The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  The instance of the Mormons (too exhaustively treated by Mr. Werner to need reëxamination here) is a case in point. We may discover hallucination, epilepsy, and lust in the character and person of Joseph Smith. He wished to be a Messiah and he became a martyr. Yet the phenomenon of Mormonism has scores of other bearings. It not only satisfied longings for a fresher and more intimate communion with God than was offered by established religions; it offered also a certain adventure. And the principle of polygamy was exceptionally appropriate in an underpopulated domain where men were scarce and fecundity was a prime virtue. The phenomena, in short, are far too complicated for any single system of judgment. In fact, after spending a considerable time in the company of men and women who made simple clothes, or diet, or a single formula of any kind, a panacea for all ills, I begin to doubt whether any one theory, even psychoanalysis—with its masterly trick of accounting for opposites—can cover anything so complex as the impulses or operations of the human spirit.

  Most of all, I hesitate to use the literary débris of psychoanalysis because of the complexion which that method gives to criticism. I recall that, when I was at school, I became enchanted with a phrase of Friedrich Nietzsche’s. When I incautiously quoted it, I was asked, “Ah, but you know what happened to the poor man, don’t you?” As if the sanity of Ella Wheeler Wilcox could add dignity or truth to her utterances or the imputed impotence of Poe could subtract grandeur from his. There is a specific place for the appraisal of works of art in relation to the psychology of the artist, just as there is a place for criticism of the artist in relation to his time and his environment, or judgment of the accomplished work of a man by the standards of social effect. But none of these methods can be entirely adequate and none of them can criticize the object itself. Neither the psychoanalytical nor the social explanation of the motives which underlay the production of the work of art has anything to do with its artistic value. Nowadays, to discover a motive which can be related to sex, or snobbery, is supposed to be the whole function of criticism.

  This is bad enough when the critic speaks of literature. When he speaks of such a complex endeavor as founding a religion, or discovering a system of human relations, the business of criticism by motives becomes entirely trivial and beside the point. Heaven knows the Messiahs turned mountebank often enough. They were so extreme that they provided their own burlesques. They were so ridiculous that ridicule failed to touch them. But what makes them important is what they did and the various ways in which, from time to time, they laid hold on the imagination of a group, or community, or country. The fact that a Christian community could exist for a score of years in Massachusetts, is far more important than any speculation as to its motives.

  I began this study of reformers and founders of movements in America with a leading idea much simpler even than that supplied by psychoanalysis. Presently, I had to give it up, not because it was untrue, but because the strange phenomena I met with refused to be attracted and to cluster round my private magnet. My original idea was a timid protest against the arrogance of reformers in general—the arrogance which consists of mortgaging the future by analogy with the past. The method is familiar. The persecuted reformer reminds you that Socrates drank the hemlock, that Christ was crucified, that Bruno was burned at the stake. He implies that he is persecuted because he is a Christ or a Socrates. The logic is appalling; the attitude, humorless and offensive. It occurred to me that a study of self-constituted saviors might serve as a check to this form of spiritual snobbery. In the endless procession of Messiahs accepted by the few and mercilessly persecuted by the many, there is one Christ, one Buddha, one Garrison, marching like file-closers to thousands of crack-brained charlatans whose good intentions pave the road not to hell, but to oblivion. The suggestion that persecution in any way proves greatness is simply absurd. The world has persecuted enough of its great men to justify a little hesitation and a deal of humility before it persecutes anyone else; but it has also persecuted so many criminals, and derided so many fools, that proof by persecution ceases to be admissible. Two thieves were crucified, and only one Christ.

  This, as I say, was my leading idea and required me, without pre-judging the nature of any experiment in religion or sociology, only to find a sufficient number who were persecuted in their time and are remembered, if they are remembered at all, as objects of derision. I found enough of these. I found others, like Frances Willard, who were foully slandered in their time and who conquered in the end. I found a surprising number of cult-leaders upon whom the respect and wealth of their contemporaries were showered, but who now seem to us scoundrels for whom even self-delusion is no excuse. The more my theory was proved, the less important it became. The active presence of these extreme men and women sparkled in so many other lights that my own illumination was not needed.

  I came gradually to want to prove nothing What I did want was to compose a sort of anatomy of the reforming temperament and to follow it, by winding roads, to the spiritual settlements it made for itself. What the man thinks who sets himself apart from humanity and expects humanity to follow him, how such people acted, what they did, where they found strength to struggle and consolation in defeat, what victories they won, how they held their faith or lost it, why they ended in an all-embracing disaster—all these things seemed to me exceptionally interesting. The facts became my actual subject—not debunking, not analyzing, not interpreting—only the facts themselves, the strange and incalculable movements of human beings in the stress of life, the mysterious designs of baffled men and women to whom common life was a labyrinth without a clew and without a door.

  GILBERT SELDES.

  New York City

  1926–1928.

  [1] I have placed opposite the opening page of many of these chapters a group of notes on the domestic life of the time. The important events are known and the significant movements are alluded to in the text. It seemed to me that some of the commonplaces and some of the oddities of daily life could be rescued from obscurity and made to serve as a background and a contrast to a study of cults and fanaticisms and eccentricities.

  [2] Nor do they improve much in general, on the rough-and-ready system of Horace Greeley. He quotes, in his autobiography, a high-falutin analysis of the character of Margaret Fuller and adds that, if he had been called upon to write it, he should have “blundered out, that noble and great as she was, a good husband and two or three bouncing babies would have emancipated her from a deal of cant and nonsense.” In Greeley’s opinion, Mrs. Greeley had a good husband. She also knew the glories of motherhood. And she was as given to cant, she was as faddish, as nonsensical, as Margaret Fuller herself. The modern version of Greeley’s remark would substitute lover for husband, but it suggests the same satisfactions as cure for the same ills.

  PART ONE

  “The morbid are our greatest danger.”

  NIETZSCHE

  I. The Stammering Century.

  THE shout of the camp-meeting announced the nineteenth century to the young Republic. Ninety-nine years later the disciples of New Thought met in their first annual Convention, and their delicate, flute-like tones served as a valedictory. In the intervening years, other voices were heard. To hear voices, especially from the Beyond, became a mark of distinction. To be a Voice, was the supreme good. Greeley called it “this stammering century.”

  The air was full of voices. The sharp hoarse command of the pioneer, guiding his wagons over mountain roads deep in mud; the suave argument of De Witt Clinton, projecting the Erie Canal; the anxious pleading of Robert Fulton, protesting that his steamboat would not ruin navigation; the precise accents of Eli Whitney, explaining to the government his principle of interchangeable parts in the manufacture of guns; the war cry of the Indians on the western plains drowned out by the nasal laconic speech of the Yankee and, later, by the strange, broad tongue of the immigrant; the cries of the Forty-niners; the yelping of Boston mobs, attacking fugitive slaves; the patriotic hymns of William Cullen Bryan
t; the rounded phrases of Webster; Edward Everett saying, “Our government is in its theory perfect, and in its operation it is perfect also. Thus we have solved the great problem in human affairs.”

  These were the voices which made America. They spoke of a successful experiment in democratic government; of a western wilderness explored and conquered; of a physical world subdued by unparalleled feats of engineering and invention; of a Federal government slowly establishing itself in superiority over independent states; of immigration and pioneering in an interplay which continued so long as free lands were available; of industry gradually taking dominance over agriculture; of enormous fortunes founded; of the United States as a world power.

  These were the fluent speakers. While they were proclaiming the Gilded Age and the promise of America, other men were vehemently stammering out God’s curse on material progress and announcing Christ’s Kingdom on earth, or the New Eden in Indiana.

  There were the three young men so emancipated that they cursed every time they spoke, causing the fastidious Emerson to remove them from the front porch to the back, out of the hearing of passers-by; and the earnest, incoherent denunciations of Robert Owen, telling Congress what was right and what wrong with the world; and the soft, Swabian accents of the Rappites, who held that sexual intercourse was a sin; and the Scots burr of Fanny Wright, who believed in Free Love. Margaret Fuller held Conversations, trying “to vindicate the right of women to think,” confessing “we cannot show high culture and I doubt about vigorous thought,” and consoling herself with “manifesting free action as far as it goes, and a high aim.” The abolitionists clamored. P. T. Barnum worked his ballyhoo for Temperance. Joe Smith, barely in command of English, dictated the Mormon Revelation. Emerson delivered an inspiring word of Command. Reformed drunkards described the terrors of delirium, and revivalists imitated the Passion in drab meeting houses, and scientists sent people into trances that they might speak the word of Truth. Men and women announced themselves Christ incarnate.

  The voices of the century seem at first a clamor of discords but, if we listen carefully, we discover a certain relation between the major voice of progress and the minor voice of radicalism. What the stammerer offered was deliverance, compensation, escape. When crops failed, when the Indians burned a clearing, when waters rose, when women began to grow mad with eternal childbearing in the wilderness, the evangelist came with his promise of streets of gold and heavenly choirs. Likewise, the founders of communities offered salvation for economic ills to the underpaid driven worker in factories, promised the sweetness of Mother Earth to the suffocated dweller in shabby tenements. To the weary the fanatic promised the instant coming of Christ. The Mormon offered to the harassed and hysterical farmers sexual freedom and the adventure of the West. The spiritualists promised release from death. The mesmerists knew a way to escape from one’s own personality. The phrenologists could determine and correct the weaknesses of character which hindered success in life. The food faddists pointed the way to health. The Transcendentalists communed with the Soul.

  These were the illusions offered to beaten men and women. Their popularity in the nineteenth century is evidence enough that the March of Progress, grandiosely saluted by the orators of the time, left wreckage behind it. At the same time, the ultimate failure of all the eccentric movements suggests that, on the whole, America prospered, that material success was sufficient for the majority of men. Progress, in fact, went in one direction; radicalism, whether religious, or social, or personal, in another. The orators of America’s progress—the Websters and Everetts—were fluent enough. The stammerers were those who spoke of its soul.

  Yet, as they fumbled for words, the exalted revivalists, and the fanatical food-faddists, and all the other radicals of the time, said something which the world did not forget. In the third decade of the twentieth century, we are living in a spiritual world they helped to form. Our radicals, and reformers, and faddists, and charlatans, are all descendants of the “ultraists”—the radicals—of the 1840’s. Our John Roach Stratons, and Tennessee legislators, and Aimee McPhersons, stem from the revivalists who flourished from 1800 to 1860. There is a continuity in our mental habits.

  Less obvious than this continuity is the interrelation of all the secondary movements of the past century. Isolated, each leader of a sect is amusing, fantastic, a little incredible: a Miller, giving the exact date of the second coming; a Matthias, declaring himself God; a Joseph Smith, writing the Book of Mormon; a Noyes, combining socialism, religion, and sexual innovations. But their full bearing only begins to be seen when we discover that they were all the children of the 1830 revivals when Charles Grandison Finney, the brigadier-general of Jesus Christ, stamped up and down the state of New York. Nor is Finney’s full significance clear, until we discover his relations with abolition and prohibition and see him, near the end of his life, associated with the co-educational college at Oberlin where Frances Willard knew him and where, appropriately, the Anti-Saloon League was founded half a century after his death. The interrelation of spiritualism, medical quackery, Christian Science, and New Thought, with mesmerism and phrenology is equally illuminating. And all of these things bear a specific relation to the decline of the Calvinist theology brought over in the Mayflower. The hysteria of the Methodist camp-meeting is connected with the hard doctrine of Jonathan Edwards. The revivalist movement is close to prohibition. Prohibition had a tremendous effect on woman’s suffrage. There were other connections even more obscure: between vegetarianism and the doctrine of the sinlessness of man; between the Rappites, who held sexual intercourse in abhorrence, and the Christian Scientists; between the resurgence of censorious Puritanism in our own time and the collapse of American radicalism in all its forms.

  To those who still care for liberty, this last point is of exceptional significance. The moral history of America can be traced in the changes which have come over the meaning of the word “reformer.” In the middle of the nineteenth century, the word meant one who wanted to give liberty to others; to-day it means, briefly, one who wants to take liberty away. The change in meaning is accompanied by a change in method. There is a dislocation of the center of fear. Laws, lobbies, censors, and spies, have displaced God as the object of awe and veneration, sometimes even as the object of faith. The great social and religious movements of the middle of the century were based on the belief that man could be made perfect. The current belief is that machinery, including the machinery of government, can be made perfect. The former method of arriving at the perfect state was Association. The present one is Prohibition. The change demanded in those days was in the human heart, not in the civil law; it was moral, not legal. Even in religious disputes there has been a marked degradation for, so long as the Bible was not challenged, all men were concerned with the awful tragedy of sin; they were all fundamentalists quarreling about the essence of religion, not about the mistakes of Moses. For a hundred years, there was but one question among men of religion: Are we saved or damned? It was not an academic question. It was present. It was real, urgent, more important than questions of health, or wealth, or social standing. It was the question of life and death. From the moment that the answer was “Saved,” all disputes lost dignity and significance.

  Whether the goodness or the justice of God eventually determines the course of human life and its destiny hereafter, exercised the imagination and the intellect of the great men of the last century. In the end, the placid assumption that God, if he exists at all, is the All-Good, set minds free to ponder the advantages of a high tariff, or the amount of alcohol one man should permit another to drink. For fifty years, a parallel question in the economic field agitated all men: could not some form of association, or cooperation, or communism, lift the burden of material necessity and set men free for the enjoyment of life? From the moment that question was answered in the negative, practical politics and economics became humanly less interesting. They became problems for technicians and engineers to solve.

&nbs
p; The opponents of Prohibition, Censorships, Blue Laws, and other attacks on private rights, are in the habit of referring these disasters to a revival of Puritanism. Actually, the religious connection is more complicated. When the theology of outraged Omnipotence, universal damnation, and natural corruption, began to break down, it split into many divisions. A number of sects, in a natural reaction against the religion of fear, became radically libertarian. The extreme types gave to man every liberty because they seriously believed that the sanctified man—i.e., the man who had accepted Jesus—could do no wrong. Such a sect was Perfectionism. It was defeated by the more orthodox Protestant churches. And even the moderate cults of universal salvation could not overcome the impetus gained by Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists in the early years of the century. Most of the Perfectionist leaders happened to dislike liquor and tobacco. Some of them abhorred all manifestations of sex. Others were violent in their distrust of romantic love. But all of them believed in liberty. The triumph of any form of Perfectionism would have made impossible the existence of the bureaucratic censor, for the Perfectionist was always individualistic. Within the limits of civil existence, he made each man the judge of his own actions. Liberty was part of the Perfectionist way to salvation.