In 1895 Godkin was sixty-four and feared the future. The United States, he wrote to a friend, “finds itself in possession of enormous power and is eager to use it in brutal fashion against anyone who comes along without knowing how to do so and is therefore constantly on the brink of some frightful catastrophe.” Indeed, as the United States had at this moment exactly one battleship in commission, Godkin was not unwarranted in thinking the Jingoes “absolutely crazy.” He believed the new spirit of “ferocious optimism,” as he strikingly described it, would lead to eventual disaster.
William James, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, was equally disquieted. “It is instructive to find,” he wrote apropos of Venezuela, “how near the surface in all of us the old fighting spirit lies and how slight an appeal will wake it up. Once really waked, there is no retreat.” His colleague at Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton, Professor of Fine Arts, who was regarded as the exponent and arbiter of culture in American life, protested the war spirit at a meeting in the Shepard Memorial Church in Cambridge. “The shout of brutal applause, which has gone up from every part of this nation,” he said, makes every rational lover of his country feel the “greatest apprehension” for the future.
The white-haired, slender, stoop-shouldered figure, the husky yet musical voice speaking in its Boston Brahmin accent, the charm of that “supremely urbane and gentle presence” was never so at home as when against the herd. Born in 1827, only a year after Jefferson and John Adams died, Norton represented the puritan and militantly liberal conscience of an older generation. He was the son of Andrews Norton, “Unitarian Pope” of New England and Professor of Sacred Literature at Harvard, who had married Catherine Eliot, daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant, and was himself descended through a long line of ministers from John Norton, a Puritan divine who had emigrated to America in 1635.
Like Lord Salisbury, Norton believed in the dominance of an aristocratic class, which to him meant a class founded, not in landowning, but in a common background of culture, refinement, learning and manners. He saw it disappearing and protested regularly against encroaching vulgarity in his lectures. In parody of his manner a student said, “I propose this afternoon to make a few remarks on the hor-ri-ble vul-gar-ity of EVERYTHING.” Another of his students at Radcliffe, in her diary for 1895, described him looking “so mildly happy and benignant … while he gently tells us it were better for us had we never been born in this degenerate and unhappy age.” Norton became one of the first contributors to the Atlantic Monthly when it was founded by James Russell Lowell in 1857, later co-editor with Lowell of the North American Review, and was one of the forty stockholders who founded the Nation.
Writing to Godkin about the Venezuela Message, Norton thought it made “a miserable end for this century” and had done much to increase the “worst spirit in our democracy,… a barbaric spirit of arrogance and unreasonable self-assertion.” What disturbed him more bitterly was the “deeper consideration” that the rise of democracy was not proving, after all, “a safeguard of peace and civilization,” because it brought with it “the rise of the uncivilized whom no school education can suffice to provide with intelligence and reason.” It might have been Lord Salisbury speaking. Norton felt the bitterness of a man who discovers his beloved to be not as beautiful—nor as pure—as he had believed. “I fear that America,” he wrote to an English friend, “is beginning a long course of error and wrong and is likely to become more and more a power for disturbance and barbarism.… It looks as if the world were entering on a new stage of experience in which there must be a new discipline of suffering to fit men for the new conditions.”
Yet his was not the desiccated and disappointed pessimism of Henry Adams, who drifted in and out of Washington and back and forth between Europe and America croaking his endless complaints like a wizened black crow; finding the century “rotten and bankrupt,” society sunk in vulgarity, commonness, imbecility and moral atrophy, himself on the verge of “mental extinction” and “dying of ennui”; finding America unbearable and leaving for Europe, finding Europe insufferable and returning to America, finding “decline is everywhere” and everywhere “the dead water of the fin de siècle … where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content.” The Venezuelan crisis merely confirmed him in the belief that “society today is more rotten than at any time within my personal knowledge. The whole thing is one vast structure of debt and fraud.” This was less a judgment on the current mood than a reflection of the rude shaking his nerves had suffered in the financial panic of 1893. Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image and ascribed his own impotence and paralysis to society at large. “Though rotten with decadence,” he said of himself in 1895, “I have not enough vitality left to be sensual.” The rotten old century, however, was bursting with vitality and he need only have looked at intimates of his own circle in the persons of Lodge and Roosevelt to have found the “ferocious optimism” that Godkin noted all around.
Although a decade older than Adams, Norton would allow himself occasional moments of optimism when he suspected that the loss of the values he loved might be the cost of a compensating gain in human welfare. “There are far more human beings materially well off today than ever before in the history of the world,” he wrote in 1896, and he could not resist the thought, “How interesting our times have been and still are!”
The last few years had indeed been full of incident. Cleveland, for all his good will, was beset by hard times. Industrial unrest gripped the nation. Depression followed the panic of 1893. In 1894 Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marched on Washington, and the bloody Pullman strike angered and frightened both sides in the deepening warfare of labour and capital. In the Congressional elections that November, the Republicans regained the House with a huge majority of 140 (244–104), and when in December, 1895, the new Fifty-fourth Congress assembled, the familiar great black figure with the great white face was again enthroned in the Speaker’s Chair.
Reed was now at the zenith of his power. The dangerous battle of his first term was long past and the guerrilla warfare of two terms as minority leader over, leaving him with unlimited control. “He commands everything by the brutality of his intellect,” said a member. His well-drilled ranks, though occasionally, and as time went on, increasingly, restive, could not break the habit of obedience. When the Speaker waved his hands upward members would stand as one man, and if by chance they rose to claim the floor when he wished them silent, a downward wave made them subside into their seats. “He had more perfect control over the House than any other Speaker,” wrote Senator Cullom of Illinois.
Stern on dignity and decorum, he permitted no smoking or shirtsleeves and even challenged the cherished privilege of feet on desk. A member with particularly visible white socks who so far forgot himself as to resume that comfortable posture, received a message from the Chair, “The Czar commands you to haul down those flags of truce.”
With no favorites and no near rivals, he ruled alone. Careful not to excite jealousy, he avoided even walking in public with a member. Solitary, the stupendous figure ambled each morning from the old Shoreham Hotel (then on Fifteenth and H Streets), where he lived, to the Hill, barely nodding to greetings and unconscious of strangers who turned to stare at him in the street.
He had a kind of “tranquil greatness,” said a colleague, which evolved from a philosophy of his own and left him “undisturbed by the ordinary worries and anxieties of life.” Reed gave a clue to it one night when a friend came to discuss politics and found him reading Sir Richard Burton’s Kasidah, from which he read aloud the lines:
Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause,
He noblest lives and noblest dies
who makes and keeps his self-made laws.
Secure in his self-made laws, Reed could not be flustered. Once a Democratic member, overruled by Reed on a point of order, remembered that the Speaker had taken a different
position in his manual, Reed’s Rules. Hurriedly, he sent for the book, leafed through its pages, pounced on the relevant passage and marched to the rostrum in anticipatory triumph to lay it before the Speaker. Reed read it attentively, cast a glance down at the man from his glowing hazel eyes and said with finality, “Oh, the book is wrong.”
During the Venezuela crisis he said little publicly, kept the Republicans in the House under firm control and trusted to Cleveland’s basic antipathy for foreign adventure, which he shared, to withstand the Jingoes’ eagerness to annex this and that. Reed was unalterably opposed to expansion and all it implied. He believed that American greatness lay at home and was to be achieved by improving living conditions and raising political intelligence among Americans rather than by extending American rule over half-civilized peoples difficult to assimilate. To him the Republican party was the guardian of this principle and expansion was “a policy no Republican ought to excuse much less adopt.”
The year 1896 was a Presidential one and Reed wanted the nomination. With the Democrats torn by their discords, chances of a Republican victory looked favorable and the nomination was a prize worth fighting for. “He is in excellent health and spirits,” reported Roosevelt, and “thinks the drift is his way.” Appearing with his moustache shaved off, Reed seemed to one reporter to feel the “necessity of taking himself seriously,” which tended to muffle his wit. As a contender for the nomination his position was complicated by the fact that the most vigorous campaigners on his behalf were Lodge and Roosevelt, whose views on expansion were fundamentally opposed to his own, although this had not yet become a touchstone. “My whole heart is in the Reed canvass,” said Roosevelt.
Reed would not go out of his way to build up support for himself by the usual methods. When members demanded private appropriation bills for their districts without which they feared they would be unable to cultivate sentiment for his nomination, he was unmoved. “Your bill will not be allowed to come up even with that Reed button in your coat,” he said to one member. When the railroad magnate, Collis P. Huntington, of the Southern Pacific, three times asked to see Reed’s campaign manager, Representative F. J. Aldrich, Reed said yes, Aldrich might call on him, “But remember, not one dollar from Mr. Huntington for my campaign fund!” Aldrich, who went to see him anyway, confided that Reed would not permit any but a few donations from personal friends and had collected a total of $12,000. Disgusted, Huntington disclosed that Reed’s rivals were not so particular about money. “The others have taken it,” he said, revealing that he had placed his bets across the board.
Another man was spending money liberally on behalf of a rival candidate. Mark Hanna, the boss of Ohio, had cast a President-maker’s eye on Reed in the previous campaign but had found him too sardonic, his oratory too Eastern and his personality hardly amenable. As Henry Adams said, Reed was “too clever, too strong-willed and too cynical” to suit the party chiefs. Since then Hanna had found his affinity in a man the antithesis of Reed—the amiable, smooth-speaking, solidly handsome McKinley, of whom it was said that his strongest conviction was to be liked. He was a man made to be managed. He had never made an enemy and his views on the crucial currency question, as a biographer tactfully put it, “had never been so pronounced as to make him unpopular” either with the silver wing or the gold-standard group. Reed now had cause to regret that in naming McKinley chairman of the Ways and Means Committee he had opened his path to prominence as sponsor of the McKinley Bill on the tariff. Since the Fifty-first Congress, when McKinley had ventured some objections to the Speaker’s methods in the matter of the quorum, Reed had had little use for him. He considered him spineless, an opinion to which he gave immortal shape in the phrase, “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair.”*
Hanna saw in McKinley less an eclair than a kind of Lohengrin and felt sure he could secure his nomination as long as McKinley’s rivals remained divided and did not unite behind any one of themselves, especially not behind Reed, the only one who had the stature for the Presidency. Hanna shrewdly judged Reed too inflexible, however, to be willing to bend for the sake of gaining the others’ support. He was right. Eastern leaders, finding the Reed camp dry of inducements, pledged their votes elsewhere. Reed was not making it easy for would-be supporters. When a political chieftain from California asked for a promise of a place on the Supreme Court for a man from his state, Reed refused, saying the nomination was not worth considering unless it were free of any deals whatsoever. The California chieftain was soon to be seen basking in Hanna’s entourage. When Governor Pingree of Michigan, who controlled the delegates from his state, came to Washington to see Reed, Aldrich had the greatest difficulty in persuading him to leave the Chair and come down to his office where the Governor was waiting. When at last he did, Pingree held forth on his views on free silver, which were obnoxious to Reed, who immediately said so. “Pingree wanted to be for Reed,” reported Aldrich helplessly. “He went away and espoused the cause of McKinley.”
Reed could see the trend but he could not have changed himself. “Some men like to stand erect,” he once said, “and some men even after they are rich and high placed like to crawl.”
When in a masterly speech he tore, trampled and demolished free silver, which was less a question of currency than of class struggle, Roosevelt, filled with enthusiasm, wrote him, “Oh Lord! What would I not give if you were our standard-bearer.” At times, however, Roosevelt confessed to being “pretty impatient” with Reed, who would not satisfy his insistence on support of a big navy. “Upon my word,” he complained to Lodge, “I do think that Reed ought to pay some heed to the wishes of you and myself.” It was a vain hope to express of a man who was not given to “heeding” anyone’s wishes. To Lodge’s annoyance, Reed also refused “to promise offices from the Cabinet down or spend money to secure Southern delegates.” Hanna, well supplied with funds, was busy in the South collecting white and Negro Republican delegates who were for sale. “They were for me until the buying started,” Reed said.
He was not sanguine and already, in a letter to Roosevelt before the Convention met, talked of retiring to the private practice of law. “In a word, my dear boy, I am tired of this thing and want to be sure that my debts won’t have to be paid by a syndicate [a reference to McKinley’s].… Moreover the receding grapes seem to ooze with acid and the whole thing is a farce.”
At St. Louis in June, Lodge made his nominating speech. Reed received 84 votes on the first ballot in comparison to 661 for McKinley and the grapes receded beyond reach.
President Cleveland likewise was rejected by the Democratic Convention in favor of an ambitious thirty-six-year-old Congressman from Nebraska, known for his crowd-catching oratory, who treated the Convention to the most memorable rhetoric since Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death. “Clad in the armor of a righteous cause … a cause as holy as the cause of liberty.… You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!” When the hysteria was over, Governor Altgeld turned a “weary face and quizzical smile” to Clarence Darrow and said, “I have been thinking over Bryan’s speech. What did he say, anyhow?”
The campaign roused the country to extremes of emotion and reciprocal hate. It was Silver against Gold, the People against the Interests, the farmer against the railroad operator who siphoned off his profits in high freight charges, the little man against the banker, the speculator and the mortgage holder. Among the Republicans there was real fear that a Democratic victory, coming after the violence of Homestead and Pullman, would mean overturn of the capitalist system. Factory owners told then men that if Bryan were elected “the whistle would not blow on Wednesday morning.” Even the Nation supported McKinley. When he won, business settled back in its seat, reinforced in its rejection of social protest. “Mark Hanna’s era,” wrote a contemporary looking back, “marked a climax of this easy defiance by the strong. I well remember the charming bulldog manner in which Hanna took up defe
nse of unlimited private monopoly.… It was a note that can never be sounded quite so fearlessly again.”
The arena was now cleared for a different battle, in which Reed’s fate and his country’s were to be decided. Cleveland had refused to be budged when Congress passed a resolution which by recognizing the Cuban rebels as belligerents would have permitted the sale to them of arms. The resolution was “only an expression of opinion by the eminent gentlemen who voted for it,” he said, and since the power to recognize rested exclusively with the Executive he would regard it “only as advice,” which left “unaltered the attitude of this Government.” Now he was replaced by McKinley, who, though personally opposed to war with Spain, was unpracticed in the art of living up to his convictions. In Spain Premier Canovas was dead, leaving weaker hands in control. In New York William Randolph Hearst, having bought the Journal, was adapting himself to the dictum of the editor of England’s first halfpenny paper, the Daily Mail, who on being asked what sells a newspaper, replied, “War.” Hearst was helping to manufacture a war by horrendous stories of Spanish cruelties, Cuban heroism, American destiny and duty, empurpled by the demands of a circulation battle with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.
A new factor in the world was the victory of Japan over China in their local war of 1895, which caused a sudden recognition of Japan as a rising power in the East and startled Kaiser Wilhelm II into coining a phrase, die Gelbe Gefahr—“the Yellow Peril.” The rise of Japan gave urgency and cogency to the demand for the Isthmian Canal and to Captain Mahan’s contention that Cuba in the Caribbean as well as Hawaii in the Pacific were necessary for the Canal’s strategic defence. In a number of articles appearing in 1897 Mahan showed that the Carribbean was a vital military crossroads which could be controlled either from Jamaica or Cuba, and he set about proving professionally and unanswerably that Cuba from the point of view of situation, strength and resources was “infinitely superior.”
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