Penguin History of the United States of America (81 page)

The Democrats convened at Chicago sure of nothing but that Cleveland and all his works must be repudiated (as a result there was a secession of gold-bugs). The platform, written largely by Altgeld, reads for the most part like a re-orchestration of the Omaha platform. The Populists, or rather Populism, had captured the Democratic party. The victory was confirmed when William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska (1860–1925) was nominated for the Presidency.

Bryan was the perfection of an American type. His undeniable abilities
were always endangered, and eventually swamped, by his conditioning. A son of the West, he believed with equal passion in America and in the Bible, as interpreted by the most literal-minded Protestants. America stood for the prospect of human betterment; the Bible promised that the prospect would be realized. In his old age he would make himself pitifully ridiculous by launching a campaign against Darwinism, believing that Darwin contradicted Christ and that without a supernatural assurance human hopes could not be fulfilled. ‘Evolution, by denying the need or possibility of spiritual regeneration, discourages all reforms, for reform is always based upon the regeneration of the individual.’ So he ended as the counsel for the prosecution in the celebrated ‘monkey trial’ of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, when a young schoolmaster was prosecuted for teaching Darwinism, in breach of an anti-evolutionist state law. But there was a greater consistency between the old Bryan and the young than the sophisticated realized. All his life he spoke for the plain people of rural America, now holding up the prospect of reform, now rebuking the backsliding times, as occasion demanded. In 1896 he captivated the Democratic convention with a speech that was both heavily Biblical in language and the purest distillation of Western silver Populism:

You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favour of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country… If they say bimetallism is good, but that we cannot have it until other nations help us, we reply, that instead of having a gold standard because England has, we will restore bimetallism, and then let England have bimetallism because the United States has it. If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the uttermost. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the labouring interests and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

The importance of this speech, with its declaration of holy war against the rich and mighty, and its invocation of the sacred names of Jefferson and Jackson, was that, together with Bryan’s subsequent campaign, it recommitted the Democratic party to its original principles. There would still be rich, conservative Democrats in the decades to come, even conservative Democratic Presidential candidates, but just as Hanna had bound the Republicans to the wealthy, so Bryan had bound the Democrats once more to the poor and weak – an action that was to keep his party out of power for sixteen years, but in the end proved to be of immense benefit to it. And it should not be forgotten that it was Populism, as well as the silver
agitation, that made this departure not merely possible, but almost inevitable.

Meantime Bryan carried his battle to the people. No front porch for him: ‘the Boy Orator from the Platte’
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travelled 18,000 miles, made 600 speeches and was heard by an estimated five million people. It was a method of campaigning that had a bigger future than McKinley’s. He did not always convince those he heard: his single-minded concentration on silver did nothing for him in the East, where, on election day, he failed to carry a single state. But it was Gospel to the West. The excitement was so tremendous that, years later, Vachel Lindsay was inspired to write one of the few great political poems in the English language by his memories of ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’:

… It was eighteen ninety-six, and I was just sixteen
And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,
When there came from the sunset Nebraska’s shout of joy:
In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat
He scourged the elephant plutocrats
With barbed wire from the Platte.
The scales dipped from their mighty eyes.
They saw that summer’s noon
A tribe of wonders coming
To a marching tune.
Oh, the longhorns from Texas,
The jay hawks from Kansas,
The plop-eyed bugaroo and giant giassicus,
The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
The horned-toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,
From all the newborn states arow,
Bidding the eagles of the west fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the west fly on…
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All to no avail. Bryan polled 6,502,925 popular votes and carried twenty-two states with 176 electoral votes, but McKinley beat him by 600,000 popular votes and carried twenty-three states with 271 electoral votes. The Republicans captured both houses of Congress, of which they were to keep control until 1910. The People’s party, having endorsed Bryan, now melted fairly rapidly into the Democratic party. (This meant, among other things, that the one-party South was stronger than ever, and the plight of the Southern blacks worse.) Cleveland went into dignified retirement as another conservative President settled into the White House.

And then, for no reason that anyone could well understand, the economy revived. Business boomed, farmers found they could at last afford to re-paint their barns, the nightmare of the hard times melted away, Americans got back their self-confidence, and a period of great prosperity, with politics to match, began.

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.

Theodore Roosevelt

Prosperous or not, self-confident or not, the Unite States had reached a point, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, when radical improvements in its political, social and economic arrangements were so plainly necessary that they were actually attempted, and therefore may be called inevitable. Women and men, young and middle-aged, rich, poor and in-between, West, South and North, all acknowledged the necessity and had some hand in shaping the improvements. It was an epoch very much to the American taste, for it seemed a proof that faith in progress, and particularly in the potential for progress in America, was justified. The word ‘progressive’ had long been a favourite in common speech, as foreign observers such as Rudyard Kipling had already noticed;
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now it became attached to a political party, a movement, an era. It remains a curiously empty word, but historians will never be able to do without it. And after all due reservations have been made it would be churlish to deny that the United States did in many respects move forward during the period before the First World War – did begin to tackle a good many serious problems intelligently. It is a moderately encouraging story.

Yet America crossed the watershed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – in a sense, between the past and our present – in battle, like Britain. There was a warning in this, but it was not noticed. The ‘progressive era’ began with gunfire in Manila Bay and ended with gunfire in the North Atlantic. Had the Americans understood the meaning of the first event they might have been less astounded by the second, or even have averted it altogether. As it was, they devoted themselves, all but a few of them (Andrew Carnegie was the most conspicuous exception, with his Endowment for International Peace), to their usual pursuits, and the darkest forces at work, which were pushing the whole world to disaster, went unnoticed, unanalysed, unchecked. Almost all Americans continued to think of themselves as probably better than other peoples, and certainly much safer. The progressive generation was quite unaware that, in the twentieth century, war would be the almost constant guide of the national destiny – strengthening, warping, encouraging, perverting all projects. Progressives would owe to warfare some of their most spectacular victories and some of their most shameful defeats. By failing to take it into sufficient account they would come several times to the very brink of destruction. It is a matter for painful speculation how much happier our age might have been had they been wiser.

Historians still argue about the origins of the Spanish-American War of 1898. It was the first foreign war since the Mexican, which had ended fifty years previously. The two conflicts were in some respects strikingly alike – short, successful, aggressive, muddled affairs; both were crowned by territorial aggrandizement and left legacies of conflict. But it is the long gap between them which really needs consideration; and it needs to be asked whether the ending of that period of peace (if we disregard the Civil War and the Indian wars for a moment) was accidental or was significant of a profound change in America’s outlook and position.

Geography, historical circumstance and political tradition intersect to condition all nations, and the United States in the nineteenth century was no exception. The world was so large, the oceans so wide and their own continent so vast and empty it was impossible for the Americans to be much concerned with foreign affairs. Furthermore, it was a settled assumption of British foreign policy, from the Treaty of Ghent onwards, that a war with the United States was always likely to be more trouble than it was worth; and while America was at peace with the British Empire (its greatest neighbour) it was buffered against interference from other quarters. The British and the Americans might have their tiffs, for there was always plenty to dispute about; but they were at one in the view classically expressed in the Monroe Doctrine, that the New World was to be preserved against the ambitions of the other great powers. The profits of trade and industrialization from Canada to the Falkland Islands were to be reserved to the English-speaking world; and although the competition between its two principal components, as they built up their ascendancy in the Caribbean and further south, was intense, it never led them to break with each other and so let in the rival pretensions of the Spanish, the French or the Germans. There was, in fact, a partnership between Britain and the United States; but it was so informal, and punctuated by so many rows, that most Americans never
detected it. Their notion of Anglo-American relations remained that which had emerged from the Revolution, been strengthened by the War of 1812, and been strengthened again by the Civil War: John Bull was an obsolete bully, but Uncle Sam could handle him. Their notion of war was shaped rather by the experience of killing Indians than by Gettysburg or the Wilderness. Their notion of diplomacy was that it was the preserve of upper-class stuffed shirts who cost the country too much money (though the American foreign service was and is kept pitiably short of funds by Congress). Geographical isolation and strategic security turned the Americans in upon themselves. The conflicts that mattered were their domestic ones. Occasionally these might have diplomatic repercussions, as witness the deep embarrassment caused to the federal government by the anti-Chinese, and later the anti-Japanese, outbursts of feeling in California, which led to the passage of much racist legislation; but that was unusual. On the whole, foreign affairs were noticed only as topics for Fourth of July addresses, or campaign speeches, when it was thought desirable to let the eagle scream a little. Then American statesmen were happy to congratulate their constituents on the immeasurable superiority of their free, republican and democratic institutions; happy to denounce the aristocratic corruption of the Old World; happy to throw in allusions to those favourite shibboleths, Washington’s Farewell Address, the Monroe Doctrine and (after 1900) the Open Door. The chances were high that neither these orators nor their audiences had given anything that could be dignified with the name of thought to the implications of these time-worn slogans; but then neither they nor their audiences set much value on thought applied to foreign relations. What they wanted was rhetoric.

Not that Americans were uninterested in the rest of the world. For one thing, it persisted in the habit of sending large numbers of its inhabitants to settle in the United States. For another, as the descendants of the immigrants grew up and prospered, the resultant ethnic communities – Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Italian-Americans and so on – organized themselves into lobbies to influence national policies in favour of their ancestral countries; and whether by exporting dollars to their relations (like the Italians and Slavs) or guns (like the Irish) they profoundly affected the history of those countries. Then, prosperous Americans liked to travel on the fast, luxurious liners that the development of iron and steam technology made possible; enterprising businessmen sought out new fields for profit; missionaries tried to convert the heathen. Perhaps this last was the most characteristic trait: there was a missionary of some kind in almost every American breast. For this people cherished two somewhat inconsistent beliefs: that they were special, indeed unique, and it was vain for lesser breeds to emulate them; and that nevertheless the American way of life was the only model worth emulating and ought to be exported as widely and rapidly as possible. They were benevolent, whether they were trying to save Europe from itself by making it sign a pledge against war, as if it were strong
drink (before 1914), or trying to mitigate war’s cruellest effects (afterwards). But they were dangerously naïve. They did not really understand foreigners and therefore did not understand themselves in relation to foreigners, which was worse still. The dangers of this naivety were reinforced by the political system. The various waves of nativism, imperialism and, after the First World War, isolationism always found politicians democratically ready to co-operate and thus win votes; brought to the fore, also, many politicians who knew no better than their constituents.