Читать книгу The Revolt Against the Masses - Fred Siegel - Страница 11
Оглавление1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism
The years before the U.S. entered World War I were a golden age for American utopian reformers. Known as the Progressive era, they were “the years of Great Expectation when the Millennium, Woodrovian fostered, seemed just around the corner,” wrote the young reformer John Chamberlain. Speaking of his fellow young intellectuals, Lewis Mumford exclaimed: “There was scarcely one who did not assume that mankind either was permanently good or might sooner or later reach such a state of universal beatitude.”
By 1919, the sweet melody of hope had been replaced among writers and intellectuals by the anger and resentment born of a cataclysmic war, a failed peace, and a country wracked by what came to be known as the Red Scare. Hope survived for some, however, in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution. These were the conditions under which the Wilson-led Progressives of 1916, preaching social redemption for all, were reborn as the liberals of 1919, now suffused with scorn not only for President Wilson but also for American society.
Modern state-oriented liberalism, so the standard tale goes, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of Progressivism. But this is true only in a limited sense. The economic mobilization of WWI did provide the administrative model for the early years of the New Deal. But culturally, socially, and politically, liberalism represented a sharp break from Progressivism.
Progressivism was a middle-class Protestant movement that hoped to adapt to the strains of big corporations and big-city political machines in order 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 reform. They were largely middle-class Victorians committed to the purification of politics, which they hoped to achieve by remolding the country’s polyglot population into a unified whole. Progressivism reached its apogee during WWI when its advocates won Prohibition and women’s suffrage while shutting down brothels and imposing “one hundred percent Americanism.”
In the standard accounts of American liberalism, both left and right argue that after the 1920s, Progressivism faced the Great Depression and as a result matured into the fully flowered liberalism of the New Deal. As I suggested in the previous chapter, this is fundamentally mistaken. While “winning the war abroad,” the Progressives “lost their war at home,” notes historian Michael McGerr. “Amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red Scare, Americans turned against the Progressive blueprint for the nation. The climax of Progressivism, World War I, was also its death knell.” Modern Republicanism—as incarnated in the 1920s by Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—and modern liberalism were both reactions to the excesses of Progressivism.
Modern liberalism was born of discontinuity, a rejection of Progressivism—a wrenching betrayal and a shift in sensibility so profound that it still resonates today. More precisely, the cultural tone of modern liberalism was, in significant measure, set by a political love affair gone horribly wrong between Woodrow Wilson and a liberal left unable to grapple with the realities of power politics. For Progressives, reformers, and Socialists, the years from 1918 through 1920 were traumatic. During the presidential election of 1916, many leftists had embraced Woodrow Wilson as a thaumaturgical leader of near messianic promise, but in the wake of repression at home and revolution and diplomatic disappointment abroad, he came to be seen as a Judas, and his numinous rhetoric was despised as mere mummery.
For the ardent Progressive Frederick Howe, who had been Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, the pre-war promise of the benign state built on reasoned reform had turned to ashes. “I hated,” he wrote, “the new state that had arisen” from the war. “I hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism that made profit from our sacrifices and used it to suppress criticism of its acts. . . . I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.” As part of his protest, the thoroughly alienated Howe distanced himself from Progressivism. Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. “The word liberalism,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, “was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.” The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.
Wilson, a devout Presbyterian, was the first—and until President Obama the only—president to have systematically studied socialism. In 1887, as a young man, he responded to the growth of vast industrial monopolies that threatened individual freedom with this argument:
It is clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.
In the midst of the 1912 presidential race, Wilson reiterated his sense of the kinship between democracy, which he saw as having roots in Christianity and socialism: “When you do socialism justice,” he said, “it is hardly different from the heart of Christianity itself.” In 1916, Wilson, a former college professor, not only brushed aside intense opposition to make the unprecedented appointments of two pro-labor-union justices to the Supreme Court, but he also backed the railroad workers in their fight for an eight-hour day. In addition he imposed a surtax on the wealthy, which earned him the support of prominent Socialists such as Upton Sinclair and Helen Keller.
To the lyrical left of Greenwich Village, Wilson’s 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” opened the way for the emergence of a more vibrant American culture. With talk of a “New Renaissance” in the background, Villager Floyd Dell spoke of an “exalted present pregnant with possibilities.” For Dell and his friends Randolph Bourne and Max Eastman, the war in Europe seemed far away. For the moment, they were imbued with an impregnable optimism. “It was,” said Dell, “our future.”
The administration’s critique of European power politics and its talk of the need for international law gave pacifist Jane Addams “unlimited faith in the president.” When Meyer London, the anti-war Socialist congressman from New York’s Lower East Side, and Socialist Party leader Morris Hillquit visited the White House to talk about the prospects for peace in Europe, they came away concluding, “[Wilson’s] sympathies are entirely with us.” Similarly, as Thomas Knock recounts in his book To End All Wars, after visiting the White House, the leaders of the American Union Against Militarism left feeling that “the President had taken us into his bosom.” Wilson, they noted, facing increased pressure to enter the war, “always referred to the Union Against Militarism as though he were a member of it” and talked about how “we” had to lay out a case for creating “a family of nations.”
The mutual courtship between Wilson and the leftists flourished during the hard-fought 1916 presidential election. In his campaign for reelection, Wilson faced a Republican Party that had recovered from its 1912 split between Teddy Roosevelt’s breakaway Bull Moose Progressives and the party’s anti-reform regulars; the revitalized GOP had coalesced around Supreme Court Justice Charles Evan Hughes. In the midst of the war in Europe, Wilson scraped out a victory by bringing into his “peace camp” sizable numbers of those who had supported TR’s intensely moralistic Bull Moosers (who admired Germany’s proto-welfare state), as well as Eugene Debs’s Socialists.
When Wilson gave his “peace without victory” speech in January 1917, proposing a democratic and anti-imperialist path out of the brambles of bloodshed, the revolutionary leftist Eastman was “enraptured.” In the next fifteen months, the faith of Eastman and the Progressives seemed well justified. But Germany’s declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare and the public revelation of the Kaiser’s plans for an alliance with Mexico to conquer the Southwest pushed the country toward war. Most Progressives backed America’s entry. The Progressive animus toward corrupt and overmighty party bosses and autocratic monarchists was, notes historian Morton Keller, “readily transferred to an overbearing Kaiser and his war machine as a continuation of the fight against tyranny at home.” Reforms at home and abroad were melded, as when The New Republic’s Walter Lippmann warned, “We shall call that man un-American and no patriot who prates of liberty in Europe and resists it as home.
Not even America’s reluctant entry into WWI in April of 1917 sundered Wilson’s strong ties with the largely anti-war left. In the very speech in which he had asked for a congressional declaration of war, Wilson welcomed the February Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which had overthrown the czar and put the Socialist Alexander Kerensky in power. The American president effusively, if inaccurately, described the Russian Revolution as the fulfillment of the Russian people’s long struggle for democracy. The revolution, explained Secretary of State Robert Lansing, “had removed the one objection to affirming that the European War was a war between Democracy and [Prussian] Absolutism.”
With American entry, Wilson, as always of two minds, made a point of keeping U.S. forces strictly under American command, which rankled the British and the French, whom he regarded as imperialists. He insisted on referring to the U.S. not as an ally of England and France but rather as an “Associated Power.” Wilson, like the isolationists, didn’t want to get tangled in Europe’s affairs, noted Walter Weyl of The New Republic; rather, he wanted to rise above them and impose a new vision from on high.
Eight months later, shortly after Lenin overthrew Kerensky, Wilson expressed his ambivalence toward Bolshevism, exclaiming, “My heart is with them, but my mind has a contempt for them.” Conceptually, Wilson saw Bolshevism as a legitimate response to economic inequality, notes historian Georg Schild. In practice, as an alternative to capitalism, he found it both unworkable and unacceptably autocratic.
“The Fourteen Points, [Wilson’s] message of good luck to the ‘republic of labor unions’ in Russia and his warning to the Allied powers that their treatment of Bolshevik Russia would be the ‘acid test’ of their ‘good will . . . intelligence, and unselfish sympathy’: These moves were immensely impressive to us,” explained Max Eastman, speaking for many leftists and Progressives. This was the extraordinary moment when Russia’s War Commissar Leon Trotsky, referring to Wilson, coined the now famous concept of the “fellow traveler.” The metaphor was based on Trotsky’s belief that the American president and the Bolsheviks shared a critique of European imperialism; both the newly Soviet Russia and a reformed, less capitalist U.S., in Trotsky’s view, were travelling on parallel tracks into a brighter future.
While Wilson increasingly spoke of an international comity between nations, comity between not-so-assimilated ethnic groups in the U.S. was breaking down. The German aggressions in eastern Europe produced pitched battles between Germans and Slavs in the streets of Chicago. At the same time, nearly a half million Germans in America returned to fight for the fatherland. Charles John Hexamer, president of the National German-American Alliance, financed in part by the German government, urged Germans in the U.S. to maintain their separate identity so they wouldn’t “descend to the level of an inferior culture.”
The most important example of German sabotage was the spectacular explosion on Black Tom Island in the summer of 1916, which shook a sizable swath of New York City and New Jersey; the force was the equivalent of an earthquake measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale. It shattered windows in Times Square, and people as far away as Philadelphia felt the blast. The man-made peninsula, situated in the mouth of New York Harbor, was a key storage and shipping point for munitions sales to the British and French. The peninsula sank into the sea as seven were killed and the Statue of Liberty was damaged. After the attack, President Wilson denounced Germany’s supporters in America as “creatures” of “disloyalty and anarchy [who] must be crushed.”
The American entrance into the war triggered hysteria, one result of which was the Sedition Act of 1918. The legislation was so broad in its assessment of what constituted a danger that it allowed violators to be sent to prison for ten years for saying that they preferred the Kaiser to President Wilson. Others were jailed for mocking salesmen who sold Liberty Bonds to support the war. Most famously, Socialist leader Eugene Debs was jailed for criticizing conscription. The disparity between Wilson’s call for extending liberty abroad and his suppression of liberty at home became a running wound for disenchanted Progressives.
Wilson placed George Creel, a journalist and Socialist who had strongly supported child-labor laws and women’s suffrage, in charge of the Committee for Pubic Information, an agency intended to sustain morale during wartime. But the committee, which Creel described as “the world’s greatest adventure in advertising,” wildly overshot its mark. Creel wanted “no mere surface unity, but a passionate belief in the justice of America’s cause that should weld the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.”
Everything German, from Beethoven to sauerkraut to teaching the German language, was barred. When black leaders protested the federal failure to respond to the wave of lynching that accompanied the war, they were accused of aiding the German enemy by criticizing the U.S. The Justice Department and the attorney general went so far as to encourage loyal vigilantism. The American Protective League (APL), a quarter-of-a-million-strong nativist organization, obtained semi-official status in order to spy on those suspected of disloyalty. The League also went out of its way to protect the national interest by breaking up strikes while branding its critics Reds.
Wilson, responding to the excesses of the American Protective League, exclaimed, “I’d rather the blamed place should be blown up than persecute innocent people.” Yet Wilson also declared, “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way.” Despite misgivings about the APL, Wilson deferred to the judgment of Attorney General Thomas Gregory and refused to restrain the group’s vigilantism. Only after the armistice ended the war in November of 1918 did Wilson, heeding the advice of incoming Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, move to end government cooperation with the APL.
The armistice largely ended the fighting in Europe, but it opened a new chapter in the hostilities at home. In America, fear of the Germans was seamlessly succeeded by the Red Scare. The Bolsheviks’ effectively unconditional surrender to the Germans in March of 1918 had created a cat’s cradle of anti-Communist fears that intertwined with hostility to the Huns. With the Soviet surrender at Brest-Litovsk, Germany won control of the Baltic states (Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine), with their attendant coal and oil resources, freeing the Kaiser’s army to focus on the Western Front with deadly effect. In this context, Lenin’s return to Russia in April 1917 by way of a sealed railroad car supplied by Berlin was seen as proof, and not only by conspiracists, that the Bolshevik leader was a German agent.
Progressives and leftists, counseled by Raymond Robbins, who had worked for Wilson in 1912 and served as an unofficial ambassador to the Bolsheviks, adopted a counter-conspiracy, echoes of which persist to this day. Robbins, smitten by Bolshevism, wrote to Lenin, “It has been my eager desire . . . to be of some use in interpreting this new democracy to the people of America.” Robbins also mistakenly blamed the U.S. for forcing Lenin to agree to Germany’s harsh terms at Brest-Litovsk. During the next few years, explains historian Peter Filene, Robbins’s efforts shaped the opinions of a vast circle of American Progressives. The Progressives were enraged when Wilson succumbed to pressure from the French and the English, both suffering massive casualties on the Western Front, and gave half-hearted American military support to a campaign that tried to force the Bolsheviks back into the war. Most Americans accused the Bolsheviks of betrayal, in their abject surrender to the Germans, but the Progressives, Filene notes, saw this “betrayal,” the American intervention, as an American perfidy.
Here too, Wilson, juggling principle and practicality, proved strikingly inconstant. In the words of historian Georg Schild: “The Wilson who agreed to the Allied intervention [against the Soviets] in the summer of 1918” and the Wilson who “one year later at the Paris Peace Conference” helped save the Soviet Union by insisting that the Germans relinquish their conquests on the Eastern Front “almost seemed like two different people.” Wilson the Progressive went to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 with the understanding that “we are running a race with Bolshevism and the world is on fire.” “From the eastern border of France all the way through Asia to the Sea of Japan,” notes historian Anthony Read, “not a single pre-war government remained in power.” From Berlin to Seattle, strikes and in some cases pro-Bolshevik revolutionary movements seemed like the wave of the future. Comintern chief Zinoviev confidently predicted, “In a year’s time, the whole of Europe will be Communist.” The leaders looking to remake the world at Versailles were confounded by Bolshevism; they didn’t know exactly what it was, much less how to contain it.
The leaders gathered at Versailles, notes Read, saw themselves as men dancing on a live volcano that had destroyed the old Europe and was threatening continued eruptions. Harry Kessler, an Anglo-German count and a Soviet sympathizer, captured the scene: “The wave of Bolshevism surging in from the East resembles somewhat the invasion by Islam in the seventh century,” he wrote. “Fanaticism and power in the service of a nebulous fresh hope are faced, far and wide, by nothing more than the fragments of old ideologies. The banner of the prophets waves at the head of Lenin’s armies too.” Faced with the Soviet challenge, Wilson, who came bearing the new ideology of universal democracy, floated the idea that the Bolsheviks should be invited to the Paris Peace Conference. Churchill, who saw in Communism something akin to “legalized sodomy,” blocked the suggestion. Wilson the Progressive took a different tact: “War won’t defeat Bolshevism, food will,” he said. Capitalism had to reform itself, he argued, to stave off Bolshevik barbarism.
Wilson’s efforts to reconstruct Europe largely failed, not only because the U.S. declined to join the League of Nations, but more significantly because the task at hand was impossible; what the war had sundered could not be put back together. Many former Wilson supporters were angry and disillusioned with the meager fruits of a war that had failed to make the world safe for democracy. But people across the political spectrum shared those feelings widely. Those who were soon to call themselves liberals were particularly incensed by wartime conscription, the repression of civil liberties, Prohibition, and the overwrought fears of Bolshevism in America.
In 1918, with war still raging, the unions, emboldened by a surge in membership and squeezed by an inflation-borne decline in living standards, engaged in a wave of strikes, some of which were forcibly repressed by Pinkerton detectives, the APL, and local police forces. The walkouts led by the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World, well known for work sabotage, seemed particularly ominous. The IWW, which sometimes called itself “Lenin’s advanced guard,” was led in part by “Big” Bill Haywood, who would soon be deported to the USSR. At the end of the year, in the wake of the armistice, the mayor of New York City, John Hylan, banned the Socialist red flag at public gatherings. Shortly thereafter, 500 soldiers and sailors broke up a Socialist rally at Madison Square Garden. The bad blood endured. In a November 11, 1919, celebration of the first anniversary of the war’s end, American Legionnaires and members of the IWW, (known as “Wobblies”) clashed in Centralia, Washington. Six Wobblies were killed in the name of combating the Red Scare.
Communism was as yet ill defined in America. Wilson himself thought it might be merely a temporary way station on the road to liberal democracy. But every strike, confrontation, and racial incident was taken, on both left and right, as a manifestation of Bolshevism. Every challenge to the existing social order, no matter how justified, was attributed to the Red Scare. The new so-called African-American uppityness, meaning insufficient deference to whites, was attributed to homegrown Bolshevism. “Uppityness” was met with a wave of lynching and a resurgence of the KKK. White attacks on blacks set off riots in Chicago and Washington that required federal troops to suppress.
The Red Scare intensified in June of 1919 when Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer was nearly killed by a terrorist bomb planted in his Georgetown home. Bombs went off in seven other cities that same night. The bombers were probably, notes historian Beverley Gage, from the Galleanisti group of Italian anarchists that included the as yet unknown Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. But the attacks were attributed to their conceptual cousins, the Russian Bolsheviki. The attacks reignited the intense nationalism of the war years and stoked a renewed hysteria. Palmer, who subsequently claimed to have a list of 60,000 subversives, engaged in a series of warrantless raids aimed at capturing the mostly immigrant “red radicals,” some of whom were jailed or shipped back to Russia. In the process, Palmer, with no reproach from Wilson, widely trampled on civil liberties and harassed the innocent as well as the likely guilty.
The pre-war Progressives had hoped to transcend a politics based on ethnic and regional peculiarities to forge a reformed national polity grounded in Protestant moral uplift. But the attempt to forge national unity in order to prosecute the war heightened the ethnic tensions wrought by mass immigration. One of the arguments put forth for enacting Prohibition in 1919 was that it might help Americanize the booze-swilling immigrants who were in need of moral improvement through assimilation.
Progressives, who had broadly supported Prohibition, saw it primarily as a means to protect working-class families from the economic depredations of drink. But the newly minted liberals were infuriated by what they saw as cultural continuation of wartime repression. “Like most sensible people,” shouted liberal Harold Stearns, “I regard Prohibition as an outrage and a direct invitation to revolution.”
An aggressive nationalism and an accelerated Americanization became political twins. Both demanded something that, with the partial exception of the Civil War North, had never existed before: a coherent, irrefragable governmental power. In Europe, war had become intertwined with revolution; in the U.S., the war and the Bolshevik challenge called up the seemingly un-American concept of a General Will, a 100 percent Americanism that brooked no opposition.
Palmer had hoped to ride the Red Scare into the White House. But within a year, the amiable Republican Warren G. Harding of Ohio was ensconced in Washington, along with his card-playing cronies. The crusade that had ended abroad finally wound down at home. Harding, who in a conciliatory gesture freed Socialist leader Eugene Debs from jail, championed what he dubbed a return to “normalcy” in public life.
The silver lining of the wartime repression was that it laid the groundwork for the modern interpretation of the First Amendment, which would eventually extend free-speech rights to individuals harassed by not only federal authorities but state and local government as well. The expansion of free speech evolved from the 1918 case of Jacob Abrams, a Russian-Jewish immigrant bookbinder. Abrams had printed anarchist leaflets in English and Yiddish and distributed them on New York’s Lower East Side by dropping them from buildings. The pamphlets bitterly denounced Wilson’s half-hearted attempts to cooperate with England and France in pressuring Russia back into the war against Germany. Zealous prosecutors saw the leaflets as violations of the Espionage Act, which made it a crime to undermine American wartime policy. Abrams was sentenced to twenty years in jail and eventually deported.
In 1919, the Supreme Court upheld Abrams’s conviction. But in his dissent, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes laid the basis for the modern First Amendment. Holmes found that “speech that produces or is intended to produce a clear and imminent danger” can be prosecuted. But he saw no such “imminent” danger in Abrams’s leaflets, which he described as “silly” writings by an “unknown man.” More important was Holmes’s underlying reasoning. Like the British philosopher John Stuart Mill, Holmes determined that a maximum of free speech was essential for a successful society. America, he reasoned, had an interest in discovering truth available only through “the marketplace of ideas,” where proponents of competing viewpoints must strive to make their best case.
The spirit of Justice Holmes, with his emphasis on a carefully calibrated consideration of conflicting imperatives, has not always been in evidence on the part of historians. In the years since the Red Scare, most left and liberal chroniclers of that period, whether due to inadequate imagination or parochial political motives, have simply argued away the existence of Communists and anarchists who sought to inflict real harm upon America. Sacco, based on the ballistic evidence, was most certainly guilty; and Vanzetti was convicted of an earlier violent crime; in the hands of sympathizers, both were turned into injured innocents whose legend became part of a martyrology.
The fears of those years were wildly exaggerated, but they were not manufactured out of whole cloth. Lenin’s emissary in New York, Ludwig Martens, wasn’t unjustly persecuted and deported. Martens, notes historian Beverley Gage, referring to internal Russian documents, was one of the conduits Lenin used to smuggle 3 million rubles (largely in gold, jewels, and silver) into the U.S. to finance Communist Party activities. The famed Wall Street bombing of September 1920 aimed at banker J.P. Morgan, which claimed the lives of thirty-eight ordinary New Yorkers and injured 400, was probably the work of radical anarchists. The post-WWI Red Scare inaugurated an ongoing dynamic in which the excesses induced by the response to an internal enemy allowed liberals to pretend that the only danger at hand was the American reaction to imagined enemies.
For the intellectuals and writers who saw the bright sun of optimism just over the horizon in 1916, the end of the war years brought anger and intensified alienation. WWI, said Floyd Dell, discredited “the schemes and instruments of idealism” and produced a generation of young minds “trained in disillusion.” Many Americans felt that they had been let down by their leader, their country, and their countrymen, and they had little interest in the intractable dilemmas of how to deal with Prussianism and Bolshevism. They felt betrayed by Wilson on Russia, betrayed by Wilson on the failures and compromises of the Versailles Treaty, betrayed by Wilson in his willingness to suppress civil liberties, and confirmed in their disdain for the society that had supported both the Red Scare and Prohibition. They placed blame for “the sanctimonious swindle” of WWI not on America’s enemies but on the middle-class nature of American society. In the words of Harold Stearns, an influential young liberal: “We crushed German militarism only to find that we ourselves had adopted many of its worst features.”
The pre-war faith in progress, noted Bertrand Russell’s son Conrad, had been “gunned down” in World War I. In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald describes the effect of WWI: “all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faith in man shaken.” President Wilson in particular was accused by one former Progressive as having “produced more cynics than any other figure in modern history.”
Stearns, soon to exile himself to France, wrote bitterly about the post-war U.S. in his seminal 1919 book, Liberalism in America: “In Soviet countries there is in fact no freedom of the press and no pretense that there is. In America today there is in fact no freedom of the press and we only make the matter worse by pretending that there is.” The man who had been President Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, Frederick Howe, was equally bitter. America “seemed to want to hurt people,” he said. “It showed no concern for innocence. . . . It was not my America, it was something else.”
Between January of 1920 and July of 1922 when the Twenties began to roar, the country endured an economic collapse nearly as steep as that between 1929 and 1933. But the plummet was followed by a rapid recovery under Harding, who was devoted to less government through lower taxes and less regulation. This might have seemed a vindication of the American way, particularly as compared with Europe’s ongoing woes. But the short, sharp downturn, resolved without government intervention, drew only passing intellectual attention. Literary elites soon returned to their central themes.
A 1922 follow-up book edited by Stearns, Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry by Thirty Americans, might better have been titled “Why There Is No Civilization in America.” The theme repeated by the various authors was that people just do things better in Europe. Stearns, the man who had done the most to explain why liberalism was different from the Progressivism that had preceded it, conceived of the book’s essays as a collective denunciation of a supposedly Puritan America. “Life in this country,” explained one of the contributors, “is joyless and colorless, universally standardized, tawdry, uncreative, given over to the worship of wealth and machinery.” America’s material success, one essayist noted, was a reflection of its spiritual failure. The wife of the American man, another contributor explained, quoting George Cabot Lodge, “finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to bear his children.” Before his death in 1918, Randolph Bourne, always a lodestar to Stearns and other young liberals, had noted: “The modern radical opposes the present social system not because it does not give him ‘rights’ but because it warps and stunts the potentialities of society and of human nature.”
The contributors to Civilization in the United States, many of them Harvard men, were driven by resentment. The so-called lost generation, explained Malcolm Cowley, was “extremely class conscious.” Like Bourne, they had “a vague belief in aristocracy and in the possibility of producing real aristocrats through education,” Cowley said. They went to Europe “to free themselves from organized stupidity, to win their deserved place in the hierarchy of intellect.” They felt that their status in America’s business culture was grossly inadequate, given their obviously exceptional intelligence and extraordinary talent. Their simmering anger at what they saw as the mediocrity of democratic life led them to pioneer the now commonplace stance of blaming society for their personal failings. Animated by patrician spirit, they found the leveling egalitarianism of the United States an insult to their sense of self-importance.
What followed was not so much protest as slow-burning scorn. In 1919, the Germanophile H.L. Mencken, writing in the New Republic, called for “honoring” the civilian heroes who had so hysterically suppressed Beethoven out of misguided patriotism; these ignoramuses, he urged, should be bedizened with bronze badges and golden crosses. Mencken branded the mass of Americans who had backed “Wilson’s War” as “boobs” and “peasants.” They were nothing more than a “timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob.” Mencken, a great admirer of the Kaiser, characterized American democracy as “the worship of jackals by jackasses.”
Taking its cue from Mencken, the liberalism that emerged from 1919 was contemptuous of American culture and politics. For the liberals, the war years had revealed that American society and democracy were themselves agents of repression. These sentiments deepened during the 1920s and have been an ongoing current in liberalism ever since.
In picking their fights with Prohibition and their Pecksniffian former hero Wilson, liberals encouraged the tolerance and appreciation of differences that would over time mature into what came to be called pluralism. “The root of liberalism,” as opposed to the Progressivism that preceded it, wrote Stearns, “is hatred of compulsion, for the liberal has respect for the individual and his conscience and reason which the employment of coercion necessarily destroys.” Although not always observed by liberals themselves—who were willing to put free speech, pluralism, and the resistance to regimentation aside in the 1930s—the call for an urbane temper would then and in the future be the mark of liberalism at its best.
The underside of this new sensibility was both an inverted moralism and a hauteur that have dogged political liberalism down to the present. “Something oppressed” the liberals, wrote literary critic Malcolm Cowley, “some force was preventing them from doing their best work.” Between 1920 and 1934, when Cowley wrote those words, that “something” oppressing liberals “was the stupidity of the crowd, it was hurry and haste, it was Mass Production, Babbittry, Our Business Civilization, or perhaps it was the machine.”
Woodrow Wilson had insisted that mass society, properly led, could produce an “autonomous life in every part yet a common life & purpose.” But, for Wilson’s critics, World War I had set fire to that optimism. The “sanctimonious swindle,” as they now described American involvement in WWI, produced a rolling wave of hostility to middle-class society, which they blamed for the bloodshed. In Greenwich Village, Floyd Dell described the fall from the heights of pre-war idealism: “Humanity seems to have climbed painfully up from the primeval slime and reached out its hands toward the stars in vain. Its arts and sciences . . . have provided it with the full means of self-destruction. . . . There are evidently flaws in our human nature which make our idealism a tragic joke.” America had failed the liberals, and they would never forgive it.
