American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

by H. W. Brands

  A remedy was sought. The people believed they had found it, not in the destruction of universal suffrage, but in the enlargement of it. It was an odd idea, and ingenious. You must understand, the constitution gave every man a vote; therefore that vote was a vested right and could not be taken away. But the constitution did not say that certain individuals might not be given two votes, or ten! So an amendatory clause was inserted in a quiet way, a clause which authorized the enlargement of the franchise in certain cases to be specified by statute.

  The amendment declared that an elementary school education entitled a person to a second vote, beyond the first he possessed by virtue of being a citizen. A high school diploma added two more votes, for four total. The holder of a university degree got nine votes altogether. Wealth, too, translated into extra votes, but less readily than education. Only the wealthiest few had more votes than the college graduates.

  This novel system was not without critics. Many newspapers had opposed it from the start, saying it would destroy the liberties of the people. But the critics had failed to prevent its approval, and after its implementation more than a few had been obliged to admit their mistake. The new system evoked a beneficent striving unlike any the country had witnessed.

  Whereas formerly a man was honored only according to the amount of money he possessed, his grandeur was measured now by the number of votes he wielded. A man with only one vote was conspicuously respectful to his neighbor who possessed three. And if he was a man above the commonplace, he was as conspicuously energetic in his determination to acquire three for himself. This spirit of emulation invaded all ranks. Votes based upon capital were commonly called “mortal” votes, because they could be lost; those based upon learning were called “immortal,” because they were permanent.

  On account of their permanency, the immortal votes were esteemed above the mortal votes, and their possessors were commonly called “immortals.” The vistor accompanied a resident down a street of one of the main cities. The resident nodded lightly to a pedestrian, then explained to the visitor that this was a one-vote nod, as the man to whom he had nodded possessed one vote. A second pedestrian approached; the resident bowed. A four-vote bow, he said. Anticipating the traveler’s question, he said that nothing compelled his acknowledgments; these were simply a matter of custom and respect. Another pedestrian approached; the resident bent at the waist and doffed his hat.

  “What grandee is that?” the traveler inquired.

  “That is our most illustrious astronomer. He hasn’t any money, but is fearfully learned. Nine immortals is his political weight! He would swing a hundred and fifty votes if our system were perfect.”

  “Is there any altitude of mere moneyed grandeur that you take off your hat to?”

  “No. Nine immortal votes is the only power we uncover for.”

  The spirit of emulation suffused the whole people, including women, who earned votes the same way the men did.

  It was common to hear people admiringly mention men who had begun life on the lower levels and in time achieved great voting-power. It was also common to hear youths planning a future of ever so many votes for themselves. I heard shrewd mammas speak of certain young men as good “catches” because they possessed such-and-such a number of votes. I knew of more than one case where an heiress was married to a youngster who had but one vote, the argument being that he was gifted with such excellent parts that in time he would acquire a good voting strength, and perhaps in the long run be able to outvote his wife, if he had luck.

  The visitor naturally wondered what kind of government this system produced. An inspection revealed the answer. “Ignorance and incompetence had no place in the government,” he reported. “Brains and property managed the state.” A common man—or woman—might aspire to office, but only if he or she possessed intelligence or acquired property. Public office was as well compensated as the most distinguished professions, and more highly respected. For this reason graft had disappeared. Justice was impartially and wisely administered, as the judges earned their offices by education, experience, and talent and held them for life. Schools and colleges were amply funded, as befit the avenues to immortality, and were free to all.

  The traveler inquired whether school attendance was compulsory, as in many countries. His host smiled tolerantly at the unthinking character of the question. “When a man’s child is able to make himself honored according to the amount of education he acquires,” the resident said, “don’t you suppose that that parent will apply the compulsion himself? Our free schools and free colleges require no law to fill them.”1

  MARK TWAIN WAS still a journalist, and still Sam Clemens to most of those who knew him, when he set sail in 1866 from San Francisco for Hawaii. The Sacramento Union had assigned him to tour the Sandwich Islands, as they were called by Americans and other outsiders, and report their sights, customs, and prospects back to the Union’s readers. The success of the venture—in terms of Twain’s discovered affinity for overseas travel and the marketability of what he wrote about it—prompted further journeys. In 1867 he embarked from New York for Europe aboard the side-wheel steamer Quaker City. “I am going on this trip for fun only,” Twain fibbed to a friend; in fact he was on assignment for the Alta California of San Francisco, which expected a series of humorous letters home. Twain toured Europe and the Mediterranean, finally reaching what Christians called the Holy Land, which inspired the book he eventually expanded his letters into: The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress.

  The book was Twain’s first best seller, and its success steeled his nerve to propose marriage to Olivia Langdon. “I want a good wife—I want a couple of them if they are particularly good,” he had told a friend, but he hadn’t seen how he could afford one on a journalist’s salary. “I can’t turn an inkstand into Aladdin’s lamp.” The Langdons, one of the wealthiest families in Elmira, New York, hadn’t seen much hope for a journalist, either, but a well-published author was another matter, and as the sales of Twain’s Innocents soared, Livy’s parents blessed the union.2

  The couple settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where the neighbors included Harriet Beecher Stowe. Henry Ward Beecher dropped by for visits and impressed Twain as a solid fellow. “Puritans are mighty strait-laced,” Twain told his mother, “and they won’t let me smoke in the parlor, but the Almighty don’t make any better people.” Twain particularly appreciated that Henry didn’t let religion intrude on his enjoyment of life. When Twain suggested that wine ought to be served with meals, Beecher agreed. “But it wouldn’t do to say it loud,” Beecher added. Twain concluded, “Henry Ward is a brick.”

  Family business took Twain to Washington in 1870, when Congress was considering a bill to reconstruct the Tennessee judiciary. A company in Memphis owed half a million dollars to one of Livy’s father’s firms, and Twain lobbied the Connecticut delegation to facilitate payment. His influence on the legislation was minimal, but the influence of the legislative process on Twain was substantial. To date the objects of his satire had been foreigners and persons at the margins of society; Washington opened an entirely new literary front. He discovered “material enough for a whole book,” he said. “This a perfect gold mine.”3

  Production began shortly after his return to Hartford. Other neighbors were Susan and Charles Dudley Warner; Charles edited the Hartford Courant, and over dinner he and Twain made light of the novels their wives enjoyed reading. The women challenged the men to do better. Neither Twain nor Warner had ever written a novel, but they accepted the challenge and decided to collaborate. Twain wrote the first section, establishing the premises of the book and introducing its major character; after that the two men alternated chapters. The title apparently was Twain’s.

  The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today was published in 1873 to strong sales and weak reviews. The plot didn’t hold together, the critics said, but betrayed the dual hands that wrote it. The satire was clumsily broad, overstating the corruption in American political and economic li
fe. Twain couldn’t deny the first criticism (which he and Warner implicitly acknowledged by claiming separate copyright control of the characters in their own chapters). He defended himself against the second charge, of exaggeration, with uncharacteristic meekness. “In America, nearly every man has his dream, his pet scheme, whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily,” he explained in the preface to the British edition. “It is this all-pervading speculativeness which we have tried to illustrate in The Gilded Age. It is a characteristic which is both bad and good, for both the individual and the nation.… But I have a great strong faith in a noble future for my country. A vast majority of the people are straightforward and honest.”4

  Straightforward and honest, perhaps, but dangerously ignorant. With more than a few of his contemporaries, Twain despaired of democracy’s ability to deliver good government. The scandals of the Gilded Age—the title caught on though the book itself soon faded from view—suggested that the greed to which capitalism appealed was more than most people could put aside when they turned to politics. The commercial success of The Gilded Age convinced Twain he might have a future as a novelist—he set to work on what would become Tom Sawyer—but he didn’t abandon political criticism. In October 1875 he published the anonymous account of the mythical republic where education and wealth augmented the voting power of men and women, making “immortals” of the best educated and yielding higher-minded, more responsible government than existed in the United States. The positive response to the article caused Atlantic editor Howells to urge Twain to file more dispatches from the model republic. But though Twain had no difficulty generating the indignation of the satirist, he lacked the patience of the reformer. And in any event the work he produced under his own name—even if assumed—was too lucrative for him to abandon.5

  OTHERS TOOK UP the cudgels against democracy, at least as currently practiced in the United States. Henry Adams devoted an entire 1880 novel, straightforwardly called Democracy, to lampooning the habits of Americans in the political arena. Adams’s politicians were venal and vulgar, his voters silly, stupid, or self-interested. Like Twain, Adams thought discretion the better part of critical valor and declined to put his name on his work; the secret of his authorship held for decades. John Hay, former personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln and future secretary of state to William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, was no less critical of American democracy in his 1884 novel, The Breadwinners. But he was even more cautious, refusing till death to acknowledge writing such a scathing attack on the practice, if not the principle, of popular government.

  Francis Parkman frankly avowed his anti-democratic opinions. Writing under his own name in the North American Review in 1878, the historian (and botanist: his Harvard appointment was in horticulture) described what he morosely called “the failure of universal suffrage.” Susan B. Anthony and other feminists would have disputed Parkman’s premise that universal suffrage existed in America, as would the growing number of disfranchised African Americans in the South, but Parkman thought the franchise had spread quite far enough already. “The transfer of sovereignty to the people, and the whole people, is proclaimed the panacea of political and social ills,” he said, “and we are but rarely reminded that popular sovereignty had evils of its own, against which patriotism may exercise itself to better purpose. Here and there one hears a whisper that perhaps the masses have not learned to use their power; but the whisper is greeted with obloquy.” Americans had dethroned King George only to enthrone a new monarch, King Demos, who had begun as “a reasonable and sensible monarch who had a notion of good government, and ruled himself and his realm with wisdom and moderation,” but who had degenerated till “he begins to lose his wits and forget his kingcraft.”

  More than Twain and some other critics of democracy, Parkman faulted not democracy per se but democracy’s perversion by capitalism. Democracy had suited the New England villages that constituted its American birthplace. That birthplace, however, no longer existed. “The village has grown into a populous city, with its factories and workshops, its acres of tenement-houses, and thousands and ten thousands of restless workmen, foreigners for the most part, to whom liberty means license and politics means plunder.” The effects of capitalism spread insidiously across the land.

  Population increased, wealth grew apace; men became rabid in making money, and women frivolous in spending it.… A vast industrial development, an immense prosperity rested safely for a while on the old national traditions, love of country, respect for law, and the habit of self-government. Then began the inevitable strain. Crowded cities, where the irresponsible and ignorant were numerically equal, or more than equal, to the rest, and where the weakest and most worthless was a match, by his vote, for the wisest and best; bloated wealth and envious poverty; a tinseled civilization above, and a discontented proletariat beneath—all these have broken rudely upon the dreams of equal brotherhood once cherished by those who made their wish the father of their thought, and fancied that this favored land formed an exception to the universal laws of human nature.

  Among these laws was the one dictating that some people were more gifted than others. “Vaguely and half unconsciously, but every day more and more, the masses hug the flattering illusion that one man is essentially about as good as another. They will not deny that there is great difference in the quality of horses or dogs, but they refuse to see it in their own genus. A jockey may be a democrat in the street, but he is sure to be an aristocrat in the stable. And yet the essential difference between man and man is incomparably greater than that between horse and horse, or dog and dog.”

  Advocates of democracy argued that education was the answer to democracy’s ills. Parkman thought the problem wasn’t simply intellectual. “It consists also in the want of feeling that his own interests are connected with those of the community, and in the weakness or absence of the sense of moral and political duty.” Immigrants lacked this feeling on arrival, and little in their experience caused it to grow. “It may be doubted, as a general rule, whether the young Irish-American is a better or safer citizen than his parent from Cork. He can read, but he reads nothing but sensation stories and scandalous picture-papers, which fill him with preposterous notions and would enfeeble a stronger brain than his and debauch a sounder conscience. He is generally less industrious than his sire, and equally careless of the public good.”

  Parkman had no easy answer to the problem he described. In fact he had no real answer at all. Democracy was too entrenched as an ideology, and capitalism too powerful as a practice. He advocated reforming higher education. “What we need most is a broad and masculine education, bearing on questions of society and government; not repelling from active life, but preparing for it and impelling toward it. The discipline of the university should be a training for the arena.” He cited the Civil War in evidence of the principle that patriotism could elevate politics above the grasping and mundane, if only briefly; the challenge was to preserve that patriotism during peacetime. He called on idealistic young people to put country before self and oust those who did the opposite. Yet though he professed optimism he hardly engendered it. “The strife is strangely unequal,” he acknowledged, “for on one side are ranged all the forces of self-interest, and on the other only duty and patriotism.” In a political economy that celebrated the former, the latter labored at a severe disadvantage. “Universal suffrage is applicable only to those peoples, if such there are, who by character and training are prepared for it.” Masses of Americans lacked the preparation, rendering the failure of universal suffrage inescapable.6

  HERMAN MELVILLE HAD gone to sea and come home to write Moby-Dick. Henry George went to sea and returned to write Progress and Poverty. The difference doubtless revealed divergent sensibilities in Melville and George; no Ahab so haunted the dreams of George as of Melville. But it also reflected the changing times. Melville shipped out in 1839, when America remained largely rural; his most popular book during his lifetime, the 1846 Typee, a
ddressed an audience attuned to the rhythms and needs of an agrarian age. Henry George, by contrast, plowed the Pacific in the wake of the California gold rush; when he turned to writing, industrialization was in full roar, oil came from the stony deep rather than the briny deep, and the cannibalism that sent frissons through readers occurred mostly in the marketplace. Henry George’s white whale was no symbolic cetacean but rather American capitalism.

  George was the second of ten children of a Philadelphia customhouse clerk and his wife; at thirteen he left school and sought a job to help support his siblings. Philadelphia was still a major seaport, and its merchant marine required a regular infusion of cabin boys. Henry signed on with the Hindoo, bound for the East Indies. In Australia, though, the crew contracted gold fever and threatened to desert for the mines back of Melbourne. The captain locked them up till the symptoms passed. On the vessel’s return to Philadelphia, George worked as a typesetter before shipping out again, on a coastal schooner ferrying coal from Pennsylvania to New England. But the Panic of 1857 curtailed the demand for coal and terminated George’s job. He headed west: to California, British Columbia, and California again. He eventually landed a job in San Francisco, setting type again. In 1861, as the eastern half of the country went to war, he pooled meager resources with four partners to found the San Francisco Daily Evening Journal. George threw himself into the venture. “I worked until my clothes were in rags and the toes of my shoes were out,” he said later. “I slept in the office and did the best I could to economize.” But readers weren’t buying what he and the others were writing, and the paper folded.

  He married, despite his poverty and lack of prospects, to an Australian-born orphan who had found her way to California. Her uncle opposed the match, prompting the eighteen-year-old girl and her twenty-one-year-old suitor to elope. They lived on love for several years, as the feckless Henry couldn’t find the rungs of the ladder of success. His spirits plumbed murderous depths. His wife was about to give birth to their second child; the cupboard was empty and so was George’s wallet. “I walked along the street and made up my mind to get money from the first man whose appearance might indicate that he had it to give,” he later wrote. “I stopped a man—a stranger—and told him I wanted five dollars. He asked me what I wanted it for. I told him that my wife was confined and that I had nothing to give her to eat. He gave me the money. If he had not, I think I was desperate enough to have killed him.”7