After leaving the Tuskegee Institute the Webers’ route through the South to Washington, D.C., followed the railroad lines through Atlanta; Chattanooga and Knoxville, Tennessee; Asheville and Greensboro, North Carolina; and Richmond, Virginia—five states and over a thousand miles in ten days—arriving in Washington on the evening of October 18, 1904. These ten days were especially fast-paced, as they included the visits with the American relatives, descendents of Georg Friedrich Fallenstein and his first wife, Elisabeth Benecke, an aspect of the journey under discussion with Max’s mother, Helene Weber, before leaving Germany. She was concerned about the circumstances of the American relatives and awaited a firsthand report. The condition of the “colonial children” (as the family referred to them) and their prospects in the New World had been under discussion in the family for years, creating a certain amount of strife and ill will, as Guenther Roth has pointed out in his finely crafted family history. As late as August 12, Helene wanted to make sure Max and Marianne had the addresses for Bill Miller and James Miller, and as a reminder promised to send them once again after they arrived in the United States. Like the Indian Territory adventure and the stop in Tuskegee, this part of the itinerary was arranged only after Max and Marianne were in St. Louis. But unlike Max’s exploration of the southwestern frontier, it requires little explanation: seeing the relatives was a matter of keeping up with the family, reporting on their circumstances, and satisfying Helene Weber’s expectations.
Our knowledge of what occurred during this part of the trip depends almost entirely on Max’s and Marianne’s letters. There is an unusual gap in the correspondence, however, from October 1–2 at the stopover in Memphis to October 12–14 in Asheville and Greensboro. When letter-writing resumed in the relaxed and temperate mountain air of The Manor at Albemarle Park, Asheville, there was even confusion about the date and day of the week. In addition, the conclusion to Max’s letter from Asheville is missing, as Marianne indicated in her later notation. These gaps contribute to the challenge of reconstructing the record of travel and the significance of their stay with the relatives.
In Max Weber: A Biography Marianne handled the episodes with the relatives by devoting three and one-half pages to the brief stay at Mt. Airy, North Carolina, using Max’s letter and a few lines of her own written in Washington, D.C. The Sunday, October 16, events at Mt. Airy are well-known for the colorful account of the afternoon baptism. Max described it himself (in somewhat more elaborate form than his letter) in his 1906 article “Churches and Sects in North America,” using the scene as illustrative material for the significance of religious affiliation and, as during the Webers’ visit to North Tonawanda, New York, his central distinction between an institutionalized church and a voluntarist religious sect.
The opinions expressed in the accompanying text of the biography, however, are more characteristically Marianne’s than Max’s. At the very least they reflect her poor health (a cold and an asthma attack) and, more significantly, her feminist point of view, whose intensity she tends to soften and blur when writing in the 1920s. Consider the more complete 1904 version of her complaint about the social scene at Mt. Airy:
For these people the driving force of the inner life and all activity is above all the feeling for the family, the love and care for their children and all the family concerns. Otherwise not much stirs the hearts and minds of the women, and why should it? Their school education is at best elementary—attendance is not required—and the so-called free school is in session for only four months. One notices it, too. The intellectual engagement of the women is much more limited than that of the men, and thus it is difficult to get anywhere with them. The men experience and learn about the operation of the world through their business relations, and despite reading newspapers irregularly, were well-informed about what’s going on. For the most part I was left with the women, of course, while Max walked around outside with the men and captivated them with his delightful stories. One simply assumed that I would be best off with companions of my own sex. But how I longed to be with the men!! How I pricked up my ears to try to snatch bits of their conversation, and how much I once again pitied the lot of my sex, whose field of vision and range of interests remain as limited as its sphere of activity! In a word, the women were very pleasant and nice, but boring; in contrast something was always going on with the men. (October 21; MWP)
It is not difficult to sympathize with Marianne’s plight, or to understand her decision to suppress these ungracious but honest passages. Her observations about schooling were correct: public school attendance was optional, and the school year averaged barely twenty weeks. Unlike Hull House and the Jane Addams circle in Chicago where she had been in her element, with the relatives in Appalachia she felt completely out of place. “As long as we were there I really felt rather uncomfortable,” was her summary of the two full days at Mr. Airy. There is indirect evidence from the oral histories of surviving family members in North Carolina that the feeling was reciprocated by the relatives, who found Max a “mighty jolly fellow” but did not know what to make of the woman they called “Mary.”
For Marianne the trip had reached its nadir. Max’s continued high spirits and the male camaraderie would understandably have been a source of envy and annoyance. Indeed, for Marianne the entire visit with relatives might have been captured in a paragraph or two, had it not been for the happenstance of being in Mt. Airy on a Sunday and attending both a Methodist and a Baptist service, two of the sects in which Max was most interested, and the subject of sections he was to write for the second part of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
What has not been understood previously, however, is that Marianne omitted not only a full account of her own reactions but also an accurate description of the journey itself, for there were in fact two visits with relatives in the South: the first with William (Bill) Miller and his family in Knoxville, Tennessee; the second with the other members of the Miller (Fallenstein) clan across the mountains in North Carolina. Marianne conflates the two, writing a single sentence about the former: “One of them [Bill Miller] had been at first a miner and then an elementary school teacher and was now owner of a law office and associated with a smart Irishman for whom he did the work; he, at any rate, was on his way toward becoming a notable.” Nothing more is said about the three days in Knoxville. However, like the Mt. Airy church services involving the rest of the Miller clan, the days there offered some unexpected insights.
When the Webers arrived in Knoxville, probably on October 9, they were returning a visit of Bill Miller’s to Freiburg in 1895, accompanied then by his father, Friedrich (Fritz) Fallenstein, also known as Francis Miller, Helene Weber’s half brother. As Guenther Roth has shown, the Millers’ visit to Freiburg gave Helene, also at the time a visitor at her son’s home in the Schillerstrasse, a welcome lift in the months following the death of her sister. In Freiburg Uncle Fritz and Bill seem to have hit it off with Max as well, notwithstanding his foul mood brought on by overwork, family tensions, and preparation for a trip to England.
Bill’s father, the “Old Captain” as he was called locally in North Carolina, had lived an adventurous early life, escaping from the ship that brought him to the New World, fighting in the Jacksonian-era Seminole Wars in Florida and Georgia, heading north for New York to make his fortune, making his living from cabinetmaking and then getting diverted by Moravians into the Virginia mountains, where he married and remained as a farmer—“to his misfortune,” as Max wrote. Max must have heard the saga from his cousins and perhaps the uncle’s banker, whom they met by chance on the train through the Blue Ridge Mountains. He recorded the details in one of the letters home, adding in a revealing reference that his uncle’s life reminded him of Gottfried Keller’s imaginative tale of ill-fated but self-inflicted decline and failure among Swiss mountain farmers, A Village Romeo and Juliet. When Max reached for a literary point of reference it was always a tip-off of the images forming in his mind: in this case not the romantic tragedy of Keller’s adaptation of William Shakespeare but the rustic conditions, peculiar habits, and hardscrabble existence of rural folk seemingly trapped by fate.
In the Civil War, Uncle Fritz chose to serve in the Confederate Army, attaining the rank of captain, and apparently he was held as a prisoner of war. One of his sons, Jefferson Miller, described to Max the terrible conditions of imprisonment in what he called this “foolish war.” After his release Fritz returned to the family in the mountains of North Carolina, scraped by as a farmer, and at one point was elected a county commissioner. Max referred to his uncle’s loyalty to Virginia and his belief in its right to secede overriding his strong abolitionist views, following John C. Calhoun’s interpretation of the U.S. Constitution in his Disquisition on Government, though the evidence about Fritz’s actual political convictions seems ambiguous.
The entire family story line did not follow Gottfried Keller’s, however. Bill Miller must have absorbed some of his father’s early ambition, as he was the only one of Uncle Fritz’s surviving six children, unlike those in the next generation, to break away from the confines of rural Appalachia to pursue a professional career. Upon his return to the United States from the trip to Germany, he decided at age twenty-nine to enroll at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a new state land-grant university created in 1879 that had been founded with the merger of Blount College (established in 1794) and East Tennessee University. The university showed its progressive side by admitting women in 1893; it remained true to the practices characteristic of its founding, and like the Chicago universities in 1904 still required chapel attendance for students. The university’s register listed Bill Miller as a student in the two-year law program from 1895 to 1897, noting that his bachelor of law (LLB) was one of ten bachelor’s degrees awarded in 1897. He also continued with graduate studies the next year, though there is no record of further degrees. Perhaps anticipating completion of his degree and a career in law, he married Magnolia (“Nola”) Brittian on December 23, 1896, and they settled permanently in Knoxville.
Bill began practicing law upon graduation, and then in 1898 entered into a partnership that lasted twenty years with a man named John P. Murphy, the first-generation “smart Irishman” referenced by Marianne. The firm of W. F. Miller and J. P. Murphy occupied space in the Miller Building in downtown Knoxville. Listed in all the city directories of the period, it appears to have been a well-connected and successful partnership, though in the early years Bill certainly brought in additional income through employment as an elementary school teacher, a miner, and a speculator in land. He must have been well regarded, as he was also called upon to substitute for his professors at the university. The family relied on his legal expertise as well, as Max noted that he managed the financial affairs both for his brother, Hugh, who suffered from epilepsy, and his sister, Elisabeth, who was married to a man named Robert Rawley whom the family considered a “gambler.”
In the correspondence addressed to Helene Weber in Berlin and the aunts in Oerlinghausen, both Max and Marianne wrote about the Knoxville experience, especially in the lengthy letter from Asheville. Having just come from Tuskegee, some of their attention was focused on race relations. This was one setting in which the Webers could explore racial attitudes with white Southerners in a relatively unconstrained way. Moreover, Knoxville itself was a city where the travelers experienced at close range the effects of post-Reconstruction segregation and discrimination against blacks: separate public facilities, transportation, parks, neighborhoods, churches, and schools. The mechanisms of disenfranchisement were also firmly in place: restrictive voter registration requirements, the poll tax, the secret ballot, vote tallies ratified by partisan election commissions, and manipulation in apportioning electoral districts.
To be sure, Knox County and eastern Tennessee participated in the wave of progressive reform after 1900. But as historians have shown, Progressivism as a political doctrine or outlook was a complicated and multifaceted movement with significant variations by region and social circumstance, marked only by a general core of shared views about industrialization, government, and the uses of “science” in public policy. In East Tennessee the “ethos of reform” encompassed several generalities: improving public education and health, supporting the rights of labor, building new roads, expanding public services, and regulating corporate interests and public utilities. It could also include support for woman suffrage, though not other forms of gender equality. As was true elsewhere, the progressive creed did not extend to racial justice; it was “for whites only,” as C. Vann Woodward pointed out in his classic history of the New South; it did not affect the lingering effect of “caste” relationships.
Progressivism in this regional variant also left the “separate spheres” for men and women untouched, a point Marianne underscored in her continuing complaint about the political economy of the household. As would occur a few days later at Mt. Airy, in Knoxville she was shunted off to the domestic sphere with the women and children: Nola, Bill’s wife, whom she found “kind-hearted and nice, but passive and phlegmatic”; her engaging and helpful mother; a visiting cousin; and two energetic children—six year-old Fritz and four year-old Ida, Bill’s adored “blue-eyed lily.” Meanwhile, Max was free to engage in important and lively discussions with Bill and the men. In the household division of labor, the educational regime for children was left to the adult women, Marianne noted, and she seemed to appreciate their approach—“simple” and “democratic” in her words—while expressing the standard cultural worries about overindulgence and lack of obedience. “Democratic” in the domestic context stood for a kind of personal ethos (with obvious political correlates): independence, self-reliance, unpretentiousness, questioning of authority. But in this Knoxville household it did not include social equality: Nola refused to allow son and daughter to play with workers’ children in the neighborhood, Marianne reported: “Status-consciousness shoots up from the ground like a mushroom.”
With Helene Weber’s concerns about the relatives in mind, Marianne also observed that compared to nine years previously, as head of a family Bill’s maturity stood out and he appeared more like one of the “notables.” But contrary to her suggestion in the biography there is little evidence that he had the desire or the means to become a member of the influential local elite, notwithstanding his professional success and public engagements. Always alert to the material foundations of life, Max noted that Bill’s annual income was
about $1000 (4200 M), and from that he saves something and must deduct debts for setting up his office. He speculates some in real estate; he bought his small house and lot for $900, half the actual value. Nola’s monthly household budget comes to $20–25 (80–100 M), as she grows sweet potatoes and the like. Such numbers are possible only in the southern states, where land in Tennessee, for example, is worth about half, or in Alabama a tenth to a fifth the value of the land in the former Indian regions settled already for a number of years by the Yankees in Oklahoma.” (October 12–13; MWP)
Indeed, Knox County records show that Bill was involved in at least ten land transactions by 1903, including the purchase of two adjacent lots on Cornelia Street in what was then a northern suburb on which the home was built. The family income may seem close to the poverty line, but Morgan Kousser has shown that for the Southern states it would have ranked easily in the upper quartile. (In 1900 the lowest 76 percent of the population averaged a mere $64 per capita annually!) “Bill always commented to me that he will probably never be a ‘rich man,’ but he is a ‘very happy man,’” Max noted, contining,
And in fact that’s the case, as Marianne will probably write: this mixture of democratic instincts and Jeffersonian ideas, combined with that Fallenstein inability to bring things to a conclusion, as found in most of Uncle Fritz’s children, make it difficult to get ahead. The combination of this mixture of ideas with the aristocratic instincts of the old miner, white Southerner and upwardly mobile notable is really quite peculiar, and it reveals questionable educational principles that make it difficult for the children to accomplish much. Bill works with an Irishman—that is, Bill does the work, while the Irishman is a deputy in the state assembly, a politician and jovial backslapping type, the kind of person who often has a political career here. He was very friendly toward me, quick-witted and mischievous, thought that I was like a man from Tennessee, or indeed from Kentucky, etc. Nevertheless the connection is advantageous for Bill, as I realized after his explanation of the relationship. The Irishman doesn’t do anything, to be sure, but pays one-third of the office expense and his portion of the profit is very small. The old fellow [he was forty-seven!], who showered me with some very valuable books, saw Bill on the street one day after his two-year “university course,” called him into his office, immediately proposed the partnership and thus “made” him. Everything is really an amazing game of chance in these half-finished relationships. Until now I didn’t know that Bill was a miner for seven months, primary school teacher for five, and his brother a miner who was let loose on the public as a physician. Not too long ago Bill (whose knowledge of jurisprudence is akin to administrative training in Germany) assumed the “professorship” in common law for two weeks, that is, he drilled the students on the basis of textbook reading, etc. etc.—a remarkable confusion in which nothing remains except the eternal change of everything, above all “vocation.” (October 12–13; MWP)
Max seems to have hit it off with Bill and his law partner, enjoying the give-and-take of these relationships. The evidence is circumstantial, but suggestive: he spent at least one and perhaps two nights in town with the men, undoubtedly engaging in discussions of public topics and perhaps attending a political meeting related to the election campaign. In the correspondence he continued to quote Bill’s opinion on social issues. And at least one of Murphy’s gifts, Arthur S. Colyar’s two-volume Life and Times of Andrew Jackson (1904), returned with Weber to Heidelberg. We might anticipate this kind of engagement anyway, as Weber had landed in one of his most familiar and favorite settings: local electoral politics.
Weber especially enjoyed the life story of his cousin’s Irish partner. Like Weber’s father, John P. Murphy had become a vocational politician, living for as well as off politics. At the end of his life he was described by the Knoxville Sentinel as a “well known citizen and active in city, state and national politics for more than 40 years.” He was the son of Irish immigrants, a Democrat and a Catholic, first employed at age eleven as a printer for the Knoxville Journal. Essentially self-educated, later in life he had studied law before setting up the partnership with Bill Miller. His political career seems to have received a helpful push during one of Grover Cleveland’s presidential terms, presumably the first from 1885–89, when he served in the U.S. Postal Service, no doubt a patronage appointment of the kind that Weber attributed to the “spoils system.” He was then twice elected to the lower house of the Tennessee Assembly (1893–95 and 1901–3) representing Knox County, and in October 1904 he was campaigning for the assembly again (and was not, as Weber suggests, an incumbent representative). But he did hold office as one of eleven aldermen on the Knoxville City Council, a salaried position, where he served continuously from 1891 to 1912, when a five-member commission replaced the elected council in the wave of progressive reform sweeping the country.
The fall election campaign found Murphy at the center of a raucous intraand interparty electoral battle in Knox County that pitted the Democratic Party machine (to which he belonged), then in control in the city and county, against another party faction as well as against the Republican nominees. Murphy’s wing of the party was dubbed variously the “organized Democracy,” the “Tyson Regulars” after one of its leaders, Colonel L. D. Tyson, or simply “the Ring” by the Republican Journal and Tribune, which enjoyed comparing it to New York’s Tammany Hall; the opposing faction became the “reformers” or “Bate democracy” for Senator William B. Bate, one of its leading “Bourbon” members, or more colorfully in the Democratic Knoxville Sentinel the “natural mugwumps” or “goo-goos.” As William R. Majors has noted, such electoral contests in Tennessee were certain to be “bitter and confusing.” The campaign revolved around the usual blend of personal ambition and charges of corruption, election fraud, patronage appointments of the unqualified, and complaints about “unprincipled” politicians in “the Ring” and hypocrisy and disloyalty among the “mugwumps.” (One can imagine this setting as the source of the American political lexicon’s wry definition of a mugwump as a fence-sitter with his “mug” on one side and “wump” on the other.) But to this mixture must be added the baffling complexity of post-Reconstruction politics in Tennessee before Prohibition. It was a border state but also a Southern state, and one composed of three distinct historical and geographical sections; Knox County, in eastern Tennessee where a quarter of the population resided, was the center of a Republican electoral majority in a state otherwise solidly Democratic.
In his pathbreaking study Southern Politics in State and Nation, V. O. Key has noted that through this period Tennessee effectively had two one-party systems: Democrats ruled in the west and central regions, distinguished by the legacy of a plantation economy, slaveholding, and support for the Confederacy; whereas Republicans controlled the east, characterized instead by small farms, a relative absence of slavery, and abolitionist and unionist sentiment. In view of these realities it is not surprising that during Reconstruction, Tennessee was the first secessionist state to have democratic rule restored. The state’s partisan alignment—forged during the Civil War and its aftermath—showed remarkable durability, persisting in voting patterns into the current century. It also made the state as a whole a relatively competitive electoral environment when compared with other Southern states, and the competition encouraged vote trading, unusual alliances, and urban party machines.
In this political context a member of a local Democratic minority but a statewide Democratic majority, Murphy aligned himself with the reform-oriented and more progressive “New South” wing of the party, as distinct from the state’s dominant “Bourbon” faction. These shifting labels must be used cautiously, but in general they referred to the main division between those committed to a vision of “progress” in education and the economy (that is, support for industrial development, railroads, transportation, urbanization) versus those who kept the “Lost Cause” alive; emphasized states’ rights, laissez-faire, and white supremacy; and traced their roots to the old planter aristocracy. The “New South” orientation was evident in organizations like the Southern Good Roads Association, formed in 1901, or the East Tennessee Education Association of 1903. One of its leading proponents was Arthur S. Colyar, who had a reputation among contemporaries as a brilliant captain of industry. He was also an important power broker who ran unsuccessfully for governor three times, in addition to being the author of the study of Tennessee’s most famous politician that Murphy had recently purchased before bestowing it upon Weber. Murphy would surely have known Colyar personally from their years of political activity in more progressive Democratic circles.
Like many parts of the country at the turn of the century, Tennessee was increasingly faced with the regional challenges of economic development, the growth of corporate power, and the need for educational reform—in short, the kinds of problems characteristic of the emerging modern American state. Murphy selected one of these issues—education—as the key to addressing all the others. He outlined his campaign position at an electoral rally on October 8, 1904, the day before Max Weber arrived; as the local press reported,
Mr. Murphy said that he had not yet been attacked by the enemy and that he would not discuss them as the hour was growing late, but that he favored an appropriation of $50,000 for the University of Tennessee. That he wanted to see 1000 free scholarships instead of 275; furthermore he was for better schools in the country districts and such should be the case. He favored a bill making the school books free and also the compulsory educational law. We should do all in our power to place the education of the children as cheap as possible. He was for good roads and longer terms of the schools in the country districts.
Over the next month Murphy elaborated this message of educational reform and a larger University of Tennessee appropriation, emphasizing the importance of educational opportunity and stressing that he wanted “to make education as close to the poor man as it could be.” Among his legislative accomplishments, he expressed pride in securing the position of factory inspector in his previous service in the assembly, an issue with which Weber would have identified.
The press reported numerous local election-related gatherings, and if not in attendance at one of these Weber would surely at the very least have heard the debates of this overheated electoral season—grist for the mill on the theme of the political party as a “machine,” or the fifteen pages in “Politics as a Vocation” in which Weber compared party organization and structure in England, the United States, and Germany. “The creation of such machines signifies the advent of plebiscitarian democracy,” Weber wrote. In America the “plebiscitarian” principle stood out in bold relief. In Weber’s interpretation it was set in motion at the national level by Andrew Jackson, an antitraditionalist politician from a new “western” state, and in 1904 reinforced by Theodore Roosevelt’s campaign and his conception of presidential leadership.
Politics is a local affair, however, and so the machine must have local roots. Americans of the time agreed. According to the editor of the Knoxville Sentinel, summing up the fall campaign,
Every political party must have organization. So in Knox county the active machine for doing the party work has been an executive committee of about 600 members. The chairman was given power to add to or take from this committee at his pleasure. It is the largest, most democratic committee in the state. Of course a smaller number of influential men consulted together and had great influence. Thus the cry of “ring” arose, but there was no more ground for such cry than has always been the case.… No more than now in the ranks of the bolters themselves. We do not claim this organization has been free from error, but we do claim it has been less open to criticism than is usually the case in a large county like this. There is another class of people who oppose all political methods and these furnished recruits to the disgruntled. These were the natural mugwumps.… They are good men, many of them, and are sincere. [But] they are of the class which is never satisfied and always in the opposition. (November 5, 1904)
The sense of politics and political method in this statement, and the moralizing oppositions and alternatives—all entirely representative of the rough-and-tumble of local American politics—bear an uncanny resemblance to Weber’s point of view. If Louis Hartz is correct about a “natural Lockeanism” in America, then one is tempted to call such statements evidence of a kind of “natural Weberianism.” The outlook about the necessity of organization is homegrown and unpolished, a kind of political vernacular that took shape with the emergence of the modern American state. Cataloged in the pages of James Bryce’s American Commonwealth, it is a way of conceiving politics that is consistent with the premises and categories of “Politics as a Vocation.”
What of the outcome? Faced with divided support from the local press, “the Ring” (and Murphy) lost this battle, electing only one of six candidates for state office, and returning the Knox County Democratic Party to its divided condition of the 1890s. The “natural mugwumps” were evidently better organized than the “organized democracy.” But Murphy continued to serve on the Knoxville City Council for another eight years, earning $100 annually while continuing the partnership with Bill Miller.
Max and Marianne would never see Bill Miller again. He outlived his cousin Max by more than two decades, passing away quietly and suddenly at age seventy-four on May 17, 1941, at his home in Knoxville, remembered as a graduate of the University of Tennessee College of Law and a member of the Washington Pike Methodist Church and the Bright Hope Lodge of the Masons; he was survived by his wife, Nola, and his daughter Ida Miller Harbison, his “blue-eyed lily.”
The Webers left Knoxville midweek. Had they stayed the evening of October 12, Max could have heard one of Murphy’s many election speeches. Instead he and Marianne treated themselves, perhaps with Bill’s knowledgeable advice, to the pleasures of an off-season vacation retreat in Asheville, North Carolina—“one of the most beautiful places we saw,” Max wrote, “surrounded by blue forested mountains and the forest at the height of its fall colors.” It was not only fall scenery and posh accommodations that awaited them. Nearby was also the attraction of the new Biltmore estate, which they toured on October 13.
Following the Civil War, Asheville had benefited from an infusion of Northern investment, including the Vanderbilt’s capital. Cornelius Vanderbilt had launched the family’s philanthropic endeavors with a $1 million endowment establishing a university in 1879 about three hundred miles away in Nashville. One of his grandsons and heirs, George Washington Vanderbilt II, then turned his attention to a quite different public works project: the Biltmore estate. Hiring Richard Morris Hunt, the architect of choice for the social stratum that Thorstein Veblen called the “leisure class,” George teamed up with him to tour France’s Loire Valley chateaux and returned with their design: a French Renaissance palace reminiscent of Blois and Chenonceaux with a banquet hall, winter garden, indoor swimming pool, and 250 rooms—all at a cost of $4 million. The Baedeker guidebook called it “probably the finest private residence in America,” eclipsing Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which had become only “an interesting example of the architecture of the period” (missed by the Webers), not to mention George Washington’s Mount Vernon, merely “an old-fashioned wooden mansion” (which the Webers did see). Jefferson, who thought he was establishing a distinctive architectural idiom for the American home, would have been scandalized. Weber seems to have been fascinated. “The famous Vanderbilt ‘estate,’” he wrote, was
as large as the principality of Lippe, with 71 miles of avenues, as far as from Heidelberg to Strasbourg; black pigs, washed daily and massaged with oil, like Odysseus; cows of every imaginable kind, each in its own stylish cottage. The little houses for pigs, built in a Swiss style, have dimensions greater than Bill’s house. Wonderful fresh ice-cream, that is, here it’s actually frozen cream; magnificent chickens, etc. etc. Hunting grounds that encompass numerous hills and many square miles of dense forest. He [George Vanderbilt] bought out the farmers, à la “Jakob der Letzte,” built a magnificent castle on a hill (unfortunately visible to us only from the rear, since he was in residence), then a very “stylish” village with a church, rented partly to the 500 personnel and foresters and others, and partly to guests—an incredible impression of possessions and squandering of labor, land, and people. But it is certainly marvelous anyway. (October 14; MWP)
The European and literary references were piled on top of each other in an effort to make sense of this new efflorescence of the moneyed leisure class. Veblen, one of Weber’s favorite American social critics, would have adroitly summed it all up under the heading “conspicuous consumption.”
For Biltmore, however, Veblen’s tagline was not quite accurate. From the beginning Vanderbilt and Hunt had worked closely with Frederick Law Olmsted, Friedrich Kapp’s old associate, to plan a self-sustaining community. The Webers had already encountered and commented favorably on Olmsted’s landscapes in New York City’s Central Park; Brooklyn’s Prospect Park; the parkways in Buffalo and Niagara Falls, New York; and Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair site at Jackson Park and the Hyde Park midway. Olmsted not only designed the Biltmore grounds but managed the feat of blending Renaissance classicism with the primeval forested expanses of the New World. This success required a massive reforestation project covering more than 100,000 acres of degraded hardwood forest, the introduction of ecological practices developed in Europe, and the employment for the first time in the United States of a scientifically trained forester, the progressive conservationist Gifford Pinchot, who during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency became the first head of the U.S. Forestry Service. The project served multiple human and commercial purposes, including local economic development and a sustainable forestry and woodworking business. It was an experiment in responsible social ecology, an effort to re-create the institutions of the working village.
Weber’s startling allusion to Peter Rosegger’s Jakob, der Letzte. Eine Waldbauerngeschichte aus unseren Tagen, published in 1888, refers to be sure to the Steiermark novelist’s favorite themes: the expropriation of farmers, the exploitation of nature, the management of wildlife for personal sport—in short, the victory of urban capital over rural tradition. The age’s defender of Edenic nature and pastoral life, of sacred Heimat, or the idea of home bound to the soil, Rosegger told a story about the last Jacob, whose ladder is broken and covenant violated. (The biblical reference is to Genesis 28:12–17.) As in Keller’s tale of Romeo and Juliet, the novel ends in tragedy and a form of life vanishes—although, not quite, for young Jacob the son has run away to sea, like young Fritz Fallenstein, finally coming to rest (like Fritz) in America. But instead of a misfortune, such as in Ferdinand Kürnberger’s odd potboiler Der Amerika-Müde (The America-Weary), which Weber cites in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the event opens the path to self-discovery.
So the tale is also about America, the ethic of conservation, and the project of what today would be called sustainable ecology. In Rosegger’s fiction, after making and losing a fortune in California’s goldfields, young Jacob returns to his true self through a pilgrimage of testing and retrieval of Homeric proportions. Finally, from the fertile and unspoiled reaches of a Sierra Valley (located by the author carelessly in Oregon), he writes to his doomed father that his new multiethnic community of German, French, English and Native American settlers has reestablished the old harmony of life in nature, “like the first humans after the earth’s creation.” Rosegger’s vision is thus a mythic narrative of escape, tribulation, recovery, healing, and salvation. The oldest myth of America has triumphed: Europe succumbs to the ravages of industrialization, while the New World glories in humanity’s redemption and rebirth. The story becomes an allegory for the vision of Biltmore’s creators, Vanderbilt and Olm sted.
Familiar with Keller’s work, Weber would also have known Rosegger’s popular novellas. Invoking the “last Jacob” as he gazed at Olmsted’s creation, he might have had any number of images in mind: the irresistible Jeffersonian myth of American societas, the daring hubris of an effort to remake the world, the reconciliation of classical European culture with the natural order of America, or the healing power of human artistry and ingenuity even in the face of the rapacious exploitation and depletion of resources that he saw in the Indian Territory. The ambiguities in Rosegger’s tale and the solitude of the mountain retreat invite conjecture. Could Weber also at some level have had in mind the meaning of his own American odyssey?
From Asheville to Mt. Airy was a journey from quiet repose and a glimpse of the “rich and famous” to something very, very different. Travel was circuitous and strenuous, boarding the train at 5:00 a.m. and arriving by horse-drawn buggy well after dark. The journey from Ashville onward was a change from the expected, a ride in a local train packed with passengers and not the comfortable Pullman cars the Webers were used to, with their impeccable service, lounge chairs, dining car meals, libraries, and writing and smoking rooms. Max was wearing his standout travel attire of knickers and high socks, misidentified by traveling companions as the German “national costume,” a source of mirth for all. He assumed cultural parochialism: no one had seen a German before. After a scenic ride through the Blue Ridge Mountains, reminiscent of the Black Forest vistas of southwest Germany, there was a brief stop in Greensboro, North Carolina, at the Hotel Huffine. Lunch consisted of three kinds of meat, a fish steak, beans, green corn, noodles, turnips, cabbage, fresh wheat bread, butter, pie, and coffee, at a cost of fifty cents per person; only in the South, he noted, cheaper than Germany, and yet another opportunity to sample everything on the table. As Marianne slept, still in recovery mode, Max penned his curiosity about what they would find at Mt. Airy: no longer the petit bourgeoisie, but perhaps authentic farmers.
If Marianne Weber was frank about her response to the relatives, Max was no less forthcoming about the results of the Mt. Airy adventure. The brief stay there turned out unexpectedly to be an opportunity to observe religion in action. His observations about religion in America had started immediately at the beginning of their U.S. visit in North Tonawanda and continued in Chicago and beyond. Over the next month they were to take a slightly different turn: attendance at religious services, seven in all, beginning at Mt. Airy on October 16 and concluding with a service of the Ethical Culture Society in New York City on November 13.
There are four versions of the Mt. Airy events, one of which Max Weber published for an informed general readership in the Frankfurter Zeitung after returning home, then amended slightly for Martin Rade’s journal Die Christliche Welt. It was his first effort to clarify the distinction between a religious sect and an institutionalized church that had crept into his consciousness already in North Tonawanda, a distinction that he thought was particularly pronounced in American practices. The Sunday at Mt. Airy must have been especially memorable, as the morning was spent in a Methodist service, the afternoon at an outdoor Baptist service that included a mass baptism, and between them a family dinner with the circuit-riding Methodist preacher as guest.
James (“Jim”) Miller, Bill Miller’s younger brother, was a devout Methodist. He was also the most successful member of the local clan—“‘busy’ like a Yankee,” Weber quoted the relatives saying, a characterization that conveyed a mixture of admiration, envy, and disapproval. With an annual income of $1,000 from farming, Jim also ran a business on the side in horses and buggies. He took the Webers and some other family members to the service at the Zion Methodist Church, a simple, austere barnlike structure in a rural location. Weber noticed the sharp contrast between the plain solemnity of the interior and the brilliant autumn colors of the surrounding landscape. The sermon was “purely practical,” and yet it had an “emotional” quality and revealed the preacher’s strong inner convictions. Congregants who felt “awakened” by the experience came forward, kneeling and praying aloud at the altar. The minister, who served eight churches in the circuit, preached “entirely like a political speaker,” Weber remarked, still fresh from the campaign in Knoxville. The only jarring element was the music, the “unspeakably dreadful singing of the shrill voices,” a source of continuing comment: “In America,” he wrote a few months later in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one “hears as community singing in general only a noise which is intolerable to German ears.”
Weber showed some awareness of the purpose of this musical aesthetic, both in the New World and in European centers of the reformed church such as the Netherlands; it brought the listener back to the “sobriety” of the setting and the occasion, as he said of the Mt. Airy service. Given additional time, he might have probed more deeply into this dimension of the musical culture of Appalachia. As anthropologists and musicologists have subsequently pointed out, the strict Calvinism of the primitive Baptist influence in Appalachia favored elimination of plain chant, bel canto, or the use of vibrato of any kind, and instead favored slow, stately, dissonant, and unaccompanied singing, without the organ or any other instrumental accompaniment. Austerity of expression was supposed to hew as closely as possible to the mode of religiosity in the original Puritans, an aural witness to the inner-worldly asceticism of the congregation.
Over dinner at Jim Miller’s after the service Weber conversed with the young Methodist preacher about religious trends, and the minister agreed that the older practices of periodic “revivals” and weekly confessional “class meetings” of individual members among like-minded neighbors were going out of style. This view confirmed Weber in his belief, as he put it, that “an enormous number of ‘orders’ and clubs of all kinds have begun partly to take on the functions of the religious community,” a development that he elaborated in the Frankfurt newspaper report:
Almost every small businessman who wants to make something of himself wears some kind of badge in his lapel. But the Ur-form of this practice that serves to guarantee every kind of “honor” for the individual is surely the religious community. This function is most fully developed … in those communities that are “sects” in the specific sense of the word to be discussed here. This was made especially clear to be personally when I attended a Baptist baptism on a cold Sunday in October in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. About ten people of both sexes in “full dress” stepped one after another into the ice-cold water of the mountain stream, in which the minister dressed in black stood waist-deep through the entire procedure. After the usual professions of conviction, they placed themselves in his arms, bent their knees, leaned back until the face disappeared under water, climbed out puffing and shaking, and were “congratulated” by the farmers who had come by horse and wagon in large numbers, and quickly driven home, sometimes hours away. (“Faith” protects them from catching a cold, it’s said.) One of my cousins, who had accompanied me from his farm and showed his disdain for the event by disrespectful spitting (he maintains his lack of church affiliation as a sign of his German heritage!), showed a certain interest when an intelligent looking young man undertook the procedure: “Oh see: Mr. X! I told you so!” Asked for an explanation, he only replied that Mr. X intended to open a bank in Mr. Airy and needed considerable credit. Further discussion revealed that for this purpose acceptance into the Baptist congregation had to have a decisive value not primarily on account of the Baptist customers, but rather much more for the customers who were not Baptists. This was because the detailed investigation into moral and business conduct of one’s life [Lebensführung] that the congregation conducts is considered by far the strictest and most reliable.
The cousin to whom Weber referred was one of James and Bill Miller’s older brothers, Jefferson (“Jeff”) Miller, a man in his late fifties who had managed only to scrape by as a farmer, an occupation and a life he detested. The generational gap and the tension over “success” within the family were readily apparent: twenty years separated these brothers, Jeff brandishing his native cynicism and hostility to the sects, while both Jim and Bill were firmly embedded in the social fabric of Methodism. Weber referred to Jim belonging to other unnamed “orders,” and Bill was also a Freemason. Differences in the forms of sociability could not be missed: at Jeff’s house religious or spiritual expression was avoided, whereas at Jim’s a prayer preceded dinner and the form of address was “brother” (or “sister”) so-and-so. (“Faith protects them from catching a cold” was actually Jim’s pronouncement.) It hardly needs to be said that cousin Max would have noticed that it was not Jeff but Jim and Bill who had made their way successfully in the world. (Parenthetically, in defense of Jeff’s manners, I should point out that the habit of chewing tobacco was widespread, even among the women relatives—to Marianne’s consternation. Fortunately today the appropriate cultural substitute has become chewing gum, with the exception, apparently, of the baseball dugout.)
The outdoor baptism was most likely sponsored by the Mt. Carmel Baptist Church. Notwithstanding uncertainty about the actual participants, the event in itself for Weber captured an important social relationship across religious affiliation, moral approbation, and economic action. One aspect of the connection was symbolic, such as wearing a badge or a lapel pin as an outward symbol of authentication and conviction. The practice was not exclusively American, though in Weber’s view in the United States its use reflected a sacred religious origin and point of reference. When displayed for secular political purposes (the ubiquity of the American flag and the flag lapel pin is the obvious example, inserted even into presidential campaigns today), the symbolic bona fides could thus be witness to a strong emotional appeal.
More was at stake than the manipulation of symbols, however, for the relationships across sect membership, morality, and economic action that Weber perceived had a direct bearing on the totality of a way of life or life conduct. Among the relatives in America the relationships were revealed in an especially unforgettable way. It was the authentication of the individual’s moral standing through social action and group membership that attracted Weber’s attention, as it had in the quite different settings of Northwestern University, the Tuskegee Institute, or the Indian Territory. At Mt. Airy, however, the example was not just the “Mr. X” or “Bem” of the baptism, but the different ways of life of the cousins as well. The language Weber chose to describe the process—moral examination, ethical probation, moral testing, methodical way of life, proving oneself through sober diligence in one’s calling—emphasized the institutionalization of access to group membership, of course. Yet it also captured the frictions and tensions of the family history set out vividly before him.
As for the sects, the crucial claim still had to be substantiated. Though the process of joining was voluntary, it was also competitive and demanded success of the applicant: the successful challenge of holding one’s own in a circle of social equals provided a test of personal legitimation. In its social consequences, sect membership thus extended to the individual “a certificate of moral qualification and especially business morals,” as Weber expressed the idea. It provided proof of one’s reputation, honesty, trustworthiness—hence, proof of one’s credit worthiness and access to credit. It was then a short step logically to understanding the sect, and all sectlike associations, as social carriers of the orientation that Weber called matter-of-factly “the bourgeois capitalist business ethos among the broad strata of the middle classes (the farmers included).”
In sum, in America the sects were the original model. All other processes of sociation and forms of group life followed their lead. Today we would say they were the guarantors of “middle-class values,” of a wealth of social trust and social capital.
In Chicago’s stockyards and again in the oil fields of Muskogee in the Indian Territory, Max Weber explored the dynamics of American society as an expression of modern industrial capitalism—one dominant way of thinking about the United States as the most advanced example of the world to come, prefigured already in Alexis de Tocqueville’s sense in the Jacksonian age of seeing the European future in the American present. In Knoxville and Mt. Airy, however, a quite different picture began to emerge: not economic rationality and its problematic and alienated effects, but an image of the processes and patterns of associational life characteristic of the American democratic social and political order. Weber’s reading of this order was “progressive” in an interesting way, calling attention to the power of associational life, the sects and orders and parties, and to the formation of the self, the certification of the individual, and the creation of citizens through the dynamic of what he called the “cool objectivity of sociation.” The phrase poses an enigma: what exactly did Weber have in mind?
At the conclusion of the Frankfurter Zeitung article Weber arrived at a formulation of the issue, giving it a polemical edge by setting up a double opposition: democratization properly understood (using the American example) versus the bureaucratization of German life that he abhorred; and more surprising, the processes of forming social groups versus the romantic nostalgia for “community”:
Whoever represents “democracy” as a mass fragmented into atoms, as our Romantics prefer to do, is fundamentally mistaken so far as the American democracy is concerned. “Atomization” is usually a consequence not of democracy but of bureaucratic rationalism, and, therefore, it cannot be eliminated through the favored imposition of an “organizational structure” from above. The genuine American society—and here we include especially the “middle” and “lower” strata of the population—was never such a sand pile. Nor was it a building where everyone who entered without exception found open doors. It was and is permeated with “exclusivities” of every kind. Where the old relationships still exist, the individual does not have firm footing, either at the university or in business life, when he has been unable to be selected into or to hold his own in a social organization (earlier almost always religious, today of one kind or another). And the old “sect spirit” holds sway with relentless effect in the intrinsic nature of the associations. The latter are always “artifacts” or “societies” [Gesellschaften] and not “communities” [Gemeinschaften], to use the terminology of Ferdinand Tönnies. In other words, they neither rest on “emotional needs” nor aspire toward “emotional values.” The individual seeks to claim his own position by becoming a member of the social group. That undifferentiated peasant-like, vegetative “comfortableness” [Gemütlichkeit] is missing, without which a German is unable to cultivate a sense of community. The cool objectivity of sociation [die kühle Sachlichkeit der Vergesellschaftung] promotes the precise placement of the individual in the purposive activity of the group, be it a football team or a political party. But this objectivity never means a diminution of the necessity for the individual to care constantly for his self-assertion. On the contrary, precisely within the group, in the circle of acquaintances the task of “proving” oneself really makes itself felt for the first time. For that reason the social group that one belongs to is never something “organic,” a mystical unified essence hovering above a person and enveloping him, but much more a quite conscious mechanism for one’s own material or ideal purposes.… the connection of the inner isolation of the individual, which signifies a maximum development of his powers of action, with his capacity for forming social groups having the strongest coherence and the greatest impact, has emerged with its highest potential on the foundation of the sects and their formation.
Weber might have written “material or ideal interests,” as he did in a later text. But the point would have been the same: both material “goods” and ideal “values” were promoted by social action within a group.
At first glance, it appears that Weber has discovered an important source, perhaps the essential historical source of social capital in America. But the passage is more extraordinary than such a conclusion might suggest, for in the hills of Appalachia amid relatives he had stumbled across evidence for an idea that had been maturing through the preceding weeks, a provisional answer to the question posed in Chicago by the tension between economic rationalization and an ethos of asceticism. Could it be that the capitalist rationalization of social and economic life might be countered by a distinctive process of sociation and a conscious promotion of associational life?
The idea required rethinking the nature of social action, or the process of forming social relationships, the verbal noun Vergesellschaftung rendered imprecisely in English as “sociation” or “association.” Consider that the radical critique of capitalism in Europe, from the young Karl Marx to Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy, had always set fragmentation against wholeness, atomization against authenticity, mechanization against organic connection, the alienating forces of civil society against the healing powers of community. The “other” of alienating capitalism was its overcoming in the species life of classless community, a conceptual placeholder borrowed from romanticism. But Weber has suggested that such mutually exclusive, reified categories are entirely misleading. The reason they mislead is that they miss the modern alternative—namely, the kind of purposive process of forming social relationships that attaches individuals both to the local and particular, and to the universal and general. The process both unifies and differentiates, and it does so on the basis of social rather than communal norms, relying on the “cool” rationality of matter-of-factness, of Sachlichkeit, instead of the warm congeniality of Gemütlichkeit, that untranslatable noun of comfort and contentment. The social norms are “objective” because they are external to the individual and have a pragmatic logic; they describe a practice. The norms are not inscribed in the “inner self” or dependent on subjective inwardness.
Stated more abstractly, this kind of sociation or process of forming social relationships combines purposive action oriented toward rational ends with the rational value orientation of egalitarian participation in group life. In that sense it is democratic; it is also thoroughly modern. The ends of coming together in a social relationship are radically different across social groups, from an election committee to a Bible study group or an athletic team, but the means of forming the social relationship are the same, replicating in the modern social setting the “sect spirit” with its matter-of-fact public, participatory, and collegial norms. The untraditional, public, impersonal, voluntary, and purposively rational solution to the problem of individual action within group constraints was what made for such an unusually potent and original variation of previous social forms—a solution romanticism and neoromantics of all stripes have consistently misjudged.
Weber’s insight follows the thread woven through the experience of the American journey to this point, discovering the basic model for social differentiation and democratization in the antiauthoritarian and nontraditional sects. The advantage of the insight is its comprehensive character, for it sets in motion the basic dynamic of American social life: on the one hand the drive toward exclusivity, toward purposive goals and distinctive individual achievements; and on the other hand the commitment to inclusiveness, to social democratization and a common, shared fate. Paradoxically, voluntaristic sociation promoted both.
How and why these two sets of contending forces are constrained, combined, split apart, and recombined is the next problem Weber would have to engage. Whether his generalizations from a century ago still hold is, of course, another matter, widely discussed and much disputed. It is an issue that we will have to judge for ourselves.