Volume 1 / Part 4 / Book 3 — The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America [Volume Three]
Reading edition
Vernon Louis Parrington
The sudden death of Professor Vernon Louis Parrington in England, June 16, 1929, cut tragically short his labors on the last volume of Main Currents in American Thought. Of this third volume approximately the first half had been completed, which, together with the outline of the work and some scattered essays in sections otherwise undeveloped, constitutes all that the author left. Unfinished it is, yet no completion by another can be justified. That anyone could duplicate his felicity of style, so unobtrusively individual, so sensitively adjusted to the freighted thought, is hardly to be hoped for; and more important, that another scholar could accurately reproduce his interpretation is an assumption not to be warranted. The decision to publish the author’s incomplete work is a tribute to his brilliance.
Nevertheless it is possible to know Professor Parrington’s chief intentions, particularly when one understands, as his associates did, his principles for organizing materials and his standards of value. Students as well as associates first of all noticed beneath the richness and complexity of his thought a constancy of purpose as clear as the treatment of mass in a Gothic cathedral. Indeed it was through a delight in architecture pursued as a hobby for many years that Parrington expressed this desire for a unity, balanced, harmonious, and properly proportioned.
This architectonic feeling, abundantly illustrated in his writing habits, was carried over not only into his classroom procedure and conversation, but also into his varied interests. Painting as well as architecture had long intrigued him. Though few people knew it, he wrote poetry distinguished for restraint in expression and clarity of form; while in conversation he persistently sought the appropriate phrase, spiced it with wit, salted it with homely realism; for no gentleman of the eighteenth century was more conscious of the charms of good discourse.
Professor Parrington’s classroom procedure had a reputation that attracted students not much interested in literature and which appealed to all ranges of intellect. The source of that popularity was the personality of the teacher, together with his gift for presenting ideas and evoking a response. By means of a Socratic cross-examination Parrington made the student discover his intellectual deficiencies; while the class, to its astonishment and delight, found the quest for truth both elusive and exciting. Surprise and satisfied expectation kept the easily bored from sinking into apathy, for there was no telling from day to day just what Professor Parrington was going to do. He paired every occasion with a fitting response; yet this flexibility did not degenerate into an aimless drifting, since he persistently simplified his main objectives and concentrated the material to be studied, while expressing its meaning through a significant symbol or a telling phrase. His classes in the eighteenth century, for example, were given the concept of harmony, balance, and proportion. They found it in architecture, they saw it in dress, they heard it in conversation, they watched it work out in the heroic couplet, they pursued it in Addison, Pope, and Swift; in short, they analyzed the whole social structure of the age and discovered it everywhere. A germinal idea, Parrington liked to call it, while he held it before the class like a many-faceted crystal, slowly turning it around and around so the student could see every face. As a result no student who had taken the course ever forgot the significance of this architectonic trilogy.
In writing habits there was a similar all-encompassing purpose. He habitually began with his thesis—a phrase, a sentence, or a revealing figure. This was examined and stripped of its implications as one would peel an onion layer by layer. So imperious was the habit of this procedure that his ability to write would be blocked until he had in mind a perfectly crystallized concept expressible at the maximum in one sentence. An example of this occurred shortly before he left on his trip to England. He had been working on the period that Mark Twain had labeled the “Gilded Age,” but found the title inadequate to his idea, and, as a result, his writing did not get on. Another day some weeks later there was an obvious satisfaction expressed in his bearing and an exceptionally pronounced twinkle in his eye. “I have found the phrase,” he said; “I will call it The Great Barbecue.” Similarly, the three volumes of this work began in a single paragraph which by progressive unfoldings he expanded to its present scope.
After having made a provisional outline, with each section condensed into a single sentence, he began writing, completing a unit here or there as circumstance and mood directed. When it was completed the process of readjustment began. Each portion was inspected for its length, which had to be fitted to its relative importance; an emphasis here was shifted to balance an emphasis there; the mood of one part was altered to make it harmonize with the mood of its neighbor. As many as twelve times he rewrote a single section in this complex and delicate effort for harmonious adjustment. Finally, he made from this his finished outline.
Knowing Professor Parrington’s methods one can now understand the problem he faced and the solution he found when bent on the task of writing a history of American literature. Although he was by nature partial to the claims of aesthetics, yet it was obvious to him that such an approach was foredoomed to failure. All too few of the American writers would deserve treatment on any aesthetic test, while many who were undeniably significant could not possibly be left out even though inferior artistically. Moreover, one only had to look at the numerous attempts already made to see the failure of the belletristic interpretation. What were these histories of American literature? Sprawling lists of names arranged in a fashion that gave little save conventionalized data and some dubious evaluations. Already there was a widespread demand for a new interpretation growing out of these past failures.
Professor Parrington found the first step to a solution when he remembered the day he opened Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise. It had come as a new and inspiring discovery to find a method that envisaged the literature of a people as the inevitable outgrowth of their racial peculiarities, environment, and epoch. It is true that the claim set up by Paine, that his method was scientific and could account for every phenomenon, proved to be unfounded; but nevertheless his work was epoch-making; it gave a unity and a significance never before attained, and this was what attracted Parrington. Nothing less unifying than Paine’s method was thinkable.
A second source of inspiration came from a close friend and colleague, J. Allen Smith, another pioneer figure, who applied to the abstract theorizings of political science the economic realities that underlie and determine them. The method was so fruitful of results that it quickly spread to a group of American political scientists, from whose findings much of Parrington’s significant work received its first flattering confirmation. Under such a stimulus Parrington was quick to realize the fruitfulness of economic determinism when applied even to literature.
A third idea completed the synthesis. When he envisaged American literature as American thought, the trammel of the belletristic was broken and he was free to reëvaluate American writers, to follow the trail of their work wherever it led; for at last he had found a method true to facts, yet one which would satisfy his insatiable demand for a significant unity, balanced, harmonious, and properly proportioned. The economic forces imprint their mark upon political, social, and religious institutions; literature expresses the result in its thought content.
But a technique, though vitally necessary, is not the end of the story. There still remains, even for the most impartial scholar, the final and, be it admitted, inescapable evaluation. Parrington was too honest with himself to dodge the issue; he made his choice and abided the result. In the foreword to the first volume he made his confession: “The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate the materials is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather than Federalistic; and very likely in my search I have found what I went forth to find, as others have discovered what they were seeking. Unfortunately the mens aequa et clara is the rarest of attributes, and dead partisanships have a disconcerting way of coming to life again in the pages of their historians. That the vigorous passions and prejudices of the time I have dealt with may have found an echo in my judgments is, perhaps, to be expected; whether they have distorted my interpretation and vitiated my analysis is not for me to determine.”
Professor Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought has, then, for its subject the adventures of American liberalism. To anyone alive to the issue an adventurous story it is, as becomes more apparent when the author’s own liberalism is completely understood. Those sections where his sympathies are kindled, where he stamps his seal of enthusiastic admiration, provide the clue which his treatment of Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Channing, and Theodore Parker assuredly verifies. All of his latent enthusiasms burst into bloom until, as in his essay on Roger Williams, nothing less than the cadence and passion of the Song of Solomon would express it. “Running through his writings is a recurrent echo of the Hebrew love-song that Puritan thought suffused with glowing mysticism: ‘I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.... I will arise now, and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loveth.’ But when he went into the broad ways of Carolinian England, seeking the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley, he discovered only abominations. The lover was tempted by false kisses; the Golden Image was set up in the high places, and the voice of authority commanded to bow down to it. And so as a Christian mystic Roger Williams became a Separatist, and set his mind upon the new world where the lover might dwell with his bride.”[1]
The liberalism of Parrington had this great virtue, which all too many creeds lack: it was built on an obligation first to examine and understand all points of view before exercising the right to condemn them. Although he disliked the personalities and groaned at the dreary pages of men like Cotton Mather, yet he was not satisfied until he got at their marrow. And again there was an abiding sense of the humane in Parrington before which all abstractions, generalizations, and logical systems had to pass in review. He feared above all, as did the sensitive Jefferson, the cancer of power. “Man,” he used to say, “has never proved himself worthy of an unrestrained control of his fellows, nor has any special group of men ever been dominant without injustice to others.” Combined with this love of freedom was an urbanity and a sense of personal integrity not subject to the interference of outside forces in convention or mob—an integrity which so impressed everyone having contact with the man, that he has been often called an aristocrat. Parrington would not have objected to the label, nor have seen it as contradictory to the principles of liberalism, since in his opinion only liberalism expressing itself in a democratic society provides for the free exercise of personal rights. Elevating oneself by riding on the shoulders of others, a common device of the pseudo-aristocrat, was to him but a vulgar gymnastic performance.
When he described Jefferson “with his aristocratic head set on a plebeian frame”[2] he was unconsciously describing himself, for there was a deep love of the soil in Parrington. One saw it, surprisingly, in his hands. They were thick and sturdy, blunted at the ends as if from too much delving into the black loam of his flower garden, where roses, peonies, and crocuses were cherished companions, and the delight of his leisure hours. He secretly suspected the apartment dweller as any true farmer would; and though there was a twinkle in his eye when he called New York a Babylon or spoke of its corrupting influence on scholar and artist, yet there was a meaning implied more serious than the jest.
It was Parrington’s hope to vindicate this liberalism “stemming,” as he said, “from the fruitful loins of the eighteenth century.” As he diagnosed it, that era had two creative currents of thought: a hopeful, vigorous liberalism, together with a sturdy realism which did not balk at men’s selfishness or deny the economic basis of social forces. Unfortunately the nineteenth-century liberal attended only to hopes and neglected the realism, while the swelling forces of industrialism accepted the economic realities but cynically brutalized them. Failure was the inevitable result; the liberals despair while Babbitt, regnant, infests the country with his blustering agents. In the unfinished section of this last volume it was Parrington’s purpose to show this parlous state of twentieth-century America, to discern the hopeful gleam in the darkness, and to uncover the hidden forces working for a more stable and just society. Parrington’s point of view then, was that of a staunch and kindly liberalism, the motif in the three volumes, the theme never absent from a page of the whole composition. It is a liberalism not to be found in any program yet formulated by political party or economic sect; it is rather a generous idealism that can envisage a future richer in values, more humane in distribution of favors than any known past. Wise to the ways of man, such a liberalism refuses confinement in the strait-jacket of any set formula, yet escapes the emasculation awaiting mere enthusiasm; for it can separate foes from friends and recognize the point where compromise means surrender.
If my analysis thus far is to any purpose it will suggest what these main objectives that Parrington never completed were to have been. The unfinished Book Two was to chronicle three parties of revolt against the plutocracy born of the Gilded Age. Of these rebellions the first was engendered on the Middle Border, where the farmers, beset by hard times, struck out against the source of their ills. As the agrarians diagnosed the situation, these economic maladjustments were brought on by a currency manipulated for the benefit of creditors, and further enhanced by capitalistic control of the political machine. One of the last of Parrington’s completed units deals with the economic phase of the revolt; the next section was to record the farmer’s effort to democratize the government. Through pressure of third-party movements the farmers tried to inject such reforms as the initiative and referendum, the recall, the direct primary, and the income tax; until, seduced by Bryan’s oratory, they joined with the Democrats in an attack upon the intrenchments of capitalism. As Parrington saw it, these agrarian descendants of Jefferson, lacking the intellectual leadership which the South had contributed in earlier days, at a tactical disadvantage, and already a minority economic group, were fated to lose their last great uprising.
Also out of the valley of the Mississippi came a literature of the Middle Border. Such writers as Edward Eggleston and E. W. Howe had already initiated a realism that revealed the drabness of frontier life and suggested its smoldering discontent, although the pastoral note fathered by the genial and romantic James Whitcomb Riley did not lack its prose children. Notably did Meredith Nicholson, William Allen White, and Booth Tarkington[3] portray the village neighborliness, its wholesomeness, its spirit of democracy, until they cast such a fog of sentiment over the scene as to blur all the realities. But the true spirit of Populism is represented in the impassioned work of Hamlin Garland, whose “admirable realism and passionate democracy” Parrington depicts in a chapter that he completed.
The second chorus of dissent came from the very citadels of plutocracy, for the wage-earners, unable to escape slavery by flight to an unshackled frontier that no longer existed, were brought to bay. The doctrine of class war, which had been ignored since the eighteenth century, was revived by the German socialists and given an added plausibility by the employers’ unscrupulous use of injunction, black list, and lockout. T. V. Powderly, who found a solution to the labor problem in syndicalism, organized the Knights of Labor. Although this union had a promising inception, it was soon wrecked, while the craft unionism recommended by Samuel Gompers forged to the front because of its middle-class ideology and spirit of compromise. On the other hand the left wing of the labor cause embraced various brands of socialism. The tragic flare-up of the Haymarket riot, which resulted in a “red” scare and persecution of the humane Governor Altgeld, served Parrington as a dramatic illustration of the obloquy that descended upon the leaders of socialism, Daniel De Leon, Eugene V. Debs, and Victor Berger. Needless to say, Parrington had planned a vindication of them horn of his desire to see more justice in the world.
There were echoes of this proletarian strife manifested in the world of letters. Certain writers following Edward Bellamy joined the quest for a socialistic Utopia. Parrington had completed his passage on Bellamy, but of the party formed to agitate for principles advanced in Looking Backward and of the other writers of Utopian novels, such as Tourgée, he left no treatment. A second set of writers were grouped together by reason of their common concern over the darkening future of American civilization. Edwin Markham, his humanitarian sympathies aroused, penned an indictment of wage exploitation in his “The Man with the Hoe” that caused no little concern in its day and spurred defenders of the existing economic system to offer liberal prizes for an equally convincing reply. The emergence of naturalism, seen in Stephen Crane[4] and Frank Norris,[4] was also a response to the darkening social outlook. Parrington defined naturalism as “a pessimistic realism that sets man in a mechanical world.” He traced this pessimistic determinism to the machine industrialism so overwhelming in its power as to impress man with his own impotence, to the centralization of wealth, which causes a caste regimentation of society, and finally to the great city, which reduces the inhabitant to an infinitesimal unit of a vast beehive. Other writers, equally oppressed by this state of affairs, concentrated on the phenomena of the city. It was here that Parrington intended to discuss Henry B. Fuller, Harold Frederic, Robert Grant, and Edith Wharton.[5]
The third party of revolt was a hesitant one—the South, still convalescing from the Civil War and further weakened by divisions in its counsels. Though burdened by parochial creeds, weakened by lack of intellectual leadership, the agrarian South, largely plebeian, joined the Middle Border in its uprising. The middle-class South, represented by Henry W. Grady, proposed a surrender to the Yankee principle of industrial exploitation, while the remnant of the old aristocracy resisted the new and clung to the traditions of the past. Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Mary Murfree, and George Washington Cable attended to these romantic traditions of the plantation, the negro, the mountaineer, and the creole; while Sidney Lanier[6] became the poet of southern landscape and sunrise. Far more significant in Parrington’s eye was the rebirth of a southern intelligentsia represented in letters by Ellen Glasgow, W. W. Woodward, the debunker, and James Branch Cabell,[7] the ironic romanticist. Professor Parrington, who had been among the first to appreciate Cabell, admired the competence of his style and the effectiveness of his ironic commentary on American civilization.
Book Three was to present the movement of liberalism from 1903 to 1917, and the reaction to it following the war. Parrington called this period of liberalism the “great stock-taking venture.” These liberals announced that the democratic hopes of earlier days had not been fulfilled, that the Constitution is not a democratic instrument nor was it intended to be, and that while Americans were professing to create a democracy, they had been creating in fact a plutocracy. They then determined upon a new program based on their discovery of the relations between economics and politics. Such relations made necessary the control of property by the collective will, and to that end they endeavored to squeeze the Hamiltonian state into a Jeffersonian mold.[8]
The muckrakers of 1903 to 1910 attacked the plutocracy where its joints creaked. In effect this group of writers from Henry D. Lloyd to Charles Edward Russell, Gustavus Meyers, and A. M. Simons popularized economics and made the liberals conscious of what was going on behind the closed doors of the directors’ meetings. On the other hand, the movement of Progressivism, engaged in the hopeless task of directing the political machinery to democratic ends, was typified by Robert La Follette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. Only one, La Follette, remained true to the colors; the other two compromised, then surrendered, and the hopes of liberalism went down in a tragic débâcle.
In the realm of letters this liberalism found expression in three major groups of writers. A set of intellectuals turned critical began to scrutinize the economic, political, and social institutions of America. Of these critics Parrington considered Randolph Bourne and Charles A. Beard[9] the most important. Another set turned to fiction, shifting their point of view from liberalism to radicalism, from politics to economics. Winston Churchill[10] had discovered the emptiness of the profit motive with its resultant destruction of beauty, freedom, and creative craftsmanship. Similarly Robert Herrick[10] became a pathologist of the city, investigated its ethics, and then rebelled at the predatory egoism which ruled its life to the destruction of all ethical integrity. At his best Jack London[11] wrote of the revolution, though later selling out to bigger and better royalties; while Upton Sinclair became the revolutionary sleuth spying upon the indecencies of the capitalist system. Perhaps these novelists were too seriously engaged in social criticism and reform propaganda to become great craftsmen, yet they were to Parrington important writers, because they were in touch with deep currents of American thought.
Still a third set of writers turned to a realistic technique appropriate to the times, yet avoided the weakness inherent in direct propaganda. The poets Masters,[12] Sandburg, Frost, and Robinson, Parrington chose for consideration as realists with an art, an underlying criticism of conditions, and a philosophy that set them above the other poets of the time. For the same reasons he had planned a section on Huneker. Theodore Dreiser,[13] because of his massive documentation, his deterministic philosophy, and his sense of the inevitable tragedy inherent in life, Parrington labeled a modern, meaning by this that Dreiser most adequately and most thoroughly represented modern America.
The last section of the book was to be a consideration of the post-war reaction to the liberalism of the preceding period. The economic democracy which liberals had marked for their goal was now attacked by the younger intellectuals. H. L. Mencken turned to farce and burlesque for methods adequate to express his contempt of American democracy. Biologists pointed to the inescapable laws of heredity as a refutation of the liberals’ hopes for social improvement; while some psychologists, discovering morons, ruled out all equalitarian Utopias. Parrington could find little sympathy in his heart for a return to the spirit of aristocracy. This narrow, doctrinaire biology, denied by the more careful biologists and the behaviorists who assert that environment is determining, cannot rule out all environmental changes. As long as the milieu is an effective force in molding the organism, room is left for social betterment by social readjustments. A disputed psychology dealing in primitive sex drives, gland secretions, and intelligence scores is no more conclusive on the subject.
The attack on industrialism is nearer to the heart of Parrington’s ideals, because it proved to him that liberalism is not by any means dead. Such a comprehensive movement enlisting first-class minds—intellectuals, poets, novelists, dramatists—revealed clearly to him the increasing criticism of a dehumanized economics, and such criticism proceeds from an implicit liberalism.
The attack on the middle class is seen best in Zona Gale,[14] Evelyn Scott, and particularly in Sinclair Lewis,[15] whom Parrington rated the chief of our younger satirists. This satire is a searching criticism of the bourgeois ideals and habitat, its tyrannical herd-mind, its poverty-stricken materialism. By its nature this satire clearly suggests a set of new ideals which grow out of a free individualism rather than a political or economic socialism. The emphasis is shifted by implication from externalities to things of the spirit. This is more clearly seen in the new philosophies just now arising, which deny the finality of economic law, turn in politics to the ideal of a decentralized state, and in science to new syntheses emphasizing the pragmatic and relative aspects of scientific law.
The latest literary fashions that Parrington intended to consider embody a psychological emphasis seen in the impressionism of biography, in the brutal but frank pacifism of war novels,[14] and most significantly of all in the impressionism and expressionism of Sherwood Anderson.[15] Parrington felt that there were rich potentialities latent in these new methods although the writers of the new school were themselves painfully at sea. In technique as well as in direct statement there was to be seen, though obscurely, a renewed emphasis upon individual integrity, the necessity for creative expression, and the reaffirmation of what some may choose to call spiritual values.
In effect he believed that all is not lost. Through the influence of science we are recovering the neglected realism of the past; we are not only reaffirming it but making its acquaintance more intimately than ever before. Weld that science to enlightened and humane aspirations (Parrington believed that there was nothing in the findings of science that prevented the union) and a revivified liberalism will make the world a fit place to live in. It is by no means an easy program, for it requires knowledge of fact, and ability to carry knowledge into the sphere of effective action. It is made doubly difficult by the untimely death of one of its chief proponents, yet in the young men and women whom he liked to have around him there must be, however obscurely, a feeling and a groping for the way out. They will be guided and inspired by such utterance as Parrington’s diagnosis of Sinclair Lewis, where he quarries out a vein of his own enduring liberalism.
“Some lingering faith in our poor human nature he still clings to. In the great American mass that human nature is certainly foolish and unlovely enough. It is too often blown up with flatulence, corroded with lust, on familiar terms with chicanery and lying; it openly delights in hocus pocus and discovers its miracle-workers in Comstocks and Aimee Semple McPhersons. But for all its pitiful flabbiness human nature is not wholly bad, nor is man so helpless a creature of circumstance as the cynics would have us believe. There are other and greater gods than Mumbo Jumbo worshiped in America, worthier things than hocus pocus; and in rare moments even Babbitt dimly perceives that the feet of his idol are clay. There are Martin Arrowsmiths as well as Elmer Gantrys, and human nature, if it will, can pull itself out of the trap. Bad social machinery makes bad men. Put the banker in the scullery instead of the drawing-room; exalt the test-tube and deflate the cash register; rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class; and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected. For all his modernity and disillusion learned from Pullman-car philosophers, Sinclair Lewis is still an echo of Jean Jacques and the golden hopes of the Enlightenment—thin and far-off, no doubt, but still an authentic echo.”
“Thin and far-off, no doubt,” is this contemporary liberalism, yet Parrington found hints of it in the midst of the war fiasco that culminated in reaction and despair. Death did not grant him the opportunity to show what he found, but the young men who learned from him the love of sound craftsmanship, who were inspired by his enlightened dreams, will some day complete the monument. In the meantime Vernon Louis Parrington would like to be held in memory as he held his friend, J. Allen Smith—as a “scholar, teacher, democrat, gentleman.”
E. H. Eby
University of Washington Seattle, Washington March, 1930
Footnotes
Foreword
With the present volume I bring to a close my studies in the main currents in American thought. The broad drifts of American opinion, as I interpret that opinion, should now be sufficiently clear. The volume immediately preceding the present one dealt with the romantic revolution in America—one of the most stimulating experiences the American mind has undergone—which was traced to twin forces: the influence upon an expansive generation of French romantic thought, and the spirit of robust individualism resulting from a fluid economics; and the creative result was the spontaneous emergence in America of a buoyant spirit of hopefulness that expressed itself in democratic programs and faith in a benevolent progress. The present volume deals with the slow decay of this romantic optimism in more thoughtful minds, and the cause of that decay is traced to three sources: the stratifying of economics under the pressure of centralization; the rise of a mechanistic science; and the emergence of a spirit of skepticism which, under the pressure of industrialism, the teachings of the physical sciences, and the lessons of European intellectuals, is resulting in the questioning of the ideal of democracy as it has been commonly held hitherto, and the spread of a spirit of pessimism. The custodianship of America by the middle class has brought unsuspected consequences in its train.
Thus after three hundred years’ experience we have returned, intellectually, to the point from which we set out, and the old philosophy brought to the new world from the compact societies of Europe, with its doctrine of determinism and its mood of pessimism, has come back in changed form to color the thinking of our generation. Emersonian optimism, that was the fullest expression of the romantic faith, is giving way to Dreiserian pessimism, and the traditional doctrine of progress is being subjected to analysis by a growing skepticism. Our intellectual history thus conceived falls into three broad phases: Calvinistic pessimism, romantic optimism, and mechanistic pessimism. Between the first and the last lies the America of yesterday that shaped the American mind and American institutions; and with the submergence of that native world we are in the way of repeating here the familiar history of Europe, with its coercive regimentations reproduced on a larger scale and in more mechanical fashion. Once more a gloomy philosophy stands on the threshold of the American mind. Whether it will enter and take possession of the household, no one can predict as yet. This much nevertheless is clear: an industrialized society is reshaping the psychology fashioned by an agrarian world; the passion for liberty is lessening and the individual, in the presence of creature comforts, is being dwarfed; the drift of centralization is shaping its inevitable tyrannies to bind us with. Whether the quick concern for human rights, that was the noble bequest of our fathers who had drunk of the waters of French romantic faith, will be carried over into the future, to unhorse the machine that now rides men and to leaven the sodden mass that is industrial America, is a question to which the gods as yet have given no answer. Yet it is not without hope that intelligent America is in revolt. The artist is in revolt, the intellectual is in revolt, the conscience of America is in revolt.
It ought not to be necessary to add that in these volumes I have not essayed to write a history of American literature—that rather difficult task for which no scholar is as yet equipped. But I have suffered so many gentle reproofs for failing to do what I did not set out to do, that it may be well to repeat what I said in the Foreword to Volume I, that I have been concerned in the present study with the total pattern of American thought—the broad drift of major ideas—and not with vagrant currents or casual variations. In particular I have been repeatedly taken to task for a seeming slight put upon certain of our artists, and it has been inferred that I slighted them because I chose to ignore whatever did not fit into a rigid scheme of economic determinism. Let me say in rebuttal that I hold no brief for a rigid scheme of economic determinism. I recognize the rich culture potentialities that inhere in individual variation from type, and I realize that the arts are likely to receive their noblest gifts from men who should be classed biologically as cultural sports or variations from the cultural type. But in such a study as I have undertaken, individual variation is significant not for its own sake, but rather for the help it may offer in determining the type. After due consideration I see no cause to apologize for my treatment of Poe, for example, if indeed I have done so. I am content to have placed him historically and culturally in relation to the whole, leaving the fascinating problem of his variation from type to those who deal with such problems.
V. L. P.
Introduction[1]
In the second volume of my studies I laid down the thesis that at the beginning of our national existence two rival philosophies contended for supremacy in America: the humanitarian philosophy of the French Enlightenment, based on the conception of human perfectibility and postulating as its objective an equalitarian democracy in which the political state should function as the servant to the common well-being; and the English philosophy of laissez faire, based on the assumed universality of the acquisitive instinct and postulating a social order answering the needs of an abstract “economic man,” in which the state should function in the interests of trade. And I pointed out further, with adequate backing up, I hope, that the first of these antagonistic philosophies was accepted by the agrarian leaders of America and found issue in the Jeffersonian program; that the second came to dominate the thinking of the mercantile, capitalistic America and took form in Hamiltonian Federalism. Unfortunately this logical alignment of diverse economic groups was obscured by the needs of practical politics, and in passing through the explosive Jacksonian revolution both philosophies underwent subtle changes. Jacksonianism imposed upon America the ideal of democracy to which all must thereafter do lip service, but it lost its realistic basis in a Physiocratic economics and wandered in a fog of political equalitarianism; and the Whiggery that issued from Federalism turned to the work of converting the democratic state into the servant of property interests. Both political parties contented themselves with an egoistic individualism that took no account of social ends, forgetful of the humanitarian spirit that underlay the earlier democratic program. The finer spirit of the Enlightenment was lost, and in consequence the major parties chose to follow the economic interests of master groups, heedless of all humanitarian issues.
But the spirit awakened by the earlier democratic enthusiasm could not be kept in political strait-jackets. The Jacksonian revolution overflowed all narrow party dikes, expressing itself in diverse humanitarian and reform movements and quickening the minds of ardent Americans with larger democratic aspirations. The noble idealism of successive third parties that have sprung up reasserted the democratic principles flouted by the major parties. The Locofoco movement, the Free-soil Party, the early Republican Party, the Greenback Party, the Populist Party, the Progressive Party, have had a common objective, namely to carry further the movement inaugurated by the Jeffersonians to make of America a land of democratic equality and opportunity—to make government in America serve man rather than property. The third-party movements have always been democratic movements, and though they have failed in their immediate objectives they have served the purpose of reminding the major parties—oftentimes rudely—that America presumes to be a democratic country. Thus interpreted the history of the political struggle in America since 1790 falls into three broad phases: the Jeffersonian movement that asserted the ideal of political democracy; the Jacksonian movement that established it crudely in practice; and the successive third-party movements that attempted to regain such ground as had been lost, to extend the field, and to perfect the machinery of democratic government.
As a result of the long struggle the abstract principle of democracy—during the period under consideration—was firmly established in the popular mind; but as it fell under the successive custodianship of different economic groups it came to receive strangely diverse interpretations. Interpreted by the coonskin Jacksonians it meant political equalitarianism; by the slave economy it meant a Greek democracy; by the industrial economy it meant the right of exploitation. It has changed service with each new master. Always the principles of Jeffersonianism—of democracy as a humane social order, serving the common well-being—have been lost out of the reckoning, and except in so far as the tendency has been checked by the third-party threat, democratic professions have been only a thin cover under which the old class warfare has gone forward vigorously. In the decades immediately following the Civil War democracy passed under the custodianship of the middle class, who were busily engaged in creating a plutocracy, and the major ideas of the earlier movement took on a characteristic middle-class coloring. The idea of a beneficent progress, which was the flower of the doctrine of human perfectibility, came to be interpreted as material expansion with constantly augmenting profits; and the idea of democracy came to be interpreted as the right to use the government of the whole for the benefit of the few.
Considered historically perhaps the chief contribution of the Progressive movement to the democratic cause is to be found in its discovery of the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the federal Constitution. That so obvious a fact so long escaped recognition was due to political causes easily understood. For a century the Constitution had been a symbol of national unity, a cohesive force amidst the drift of expansion, a counter influence to the disintegrations of states-rights particularisms; and as such it had appealed to the national loyalties of men in every commonwealth. To criticize it was reckoned disloyal. The long process of interpretation had remained in the hands of the lawyers and had been wholly legalistic and antiquarian. In all this earlier commentary—except for a small group of left-wing Abolitionists who repudiated the entire instrument—no question as to the democratic spirit of the Constitution was raised, no doubts as to its sufficiency as a fundamental democratic law were suggested. The class divisions that presided at its making were ignored, and the aristocratic spirit of its creators was forgotten. But with the rising revolt against the custodianship of government by financial and industrial interests came a new critical interest in the fundamental law. Discovering that its hands were tied the democracy began to question the reason for the bonds that constrained its movements. The latent distrust was quickened by what was regarded by many as judicial usurpations of power, such as the act of the Supreme Court in declaring unconstitutional the federal income-tax law, and the question of the desirability of an eighteenth-century document that by its complexity unduly impeded the functioning of the democratic will, was thrust into the foreground of political debate. It was the struggle of 1789 over again.
The new school of criticism was historical rather than legalistic. It was concerned primarily with origins—and it must take into account the political theories and class interests of the eighteenth-century gentlemen who framed the document. It refused to look upon the Fathers as supermen, devoted unselfishly to high patriotic duty, but chose to regard them as capable statesmen, saturated with aristocratic prejudices, who fearful of losing control of the new venture in republicanism, took care to shape an instrument that threw sharp restrictions about the majority will.
The theme of the present volume is the industrialization of America under the leadership of the middle class, and the consequent rise of a critical attitude towards the ideals and handiwork of that class. It concerns itself primarily with the spirit of realism that under the constrictions of industrialism and with the spread of scientific modes of thought emerged to question the ardent romanticisms of an earlier age, and bring under doubt the excellence of a social order created by the Industrial Revolution.
The field to be traversed is thus predetermined. The interpretation of our literature since 1860 must be fitted into the broad lines of our national experience and will follow the main divisions of development.
I. The conquest of America by the middle class and its custodianship of democracy. The philosophy of the middle class.
II. The challenge of that overlordship by:
1. The older democratic agrarianism as expressed chiefly in the third-party movements.
2. The new proletarian philosophy that came likewise out of the ferment of the French Revolution, but that traveled a different course—through Europe and the earlier continental Industrial Revolution, and thence to America.
III. The intellectual revolution brought about by science with the results:
1. The recovery of a spirit of realism.
2. The appropriation of science by the middle class.
IV. The rise of a detached criticism by the younger intellectuals.
In dealing with this material it will be necessary to follow sectional lines in the earlier decades until the encompassing movement of centralization finally obliterated them and produced a common national spirit and purpose.
In the welter that is present-day America militant philosophies with their clear-cut programs and assured faiths are wanting, and many feel, as Matthew Arnold felt fourscore years ago, that they are dwelling between worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. The old buoyant psychology is gone and in the breakdown and disintegration of the traditional individualism no new philosophies are rising. Builders of Utopias are out of a job. Political and economic theory is in charge of paymasters and is content with the drab rim of the familiar landscape. Retainer-fees have blotted out for it the lovelier horizons that earlier thinkers contemplated. Academic political scientists and economists have largely joined the Swiss guards, and abdicated the high prerogative of speculative thought. It is the men of letters—poets and essayists and novelists and dramatists, the eager young intellectuals of a drab generation—who embody the mind of present-day America; not the professional custodians of official views. They at least decline to block the path to the Promised Land with retainer-fees; they at least are free souls, and in the measure of their abilities, free thinkers. It is to them therefore that one must turn to discover the intellectual currents of later America—to their aspirations as well as to their criticisms. Literature at last has become the authentic voice of this great shapeless America that means so much to western civilization. Not theologians any longer, nor political philosophers, nor industrial masters, nor bankers, are the spokesmen of this vibrant life of a continent, but the intellectuals, the dreamers, the critics, the historians, the men of letters, in short; and to them one may turn hopefully for a revelation of American life.
The period dealt with in the present study marks the complete triumph of the middle class and the final defeat of the traditional agrarianism. The disintegration of the earlier romanticisms, both native and imported, has run its course. The philosophy of Jefferson and John Taylor, with its physiocratic bias, its antipathy to a money economy, its love of local autonomy, has been buried in the potter’s field.
Amidst all the turmoil and vague subconscious tendencies, certain ideas slowly clarified: first, that the earlier democratic aspirations had somehow failed, that an equalitarian philosophy adapted to frontier conditions could not easily be carried over into a centralizing and stratifying America and was doomed to eventual defeat; second, that even in the supposed heyday of our democracy, we had never achieved a democracy, but rather a careless individualism that left society at the mercy of a rapacious middle class; third, that we must take our bearings afresh and set forth on a different path to the goal. As these convictions slowly rose into consciousness, a quick suspicion of our earlier philosophies arose to trouble us. With the growing realism of the times came a belief that our French romantic theories were mainly at fault and we must somehow go back to the rationalistic eighteenth century and start once more to recreate a democratic philosophy. The crux of the matter seemed to lie in the romantic conception of human nature. Rousseau and Godwin were the false prophets who led us astray, and we must return to the solid realism of John Locke. In the light of a realistic psychology, with its discovery of morons, and its study of mob tendencies, it was no longer possible to take seriously that attractive figment of the romantic imagination—man in the state of nature, perfectible by following the light of reason, seeking justice. Morons do not fit nicely into the older theory—they jar one’s faith in human perfectibility. In the light of intelligence tests perhaps the whole romantic theory of democracy was only a will-o’-the-wisp. With the very foundations of our traditional philosophy turning to quicksand under our feet, no wonder we are bedeviled by doubts and uncertainties. Utopias no longer seem so near at hand as they did; plans and specifications of the ideal commonwealth no longer seem simple matters to be drawn by any competent social carpenter. Our jauntiness is gone, speculation is less important than investigation, and in the spirit of sober realism we are setting about the serious business of thinking.
In this thinking two major forces are at hand: economics and psychology. In our economic realism we are returning to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and adapting the determinism that marked political thought from Harrington and John Adams to Webster and Calhoun; but we are equipped with a psychological knowledge that those earlier thinkers lacked. Wedding the new psychology to the older economic determinism, we may hope in a spirit of sober realism to make some progress in our thinking.
Yet not too hastily should we abandon our earlier faith: the eighteenth-century conception of environment as a creative influence in determining character is a vital idea not yet adequately explored. Even morons may be traced back to adenoids or diets of salt pork and whisky or to later machine labor, and aristocracies are still seen to be economic. And aristocratic albinos may well breed mobs and morons. Jefferson was not as foolish as many of his disciples have been, and Jeffersonian democracy still offers hope. Education begins to fail—except education to individualize and to summon forth the potential intelligence of the younger generation.
Footnotes
Contents[1] [Volume Three]
Introduction: The Great Revolution xxiii
I. [A New America in the Making: Rise of capitalistic industrialism submerging the older agrarianism, the Enlightenment, the Jacksonian frontier]
II. [Aristocracy Dead: The principle of democracy accepted, yet driving toward a plutocracy. A middle-class, urban civilization]
III. [Cleavages: Western agrarianism; Eastern capitalism. The South confused, bitter, hesitant. Expansion of the frontier and the cities. The swift extension of the psychology of the city]
IV. [Changing Patterns of Thought: (1) From the frontier came the doctrine of preëmption, exploitation, progress; (2) From the impact of science came the dissipation of the Enlightenment and a spirit of realism; (3) From European proletarian philosophies came a new social theory]
V. [Certain Drifts: to unity, to realism, to criticism]
Book I: Changing America
Changes in traditional economies after the Civil War. The rise of American industrialism and the conquest of nature by science. The age of the middle class. The last flare-up of the spirit of the frontier 3
Part I
The Gilded Age
I. The American Scene 7
I. Free America: Half a continent awaiting preëmption; new raw materials—oil, steel, copper, coal. A new technique of exploitation—capital, transportation, machinery. Philosophy embraced in three ideals: preëmption, exploitation, progress 7
II. Figures of Earth: The flowering of Jacksonian frontier spirit, simplified to the acquisitive instinct; a crude, dynamic energy 10
III. Politics and the Fairy Godmother: The struggle within the Republican Party; the gospel of Whiggery and the triumph of the American System, Henry Clay 17
IV. The Great Barbecue: How capitalism and agrarianism fared—the Homestead Act and railway grants. The shift from governmental to private control 23
V. Folk Heroes 26
1. General Grant 27
2. Jay Cooke 31
3. Charles A. Dana 43
II. The Culture of the Seventies: With the decay of aristocratic controls, a loss of unity. Three strands: aristocratic, romantic, frontier 48
I. New England in Decay: The Genteel Tradition and the drift away 50
1. Thomas Bailey Aldrich and the Genteel 54
2. The New England Scene: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Sarah Orne Jewett; Mary Wilkins Freeman 60
II. The Afterglow of the Enlightenment—Walt Whitman 69
III. The Backwash of the Frontier—Mark Twain 86
III. Changing Theory: An agricultural people changing to an urbanized people. The railways hasten economic development 102
I. Winds of Economic Theory: The conscription of economics: The business man comes to the front 103
1. Henry C. Carey 105
2. Francis A. Walker 111
II. The Conscription of Political Theory: The democratic and plutocratic trends. Development of the democratic principle vs. the cult of the Constitution. New conception of the political state 117
1. Theodore Woolsey 120
2. [John W. Burgess] 124
III. [The New Ally: The courts: the police power and the fourteenth amendment; the injunction] IV. [Buttressing the Democratic Theory] 1. A Democratic Economics—Henry George 125
2. [Supplementing the Democratic Political Theory—Henry D. Lloyd]
IV. The Beginnings of Criticism: The pessimists skeptical of democracy, the optimists calling for reform of the spoils system. No competent critics of industrialism 137
I. The New England Conscience and Capitalism—Wendell Phillips 140
II. Morality and Politics—George William Curtis 147
III. English Liberalism and Politics—Edwin Lawrence Godkin and the Nation 154
IV. Fiction Considers the State of the Country 168
1. The Political Novel: The Gilded Age; Democracy; An American Politician 169
2. [The Economic Novel: The Bread-winners] 173
3. The Beginnings of the Sociological Novel: H. H. Boyesen 179
Part II
New Patterns of Thought
I. Disintegration and Reintegration: Two forces creating a new ideology, science and the machine. The decay of the older theological, political mind, and the emergence of an urban mind 189
I. The Victorian Mood—A genial optimism 193
1. Sociology and the Enlightenment: Condorcet, Comte, and the gospel of progress 194
2. Biology and the Enlightenment: Spencer and the philosophy of anarchism 197
3. The End of the Hopes of the Enlightenment 202
II. The School of Spencer—John Fiske 203
II. The Skepticism of the House of Adams: The flower of the sturdy New England character. They fail to adjust to the Gilded Age 212
I. Charles Francis Adams—The Business Failure 213
II. Henry Adams—Intellectual 214
III. Brooks Adams—Rebel 227
III. Victorian Realism: In the eighties realism begins to excite interest and the movement gets under way, though the American taste is still romantic. The psychology of the dispersion marking America 237
I. [William James and Pragmatism]
II. Henry James and the Nostalgia of Culture 239
III. William Dean Howells and the Realism of the Commonplace 241
Book Two: The Old and the New: Storm Clouds
Part I
The Middle Border Rises
I. The Plight of the Farmer 259
I. Democratic Reactions to Plutocracy: The Middle Border suffers. Two moods: Buoyancy, depression—the farmer deflated. The economic problem 259
II. The Farmer Considers Politics: His intellectual equipment—homespun theories derided by the schools. The movement of organization: The Grange, The Alliance, Populism. The flare-up of the nineties—the doctrine of more corn and less hell 263
III. The Greenback Movement: The laissez-faire theory abandoned by English economists. American spokesmen: John Sherman, David A. Wells, Eleazar Lord. Diverse theories of money—the intrinsic-value theory and the quantitative theory. The money question a heritage of the Civil War—a debtor class and an appreciating standard of value 266
IV. Greenbackism and Peter Cooper 276
V. [Bi-metallism: A heritage of Jacksonian democracy: Ignatius Donnelly, “Coin” Harvey]
II. The Democracy of the Age of Innocence 283
I. Capitalistic Encroachments: Due to inadequate democratic machinery. The movement to democratize government. Plutocracy content with the machine which it controlled; hence radical proposals must issue from the discontented. After 1870, with few exceptions, popular democratic thinking done west of the Allegheny Mountains 283
II. Third-party Movements. A summary of democratic proposals of previous movements 285
III. [The Populistic Program: Income tax; the initiative and referendum; the recall; direct primary; Australian ballot; popular election of Senators; sub-treasuries; proportional representation] IV. [William Jennings Bryan and the Last Battle]
III. Literature and the Middle Border 288
I. [Edward Eggleston and Frontier Realism] II. [Whitcomb Riley and Folk Romance] III. Hamlin Garland and the Middle Border. Joseph Kirkland, Harold Frederic 288
Part II
Proletarian Hopes
I. [Plutocracy and the Workingman: Disruption of industry—strikes and lockouts in the Gilded Age. Bitterness of conflict. The discovery of the injunction]
I. [Industrialism and the American theory of freedom: Rise of labor unions. Passing of the frontier. Incoming of German Socialists and the recovery of the doctrine of class war lost since the eighteenth century] II. [The first solution—Syndicalism: T. V. Powderly and the Knights of Labor] III. [The second solution—craft unionism: Gompers and the A. F. of L. A middle-class solution]
II. [The Rise of the Left]
I. [The Menace of Socialism: The Haymarket riot; Governor Altgeld] II. [Leaders of the Left: Daniel De Leon; Eugene Debs; Victor Berger]
III. The Quest of Utopia 301
I. Edward Bellamy and Looking Backward 302
II. [After Bellamy: “Nationalism”; Tourgée’s Murvale Eastman]
IV. [The Darkening Skies of Letters: The clouds gathering on the “gay” horizon of American optimism. Changes in the temper of scientific thought point to determinism. A gloomier realism on the way, coming first from the West] 316
I. [Edwin Markham and “The Man with a Hoe”] II. [The Rise of Naturalism: Stephen Crane; Frank Norris[2]] III. [Fiction Discovers the City]
Part III
The Hesitant South
I. [Two Worlds: The aristocratic clinging to the romance of the past; the plebeian agrarian joining with the Middle Border in its protest against plutocracy. Tom A. Watson. The beginnings of industrialism that proposed to exploit the cotton and iron of the South] II. [The Romance of the Past: Thomas Nelson Page and the plantation tradition; Joel Chandler Harris and the romance of the negro; Mary Murfree and the romance of the mountaineer; George Washington Cable and the romance of the creole] III. [Sidney Lanier—the poet of the South[3]] IV. [Henry W. Grady and the Surrender to the Middle Class] V. [The Southern Intellectual: James Branch Cabell;[4] Ellen Glasgow; W. W. Woodward]
Book Three: The New America
Part I
The Rise of Liberalism[5]
1. [Movements of Liberalism: Three periods: 1790–1912; 1820–1860; 1903–1917. Since 1870 three attitudes towards democracy: (1) It has been achieved but the machine needs closer attention—civil service reform; (2) It has not been achieved because of the Constitution, but it must be achieved through remodeling political machinery; (3) No intelligent person desires it to be achieved. The movement of liberalism (1903–1917) a great stock-taking venture]
I. [Discoveries] 1. [That the democratic program has not been fulfilled] 2. [That the Constitution is not a democratic instrument, and was not intended to be—the clash between the Declaration and the Constitution] 3. [That while professing to create a democracy we have been erecting a plutocracy] II. [Conclusions] 1. [The rediscovery of the relations between economics and politics] 2. [The necessity of subjecting property to the collective will] 3. [To that end the need of democratizing the machinery of government—political Progressivism. The application of the Hamiltonian state to the Jeffersonian program]
II. [Liberalism and the Journalists: The Muckraking Movement[6]]
I. [The Origins in the Nineties—Henry D. Lloyd’s Wealth vs. Commonwealth] II. [The Gathering Clan: Lawson’s Frenzied Finance; Ida Tarbell; Ray Stannard Baker; McClure’s, The American, Hampton’s] III. [The Left Wing] 1. [Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities] 2. [Charles Edward Russell, The Stories of Great Railroads] 3. [Gustavus Myers, Great American Fortunes] 4. [A. M. Simons, Social Forces in American History]
III. [Liberalism and Politics: The Movement of Progressivism]
I. [Robert La Follette—The State and Industry] II. [Theodore Roosevelt—Middle-Class Liberal] III. [Woodrow Wilson]
Part II
Liberalism and Letters
I. [Liberalism and the Intellectuals: The movement becomes critical]
I. [Walter E. Weyl—Radical] II. [Thorstein Veblen—Social Economist] III. [Charles A. Beard—Political Scientist[6]] IV. [Herbert Croly—Political Critic] V. [The Younger Intellectuals: Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank]
II. [Liberalism and Fiction: A shift from liberalism to radicalism—from politics to economics]
I. [Winston Churchill: From romance to syndicalism[7]] II. [Robert Herrick: Academic radical[7]] III. [Jack London: Revolutionist[8]] IV. [Upton Sinclair: Social detective[8]]
III. [Liberalism and Realism]
I. [The Poets and Realism: Masters, Sandburg, Frost, Robinson] II. [The Essay—Huneker] III. [Theodore Dreiser—A Modern[9]]
Part III
Reaction
I. [The War and Liberalism: The reaction developed a many-sided attack on the liberalisms of the preceding period. The older intellectuals had abandoned French equalitarian democracy, but set as their goal economic democracy; the younger intellectuals attacked the principle of democracy, the ideal of industrialism, the culture of the middle class]
II. [The Attack on Democracy: A return to the eighteenth century spirit of aristocracy. Purveyors of current disgusts]
I. [Philosophical: H. L. Mencken—a Nietzschean critic. A cynic who grows witty over American failure] II. [Biological: The falsity of the perfectionist philosophy derived from Locke. Not environment but heredity—the isolated germ existence before birth] III. [Psychological: The discovery of morons. Primitive drives—sex, hunger—keep men children. Nevertheless behaviorism a denial of the aristocracy of the biological argument, holding with Locke that environment is determining]
III. [The Attack on Industrialism: A comprehensive movement that enlists first-class minds—intellectuals, poets, novelists, dramatists]
V. [New Philosophies]
I. [Economics: Denial of the finality of economic law: A pragmatic view—Mitchell] II. [Political Theory: A decline of the program of industrial democracy] III. [Science: A rejection of the law of causality and a weakening of the authority of science]
VI. [New Literary Fashions]
I. [In fiction, impressionism and expressionism—Sherwood Anderson[11]] II. [In biography: The impressionism of psychography] III. [In war fiction:[11] A brutal realism and frank pacifism]
Addenda 323
Naturalism in American Fiction 323
1. Stephen Crane 328
2. Frank Norris 329
“McTeague” 330
“Vandover and the Brute” 332
“The Octopus” 332
Sidney Lanier 334
The Incomparable Mr. Cabell 335
The Problem Novel and the Diversion from Naturalism 346
Jack London: The Novelist of the Proletariat 352
Upton Sinclair 353
Theodore Dreiser: Chief of American Naturalists 354
Sinclair Lewis: Our Own Diogenes 360
Sherwood Anderson: A Psychological Naturalist 372
A New Romance 372
1917–1924 373
I. The Small Town in Fiction 373
William Allen White: A Son of the Middle Border 374
Booth Tarkington: The Dean of American Middle-Class Letters 375
Dorothy Canfield (Fisher) 375
II. The Realistic Small Town and the New Naturalism 376
Zona Gale—The Transition from Romance to Realism 377
Donn Byrne 377
Robert Nathan 378
Joseph Hergesheimer: A Sophisticated Romantic 379
III. Certain Other Writers 381
Edith Wharton—The Genteel Tradition and the New Plutocracy 381
Willa Cather: Epics of Women 382
IV. Some War Books 384
John Dos Passos 384
E. E. Cummings 385
Thomas Boyd 385
Laurence Stallings 385
V. Youth in Revolt—Certain Purveyors of the Hectic 385
F. Scott Fitzgerald 386
Stephen Vincent Benét and Floyd Dell 386
Ben Hecht 386
Ole Rölvaag’s Giants in the Earth 387
The Short Story 397
A Chapter in American Liberalism 401
Bibliography 415
Index 421
Footnotes
Book One • Changing America
When America laid aside its arms after Appomattox and turned back to the pursuits of peace it was well advanced toward the goal set by Alexander Hamilton three-quarters of a century before. The great obstacle that had withheld its feet hitherto had been swept from its path. A slave economy could never again thwart the ambitions of the capitalistic economy. The jealous particularism that for a generation had obstructed the inevitable drift toward a coalescing national unity had gone down in defeat. The agrarian South was no longer master in the councils of government; the shaping of the future had fallen to other hands and the unfolding of the new order could go forward without southern let or hindrance.
Other obstacles were falling away of themselves. North as well as South, the traditional domestic economy was already a thing of the past. An easier way to wealth, and one enormously more profitable, had been discovered. The future lay in the hands of the machine that was already dispossessing the tool. In the hurry of the war years the potentialities of the factory system had been explored and the ready resources of liquid capital had been greatly augmented. From the smoke of the great conflict an America had emerged unlike any the earlier generations had known. An ambitious industrialism stood on the threshold of a continental expansion that was to transfer sovereignty in America from a landed and mercantile aristocracy to the capable hands of a new race of captains of industry. Only the western farmers, newly settled in the Middle Border and spreading the psychology of the frontier through the vast prairie spaces of a greater Inland Empire, remained as a last stumbling-block. Other battles with agrarianism must be fought before capitalism assumed undisputed mastery of America; but with the eventual overthrow of the agrarian hosts in their last stronghold the path would lie broad and straight to the goal of an encompassing industrialism, with politicians and political parties its willing servants. There would be no more dissensions in the household. With southern Jeffersonians and western agrarians no longer sitting as watch dogs to the Constitution, the political state would be refashioned to serve a new age, and the old dream of a coalescing national economy become a reality. The American System was in the way of complete establishment.
Other changes impended, and greater. The enthronement of the machine was only the outward and visible sign of the revolution in thought that came with the rise of science. As a new cosmos unfolded before the inquisitive eyes of scientists the old metaphysical speculations became as obsolete as the old household economy. A new spirit of realism was abroad, probing and questioning the material world, pushing the realm of exact knowledge into the earlier regions of faith. The conquest of nature was the great business of the day, and as that conquest went forward triumphantly the solid fruits of the new mastery were gathered by industrialism. Science and the machine were the twin instruments for creating a new civilization, of which the technologist and the industrialist were the high priests. The transcendental theologian was soon to be as extinct as the passenger pigeon.
With the substitution of the captain of industry for the plantation master as the custodian of society, the age of aristocracy was at an end and the age of the middle class was established. A new culture, created by the machine and answering the needs of capitalism, was to dispossess the old culture with its lingering concern for distinction and its love of standards—a culture that should eventually suffice the needs of a brisk city world of machine activities. But that would take time. In the meanwhile—in the confused interregnum between reigns—America would be little more than a welter of crude energy, a raw unlovely society where the strife of competition with its prodigal waste testified to the shortcomings of an age in process of transition. The spirit of the frontier was to flare up in a huge buccaneering orgy. Having swept across the continent to the Pacific coast like a visitation of locusts, the frontier spirit turned back upon its course to conquer the East, infecting the new industrialism with a crude individualism, fouling the halls of Congress, despoiling the public domain, and indulging in a huge national barbecue. It submerged the arts and created a new literature. For a time it carried all things before it, until running full tilt into science and the machine, its triumphant progress was stopped and America, rejecting individualism, began the work of standardization and mechanization. It is this world in transition from an aristocratic to a middle-class order, turmoiled by the last flare-up of the frontier spirit, shifting from a robust individualism to a colorless standardization, which the chapters that follow must deal with. A confused and turbulent scene, but not without its fascination to the American who would understand his special heritage—perhaps the most characteristically native, the most American, in our total history.