Читать книгу The Revolt Against the Masses - Fred Siegel - Страница 10
ОглавлениеModern liberalism has often been defined as the experimental method applied to politics and as the mentality that insists that culture, not nature, puts the future of humanity in its own hands. In terms of American history, modern liberalism is conventionally presented as an adaptation of nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberal individualism to the growth of big business, and as an updated expression of Jacksonian animus to vested interests. There is something substantial in all of these definitions, but, even taken together, they leave out a great deal.
American liberals don’t like to compare themselves with other twentieth-century ideologues. But, like all the ideologies that emerged in the early twentieth century—from communism and fascism to socialism, social democracy, and its first cousin, British Fabianism—liberalism was created by intellectuals and writers who were rebelling against the failings of the rising middle class. They had a quarrel with the industry, immigration, and economic growth that produced unprecedented prosperity in the United States. They recoiled at what they saw as the ugly bustling cacophony of the urban masses loudly staking their claim to capitalism’s bounty.
In America, the founding fathers of liberalism emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, looking both backward to the more orderly virtues of pre-industrial society and forward to the promise of a future that would use science to transcend the crass culture created by a largely unregulated capitalism. At a time when millions were reaping the benefits of a stunning array of new inventions—the telephone, motion pictures, the washing machine, the gramophone—America seemed ripe for reshaping. Autos, airplanes, and radios were altering received notions of time and space. On the one hand, we were reveling in the new: the most dynamic economy in the world that was generating vast national oligopolies. On the other, we were mired in the old: a provincial political culture rooted in practices that had taken hold well before the Civil War. The disparity was striking.
The politics of the countryside were organized around courthouse cliques pursuing petty preferences and ethnic squabbles, while urban centers were ravished by the “pigs at the trough” character of the big-city political machines, which replaced the rule of law with the politics of patronage. By European standards, there was no central government in America to speak of. Most social and economic policy originated in the states, where the political parties (organized around ethnic, cultural, and regional issues) dominated government. Nationally, the president spent as much time on patronage as policy, and he competed with Congress for control of the departments of the Treasury, Agriculture, and the Interior. Far from regal, presidents in this era were known to answer the White House doorbell. Shortly after the famed British author H.G. Wells visited the U.S. in 1905, he described the American federal government as “marooned, twisted up into knots, bound with safeguards, and altogether impotently stranded.”
In the aftermath of the Civil War, anti-slavery journalists and intellectuals felt besmirched by the “great barbecue” of getting and spending unleashed by the breakneck expansion of the economy. James Russell Lowell’s 1876 “Ode for the Fourth of July” captured the sense of displacement:
And if the nobler passions wane,
Distorted to base use, if the near goal
Of insubstantial gain
Tempt from the proper race-course of the soul…
Is this the country we dreamed in youth,
Where wisdom and not numbers should have weight…?
E.L. Godkin, the founding editor of The Nation and a forerunner of liberalism, similarly complained about ignoble Americans: “A gaudy stream of bespangled, belaced, and beruffled barbarians” were flocking to New York to spend their recently acquired fortunes. “Who knows how to be rich in America?” he asked. “Plenty of people know how to get money; but…to be rich properly is indeed a fine art. It requires culture, imagination, and character.” Godkin and his allies, hoping for leaders of superior intelligence and virtue, looked to Charles Francis Adams Jr. as a possible leader. He was the grandson of president John Adams and the son of President John Quincy Adams, and, like Godkin, he thought that businessmen lacked the temperament to govern; what we needed in office were aristocrats like him.
It was Charles Francis Adams’s brother Henry who, through his book The Education of Henry Adams (first published privately in 1907), became an inspiration to liberals. The Education described Henry Adams’s disappointment with an American society that did not pay him due deference. Adams’s disaffection created the model for much of what became left-wing intellectual life. Adams turned his sour complaints of being bypassed and his sense of himself as a failure into a judgment against the American people. The hustle and bustle of American life were so dismaying to him that he once said he “should have been a Marxist.”
“To the gradually cohering body of dissenters from the orthodoxies of American life,” explained Lionel Trilling, “The Education of Henry Adams was a sacred book . . . despite, or because of, its hieratic esoteric irony and its reiterated note of patrician condescension.” Henry Adams grounded the intellectual’s alienation from American life in the resentment that superior men feel when they are insufficiently appreciated in America’s common-man culture. Adams’s disdain for the modern and the mechanical and his distrust of the ideal of progress would become leitmotifs of American liberalism and important elements of the environmental movement. Reissued, The Education of Henry Adams won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. In the wake of WWI, the book was read as prophecy that had foretold the damage done by democracy in the Great War.
Adams resented the new men—the economists, physicians, and chemists whose science-based authority had displaced literary men such as himself. H.G. Wells and the American architecture critic Herbert Croly, two of modern liberalism’s founders, shared Adams’s anti-capitalist sentiments. But Wells and Croly argued in their seminal works that the very experts Adams had despised had a crucial role to play: They could help displace the freewheeling capitalism the literary elites scorned.
H.G. Wells is today best remembered as the author of such late-nineteenth-century best-selling socio-scientific fantasies as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man, all still read today, if only as entertainment or fodder for Hollywood scripts. But he was much more than a fantasist. At the turn of the twentieth century, Wells set forth the two central tropes of liberalism: a sense of superiority and a claim on the future. Liberals thought themselves smarter than other people because they had seen through the supposed Victorian verities to a future not yet born.
“Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation,” George Orwell explained in 1941. “There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined.”
Wells’s 1901 nonfiction book Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought was credited with “the discovery of the future.” He described the book as the “keystone to the main arch of my work.” His programs for deploying scientific remedies to cure social diseases turned the already esteemed author into a social and political seer in England and also in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in The North American Review.
The story of the shift from the “old” nineteenth-century Victorian liberalism of laissez-faire to the “new liberalism” that is the modern statist variety has almost exclusively focused on how the growth of giant industries undercut the old assumptions about individual sovereignty. But there was a parallel shift induced by the concussive intellectual impact of Darwinism. Darwin’s location of human origins in the natural world rather than the spiritual realm begged for prophets of a secular humanity. Wells, who more than any other intellectual understood both shifts, saw himself and was seen by his devotees as just such a prophet.
Anticipations seemed to endow the author with omniscience and made Wells an intellectual hero for reform-minded writers anxious to break with what they saw as the stale orthodoxies of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism, with its business-centered morality and embrace of democracy. “The book,” Wells explained, “was designed to undermine and destroy…monogamy, faith in God & respectability, all under the guise of a speculation about motor cars and electrical heating.” For many young American intellectuals, Wells’s writings were a passport out of provincialism.
Looking back on the century of material and mechanical progress that had just passed, numerous fin de siècle writers commented on both its achievements and its running sore, the seemingly permanent immiseration of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead and asserted that there was as much a pattern to the future as there was to the past. He not only argued inductively about the likely nature of what was to come based on the way the telephone and telegraph and railroad had shrunk the world, but he also conjured up a dramatic cast of characters. His account was peopled with those he loathed, such as the idle, parasitic rich and the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” whom he described as “the people of the abyss.” He similarly despised the yapping politicians and yellow journalists who were, in his view, instruments of patriotism and war.
But if these were the people who were leading the world on the path to hell, there were also the redeemers, the “New Republicans,” “the capable men” of vision who might own the future. These scientist-poets and engineers could, he thought, seize the reins in the Darwinian struggle; rather than descending into savagery, we would follow their lead toward a new and higher ground. They were the heroes of the drama. “Written in the language of sociology,” explain his biographers Norman and Jeanne McKenzie, his fictions were morality plays about the Last Judgment. If the redeemers, the anti-global-warming crusaders of their day, were rejected, then civilization would perish.
For the randy Wells, the choice was clear. On one hand, he could join the ranks of the new men of science—who aimed to discard Anglo-American family mores and replace the politicians—and freely pursue a richly textured life. On the other hand, if he adhered to stale Victorian morality, his life would be one of bleakly conventional routines. Compared with the “normal, ordinary world which is on the whole satisfied with itself” and that encompasses “the great mass of men,” he wrote, “there is the ever advancing better world, pushing through this outworn husk in the minds and wills of creative humanity.” This was the difference between the bovine “Normal Life” of workers, clerks, and small businessmen and the “Great State” led by the creative class. The conflicts between these classes were “not economic but psychological,” he said. The advent of the machine created the possibility of what he called, anticipating Herbert Marcuse, “surplus life.” It was a realm of expanded imagination available to those who eschewed “the normal scheme” and engaged in what John Stuart Mill had portrayed as “life experiments.”
Wells gave an account of his first trip to these shores, in 1906, in The Future in America, which was serialized in U.S. and British magazines. In it, we see that Wells was heartened by the absence of a traditional aristocracy in America but also chagrined that Americans lagged in creating a new aristocratic class of scientists and intellectuals, who were the key to a shining future. “All Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one sort or another,” he wrote. “The American community…does not correspond to an entire European community at all, but only to the middle masses of it—to the trading and manufacturing class between the dimensions of the magnate and the clerk and the skilled artisan. It is the central part of the European organism without either the dreaming head or the subjugated feet.” In England, he noted approvingly, modern men of money “had become part of a responsible ruling class.” But the absence of an aristocracy in the U.S. had a debilitating underside because it left the country without the sense of “state responsibility,” which was needed “to give significance to the whole.” The typical American “has no sense of the state,” Wells complained. “He has no perception that his business activities, his private employments, are constituents in a larger collective process.”
Wells was appalled by the decentralized nature of America’s locally oriented party and country-courthouse politics. He was aghast at the flamboyantly corrupt political machines of the big cities, unchecked by a gentry that might uphold civilized standards. He thought American democracy went too far in providing leeway to the poltroons who ran the political machines and the “fools” who supported them. The “immigrants are being given votes,” but “that does not free them, it only enslaves the country,” he said. In the North, he complained, even “the negroes were given votes.” This was no small matter for Wells, because as an Englishman he saw his country’s path as thoroughly intertwined with America’s. “One cannot look ten years ahead in England, without glancing across the Atlantic,” he wrote in The Future in America. “Our future is extraordinarily bound up in America’s, and in a sense dependent on it.” Not that he embraced it: “I would as soon go to live in a pen in a stockyard as into American politics,” he wrote.
The federal government in Washington, suffering from “state blindness,” from “a want of concentration,” sent Wells into further hyperbole. “The place seems to me to reflect…that dispersal of power, the evasion of simple conclusiveness” produced by “a legislature that fails to legislate, a government that cannot govern.” Demonstrating his limited knowledge of European governments, he rated the American government as the bottom of the barrel: “Congress as it is constituted at present is the feeblest, least accessible, and most inefficient central government of any civilized nation in the world West of Russia.”
At a time when “collectivism” and “individualism” were new words that reflected the twin challenge to the Victorian ideal of laissez-faire government, Wells saw the absence of an American collective will as the nation’s greatest weakness. “The greatest work which the coming century has to do…is to build up an aristocracy of thought and feeling which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of mercantilism” and its allies “materialism and Philistinism.” Wells had discarded the Calvinism of his youth but clung fondly to its concept of a deserving elect.
Limning what would become modern American liberalism, Wells saw three social streams that might converge to form the headwaters of the great river of statism. Speaking of “salvation by schools,” he was greatly encouraged by the growth of scientific and professional knowledge in American academia, which was well ahead of its English counterpart that was still struggling, in his view, to shake off the cobwebs of classical learning. Like his teacher Thomas Huxley, who had become famous as “Darwin’s bulldog,” Wells believed that only the intelligentsia could save industrial civilization from self-destruction. Presciently, Wells told his readers, “I write of the universities as the central intellectual organ of a modern state.”
Wells was also inspired by the early-twentieth-century muckrakers who, with their allies in the Progressive movement, led a sharp shift away from America’s ethnic and regional politics. The muckrakers challenged the traditional American sense of certainty and self-satisfaction. Aided by the growth of the penny newspapers and monthly ten-cent magazines, such as those that serialized Wells’s novels, the muckrakers’ assault on the great monopolies and political machines helped create an increasingly national political identity. “The Americans,” Wells wrote, “have become suddenly self-critical, are hot with an unwonted fever for reform and constructive effort.” Can-do commercialism, he argued, was “crushing and maiming a great multitude of souls.” Progressivism, or what Wells innocently called “the revolt of the competent,” pointed to the creation of a Wellsian managerial elite similar to the “voluntary nobility” he idealized as samurai in his 1905 dialogue novel, A Modern Utopia.
In the course of Wells’s 1906 visit to the U.S., Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens befriended him. He became part of their world, and it was Steffens who arranged Wells’s first visit to the White House. And though they disagreed on some scores, Wells placed his greatest hopes in the person of President Theodore Roosevelt.
TR, an avid reader, was delighted to sit down at the White House and talk for hours with Wells, who was already an international celebrity at age thirty-nine. Like Wells and Charles Francis Adams Jr., Roosevelt (the warrior President made famous by his role as the leader of the Rough Riders in the Spanish–American War) thought businessmen incapable of political leadership. The president saw them as having the “ideals of pawnbrokers.”
Roosevelt recognized that the confluence of rapid industrialization and high levels of immigration had exacerbated class divisions in America, but he felt that class barriers could be overcome. The eugenically minded Wells, who compared mass immigration to the earlier slave trade, was doubtful. “In the ‘colored population,’ America has already ten million descendants of unassimilated and perhaps unassimilable labor immigrants,” he wrote. “These people are not only half civilized and ignorant, but they have infected the white population with a kindred ignorance.” Roosevelt had read The Time Machine, and he rightly saw it as an anticipation of deepened class divisions hardened over time into an overworld and an underworld; he disagreed with Wells’s pessimism. Discussing the significance of The Time Machine, Roosevelt became “gesticulatory,” his voice “straining.” Roosevelt, as Wells recalled it, considered Wells’s notion that “America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all mankind must culminate and pass” one day: “ ‘Suppose after all,’ [TR] said slowly, ‘that it should prove to be right, and it all ends in butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The [reform] effort’s real. It’s worth going on with it. It’s worth it—even then.’”
“My hero in the confused drama of human life is intelligence; intelligence inspired by constructive passion,” Wells wrote in The Future in America. “There is a demigod imprisoned in mankind.” Three years before Herbert Croly’s pathbreaking book The Promise of American Life, in which Croly offered Roosevelt as the embodiment of a new liberal politics, Wells presented TR as a demigod incarnate, the very symbol of “the creative will in man.” “His range of reading is amazing, and he has receptivity to the pitch of genius,” Wells wrote of Roosevelt. Here was the man of the future—“traditions have no hold on him”—the very model of the philosopher-samurai, seemingly stepped out of one of his own novels. “I know of no other a tithe [tenth] so representative of the creative purpose, the goodwill in men as he.”
The American thinkers who did the most to carve out the enduring assumptions and mental gestures that streamed into liberalism as an ideology were Herbert Croly, editor and co-founder of The New Republic, and Randolph Bourne, a spirited young prophet full of righteous anger. Croly had a slow-fire political piety, and Bourne a tendency to not so much live as burn intensely, but both argued eloquently in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and H.G. Wells for a secular priesthood that could Europeanize America. Their legacy not only endured; it thrives down to the present.
Herbert Croly, whose 1909 book The Promise of American Life was the first political manifesto of modern American liberalism, was admired by both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. His approach to liberalism, as his economically oriented colleague George Soule explained, was “more fundamental” than that of others who, like Croly, wanted to reshape public institutions. What Croly wanted was to remake American life “for the purpose of liberating a large quantity and higher quality of American manhood and womanhood,” Soule wrote. “What was important was the process of liberation of the personality, not mere achievement of honest city government, regulation of monopolies, or better conditions for labor.”
Croly and Bourne hoped for a re-founded regime that would break with the “monarchism” of a totemic Constitution. “Disinterested” intellectuals, as well as poet-leaders, experts, and social scientists such as themselves would lead the new regime. They saw such men and women as possessing a third eye that allowed them to see not only more of the world but also the world in its proper perspective. And if their talents were not to be wasted or frustrated, it was imperative to constrain the conventional and often corrupt politics of middle-class capitalists so that these far-seeing leaders might obtain the recognition and power that was their due.
Croly had little use for Hamilton’s ideal of a commercial republic and even less for Jefferson’s yeoman individualists; they were the bêtes noires of his philosophy. “To achieve a better future,” he argued, Americans had to be “emancipate[d] from their past.” He rejected American tradition, with its faith in the Constitution and its politics of parties and courts, and argued for rebuilding America’s foundation on higher spiritual and political principles that would transcend traditional ideas of democracy and self-government. Like Wells, Croly called for centralized power that might be, he acknowledged, “injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy.” But this was no great loss, because “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conceptions of his responsibilities as a democrat.” The “erroneous and misleading” democratic tradition, he concluded, “must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy” remodeled along French lines
Croly had studied in Paris and had “an addiction to French political philosophy,” in the words of his friend, the literary critic Edmund Wilson. Croly, said Wilson, “considered his culture mainly French.” Croly’s aim was to restructure the Republic on a Francophile footing. His argument in The Promise of American Life and its successor, Progressive Democracy (1915), two books so tightly connected that Croly said he wished he had written them as one, is best described as a plan for achieving (Auguste) Comtian ends—that is, the worship of society—by Rousseauian means, i.e., a plebiscitary democracy led by enlightened experts. As Croly himself explained it, he was “applying ideas, long familiar to foreign political thinkers, to the subject matter of American life.”
If liberals have a hard time understanding their own history, it’s at least in part because they’ve so successfully avoided dealing with Herbert Croly—who he was and what he hoped to achieve. Croly’s moralistic streak led his detractors to describe him as “Crolier than thou,” but his was an unconventional kind of morality. He was born in 1869 to David Croly and Jane Cunningham Croly, both successful New York journalists. David Croly, a sexual reformer who believed that copulatory repression bred social disorder, was a founding member of the Church of Humanity, an institution dedicated to propagating the ideas of the French sociologist Auguste Comte. David Croly’s wife, known professionally as “Jennie June,” was a caustic critic of marriage and a leading feminist writer. Their son was among the first in America to be baptized into the Comtian faith. Comte, a utopian socialist of sorts, attributed the troubles of the modern world to the “spiritual disorganization of society.” He wanted to deploy positivist science to restore the unity lost in the Protestant Reformation, and thus create a modern version of the “moral communism of medieval Christendom.”
The young Herbert Croly was raised to be a prodigy, but he developed slowly. He left Harvard before graduating and went to work for the Architectural Record, during which time he wrote Stately Homes in America from Colonial Times to the Present Day. At the age of forty, he took the underlying themes of his architectural writing, the tension between the artist and the marketplace, and translated them into politics, in The Promise of American Life. The book sold poorly but propelled him onto the national stage, where he drew the interest of former president Theodore Roosevelt. Croly would influence TR, just as TR, whom Croly saw as an American Bismarck, had already influenced him.
Bismarck was much on Croly’s mind. In The Promise, Croly, like John Stuart Mill, showed nothing but contempt for English liberalism. He saw it leading to “economic individualism . . . faith in compromise . . . [and a] dread of ideas.” These had, he wrote, made “the English system a hopelessly confused bundle of semi-efficiency and semi-inefficiency.” Croly much preferred the greater efficiency and, as he saw it, the greater equality of Germany, where “little by little the fertile seed of Bismarck’s Prussian patriotism grew into a semi-democratic nationalism.” Its great virtue was organization: “In every direction, German activity was organized and placed under skilled professional leadership, while…each of these special lines of work was subordinated to its particular place in a comprehensive scheme of national economy. … The German national organization means increased security, happiness and opportunity of development for the whole German people.”
Liberals came to accept as a given Croly’s insistence that, in America, the German path could be achieved only by using higher education to create the “skilled professional leadership” necessary to run society. Entrusting public affairs to this educated class would, Croly believed, have “a leavening effect on human nature.” “Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility,” he said. These were the words of a radical, not a reformer—a man who, like Marx and Comte, saw himself as leading humanity to a higher and more refined stage of civilization.
For Croly, businessmen and their allies—the jack-of-all-trades latter-day Jeffersonians—were blocking the path to the bright future he envisioned for the specialists of the rising professional classes. America’s business culture, he warned, threatened individuality, because businessmen “have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike,” despite their differences. “Their individualities are forced into a common mold because the ultimate measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash. … In so far as the economic motive prevails, individuality is not developed; it is stifled.”
The flip side of Croly’s hostility to self-interested businessmen was his adoration of the new class of American intellectuals and artists. This class had the virtue, he said, of having a “disinterested” take on public affairs, which allowed it to rise above the petty peculiarities of the marketplace and serve all of humanity, in the manner of Plato’s guardians. Unfortunately, “the popular interest in Higher Education has not served to make Americans attach much importance to the advice of the highly educated man,” Croly lamented. “He is less of a practical power in the U.S. than he is in any European country.” Like H.G. Wells in England, Mussolini in Italy, and Lenin in Russia, Croly wanted the collective power of society put “at the service of its ablest members,” who would take the lead roles in the drama of social re-creation.
Croly’s Progressive-era audience was stirred by his insistence that the “ablest” deserved a more interesting world. “The opportunities, which during the past few years the reformers have enjoyed to make their personal lives more interesting, would be nothing compared to the opportunities for all sorts of stirring and responsible work, which would be demanded of individuals under the proposed plan for political and economic reorganization,” he wrote in The Promise.
Croly concludes The Promise with the insistence that “the common citizen can become something of a saint and something of a hero, not by growing to heroic portions in his own person, but by the sincere and enthusiastic imitation of heroes and saints.” This will depend, he argued in the book’s final sentence, on “the ability of his exceptional fellow-countrymen to offer him acceptable examples of heroism and saintliness.” Croly’s critique of industrial-era inequality had by its conclusion become a call for, in his own words, the “creation of a political, economic, and social aristocracy.”
In recent years, the terms “progressive” and “liberal” have become interchangeable. But while the Progressives and the founding fathers of liberalism shared a hostility to various groups—big-city political bosses, the immigrant masses, pharisaical plutocrats, and laggard legislatures—their sensibilities were fundamentally at odds. Wells and Croly sought transcendence; they looked to the creation of a new elite, a separate caste with the wisdom to lead society to social salvation by breaking with the conventions of middle-class Victorian morality. Progressivism, which embraced a conventional morality, sought social control over the unruly passions. It was a largely middle-class Protestant movement that wanted to outlaw alcohol, gambling, and prostitution. Broadly speaking, Progressives hoped to tame the big corporations and big-city political machines so as to restore the traditional promise of American life. The Progressives who were important in both the Republican and Democratic Parties were in the business of “moral uplift.” They had no use for the saloon, sexuality, or socialism. In the words of President Theodore Roosevelt, they wanted to curb the power of big business so that the “worthy man” had the “chance to show the worth that is in him.” Influenced by the social gospel, they aimed to diminish class divisions by outlawing child labor and instituting an income tax. They wanted to build what philosopher William James described as a “middle-class paradise.”
After the 1912 election, the Progressives, led by a segregationist, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, placed their faith in pragmatic reason and the better natures of the American people. Expanded government, even if it skirted the limits of constitutionally permitted powers, they insisted, would serve as an efficacious engine of popular goodwill that could soften the harsh rigors of industrial capitalism. After the unfortunate interregnum of the 1920s, so the story goes, Progressivism, faced with the Great Depression, matured into the full-blown liberalism of the New Deal.
But that is not what happened. The first articulation of what we would today recognize as modern liberalism was shaped by the lyrical left of pre-WWI Greenwich Village and also by the split within the Progressive movement between those who supported American involvement in WWI and the philo-German opponents of the war.
For the Greenwich Villagers of 1915, H.G. Wells was a seer. The influential literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, who coined the terms “highbrow,” “lowbrow,” and “middlebrow” to demarcate the levels of taste in American life, was the first American to write a book on Wells. “Without doubt,” wrote Brooks, “Wells has altered the air we breathe and made a conscious fact in many minds the excellence that resides in certain kinds of men and modes of living and odiousness that resides in others.” Hope for the Wellsian future, Brooks argued, was to found in “the rudiments of a socialist state,” which he located “in the Rockefeller Institute, the Carnegie and Russell Sage Foundations, the endowed universities and bureaus of research, and in the type of men they breed.”
Village rebel Floyd Dell similarly found Wells to be a spiritual and political guide to the future. For Dell, Wells was a revelation:
And suddenly there came into our minds the magnificent and well-nigh incredible conception of Change. … gigantic, miraculous change, an overwhelming of the old in ruin and an emergence of the new. Into our eternal and changeless world came H.G. Wells prophesying its ending, and the kingdom of heaven come on earth; the heavens shall be rolled up like a scroll, and all the familiar things of earth pass away utterly—so he seemed to cry out to our astounded ears.
Alongside Wells there arose Randolph Bourne, the first prophet of what in the 1960s would be called youth culture. Bourne came of age in the Greenwich Village of the pre-WWI years when the lyrical left was besotted with utopian ideas of a new revolutionary culture that would break down the barriers between art and politics. Bourne’s “political discussions were actually lit by a spiritual viewpoint,” explained his friend and fellow mystic Waldo Frank. “They took into account the content of the human soul, the individual souls, the values of being.”
Bourne’s premature death in 1918 from influenza at age thirty-two came as he reached the height of his fame. His scathing attacks on “Mr. Wilson’s War” had already secured his political immortality. Bourne’s anti-war writing would be repeatedly revived, first in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and again with tremendous force in the Vietnam War era; most recently he’s been recast in the light of Foucault and postmodernism as an intellectual pioneer who introduced Nietzschean themes into American intellectual life. But unlike the Bourne of legend, the real man was never persecuted for his anti-war views and in fact was not anti-war as such; rather, in WWI he was anti-American and culturally philo-German. It was Bourne who pioneered the use of moral equivalence when, in a defense of Germany, he emphasized the parity between “the horrors of capitalistic peace at home” with the “horrors of war in Belgium.”
Bourne, said his friend and biographer Van Wyck Brooks, wanted to “think emotions” and “feel ideas.” The young prophet of multiculturalism established a number of conceptual tropes that took an unrelenting hold among liberals. They found in his writings their own irresolvable tensions and anomalies raised to a literary level.
Bourne was the ideologist of Youth, always with the capital Y, as source of wisdom. He asserted, by way of Nietzsche, that the older generation’s puritanical calls for service and selflessness were in fact either empty rhetoric or a veiled version of selfishness in which good deeds were merely the basis for boasting and “the will to power.” In his collection of essay published in 1913 as Youth and Life, he electrified his contemporaries by presenting Youth as an alternative to the Christian virtues. “The world has nothing to lose but its chains—and its own soul to gain,” he wrote. “Youth…has no right to be humble. The ideals it forms will be the highest it will ever have, the insight the clearest, the ideas the most stimulating. . . . Youth’s attitude is really the scientific attitude. . . . Our times give no check to the Radical tendencies of Youth.” The goal of “my religion,” he explained, was “the bringing of a fuller, richer life to more people on this earth. “Perpetual youth” would be “salvation.”
Bourne wanted to enlist “a vast army of young men and women who felt a fluttering in their souls that call them to some great impersonal adventure.” He envisioned a modernized version of the Catholic priest, “a new type of teacher-engineer-community worker,” who could aestheticize society and redeem slovenly America. “I begin to wonder whether there aren’t advantages in having administration of the State taken care of by a scientific body of men with a social sense, or perhaps an aesthetic-scientific idea of a desirable urban life,” he wrote. “There really may be something in the German claim that this liberates energies for real freedom of thought.”
His other cat’s-paw was what he saw as the pre-modern energies of the new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe not yet corrupted by capitalist modernity. He called for them to create a “Trans-National America”—in effect, to practice multiculturalism avant la lettre in order to free the country from the shackles of puritanical Protestant culture. In its place, he hoped for a “beloved community” in which the young would replace bourgeois individualism with an organic culture that encouraged people to flourish as individuals and yet absorbed them into a loving whole. Bourne would be read on some of the communes of the 1960s as the prophet of their founding.
Randolph Bourne, the pioneer of generational politics and an aestheticized society, was born in 1866 to a genteel middle-class Presbyterian family of Bloomfield, New Jersey, descended from Protestant ministers and lawyers. He entered the world in literally the worst manner possible, suffering from what he once described as a “terribly messy birth.” Tuberculosis of the spine turned him into a dwarfed hunchback. His face was contorted, his ear misshapen, his breathing difficult and audible.
Yet he made his mark as a student at Columbia, where he studied with John Dewey, Franz Boas, and Charles Beard and was seen by his fellow students as already the equal of these giants. As an undergraduate, he published in The Atlantic and would soon become a staff writer at Croly’s New Republic. He shared Croly’s hopes for improving America’s tastes by reshaping individual Americans in the collective image created by a great national project. Writing in a utopian vein similar to Croly’s, Bourne explained:
What the primitive man had easily, through the compactness of his society, and what every compact groups gets easily—the exaltation of the individual by concerted social expression of the common desires, ideas and ideals—we are reaching out for with great pain and striving . . . we are feeling for a complete social consciousness which must eventually raise the whole world to a kingdom of Heaven.
But while the Kingdom of Heaven was within reach, its prophets were mired in the muck of America, a land of “appalling slovenliness” and “ignorance.” The urban masses, as Bourne saw them, were “without taste, without standards but those of the mob.” The recent immigrants, once exposed to their new country’s commercial culture, became, Bourne argued, “the flotsam and jetsam of American life, the downward undertow of our civilization with its leering cheapness and falseness of taste and spiritual outlook, the absence of mind and sincere feeling we see in our slovenly towns, our vapid moving pictures, our popular novels, and in the vacuous faces of crowds on the city street.”
Bourne, his ideas already well developed, was an important part of New York’s bohemian cultural and literary scene and a spokesman for youth when he won a fellowship in 1913 to tour Europe. Traveling in continental Europe on the eve of World War I, Bourne was awed by “the joyous masses” that have “evolved a folk-culture.” His first stop was England, which “was always exasperating me and shocking my instincts,” he wrote to a friend. With few exceptions, such as the suffragettes and the writings and personality of George Bernard Shaw, England’s commonsense politics repelled him. Already alienated from the middle class of his native Bloomfield, he found in Britain the “hard inhumanity” and “crusted hypocrisy” he associated with Anglophile America.
France and Germany were another matter. Most Americans thought of Europe as old and decadent and America as holding out youthful promise; Bourne reversed those assumptions. “To cross the seas,” he wrote, “and come upon my own enthusiasms and ideals vibrating with so intense a glow seemed an amazing fortune.” He was drawn to unanimisme, a literary movement devoted to unearthing the French folk-consciousness that had been buried in France’s cities. He admired the “group mind” that had been forged in French peasant culture and that resisted American-style modernity. Describing Paris, he said, “I soon felt an intellectual vivacity, a sincerity and candor, a tendency to think emotions and feel ideas that wiped out those facetiousnesses and puzzle-interests and sporting attitudes towards life that so got on one’s nerves in England.” To a friend he wrote, “The irony and vivacity of the French temperament delight me.” Clearly enamored, he believed that, unlike in England, class distinctions barely existed in France.
He found reading Rousseau a revelation. Assessing Rousseau’s arguments about the need for a General Will, Bourne exclaimed: “Yes, that is what I would have felt, done, said! I could not judge him and his work by those standards that the hopelessly moral and complacent English have imposed upon our American mind. It was a sort of moral bath; it cleared up for me a whole new democratic morality, and put the last touch upon the old English way of looking at the world in which I was brought up and which I had such a struggle to get rid of.”
Bourne was also drawn to the French proto-fascist Maurice Barrès, who believed an all-encompassing nationalism should replace bourgeois individuality. In France, “the search for the nationalisme intégral of Barrès, the youth of today, one feels, are seeking the nourishing quality of…the richness of a common culture, which has a right to make traditionalism seem seductive and beautiful.” Writing in The Atlantic in an article titled “Maurice Barrès and the Youth of France,” he found in Barrès “a traditionalism from which all the blind, compressing forces of the social groups have been withdrawn, so that one feels only the nourishing influence of a rich common culture in which our individual souls are steeped.” “This is a gospel to which one could give one’s self with wistfulness and love!” he enthused. Bourne was drawn to Barrès’s evocation of the “ ‘communion of saints’—the ideal collective life where the hunger of ‘moi individuel’ is satisfied by the ‘moi social.’ ” In this glorious France, “the land and its dead” along with its “worshipers” would be “bound together in interwoven links of amitiés, a consciousness of a common background of living truth.”
“The new national consciousness” of Barrès, he argued, was “not a mere chauvinism, but sounds deeper notes of genuine social reform at home.” Bourne—whose most famous and enduring essay, “War Is the Health of the State,” was a denunciation of American involvement in WWI—wholeheartedly approved of French preparations for war with Germany. He saw them as contributing to the health of the French state:
The hard decivilizing life of the caserne [barracks] is accepted . . . as a necessary sacrifice against the threats of the foe to the east. Politically, a restlessness seems to be evident, a discontent with the feebleness and colorlessness of the republican state, and a curious drawing together of the extreme Left and the extreme Right, in an equal hatred . . . of the smug capitalism of the day—a rapprochement for the founding of the Great State, which shall bind the nation together in a sort of imperial democracy, ministering to the needs of the people and raising them to its ideals of splendor, honor, and national defense.
Drawn as he was to France, he found Germany even more captivating. Arriving in Germany just as the Kaiserreich ignited World War I, Bourne was in the Berlin crowd when Wilhelm II, speaking from his balcony, declared war. Bourne was enthralled by an entire nation in Kultural revolt against the values of Anglo-America Zivilization. “German ideals,” he believed, were the only broad and captivating ones for his generation. He was moved by “the feel of their sheer heroic power” compared with the pale fare of the Anglo-Saxon world. “Whatever the outcome of the war,” he insisted, anticipating Charles Lindbergh, “all the opposing countries will be forced to adopt German organization [and] German collectivism.”
Although not drawn to German militarism, he compared Germany very favorably with “shabby and sordid” America and its “frowsy towns.” He found that in Germany “war on squalor and ugliness was being waged on every hand,” because “taste is, after all, the only morality.” Taken by the beauty of German architecture and town planning, he anticipated the arguments made on behalf of the USSR in the 1930s: “The Stadtbaurat [head of municipal planning and building] went over for us the development of the city, and gave us considerable insight into the government, policy and spirit of a typical little German municipality. Undemocratic in political form, yet ultra-democratic in policy and spirit, scientific, impartial, giving the populace—who seemed to have no sense of being excluded from ‘rights’—what they really wanted, far more truly than our democracies seem to be able to secure.”
In America, he felt oppressed by the “blind compressing forces of conventionality” he had experienced in his New Jersey hometown. In America, he wrote, “social pressures warp and conventionalize and harden the personality,” inhibiting truly creative people. American society was “one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue it likes.” He preferred the “spirit” of “the open road, with the spirit always traveling . . . always escaping the pressures that threaten its integrity.”
Bourne occasionally spoke of the open road, which invokes individuality, but he also spoke and wrote often of his hunger to be swept up in something larger than himself, of “vibrating in camaraderie with the beloved society, given new powers, lifted out of himself, transformed through the enriching stimulation of his fellows—the communion of saints—into a new being, spiritual because no longer individual.”
Enthralled by Germany, he bracketed its militarism as being of limited importance; after all, Germany offered its people the possibility of being absorbed into an oceanic spirit of oneness. In 1915, a few months after German submarines sank the Lusitania, a British passenger ship with a large number of Americans on board, Bourne opened an article for The New Republic with the following words: “German ideals are the only broad and seizing ones that have lived in the world in our generation. Mad and barbarous as they must seem to minds accustomed to much thinner and nicer fare, one must have withdrawn far within a provincial Anglo-Saxon shell not to feel the thrill of their sheer heroic power.”
While praising the imposing tastefulness of German sculpture and town planning, with its “clean, massive and soaring lines,” he wrote that “the cosmic heroisms of the German ideal fall . . . strangely on our ears.” “It comes to us as a shock to find a people who believe in national spirits which are heroic, and through the German spirit, in a world-spirit; for the ‘world spirit,’ says one of their professor-warriors, ‘speaks today through Germany.’ ” In fighting Germania, the British and the French, stuck in the aesthetic status quo, were rejecting “the most overwhelming and fecund group of ideas and forms in the modern world, ideas which draw all nations after them in imitation, while the nations pour out their lifeblood to crush the generator.”
Bourne identified deeply with Germany, which he saw as a victim, not unlike himself, of those with inferior taste who were waging war on superior beings. Just as he saw himself as a victim of his traumatic birth and uncomprehending bourgeois family, so Germany in his eyes had become a victim of its troubled origins and philistine neighbors. “It has been the tragedy of the German spirit that [it] has had to dwell in a perverse universe, so that what from within looked always like the most beneficent working-out of a world-idea seemed from without like the very running-amuck of voracious power.” He was taken by the promise of a German victory:
From the prospect of German hegemony, we can at least foreshadow the Pax Romana. With its lulling truce, its shelter for the recuperation of the world, its enforced learning of the ideas of order, neatness, prosperity to which the British and Latin civilizations seem as yet relatively indifferent. A Germanized England or France would be an England or France immensely furbished, immensely modernized. Germanization would be the rough massage that would bring the red blood to the surface and a new glow of health to these two nations.
“The world,” he went on, explaining why taste was morality, “will never be safe until it has learned a high and brave materiality that will demand cleanliness, order, comfort, beauty, and welfare as the indispensable soil in which the virtues of mutual respect, intelligence, and good will may flourish.”
Like his fellow Greenwich Village lyrical leftist Max Eastman, Bourne had little interest in either Germany’s political culture or the conduct of the war. Eastman spoke approvingly of Germany’s “state-socialism attended by paternal discipline,” and he admired the “candor” of Germany’s expression of its war aims, which, he thought, reflected the authenticity of German culture. The German attempts to encourage a Mexican invasion of the United States; German sabotage in America, such as the explosion of Black Tom Island in New York Harbor; and Germany’s pursuit of unrestricted submarine warfare—these were beneath concern for both Eastman and Bourne.
After three years of war, The New Republic reversed course and supported American entry into the conflict, in part on the grounds that American involvement could help stem German militarism and also accelerate domestic reform. The reversal led Bourne to break with Croly and his mentor John Dewey, as well as with Walter Lippmann of The New Republic. In Bourne’s influential essays “War and the Intellectuals” and “War Is the Health of the State,” written in 1917 for Seven Arts, he lamented that the entire pre-war period had been “spiritually wasted.” “The real enemy” he insisted, as he had not when in France and Germany, “was war itself.” He said little of Wilson except to argue cursorily that he could have used American powers to “force a just peace.” And he had few disagreements with Wilson’s war aims except to argue that democracy could have been expanded peacefully.
He decried “a war deliberately made by intellectuals,” referring not to the Nietzschean strand in Germany that he much admired, but to American intellectuals. Equating Germany’s Prussian political life with that of the U.S., he compared pro-war writers at The New Republic to the Prussian general and theorist of war Friedrich von Bernhardi. His old friends at The New Republic had betrayed their calling, he insisted, by bowing before the British like “colonials” in thrall to their masters. Appealing to the instincts of “the herd,” they had incited the “sluggish masses” to go to war. He seems never to have asked why unconventional souls such as Thorsten Veblen, his good friend Van Wyck Brooks, and Upton Sinclair felt sufficiently menaced by Prussian militarism to reluctantly support, as did Wilson, American entry into the war.
When Bourne succumbed to influenza in 1918, he was deeply mourned by his many friends. Brooks remembered his “quick bird like steps and the long, black student’s cape he had brought back with him from Paris.” In his celebrated novel 1919, John Dos Passos wrote that if ever a man had a ghost, it was Bourne: “A tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak hopping along the grimy old brick and brownstone streets still left in downtown New York, crying out in a shrill soundless giggle: War is the health of the state.”
But that wasn’t quite right. The American state shrank rapidly under Wilson’s successor, Republican Warren G. Harding. The new president had the good graces to free Socialist Eugene Debs, whom Woodrow Wilson had jailed for vocally opposing the war. Harding’s slogan was “not nostrums but normality.” The main stem of the GOP, historian Morton Keller writes, “sloughed off its older support for active government and redefined itself as the party of laissez-faire and the old America”
While Bourne was dying, H.L. Mencken, described by the New York Times as “the premier social critic of the first half of the twentieth century,” was coming to fame as a bitter German-American critic of “Mr. Wilson’s War.” At the height of his influence in the 1920s, Mencken’s reputation fattened on the inanities of Prohibition, blue-nosed book-banning, and the Ku Klux Klan, all of which he saw as works of the “boobus Americanus.” His broadsides against Prohibition, posturing preachers, and anti-evolutionists made him a hero to generations of liberals and college students. But his true quarry was American democracy and the American people, whom he defined as a “rabble of ignorant peasants.”
Henry Louis Mencken, born in 1880 to a moderately successful German-American cigar manufacturer, adopted his father’s prejudices. Father and son disdained do-gooders, socialists, and Democrats. Terry Teachout, in his book on Mencken, The Skeptic, quotes Mencken’s description of his father: “All mankind, in his sight, was divided into two great races: those who paid their bills, and those who didn’t. The former were virtuous, despite any evidence that could be adduced to the contrary; the latter were unanimously and incurably scoundrels.” His father’s death freed the young Henry, age eighteen, to become a newspaperman.
A self-educated man, Mencken developed himself by writing books, at the age of twenty-six and twenty-seven, on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, his two chief intellectual influences. His was the first book on Nietzsche published in America. Neither book was successful, but both represented the first flowerings of an audacious talent.
Mencken’s style drew heavily on Shaw, particularly his propensity for “stating the obvious in terms of the scandalous.” Mencken, the confident son of a burgher, was little interested in Shaw’s Fabian Socialism, but he was enthralled by the Irishman’s insistence on “the selective breeding of man.” In his 1903 play Man and Superman, Shaw wrote that “we must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the Commonwealth,” and these words became a signpost of Mencken’s career. In a sense, each writer paved the way for the other. Thanks in part to Mencken, Shaw became a popular playwright in America even before he established himself as a fixture on the London stage. The Devil’s Disciple and Caesar and Cleopatra were first presented in America, not England.
Shaw the transplanted Irishman and Mencken the displaced Deutschlander shared an abiding hatred of Anglo-American culture. And like the Napoleonists (the British radical Whigs who hoped for a Napoleonic victory that could clear out the detritus of the English aristocracy), Mencken and Shaw strongly admired powerful rulers who could defeat democracy in the name of a more orderly and culturally hierarchical set of social arrangements.
The Americans learned from Shaw how to be narrow-minded in a witty, superior way. Shaw pioneered the path whereby an author could simultaneously insult the middle class and yet be embraced by it on the grounds that receptivity to criticism signified someone who was a cut above. Both men mined the ore that was usually the moral strength but sometime the self-defeating vulnerability of Western culture: its capacity for self-criticism.
The content of Mencken’s writings drew on Shaw’s Social Darwinist, Nietzschean, and eugenicist thinking. “Through Shaw,” Mencken later wrote, “ I found my vocation at last.” In the introduction to his essays on Shaw’s plays, Mencken wrote, “Darwin made this war between the faithful and the scoffers the chief concern of the time, and the sham-smashing that is going on might be compared to the crusades that engrossed the world in the middle ages.” And Shaw was “the premier scoffer and dominant heretic of the day,” declared Mencken. For all the differences between the meat-eating, beer-drinking Mencken and the asexual, anti-vaccine, vegetarian teetotaler Shaw, they were both, acknowledged the American, “working the same side of the street.” Both men rose to the height of their influence in the midst of the carnage of World War I. Shaw as a pacifist (for the time being) and Mencken as paladin of free speech became icons of opposition to conventional Anglo-American values.
Mencken had genuine cause for bitterness during World War I, when the excesses of zealous Americanism left him fearful for the safety of his family. But while Mencken was touting the genius of Teutonic militarism, German saboteurs blew up the munitions depot at Black Tom Island off Manhattan. That strike, until 9/11 the most violent action by a hostile force in the history of New York City, caused $20 million (in 1916 dollars) of damage, sinking the peninsula and its contents into the sea. The Kaiser’s plans to invade New York Harbor and his plot to bring Mexico into the war against the United States never came off, but not from a lack of interest.
Mencken’s World War I writings on behalf of imperial Germany have been largely forgotten. Opposed to American intervention on the side of the Allies in the Great War, Mencken had no objection to war per se. Drawing on Nietzsche’s notion of the “will to power,” he wrote: “War is a good thing, because it is honest, it admits the central fact of human nature. . . . A nation too long at peace becomes a sort of gigantic old maid.” What he opposed were British, and then American, efforts at defeating German militarism.
The war, notes Mencken biographer Fred Hobson, “focused his thoughts” and created a clear position. Mencken explained:
I, too, like the leaders of Germany, had grave doubts about democracy. . . . It suddenly dawned on me, somewhat to my surprise, that the whole body of doctrine that I had been preaching was fundamentally anti–Anglo Saxon, and that if I had any spiritual home at all, it must be in the land of my ancestors. When World War I actually started, I began forthwith to whoop for the Kaiser, and I kept up that whooping so long as there was any free speech left.
This wasn’t a brief episode, but the very core of Mencken’s political being. He proudly proclaimed in his columns for the Baltimore Sun papers that in the battle between autocracy and democracy, he wanted to see democracy go down. Mencken was enamored not only of the Kaiser’s autocratic rule but also with “the whole war machine.” He mocked Allied outrage over German killings of Belgian civilians, as well as the sinking of the Lusitania, which brought the death of 124 Americans. Mencken advised Theodore Dreiser, a fellow German American: “There can never be any compromise in future men of German blood and the common run of ‘good,’ ‘right thinking’ Americans. We must stand against them forever, and do what damage we can do to them, and to their tin-pot democracy.”
During the course of the war, he was censored by the Sun papers but wrote three revealing articles for The Atlantic. The first, “The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet,” celebrated Nietzsche as the inspiration for the new Germany, which was “contemptuous of weakness.” Germany was a “hard” nation with no patience for politics because it was governed by the superior men of its “superbly efficient ruling caste,” he wrote admiringly, adding: “Germany becomes Nietzsche; Nietzsche becomes Germany.” Mencken approvingly quoted Nietzsche to the effect that “the weak and the botched must perish. . . . I tell you that a good war hallows every cause.”
The second Atlantic article, based on Mencken’s own reporting from the Eastern Front in 1917, was a piece of hero worship that exalted General Erich Ludendorff as Germany’s “national messiah.” Mencken treasured the Kaiser, but he thought Ludendorff was worth “forty kaisers” and was the man to lead German Kultur in its total war against Anglo-Saxon civilization. According to Mencken, the general’s greatness revealed itself in the way that he had stamped out people’s individuality so that “the whole energy of the German people [could] be concentrated on the war.”
The third, and most intriguing, essay—“After Germany’s Conquest of the United States”—talked about the benefits to America of being ruled by the hard men of a superior Kultur. Known only because of the exchange of letters between Mencken and the editor of The Atlantic, the article was withdrawn and never published. Interestingly, despite Mencken’s extraordinary efforts to document his own life, the manuscript, according to Vincent Fitzpatrick, curator of the Mencken collection, cannot be found. Mencken’s reputation, it seems, was saved by wartime self-censorship—in Boston, home of The Atlantic.
