American Experiment (204 page)

Holmes’s dualism—his stinging attacks on legal and social absolutes along with his cleansing and negative skepticism—reflected central ambivalences in the central doctrines of Peirce, James & co. The powerful emphasis in pragmatism on the inseparability of ideas from action, on the vital role of decision and choice, on ideas as plans of action, on the need to verify ideas by events, on the concept of ideas as instruments, on the mind as a crucial instrument of adaptation and survival, on ideas as changing and dynamic rather than fixed, and—always—on the knowledge that comes from immersion in experience and experiment—these notions, while by no means new, swept through the musty dogmas and received ideas of the fin de siècle like a clearing west wind. These ideas struck home in an America that was continually, feverishly experimenting, inventing, innovating.

Yet there were other tendencies in pragmatism that gravely impaired it as a tool for understanding the principles on which the nation had been founded and virtually crippled it as a means of understanding and solving the failure of Americans to make their democratic system respond to the transcending needs and aspirations of the people—in short,
really
to
“work.” In its attack on absolutes, pragmatism failed to grasp the power, not of dogmas, but of measured principles to provide practical guidelines for political activism and governmental action. Reality, yes—but the nature of reality was one of the oldest philosophical questions, and pragmatism threw little light on it. Practicality, yes—but what really was practicality, tested by what broader criteria? Experience, yes—but how did one evaluate experience? Experimentation, yes—but how did one know how to measure the results of the experiment? To a pragmatist it might seem foolish or utopian or “impractical” to measure practical results by old canons of liberty and equality, dignity and justice—but what were these canons if not the result of hundreds of years of human experience, tested in the most bitter intellectual, political, and physical struggles, out of which the great Enlightenment values had emerged?

It was because pragmatism could not answer such burning questions as these that it faltered as both a method of thought and a guide to action. On the one hand, the overextension of this antidogmatic creed converted it into something of a dogma itself, as the Williams College philosopher James B. Pratt protested to few listeners. And because it had no transcending central doctrine that would “stiffen” it as a theory, pragmatism was easily distorted in the public mind and perverted into a simple defense of the capitalist and Social Darwinian status quo. In his enthusiasm, James told his Columbia audience that “if you follow the pragmatic method, [you] must bring out of each word its practical cash-value….” These words, torn out of their broader context, were used to flay pragmatism as a handmaiden of conservatism. This was unfair, but understandable. For the more that pragmatism emphasized practicality and realism and derogated principle and morality, the more the test of experience was short-run, tangible, quantifiable reward. And reward for whom? For the experimenter, the doer, the practitioner—and the devil take the rest. And in this sense pragmatism was a philosophy least needed in an America abounding with innovators and doers and experimenters, but short on wide moral vision, collective social organization, and long-range political action.

The most portentous change in the intellectual climate around the turn of the century came in the way Americans viewed their own history, under the guidance of the New Historians. Perhaps it was high time. A century and a quarter had passed since Americans had fought for their independence under the banner of liberty and equality, a century since they had organized themselves under a stronger national government, almost a
century since they had bound themselves together more lightly through national political parties, and almost half a century since they had reaffirmed their commitment to liberty, equality, and nationhood in the Civil War, under the leadership of a man who proclaimed on a great battlefield that their government of the people, by the people, and for the people would not perish from the earth.

How well was the nation living up to its professed principles? For the past fifty years, journalists, theologians, intellectuals of many hues had been witnessing with deepening concern and revulsion the rise of an inegalitarian society in which some Americans lived in extravagant luxury and others in utter penury, in which Southern blacks still lacked meaningful freedom, women still lacked the right to vote, Indians lacked the right to live where they wished or even to live, Orientals lacked the right to welcome their kind from overseas, labor in most sectors lacked the right to organize. They were witnessing the rise of an increasingly concentrated corporate capitalism that wielded enormous political influence in national and state legislatures and before the bar. They were witnessing a saturnalia of vulgar display, party spoils, civic corruption, sordid materialism, in which the scramble for money, status, and power seemed to taint all that it touched.

Some New Historians reacted all the more sharply to all this because of their own feeling of vulnerability. They were part of a “status revolution” in which educated, middle-class professional persons and intellectuals had found themselves caught between the nouveaux riches and the rising claims of industrial workers, poor farmers, and immigrant masses. “The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich, the masters of great corporations,” Richard Hofstadter wrote, “were bypassing the men of the Mugwump type—the old gentry, the merchants of long standing, the small manufacturers, the established professional men, the civic leaders of an earlier era.” Alienated, the professional people were shifting in their own allegiances. Thus Protestant clergy, which had presented a “massive, almost unbroken front in its defense of the status quo,” in the 1870s, and had denounced the railway strikers of 1877 as “wild beasts,” had considerably softened in its attitudes; by the 1890s, the earlier social-gospel doctrines were coming to the fore among key sectors of the clergy. The legal profession, once dominated by small-town lawyers and partnerships, was becoming increasingly bureaucratized and commercialized. American lawyers seemed to the visiting Lord Bryce much less of a distinct professional class.

The historical profession was undergoing a transformation of its own. Not only had the New Historians emerged from the broadening, somewhat
beleaguered middle classes. Not only had they witnessed the tumultuous economic and social changes of late-century, vast industrialization, swelling immigration, and sharp depressions like that of the 1890s. They represented a new breed of professional historians who, in the budding graduate schools of the nation, were replacing the literary gentlemen-amateurs—the Bancrofts and Parkmans and the like—who had written the great nineteenth-century histories. Now the trained, disciplined professionals, with their newly won Ph.D.s, were taking over.

While few of the professional historians were pragmatists in a philosophical sense, most of them shared the temper of pragmatism—its revolt against formalism, absolutes, abstractions, and patriotic pieties, in favor of economics, empiricism, and “realism.” Frederick Jackson Turner, after presenting his famous paper on the significance of the frontier in American history to a meeting of the American Historical Association in 1893, had continued to argue that democracy had flourished on the frontier, which provided mobility and opportunity and an economic safety valve. Orin Grant Libby, one of Turner’s students, analyzed the voting for the Constitution of 1787 on the basis of debtors and creditors. At the University of Washington, J. Allen Smith argued boldly that the Constitution of 1787, bluntly contradicting the democratic spirit embodied in the Declaration of Independence, was deliberately designed to block popular rule through its stultifying checks and balances, including judicial review.

By far the most conspicuous and controversial of the New Historians—at least by 1913, when he published his
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution
—was a thirty-nine-year-old associate professor of politics at Columbia, Charles Austin Beard. Raised in a prosperous Indiana home where his father, a banker, businessman, and radical Republican, presided over vigorous family debate, young Beard had gone on to DePauw and then received an advanced education in Western industrial society. He had lived for a time in Jane Addams’s Hull-House in Chicago, where he encountered urban immigrant life in the raw; studied at Oxford, where he plunged into Fabian socialism, Labour Party politics, and the writings of John Ruskin (which were already influencing a young Indian named Gandhi); helped establish Ruskin Hall at Oxford as a school for working-men; spent two years lecturing to workers in and around Manchester, the heartland of British industrialism; and then returned home for graduate work at Columbia. There he joined a brilliant intellectual company including James Harvey Robinson in the New History and E. R. A. Seligman in economics. As he matured, his tall spare frame, bald eagle’s nose, and piercing blue eyes gave him the appearance of a benign Uncle Sam.

Beard was a noted young historian when he published his
Economic
Interpretation;
suddenly he became notorious. To a nation still worshipping the Constitution and its framers, Beard calmly reported that the “first firm steps toward the formation of the Constitution were taken by a small and active group of men immediately interested through their personal possessions in the outcome of their labors”; that a “large propertyless mass” lacking the vote was excluded from participating in the convention through representatives; that almost all the members of the Philadelphia convention were “immediately, directly, and personally interested” in establishing the new system; and that the new constitution was ratified by one-sixth or less of the country’s adult males.

Washington, Franklin, and the rest were simply lining their own pockets? A storm broke out over the head of the young professor. In Marion, Ohio, Warren G. Harding’s
Star
headlined:
“SCAVENGERS, HYENA-LIKE, DESECRATE THE GRAVES OF THE DEAD PATRIOTS WE REVERE.”
A recently retired Republican President, William Howard Taft, demanded to know whether Beard would have preferred a Constitution drafted by “dead bodies, out-at-the-elbows demagogues, and cranks who never had any money?” Asked if he had read “Beard’s last book,” Columbia’s imperious president, Nicholas Murray Butler, exclaimed, “I hope so.”

Why this furor at the time when many of the New Historians had been making much the same point about the influence of property on American politics and government? Partly because Beard had done an enormous amount of spadework, digging into the dust-covered records in the federal Treasury Department. Partly because the book bristled with lists of the Framers’ holdings, but so starkly and dully presented that Max Lerner later would wonder if Beard had expected trouble and stripped the book of every adornment, “on the theory that a plain woman would be less suspected of being a wanton than an attractive one.” Partly because the book offered, in sum, such a simple, understandable explanation of the almost exclusively economic motives that lay behind a great historic act—the framing of the Constitution.

This simple economic interpretation, which Beard later seemed to repudiate, told perhaps more about Beard and the New Historians than about the Framers. It dramatically posed the issue of whether ideas or interests had the greater—even the fundamental and ultimate—impact on the course of history, This was an ancient question, and might have been avoided by Beard himself except that he chose to pose it near the start of his
Economic Interpretation,
and in particular called to his cause James Madison as an economic determinist. Triumphantly he quoted Madison’s famous dictum in the tenth
Federalist
that the “most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of
property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.”

Was it significant that Beard, in quoting this noted paper, jumped over two cardinal passages: Madison’s tribute to liberty as “essential to political life” and his listing of ideas—a “zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning Government and many other points, as well as of speculation as of practice”—at the very head of his causes of faction? Madison in any event spoke for a large number of Framers who studied ideas, took them seriously, and acted in response to them. Often these ideas expressed—and cloaked—crass self-interest or, more typically, group and regional interest, but more often their ideas—especially their profound and measured belief in liberty—expressed their Enlightenment values, their religious and secular education, their qualities of intellect and imagination. It was because Beard, despite his protestations to the contrary, virtually dismissed these forces in leaders and in history that Holmes could in turn dismiss Beard’s “covert sneer” against the Framers and argue that “high-mindedness is not impossible in man.”

The issue of ideas versus interests was far more important, during the progressive era, than an academic argument among historians or philosophers. The issue went to the heart of the progressive response to the rising economic and political power of concentrated industrial capitalism. If popular and democratic forces were to curb economic power, they must understand the capitalists—their interests, their motives, their ideas. If the capitalists were responding merely to naked economic interest, then indeed the democratic strategy would be clear: to “turn economic determinism upside down” and gain control of industry, capital, and perhaps the capitalists themselves. This might be done through the “socialization of the means of production,” precisely what many Marxists, as confirmed economic determinists, were urging.

But if on the other hand
ideas
served as the crucial engines of history, a different strategy would be implied for the democratic control of economic power. That strategy must comprehend the infinite variety of noneconomic as well as economic interests, the pervasive influence of psychological forces rational and irrational, the power of ideology, the role of chance and contingency, and the daring leaps, the awful limitations, and the practical compromises of the human mind. It must understand why some persons’ ideas were pinioned to their interests, others could not even calculate their own interests, and still others far transcended them. It must comprehend an Andrew Carnegie as well as a Jay Gould, a Theodore Roosevelt as well as a J. P. Morgan.