LIBERTY! A HUNDRED FOURTHS of July broke loose yesterday to exalt her name, and despite the calendar rolled themselves into a delirious and glorious one,” rhapsodized the usually dour New York Times. “At daybreak the city stirred nimbly and flung a million colors to the heavy air, for the cloud king had covered the heavens and moved upon the waters; but she plumed herself and showered scarlet, and snow, and azure, and gold, defying the skies to darken her festival.”
Thus the Times pictured the dedication of the Statue of Liberty on a wet and foggy October 28, 1886. The massive icon represented a triumph of the human spirit as well as of the spirit of liberty. French intellectuals, struggling to establish a new republic out of the ruins of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, had conceived the mad notion of a joint French-American project to erect a colossal statue of liberty as a stimulus to both peoples to cherish and safeguard freedom. They sought the common denominator between “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” and “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Countless obstacles arose. Bartholdi, the sculptor, was noted more for his addiction to colossi than for his art. Viewing the project with suspicion, Congress granted funds for the dedication (but none for liquor) and for maintenance (as a lighthouse), and then cut off further aid. The public was importuned for funds, which the poor withheld because they viewed “Liberty” as a folly of the rich, but the rich did not give either. Still, some money was raised through auctions, benefit performances, and even a poetry contest, which attracted a reluctant contribution from one Emma Lazarus. And at a critical moment Joseph Pulitzer, an immigrant from Hungary, used his New York World and his St. Louis Post-Dispatch to pull in small gifts from over 100,000 donors, including countless schoolchildren.
So there the great figure stood, rising with her torch 152 feet above the pedestal on Bedloe’s Island, 300 feet above sea level. Troops, bands, Templars, veterans, dignitaries disgorged onto the tiny island from ferry, tug, and yacht. The rich, now enthusiastic, were there, while the contributing public watched from the shores or excursion steamers. Count de Lesseps presented the gift. A senator—William Evarts—was celebrating Franco-American love of liberty when Bartholdi, perched far above on the head of the statue, acted on a false signal through the mists, unveiled the figure, and set off a cacophony of shouts, whistles, drums, horns, applause, and booming guns that drowned out the rest of the senator’s remarks. A President—Grover Cleveland—accepted the gift, stating that “Liberty has here made her home” and would pierce the darkness of ignorance and oppression “until liberty shall enlighten the world.”
Liberty. The idea had doubtless lost some of its enkindling power of old, but it was still the central and most compelling value in the American ideology. The pennies and nickels that jangled in newsboys’ pockets still bore the magic word. Politicians still climaxed their declamations with appeals to the goddess of liberty, as did student orators evoking memories of the liberty of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and above all Daniel Webster—“Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.”
In the post-Civil War years, the American idea of liberty was as complex, many-sided, and ambiguous as in the antebellum period, when diverse notions of freedom probably did more to divide than to unite Americans in dealing with the issue of slavery and its cure. Liberty still meant, most fundamentally, freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. It meant, even more powerfully, the right to own and use your “private” property as you wished. Property, John Adams had said, was “surely a right of mankind as really as liberty,” and this idea flourished in a booming era of huge agglomerations of property. Liberty was still viewed in largely negative terms, as liberty from church and state and other establishments; the idea of achieving broader liberties, economic and social, through collective efforts, especially through government, was a matter more of philosophical debate than of practical consideration.
Ideas have consequences, but not merely because they exist as abstractions. They must be evoked and articulated and sounded forth, like music from a score. The social and intellectual context of the 1870s and ’80s was such as to enhance the individualistic component of liberty—the emphasis on protection of individual rights, individual opportunity, private property as essential to a person’s security and dignity, the curbing of external obstacles on individual development. But this kind of “individualistic liberty,” or individualism, embraced a wide span of human thought and behavior—all the way, at least, from Emerson’s spacious concepts of personal growth and fulfillment, spiritual and intellectual, to the narrowest kind of material self-seeking and success.
In a curious way, the Statue of Liberty itself seemed to symbolize both the power and the ambiguity of the idea of liberty in America. Bartholdi and his fellow republicans in France had conceived of the icon as Liberty facing away from America and “enlightening the world”—especially reactionary Europe. Emma Lazarus’s noble words had Liberty turned toward arriving immigrants as persons seeking a new life away from the old country. Was Liberty more for export abroad or for internal use? And what did it mean, in this dedication year of 1886?
Across the Atlantic, in London, Karl Marx had viewed with scorn this kind of paean to liberty—bourgeois liberty. He had long since denounced bourgeois liberty as that “of man regarded as an isolated nomad, withdrawn into himself.” The right of liberty under capitalism was simply the right of private property—“the right to enjoy one’s fortune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest…. It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty….”
Americans had long been world-famous for their competitive spirit and enterprising ways. A century and a half before Carnegie and Swift made their millions, young Benjamin Franklin was selling thousands of copies of his Poor Richard’s Almanack, which instructed that God helps them that help themselves, that Keep thy shop, and thy shop will keep thee, that The used key is always bright, that Early to bed, etc. In Franklin’s time and after, however, overly bumptious entrepreneurial spirit had been checked and balanced by elitist public leadership, intellectual authority, legal due process, and civic virtue. Then the “victory” of the Northern economy in the Civil War and the long economic boom of the postwar decades brought a dynamic combination of a quickened spirit of individual enterprise—and a recharged doctrine of laissez-faire economics.
Central to the whole concept of aggressive economic individualism was this doctrine of “government let be”—a doctrine that had gripped the British and continental business mind at the turn of the century. The physiocrats of eighteenth-century France had contended not only that land was the basis of all wealth but that the “natural order of liberty” would flourish best in a setting of absolute freedom of trade, full rights of property, and abolition of restrictive laws. These ideas had profoundly influenced Adam Smith, who planned at one time to dedicate his Wealth of Nations to François Quesnay, the founder and leader of physiocracy. In publishing this quickly famous volume in the same year as the Declaration of Independence, Smith issued an economic declaration of individualism—one that fell happily on the ears of businessmen frustrated by the old mercantilist regulations.
The brilliant (if by no means original) constellation of ideas—that the natural economic order tends to maximize individual well-being, that this order must not be interfered with, that collective as well as individual betterment results from that order, that if enterprisers were free to pursue self-interest, the “invisible hand” of commercial competition would be far more effective than the state as a regulator of economic behavior—closely influenced the practical policies of parties and politicians, especially in Britain. Smith’s notions received powerful support from Thomas Malthus’s contentions that population, especially among the lower classes, constantly tended “to increase beyond the means of subsistence,” and that not poor laws but only the poor themselves could meet this problem. Another corollary to laissez-faire doctrine was David Ricardo’s “iron” law of wages, decreeing that the total wage fund was fixed and hence any successful effort by workers to increase their wages simply robbed other workers of income.
These men were not scribblers in garrets but prestigious political and economic philosophers whose words carried enormous weight among ruling establishments. And they reached the minds of wellborn Americans at perhaps the most vulnerable stage of their lives—in their undergraduate years. Students at Brown University could listen to their president, Francis Wayland, defend the rights of property, proclaim that men should be allowed to use their capital as they wished, virtually equate the laws of laissez-faire economics with the laws of God; if the students missed Wayland’s sermons and lectures, they could read any of eighteen editions of his Elements of Political Economy. The men of Bowdoin could read a volume of the same title by their great preacher and teacher Samuel Phillips Newman, based on the principles of classical economics, just as the men of Harvard could peruse a textbook on the principles of political economy by their young philosopher-economist Francis Bowen, with similar conclusions, and the men of Williams could learn the same doctrines from their young political economist, Arthur Latham Perry.
Through teachers like these—and countless others north, south, and west—college men drank in the thoughts of Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, of Jean Baptiste Say and Harriet Martineau, thinkers who themselves had absorbed the great individualistic and libertarian doctrines of Locke and his successors. If the American teachers were sometimes more Smithian than Smith, more Malthusian than Malthus, their students hardly cared. The young men embraced with fervor doctrines that seemed so well to fit the times. Practical politicians were often less ardent as they weaved their course between governmental hands-off and governmental intervention in the economy, but the practical men too, perhaps unknowingly, were the intellectual slaves of various economic theorists, alive or defunct.
Individualism could be a spacious and noble doctrine; it could be a crabbed and selfish one. In America it was both. It was the individualism of Jefferson, of free and responsible persons rationally and collectively seeking the good life and the just society; it was also the individualism of the market economists, of those competitors in the economic arena seeking to make money and attain personal success, on the theory that a good society would arise out of the struggle for individual reward. The individualism of Jefferson had been an enormously liberating and democratizing force, encouraging movements for more social equality, suffrage for poor men, and even freedom for slaves.
What happened after the Civil War in American elitist and popular thought alike was the steady divesting of individual liberty’s broader, richer dimensions and their replacement by a narrow, egoistic individualism defined as competition, striving, and personal success. What Clinton Rossiter called the “Great Train Robbery of American intellectual history” became the means by which postbellum rugged individualists stole the word symbols of Jeffersonian liberalism, such as liberty, equality, progress, and opportunity, and glued them onto the platform planks of conservatism.
These refurbished planks would undergird American conservatism for at least a century. The higher, immutable laws of economics: anyone believing in a benevolent deity, said Edward Atkinson, must know that the operation of the higher law is “steadily, surely, and slowly working to the benefit of the great mass of the people.” Man as homo economicus: persons were defined by their economic self-interest rather than by their social or aesthetic needs. “Political Economy,” John Stuart Mill had written in 1844, “considers mankind as occupied solely in acquiring and consuming wealth.” The free market as regulator: rents, profits, wages, prices were to be determined by the laws of competition. Government as the enemy: no matter how representative and democratic, government was meddlesome, incompetent, corrupt. “Men may vote as they please,” said a theologian, “but the laws of production and of trade are as inexorable as the law of nature.” Liberty as economic individualism: liberty, said the noted political scientist John W. Burgess, “is the absence of government in a given sphere of individual or social action.”
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.
Little had been said that clarified the tenets of Social Darwinism. Perhaps it was not necessary. The hardheaded businessmen there knew what they believed—in the gospel of rugged individualism in general but in countless exceptions in practice. Carnegie would go on venerating Spencer and favoring tariffs. Other industrialists would favor competition in general but not in their own fields of business. They believed in economic individualism but also in corporate, collective capitalism. Many a man of public affairs there wanted laissez-faire, except when it hurt the rich—or himself.
The delightful confusion of the evening was well expressed by Beecher during his remarks: “I had just as lief be descended from a monkey,” said he, turning to Spencer, “if I have descended far enough.”
Hardly three weeks earlier, a quite different group of men had gathered at Delmonico’s to honor a man who was neither a captain of industry nor a world-famous intellectual, but a journalist: Henry George. Compared to Spencer’s hosts, the hundred or so men who lined up to greet George were a motley crowd, reflecting the vigorous and variegated mind of Gotham. Here were Perry Belmont, congressman and son of a longtime head of the national Democratic party; Felix Adler of the Ethical Culture Society; Thomas Kinsella, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and educational reformer; Roger Atkinson Pryor, Confederate soldier-politician turned Manhattan lawyer; David G. Croly, modernist editor who had actually spoken for miscegenation; Thomas G. Shearman, corporation lawyer, tax reformer, and defender of Henry Ward Beecher against charges of adultery; and the ubiquitous Beecher himself.
The apolitical Delmonico’s did itself proud as usual, providing twenty-eight items of food and drink. The lion of the occasion hardly looked the part, with his slight build and scuffed shoes; but Henry George’s editorial growls had sounded across the Western world. He had indeed shown the kind of spunk and competitive drive that Spencer and Alger alike would have admired. Young George had left his middle-class home and school at thirteen to serve as an errand boy in a Philadelphia importing firm, then shipped out on long sea voyages as foremast boy. Between trips, a typesetting job drew him into the world of publishers and journalists. He drank deeply of his travel experiences—the life of the common sailor before the mast, the scramble for land in California, the horrifying contrast of wealth and poverty in Calcutta and New York. A voracious reader, he ranged through the works of French physiocrats and English classicists, American Whigs and Jeffersonians, religious prophets and radical intellectuals. For years, he lived hand to mouth as a California newspaper writer, shifting restlessly from job to job while he pursued his own success ethic—even as, opinionated and cantankerous, he quarreled incessantly with bosses and fellow workers.
It was in the yeasty economic and journalistic milieus of California that George grappled with the problem of poverty. He himself was so down-and-out at one point, with a half-starved wife and child at home, that he accosted the first prosperous-looking man he saw on the street and asked him desperately for five dollars, which the stranger gave him; if he had not, George said later, he was ready to knock the man down. But soon in a series of newspaper articles and finally in Progress and Poverty, he propounded his long-fermenting ideas: that the ownership of land brings control over society; that every man has a natural “labor right” to land; that when he rents privately held land from others he is robbed of some of that labor right; that the solution is to regain the public right to rent through a single tax on land.
Man’s right to himself, and to what he produced, George said, was accepted. “But man has also another right, declared by the fact of his existence—the right to the use of so much of the free gifts of nature as may be necessary to supply all the wants of that existence, and which he may use without interfering with the equal rights of anyone else; and to this he has a title as against all the world.”
Recognition came to George only after he had moved back to New York and then traveled abroad. In England, he met the socialist H. M. Hyndman; Helen Taylor, the stepdaughter of the late John Stuart Mill; the political reformer John Bright; the rising radical Joseph Chamberlain. He did not meet Karl Marx. Highly sympathetic to the Irish cause, George hobnobbed with the leaders of the Irish Land League, who were in turn entranced by his views on land. His fame soared at home and abroad when he was arrested during a trip to Ireland; indeed, so many American Irish leaders attended the Delmonico’s banquet that at least one of the diners thought they were welcoming a fiery rebel from Ireland.
George was perhaps the most arresting of a number of journalists whose ideas were agitating American opinion during the 1880s. Another inciter was Edward Bellamy, a struggling young editor who was beginning to taste success and fame during that decade of intellectual excitement. Raised in a western Massachusetts textile town, Bellamy attended Union College for a year, traveled abroad, studied law, worked for a time for the noted Springfield Union and the equally noted New York Evening Post, and then with his brother founded the Springfield Daily News. More and more drawn to social and political problems, Bellamy began publication in a country paper of The Duke of Stockbridge, a fictional treatment of Shays’s Rebellion. He had several more works of historical fiction to his credit by the time, in 1888, he published Looking Backward, which embodied an effort, he said later, to “reason out a method of economic organization” by which the republic might guarantee its citizens’ welfare “on a basis of equality corresponding to and supplementing their political equality.”
The story of Julian West, a young Boston millionaire who fell asleep in 1887 and awoke in 2000, the novel pictured through his eyes an orderly, affluent, egalitarian, rational Boston of 2000, in contrast with the cruel, class-ridden, and altogether bleak city of the late nineteenth century. The novel gained in force from powerful metaphors—notably of capitalism as a prodigious coach pulled uphill by “masses of humanity” driven by hunger, and crowded on top by travelers who called down to the toilers, urging patience and hinting at possible compensation in the next world—and remarkable prophecies, including music piped into drawing rooms (by telephone) according to published programs. But mainly the book gained from its portrait of a new world in which equitable “credit cards”—Bellamy’s term—had taken the place of money, a Boston without taxes or army or navy, without lawyers or law schools, a utopia of hierarchy and harmony and benign regimentation, in which women as well as men enjoyed liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Looking Backward was an instant hit. Not only did it sell by the tens of thousands, achieving finally a total sale of one million, but it produced a rash of Bellamy clubs formed to discuss the book and its implications. A decade later Bellamy wrote a sequel, Equality. Again the force of Bellamy’s ideas overcame his heavy dialogue. At the start of Equality, Julian West’s sweetheart Edith battered him with a cross-examination that Bellamy’s hero could not bear.
She couldn’t understand, said twenty-first-century Edith of nineteenth-century Boston, the gap between people’s pretensions then and the “shockingly unequal conditions of the people, the contrasts of waste and want, the pride and power of the rich, the abjectness and servitude of the poor, and all the rest of the dreadful story.”
“It is doubtful,” Julian acknowledged, “if there was ever a greater disparity between the conditions of different classes than you would find in a half hour’s walk in Boston, New York, Chicago, or any other great city of America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.”
“And yet,” says Edith, “it appears from all the books that meanwhile the Americans’ great boast was that they differed from all other and former nations in that they were free and equal. One is constantly coming across this phrase in the literature of the day.…”
They were supposedly equal before the law, Julian said, but he had to admit that in fact rich and poor were not. But they were equal in “opportunities.” Edith leaped on this. It seemed, she said, that they all had an equal chance to make themselves unequal. Was there any way in which people were equal?
“Yes, there was,” says Julian. “They were political equals. They all had one vote alike, and the majority was the supreme law-giver.”
Then, asked Edith, why did not a majority of the poor put an end to their inequalities?
“Because,” says Julian, “they were taught and believed that the regulation of industry and commerce and the production and distribution of wealth was something wholly outside of the proper province of government.”
Then, asked Edith, “if the people did not think that they could trust themselves to regulate their own industry and the distribution of the product, to whom did they leave the responsibility?”
“To the capitalists.”
“And did the people elect the capitalists?”
“Nobody elected them.”
“By whom, then, were they appointed?”
“Nobody appointed them.”
“What a singular system!” To whom then were the capitalists accountable?
They were accountable to nothing but their consciences, said Julian.
“Their consciences! Ah, I see!” In the end she forced Julian to grant that the people surrendered their power to capitalists in the name of “individual liberty,” that they did not obtain such liberty, that capitalists used the government to quell the “quenchless blaze” of “greed and envy, fear, lust, hate, revenge, and every foul passion” of the poor and of the degraded “outcasts.” And he admitted that the capitalists controlled the political as well as the economic government by buying votes with money and with “fireworks, oratory, processions, brass bands, barbecues,” and the like. And the worst thing, Julian admitted, was that the poor were kept in such degradation as to be “not morally any better than the rich.”
Rivaling George and Bellamy in the force of his protest against capitalism was still another journalist, Henry Demarest Lloyd. Brought up in a New York City family of radical Democratic sympathies, young Lloyd had plunged into the world of free traders, civil service reform, and anti-monopoly on his graduation from Columbia College in 1869. Hired by the Chicago Tribune as an editorialist, he moved steadily beyond political liberalism to a social radicalism that called for profound changes in the capitalistic system. In his writings, culminating in Wealth Against Commonwealth in 1894, he critically analyzed railroads and other corporations and championed small businessmen, consumers, and workers, including striking trade unionists. His repeated calls for social justice and his attacks on monopoly—especially the Standard Oil monopoly—brought him into virtually a personal confrontation with John D. Rockefeller.
Lloyd’s power lay less in his ideas, which were not especially original, than in the analysis that supported them. Like a good journalist, he pored through the records of court and legislative investigations of great corporations, and conducted on-the-spot investigations of conditions of coal miners. An activist, he helped organize Milwaukee streetcar workers, and he succeeded in gaining commutation of the death sentence of convicted “anarchists.” Unlike certain other radicals, Lloyd would not trade liberty for equality. He “insisted that the rehabilitation of individual and economic liberty so essential to further democratic advances,” according to Chester Destler, “must result from the progressive, experimental harmonization of individualism with social cooperation.” For Lloyd, individual liberty was both means and end.
Lloyd the social reformer, Bellamy the utopian, George the single-taxer—these were men of highly diverse personalities but also of striking similarities. Though men of ideas, they were not academic scholars; rather, they were largely self-taught, drawing their learning from books, experiences, and travels, especially their journeys to a Britain itself undergoing rapid social change. They came from deeply religious families. All three rose to success in the fiercely competitive world of American journalism. The lives of all three would become entangled in the climactic events of the 1890s. But what most typified them was what most divided them—their diverse solutions to the ills of capitalism and their largely separate followings.
Fundamentally, they disagreed with one another. George saw Looking Backward as building a “castle in the air” but also tending toward governmental paternalism. The youthful Lloyd called George a “quack” and dismissed Bellamy as too utopian. For his part, Bellamy felt that George’s notion of nationalizing land first, rather than last, would antagonize so many interests at the start as to jeopardize any major reform. Bellamy must have known that Lloyd had little regard for Looking Backward and for Bellamy’s creed of “Nationalism” and following of “Nationalists.”
“Mr. George,” Bellamy asked when the two happened to meet at a dinner, “why are you not a Nationalist?”
“Because I am an individualist,” George replied.
“I am a Nationalist,” said Bellamy, “because I am an individualist.”
Each of these thinkers had his own following as well as ideas: George’s single-taxers, Bellamy’s nationalists, Lloyd’s trade unionists. Each was a kind of politico of protest as well as entrepreneur of ideas. Each operated on his own success ethic. Nor did any of the three ground himself in doctrines of Marxist socialism that had a common foundation. Bellamy saw the word socialist as suggesting “the red flag with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion.” Marxists viewed Bellamy as a utopian, always a dangerous breed of reformer. To George, Marx was the “prince of muddleheads.” Marx put down Progress and Poverty as an effort to save capitalism and George as “utterly backward” as a theorist. Lloyd rejected Marxist “determinism” and felt that the labor theory of value had too many exceptions.
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.”
And then “she come smashing straight through the raft.”
The voices of protest against mushrooming industrialism—the voices of reformers like George and Bellamy, of social critics like Adams and James, of radicals like Phillips and Peabody, of novelists like Twain and Norris—were even more mixed and diverse than those of the defenders of capitalism. Most of the critics themselves were of middle-class or even upper-class origin. Could a more coherent and unified voice arise from the workers themselves—from a class that was experiencing the ills of industrialism firsthand? From a class that needed both liberty and equality—needed freedom from the boss and the foreman and long hours and wage labor, needed more economic and social equality as well as political, needed equality of women with men and of blacks with whites?
Had not the Declaration of Independence promised both liberty and equality? The Declaration, declared Daniel De Leon, was the product of its age’s “experience and learning,” promising a “future of freedom” requiring the “collective society in America” to assume the “duty of guaranteeing to the individual a free field—EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY.” This kind of individual liberty—guaranteed to the individual by the state, rather than simply protected for the individual against the state—had a far more egalitarian and radical thrust than the individual liberty preached by the Social Darwinists.
Yet working-class unity of doctrine depended in large part on workers’ class-consciousness, which Marx and others found lacking in the United States. The American labor market, Marx said, was repeatedly emptied “by the continuous conversion of wages laborers into independent, self-sustaining peasants. The function of a wages laborer is for a very large part of the American people but a probational state, which they are sure to leave in a longer or shorter term.” Others observed that the workers, like other Americans, were “infected” by Social Darwinism and domestic Algerism. And by the late 1860s the American working class itself was fundamentally divided between socialists calling for radical economic and political efforts to transform or replace capitalism, and trade unionists trying to improve their economic conditions within the existing system.
Orthodox Marxists expected that American workers would go through a period of trade unionism; then, bamboozled or broken by the bosses, the trade unions would convert into a socialist movement. Rather, the reverse happened. Militant socialism had its heyday during the seventies and eighties and then gave way to a bread-and-butter “business unionism” that was the bane of all good Marxist socialists.
To many Americans in these years, socialism was not a new idea. The communitarianism of Robert Owen and the futuristic utopianism of Charles Fourier had excited the avant-garde in the East and had helped stimulate the founding of socialistic and egalitarian communities, especially in western rural areas. In the East, socialist ideas had taken root among sections of the working class. Germans and other Europeans fleeing from the repressions after the unrest of ’48 had brought radical ideas across the Atlantic. By the 1870s, German socialists and trade unionists, swelled by arrivals now escaping from Bismarck’s antisocialist laws, were organizing “Educational and Defensive” associations to protect themselves against police and employer repression.
European radicals brought a good deal of experience and sophistication to American socialism, but they tended to be hopelessly divided over philosophy and doctrine. Marx and Engels transferred the International Workingmen’s Association from London to New York in 1872, not to find richer proletarian soil but to kill it off, for the first International had become, in their view, fatally infected with Bakuninist anarchism. Marxian socialists, under the leadership of Marx’s American lieutenant, Friedrich Sorge, pursued two political strategies, forming the Socialist-Labor party in 1877 but also operating through sections of the trade union movement, notably Adolph Strasser’s cigar-makers. Both Marxists and anarchists in turn jousted with Lasallean Socialists, followers of the great German revolutionary and romantic, who had been killed in a duel over a love affair in 1864 but whose belief in political action profoundly influenced his German-American followers.
In the tiny cauldrons of left-wing dispute, in the saloons and beer gardens and union halls of Chicago and St. Louis, of New York and Cincinnati and a dozen other cities, Marxist ideas collided and coalesced with these and other rival doctrines. Not only did Marxists compete with bread-and-butter trade unionists, with communitarians pursuing their dreams of brotherhood and sisterhood, with populists seeking relief for farmers, with native-grown socialists, with evangelical radicals, syndicalists, utopians of every hue, but these rival groups also divided among themselves over means if not ends—over political action versus economic, peaceful tactics versus violent, third-party tactics versus major-party collaboration, over internal organization and external propaganda, over questions of timing, leadership, money, secrecy, discipline.
Not only did many socialist battalions tend to be dominated by their talented German chieftains, thus alienating Irish, native Americans, and other groups, but they also attracted cranks, fanatics, charlatans, and polemicists. Doubtless the controversial Woodhull sisters were hardly socialism’s greatest asset in the early seventies, though they had earned their salt by publishing in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, for the first time in the United States, the Communist Manifesto. But socialism at this point scarcely needed the nostrums spouting from their editorial page—Pantocracy (universal government), Universology (universal science), Alwatol (universal language), cooperation of the Spirit-World with the Mundane Sphere, and “The Universal Formula of Universological Science—UNISM, DUISM and TRUISM.”
During these years, thousands of American workers were pursuing a dream of their own—organization into one great national union that could face powerful corporations on its own terms. In the late 1860s, fearing both the concerted opposition of employers and the competition of immigrants, leaders of machinists, carpenters, and other national brotherhoods organized the National Labor Union, which focused on local producers’ cooperatives and on national political action. The NLU helped win the eight-hour day in several states and for federal government laborers and mechanics. In 1872, the NLU had the audacity to convert itself into the National Labor Reform party and even to nominate Judge David Davis, Lincoln’s old crony, for President; Davis’s withdrawal doomed both the union and the party.
Labor organization, especially national, was still fixed in an old pattern: trade unionism—especially “business” unionism—seemed to thrive during good times, and then collapse in the face of depression as union members faded away along with their jobs. Many socialists, Marxists or otherwise, not only expected this but welcomed it, for workers must learn not to be so dependent on capitalism. Indeed, let “wage slavery” go on, they urged, let it expand so far as to leave wealth to “only two or three capitalists out of the millions of workers,” and then a large and united workers’ movement would take over. But most of the millions of workers preferred bread-and-butter unionism, step-by-step improvement.
The socialist strategy met a sharp testing in the mid-seventies. Only nine of thirty national unions survived the panic-induced depression of ’73; union membership was decimated, reaching a low point of 50,000 members in 1878. The aftermath was not an enlarged and united socialist movement turning to political action in order to transform society, but despair, demoralization, unrest, protest, violence, and terrorism. In Pennsylvania the “Molly Maguires,” an outgrowth of the anti-landlord Ancient Order of Hibernians in Ireland, terrorized the coalfields, systematically killing railroad bosses who ran the mines. Then, in 1877, wage cuts on the Baltimore & Ohio, the Pennsylvania, the New York Central, and other railroads brought a phenomenon few had expected in the United States— a “general strike” of railroad and other workers. As violence spread across the nation’s railways, America for a time seemed on the brink of revolution. Railroad strikers and others seized junctions and depots, burned hundreds of freight cars, looted stores, exchanged fire with troops, even tried to stop a militia regiment in Baltimore from sallying forth from its armory.
The response was quick and harsh. Federal troops crushed the strike in Pittsburgh, after twenty-six persons had been killed. The army “restored order” in Martinsburg, West Virginia. State legislatures revived their old anti-strike laws. Found guilty of murder on the testimony of a secret Pinkerton infiltrator, ten Molly Maguires were hanged. Capitalists of diverse views seemed to unite against labor. Earlier, when railroad engineers had struck the Boston & Maine, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., had called for decent wages and conditions for railroad workers, but since the lines were public utilities, he wanted strikes to be outlawed and militant strikers fined and jailed.
Then, out of this suffering and violence, there developed perhaps the grandest effort American workers ever made to build a nationwide union, militant yet responsible. It was an organization that called itself noble—the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor. Founded as a clandestine society at a tailors’ meeting in Philadelphia in 1871, the Knights shed their secrecy a decade later, opening their ranks to skilled and unskilled, men and women, immigrants and blacks—to all except saloon-keepers, gamblers, stockbrokers, bankers, lawyers, and doctors. Organized into local and district assemblies embracing workers of diverse crafts and skills, the Knights were a highly centralized but democratic organization, with their assemblies made responsible to the general executive board and to the Grand Master Workman. At last workers had “one big union.”
The Knights, responding to a deep economic and psychological need among workers, rose like a meteor from about 100,000 members in 1885 to almost 700,000 a year later. Under its longtime Grand Master, Terence V. Powderly—“part idealist, part politician, part mountebank,” in John Garraty’s view—the Knights favored the eight-hour day, the graduated income tax, prohibition of imported contract labor, consumers’ and producers’ cooperatives, an end to the monopoly power of railroads and banks. Officially the Knights were opposed to labor violence, class conflict, and socialism. “I hate the word ‘class,’” Powderly said, “and would drive it from the English language if I could.” But their language was often radical and their songs militant:
Toiling millions now are waking—
See them marching on;
All the tyrants now are shaking,
Ere their power’s gone.
Chorus: Storm the fort, ye Knights of Labor.
Battle for your cause;
Equal rights for every neighbor—
Down with tyrant laws!
While Powderly was still preaching cooperation, education, and reform, workers within the Knights of Labor and outside began striking in response to depression wage cuts and other ills. Thousands of unorganized workers walked off their jobs and joined the Knights. In the “great upheaval” of 1884, railroad union locals struck the whole southwestern system, controlled by Jay Gould. After the governors of both Missouri and Kansas backed up the strikers, Gould retreated. Wounding this capitalist dragon emboldened thousands more workers to join the noble order.
As the Knights of Labor burgeoned in numbers, however, it slackened in discipline. More strikes broke out, beyond the control of the Grand Worthies now running the organization. The Knights’ decline seemed as fleet as a falling star. In the fateful year of 1886, the Knights again struck the “blood-sucking corporations” of Gould’s southwestern system, only to give up the effort, amid violence and arrests, when the financier refused even to arbitrate. A general strike in Chicago for the eight-hour day collapsed. And the Knights suffered from the public hysteria following an incident in Chicago during the general strike.
This was the Haymarket Massacre. In origin it had nothing to do with the Knights, and involved a strike at the McCormick Harvester plant begun months before the general strike. After a violent clash at McCormick’s, a small group of anarchist revolutionaries put out a flammable circular in English and German charging that “your masters sent out their bloodhounds—the police—they killed six of your brothers” (one had been killed) and calling for a protest meeting in Haymarket Square. The much-advertised “revenge” meeting was a flop: the crowd was disappointingly low, the speeches turgid, the weather rainy. The last speaker, his beard dripping, had just told the few hundred people still lingering that his was the last speech and “then we’ll all go home,” when a phalanx of 180 policemen swung into the square. Their captain ordered the crowd to “peaceably disperse.” “Why, Captain,” said the speaker, “we are peaceable.”
There was a moment of tense silence, then a bomb burst among the police. Amid their dead and stricken comrades, the police re-formed ranks and opened fire on the crowd; workers fired back, then dragged their dead and wounded to friends’ homes. Seven policemen died, seventy more were wounded, workers’ casualties could never be calculated but doubtless were higher. Later, eight alleged anarchists were convicted on the charge of conspiracy and four were hanged.
1886 was a decisive year for American labor. Although the Chicago Knights of Labor denied any sympathy or connection with the “cowardly murderers” who had caused riot and bloodshed, the whole organization was tainted and its decline began. The battle brought the first major “red scare” in American history. It led some workers to abandon force, turned others into ardent revolutionaries. It created, in Henry David’s view, “America’s first revolutionary martyrs.” Reactions to Haymarket brought the drive for the eight-hour day temporarily to a halt.
1886 was also the year in which a whole new national labor organization was founded, an old economic and political strategy revitalized and broadened, and the socialist and other radical trade unions outflanked.
The American Federation of Labor was founded in December 1886 in Columbus, Ohio, by twenty-five labor groups representing perhaps 150,000 members, mostly skilled workers. Its origin lay in a remarkable craft union, the Cigarmakers’ International, which numbered many Germans of the “old schools,” both socialist and unionist. In part because the cigar-makers had to face new technology, such as cigar molds and bunch-breaking machines, that threatened their jobs, in part because they lived amid philosophical debate and indeed liked to make their cigars while someone read aloud from the classics, this union had to face all the urgent questions of organization, discipline, centralization, political action, craft exclusiveness that had challenged trade unionism from the start. Arguing bitterly, some stuck to their craft union, some joined the Knights of Labor. The cigar-makers were lucky to have leaders able intellectually to meet this challenge.
One of them was Adolph Strasser, a Hungarian immigrant who had proved a resourceful organizer of New York City cigar-makers. Strasser was all practicality, which he defined as advancing the interests of cigar-makers through patient negotiation, limited goals, and ample union benefits such as insurance. At a Senate committee hearing in 1883 on labor-capital relations a senator asked him:
“Do you not contemplate, in the end, the participation of all labor and of all men in the benefits of trades unions?”
“Our organization does not consist of idealists,” Strasser answered. “We do not control the production of the world. That is controlled by the employers. I look first to cigars.”
“I was only asking you in regard to your ultimate ends,” the senator persisted.
“We have no ultimate ends. We are going on from day to day. We are fighting only for immediate objects—objects that can be realized in a few years.”
At first, Samuel Gompers too looked only to cigars. Born in a London tenement in 1850, the son of a Jewish cigar-maker, at thirteen he had emigrated with his family to New York’s Lower East Side, where he and his father resumed cigar-making. Breathing in the heady New York atmosphere, he attended lectures at Cooper Union, read aloud, listened, and argued in the cigar-makers’ workrooms. At first, Gompers spouted “wild plans for human betterment,” as he recalled much later, but on the advice of a former Marxist who told him, “Study your union card, Sam, and if the idea doesn’t square with that, it ain’t true,” he veered toward business unionism. Chosen head of his local, he, with Strasser, centralized control, boosted membership dues, and organized unemployment, strike, sickness, and accident benefits.
It was these ideas that Gompers carried into the organization of a new national federation. A sturdy, outspoken man of inexhaustible enthusiasm and energy, he articulated better than any of his comrades the philosophy of pragmatic labor organization and action. He wanted practical results: wages, hours, safety, benefits. From such advances, workers could progress further in economic and moral education and in their understanding of ultimate ends. The first step was to improve conditions of work and life. “The more the improved conditions prevail, the greater discontent prevails with any wrongs that may exist. It is only … the enlightenment begotten from material prosperity that makes it at all possible for mental advancement.” This idea sharply separated Gompers’s strategy from the Marxists’.
Gompers, indeed, was almost a neo-Social Darwinist in his ideology. He accepted industrialization and free enterprise. Capitalism was progress, and profits were necessary to capitalism. As corporations and trusts gained more power, labor must do the same—through solidly based organization. In the organization of business unions, Gompers believed that, in order to protect the adult male wage, unskilled as well as skilled, women as well as men, blacks as well as whites, ought to take part, though on a subordinate basis. These were “practical” views, for he believed not that blacks were equal to whites but that they could take over white jobs and hence must be organized. The same applied to women and immigrants. All this was crucial to the ability of organized labor to compete with organized capital.
He was far more cautious in regard to political action. He fought off any involvement of the AFL with socialist parties, preferring to deal with the major parties on the basis of expediency. He gave clear priority to economic action over political. Workers should expect little from the government. “The only desirable legislation for the workers,” as a group of scholars later summarized Gompers’s and the AFL’s position, “is that which offers protection to their labor market by restriction of immigration, and which restrains government activities, such as the courts and police, from encroaching upon or hampering such union activities as strikes, picketing, and boycotts. The workers ought not to demand more positive legislation from the government…. Therefore such legislation as they need can be obtained more readily by opposing or supporting candidates of the two large parties rather than by organizing a separate labor party.” Above all, no long-range, visionary programs or tactics should be used. Government hands-off—broker politics—gradual betterment: this was Gompers’s and Strasser’s response to the Social Darwinism of the day; this was their own Social Darwinism. During the capitalist boom, it was an idea that seemed to work. While the Knights declined in leaps and bounds, the AFL moved ahead in numbers as slowly—and as steadily—as the tortoise. Its tests would come with hard times and in a political situation in which both “large parties” were conservative, and labor might have to look for allies on the left. By the late 1880s, such a potential ally seemed to be rising in America’s South and West.
Somewhere in central Texas, sometime in the late eighties:
In the twilight splendor of the Plains, men and women march along dusty trails toward the glow of a campfire in the distance. Some walk; some ride horses or burros; some—whole families—jolt along on covered wagons or buckboards. With their creased, careworn faces, their poor gingham clothes, they might seem to be one more trek in the great western movement of American homesteaders. But not so. These people walk with hope and pride—even with exhilaration as they reach a hillcrest and see stretching for miles ahead and behind thousands of people marching with them, hundreds of wagons emblazoned with crude signs and banners. Soon they reach their encampment, not to settle down for the night but, in company with five or ten thousand comrades, to hear fiery speeches late into the evening.
These people will be part of an arresting venture in popular grass-roots democracy, part of the “flowering of the largest democratic mass movement in American history,” in Lawrence Goodwyn’s judgment. Ultimately they will fail—but not until they have given the nation an experiment in democratic ideas, creative leadership and followership, and comradely cooperation.
At first on the Texas frontier but soon in the South and Midwest, farmers in the mid-1880s collectively sensed that something was terribly wrong. In the South, farmers white and black were shackled by the crop lien system and the plummeting price of cotton. In the West, homesteaders were losing their mortgaged homes. Grain prices fell so low that Kansas farm families burned corn for heat. Everywhere farmers suffered from a contracting currency, heavy taxation, and gouging by railroads and other monopolies. As farmers perceived the “money power” buying elections and public officials in order to pass class legislation, some agrarian leaders and editors wondered if the farm areas trembled on the brink of revolution.
The crop lien system, tight money, and the rest of the farmers’ ills—these seemed remote and impersonal to many an eastern city dweller. But for countless Southern cotton farmers “crop lien” set the conditions of their existence.
It meant walking into the store of the “furnishing merchant,” approaching the counter with head down and perhaps hat in hand, and murmuring a list of needs. It meant paying “the man” no money but watching him list items and figures in a big ledger. It meant returning month after month for these mumbled exchanges, as the list of debts grew longer. It meant, as noted earlier, that the farmer brought in the produce from his long year’s hard labor, watched his cotton weighed and sold, and then learned that the figures in the ledger, often with enormously inflated interest, added up to more than his crop was worth—but that the merchant would carry him into the next year if he signed a note mortgaging his next year’s crop to the merchant. It meant returning home for another year’s toil, knowing that he might lose his spread and join the army of landless tenant farmers. From start to finish it meant fear, self-abasing deference, hatred of self and others.
Above all, the system meant loss of liberty, as the farmer became shackled to one crop and one merchant—loss of liberty for men and women raised in the Jeffersonian tradition of individual freedom in a decentralized agrarian republic, in the Jacksonian tradition of equality of opportunity in a land free of usurious banks and grasping monopolies. Their forefathers had fought for independence; was a second American revolution needed to overthrow a new, an economic, monarchy? “Laboring men of America,” proclaimed a tract, the voices of 1776 “ring down through the corridors of time and tell you to strike” against the “monopolies and combinations that are eating out the heart of the Nation.” But strike how? “Not with glittering musket, flaming sword and deadly cannon,” the pamphlet exhorted, “but with the silent, potent and all-powerful ballot, the only vestige of liberty left.”
One course seemed clear—people must organize themselves as powerfully against the trusts as the trusts were organized against them. But organize how? Economically or politically? Experience did not make for easy answers. Farmers had plunged into politics with Greenbackers and laborites and ended up on the short end of the ballot counts. The answer of the recently founded Farmers’ Alliance in Texas was to try both economic and political structures, but more intensively and comprehensively than ever before. Built firmly on a network of “suballiances”—neighborhood chapters of several dozen members meeting once or twice a month to pray, sing, conduct rituals, debate issues, and do organizational business—the state Alliance experimented with several types of grass-roots cooperatives, including stores, county trade committees to bargain with merchants, and county-wide “bulking” of cotton.
The key to Alliance power was not organization, though, but leadership—and not the leadership merely of a few persons at the top but of dozens, then hundreds, of men and women who were specially hired and trained to journey across the state visiting suballiances, helping to form new ones, and above all teaching members graphically and in detail about the complex political and economic issues of the day, both national issues like money and finance and local ones like the building and expanding of co-ops. These were the famed “lecturers,” who in turn were responsible to a state lecturer. The Alliance’s first state lecturer was William Lamb, a rugged, red-haired, thirty-four-year-old farmer. Born in Tennessee, he had traveled alone at sixteen to the Texas frontier, where he lived in a log hut until he could build a house, raise children with his wife, and learn to read and write at night.
Lamb soon emerged as one of the most creative and radical of Alliance leaders. When the Great Southwest Strike erupted against Jay Gould’s railroad early in 1886, Lamb defied the more conservative Alliance leaders by demanding that the Alliance back a Knights of Labor boycott. Though suballiances gave food and money to striking railroad workers, the strike collapsed. The Knights continued on their downward slide, but the Texas Alliance continued its phenomenal growth, with perhaps 2,000 suballiances and 100,000 members by the summer of that year.
Lamb and other lecturers also look leadership on another critical issue facing the Alliance. Wracked by scorching drought, crop failures, and increasing tenantry, Texas farmers by 1886 were meeting in schoolhouses and clamoring for a new strategy—political action. They were impatient with the old shibboleth that the Alliance must steer clear of politics because politics would kill it. The decisive turning point in the agrarian revolt came at the Alliance state convention in Cleburne in early August 1886. A majority of the disgruntled, rustic-looking delegates from eighty-four counties “demanded” of the state and federal governments “such legislation as shall secure to our people freedom from the onerous and shameful abuses that the industrial classes are now suffering at the hands of arrogant capitalists and arrogant corporations”—legislation including an interstate commerce law and land reform measures. A conservative minority, opposing a proposal for greenbacks that defied the Democratic party, rejected the demands, absconded with the treasury, and formed a strictly “nonpartisan” Alliance.
At this critical moment Charles Macune, another leader fresh from the grass roots, stepped into the fray. Settled on the Texas frontier at nineteen after early years of poverty and wanderings, Macune had married, studied law and medicine, and practiced both. Developing into a skillful writer, compelling speaker, and innovative thinker, Macune had become well versed in farming matters and active in his county Alliance. And now this tall, magnetic physician-lawyer-farmer, buoyed by the rising militance of the delegates, proposed an ingenious compromise that was also a creative act of leadership.
Persuading the conservatives to give up their rival Alliance and the radicals to tone down their drive toward partisan politics, he proposed an expansion that was both geographic and functional. In his dazzling vision, a national network of state Alliance “Exchanges,” starting in Texas, would collectively market cotton and buy supplies and farm equipment. This giant farmers’ cooperative would not only achieve higher, more stable prices, but would provide the credit to free all farmers from the furnishing merchant and mortgage company. Thus, he proclaimed, mortgage-burdened farmers could “assert their freedom from the tyranny of organized capital.” At a statewide meeting at Waco in January 1887 the farmer delegates enthusiastically adopted Macune’s grand strategy, decided on merger with the Louisiana Farmers’ Union, and chose Macune as first president of the National Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union. The state Alliance built a huge headquarters in Dallas even while doubling its membership and preparing a small army of lecturers to proselytize the South during mid-1887.
Even that army of enthusiasts seemed astonished by the response. “The farmers seemed like unto ripe fruit,” one reported from North Carolina. “You can garner them by a gentle shake of the bush.” He had held twenty-seven meetings in one county and left twenty-seven suballiances in his wake. With cotton down to eight cents a pound, farmers were desperate for relief. Together they and the lecturers set up trade committees, cotton yards, and warehouses in hundreds of counties, along with state exchanges. Georgia, with its big state exchange and its cooperative stores, gins, and warehouses, was the most successful. When manufacturers of the commonly used jute bagging organized a trust and doubled the price, the Georgia Alliance—and later other state groups—successfully boycotted the “jute trust,” using cotton or pine straw instead, while protesting farmers donned cotton bagging and even witnessed a double wedding in which both brides and both grooms were decked out in that finery.
The idea of farm cooperation swept into the Midwest. The Alliance came to be most deeply rooted in the corn and wheat fields of Kansas, where a great boom had busted in 1887 amid mounting debts and foreclosures. When political efforts failed the next year, farm leaders visited Texas and returned full of missionary zeal. The formation of suballiances and the building of cooperatives proceeded feverishly until the entire state boasted of over 3,000 local units. When the “twine trust” hiked by 50 percent the price of the twine used to bind wheat, Alliance staged a boycott. The trust lowered its price.
As early as 1889, however, Alliance leaders in Kansas were concluding that education and cooperation were not enough, that electoral political action was necessary too. The question was not whether to engage in politics but how—independent political action versus third-party efforts versus working through a major party; lobbying and pressuring established parties versus direct action to take power. The existing political landscape was barren. The Republican and Democratic parties both were sectional entities, appealing to lingering Civil War hatreds to win elections. Farmers who actually shared common conditions and needs were polarized by politicians who waved the bloody shirt. Though most farm leaders in Kansas spurned “partisan politics” at every turn, what they actually rejected was the familiar brand of party politics animated by sectionalism and penetrated by railroad and other monopolies. Many envisioned not just an alternative party, but an alternative kind of party that would overcome racial and sectional hatred and respond to grass-roots needs.
A county “people’s convention” that nominated—and elected—a “people’s ticket” for county offices against the trusts inspired Alliance leaders in Kansas to raise their sights to state action. A convention of industrial organizations in Topeka, with delegates from the Knights of Labor and the “single tax” movement as well as from Alliance groups, assembled in Representative Hall in the statehouse, formally set up the People’s Party of Kansas, and called a state convention to choose statewide candidates and adopt the first People’s Party platform.
Once again new leaders emerged out of this agitation and conflict. In the “Big Seventh” congressional district in southwest Kansas, a Medicine Lodge rancher and town marshal named Jerry Simpson quickly emerged as the most noted Kansas Populist. A sailor on the Great Lakes and later an Illinois soldier in the Civil War, Simpson had run a farm and sawmill in northeastern Kansas before turning to cattle-raising. After the harsh winter of 1887 killed his cattle and destroyed his life’s savings, he turned to the Alliance and the new political insurgency.
Simpson won his imperishable title as “Sockless Jerry” during his campaign in 1890 against Colonel James Hallowell. “I tried to get hold of the crowd,” Simpson recalled. “I referred to the fact that my opponent was known as a ‘Prince.’ Princes, I said, wear silk socks. I don’t wear any.” Hallowell, he went on, boasted that he had been to Topeka and had made laws. Picking up a book, Simpson recalled, he tapped on a page with his finger. “I said, here is one of Hal’s laws. I find that it is a law to tax dogs, but I see that Hal proposes to charge two dollars for a bitch and only one dollar for a son of a bitch. Now the party I belong to believes in equal and exact justice to all.”
Women leaders in Kansas attracted even more attention than the men. “Women who never dreamed of becoming public speakers,” wrote Annie Diggs, “grew eloquent in their zeal and fervor. Josh Billings’ saying that ‘wimmin is everywhere,’ was literally true in that wonderful picknicking, speech-making Alliance summer of 1890.” While most Alliance women did rather mundane tasks, a good number of them emerged as compelling leaders and stump speakers. Diggs herself had worked actively in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Kansas and as a lay preacher in the Unitarian Church when, in the mid-eighties, she journeyed east to become Boston correspondent for several Kansas papers. She returned to Kansas, worked with the Alliance, wrote on suffrage and temperance and Alliance issues despite a public disavowal by her Republican editor, and then joined Stephen McLallin, a leading Populist editor, as associate editor of the Topeka Advocate. Together they shaped it into the leading reform paper in the state.
There were other noted women leaders: Fanny McCormick, assistant state lecturer who ran for state superintendent of public instruction; Sarah Emery, author of the widely read Seven Financial Conspiracies and a spellbinding orator; Kansas-born Fanny Vickrey, another gifted orator. But attracting most attention of all was the indomitable Mary Lease.
Lease was born in Pennsylvania of parents who were Irish political exiles and grew up in a family devastated by the Civil War; her two brothers died in the fighting, her father in Andersonville prison. She moved to Kansas in the early 1870s, taught parochial school, raised a family, tried and failed at farming, studied law—“pinning sheets of notes above her wash tub”—became one of the first woman lawyers of Kansas, and began a tempestuous career as a speaker for Irish nationalism, temperance, woman’s suffrage, union labor, and the Alliance. A tall, stately woman, she had “a golden voice,” in William Allen White’s recollection, “a deep, rich contralto, a singing voice that had hypnotic qualities.” But she could also hurl “sentences like Jove hurled thunderbolts,” Diggs said, as she gave scores of speeches, some over two hours long, throughout Kansas. Pointing to the starving families of Chicago and the wasted corn piled along the railroad tracks or burned for heat, she exclaimed, “What you farmers need to do is to raise less corn and more Hell!”
Led by such women and men champions, propelled by acute needs and high hopes, the Kansas Populists roared to a sensational victory in 1890. They carried 96 of the 125 seats in the state’s lower house and swept five out of seven congressional districts, sending Sockless Jerry along with the four others to Washington.
“THE PEOPLE ON TOP!” headlined the Nonconformist. But were they? The Populists elected only one statewide official, their candidate for attorney general. The Republicans still controlled the state administration, the holdover Senate, and the judiciary. The House passed a woman’s suffrage bill but the Senate axed it. The Populists’ one victory was to oust a conservative United States senator and send Populist editor William Peffer to Washington in his place. And now they had a crucial issue—Republican subversion of the will of the people. The Kansas Populists conducted a repeat crusade in 1892 with massive parades and encampments. This time they elected the entire state ticket and most of their congressional candidates again, including Simpson, and gained control of the Senate—but lost their majority in the House, amid accusations of wholesale Republican fraud.
The “first People’s party government on earth” was inaugurated in Topeka at the start of 1893. After a spectacular parade through downtown Topeka the new governor, Lorenzo Lewelling, gave a stirring address—his “incendiary Haymarket inaugural,” a GOP editor called it—followed by Lease and Simpson. But the gala was shortlived. When the new legislature convened, the Populists organized the state Senate, but they and the Republicans each claimed a majority in the House. There followed a tug-of-war that would have been comic opera if the stakes had not been so high: each “majority” organized its own “House” with speaker and officers; neither side would vacate the hall, so they stayed put all night, with the two speakers sleeping, gavels in hand, facing each other behind the podium; finally Lewelling called up the militia—including a Gatling gun minus its firing pin—while the Republicans mobilized an army of deputy sheriffs, college students, and railroad workers. The GOP legislators smashed their way into the hall with a sledgehammer; and the militia commander, a loyal Republican like most of his troops, refused the governor’s order to expel the invaders.
Bloodshed was narrowly averted when the Populists agreed to let the Republican-dominated Kansas Supreme Court rule on the issue, and predictably the court ruled against them. The Populists then paid the price. Their legislators fared worse than in 1891, passing two election reform measures and putting suffrage on the ballot, but not accomplishing much else. Their chief priority, railroad regulation with teeth, was a direct casualty of the conflict. Clearly, under the American and Kansan systems of checks and balances, a movement could win elections but still not win power.
Alliance cooperation and Populist politics spread through other Northern states, moving west into the mountain states toward the Pacific, north into Minnesota and the Dakotas, east into the big corn spreads. Everywhere the new movement mobilized people and encountered Republican party power and entrenched elites. Thus “in sundry ways, at different speeds, at varied levels of intensity, and at diverse stages of political consciousness, the farmers brought the People’s Party of the United States into being,” in Goodwyn’s summarization. “In so doing, they placed on the nation’s political stage the first multi-sectional democratic mass movement since the American Revolution.”
It was in the South, however, that the Alliance continued to expand most dramatically and yet to encounter the biggest obstacles. The first of these obstacles was the Southern Democracy, which continued to live off its role as defender of the Lost Cause. The second, closely connected, was race— not simply race, as C. Vann Woodward has explained, but “the complexities of the class economy growing out of race, the heritage of manumitted slave psychology, and the demagogic uses to which the politician was able to put race prejudice.” Southern Populists reluctantly concluded that they could not achieve the subtreasury plan for credit and currency and other reforms unless they forged a biracial coalition of small landowners, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. This meant war with the Southern Democracy and potential division within Populism.
Georgia was an even more tumultuous battleground than Kansas. There one man, backed by the mass of poor farmers, personified the entire movement: Tom Watson. Descended from prosperous slaveholders, he had seen his father lose his forty-five slaves and 1,400 acres after Appomattox and end up as a tavern owner in Augusta. Young Watson managed to spend two years at Mercer University before running out of money. After years of poverty he turned to law, prospered, and won election to the Georgia lower house at twenty-six, but quit before his term ended.
“I did not lead the Alliance,” Watson recalled. “I followed the Alliance, and I am proud that I did.” After taking leadership in the “jute fight,” he decided to run for Congress as a Democrat with Alliance backing. The white Georgia Alliance sought to field its own candidates within the Democratic party and back non-Alliance candidates only if they endorsed the Alliance program—the “Alliance yardstick,” they called it. Alliance leaders took over the Democratic party state convention, wrote the party platform, won control of both houses of the “farmers’ legislature,” elected the governor and six of ten members of Congress. Watson trounced his Republican opponent almost ten to one in a fight as “hot as Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.”
Coalitions embody conflicts. The lines were now drawn between Alliance members who were mainly Democrats and Democrats who were mainly Alliancers. The national Alliance had urged that its members of Congress not join any party caucus that did not endorse the Alliance platform. The whole Southern delegation but one stayed with the majority Democratic caucus and elected a Georgian, Charles Crisp, to the speakership. The exception was Watson. He and Sockless Jerry Simpson introduced the Alliance platform into Congress, fighting especially hard for the subtreasury proposal. Virtually none of the platform was even reported out of committee except the subtreasury item, which finally came to the floor after Watson used every maneuver to pry it out of committee; by then it was too late for action.
Beaten in Washington, Watson flourished politically at home. This was a time when many black tenants and sharecroppers were becoming alienated from the GOP and were turning to the new party. Watson called on blacks as well as whites to overthrow the plutocracy that had used race hatred to bolster its rule. “You are kept apart,” he told black and white Georgians, “that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings.” Campaigning for reelection in 1892, now as leader of the Georgia People’s Party, Watson championed political equality for blacks, economic equality to a lesser extent—and social equality or “mixing” not at all. But despite both white and black Populist support, Watson was beaten for reelection in a campaign marked by massive election fraud and the killing of a score of Populists, most of them black.
Texas was having its own problems with the entrenched white Democracy and entrenched capital. The Texas Alliance Exchange, the linchpin of cooperative efforts, had gotten off to a flying start by selling vast amounts of cotton to eastern mills and abroad and buying supplies and equipment. Still, it could not break the enslavement of tenants and sharecroppers to the crop lien system, and increasingly it suffered from lack of capital. Banks in Dallas and elsewhere turned a cold face to requests for loans. Desperately the leadership turned to the suballiances themselves for money. In a remarkable popular mobilization, thousands of farmers marched to county courthouses to pledge help. It was not enough; a year later the Texas Exchange closed its doors for good.
The ever-resourceful Charles Macune now presented his subtreasury plan, providing treasury notes to farmers, as a means of financing cooperatives with public rather than private credit and thus enlisting the government in the struggle to raise agricultural prices. The indefatigable William Lamb fashioned this economic reform into a weapon of political revolt as he launched a full-scale lecturing campaign in each congressional district. The Texas Alliance won a stunning victory through the Democratic party in 1890, electing a governor and a legislature committed to most Alliance demands, but a host of Democratic “loyalists” opposed the subtreasury and bolted from the Alliance. Spurred by Lamb and other leaders, Alliance members decided to create the People’s Party of Texas. At the founding convention in August 1891 white and black delegates forged a remarkable coalition, with a commitment to political and economic equality for blacks.
As the presidential election year of 1892 approached, Alliance leaders were concluding that a national People’s Party was needed to consolidate the grand coalition of farmers and workers, strengthen the state parties, and seize control of the federal government. Plans were carefully laid. The Alliance organized a massive lecturing campaign, distributed vast quantities of books and pamphlets, including Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and formed a National Reform Press Association to coordinate the propaganda efforts of the one-hundred-strong Populist newspapers. A St. Louis conference of farm, labor, and women delegates drew up a platform and heard the Minnesota Populist orator and novelist Ignatius Donnelly give an unforgettable speech in which he charged: “Corruption dominates the ballot box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.… The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes, unprecedented in the history of the world, while their possessors despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed two great classes—paupers and millionaires.”
Then came the national founding convention of the People’s Party, Omaha, July 4, 1892. The delegates adopted a platform that harked back to the “Cleburne demands” six years earlier and indeed to decades of labor, farm, and socialist manifestos: a flexible “national currency” to be distributed by means of the subtreasury plan; free and unlimited coinage of silver and gold; a graduated income tax; government ownership and operation of the railroads, telegraph, and telephone; barring of alien land ownership and return of land held by railroads and other corporations “in excess of their actual needs”; political reforms such as the direct election of United States senators. But the platform ignored labor’s most urgent needs and omitted mention of woman’s suffrage. The convention also took a moderate course in nominating for president James B. Weaver of Iowa, the reform editor and ex-Union general who had led the Greenbackers in 1880, balancing him with an ex-Confederate general as his running mate.
Plunging into the election campaign, the Populists unsheathed their thousands of lecturers, their orators such as Lease and Donnelly, their tactics in some states of opportunistic coalition-building with Republicans in the South and especially with Democrats in the West. Weaver and his wife were rotten-egged in the South—Mrs. Weaver to the point that, according to Lease, she “was made a regular walking omelet by the southern chivalry of Georgia.” The results were promising for a fledgling third party: Weaver polled over one million votes, actually carrying Kansas and four western states with twenty-two electoral votes. Populist governors were elected in Kansas, Colorado, and North Dakota. But in the Northeast, parts of the Midwest, and the South the party fared poorly. In Texas the Populists lost badly to the Democrats. It was with mingled hopes and an exhilarating sense of momentum that the Populists turned to the economic and political struggles ahead.
The idea of liberty had been the animating impulse behind the Alliance. But during the century soon to come to an end that idea had also guided organized capital and labor. Each group of course meant something different by “liberty”—businessmen meant freedom from interference with property, labor meant freedom from boss control of its working life, farmers meant freedom from furnishing merchants, banks, railroads, trusts. More than the other groups, however, the Alliance had made liberty into a positive idea—realizing and fulfilling oneself by gaining broader control of one’s working environment through participation in Alliance cooperatives. Along with industrial workers, Populist farmers had also preached the idea of equality—a real equality of opportunity. But the cooperators, with their denunciations of “selfish individualism,” had moved even more than labor toward the third great concept in the Enlightenment trinity— fraternity, or comradeship. The idea of cooperation had grown out of, and had sustained, the practices of sisterhood and brotherhood.
And if the Populists had realized all three values to a greater extent than any other large group, it was mainly because of a conscious effort toward the intensive use of massive numbers of second-cadre activists—35,000 or more “lecturers”—in rousing farmers to political self-consciousness. As in all deeply felt democratic movements, the great leaders were educators, and the great teachers were leaders.