Stories Lost to History
One of the shining lights of the work is the numerous stories it tells about our history, so many of which seem otherwise lost to our collective memory and understanding.
Duke’s Mixture
Even more impressive and significant was the rise of the tobacco kingdom of James Buchanan Duke and his rivals. During the war and afterwards, Union soldiers stationed at Durham, North Carolina, had carried away a pleasant recollection of “bright tobacco” developed in that area through a charcoal process that produced a mild smoke or “chaw” that would not bite the tongue. Washington Duke, James’s father, an antislavery farmer who is said to have voted for Lincoln in 1860 but who, nevertheless, had served in Lee’s army, had returned from the war to find his farm stripped by marauders, except for a barn of bright tobacco. Thereafter, he went peddling with James and eventually developed his own bright leaf variety of smoking tobacco known widely as “Duke’s Mixture.”
James Duke was no soft Southern Bourbon, though he shared their industrial enthusiasm. He took John D. Rockefeller as his model and displayed a commercial ruthlessness and promotional ingenuity that had been almost forgotten in the South during the days when cotton was king. When his father offered him a chance to get a liberal arts education befitting the station of a traditional Southern gentleman, James decided instead to go off to a business college in the North and returned to Durham with aggressive commercial ideas. His neighbors had already begun to popularize “Bull Durham” with a bovine symbol borrowed from an English mustard label, and makers of the plug and pipe tobacco were beginning to look into the possibilities of the cigarette. James Duke outdid his rivals in gaining patent control of the best cigarette-rolling machines, and revolutionized production.
Since Southerners tended to regard cigarettes as an effeminate importation from Russia and Turkey, Duke reached out for a wider market in the North, hired expert Russian Jews to teach his Negro workers the best techniques, and originated a nation-wide sales campaign. He cut prices, gave away premiums, and introduced billboard advertising with alluring actresses smoking away in queenly style. (Personally, James Duke, who came of strict Methodist ancestry, did not like to see ladies smoke.) Adopting the latest techniques of the Yankee monopolists in oil, steel, railroads, and other swiftly expanding fields, he launched bitter price wars to force competitors to sell out to him, used spies and rebates against competitors, gained control of retail outlets through the United Cigar stores, learned the intricacies of trust and holding company evasions, and forced tobacco farmers to sell to him at ever-lower prices. After a severe cigarette war, Duke brought his rivals under his hegemony in 1890 when the American Tobacco Company was organized with himself as president and leading stockholder.
A fascinating chapter in our history and what certainly sounds like a fascinating character through whose lens it may be beneficial to peer. A hundred and fifty years prior to Wal-Mart, it appears that the likes of Sam Walton have nothing on James Duke.
American murderer
And speaking of fascinating chapters in our history.
[Walter Hines] Page’s role in promoting public health in the South is worthy of considerable attention. Shortly before World War I, the Southern masses became the beneficiary of the discoveries made by the public health movement in eradicating hookworm. Tropical medicine, reflecting the nation’s advance in the Caribbean, had gone far under American and native doctors in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Canal Zone. In Puerto Rico, Colonel Bailey K. Ashford, an army surgeon in the Spanish-American War, found that the anemia affecting thousands of poor islanders was due to hookworm. A native of North Carolina, Dr. Charles W. Stiles, who taught medical zoology at the Johns Hopkins University, identified in 1902 the parasite Necator Americanus (American murderer) as the hookworm of the Southern poor white. He pointed out to Walter Hines Page in 1909 that the anemic “dirt-eater” whom they saw near a Greensboro train platform was a typical hookworm case. Stiles asserted that this man could be cured with “about fifty cents worth of drugs” and that at least 2,000,000 Southerners, especially poor whites, suffered from the parasite.
While local newspapers resented a fancied slur upon the South, and Northern journalists joked about the discovery of the “germ of laziness,” Page used his intimate contacts with Rockefeller to initiate the Rockefeller Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease. The ensuing drive to cure the pale, enervated parasite victims, conspicuous for the listlessness and distended bellies, revealed in 1911-14 that almost 60 per cent of all Southern school children had some hookworm infestation. Yet, by 1918 about one-third of those infected were cured and the proportions of those affected dropped steadily thereafter. Elsewhere in backward areas of the world, from the West Indies and Egypt to India and China, the Rockefeller Commission applied these lessons to save millions from a lifetime of futility and hopelessness.
This is one of the scientific marvels of modern times, now almost entirely forgotten. Can you imagine the government or nonprofit commission trying to eliminate such a hidden parasite in so much of the population today? No one would likely believe it and perceive it as a threat to their liberty.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull
And speaking of fascinating characters.
The Beecher affair proved a great triumph for outspoken journalism in an intimate matter hitherto bound up in the Victorian conspiracy of silence. The journalists who had done most to force Tilton to take court action against Beecher were two remarkable if eccentric feminists, Victoria Claflin Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin, editors of the sensational ‘Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly’ of New York. They led the extreme left wing of the feminists and lectured on behalf of greater freedom for women, birth control, eugenics, and the single moral standard for both sexes. Victoria, herself -- unlike Susan B. Anthony and certain other suffragettes -- was unusually pretty. She was a spellbinder on the lecture platform, and one of the first women to speak out openly for scientific birth control in the interest of eugenics, for rational sex education, and for liberal divorce laws. She was a leader in spiritualist and mental healing circles and even campaigned to elect herself president of the United States with Frederick Douglass, the ex-slave, as vice-president.
This is the only mention of what sounds like an extraordinary person. It may be time to find a full biography.
Child Guidance Clinics
And since this is a history of ‘thought,’ there are also some interesting thoughts that have been expressed throughout our history, some of which have been pressed into actual social and political movements -- again, at least from my point of view, all but forgotten today.
One of the most successful juvenile court judges was Ben B. Lindsey, the first head of the Denver Juvenile Court. He had long fought for honest government and anti-child-labor laws and now he set an example of informal juvenile court technique without lawyers or juries. Children were not charged with any crime but were treated by experts as immature and maladjusted individuals in whose downfall environmental conditions and inadequate parental control were responsible. This clinical approach to understanding the child’s personality was strengthened after 1909 by Dr. William Healy and his Chicago associates who set up a juvenile psychopathic institute in connection with the city’s juvenile court. Out of this mental hygiene emphasis grew the child guidance clinic. By 1914 there were over a hundred such clinics attached to medical schools, mental hospitals, juvenile courts, and other institutions. So successful was the entire juvenile court movement that western Europe promptly borrowed its techniques and improved them by placing less reliance upon policemen and more on social workers in the handling of children.
Hmmm. I wonder what happened. Seems like we don’t do much of this anymore. Now we seem to more frequently try twelve-year-olds as adults when they commit crimes.
Higher Criticism
And speaking of interesting thoughts leading to social movements.
The urban intellectuals, even more than the workmen, led the trek away from the church. This generation debated over and over again the problem of reconciling modern science with religion and failed to resolve its secret doubts, even while reaffirming the unity of both. Before the Civil War certain German theological schools fostered “scientific criticism” of the Bible. David Friedrich Strauss of Tübingen shocked the orthodox world in 1835 with his naturalistic “higher criticism” of the Bible and of Christ, in his ‘Life of Jesus.’ Revelation, miracles, and the supernatural suffered their most severe attacks since the time of Voltaire. Protestantism, leaning heavily on the doctrine that the Bible was literally inspired and the sole authority for religion, staggered under the attacks of the “higher critics” upon the origin and development of Christian sacred writings. Scholars, armed with vast linguistic knowledge, challenged the accuracy and authorship of various biblical texts, and anthropologists like Edward Taylor and James Frazer in Britain undermined the assumptions of orthodoxy through the new science of “comparative religion.” Frazer’s monumental work, ‘The Golden Bough’ (1890), a critical collection of religious and superstitious practices and beliefs, stimulated the reader’s impression that Christianity consisted of myths analogous to those of primitive religions.
I’ve read The Golden Bough. Now, it seems like Life of Jesus is going on my reading list.
Elevate, Don’t Indoctrinate
And speaking again of interesting thoughts leading to social movements.
During the pessimistic months of 1940 when France tottered to surrender, [George S.] Counts urged his listeners of the American Federation of Teachers at Buffalo to reconstruct the educational system as a dynamic agency for democratic idealism and reform. The school, he charged, had failed to transmit the great liberal humanistic heritage of our culture, being content with teaching superficial loyalty and with putting the intellect to sleep. It offered no direction to frustrated youth, no affirmation of life, vision, seriousness, or deep moral purpose. He would put the public schools in the direct service of democracy by wiping out educational inequalities between races and classes, by making vocational education an instrument of opportunity for youth, and by liberalizing adult education. Specifically, he would seek a fairer system of school taxation, strengthen the educational responsibilities of teachers, and give labor and other community groups representation on the school boards. These changes would equip the individual to advance both himself and society.
Certainly a fascinating movement, but again, all but seemingly forgotten today in the political fights over local school boards. The fact that Wish describes this as a revolutionary movement makes you realize what an uphill battle enlightenment has always been in society. Conservatives, then as now, always looking to conserve what used to be.
Not least among the rebels of Teachers College was William H. Kilpatrick, who looked upon John Dewey as another Socrates who “brought philosophy down from the clouds to dwell among men.” Kilpatrick quarreled with the educator’s tendency to study only the impersonal aspects of education, to pile up techniques devoid of any social philosophy, and to assume that this colorless neutralism someone supplied aim and direction. Like Dewey and Counts, he scored the harmful influence of vested interests on the school; and in ‘Education and the Social Crisis’ (1932) he called for a philosophy and program of action free from fears of indoctrination or of becoming involved in the conflicts of the day. He, too, looked toward democratic experimentation to achieve a more collectivist social order.
Collectivist. There’s that word. I’m sure it scared the shit out of people then, just like it scares the shit out of them now. Still, it may be worth getting the referenced book and see what Kilpatrick had to say.
An Unbearable Isolation
And speaking of conservatives and the things they fear.
There was a penetrating explanation of the revolt against liberal individualism in Erich Fromm’s ‘Escape from Freedom’ (1941), which had passed through nineteen printings by the spring of 1959. Fromm was an imaginative German psychologist currently resident in New York who used a psychoanalytical technique to understand the character of modern man and the illness of a civilization that could produce fascism and communism. Man had freed himself from the bonds of preindividualistic society which had simultaneously given him security and limited his choices; but he failed to gain freedom in the positive sense of fulfilling himself intellectually and emotionally. Freedom had left him isolated, anxious, and powerless. “This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submissions or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.” Hence the flight to the Leader, the powerful state, and the sadistic programs against minorities. Although Fromm did not actually analyze conservatism, but rather ultra right-wing reaction, he suggested, as Tannenbaum had done, that modern man suffered from an unbearable isolation and must identify himself with a meaningful role in economic production, distribution, and organization.
Wish is writing here of the 1950s, the rise of McCarthyism, and the many political scientists and philosophers who diagnosed and described the cultural underpinnings of the era.
An outstanding psychologist observed of the McCarthy type of conservative: “The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”
Boy, is that spot on -- for then, but also for the current moment.
Syllabus for a Course on American Literature
Another discovered joy in this volume was the steady and on-going review of the literature produced in each era of American history, and the societal and cultural significance that it had. Many of the authors and works mentioned were familiar to me, but many more were not -- and, as I read, I found myself speculating on developing a critical syllabus for the literature of unread authors (for me) that reflected the societal history of the American nation.
The New South
We would begin with the reconstructed South and the writers who tried to reveal rather than celebrate its past, especially as it came into stark contrast with a modernizing nation.
While most local color writers respected the proprieties and disdained to pry into such questions as actual race relations, sex mores, and disease, a transplanted Yankee lady, Octave Thanet, who wrote under the pseudonym of Alice French, showed considerable willingness to discuss these forbidden themes. Her discovery of the Arkansas “rednecks” of the 1880’s and 1890’s added more subject matter for the local colorists. Residing in a decayed plantation house, she told of the hard-headed, backward trash who were by Southern standards so degraded as to be jailed together with Negroes in a chain gang. In numerous stories he described promiscuous poor white women, anemic tenants, drunken croppers, sadists, and tragic families whose women died early from overwork and child-bearing. Much of her work, however, appeared later than the 1880’s and showed the effect of the new realism that was captivating Northern as well as Southern writers.
The new realism will be one of the major themes that would be explored in this course.
Southern Demagogues and Liberals
It was evidently a major force in these portrayals of the “real” South.
In literature genuine modern realism came to the South with the Richmond-born novelist, Ellen Glasgow, a rebel against the inhibited “genteel tradition” of the North as well as the “sentimental fallacy” of the Southern plantation tradition. Unlike most writers of the New South, who dwelt upon the Old South with nostalgia but had no intention whatever of giving up the social order of the Industrial Revolution, Miss Glasgow sought fidelity to experience through the example of Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, and the English realists -- she read the Russians much later. “What the South needs is blood and irony,” she declared.
Her first novel, ‘The Descendant’ (1897), was begun when she was eighteen and had already determined to seek realism. She took as her central figure “one of the despised and rejected of society, an illegitimate offspring of the peasant or ‘poor white’ class.” Critics were not only shocked to find a well-brought-up Southern girl writing about illegitimacy but they also disliked the frank naturalistic philosophy expressed on her title page -- a quotation from Haeckel, the evolutionist.
In 1902, she published ‘The Battleground,’ first of a long series of novels dealing with the social history of Virginia since 1850. Although she did not wholly escape the temptation to romanticise, she kept her story remarkably close to actuality in delineating character, costume, and the tobacco fields she had known at first hand from childhood days. She could be as unconventional as Octave Thanet, at least in portraying classes, the irregular sex life among the farmers, and the degraded sharecroppers who lacked real incentives in a planter’s society. Her women were not pretty, empty-headed Southern belles, but substantial human beings, capable of struggling against the dicta of man-made society. Occasionally, she pictured a Negro with real authenticity, but generally confined herself to the Southern white. Her best work was yet to come in the 1920’s and afterwards, but she was never to permit her realism to take the form of “hard-boiled fiction” and a mechanistic “stream of consciousness.”
Indeed, we will return to Ellen Glasgow as one of the key women writers of the 1920s, who will form an interesting juxtaposition with some of the more famous, “hard-boiled” male authors.
The Last Frontier
But before we go there, there are other social movements to explore through fiction, including the fight for minority rights.
In the East, which had once crusaded for Negro rights, two Ponca chiefs, Standing Bear and Bright Eyes, touched sympathetic audiences with the woes of the Red Man. One of these impressed listeners was the Massachusetts-born novelist, Helen Hunt Jackson, who became a latter-day Harriet Beecher Stowe in behalf of a racial minority. Moving to Southern California in 1872 to recover her health, Mrs. Jackson became absorbed by the culture of the Mission Indians and the degradation of these scattered tribes. In 1881 appeared ‘A Century of Dishonor,’ a scathing indictment of federal Indian policy, some of it grossly exaggerated for propagandistic effect. Popular indignation was awakened by this long record of broken faith. Far more widely read was her picturesque novel, ‘Ramona,’ which appeared in 1884, the year before her death. This sentimental and melancholy novel, in the Victorian tradition of Longfellow’s ‘Hiawatha,’ told the idyllic love story of the part-Indian girl, Ramona, and her husband Alessandro. Their beautiful world of Spanish-Indian missions and unspoiled simplicity was violently disrupted by the American gold seekers. Beneath the weight of the Anglo-Saxon’s lust for riches and his materialism, the old Spanish and Indian patriarchal life crumbled and Ramona herself broke mentally and was finally murdered. Although Mrs. Jackson’s interpretation neglected many historic factors, and the love story often overshadowed the wrongs of the Indian, the book did much to arouse the conscience of the nation. Indian Rights Associations sprang up in most cities, much to the author’s delight, and Congress finally took action in the Dawes Act of 1887.
An interesting use of fiction to spur action on social and political movements. This is something else that the course would examine, especially as the naturalistic realism would merge with the political propaganda in such ‘novels’ as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
The Urban Impact in Rural Life
Much of the late nineteenth century seems replete with these examples -- experimenting with realism in order not just to paint a more naturalistic picture, but also to comment philosophically or politically on the states of man.
Hamlin Garland of Wisconsin and Iowa, as we have seen, broke with the romanticists to tell the story of the prairies as realistically as he could. His rebellious attitude toward the hardships of rural life permeated his stories ‘Main-Travelled Roads’ (1890) and such autobiographical books as his very successful ‘Son of the Middle Border.’ He showed an excellent reportorial skill in most of his writings, though farmers challenged the fairness of his anti-rural view.
Christian Socialism
But then, perhaps comprising its own semester in this larger syllabus, we would have to examine several works cited in Wish’s chapter on “Urbanism and the Church,” which details the fascinating movement called Christian Socialism. It may be helpful here to spend some time on that larger context.
The long dreary depression eras of 1873 and 1893 and the violent nation-wide strikes associated with them led many thoughtful clergymen to revise their exclusive emphasis on otherworldliness. Besides, the rapid growth of Marxist socialism among laborers during the 1880’s and afterwards alarmed churchmen in both Europe and America. Radical clubs ridiculed the clergyman’s promises of salvation as “pie in the sky” and the Marxian terms assailed religion as an opiate for the people to divert attention from the class struggle. After 1890, many Protestants and Catholics devoted serious attention to formulating a “social gospel,” which taught that the principles of Christianity were broad enough to support a just social order of a cooperative nature. For them, the traditional kingdom of heaven could not be allowed to obscure the hope of a kingdom of righteousness on earth.
Was this, I wonder, the actual beginning to the “social gospel” that so permeates our discussions about Christianity today? Didn’t the clergy advocate for the brotherhood of man prior to the 1890s?
Socially-minded critics attacked the orthodox who were only concerned with the problem of personal redemption without realizing that society, too, must be redeemed from its economic abuses. They were dissatisfied with the limited ascetic program of the churches -- temperance, Sabbatarianism, Comstockian morality, and persistent campaigns to halt smoking and card-playing. Within the traditional church doctrine of stewardship, churchmen insisted that all wealth is held and administered for the common good. Catholics recurred to the pre-capitalistic Christian society of the medieval guild community with its subordination to the common good -- in theory at least -- of profits and competitive conflict. Social gospelers also found theological sanctions in the doctrine that God was immanent in human society -- a formula that tended to blur the usually sharp distinctions between secular and religious interests.
Sure they did. But I guess the unfettered capitalism of the age pushed those ideas underground and now, after the slave had been emancipated, they were being revived. But the orthodoxy would fight against it, in ways much like the Christian authoritarians of today who stridently claim that Jesus was NOT A SOCIALIST!
England directly influenced the social gospel movement and its institutions, for her urban-industrial problems resembled those of the United States in an accentuated form. Within the Church of England a group of clerics and laymen, led by Frederick D. Maurice, took up where Chartism had left off in 1848 to rebel against laissez-faire capitalism and to demand that the economic order conform to Christian ethics within a cooperative system. Best-known of these “Christian Socialists” to American readers was the clergyman-novelist Charles Kingsley, who wrote ‘Alton Locke’ (1850) and ‘Yeast’ (1851) to picture working-class conditions. In England, too, there was the esthetic and individualistic Socialism of William Morris and John Ruskin. These men seldom went beyond plans or experiments for a producer’s or consumer’s cooperative, but they influenced the gradualist tradition of the Fabian Socialists and the British Labour Party. From England, too, came the settlement movement, which was originated by an Anglican vicar, Samuel A. Barnett, as an experiment in London slum rehabilitation. Barnett founded Toynbee Hall in 1884 to provide university-trained “residents” in a poor district of the East End. Essentially, all these activities were merely middle-class efforts to direct the economic salvation of the working classes. Some groups of the Christian Socialists were even cool to secular trade-union movements and none favored the revolutionary Marxist or anarchist panaceas for the ills of the world.
I find all of this endlessly fascinating, and to know that there is a literature out there that can be acquired and read just whets my appetite all the more. Much of it, however, is not fiction, but more social commentary and criticism.
Much more influential upon the later Christian Socialist movement was Washington Gladden, outspoken pastor of the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio. He insisted that now that slavery had been abolished, the emancipation of labor came next and the social problem was therefore primary. Active in various municipal and social reforms, he expressed his conviction that the laborer’s real wages had declined during 1860-86 and were still falling. He was one of the early clerical figures to give the weight of church support to trade unions and the right to strike; his wrath fell upon the abuses of unregulated economic competition. Adam Smith and classical economics, he charged, had come to replace the Bible. His numerous books, such as ‘Applied Christianity’ (1886), popularized the social gospel. In 1891 appeared his challenging exposition of religious Modernism in ‘Who Wrote The Bible?’
As alluded to earlier, after the slave, next comes the laborer. To think that this was a natural progression in the zeitgeist of freedom-minded people is almost a revelation to me. The battle between slaveholder and slave always, perhaps, being the most egregious form of the battle between capital and labor.
While Gladden offered little in the way of concrete reforms, the developing English movement of Christian Socialism crossed the Atlantic and gave a program to many American social gospelers. One of these American leaders of Christian Socialism was an Episcopal clergyman of Boston, William D. P. Bliss, who named his organization the Church of the Carpenter and even joined the Knights of Labor. Like other radical clergymen, he had been attracted at first by Edward Bellamy’s Utopian Socialist book ‘Looking Backward, 2000-1887’ (1888), in which the leading character awakens in the midst of a socialist society that plans almost every phase of daily life. However, the secular nature of Bellamy’s Nationalist movement led Bliss and other churchmen to turn away and organize in 1889 the Society of Christian Socialists in Boston, editing ‘The Dawn,’ and attacking plutocracy and economic planlessness in favor of a gradualist program of regulation and control of capital.
And just as many abolitionists were rooted in their Christian faith, so too, evidently, were these labor socialists.
The greatest name and influence in American Social Christianity was undoubtedly Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist clergyman of Rochester, New York, the son of German liberal Forty-eighters. As a young idealistic pastor in New York city’s slums, he had seen poverty at first hand; as a result, his religion was imbued with a strong social quality. He had read sympathetically Henry George’s single-tax doctrines, Tolstoy’s idealistic essays on personal redemption, and John Spargo’s socialist writings. He emerged a Christian Socialist, devoted to the goal of a socialist state based on biblical principles.
To Marxians, however, his rejection of the principles of the class struggle as a cardinal tenet of socialism put him outside the pale of “scientific socialism.” Rauschenbusch denounced the jungle philosophy of unregulated competition and proposed a social order in which the profit motive would be replaced by a cooperative ideal. In ‘Christianizing the Social Order’ (1912), written at the height of the Bull Moose movement, he predicted gloomily, “An ever increasing number of people are henceforth to live in a land owned by an ever decreasing number.” It was time to turn away from mammonism and corporate control of government and time for all society to experience the exalted sense of personal regeneration that the convert knew.
In his published Yale lectures of 1917, ‘A Theology for the Social Gospel,’ Rauschenbusch formulated the doctrinal basis of Social Christianity. Most popular of all was ‘The Social Principles of Jesus’ (1917). These titles alone suggest the consistent emphasis that he put upon his central tenets of a kingdom of righteousness on earth. Under his leadership Christian Socialists organized the Brotherhood of the Kingdom. More important than this is the fact that, for an entire generation at least, innumerable idealistic young clergymen were profoundly influenced by the social teachings of Rauschenbusch.
Talk about Lost Christianities! I would really love to read this Rauschenbusch and the authors like him. To what degree, I wonder, did the emerging realism come through in their “novels,” and to what degree did they presage the coming wave of socialist “tracts” by Upton Sinclair and the other muckrakers? There’s got to be one of my speculative PhD theses in that idea.
No man in the entire Social Christian movement enjoyed so vast an audience as the Reverend Charles Monroe Sheldon of Topeka, Kansas, whose mass appeal as a novelist may justly be compared with that of Harriet Beecher Stowe. A prolific writer of idealistic sketches for denominational papers, this Congregationalist minister knew poverty and unemployment from close observation. In 1896, he published ‘In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?’ This began with a story related to a congregation by an unemployed youth whose wife had died in a New York tenement. The young man challenged the congregation by asking what Jesus would do if He were a member of this church. After the youth died the aroused pastor asked his congregation to live for a year exactly as they thought Jesus would, regardless of consequences. Thereafter a wholesale transformation took place as members gave up narrow or harmful activities to promote better housing for the poor, mission work, and temperance. So sensational was the success here and abroad of ‘In His Steps’ that the book sold over 100,000 copies in a year and quickly passed the millions mark and the story was shown on the motion picture screen in 1936.
What an amazing period of American history.
The climax of the social gospel movement came in 1908 after Unitarians, Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, and Congregationalists had already formed welfare organizations and adopted social principles going beyond the older restricted notions of charity. In May, 1908, the Methodist Episcopal Church issued its famous “Social Creed,” which included these principles: industrial conciliation and arbitration; elimination of factory hazards to life and health; the abolition of child labor; protection of women in industry; abolition of the sweat shop; the “gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to the lowest practical point, with work for all”; and the acquisition of “that degree of leisure for all which is the condition of the highest human life.” They advocated a holiday of one day in seven, “a living wage in every industry,” and particularly “the highest wage that each industry can afford, and for the most equitable division of the products in industry that can ultimately be devised.”
To think that these innovations all grew from a Christian perspective and movement, one, evidently, that managed to consume much of the Christianity that came before it, the one riddled with myths of personal responsibility and individual salvation.
This ambitious program was implemented that same year by the formation of the most important interdenominational group in the history of the Protestantism: The Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, eventually representing twenty-seven national denominations, including both races, and dealing with practically every problem of human welfare. This organization took over as its own the Social Creed of the Methodists and set up local and state councils to assist it in dealing with national and international questions including evangelical programs, reform of marriage laws, philanthropy, and social legislation. “The Council holds it a Christian duty to make the influence of Christ effective in all human relations,” reads a recent semi-official statement; “It draws Christian representatives of management, labor, and agriculture together to consider what light is shed upon their problems by the common Christian commitment.” Thus in the twentieth century centrifugal tendencies of Protestantism had been partially checked through such interdenominational forms as the F.C.C.C.A. More and more churches took up the “labor question,” investigated strikes sympathetically, or offered their services as labor mediators. The “institutional” church grew after 1890 to include a wide variety of welfare, educational, and recreational activities. Such urban churches often added employment bureaus, charitable relief agencies, kindergartens, gymnasiums, libraries, clubs, dispensaries, soup kitchens, hospitals, and home economics classes. A “Christian sociology” pervaded their philosophy.
Not just a Christian sociology, but a Christian socialism. Its rise, and the attacks it must have suffered and still suffers today, is the work of several PhD theses.
The Captain of Industry
Because, of course, there was a counterpose to Christian Socialism, and not just a reactionary one, but one with a claim to actual and theoretical good works. It was (and still is) capitalism, and, more specifically, the rich and philanthropic men who had used it to acquire incredible wealth.
The social contribution of wealthy businessmen had its best exponent and eulogist in Andrew Carnegie, who in his own lifetime gave away nine-tenths of his $300,000,000 fortune for public purposes. He endowed eight permanent philanthropic foundations of which the largest was the Carnegie Corporation of New York for “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.” He provided over 2,500 library buildings for communities in America and Canada that lacked them, and founded such scientific institutions as the Carnegie Institute of Technology at Pittsburgh (1901) and the Carnegie Institution at Washington (1902). Schools for both races benefited greatly from his substantial gifts. To impecunious college professors, unable to amass enough savings to retire with dignity, he offered millions in free pensions through the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Like other philanthropists who hoped to end war through financing peace movements -- such as the Nobel Peace Prize and Edwin Ginn’s World Peace Foundation -- he founded a peace research and publication fund, the ten-million-dollar Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, dedicated to the speedy abolition of war between the so-called civilized nations. He erected a Temple of Peace at the Hague to promote international arbitration and a beautiful building in Washington for the Pan American Union. Wisely, he made his bequests flexible enough to enable administrators to alter his original instructions in order to meet future changing conditions.
Much more articulate than his fellow-millionaires -- he had long dreamed of a literary career -- he wrote numerous books and articles of his favorite doctrine of the stewardship of wealth. In ‘The Gospel of Wealth’ (1900) he wrote:
“This, then, is held to be the duty of the man of wealth: to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for all wants of those dependent upon him; and, after doing so, to consider revenues which come to him simply as trust funds.”
In his book, ‘The Empire of Business’ (1902), he reaffirmed this doctrine of surplus wealth as a sacred trust and asserted,
“It is to business men following business careers that we chiefly owe our universities, college, libraries, and educational institutions, as witness, Girard, Lehigh, Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and many others.”
In a quick aside, Wish tells us about how the era of philanthropic captains of industry was short-lived, as the Great Depression shifted the locus of public support from the private to the public sector.
The depression and federal welfare expenditures weakened the historic role of the captain of industry and his successor the chairman of the huge corporation. One of the proudest parts he had played was that of a Mycaenas, a patron of the arts, sciences, and great philanthropies. However, these gifts were cut down not only by the depression but also by the high graduated income taxes, the corporate taxes, the inheritance taxes, and other new levies that had never beset the smooth path of the early American fortunes. Private colleges and charitable institutions that had piled up endowments of hundreds of millions in the past from Rockefeller, Carnegie, Stanford, and others faced the danger of eclipse at the hands of tax-supported institutions and colleges -- unless saved by the government. Inevitably the power of the state grew as tax funds went to farm subsidies, schools, public health, low-cost housing, subsidized electrical power, mass relief, and low-interest credit for a variety of purposes.
It sounds like another one of those imaginary PhD theses that I would love to make real. Which was better? Robber Baron Philanthropy or New Deal Taxation and Investment?
Toward Literary Realism
But the increasing through-line that we will see in this course in the move towards literary realism.
Far more sophisticated and sensitive in the art of realism, though less concerned with economic injustices, was the remarkable Henry James, brother of the Harvard philosopher. Both had spent much of their youth in European places and Henry later became one of a distinguished band of expatriates who found Western Europe and England especially more mature intellectually and esthetically than their homeland. In his generation the expatriates included Whistler, and among the younger ones, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. But Henry James was no escapist, for he preserved his American connections in the “internal theme” of his novels. In ‘The Ambassadors’ (1902), he depicted a New England expatriate who rebelled against the materialism of his industrial section and found fulfillment in the Old World charm and traditions of Western Europe. His novels frequently centered around the life of American expatriates. Yet James had his largest audience in the years that he was close to America (he left in 1876), especially for the novelettes, ‘Roderick Hudson’ (1876), ‘The American’ (1877), ‘Daisy Miller’ (1879), ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ (1881), and ‘Washington Square’ (1881). By the mid-twentieth century a group of sensitive American critics, particularly F. O. Matthiessen, rediscovered the neglected genius of Henry James.
This American novelist who had more awareness than most of his compeers of the esthetic principles of the novel, drew his inspiration in part from the French realists, Flaubert and Balzac, and in part from the Russians. When he met Turgenev in Paris in 1875 James felt deeply impressed by the Russian’s outlook and later wrote, “Our Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, moralistic, conventional standards were far away from him, and he judged things with a freedom and spontaneity in which I found a perpetual refreshment.” To him Tolstoy’s art was perfection itself in its depiction of the inner life. “The perusal of Tolstoy -- a wonderful mass of life,” he wrote, “is an immense event, a kind of splendid accident, for each of us.” He, too, aimed at the realism of uncovering the human soul rather than at the embellishments and tricks of plot structure.
This is where we begin to find Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser and others busy changing the novel into something more raw and exposed -- not just of society but of the inner life of average people. And what a treat it was for me to have this analysis of authors, many of whom I had not previously been exposed to.
Frank Norris continued the vogue of naturalism, being won to Zola and Flaubert after a romantic enthusiasm for Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling that he never quite discarded. As the son of a wealthy man, he had been reared in comfortable San Francisco society, attended a fashionable preparatory school, and studied art in Paris. He acquired a lasting interest in Darwinism while attending the lectures on evolution of Professor Joseph Le Conte at the University of California. At the same time he fell in love with Emile Zola. He took this naturalist as a model for an ambitious trilogy on the story of American society, an epic of wheat, ‘The Pit,’ ‘The Octopus,’ and another volume that he did not complete before his death in 1902. ‘The Pit’ centered upon Chicago’s wheat speculators and their rout by circumstances. ‘The Octopus’ dealt with the California wheat raisers who fought against exploitation by the railroads, but Norris allowed his naturalist creed to overcome his sense of injustice by explaining the railroad executives, too, as a product of impersonal forces of “supply and demand” rather than as deliberate instigators of evil. The central idea of the trilogy was deterministic. “Men were naught, life was naught, force only existed.” Still, Norris was too much the optimistic disciple of Spencer to give up a fervent belief in the “law” of progress and ultimate justice. Even Zola, the champion of Dreyfus, had held similar beliefs. These naturalists were still romantics at heart.
This one sounds like a must-get, especially after my slog through Atlas Shrugged, in which the villains were painted as cartoonishly evil, rather than as subjects of the same natural forces that drove the heroes.
There was even more of Zola, especially of his theme of human degeneration and primitivism, in Norris’ strongly naturalistic novel, ‘McTeague’ (1899). This is the story of a brutish, lustful San Francisco dentist who acquires his degenerate qualities from an alcoholic father. McTeague marries an avaricious woman whose increasing niggardliness provokes repeated quarrels and finally her murder. His utter degeneration and death follow. This novel dealt with two naturalistic qualities, the determinism of heredity (rather than environment) and the primitive instincts of the brute. More of Norris’ primitivism, in a very direct form, appeared in his posthumous novel, ‘Vandover and the Brute,’ in which the central figure degenerates into an animal-like creature.
The Lost Generation
And things seem to get even bleaker from there.
Another significant Illinoian of the Lost Generation was John Dos Passos. Once a Harvard aesthete who dabbled in radical causes, he had now seen the brutalities and meaninglessness of war. His ‘Three Soldiers’ (1921) was an antimilitarist novel which showed the rapid disillusionment of enthusiastic recruits and tried to explain the conflagration as a conspiracy of Wall Street and the munitions makers. During the radical immediate postwar years, Dos Passos held Marxist ideas, took part in a violent Kentucky coal miners’ strike, and even went to jail for demonstrating in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. By 1925, when his successful novel, ‘Manhattan Transfer,’ appeared, he showed little of this radical note. Now he seemed overwhelmed by the futility of life in an American metropolis, when idealism and meaning had departed. His rather effective kaleidoscopic handling of men and events enhanced his pessimistic theme although these techniques annoyed Irving Babbitt and the academicians.
This is the period in which we’ll find H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis and, interestingly, a trio of important female writers.
Less given to the naturalist or journalist themes of Mencken and Lewis were three remarkable women who clung to older realism and literary craftsmanship. Edith Wharton of New York City, Ellen Glasgow of Richmond, and Willa Cather, who had left Virginia as a child for Nebraska, rejected Freud, Nietzsche, James Joyce, and the Lost Generation. Naturalistic critics suspected that Edith Wharton was too genteel for their company, but those who appreciated the delicacy and objectivity of Henry James easily enjoyed the carefully constructed and realistic novels of Mrs. Wharton. In 1911 she had pictured the rural decay and frustrations in an absorbing novelette of rural Massachusetts, ‘Ethan Frome.’ and had shown herself a master of psychological insight and tragedy. Among her substantial novels, ‘The Age of Innocence’ (1920) stood out for its close-knit tale of New York middle-class life in the 1870’s. Stubbornly she resisted the amoral naturalists and their contrived camera-eye techniques and yet discerning critics were to praise her for decades.
Is that yet another PhD thesis I hear beckoning me? Naturalistic Men and Realistic Women: The Conflicting Novel Traditions in 1920s America? Oh, please don’t tempt me. To be fair, I have read The Age of Innocence (I think it was assigned in high school or college) but the rest of Wharton’s work is unknown to me. As is Ellen Glasgow.
Ellen Glasgow fulfilled her prewar promise of honest realism and continued to tell the changing story of the post-bellum South without sentimentality. Though her view of rural decay was not the same as the personal degeneracy suggested in Edith Wharton’s ‘Ethan Frome,’ she too understood these problems in tracing the fortunes of Virginia’s small farmers, as in ‘Barren Ground’ (1925), one of her best novels. In ‘The Romantic Comedians’ (1925) she dealt critically with the hedonism of the postwar era. Like the younger Southern writers, she felt disturbed by the exploitative new capitalism, the materialistic city, the soulless machine, and the decline of ethics and taste.
Funny how Glasgow shows up in two distinct eras. The third female mentioned, Willa Cather, would have to be left off my syllabus, as I think I’ve read just about everything she’s written. Maybe, instead, to cap off this last section of the course, I should focus on a short story writer?
While short-story readers liked the new de luxe reprints of the cheerful O. Henry stories with their trick endings and sentimentality, the more discriminating turned to such gifted naturalists as Sherwood Anderson of Ohio, who gave up his paint factory and home to begin a literary career. Like Sinclair Lewis, he had been raised in a small town and had rebelled against its smugness and hypocrisy. He read Freud avidly and looked upon life in the psychoanalytic terms of repression, psychoses, and frustrations, with sex motivations most evident. This technique made his sketches in ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ (1919) acridly bitter, though tinged with pity. The characters are almost Dostoevskian in their revealing introspective qualities. There is the frustrated village boy who angrily strikes the sophisticated town reporter whom he actually admires and would like as a friend. A gentle German Schoolmaster is falsely charged by a thick-witted boy with being a sex pervert and is brutally beaten and kicked by a saloonkeeper, narrowly escaping a lynching mob. Winesburg has its peeping Tom minister and a variety of suppressed, embittered, and lonely neurotics. Throughout, Sherwood Anderson implied that the ugliness of the small town was not so different from other phases of a standardized mammonistic civilization. Men’s creative impulses were thwarted by the pressures for social conformity and they reacted with intellectual dishonesty. In his popular novel ‘Dark Laughter’ (1925), Anderson contrasted the puritanical guilt-laden frustrations of middle-class whites with the joyous hedonism of New Orleans Negroes.
This naturalism, or literary realism, is leading us somewhere. Not just painting the roughness of the scene, but also shining the light of propaganda on it.
Social Consciousness and Environmentalism
Aside from the pulp writers who offered the usual sugar-coated fiction of escapism regardless of the depression, the serious novelists reflected a militant social consciousness. The literature of social protest had its historic roots in the Progressive era of Theodore Roosevelt and even much earlier. Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel ‘The Jungle’ concerning meat-packing conditions in Chicago had aroused Americans to take pioneer steps toward consumer protection, and was now busily running as a radical Democrat rather than as a Socialist for governor of California in 1934 on his EPIC plan (End Poverty in California). But after defeat he published the highly successful and well-written Lanny Budd novels with their historical background of twentieth century America, the stock market crash, the Nazi concentration camps, the Spanish Civil War, and the dream of internationalism and world peace. Few novelists actually studied or mastered Marxism and it was obvious that the American “proletarian’ Novel fell far short of the approved Soviet models. Behind the candid camera realism of the thirties lurked the idealism and nostalgia of an earlier optimistic America. Usually there was no summons to the barricades, only a fervent and sometimes angry plea to build a just social order but within the traditional framework.
Again, this one may violate my own rule, since I have read The Jungle, but the Lanny Budd series seems difficult to pass up. But here’s another that completely passes the test, since I have never even heard of this author.
The agrarian regionalist tendency toward merciless self-criticism had its counterpart in the urban novelists and playwrights who lashed out at the slums. These city writers also stressed the naturalistic theme of human degradation. James T. Farrell of Chicago, who knew the South Side slums and the underprivileged Irish-American youth at first hand, easily matched the hard-boiled naturalism of the Southern writers in depicting degeneracy, predatory sex exploits, and sodden sensibilities. His semiauthobiographical trilogy, ‘Studs Lonigan,’ traced the brutalizing life of a youth and his friends through its inevitable course of cruel frustration and defeat. Studs and his gang of cynical ruffians are beaten adolescents, succumbing to a realization of failure, disease, and hopelessness. Like Zola, Farrell planned a series of novels to describe microscopically the decay of a group beneath the pressure of the environment. He had learned much in technique from Dostoevski, Flaubert, and James Joyce and reached a substantial following in Europe as well as in the United States.
Here the syllabus would have to end, as Wish has provided me with no more fodder for it. But there is yet a third joy I stumbled across in reading this history.
Links to Other Social Histories
And finally, realizing how much I enjoyed this social history, I really appreciated the references to other works of the same type, all of which I plan to add to my reading list. These include:
- Adams, Henry - History of the United States During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, Nine Volumes (1889-91)
- Lippmann, Walter - Public Opinion (1922)
- Lynd, Robert S. & Helen - Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (1929)
- Parrington, Vernon Louis - Main Currents in American Thought, Three Volumes (1927-30)
- Richards, Ivor A. - The Meaning of Meaning (1923)
- Roosevelt, Theodore - The Winning of the West, Four Volumes (1889-96)
- Sumner, William Graham - Folkways: A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals (1906)
- Trilling, Lionel - The Liberal Imagination (1950)
+ + +
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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