American Experiment (180 page)

Little had been said that clarified the tenets of Social Darwinism. Perhaps it was not necessary. The hardheaded businessmen there knew what they believed—in the gospel of rugged individualism in general but in countless exceptions in practice. Carnegie would go on venerating Spencer and favoring tariffs. Other industrialists would favor competition in general but not in their own fields of business. They believed in economic individualism but also in corporate, collective capitalism. Many a man of public affairs there wanted laissez-faire, except when it hurt the rich—or himself.

The delightful confusion of the evening was well expressed by Beecher during his remarks: “I had just as lief be descended from a monkey,” said he, turning to Spencer, “if I have descended far enough.”

Hardly three weeks earlier, a quite different group of men had gathered at Delmonico’s to honor a man who was neither a captain of industry nor a world-famous intellectual, but a journalist: Henry George. Compared to Spencer’s hosts, the hundred or so men who lined up to greet George were a motley crowd, reflecting the vigorous and variegated mind of Gotham. Here were Perry Belmont, congressman and son of a longtime head of the national Democratic party; Felix Adler of the Ethical Culture Society; Thomas Kinsella, editor of the Brooklyn
Daily Eagle
and educational reformer; Roger Atkinson Pryor, Confederate soldier-politician turned Manhattan lawyer; David G. Croly, modernist editor who had actually spoken
for
miscegenation; Thomas G. Shearman, corporation lawyer, tax reformer, and defender of Henry Ward Beecher against charges of adultery; and the ubiquitous Beecher himself.

The apolitical Delmonico’s did itself proud as usual, providing twenty-eight items of food and drink. The lion of the occasion hardly looked the part, with his slight build and scuffed shoes; but Henry George’s editorial
growls had sounded across the Western world. He had indeed shown the kind of spunk and competitive drive that Spencer and Alger alike would have admired. Young George had left his middle-class home and school at thirteen to serve as an errand boy in a Philadelphia importing firm, then shipped out on long sea voyages as foremast boy. Between trips, a typesetting job drew him into the world of publishers and journalists. He drank deeply of his travel experiences—the life of the common sailor before the mast, the scramble for land in California, the horrifying contrast of wealth and poverty in Calcutta and New York. A voracious reader, he ranged through the works of French physiocrats and English classicists, American Whigs and Jeffersonians, religious prophets and radical intellectuals. For years, he lived hand to mouth as a California newspaper writer, shifting restlessly from job to job while he pursued his own success ethic—even as, opinionated and cantankerous, he quarreled incessantly with bosses and fellow workers.

It was in the yeasty economic and journalistic milieus of California that George grappled with the problem of poverty. He himself was so down-and-out at one point, with a half-starved wife and child at home, that he accosted the first prosperous-looking man he saw on the street and asked him desperately for five dollars, which the stranger gave him; if he had not, George said later, he was ready to knock the man down. But soon in a series of newspaper articles and finally in
Progress and Poverty,
he propounded his long-fermenting ideas: that the ownership of land brings control over society; that every man has a natural “labor right” to land; that when he rents privately held land from others he is robbed of some of that labor right; that the solution is to regain the public right to rent through a single tax on land.

Man’s right to himself, and to what he produced, George said, was accepted. “But man has also another right, declared by the fact of his existence—the right to the use of so much of the free gifts of nature as may be necessary to supply all the wants of that existence, and which he may use without interfering with the equal rights of anyone else; and to this he has a title as against all the world.”

Recognition came to George only after he had moved back to New York and then traveled abroad. In England, he met the socialist H. M. Hyndman; Helen Taylor, the stepdaughter of the late John Stuart Mill; the political reformer John Bright; the rising radical Joseph Chamberlain. He did not meet Karl Marx. Highly sympathetic to the Irish cause, George hobnobbed with the leaders of the Irish Land League, who were in turn entranced by his views on land. His fame soared at home and abroad when he was arrested during a trip to Ireland; indeed, so many American Irish leaders
attended the Delmonico’s banquet that at least one of the diners thought they were welcoming a fiery rebel from Ireland.

George was perhaps the most arresting of a number of journalists whose ideas were agitating American opinion during the 1880s. Another inciter was Edward Bellamy, a struggling young editor who was beginning to taste success and fame during that decade of intellectual excitement. Raised in a western Massachusetts textile town, Bellamy attended Union College for a year, traveled abroad, studied law, worked for a time for the noted Springfield
Union
and the equally noted New York
Evening Post,
and then with his brother founded the Springfield
Daily News.
More and more drawn to social and political problems, Bellamy began publication in a country paper of
The Duke of Stockbridge,
a fictional treatment of Shays’s Rebellion. He had several more works of historical fiction to his credit by the time, in 1888, he published
Looking Backward,
which embodied an effort, he said later, to “reason out a method of economic organization” by which the republic might guarantee its citizens’ welfare “on a basis of equality corresponding to and supplementing their political equality.”

The story of Julian West, a young Boston millionaire who fell asleep in 1887 and awoke in 2000, the novel pictured through his eyes an orderly, affluent, egalitarian, rational Boston of 2000, in contrast with the cruel, class-ridden, and altogether bleak city of the late nineteenth century. The novel gained in force from powerful metaphors—notably of capitalism as a prodigious coach pulled uphill by “masses of humanity” driven by hunger, and crowded on top by travelers who called down to the toilers, urging patience and hinting at possible compensation in the next world—and remarkable prophecies, including music piped into drawing rooms (by telephone) according to published programs. But mainly the book gained from its portrait of a new world in which equitable “credit cards”—Bellamy’s term—had taken the place of money, a Boston without taxes or army or navy, without lawyers or law schools, a utopia of hierarchy and harmony and benign regimentation, in which women as well as men enjoyed liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Looking Backward
was an instant hit. Not only did it sell by the tens of thousands, achieving finally a total sale of one million, but it produced a rash of Bellamy clubs formed to discuss the book and its implications. A decade later Bellamy wrote a sequel,
Equality.
Again the force of Bellamy’s ideas overcame his heavy dialogue. At the start of
Equality,
Julian West’s sweetheart Edith battered him with a cross-examination that Bellamy’s hero could not bear.

She couldn’t understand, said twenty-first-century Edith of nineteenth-century Boston, the gap between people’s pretensions then and the
“shockingly unequal conditions of the people, the contrasts of waste and want, the pride and power of the rich, the abjectness and servitude of the poor, and all the rest of the dreadful story.”

“It is doubtful,” Julian acknowledged, “if there was ever a greater disparity between the conditions of different classes than you would find in a half hour’s walk in Boston, New York, Chicago, or any other great city of America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.”

“And yet,” says Edith, “it appears from all the books that meanwhile the Americans’ great boast was that they differed from all other and former nations in that they were free and equal. One is constantly coming across this phrase in the literature of the day.…”

They were supposedly equal before the law, Julian said, but he had to admit that in fact rich and poor were not. But they were equal in “opportunities.” Edith leaped on this. It seemed, she said, that they all had an equal chance to make themselves unequal. Was there any way in which people were equal?

“Yes, there was,” says Julian. “They were political equals. They all had one vote alike, and the majority was the supreme law-giver.”

Then, asked Edith, why did not a majority of the poor put an end to their inequalities?

“Because,” says Julian, “they were taught and believed that the regulation of industry and commerce and the production and distribution of wealth was something wholly outside of the proper province of government.”

Then, asked Edith, “if the people did not think that they could trust themselves to regulate their own industry and the distribution of the product, to whom did they leave the responsibility?”

“To the capitalists.”

“And did the people elect the capitalists?”

“Nobody elected them.”

“By whom, then, were they appointed?”

“Nobody appointed them.”

“What a singular system!” To whom then were the capitalists accountable?

They were accountable to nothing but their consciences, said Julian.

“Their consciences! Ah, I see!” In the end she forced Julian to grant that the people surrendered their power to capitalists in the name of “individual liberty,” that they did not obtain such liberty, that capitalists used the government to quell the “quenchless blaze” of “greed and envy, fear, lust, hate, revenge, and every foul passion” of the poor and of the degraded “outcasts.” And he admitted that the capitalists controlled the political as
well as the economic government by buying votes with money and with “fireworks, oratory, processions, brass bands, barbecues,” and the like. And the worst thing, Julian admitted, was that the poor were kept in such degradation as to be “not morally any better than the rich.”

Rivaling George and Bellamy in the force of his protest against capitalism was still another journalist, Henry Demarest Lloyd. Brought up in a New York City family of radical Democratic sympathies, young Lloyd had plunged into the world of free traders, civil service reform, and anti-monopoly on his graduation from Columbia College in 1869. Hired by the Chicago
Tribune
as an editorialist, he moved steadily beyond political liberalism to a social radicalism that called for profound changes in the capitalistic system. In his writings, culminating in
Wealth Against Commonwealth
in 1894, he critically analyzed railroads and other corporations and championed small businessmen, consumers, and workers, including striking trade unionists. His repeated calls for social justice and his attacks on monopoly—especially the Standard Oil monopoly—brought him into virtually a personal confrontation with John D. Rockefeller.

Lloyd’s power lay less in his ideas, which were not especially original, than in the analysis that supported them. Like a good journalist, he pored through the records of court and legislative investigations of great corporations, and conducted on-the-spot investigations of conditions of coal miners. An activist, he helped organize Milwaukee streetcar workers, and he succeeded in gaining commutation of the death sentence of convicted “anarchists.” Unlike certain other radicals, Lloyd would not trade liberty for equality. He “insisted that the rehabilitation of individual and economic liberty so essential to further democratic advances,” according to Chester Destler, “must result from the progressive, experimental harmonization of individualism with social cooperation.” For Lloyd, individual liberty was both means and end.

Lloyd the social reformer, Bellamy the utopian, George the single-taxer—these were men of highly diverse personalities but also of striking similarities. Though men of ideas, they were not academic scholars; rather, they were largely self-taught, drawing their learning from books, experiences, and travels, especially their journeys to a Britain itself undergoing rapid social change. They came from deeply religious families. All three rose to success in the fiercely competitive world of American journalism. The lives of all three would become entangled in the climactic events of the 1890s. But what most typified them was what most divided them—their diverse solutions to the ills of capitalism and their largely separate followings.

Fundamentally, they disagreed with one another. George saw
Looking Backward
as building a “castle in the air” but also tending toward
governmental paternalism. The youthful Lloyd called George a “quack” and dismissed Bellamy as too utopian. For his part, Bellamy felt that George’s notion of nationalizing land first, rather than last, would antagonize so many interests at the start as to jeopardize any major reform. Bellamy must have known that Lloyd had little regard for
Looking Backward
and for Bellamy’s creed of “Nationalism” and following of “Nationalists.”

“Mr. George,” Bellamy asked when the two happened to meet at a dinner, “why are you not a Nationalist?”

“Because I am an individualist,” George replied.

“I am a Nationalist,” said Bellamy, “because I am an individualist.”

Each of these thinkers had his own following as well as ideas: George’s single-taxers, Bellamy’s nationalists, Lloyd’s trade unionists. Each was a kind of politico of protest as well as entrepreneur of ideas. Each operated on his own success ethic. Nor did any of the three ground himself in doctrines of Marxist socialism that had a common foundation. Bellamy saw the word
socialist
as suggesting “the red flag with all manner of sexual novelties, and an abusive tone about God and religion.” Marxists viewed Bellamy as a utopian, always a dangerous breed of reformer. To George, Marx was the “prince of muddleheads.” Marx put down
Progress and Poverty
as an effort to save capitalism and George as “utterly backward” as a theorist. Lloyd rejected Marxist “determinism” and felt that the labor theory of value had too many exceptions.