Oliver Wendell Holmes
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MANY HISTORIANS ASSESSING how the Civil War changed American society have quoted Louis Menand’s trenchant observation about what the war did to Oliver Wendell Holmes: it did not merely make him lose his beliefs, Menand wrote, “It made him lose his belief in beliefs.” Walt Whitman, for one, agreed. Looking “at our times and land searchingly . . . like a physician diagnosing some deep disease,” he wrote in an 1871 essay in which he bemoaned America’s loss of moral identity in the wake of war and industrialization, “genuine belief seems to have left us.”8
The truth for Holmes was more complicated. After the war he destroyed a number of his diary pages and letters to his parents. In a letter to his mother on July 4, 1862, he mentions that he is sending a page from his diary “to show my feelings” after the Battle of Fair Oaks, two weeks earlier. On the envelope he afterward wrote, “letter referred to within destroyed—rather pompous.”9
It was not clear whether he was embarrassed by some high-minded thoughts about the abolitionist cause, or whether it was some naive gush of romantic chivalry that he found “pompous” after having experienced the full brutality of war. He did speak later of how distant seemed the fiery enthusiasms for abolition that had filled his youth: relating to Laski in 1926 how he had been one of the “little band intended to see Wendell Phillips through if there was a row after the meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society,” he observed, “How coolly one looks on that question now.”10 Unlike his friend Pen Hallowell, he was largely unmoved by the plight of the freed slaves after the war. He sealed off his idealism for the cause he had fought for, just as he had sealed off the experience of the war itself.
But he never lost his belief in man’s capacity for ideals, nor his personal conviction that ideals mattered. “Of all humbugs the greatest is the humbug of indifference and superiority,” he wrote his friend Lady Castletown in 1897. “Our destiny is to care, to idealize, to live towards passionately desired ends.” He always dismissed the nihilistic attitude “it is all futile,” which he termed “the dogmatism that often is disguised under scepticism. The sceptic has no standard to warrant such universal judgments. If a man has counted in the actual striving of his fellows he cannot pronounce it vain.”11
What the war did make him question was the morally superior certainty that often went hand in hand with belief: he grew to distrust, and to detest, zealotry and causes of all kinds. “The abolitionists had a stock phrase that a man was either a knave or a fool who did not act as they (the abolitionists) knew to be right,” Holmes wrote Pollock in 1929. “So Calvin thought of the Catholics and the Catholics of Calvin. So I don’t doubt do the more convinced prohibitionists think of their opponents today. . . . It is as well that some of us don’t know that we know anything.” Every cause, Holmes said, was at heart a kind of despotism—an attempt to force one’s own views on others. “I don’t care to boss my neighbors and to require them to want something different from what they do,” he told Laski, “even when, as frequently, I think their wishes more or less suicidal.”12
The worst thing about the Boston moralists before the war was not only their superior assumption that they were right, but their disdain for troubling themselves with the practical consequences of that certainty. The war had shown what those consequences were: he had seen, Holmes said, the “the power that prejudice gives a man” to hate, and fight, and kill. And if he would come to insist as a cornerstone of his legal philosophy that law is fundamentally a statement of society’s willingness to use force—“every law means I will kill sooner than not have my way,” as he put it—it was because he did not want the men who threw ideas around ever again to escape responsibility for where those ideas led. It was the same reason he lost the enthusiastic belief he once had in the cause of women’s suffrage: political decisions had better “come from those who do the killing.”13
More than once he cautioned his friends about “the irresponsibility of running the universe on paper,” as Frankfurter summarized Holmes’s counsel. Or, as Holmes explained it to John Wu, “The test of an ideal or rather of an idealist, is the power to hold it and get one’s inner inspiration from it under difficulties. When one is comfortable and well off, it is easy to talk high talk.”14
A corollary was that nothing in life comes without a price, and it was best to know in advance what the bill was going to be. “Remember, my friend, that every good costs something,” he cautioned Einstein. “Don’t forget that to have anything means to go without something else. Even to be a person, to be this means to be not that.”15
But the war had done more than that: it had been a cataclysmic reproach to the very idea that there was even such a thing as a common interest of society, much less one that would be embraced by all as a self-evident good on nothing more than a few lectures, sermons, and pamphlets by Boston intellectuals.
The manifest failure of Boston’s Unitarian optimism had itself engendered “a certain tough-mindedness” that Holmes’s entire generation shared, Daniel Howe observed: “The very fact of war went far to destroy the hopefulness which had characterized so much of antebellum Unitarian thinking and gave the Boston Brahmin mind a more somber cast. No longer was it possible to put so much faith as before in voluntary moral suasion as a means of effecting progress.” Even Dr. Holmes acknowledged as much; in his postwar novel Elsie Venner he drily observed, “ ‘The beauty of virtue’ got to be an old story at last. ‘The moral dignity of human nature’ ceased to excite a thrill of satisfaction, after some hundred repetitions.”16
It was not just slavery that had revealed the divisions in society; the war had forced on Boston the unsettling truth that it was just one town, Einstein remembered Holmes telling him, and that discovery had upended the entire comfortable and secure world that Holmes had grown up in. “He told me,” said Einstein, “that after the Civil War the world never seemed right again.”17
That had as much to do with what the war had done to Boston as what it had done to Holmes. America, as seen from Boston, “had once been as vague as Australia,” wrote Van Wyck Brooks. But as news came from battlefields as far west as New Mexico and as far south as New Orleans, “In every house & shop, an American map has been unrolled, & daily studied,” Emerson wrote in his journal. “We will not again disparage America. . . . The war is a new glass through which to see things.”18
The war accelerated a shift in political and economic power away from New England that underscored the parochialism of its views and values. Grant, elected president in 1868, represented the rising power of the West, along with a new kind of politics that had little time for the refined moral and intellectual sensibilities or social airs of Boston’s prewar leaders. Grant hated Charles Sumner for his English tailored clothes, despised Dr. Holmes’s diplomat friend John Motley “because he parted his hair in the middle.” New England’s statesmen, wrote Brooks, “were unhorsed at once and, it seemed, forever.” That same year the Cunard line moved its main port of entry from Boston to New York, confirming Boston’s eclipse as the railroad hub and trade and financial center of the nation. Fortunes made on the new western frontier in mining, railroads, and commerce overshadowed New England’s old wealth, built on the declining textile and shipping industries.19
Even Boston was not Boston anymore. Members of the city’s burgeoning Irish population had fought with incredible bravery in the war, giving them a claim on the city’s conscience that could not be ignored. Boston’s Irish had come from the poorest of the poor, looked down on in the years before the war as at best objects of pity and charity and at worst an alien pestilence to be contained. From 1846 to 1849, during the worst of the potato famine, 125,000 Irish had arrived in Boston, most from the destitute western counties, most settling in Boston only because they were too poor to travel anywhere else upon disembarking from the immigrant ships at their first port of call. The part played by the heavily Irish Columbian Artillery company in the return to slavery of Anthony Burns in 1853 had added to the anti-Irish wave that propelled the nativist Know-Noth
ing party to power in the state the following year, and to a deepening conviction that the Irish shared none of America’s true values as seen from Beacon Hill.20
But when, in the weeks immediately following Fort Sumter, the commander of the disbanded Columbian Artillery stepped forward to raise a new Irish regiment to join the fight against the Confederacy, all the old moral certainties became less certain. “This is my country as much as the man who was born on the soil,” Peter Welsh wrote to his wife from Virginia, where he was serving with the Boston Irish regiment, the Ninth Massachusetts Infantry. The forty-four men of the Fighting Ninth killed or mortally wounded in the Wilderness exceeded even the losses of the Twentieth. Boston could not help noticing. When the Ninth’s commander Thomas Cass was killed in the Peninsula Campaign, the city erected a monument to his memory in the Public Garden. And in 1861 Harvard awarded an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree to Boston’s Catholic bishop, John B. Fitzpatrick, a recognition unthinkable a few years earlier.21
After the war, as the Back Bay project and new industries including electric, telephone, and gas utilities created new and better-paying opportunities than the pick-and-shovel jobs the Irish had been lucky up until then to get, the Irish began moving rapidly out of the crowded waterfront tenements to new neighborhoods in the expanding city; though it would be another generation or more before the “lace-curtain” Irish (or the still later “two-toilet” Irish) made their first inroads into the city’s more affluent suburbs, their rising prosperity brought political power and a new brand of rough-and-tumble politics that turned Boston’s guardians of civic virtue on their heads. To the Irish, whose Old World mores based on family ties “placed strong personal loyalties above allegiance to abstract codes of law or morals,” as Richard Hofstadter noted, politics had nothing to do with the pursuit of public virtue, the greater good, or the disinterested progress of the community, and everything to do with personal obligations and deal making. Boston’s moral spokesmen now suddenly seemed “less the natural leaders of a unified commonwealth,” Daniel Howe observed, “than one interest group within a pluralistic society.”22
Likewise the Unitarian movement, which had long resisted the idea of forming an association because they viewed their ideas as self-evident Christian moral truths that would transcend sectarian divisions, in 1865 abandoned their dream of universality and set up a regular denomination, in competition with every other squabbling church faction.23
What had seemed universal certainty in prewar Boston now seemed to depend entirely on where one was sitting.
“WHEN I CAME BACK from the war my head was full of thoughts about philosophy,” Holmes told Frankfurter in 1932, but “I was kicked into the law by my Governor.” Francis Biddle, not always the most reliable relater of Holmes anecdotes, told in his brief 1942 biography of the justice how Holmes had gone to visit Emerson in Concord not long after his return from the war. He had spent the evening talking over whether he should try to emulate Emerson’s own life’s work, and in the end decided that philosophy was too far removed from the roar and battle of life ever to satisfy him.24
But of course Holmes himself had earlier declared his intention to go to law school, when he wrote his Class Album sketch upon graduating from Harvard just before he left for the war, and whatever “kicking” Holmes Sr. did may have been more to get his son back on his already announced track. Holmes told Frankfurter he had even in “a vague way” thought about medical school, which was such an unlikely idea on all counts that that may have been what really provoked his father to tell his son to get serious and stop woolgathering. Holmes offered a slightly facetious amendment to his initial description of his father kicking him into the law which acknowledged that in fact his father had merely pointed out an obvious truth: he “put on the screws to have me go to the Law School—I mean he exerted the coercion of the authority of his judgment.”25
Harvard Law School was then a two-year program, and Holmes applied himself to the work with an intensity not dampened by the intellectual incoherence of the subject as it was then presented to students. “It required blind faith—faith that could not yet find the formula of justification for itself,” he recounted decades later.
There were few of the charts and lights for which one longed when I began. One found oneself plunged in a thick fog of details—in a black and frozen night, in which there were no flowers, no spring, no easy joys. . . . One heard Burke saying that law sharpens the mind by narrowing it. One heard in Thackeray of a lawyer bending all the powers of a great mind to a mean profession. One saw that artists and poets shrank from it as from an alien world. One doubted oneself how it could be worthy of the interest of an intelligent mind.26
“Truth sifts so slowly from the dust of the law,” he wrote to H. H. Brownell, a poet of the Civil War who had himself begun in the law, at the end of his first year of studies. But, he added, “I think my first year at law satisfies me. Certainly it far exceeds my expectations both as gymnastics and for its intrinsic interest.” He liked to drop in on John C. Ropes and talk over the technical points he was mastering, sipping a gin toddy and smoking a cigar. Ropes later remarked to William James that “he had never known of anyone in the law who studied anything like as hard as Wendell.”27
From the start he took heart in the belief that mastery of a subject, and thorough professional expertise, was the only way to accomplish anything significant in life. A year and a half after receiving his degree, and still thoroughly immersed in a now self-directed program of voluminous readings in the law, he wrote William James of his “ever increasing conviction that law as well as any other series of facts in this world may be approached in the interests of science and may be studied, yes and practised, with the preservation of one’s ideals. I should even say that they grew robust under the regimen.”
But that meant one could not pick and choose what was pleasant; to pursue a profession required total commitment of a kind that was the exact opposite of his father’s enjoyable dilettantism:
Since I wrote in December I have worked at nothing but the law. Philosophy has hibernated in torpid slumber, and I have lain “sluttishly soaking and gurgling in the devil’s pickle,” as Carlyle says. It has been necessary,—if a man chooses a profession he cannot forever content himself in picking out the plums with fastidious dilettantism and give the rest of the loaf to the poor, but must eat his way manfully through crust and crumb—soft, unpleasant inner parts which, within one, swell, causing discomfort in the bowels.28
Holmes was hardly alone in feeling that the generalism of his father’s generation was an anachronism in the postwar world. “Holmes’s rejection of the intellectual style of prewar Boston,” Menand observed, “mirrored a generational shift. To many of the men who had been through the war, the values of professionalism and expertise were attractive; they implied impersonality, respect for institutions as efficient organizers of enterprise, and a modern and scientific attitude—the opposites of the individualism, humanitarianism, and moralism that characterized Northern intellectual life before the war.”29
His personal experience on the battlefield, where moral ardor and gentlemanly attainment had proved no match for technical competence in military science, was repeated in the larger lessons of the war’s organization and management. At the start of the war a number of Boston women had rushed to form aid societies for the soldiers at the front: they rolled bandages and knitted socks and mittens and launched a variety of well-meaning but largely uncoordinated efforts to improve hospital care. It was all very much in the style of prewar Boston’s philanthropic support for social causes of all kinds. But these amateur efforts were quickly supplanted by far more professional organizations, notably the U.S. Sanitary Commission, run by businessmen who deliberately played down any sentiment of philanthropy or good deeds and instead emphasized their practical dollars-and-sense approach to problem solving: they employed professional fund raisers, hired and paid a staff of experienced managers, and quickly showed what could b
e done with modern business practices. They sent stocks of medicine to the field, bought and equipped wagon trains and steamships to evacuate the wounded, and gathered statistics on diseases and sanitary conditions to see where improvements were needed.30
But more broadly, the failure of Boston’s amateurism and idealism to yield much of anything of use in “the workaday world” had been brought into sharp relief by the war; the Boston moralists now looked not only “precious, snobbish, overrefined, softly sentimental,” but simply incompetent as well. “The gap between their promise and their achievement in science, the arts, evangelism, pedagogy, and politics,” wrote Daniel Howe, was “too obvious to be ignored.”31
The new spirit of the age was nowhere more evident than at Harvard. “Our new President, Eliot, has turned the whole University over like a flapjack,” Dr. Holmes reported to his friend Motley. Charles Eliot was not only not a clergyman, he was a chemist, and he proceeded in quick order to throw the classics overboard, introduce electives and majors, and revitalize the teaching of science and modern languages. “He loved skill,” Brooks observed, and it would be no coincidence that just a few years later he would hire the twenty-nine-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as University Lecturer on Constitutional Law.32
Holmes would later in life jocularly formulate his idea about the paramount virtue of professionalism in what he called “my imaginary society of jobbists.” As he described his conceit to Wu, its members “were free to be egotists or altruists on the usual Saturday half holiday provided they were neither while on their job. Their job is their contribution to the general welfare and when a man is on that, he will do it better the less he thinks either of himself or of his neighbors, and the more he puts all his energy into the problem he has to solve.”33