, quoted at p. 88; and see Riis, The Other Half, op. cit., chs. 10, 11.

  147 [“Jewtown”]: Riis, The Other Half, p. 104.

  [Jews indifferent to abuse]: ibid., p. 42.

  [Nineteenth century immigration]: Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (Harper & Bros., 1961), pp. 471–72.

  148 [Blacks in Washington]: James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington (University of Illinois Press, 1980).

  [A “vile place”]: quoted in ibid, pp. 26–27.

  [Color line in Manhattan]: Riis, The Other Half p. 150.

  [Ethnic cleanliness]: ibid.

  [“Once a colored house”]: quoted in ibid., p. 151.

  [Welshman on Southern blacks]: John R. Williams to William Thomas, letter of November 10, 1895, in Mortimer S. Adler, ed., The Negro in American History: A Taste of Freedom, 1854–1927 (Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation, 1969), pp. 137–41, quoted at pp. 139, 140.

  149 [Black cowhands]: Kenneth W. Porter, “Negro Labor in the Western Cattle Industry,1866–1900,” in Milton Cantor, ed., Black Labor in America (Negro Universities Press,1969), pp. 24–52.

  [Vardaman on official Southern racism]: quoted in E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States (Macmillan, 1949), p. 157; and see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford University Press, 1974).

  149 [Kansas Exodus]:
Charles H. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850–1925 (Russell& Russell, 1967), pp. 213–15.

  149–50 [Cheyennes vs. the Union Pacific]: Angie Debo, A History of the Indians of the United States (University of Oklahoma Press, 1970), pp. 185–86.

  150 [Ten Bears against settling]: quoted in ibid., pp. 187–88.

  [The Sioux]: Ruth Underhill.Red Man’s America (University of Chicago Press, 1953), ch. 8; see also George Bird Grinnell, When Buffalo Ran (University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Royal Hassrick, The Sioux: Life and Customs of a Warrior Society (University of Oklahoma Press, 1972); and Warren K. Moorehead, The American Indian in the United States: Period 1850–1914 (Andover Press, 1914).

  [Sioux Ghost Dance]: Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., The Indian Heritage of America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), p. 121; Underhill, p. 159.

  [Sioux preparation for the hunt]: Grinnell, p. 19.

  [The hunt]: Underhill, p. 156.

  [The agriculturalists of the Southwest]: E. E. Dale, The Indians of the Southwest (University of Oklahoma Press, 1949); Josephy, ch. 16; Underhill, ch. 9; Clark Wissler, Indians of the United States (Doubleday, 1966), ch. 22.

  151 [Hopi snake dance]: Wissler, p. 220.

  [The pueblo]: ibid., p. 225.

  [The Navajos and Apaches]: Underhill, ch. 10.

  [Kwakiutl competitiveness and cannibalism ]: Phillip Drucker, Cultures of the North Pacific Coast (Chandler, 1965), ch. 8; Josephy, p. 77; Wissler, p. 119.

  5. THE POWER OF IDEAS

  152 [Times on liberty]: New York Times, October 29, 1886, p. 1.

  152–3 [Creation and dedication of the Statue of Liberty]: Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty (Penguin Books, 1976); Rodman Gilder, The Battery (Houghton Mifflin, 1936), pp. 219–20.

  153 [Cleveland’s acceptance of the Statue]: quoted in New York Times, October 29, 1886, p. 2.

  [Liberty]: Christian Bay, The Structure of Freedom (Stanford University Press, 1958); Sidney Hook, The Paradoxes of Freedom (University of California Press, 1964); Louis Hartz, TheLiberal Tradition in America (Harcourt, Brace, 1955).

  [Webster on Liberty and Union]: Register of Debates (Gales and Seaton, 1830), vol. 6, 21st Congress, 1st session, January 27, 1830, p. 80.

  [Adams on liberty and properly]: from John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of the Governments of the United States, quoted in Francis W. Coker, Democracy, Liberty, and Property (Macmillan, 1942), p. 125.

  [Emerson’s liberty]: see James MacGregor Burns, The Vineyard of Liberty (Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 483, 491.

  154 [Marx on bourgeois liberty]: Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Robert C. Tucker, ed..The Marx-Engels Reader (W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 40.

  Dinner at Delmonico’s

  155 [Liberty and laissez-faire]: R. L. Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy (Harvard UniversityPress, 1963).

  [Malthus]: T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, 2nd ed. (W. Pickering, 1836).

  [Ricardo]: David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 3rd ed. (John Murray, 1821).

  [Wayland]: The Elements of Political Economy (Gould, Kendall and Lincoln, 1837).

  156 [Individualism, late nineteenth-century America]: Irvin G. Wyllie, Self-Made Man in America (Rutgers University Press, 1954); Kenneth S. Lynn, Dream of Success: The Modern American Imagination (Little, Brown, 1955); Theodore P. Greene, America’s Heroes (Oxford University Press, 1970); Moses Rischin, ed., The American Gospel of Success (Quadrangle, 1965); Richard M. Huber, The American Idea of Success (McGraw-Hill, 1971).

  [The “Great Train Robbery”]: Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Alfred A. Knopf, 1955). p. 221.

  [Conservatism in nineteenth-century America]: Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865–1901 (University of Michigan Press, 1956), passim, from whom Atkinson (p. 52), J. S. Mill (p. 9), the theologian, Roswell D. Hitchcock (p. 121), and Burgess (p. 94), respectively, are quoted; see also Rossiter, esp. chs. 3 and 4; Vernon Louis Parrington, The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America (Harcourt, Brace and World. 1958), vol. 3 of Main Currents in American Thought.

  157 [Darwin vs. the creationists]: Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought, 2nd ed. (Ronald Press, 1956), ch. 14.

  [The “Vogue of Spencer”]: Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, rev. ed. (Beacon Press, 1955), ch. 2; Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography (Houghton Mifflin, 1920), esp. pp. 333–39; John Fiske, Edward Livingston Youmans (D. Appleton, 1894), esp. pp. 502–51.

  [Spencer on true liberty]: Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (D. Appleton, 1865), quoted in Fine, p. 33.

  [Spencerism and its influence]: Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (D. Appleton, 1904), for recent analyses of Social Darwinism see Robert C. Bannister, Social Darwinism: Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Temple University Press, 1979); Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and English Thought: The Interaction Between Biological and Social Theory (Humanities Press, 1980); Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (W. W. Norton, 1962); Jack Jones, “Social Darwinism Reconsidered,” Political Psychology (Spring–Summer 1981–82), pp. 239–66.

  158 [Hofstadter on Spencer]: Hofstadter, p. 32.

  [American sales of Spencer’s books]: ibid., p. 34.

  [James on Spencer]: Fine, p. 41.

  [Professors agreeing on free competition]: J. F. Normano, The Spirit of American Economics (John Day, 1943), p. 61, quoted in Fine, pp. 11–12; see also Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (Viking Press, 1946–59). vol. 2; Anna Haddow, Political Science in American Colleges and Universities, 1636–1900 (D. Appleton-Century, 1939), Part 4.

  [Sumner]: Hofstadter, ch. 3; Stow Persons, ed., Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner (Prentice-Hall, 1963); Bruce Curtis, William Graham Sumner (Twayne, 1981).

  [Sumner on “strong” and “weak”]: quoted in Hofstadter, p. 57.

  [Sumner on the natural selection of millionaires]: ibid., p. 58.

  159 [Student exchange with Sumner]: William Lyon Phelps, “When Yale Was Given to Sumnerology” (review of Harris E. Starr, William Graham Sumner), Literary Digest International Book Review, vol. 3, no. 10 (September 1925), pp. 661–63, quoted at p. 661.

  [Clergymen on success and property]: quoted in Fine, pp. 118–19.

  [Edwin Lawrence Godkin on government intervention and corruption]: quoted in Parrington, vol. 3, p. 162.

  160 [Horatio Alger, Jr.]: John Tebbel, From Rags to Riches (Macmillan, 1963); Ralph D. Gardner, Horatio Alger, or the American Hero Era (Wayside Press, 1964); Herbert R. Mayes, Alger (Macy-Masius, 1928).

  [Huber on Alger’s heroes]: Huber, p. 46.

  [Greene on Munsey]: Greene, quoted at p. 99.

  [“Riches power”]: quoted in ibid., p. 99.

  [White on Munsey]: ibid., p. 102.

  [McGuffey Reader on trying]: quoted in Rischin, p. 45.

  161 [Carnegie on Spencer]: quoted in Joseph F. Wall, Andrew Carnegie (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 381.

  [Dinner at Delmonico’s]: Spencer, Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 478; New York Times, November 10, 1882, p. 5; Carnegie, pp. 335–37; Wall, pp. 387–89; Lately Thomas, Delmonico’s (Houghton Mifflin, 1967); Ethel F. Fisk, ed., The Letters of John Fiske (Macmillan, 1940), p. 478.

  162 [Wall on other speakers]: Wall, p. 388.

  [Beecher’s qualified endorsement of evolution]: quoted in New York Times, November 10, 1882, p. 5

  The Bitch-Goddess Success

  [Dinner at Delmonico’s for Henry George]: New York Times, October 22, 1882, p. 9; Perry Belmont, An American Democrat (Columbia University Press, 1940), pp. 296–97.

  [Henry George]: Henry George, Jr., The Life of Henry George (Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1960); Charles Albro Barker, Henry George (Oxford University Press, 1955).

  163 [Henry George on man’s right to the free gifts of nature]: quoted in George, Jr., p. 223.

  [Bellamy]: Sylvia E.
Bowman, The Year 2000: A Critical Biography of Edward Bellamy (Bookman Associates, 1958), esp. pp. 107–52.

  [Bellamy on his purpose in writing Looking Backward]: Edward Bellamy, “How I Wrote Looking Backward,” Ladies’ Home Journal, vol. 2, no. 5 (April 1894), quoted in A. E. Morgan, Edward Bellamy (Columbia University Press, 1944), pp. 229–30.

  [Looking Backward]: Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (Houghton Mifflin, 1888).

  [The metaphor of the coach]: ibid., pp. 10–12.

  164–5 [Dialogue between Julian West and Edith]: Edward Bellamy, Equality (D. Appleton, 1897), pp. 4–13.

  166 [Lloyd]: Chester McArthur Destler, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Empire of Reform (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963).

  [Destler on Lloyd]: ibid., p. 301.

  166–7 [George on Looking Backward]: quoted in Barker, p. 540.

  167 [Lloyd on George]: quoted in Destler, p. 136.

  [Bellamy, nationalizing and “Nationalism”]: Bowman, pp. 122–38, 308–14.

  [Bellamy-George exchange]: quoted in Morgan, pp. 392–93.

  [Bellamy on the word socialist]: quoted in John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth, 1877–1890 (Harper & Row, 1968), p. 319; see also, Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 252.

  [“Prince of muddleheads”]: quoted in Garraty, p. 319.

  [Marx on George as theorist]: quoted in Barker, p. 356.

  [Lloyd on Marx’s determinism]: quoted in Destler, pp. 180, 508.

  [Gladden]: see Washington Gladden, Applied Christianity: Moral Aspects of Social Questions (Houghton Mifflin, 1886), esp. pp. 103 ff; Washington Gladden, Tools and the Man (Houghton Mifflin, 1893).

  [Morris on Looking Backward]: quoted in Parrington, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 311–12.

  167–8 [Post-Civil War New England culture]: Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer, 1865–1915 (E. P. Dutton, 1940]: Parrington, vol. 3, passim; see also F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 1941). [Parrington on nostalgia for Federalism]: Parrington, vol. 3, p. 50.