American Experiment (181 page)

Thus the social rebels argued and divided. Nor were other voices more united. Washington Gladden, Congregational pastor and shaper of the new “social gospel,” favored trade unionism and public ownership of utilities but rejected socialism in favor of Christian compassion, love of justice, and social service. Ignatius Donnelly deserted conservative Republicanism to write a book proving the existence of a lost Atlantis, a second work contending that the earth had collided with a giant comet, a third demonstrating that Francis Bacon had written the works of Shakespeare, and a fourth—
Caesar’s Column
—that rivaled
Looking Backward
in theme and popularity. Then there were the communitarians—especially the Shakers—who wanted local reform but feared the grand national experiments of Bellamy and the rest. Their intellectual godfather, the Englishman William Morris, called
Looking Backward
a “horrible Cockney dream.”

Once upon a time, New England could have been depended on to focus the nation’s intellectual concerns, to reinvigorate its founding ideas and ideals, to turn the needle of its moral compass to true north. And indeed, for a time after the Civil War, Boston at least opened up shop again for
its old intellectual business. Emerson, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, and the literary giants of the past still adorned the drawing rooms of Beacon Hill and tramped the paths of Harvard Yard. Not only did Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once again preside as the “autocrat of the breakfast table,” but he and the giants and lesser luminaries still might converse at length—sometimes for eight hours straight over a long dinner—at the Saturday Club, without any lag or lapse in the brilliance of the discourse.

Yet, if New England was not “in decay,” it was clearly slipping into a long and languid Indian summer. Of Thoreauian Utopianism and Enlightenment vagaries and frontier bumptiousness it had had enough, Vernon Parrington wrote, “and so it turned back lovingly to the culture of earlier times and drew comfort from a dignified Federalism—enriched now by a mellow Harvard scholarship that was on intimate terms with Dante and Chaucer and Cervantes and Shakespeare—a Federalism that fitted the dignified Brahmin genius as comfortably as an old shoe.” The years of its intellectual leadership were coming to an end. Boston, said Henry Adams, had stopped believing in itself.

Once supremely creative, New Englanders now concentrated on remembering, recording, observing—and criticizing. Mark Twain, as he was about to lecture before a Boston audience for the first time, described his prospective listeners as “4000 critics.”

Above all, the spirit of reform seemed to be dying. Compared to the transcending and transforming issues of the past, the new ones—currency, tariffs, the debt, railroad land grants—seemed at once crass and complex. To the “terrible simplifiers” of New England, slavery had seemed a clear as well as a compelling issue; now, corruption and patronage offered less delectable indignation to the Puritan conscience. “Most of the old reformers were exhausted,” Van Wyck Brooks concluded. “They had no energy left for fresh campaigns, although Boston, prolific in causes, swarmed with friends of progress and new reformers rose with other movements, the cause of peace, the cause of woman’s suffrage, dietary reform and Darwinism, the cause of the short-skirts league and the short-haired woman who amused profane New York for a generation.”

In some, nonetheless, the old flame of reform still burned. The magnificent Wendell Phillips, who had braved the mobs of old in his bitter attacks on slavery, now hurled his moral thunderbolts in support of penal reform, prohibition, woman’s suffrage, the labor movement, justice to Indians. Elizabeth Peabody—onetime pupil of Emerson, longtime secretary and amanuensis of William Ellery Channing, sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne and of Horace Mann, a founder of the Brook Farm community— embraced a variety of reforms, from education to Indian rights. Nor could
any cause be launched, from peace or suffrage to pure milk for babies, without Julia Ward Howe, of “Battle Hymn” fame, and her husband Samuel. Boston had its cynics, too. Charles A. Dana, once a devotee of the renowned utopian experiment Brook Farm, was becoming a foe of civil-service purification and everything else reformers seemed to believe in. And had Brook Farm itself not been used as a Union army camp during the war?

For a decade or so after that war, Boston served as a place where the older, moneyed “men of letters” lingered, passing on their intellectual heritage and political ideas to younger men who would spend most of their lives in retreat from New England. Perhaps the most noted of these was the young Harvard historian Henry Adams. As bald, high-domed, and stocky as his illustrious President-ancestors, Henry, like his brothers Charles and Brooks, had to adjust his eighteenth-century heritage of intellectual independence and rocklike integrity to the realities of late nineteenth-century capitalism. Unlike Charles, who had ventured into that world and retreated from it in bitterness against the moneymaking, “bargaining crowd,” Henry had backed off from the start. At Harvard he taught medieval history, lecturing reluctantly to large classes that he tried to drive away, he boasted, with “foul and abusive” language. Leaving Cambridge for Washington in the late seventies, he retreated in his historical work to the Federalist-Jefferson era, while narrowly eyeing contemporary politicians in the nation’s capital; and in later years, amid much travel abroad, he retreated again, and most creatively, to the world of the twelfth century and its great cathedrals.

All the while, he possessed an intense and morbid interest in politics, in power. Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, the heroine of his novel
Democracy,
wanted not merely an understanding of the source and mechanics of power; what “she wanted,” Adams writes, “is
POWER”
itself. Adams himself wanted more than power—he wanted an intellectual comprehension, which of course might command power. He explored the great dualisms—morality and power, politics and statesmanship, the pastoral and the industrial, science and religion, the individual and the democratic mass, material progress and moral decline. Above all, he turned away from the multiplicity and volatility and materialism of the world in which he lived, for the harmony and stability, the maternal love and cathedral serenity of the glory days of Chartres and Mont-Saint-Michel. His choice was certain: the Virgin over the Dynamo.

Henry James did not reject the multiplicity of American types—indeed, he lived off it—but he too fled Cambridge after a dozen years, much interrupted by travel, of writing reviews and stories for the
North American
Review
and the
Atlantic Monthly.
Drawn to Europe since his boyhood journeys there, he was relieved to desert America—its excessive egalitarianism that diluted individuality, the “flatness” of its democracy, the vulgarities of the Gilded Age, the materialism of the rich, the “bitch-goddess success.” Nor did he miss Boston, or, especially, its reformers; he caused a flap in the Athens of America when, in
The Bostonians,
he appeared to lampoon Elizabeth Peabody with a character, Miss Birdseye, whom he judged a humorless, confused, credulous, discursive old woman. Yet Parrington’s later assessment has stood up: James “was concerned only with
nuances.
He lived in a world of fine gradations and imperceptible shades.” At his best, he was “pragmatizing,” as James later said, even before his brother William explained this “way of thinking.” But neither from Boston nor London did Henry James discern the “figure in the carpet” of the American experiment.

The void left in New England by these writers—and by countless others of the “best and brightest,” in John Hay’s words, who left for Michigan copper lodes or California gold mines or Pittsburgh steel works—was not redressed in any other region. New England indeed continued to influence intellectual life across the nation because of the heritage of Emerson, Hawthorne, & co., and because of the migration of its sons and daughters to other parts. As a publishing center, Boston could still reach into the hinterlands. William Dean Howells had come to Cambridge from a poor boyhood in Ohio via journalism and a campaign biography of Lincoln that helped bring a consulate in Venice, where he absorbed history and culture. He arrived in New England adoring Cambridge and all it stood for and, improbably, Cambridge loved this young man from the heartland—for his open, ingenuous manner, for his limpid writing and developing “realism,” and, not least, for his adoration of Cambridge. Adopted by the Brahmins and the whole
Atlantic
crowd, he quickly rose to its editorship.

Even so, Howells would leave Boston and the
Atlantic
after a decade and a half. Before doing so, however, he managed to open up the
Atlantic
to writers who otherwise might have been ignored by the Brahmins. One of these was Samuel L. Clemens, a former Mississippi pilot and California journalist who had first won note for a short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Howells accepted his reminiscences, “Old Times on the Mississippi,” the reception of which encouraged the narrator, Mark Twain, to go on to the exciting adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Jim on the river of American history.

For Twain, the great river was not history but life itself. She was indeed outside of history and of human control. She ran as she wished, changing course, moving villages from one side of the river to the other, following
her natural freedom. Because the pilots were close to the river, Twain endowed them with mythical qualities: the pilots were childlike, brutish, spontaneous, and above all unfettered and independent.

The river was serene and beautiful, despite its occasional perils. “It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up.… The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up way off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking.…”

Only man—especially his grasping, feuding, lynching representatives along the river—was vile: man and technology, whether guns or steamboats. Huck wishes to escape technology and regulation. He lights out for the Territory “because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” For him and for Jim, who is fleeing slavery, the raft means freedom. When the raft is smashed apart by a riverboat and when Huck discovers that Jim has been recaptured, the image of the river as freedom collides with that of society as cruel and confining. But Huck lives
in
that society, and when he is tempted to return Jim to slavery because he, Huck, must live by local rules and mores, “I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.” His decision for Jim’s liberty was a decision for his own—and for their equality and fraternity.

“NOTICE,” Twain proclaimed at the start
of Huck,
“Persons trying to find a motive, moral, or plot in this narrative would be, respectively, prosecuted, banished, or shot.” Twain in fact offered a motive in the desire for freedom, a moral in the curse of “sivilization,” a plot in the protection and eventual liberation of Jim. The book reflected Twain’s own hope for people’s liberation—a hope tempered by his realization that the currents of change, symbolized by Jim’s freedom on the river even as the raft floats deeper and deeper into the slave lands, are remorseless. With the passing years, Twain’s hopes for freedom and individuality dwindled as industrial “sivilization” advanced.

As the century neared its close, another novelist was exploring the external and internal forces that seemed to control human fate. Frank Norris’s
McTeague
pictured ordinary men and women caught and dragged down by their instinctual drives. Money plays a central role in that downfall. One character, overcome by her instinct for hoarding money, “makes
love” to her gold coins. A dentist, told he can no longer practice because he lacks a license, degenerates into an animal run amok and murders his penny-pinching wife with his bare fists before he himself is trapped and killed in Death Valley.

In a more ambitious novel,
The Octopus
—the first of a planned trilogy entitled
Epic of the Wheat
—Norris moved to a wider canvas and drew a harsher portrait of society. The railroad is the villain. Impersonal and cold, it destroys anyone in its way. Popular rage against the California railroad culminates in the deaths of protesting farmers. The novel contrasts a rich man’s banquet and a starving mother and child. Wheat itself, though ample and life-giving, is impersonal and remorseless, literally engulfing and slaying a railroad functionary. Men are shot down, hearts broken, young girls “brought to a life of shame,” old women starved to death.
“But the
WHEAT
remained,”
a mighty world force, untouched, unassailable, indifferent, resistless.

Henry George and his fellow social critics, Henry Adams and the other intellectual legatees of the Brahmins, Twain and his fellow realists—what did they have in common? Nothing very definite or explicit. They differed not only in their answers but in their questions. But what comes through their writings, expressed in a diversity of ways, is a common repugnance to the materialism, acquisitiveness, competitiveness, the success ethic of the time—the very reverse of the ideals of Carnegie and Alger.

At the heart of the rising industrial force was the machine, and the machine that continued to symbolize both the great hopes and intrinsic evil of industrialism and urbanism was the railroad. Henry Adams’s brother Charles had been corrupted by it. The California wheat farmers were crushed by it. And Mark Twain’s steamboat had the soul of a locomotive when Huck heard her “pounding along,” not deviating an inch from her course, “looking like a black cloud with rows of glow-worms around it” and suddenly bulging out, “big and scary, with a long row of wide-open furnace doors shining like red-hot teeth, and her monstrous bows and guards hanging right over us.”