American Experiment (179 page)

Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard reincarnated, the Jeffersonian belief in lean government revised and revived, the laissez-faire classicists revisited—the
resurgence of all these currents of economic thought should have been enough to empower economic individualists with all the intellectual authority they needed in order to press for their marketplace version of liberty. And so it did. Following the war, however, two English thinkers immensely fortified the convictions of American individualists.

Charles Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species
had burst upon the British scene in 1859. The first edition sold out within the day. Superbly explicated and massively supported, his thesis grounded the old theory of evolution on the propositions that a struggle for existence rages among the prodigal issue of organisms, that variations in the offspring helped certain plants or animals to survive and reproduce, and that these mutations spread to the whole species during succeeding generations. Popularly interpreted as a theory that man was descended from the apes, “Darwinism” promptly set off blazing disputes with “creationists” who believed in the fall of Adam and original sin. Darwin’s theory was further popularized, and the argument extended, when Herbert Spencer dramatized the principle of natural selection as “the survival of the fittest.” In a profusion of writings including ten weighty works of “synthetic philosophy,” Spencer laid out an anti-statist doctrine that he had earlier embraced as a young editor at the London
Economist.

Americans seemed cut off from these ideas by their absorption in the Civil War; then came the “Vogue of Spencer.” His views that nature put all on trial and that the mentally as well as the physically weak perished; that true liberty consisted of every man having “freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not on the equal freedom of any other man”; that state interference to protect the weak or deprived violated the process of natural selection; that public schools, state insane asylums, state poor-houses, state boards of health, even state post offices, were suspect; that, happily, government would decay as civilization progressed—these ideas, comprising the most radical defense of laissez-faire ever heard in America, fell with the tinkling melody of an intellectual aphrodisiac on the ears of the social and economic elites of America.

Why were they so incited by this far-off thinker—a man who had not even deigned to visit America—with his fastidious ways and intellectual arrogance, when they already had ample intellectual support in the “Manchester School” and other classic thought, in the laissez-faire view of some of their own Founding Fathers, in their own creed of individualism? In part because this was the Age of Science, and scientific discovery and thought had gripped the American mind as never before. Spencer, with his weighty treatises, seemed as scientific in applying the “survival of the fittest” to the social order as Darwin was in finding it in the natural.

There was a deeper reason. The great philosophical expounders of laissez-faire had often showed a deplorable tendency to “go soft” when it came to practical applications. Fundamentally humane and enlightened men, they ultimately balked at denying state aid to the poor and the helpless. John Stuart Mill, the great apostle of liberty, seemed to be turning almost socialistic in some of his thinking. But not Spencer—he supported the most rigorous application of laissez-faire not only as economically correct but as socially and morally valid, because the result would be the perfection of the human race and the eradication of social evils.

What a marvelous idea for the elites: to be individually selfish was to be socially sane and right! For these men, too, needed their ideas to be validated by some measure of higher morality, especially in this era when religious doctrine so often seemed old-fashioned and inadequate. Spencer, to boot, argued in strong dramatic terms understandable to every man, thus making him, as Hofstadter said, “the metaphysician of the homemade intellectual, and the prophet of the cracker-barrel agnostic.” In the last three decades of the century, Spencer’s American publisher, D. Appleton and Co., sold well over 300,000 copies of his writings. He was a philosopher, William James noted, who could be valued by those who had no other philosopher.

No wonder economic elites clutched Spencer to their austere bosoms. But the remarkable aspect of the Vogue of Spencer was the extent to which he was accepted and celebrated in the academic and religious worlds. A host of teachers of a variety of subjects preached Spencerism; indeed, the discipline of “political economy” was virtually equated with the doctrine of laissez-faire. While the scholars differed with one another on practical applications, as theorists, “free competition and denial of state interference was their dogma, economic liberty their slogan.” They wrote books and pamphlets, testified before legislatures, pontificated in the press, lectured from their platforms. The message was simple: Social evolution meant social progress.

By far the most famous and effective of the laissez-faire academics was William Graham Sumner of Yale. Brought up by his English immigrant father to venerate the Protestant economic values, especially thrift, Sumner divided his life between writing a systematic science of society and crusading for economic individualism inside his classroom and outside. The ‘‘strong” and the “weak,” he preached, were simply terms for “the industrious and the idle, the frugal and the extravagant.” If we do not like the survival of the fittest, he said, we will have the survival of the unfittest. Millionaires were the “product of natural selection”; hereditary wealth guaranteed the enterpriser that he might continue in his children the
qualities that had enabled him to benefit the community. But millionaires should not be artificially aided by the government, any more than should the poor.

Students flocked to Sumner’s courses, looking for debate. One of them, William Lyon Phelps, later remembered Sumner’s exchange with a dissenter:

“Professor, don’t you believe in any government aid to industries?”

“No! it’s root, hog, or die.”

“Yes, but hasn’t the hog got a right to root?”

“There are no rights. The world owes nobody a living.”

“You believe, then, Professor, in only one system, the contract-competitive system?”

“That’s the only sound economic system. All others are fallacies.”

“Well, suppose some professor of political economy came along and took your job away from you. Wouldn’t you be sore?”

“Any other professor is welcome to try. If he gets my job, it is my fault. My business is to teach the subject so well that no one can take the job away from me.”

The most respectable men of God took up the tenets of Social Darwinism, though rarely did they utter the name of the controversial English biologist. No one, said Princeton’s clergyman-president James McCosh, was at liberty to deprive us of our property or to interfere with it; attempts to do so were “theft.” Love required the acquisition of property, said Williams’s clergyman-president, Mark Hopkins, and those who had done the most for our institutions had been men with a “strong desire of property.” In his renowned sermon
Acres of Diamonds,
Baptist clergyman Russell Conwell preached the gospel of success: “It is your duty to get rich. It is wrong to be poor.”

Some of the most respectable journals preached laissez-faire. Occasionally, it was a laissez-faire that attacked business as well as the poor for demanding aid from government. “The Government must get out of the ‘protective’ business and the ‘subsidy’ business and the ‘improvement’ and the ‘development’ business,” wrote Edwin Lawrence Godkin of the
Nation.
“It must let trade, and commerce, and manufactures, and steamboats, and railroads, and telegraphs alone. It cannot touch them without breeding corruption.” The government had as much as it could do, he added, just to maintain order and administer justice. Words like these were repeated in hundreds of dailies and weeklies.

The dream of individual striving and success resonated most dramatically in the well-thumbed pages of boys’ stories about “rags to riches.” Perhaps the single most influential writer of the late nineteenth century
was a small, slight, diffident man, cursed by ill health and blighted romances, named Horatio Alger, Jr., who wrote about heroes—economic heroes. Youngsters and oldsters totaling tens of millions devoured his 106 books and voluminous other writings. Rarely could it more properly be said of an author that to read one of his works was to read them all. Whether it was
Ragged Dick—
the first of Alger’s famous works—or
Tony the Hero
or
Dan the Detective
or
Tattered Tom,
whether the theme was
Luck and Pluck
or
Strive and Succeed
or
Do and Dare
or
Brave and Bold
or
Paddle Your Own Canoe,
Alger’s novels followed a set format: the boy-hero is born poor, leads an exemplary life, faces up to poverty, shows a lot of pluck, and ends up rich, though usually not
very
rich. Yet Alger often departed from the mythology of the self-made man. His heroes sometimes rise from the middle class, not from poverty; they seem to depend as much on luck as pluck; and his rich men are often not good people. More curiously, as Richard Huber pointed out, his heroes are not self-made men but self-made boys. And only one of his heroes, Tattered Tom, was a girl, and she a tomboy—probably a reflection both of the sexism of the time and of the near-certainty that Horatio Alger, Jr., was a homosexual.

Others besides Alger, most notably William Makepeace Thayer, wrote success books, and rags-to-riches stories appeared in magazines as well as paperbacks. The most notable of the success magazines was
Munsey’s.
Frank Munsey himself not only read and printed Alger’s stories, wrote the same kind himself, and put the Alger stamp on every issue, but, according to Theodore Greene, “lived all his life in the fictional world” of Alger. He spent his life in a feverish search for what he called “riches, power, the world, the great big world,” and after perilous ups and downs that matched those of any Alger hero, he did indeed reach the top. There, however, he bought, merged, killed, and trivialized so many newspapers as to earn the obituary notice from a later editor, William Allen White: “Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manners of an undertaker.… May he rest in trust.”

Young would-be heroes did not even need to wait to read books and magazines. Many of their schoolteachers shared the same ethic. And staring at them from the early pages of the
McGuffey Reader
were the lines:

... If you find your task is hard,

Try, Try Again!

Time will bring you your reward,

Try, Try Again;

All that other folks can do,

Why, with patience, should not you: Only keep this rule in view;

Try, Try Again.

No one in America exemplified Horatio Alger’s type of hero better than Andrew Carnegie. He rose from near-poverty to enormous riches; he was industrious, neat, frugal, honest, lucky, and plucky; he was probably the biggest individual success of the late nineteenth century. And, by a fittingness all too rare in history, he was of all America’s great men the leading disciple of Herbert Spencer. “Before Spencer, all for me had been darkness,” Carnegie liked to say; “after him, all had become light—and right.” To Carnegie and many others, Spencer was the “master.”

People wondered when the master might visit the United States. A hypochondriac, Spencer had an aversion both to travel and to noisy adulation. He finally responded to the entreaties less of Carnegie than of his American publishers and his mass of American champions, who far surpassed his British devotees in both numbers and enthusiasm. He made the crossing in August 1882 on one of the finest Cunarders. By the time Spencer had been escorted by enthusiastic friends to Pittsburgh—where, despite a personal tour by Carnegie, he found the steel works stifling and the city repulsive—and then to a dozen other stops, he was physically exhausted and emotionally in a funk about the planned climax of the trip, a banquet at Delmonico’s where he was to be main speaker and guest of honor.

On the evening of November 9, 1882, a stream of broughams and victorias and daumonts dropped their passengers in front of the wide entrances of Delmonico’s, the most fashionable restaurant in Manhattan, at Fifth Avenue and 26th Street. In its banquet hall were gathering over 150 of the most distinguished men in America: political leaders like Carl Schurz and ex-Secretary of State William M. Evarts, intellectual celebrities such as Sumner and John Fiske, religious luminaries such as Lyman Abbott and Henry Ward Beecher, publishers including the Appletons, university presidents, a brace of business leaders. Carnegie himself escorted Spencer to the dinner and delivered him over to the head table. Spencer made clear that he was too exhausted for small talk.

When at 9:30 the bounteous meal was over, chairs pulled back, and cigars lighted, the distinguished audience was in for some surprises. Spencer, pulling himself together, spoke not on Social Darwinism but, rather, chided American businessmen that they worked
too
hard, passed their “damaged constitutions” on to their children, even started to turn gray ten years before their English counterparts did. Life was not for working but
working for life, he said. Nor did the other speakers follow the Social Darwinist script. As Joseph Wall pointed out, “Schurz stressed Spencer’s moral and ethical probity, Carnegie stressed Spencer’s detestation of the military, Fiske announced that Spencer had contributed as much to religion as he had to science, while Henry Ward Beecher, carried away with his own rolling oratory, told the startled Spencer that they would meet once again beyond the grave in that great banquet hall in Heaven.” It was almost midnight and the air was dense with cigar smoke by the time Beecher rose to speak, but the world-famous pulpitarian spoke so brilliantly on the reconciliation of evolution and religion that men stood roaring their approval and waving their handkerchiefs at the conclusion.