The Proud Tower (25 page)

At this juncture History lent a hand. On February 24, 1895, the Cuban people rose in insurrection against Spanish rule and on March 8 a Spanish gunboat chased and fired on an American merchant vessel, the
Alliance
, which it supposed to be bent on a filibustering errand. This “insult to our flag,” as it was called, evoked a burst of comments from prominent members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee which showed that Lodge had not been speaking only for himself. The American appetite for new territory was making itself felt. Senator Morgan of Alabama, Democratic chairman of the Committee, said the solution was clear: “Cuba should become an American colony.” Reed’s colleague but not his friend, Senator Frye of Maine, agreed that “we certainly ought to have the island in order to round out our possessions” and added with simple candor, “If we cannot buy it, I for one, should like an opportunity to acquire it by conquest.” Another Republican, Senator Cullom of Illinois, expressed even more plainly what was moving inside the American people. “It is time some one woke up,” he said, “and realized the necessity of annexing some property—we want all this northern hemisphere.” It was not, in 1895, necessary to disguise aggressiveness as something else. As yet the Senators were not talking in terms of support for Cubans rightly struggling to be free, because the
insurrectos
, who were burning American property as enthusiastically as Spanish, had not yet been presented in that light.

With President Cleveland standing robustly against expansion, the exuberant greed of certain Senators had little effect on policy. It was an act by Cleveland himself, at the end of the year, that brought into open explosion the new American mood. His emphatic assertion of the Monroe Doctrine over Venezuela, in defiance of Britain, marked the beginning of a new period in American life as vividly as if a signal flag had been run up to the top of the American flagpole. No question of gain, territorial or otherwise, was involved in Venezuela; it was simply a question of asserting an American right, as it seemed to Cleveland and especially to his exceedingly assertive Secretary of State, Richard Olney. The burst of chauvinism, jingoism and general bellicosity that it touched off startled everyone, though it came less from the common man than from the rich and powerful and vocal. The Union League Club had 1,600 members, proclaimed one of them, and “we are 1,600 to a man behind Mr. Cleveland in this matter.… There is absolutely not one dissenting voice.” Congratulations from other Republicans, stung to admiration, poured in upon the White House, including one from Theodore Roosevelt. The New York
Times
exaggerated matters in headlines which had no relation to the reports beneath them.
PREPARATIONS FOR WAR
and
COUNTRY IS AROUSED
, they ran, or,
WANT TO FIGHT
E
NGLAND
:
Army and Navy Men Profess Great Eagerness to Go to War. Talk of Invasion of Canada.
The Army bureau chief who was quoted, far from talking about invading Canada, gave a careful and sober statement of American naval and military inadequacies and stated his belief that America would “make a sorry spectacle at war with England.”

The surge of militancy evoked by the Venezuela Message shocked people who still thought of the United States in the terms of its founders, as a nation opposed to militarism, conquest, standing armies and all the other bad habits associated with the monarchies of the old world. This tradition was strongest in New England, and was stronger among the older generation—roughly those who were over fifty in 1890—than among the new. They were closer to Jefferson, who had said, “If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.” They took seriously the Declaration of Independence and its principle of just power deriving from the consent of the governed. They regarded the extension of American rule over foreign soil and foreign peoples as a violation of this principle and a desecration of the American purpose. The original American democracy was to them a torch, an ideal, an example of a brave new world that had set its face against the old. They wanted nothing to do with titles of rank and nobility, knee breeches, orders or any of the other insidious trappings of monarchy, and when in the Navy the title of Admiral was first proposed, an officer fumed, “Call them Admirals? Never! They will be wanting to be Dukes next.”

First-generation immigrants who had come to the United States beckoned by the American dream were as deeply devoted to the founding principles as those in whom they had been bred for generations. Some came out of the balked revolution of 1848, seeking Liberty, like Altgeld’s father and like Carl Schurz, now sixty-six, who as journalist, editor, Cabinet minister and Senator had been a power and reformer ever since Lincoln’s Administration. Some came to escape oppression or poverty and to seek opportunity, like the Scottish weaver who arrived in 1848 with his twelve-year-old son, Andrew Carnegie, or like the Dutch-Jewish cigarmaker who came from a London slum in 1863 with his thirteen-year-old son, Samuel Gompers. Some came, like E. L. Godkin, editor of the
Nation
and the New York
Evening Post
, not as a refugee from oppression, but as a voluntary exile from the old world, lured by America as a living demonstration of the democratic ideal. To them, as to men whose ancestors had come in the 1630’s, America was a new principle, and they saw the new militancy as its betrayal.

Godkin, filled with “anxiety about the country,” determined to oppose the Venezuela Message even if he should jeopardize his paper with the “half-crazed public.” Son of an English family settled since the Twelfth Century in Ireland, where he had been born and brought up, he had served as correspondent for English papers during the Crimean War and the American Civil War. He became editor of the
Nation
when it was founded in 1865 by a group of forty stockholders who supplied $100,000 with the stated purpose of championing the labouring class, the Negro, the cause of popular education and “true democratic principles in society and government.” In 1883, while remaining at the
Nation
, he succeeded Carl Schurz as editor of the
Evening Post
and through the medium of these two organs made himself, as William James said, “a towering influence on all thought concerning public affairs.”

He was a handsome, bearded, hot-tempered Celt, delighting in combat, brooding in melancholy, vivacious, pugnacious and a muckraker before Roosevelt invented the name. So unrelenting was his pursuit of corrupt practices by Tammany politicians that on one occasion they had him arrested for criminal libel three times in one day. James Russell Lowell agreed with the opinion of an English journalist that Godkin had made the
Nation
“the best periodical in the world,” and James Bryce, already famous as the author of
The American Commonwealth
, declared the
Evening Post
to be “the best paper printed in the English language.” Closer to home, opinion was hotter. Governor Hill of New York said he did not care about “the handful of mugwumps” who read the
Evening Post
in New York City. “The trouble with the damned sheet is that every editor in New York State reads it.” This was what accounted for Godkin’s pervasive influence; that other makers of opinion took their opinions from him—though not, to be sure, all. “What fearful mental degeneracy results from reading it or the
Nation
as a steady thing,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt to Captain Mahan in 1893.

In 1895 Godkin was sixty-four and feared the future. The United States, he wrote to a friend, “finds itself in possession of enormous power and is eager to use it in brutal fashion against anyone who comes along without knowing how to do so and is therefore constantly on the brink of some frightful catastrophe.” Indeed, as the United States had at this moment exactly one battleship in commission, Godkin was not unwarranted in thinking the Jingoes “absolutely crazy.” He believed the new spirit of “ferocious optimism,” as he strikingly described it, would lead to eventual disaster.

William James, Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, was equally disquieted. “It is instructive to find,” he wrote apropos of Venezuela, “how near the surface in all of us the old fighting spirit lies and how slight an appeal will wake it up. Once
really
waked, there is no retreat.” His colleague at Harvard, Charles Eliot Norton, Professor of Fine Arts, who was regarded as the exponent and arbiter of culture in American life, protested the war spirit at a meeting in the Shepard Memorial Church in Cambridge. “The shout of brutal applause, which has gone up from every part of this nation,” he said, makes every rational lover of his country feel the “greatest apprehension” for the future.

The white-haired, slender, stoop-shouldered figure, the husky yet musical voice speaking in its Boston Brahmin accent, the charm of that “supremely urbane and gentle presence” was never so at home as when against the herd. Born in 1827, only a year after Jefferson and John Adams died, Norton represented the puritan and militantly liberal conscience of an older generation. He was the son of Andrews Norton, “Unitarian Pope” of New England and Professor of Sacred Literature at Harvard, who had married Catherine Eliot, daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant, and was himself descended through a long line of ministers from John Norton, a Puritan divine who had emigrated to America in 1635.

Like Lord Salisbury, Norton believed in the dominance of an aristocratic class, which to him meant a class founded, not in landowning, but in a common background of culture, refinement, learning and manners. He saw it disappearing and protested regularly against encroaching vulgarity in his lectures. In parody of his manner a student said, “I propose this afternoon to make a few remarks on the hor-ri-ble vul-gar-ity of
EVERYTHING
.” Another of his students at Radcliffe, in her diary for 1895, described him looking “so mildly happy and benignant … while he gently tells us it were better for us had we never been born in this degenerate and unhappy age.” Norton became one of the first contributors to the
Atlantic Monthly
when it was founded by James Russell Lowell in 1857, later co-editor with Lowell of the
North American Review
, and was one of the forty stockholders who founded the
Nation.

Writing to Godkin about the Venezuela Message, Norton thought it made “a miserable end for this century” and had done much to increase the “worst spirit in our democracy,… a barbaric spirit of arrogance and unreasonable self-assertion.” What disturbed him more bitterly was the “deeper consideration” that the rise of democracy was not proving, after all, “a safeguard of peace and civilization,” because it brought with it “the rise of the uncivilized whom no school education can suffice to provide with intelligence and reason.” It might have been Lord Salisbury speaking. Norton felt the bitterness of a man who discovers his beloved to be not as beautiful—nor as pure—as he had believed. “I fear that America,” he wrote to an English friend, “is beginning a long course of error and wrong and is likely to become more and more a power for disturbance and barbarism.… It looks as if the world were entering on a new stage of experience in which there must be a new discipline of suffering to fit men for the new conditions.”

Yet his was not the desiccated and disappointed pessimism of Henry Adams, who drifted in and out of Washington and back and forth between Europe and America croaking his endless complaints like a wizened black crow; finding the century “rotten and bankrupt,” society sunk in vulgarity, commonness, imbecility and moral atrophy, himself on the verge of “mental extinction” and “dying of ennui”; finding America unbearable and leaving for Europe, finding Europe insufferable and returning to America, finding “decline is everywhere” and everywhere “the dead water of the
fin de siècle …
where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content.” The Venezuelan crisis merely confirmed him in the belief that “society today is more rotten than at any time within my personal knowledge. The whole thing is one vast structure of debt and fraud.” This was less a judgment on the current mood than a reflection of the rude shaking his nerves had suffered in the financial panic of 1893. Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image and ascribed his own impotence and paralysis to society at large. “Though rotten with decadence,” he said of himself in 1895, “I have not enough vitality left to be sensual.” The rotten old century, however, was bursting with vitality and he need only have looked at intimates of his own circle in the persons of Lodge and Roosevelt to have found the “ferocious optimism” that Godkin noted all around.

Although a decade older than Adams, Norton would allow himself occasional moments of optimism when he suspected that the loss of the values he loved might be the cost of a compensating gain in human welfare. “There are far more human beings materially well off today than ever before in the history of the world,” he wrote in 1896, and he could not resist the thought, “How interesting our times have been and still are!”

The last few years had indeed been full of incident. Cleveland, for all his good will, was beset by hard times. Industrial unrest gripped the nation. Depression followed the panic of 1893. In 1894 Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marched on Washington, and the bloody Pullman strike angered and frightened both sides in the deepening warfare of labour and capital. In the Congressional elections that November, the Republicans regained the House with a huge majority of 140 (244–104), and when in December, 1895, the new Fifty-fourth Congress assembled, the familiar great black figure with the great white face was again enthroned in the Speaker’s Chair.

Reed was now at the zenith of his power. The dangerous battle of his first term was long past and the guerrilla warfare of two terms as minority leader over, leaving him with unlimited control. “He commands everything by the brutality of his intellect,” said a member. His well-drilled ranks, though occasionally, and as time went on, increasingly, restive, could not break the habit of obedience. When the Speaker waved his hands upward members would stand as one man, and if by chance they rose to claim the floor when he wished them silent, a downward wave made them subside into their seats. “He had more perfect control over the House than any other Speaker,” wrote Senator Cullom of Illinois.