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III

A Reformer’s World

THE AMERICA OF GASTON’S YOUNG MANHOOD WAS changing rapidly, and not in ways that made him proud of his country. Even the most casual inquiries turned up gruesome tales of deepening poverty, wrenching class conflict, with violent confrontations between industrial workers and factory owners. Many young intellectuals, the historian Dorothy Ross writes, believed they were living in an age of “profound historical crisis,” in which cherished republican values were being threatened by the new industrial capitalism. “Unadulterated capitalism,” according to another authority, seemed to many to be on the verge of destroying the social order. Richard T. Ely, one of the young scholars of that era, believed that the workings of the new system of competitive individualism were “as cruel as laws of nature.” He declared that “our food, our clothing, our shelter, all our wealth, is covered with stains and clots of blood.” As Ross observes, many of the intellectuals who etched these searing indictments were “nurtured in evangelical piety, Whiggish moral politics, and the Christian ethicism of the American colleges,” a trio of influences that had been working on Gaston; and, like the better-known critics whom Ross describes, Gaston was increasingly drawn to the “organic and idealistic thrust of socialism” in his search for answers to the social riddle. “Capital is allowed to control all opportunity,” he wrote about this time, “and give the laborers only enough of their product to keep their souls and bodies together.” ²⁹

Passionate and eager to find answers, Gaston embarked on an extraordinary five-year intellectual and moral odyssey that culminated in the founding of the model community he would call Fairhope.

He began his journey in August of 1889 by purchasing the two-year-old Suburban Advocate, a small newspaper serving University Place. News analysis and editorial writing were better suited to Gaston’s temperament than land speculation. Journalism was also more congenial to his new passion for the study of American society, for seeking answers to the problems it created, and, especially, for finding an appropriate role for himself. A college classmate wrote approvingly from Colorado of the paper, remarking that “we can see ever so much of Ernest in it” ; a friend from Minneapolis expressed his “trust” in the “citizenship” guidance he found in Gaston’s writings.³⁰ Unfortunately, no copies of the Advocate have survived; other evidence, however, indicates that editing it gave Gaston the opportunity to explore new ideas, develop his persuasive powers, and extend his sphere of influence.

Gaston took a second fateful step in the autumn of 1889. He brought together a small group of friends—one was a former Drake professor and another his father-in-law—to form what they called the Des Moines Investigating Club—a club to “investigate” the social and economic condition of the United States by bringing the members abreast of the best and latest literature. Gaston looked on the club as a forum for gaining perspective, broadening and testing his ideas, and sharpening his editorial skills. The group met weekly throughout the winter, discussing such popular works of social criticism as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and Laurence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth.³¹

Gaston did nothing new when he established the Investigating Club. All across the country in the summer and fall of 1889 similar groups were being formed, most of them to champion the social theories of Edward Bellamy. Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, appeared at the beginning of 1888 and in the next year the enthusiasm it generated led to the creation of a magazine, the Nationalist, and a network of clubs claiming six thousand members.³² By the end of that year the novel had sold two hundred thousand copies and, as one historian writes, it caused millions of Americans—“social workers, farmers, businessmen, bankers, and housewives”—to confront Bellamy’s “argument for a wholesale rearrangement of their capitalist society.” ³³ Gaston, according to a friend, was “much pleased with the book,” but his club was not formally affiliated with the Bellamy movement.³⁴ Nevertheless, the great author’s advice was solicited and he was invited to come to Des Moines to speak to its members. Pleading poor health, Bellamy declined the invitation, praised Gaston as one who was “looking for the morning,” and counselled him to “do all you can for our common cause personally and in your paper,” assuring him that “you can in no other way serve your country better.” ³⁵

The most popular novel of social criticism since Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bellamy’s Looking Backward viewed the America of the 1880s from the perspective of the year 2000, the time its hero awakened after more than a century’s sleep. Gaston and his fellow Investigating Club members could sympathize with Bellamy’s Julian West, a man of culture and comfortable means who was appalled by the realities of his own age, viewed with fresh eyes. They could also agree with the sage Dr. Leete, West’s twenty-first century host and mentor, who analyzed for him the doomed social order of the nineteenth century. The central problem, Dr. Leete explained, was “excessive individualism.” A cancer destroying the country, it was the “animating idea” of the age; it was a foil to “public spirit” and was “fatal to any vital sentiment of brotherhood and common interest among living men” as well as subversive of “any realization of the responsibility of the living for the generation to follow.” With unbridled individualism fueling and guiding the fabulous industrial and technological revolution, American workers lost the independence and control over their destiny they had once had, and, in the face of “the absorption of business by ever larger monopolies,” the small businesses that were not sucked into the vortex of monopoly “were reduced to the condition of rats and mice, living in holes and corners, and counting on evading notice for the enjoyment of existence.” When Dr. Leete explained that “the records of the period show that the outcry against the concentration of capital was furious,” the incipient Des Moines rebels could take heart, feeling that their voices contributed to that outcry; they were part of a movement.³⁶

Opposite: Edward Bellamy’s letter encouraging E.B. Gaston.

According to Bellamy’s utopian romance, the great outcry had produced change without revolution. There was no class warfare. Instead, enlightened citizens came to regard socialism as beneficent, humane, and rational, and saw it as a logical alternative to the ruthless, competitive industrial order of capitalism. A peaceful, evolutionary process took the consolidation that had been the distinguishing feature of the nineteenth century industrial revolution to its logical conclusion so that all competing industries had been absorbed by a “single syndicate representing the people, to be conducted in the common interest for the common profit.” With the means of production and distribution nationalized, inefficiency was eliminated along with exploitation and inequality. National income rose and individual incomes, once wildly uneven, became more nearly equal. Such a vision had great appeal. The reform-minded Iowa Tribune explained approvingly that the Bellamy doctrine meant “ownership and control of capital, and the organization and direction of labor by the Nation.” Nationalism, the term Bellamy preferred to socialism, would guarantee “to every citizen nurture, education and comfortable maintenance from the cradle to the grave.” ³⁷

Gaston and his friends studied Henry George as well as Bellamy. George had entered into the American consciousness a decade earlier with the publication of Progress and Poverty, an eloquent work that combined economics and ethics, laid bare the inequities of the social order, and made its reformation appear not only urgently needed but also possible. Described by George’s biographer as “a moral Mount Whitney of American protest,” Progress and Poverty was unmatched in its power to gather converts to radicalism and protest.³⁸ “No single figure in the last two decades of the nineteenth century was more successful than Henry George in arousing public opinion to an awareness of the social origins of wealth and poverty,” one historian writes, while another believes that his writings “magically catalyzed the best yearnings” of the men and women of the ’eighties, helping to banish the arrogance and indifference of the previous generation.³⁹ The famous writer, also a powerful orator, spoke in the Opera House in Des Moines in January of 1889 but no record survives to tell whether Gaston heard or met him.⁴⁰

To George the central problems of the age were the unfair distribution of wealth and power and the deepening poverty that accompanied unprecedented material progress. “This association of poverty with progress,” he wrote in his most famous passage, “is the great enigma of our times. . . . It is the riddle which the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization and which not to answer is to be destroyed.” Why, George asked, and his Des Moines readers wondered, could not everyone benefit from society’s prodigious wealth-producing ability? Advancing material progress ought “to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy life,” he wrote; instead, it made life worse for millions of people. Not to discover and then to apply a solution to this problem, George warned, was to ensure the decline of American civilization:

What has destroyed every previous civilization has been the tendency to the unequal distribution of wealth and power. This same tendency, operating with increasing force, is observable in our civilization today, showing itself in every progressive community, and with greater intensity the more progressive the community. Wages and interest tend constantly to fall, rent to rise, the rich to become very much richer, the poor to become more helpless and hopeless, and the middle class to be swept away.⁴¹

As members of the threatened middle class, their consciences stirred by the poor who “become more helpless and hopeless,” Gaston and his friends pored over the works of George and Bellamy in the winter of 1889-1890. The two prophets, despite sharply different styles, wrote generally similar descriptions of the problem that cried out for solution. Each also wrote with a moral urgency that made ardent reformers of readers throughout the nation and abroad as well. The differing programs of action they offered to those converted readers, however, clashed in what appeared to be fundamental ways.⁴² Bellamy saw a logical development in the history of capital consolidation and favored national ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, a form of socialism he and his followers called nationalism. George, anguished by the same excessive individualism that outraged Bellamy, believed that its evils could be curbed, the spirit of cooperation nurtured, and the productivity of free individuals enlarged by socializing land, the one factor of production whose monopoly he believed accounted for poverty amidst plenty. “We have examined all the remedies, short of the abolition of private property in land,” he wrote, “and have found them all inefficacious or impracticable. . . . Poverty deepens as wealth increases, and wages are forced down while productive power grows,” he explained, “because land, which is the source of all wealth and the field of all labor, is monopolized.” Thus, to abolish poverty and make wages just, he concluded, “We must make land common property.” ⁴³

Two years before Gaston and his friends began studying George, the radical message of Progress and Poverty had been somewhat muted by some of George’s least-radical followers who came up with the deceptive label “single tax.” Fearing popular objection to land nationalization, wishing to enlist businessmen in their cause, and unable to find an appropriate title for their movement, these Georgists argued that it was necessary only to nationalize the income from land, through taxation; land tides could remain undisturbed. All government revenue could be raised by such a tax on community-created land values, they believed, removing the justification for any other form of taxation—thus the label “single tax.” George himself “never regarded the term as describing his philosophy,” his son wrote, “but rather as indicating the method he would take to apply it.” ⁴⁴

Henry George

Put differently, George saw the single tax as the fundamental reform, the basic structural change, that would make possible the flowering of his philosophy. The philosophy itself went far beyond a change in tax policy. George’s understanding of the subtle relationship between competition and cooperation and his awareness of society’s increasing complexity kept him from simple doctrinal solutions. He opposed a heavy government hand on individual initiative, but he advocated new cooperative functions. Putting it bluntly in his 1883 book, Social Problems, George wrote that “either government must manage the railroads or the railroads must manage the government.” And he added: “all I have said of the railroad applies ... to the telegraph, the telephone, the supplying of cities with gas, water, heat and electricity,—in short to all businesses which are in their nature monopolies.” ⁴⁵

Gaston was profoundly influenced by George’s writings, and in time George would become the chief intellectual force in his life. But, at this early stage of his development, Gaston did not view Progress and Poverty as an exclusive guide to reform. Though persuaded of the iniquity of land monopoly, he still was convinced that socialized production and distribution were required in the ideal community.

Gaston’s socialist inclinations, nurtured by his reading of Looking Backward, may have been fortified by another book the group read that winter, Laurence Gronlund’s The Cooperative Commonwealth. Published in 1884, it never rivaled Looking Backward or Progress and Poverty in either influence or sales, but its Danish-born author believed he was the first writer to explain to an American audience the essentials of Marxian socialism. According to Gronlund, the Marxian road to socialism did not require class conflict. Instead, Gronlund described a scheme of evolutionary, peaceful development that led to a cooperative commonwealth in which the state would help “every individual to attain the highest development he or she has capacity for,” a state that would “lay a cover for every one at Nature’s table.” To lead the peaceful revolution, Gronlund called for the mobilization of “a vigorous . . . minority of intelligent and energetic American men and women,” mostly young people like Gaston and his associates in the Investigating Club. Bellamy believed that Gronlund would lodge too much power in the hands of the working class, complaining that “the germ of this coming order Mr. Gronlund professes to see in the trades union, while the nationalists see it in the nation.” ⁴⁶

The eclectic reading habits of the Investigating Club members were typical of reformers of Gaston’s generation. Theirs was an age when heightened conscience, shocked and galvanized by the brutal realities of social change, was fortunately coupled with unusual flexibility—in ideas, in movements, and in social experiments. Ideas were in flux and ideological lines were constantly being tested and redrawn. Karl Marx, for example, was but one of many socialist writers; and, in fact, he had very little influence in America. Bellamy had never studied either Marx or German socialism when he wrote Looking Backward and, as the historian John Thomas puts it, he “snorted derisively” when his failure to discuss Marx was mentioned. The very word socialism, in fact, was a relative newcomer to the English language and still had uncertain meaning. Thus, intellectual excitement and hopes for change flourished because they were free of the blinding mental associations and reminders of failed doctrines that would later constrict social analysis.⁴⁷

Dorothy Ross has written of the “transforming enthusiasm of the early eighties” when “evangelical, liberal, and socialist impulses converged on the desire for a more egalitarian and fraternal order.” Most of the young intellectuals who spoke of “socialism,” as Ross explains, understood it to mean “the principle of association or cooperation in economic and political life.” It was the opposite of individualism, which meant the pursuit of self interest, unrestrained by considerations for society as a whole. Definitions of socialism were varied enough to include “the voluntary efforts of workingmen to combine into cooperative industries as well as efforts of the state to control economic activity on behalf of all classes.” With such an elastic meaning, the banner of socialism was lifted by reformers all across the country.⁴⁸

This helps us to understand why, as Daniel T. Rodgers explains, there could be a pronounced harmony of interest among reformers hawking all manner of apparently competing solutions. They were united in a common quest by “a vivid sense of exploitation,” as he puts it. One of Bellamy’s biographers describes the era as “a period of feeling about for a good social order,” a time when rival social reformers were more drawn together by their common outrage rather than separated by their differing social philosophies. Henry George’s biographer writes of the many threads of reform that were being woven into a common design. “The Henry George impulse,” Charles Barker explains, “interfiliated with other impulses. . . . Such a cross-connecting . . . was never more natural than during . . . the last quarter of the nineteenth century.” With deep faith in his own political economy, George himself deplored the union of disparate ideas. But with no such fixed intellectual anchor, Gaston and his associates read and learned from Bellamy, George, Gronlund, and others, drawing inspiration and insight from all of them, all the while choosing freely what suited them best.⁴⁹

At some point the club members shifted the focus from ideas to action. What could be done? They had reached agreement about what was wrong, and they were getting closer to a vision of what a reconstructed nation might look like. They were clear about the need for a more caring, cooperative society, one that would nurture individual expression and achievement as it looked to the common welfare. But what might a few individual reformers do to stem the onslaught of greed and chart a new course for their country? Could they be more than thoughtful observers and vigilant critics of their society? Were they foolish to think it really possible for a few ordinary citizens to make a difference in the historical process? How could one make a difference? What options did America offer?

The labor movement and the political process were the two most obvious ones. Gaston was strongly drawn to the Knights of Labor, now twenty years old and beginning to recede from the crest of its influence. Like Henry George, who had joined the Knights in 1883, Gaston lauded the view of land as “the natural source of wealth” and “the heritage of all the people.” As the nation’s most influential organization of working men and women, the Knights championed the same “religion of solidarity” emphasized by Bellamy and the same belief in the evolution of natural cooperation favored by George. Opposing inequality and exploitation in American life, especially disparate wage scales for women, child labor abuses, and discrimination against blacks, the Knights pointed the way to a cooperative commonwealth by favoring the eight-hour day, a graduated income tax, and public ownership of such “natural monopolies” as railroads, telephones, and telegraphs. The famous Knights’ declaration that “an injury to one is the concern of all” expressed a value system that stood in stark contrast to the acquisitive, competitive individualism of the emerging corporate state.⁵⁰

Gaston sympathized with the Knights’ concept of a cooperative society but he sensed it was not enough, at least not for him, and so he looked elsewhere for what he hoped would be a more comprehensive way of advancing the ideas he and his friends had been studying. He had been active in local politics since his university days, but at the end of the 1880s he seems not to have considered politics a hopeful avenue to reform. He had not joined either the Greenback Party or the Union Labor Party, the two radical alternatives available to him. Instead, he remained a member of the Republican Party, but he grew increasingly disillusioned both with its retreat from its former idealism and with the American political system in general.⁵¹