As always in our history, the most virulent ethnocentrism was reserved for race. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, control by local whites over emancipated blacks became more violent. For southern blacks, historian Richard McCormick reports, “the early 1900s brought nearly complete exclusion from politics, legal segregation of virtually all public and private facilities, and a sickening explosion of race riots and lynchings.” On May 18, 1896, in the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson case, the Supreme Court endorsed “separate, but equal” Jim Crow laws. The stain of segregation spread steadily after the turn of the century—from railcars to streetcars, ferryboats to chain gangs, zoos to theaters, hospitals to jails. White racist vigilantism spread from the South to the Midwest and West. By the 1880s lynchings had become common and peaked between 1889 and 1898. During that decade there was an average of one lynching every other day somewhere in America. Meanwhile, between 1890 and 1908 virtually all southern states disenfranchised African Americans, using new race-based suffrage restrictions—the poll tax, the literacy test, the grandfather clause, and other devices. Throughout the South electoral participation by African Americans fell by an average of 62 percent—by as much as 100 percent in North Carolina, 99 percent in Louisiana, 98 percent in Alabama, and 83 percent in Florida.28
The more vicious forms of segregation were concentrated in the South, but in the North many civic institutions explicitly excluded working-class people, as well as African Americans, Jews, and Catholics, from membership. Progressives in the South were intent on excluding blacks from politics, and those in the West were hostile to Asians. At the same time, across the nation racist doctrines gained intellectual credibility. Professor Nathaniel Shaler of Harvard argued that emancipated blacks were reverting to the savages they had once been. “The administrations of T.R. [Teddy Roosevelt] and Woodrow Wilson coincided with what has been, since the abolition of slavery, the nadir of race relations in America,” observes political historian Wilson Carey McWilliams. In short, the Progressive Era was intimately associated with exclusion.29
Americans at the end of the nineteenth century were divided by class, ethnicity, and race, much as we are today, although today’s dividing lines differ in detail from those of a century ago (as Asians and Hispanics, for example, have replaced Jews and Italians as targets of discrimination). Equally evocative of our own social dilemmas were debates about the effects of the transportation and communications revolutions on traditional community bonds. The railroad and rural free delivery, mail-order firms and (somewhat later) chain stores, and the automobile disrupted local commerce and threatened place-based social connections. Sears, Roebuck, Montgomery Ward, the A&P, and Woolworth’s were the counterparts to today’s Wal-Mart and Amazon.com. Thundered William Allen White, the influential Progressive Kansas journalist,
The mail order house unrestricted will kill our smaller towns, creating great cities with their … inevitable caste feeling that comes from the presence of strangers who are rich and poor living side by side. Friendship, neighborliness, fraternity, or whatever you may call that spirit of comradry that comes when men know one another well, is the cement that holds together this union of states.30
Editorialized one newspaper in neighboring Iowa, “When your loved one was buried, was it Marshall Field and Co. who dropped a tear of sympathy and uttered the cheering words, or was it your hometown merchant?”31
The new communications technology triggered a lively debate among turn-of-the-century social philosophers that prefigured with remarkable fidelity the quickening controversy in contemporary America about the effects of the Internet. On the one hand, optimists enthused that the new technologies of communication would allow human sympathy wider scope. Altruism would expand in a society newly unified by rail, power line, and telegraph.32 In William Allen White’s Utopian vision, the new technological advances in the communications field harbored the possibility of making the
nation a neighborhood…. The electric wire, the iron pipe, the street railroad, the daily newspaper, the telephone … have made us all one body…. There are no outlanders. It is possible for all men to understand one another…. Indeed it is but the dawn of a spiritual awakening.33
Philosopher Herbert Croly argued that the new communications media would allow an active citizenry to “meet” despite distance and thus would reduce or eliminate the need for representation. Replace electricity and the telephone with the Internet in these arguments, and the thesis sounds exceptionally timely at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
On the other hand, more cautious social observers like John Dewey and Mary Parker Follett were concerned with how to intertwine the new technology with face-to-face ties. Although they recognized and honored the larger new society, they also cherished the smaller, older social networks of neighborhoods.
The Great Society created by steam and electricity may be a society [wrote Dewey], but it is no community. The invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life. …The machine age in developing the Great Society has invaded and partially disintegrated the small communities of former times without generating a Great Community.34
Real solidarity [added Follett] will never be accomplished except by beginning somewhere the joining of one small group with another…. Only by actual union, not by appeals to the imagination, can the …varied neighborhood groups be made the constituents of a sound, normal, unpartisan city life. Then being a member of a neighborhood group will mean at the same time being a member and a responsible member of the state.35
Working in Roxbury, a then new streetcar suburb of Boston, Follett observed that “a free, full community life lived within the sustaining and nourishing power of the community bond … is almost unknown now.” Seeking to re-create face-to-face neighborhood bonds, historian Jean Quandt reports, Follett
sought to make [community] centers into institutions for overcoming civic apathy, furthering mutual understanding among groups, and creating a local framework for the integration of churches, trade associations, lodges, and youth groups…. [T]he face-to-face communication which started at the level of the community center would remain the surest way of creating solidarity.36
Progressives also worried about professionalization and about ordinary men and women forsaking participation for spectatorship and leisure. Sociologist Robert Park wrote: “In politics, religion, art and sport we are represented now by proxies where formerly we participated in person. All the forms of communal and cultural activity in which we … formerly shared have been taken over by professionals and the great mass of men are no longer actors, but spectators.” A few years later John Dewey, a younger member of the Progressive intellectuals, blamed cheap entertainment for the decline of civic involvement: “The increase in the number, variety, and cheapness of amusements represents a powerful diversion from political concern. The members of an inchoate public have too many ways of enjoyment, as well as of work, to give much thought to organization into an effective public…. What is significant is that access to means of amusement has been rendered easy and cheap beyond anything known in the past.”37
Social reformers in the Progressive Era (as in our own era) were caught on the horns of a dilemma. In social service, in public health, in urban design, in education, in neighborhood organization, in cultural philanthropy, even in lobbying, professional staff could often do a more effective, more efficient job in the task at hand than “well-meaning” volunteers. However, disempowering ordinary members of voluntary associations could easily diminish grassroots civic engagement and foster oligarchy. Progressives struggled with themselves over the choice between professionalism and grassroots democracy, though in the end professionalism would win out.38
Beyond these portentous debates about technology and professionalism, many Americans at the close of the nineteenth century felt morality eroding and community fracturing. The dominant public ideology of the Gilded Age had
been social Darwinism. Its advocates had argued that social progress required the survival of the fittest—with little or no interference by government with the “natural laws of the marketplace.” In a society so organized, the ablest would succeed, the feckless would fail, and the unhindered process of elimination would ensure social progress. In important respects this philosophy fore-shadowed the libertarian worship of the unconstrained market that has once again become popular in contemporary America. However, at the end of the nineteenth century, critics of social Darwinism gradually gained the upper hand both intellectually and (increasingly) politically.35 “At the turn of the century,” reports historian Painter, “Americans came increasingly to feel that society needed to be democratized to ensure everyone a decent chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”39
This philosophical U-turn was triggered in part by the revelations of muckraking journalists—Jacob Riis, whose How the Other Half Lives (1890) portrayed the tragic conditions in slum tenements; Lincoln Steffens, whose Shame of the Cities (1904) censured urban squalor and government corruption; Ida Tarbell, whose exposés in McClure’s magazine (1904) attacked the depredations of the Standard Oil trust; Upton Sinclair, whose The Jungle (1905) decried abuses of immigrant laborers; and others.40 Quite apart from such specific abuses, however, Progressive intellectuals articulated a broader yearning for the community values of small-town life, nostalgia provoked by the materialism, individualism, and “bigness” of the new America.
The pace and degree of the social change through which Americans had just lived a century ago were profoundly disorienting. The transformation of their society affected virtually everyone and tore asunder traditional relationships. They expressed their feelings about the social disjunctures in their lives in remarkably contemporary terms. “We are unsettled to the very roots of our being,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1914.
There isn’t a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn’t move in a strange situation. We are not used to a complicated civilization, we don’t know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves.41
A year later Booth Tarkington, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Hoosier novelist, reflected on the social changes that had accompanied late-nineteenth-century urbanization in his native Indianapolis.
Not quite so long ago as a generation, there was no panting giant here, no heaving, grimy city; there was but a pleasant big town of neighborly people who had understanding of one another, being on the whole, much of the same type. It was a leisurely and kindly place—”homelike,” it was called…. The good burghers were given to jogging comfortably about in phaetons or in surreys for a family drive on Sunday. No one was very rich; few were very poor; the air was clean, and there was time to live.42
Urban historian Robert Barrows notes the nostalgic oversimplification in these lines but adds that “Tarkington’s lament for a simpler time also reflected a reality that readers of his generation would have accepted without hesitation.” Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, a firsthand witness to the changes, observed in 1912 that “in our own life the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up by the growth of an intricate mesh of wider contacts which leaves us strangers to people who live in the same house …diminishing our economic and spiritual community with our neighbors.”43 Urbanization, industrialization, and immigration had undermined neighborliness.
Progressive thinkers came mostly from small towns, and they recognized the oppressive features of small-town life—”the small-town herd,” as one of them put it. But they also recalled the virtues of a community rooted in interpersonal ties. “Reading of a wedding or the birth of a child,” William Allen White noted, “we have that neighborly feeling that breeds the real democracy.” Such neighborliness constituted an informal network of mutual aid, social capital in a particularly pure form. In small towns, historian Quandt observes,
[w]ith everyone minding everyone else’s business, illness or distress was quickly known and called forth a quick response. Jane Addams remembered the uses of village gossip: it kept men informed about who needed help and enabled them to do “the good lying next at hand.”…Along with a feeling of intimacy and a sense of classlessness, the small-town ethos which shaped the values of these intellectuals emphasized widespread participation in the public affairs of the community…. The result was a political democracy based on an egalitarian rather than a paternalistic sense of community.44
The communitarian Progressives decried the erosion of such close-knit ties in urbanizing, industrializing America. The impersonal and attenuated ties of the market replaced the sturdier bonds of family, friendship, and small-town solidarity. Their theories echoed distinctions articulated by contemporaneous social theorists from Europe—Sir Henry Maine’s status versus contract, Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft, Emile Durkheim’s mechanical versus organic solidarity, and Georg Simmel’s comparison of town and metropolis, all expounded between 1860 and 1902. Britain, as the first industrializing country, first encountered the modern clash of self-seeking and solidarity. As early as 1845 Benjamin Disraeli, later to become a Victorian reformer, wrote:
In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbours. Christianity teaches us to love our neighbour as ourself; modern society acknowledges no neighbour.
In the newer social order, his American successors concurred, “relations tended to be superficial, the restraints imposed by public opinion weak, and common cause with one’s neighbor lacking.”45
Yet these thinkers remained hopeful that social bonds of different form but similar value could be reconstructed even in the arm’s-length society that they saw arising around them. Their diagnosis of social change led to prescription, not despair. As historian Quandt describes the optimistic outlook of these reformers, “The easy sense of belonging, the similarity of experience, and the ethic of participation might be more easily maintained in the small locality than anywhere else, but this did not preclude their cultivation in different soil.”46 Finding or shaping new tools for cultivating community in the alien soil of industrial society was, thus, a central task for the Progressives.
Social reformers of the Progressive Era began to see society’s ills, poverty and the rest, as reflecting societal and economic causes, not individual moral failings. Rugged individualism seemed increasingly unrealistic in the new, more complex and interdependent circumstances and was gradually supplanted by a more organic conception of society. Progressives did not deny the importance of self-interest but added that men and women were also moved by nonmaterial values—affection, reputation, even altruism.
During the Gilded Age “charity” and “Americanization” had seemed to the comfortable middle classes an adequate response to social ills. “In these decades,” writes social historian Paul Boyer, “the middle class was in fact abandoning the immigrant cities and their complex problems—fleeing to the suburbs, retreating into tight neighborhood enclaves, dismissing municipal politics with ridicule, and allowing the industrial capitalism that was shaping the city to proceed unchecked and uncontrolled.” But, adds historian Jeffrey A. Charles, “by the turn of the century … sociability alone appeared to be an inadequate response to the feeling of crisis that gripped the middle class…. [S]ocial redemption required a new type of cooperative activism … serving the community.”47
Campaigning for president in 1912, Woodrow Wilson spoke of the transformation that had overtaken America in the preceding four decades in terms he knew voters would understand.
We have come upon a very different age from any that preceded us…. Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one another as ind
ividuals…. All over the Union, people are coming to feel they have no control over the course of their affairs. To-day, the everyday relationships of men are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other individual men. Now this is nothing short of a new social age, a new era of human relationships, a new stage-setting for the drama of life.48
IT WAS, IN SHORT, A time very like our own, brimming with promise of technological advance and unparalleled prosperity, but nostalgic for a more integrated sense of connectedness. Then, as now, new modes of communication seemed to promise new forms of community, but thoughtful men and women wondered whether those new forms would be fool’s gold. Then, as now, optimism nurtured by recent economic advances battled pessimism grounded in the hard realities of seemingly intractable social ills.
Then, as now, new concentrations of wealth and corporate power raised questions about the real meaning of democracy. Then, as now, massive urban concentrations of impoverished ethnic minorities posed basic questions of social justice and social stability. Then, as now, the comfortable middle class was torn between the seductive attractions of escape and the deeper demands of redemptive social solidarity.
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