Too often the minds of students are occupied with men’s theories and speculations, falsely called science and philosophy. They need to be brought into close contact with nature. Let them learn that creation and Christianity have one God. Let them be taught to see the harmony of the natural with the spiritual. —Christ’s Object Lessons, 25.WEGW 209.1

Reflecting in 1879 upon the impact of the Civil War, novelist Henry James wrote that it “marks an era in the history of the American mind.” In that experience Americans “had eaten of the tree of knowledge” and found the world “a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult.”WEGW 209.2

There is considerable truth in James’s words, for Americans seem to have moved from a buoyant and even sentimental optimism prior to 1860 to an outlook that, although still basically optimistic, contained a hardness and grimness not previously apparent. The Civil War with its death and destruction was not the only source of this change in mood and ideas, but it probably played a fundamental role, making it possible for certain ideas to be accepted that earlier would have been rejected.WEGW 209.3

Americans of the antebellum period had reason to be optimistic. The War of 1812 had apparently made them a permanent member of the family of nations and had provided an authentic hero in the person of Andrew Jackson. The nation was rapidly expanding its borders; between 1816 and 1859, 15 new states entered the Union, extending its territory to such far-flung regions as Texas, California, and Oregon, and the population more than doubled. Accompanying this expansion, Americans threw their energies into building highways, canals, and railways so that both goods and people could move with increased speed.WEGW 209.4

The technological improvements evidenced in such things as steamboats and railroads extended to the telegraph and printing press and such domestic items as ice coolers, mosquito nets, sliding tables, and patent ink stands. The material basis of life was improving, even for the masses. “Give but a passing glance at the fat volumes of patent office reports,” wrote Walt Whitman, “and bless your star that fate has cast your lot in the year of our Lord 1857.”WEGW 210.1

These social and technological developments gave support to widespread belief in the idea of progress, but this faith in the future drew upon other sources as well. Even before settlement began, many Europeans regarded America as an earthly paradise, helping create a myth that continued to influence American thinking in the nineteenth century. The Revolutionary War era had bequeathed a faith in equality and natural rights that by the 1830s expressed itself in the much lauded “common man.” And since the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Christian revival had been under way, pushing Calvinistic predestinarianism aside and teaching that perfection was not only possible but expected.WEGW 210.2

In the years after his victory at New Orleans, Andrew Jackson came to symbolize many of these currents of thought. A frontiersman who was close to nature, Jackson represented American superiority to an overcivilized Europe. A man of iron, he revealed that Americans could accomplish great things through determination and will. And as God’s instrument, Jackson proved that the Lord presided over American destiny. The description may not have been accurate, but in making Jackson a hero Americans created a figure embodying their deepest desires.WEGW 210.3

On a more sophisticated level, George Bancroft was saying much the same thing in his 10-volume History of the United States, which began publication in 1834. Blending both philosophical and popular ideas, Bancroft presented America as God’s chosen nation to lead all men toward fulfillment of man’s potential. “In America,” he wrote, “the influences of time were molded by the creative force of reason, sentiment, and nature; its political edifice rose in lovely proportions, as if to the melodies of the lyre. Peacefully and without crime, humanity was to make for itself a new existence.”WEGW 210.4

With such sentiments in the ascendancy it is not surprising that numerous reform movements arose, seeking to help America fulfill its destiny. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to the Englishman Thomas Carlyle: “We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.”WEGW 211.1

These reformers were basically of two types: those who worked within existing social institutions, and those who attempted to establish new social systems. Those among the first group pursued a variety of causes. The American Society for the Promotion of Temperance, later named the American Temperance Union, appeared in 1826. The American Peace Society took form in 1828. During the next decade Sylvester Graham, William A. Alcott, and others brought health reform into the spotlight. In 1830 William Lloyd Garrison announced the beginning of the abolitionist movement to end slavery. Eleven years later Dorothea Dix started her investigation of the treatment of the insane in Massachusetts. And in the same state, Horace Mann was meanwhile advocating the expansion of public education.WEGW 211.2

Whereas these individuals accepted the basic structure of existing society, others wanted to scrap that structure in favor of something new. Religion was particularly important in some of these ventures. Their inspiration came perhaps from the Shakers and German pietistic groups that had established communities in the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The most famous of those appearing in the 1830s were Joseph Smith’s Latter-day Saints (Mormons), who developed a patriarchal organization and eventually practiced polygamy, and John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community in New York, which attempted to extend to the institution of marriage the principle of holding all things in common.WEGW 211.3

The secular attempts to establish utopian communities were not nearly as successful as the religious efforts. Robert Dale Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana began in 1825 but lasted only three years. More than 50 Fourierist communities, inspired by the ideas of the French writer Charles Fourier, took form in the 1840s, but by the next decade all had disappeared. Fanny Wright’s attempt at Nashoba, Tennessee, to break down racial prejudice through miscegenation, and Josiah Warren’s anarchist villages in Ohio and Long Island were similarly short-lived.WEGW 211.4

Nearly all of these reformers assumed that man’s nature was basically good. With the decline of the Calvinistic emphasis upon man’s sinfulness, the optimistic view of man gained widespread currency. On the popular level this opinion, often the product of either ministerial or feminine writings, expressed itself in terms that we now call “sentimental.” Describing the works of a popular lady novelist, a reviewer stated that her characters “are distinguished for the union of purity, sweetness, and admirable sense—the quaint archness of their conversation has an irresistible charm ... and although often placed in incredible situations they display a naturalness and beauty of conduct which never fails to touch the moral sensibilities.” The key words here are “purity,” “charm,” “sweetness,” “beauty,” and “moral sensibilities,” terms that are more concerned with emotional effect than intellectual content.WEGW 212.1

On a more sophisticated level, the belief in the goodness of man found its chief expression in the transcendentalist movement, an American manifestation of Romanticism. At heart a religious quest, transcendentalism sought to break away from the cold intellectualism of Unitarian theology, the dominant belief among New England thinkers, and replace it with a new union of mind and spirit. In 1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and a few others began meeting together, believing that in the writings of the English Romantics Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle “there was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life.” They attracted other individuals to their circle and in 1840 began publishing The Dial, a magazine that continued until 1844. Although involving relatively few people, transcendentalism was probably the most creative intellectual movement in America during the first half of the nineteenth century.WEGW 212.2

Emerson became the movement’s chief spokesman. He believed that every individual had within him a divine spark that needed only to be fanned in order for man to achieve greatness. God, or the “Oversoul,” pervaded nature; nature was thereby a symbol of the Divine Being and the means by which man came to recognize his own divinity. As Emerson put it: “Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed in the blythe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”WEGW 212.3

Not surprisingly, Emerson called for self-reliance (the title of one of his essays) on the part of both the individual and the nation. “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.... A nation of men will for the first time exist because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.”WEGW 213.1

Despite its pervasiveness in antebellum American culture, not everyone shared this optimism. The expansion of territory, economic activity, and technological invention brought with it social dislocation as people moved from place to place, the economy cycled in boom and bust, and the noisy, smoky machine intruded into the pastoral landscape. The continuing problem of slavery was separating the nation into two societies. And the influence of Calvinistic Puritanism, with its dark view of reality, had not completely departed from the scene.WEGW 213.2

On the surface, the bumptious followers of Andrew Jackson might seem the perfect examples of American optimism. But their speeches and newspapers reveal a considerable anxiety about the direction that American life was taking, and a nostalgic look backward to a virtuous early republic. Jackson himself reviled the “Monster,” the Bank of the United States, which he believed to be corrupting American virtue.WEGW 213.3

Writing about the laboring classes, the journalist Orestes Brownson (who would eventually become a Roman Catholic) said in 1840: “The man who employs them, and for whom they are toiling as so many slaves, is one of our city nabobs, reveling in luxury; or he is a member of our legislature, enacting laws to put money in his own pocket; or he is a member of Congress, contending for a high tariff to tax the poor for the benefit of the rich; or in these times he is shedding crocodile tears over the deplorable condition of the poor laborer while he docks his wages 25 percent, building miniature log cabins, shouting Harrison and ‘hard cider.’ And this man too would fain pass for a Christian and a republican. He shouts for liberty, stickles for equality, and is horrified at a Southern planter who keeps slaves.”WEGW 213.4

Such language was rather different from that of the fervent advocates of contemporary progress.WEGW 214.1

This anxiety also appeared in the emergence of anti-Catholicism during the 1830s and 1840s. Increasing numbers of Catholic immigrants, particularly after the Irish potato famine, disturbed many Protestant Americans. Samuel F. B. Morse, later to invent the telegraph, published his Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States in 1834. In this tract he argued that the Holy Alliance (Russia, Austria, and Prussia) was working through the pope, the Jesuits, and the Catholic hierarchy to subvert democracy by promoting Catholic immigration to America.WEGW 214.2

Books such as Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal reached even larger numbers of readers and, although Awful Disclosures was revealed as fraudulent, confirmed their worst suspicions and fears regarding the nature of Catholicism. By the 1850s anti-Catholicism had broadened into a general nativist or anti-immigrant movement that gained considerable if temporary political force through the American or Know-Nothing party.WEGW 214.3

The philosophy of progress was rejected on a deeper level by two major American writers, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Although no longer a believer, Hawthorne could not escape much of the puritan outlook. In novels such as The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables he brooded over the consequences of sin, and in his story “The Celestial Railroad” he satirized the philosophy of progress, suggesting that it is only an illusion that will lead to destruction.WEGW 214.4

Melville reacted even more strongly against the Emersonian view of reality. Evil and malice are essential facts of the universe, he believed, and they must be faced. And face them he did in Moby Dick and Pierre and other novels, but he was never able to wrest those facts into an understandable whole. “Ay Pierre ...,” he wrote, “for thee, thy sacred father is no more a saint; all brightness hath gone from thy hills, and all peace from thy plains; and now, now, for the first time, Pierre, Truth rolls a black billow through thy soul! Ah, miserable thou, to whom Truth, in her first tides, bears nothing but wrecks!”WEGW 214.5

This skeptical view of the doctrine of progress also appeared widely, if in different form, in the South. For the most part, Southerners were not participating in the development of industries or cities, and they felt threatened by Northern attacks on their “peculiar institution” of slavery. They responded by defending the agricultural way of life in general and the slave system in particular. In doing so they revealed a deep-seated pessimism about man and society.WEGW 214.6

The defense of slavery revolved around three principal arguments. The most important was religious, namely that slavery did not violate the letter of either the Old or New Testaments. A leading exponent of this view, Thornton Stringfellow, argued that God had sanctioned slavery in the patriarchal age, that God had included it in His “National Constitution,” and that Jesus had recognized its legality and regulated its duties.WEGW 215.1

A second argument was scientific, that Negroes constituted a separate and inferior race. As put forward by Josiah Nott and Samuel Cartwright, this argument drew from the theory of diverse origins of man held by many American scientists at the time, but because of its contradiction of the Bible it did not gain wide acceptance in the South. A third major argument, that there was no acceptable way of getting rid of the institution, revealed the basic conservatism of Southern culture. As Thomas R. Dew said: “The relations of society, generated by the lapse of ages, cannot be altered in a day.”WEGW 215.2

The most extreme defense of slavery came from the pen of George Fitzhugh, a Virginia lawyer and planter. In his works Sociology for the South; or the Failure of Free Society and Cannibals All! or, Slaves Without Masters he attacked the idea of progress, belief in the goodness of man, and natural rights—in short, the values upon which Northern society was based. Free society, he believed, was heading for disaster. In contrast, Southern society, which he described as a kind of patriarchal socialism, offered a model for Northerners. Slavery was not a necessary evil; rather, it was a positive good. “The world will only fall back on domestic slavery when all other social forms have failed and been exhausted,” he urged. “That hour may not be far off.”WEGW 215.3

Although some Southerners criticized Fitzhugh for his concession to socialism, the general response was enthusiastic, for he had abandoned defense for offense. He had also revealed the fundamental differences between the values of Southern society and those of America at large.WEGW 215.4

As the 1850s advanced, anxiety increased over the inability of the nation to resolve the crisis of slavery. When war broke out in 1861, the abolitionists interpreted it as a punishment from God and believed, along with other optimists, that a purer nation would emerge from the cataclysm. A more pessimistic view also developed, represented by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—wounded three times in battle—which discarded humanitarian causes, replacing them with an emphasis on technical efficiency, order, and strength. By the war’s end the latter attitude had become dominant, affecting even such seemingly incurable optimists as Emerson, who now began talking about the need for authority and discipline.WEGW 216.1

Such a change of mood probably helped prepare many Americans for Darwinism, the dominant intellectual influence of the postbellum period. The theory of evolution had been in the air for most of the nineteenth century, but (apart from scientific papers by Charles Darwin and his fellow Englishman, Alfred Russell Wallace) until Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, no one had offered an acceptable explanation of the evolutionary process. In that book Darwin made two essential points: that evolution is the law of life and that it develops by means of natural selection or, as another writer put it, survival of the fittest. In 1871 Darwin, in Descent of Man, extended the evolutionary process to humanity.WEGW 216.2

Although some individuals found it necessary to abandon all religious faith, the response to Darwinism among both scientists and nonscientists fell into three basic patterns. One group, found largely among Presbyterians, Baptists, and the smaller sects, rejected evolution outright. Charles Hodge, leader of the conservative Princeton Theology (after Princeton Theological Seminary) asked, What is Darwinism? in 1874 and answered, “It is atheism.” Although many Americans agreed with Hodge, no organized opposition to Darwinism arose in nineteenth-century America.WEGW 216.3

Most intellectuals adopted evolutionary theory in some form, and the more liberal denominations, including the Unitarians and Congregationalists, found it acceptable. But belief in evolution was not necessarily agreement with the Darwinian version. A large group rejected the theory of natural selection, and some opposed applying evolution to man. The president of Princeton University, James McCosh, argued that the power of God must be invoked to fully explain the development of the natural order. Somewhat similarly, Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most famous preachers of the day, described evolution as “the history of the divine process in the building of this world.”WEGW 216.4

A third group accepted Darwin’s theory but argued that it did not contradict religion. Asa Gray, a professor of natural history at Harvard, became the chief exponent of this view. When he published a review of Origin of Species in 1860, he declared that the struggle for existence is undeniable. At the same time, however, he also argued that order in the natural realm presupposed a mind behind it.WEGW 217.1

Over the next several years Gray became Darwin’s main sponsor in the United States, seeking to obtain a fair hearing for the Englishman’s ideas and to convince Americans that natural selection was compatible with belief in God. In 1880 he spelled out his ideas in detail. In his book Natural Science and Religion, Gray extended evolution to include man, something he had previously resisted, and suggested that natural selection was the Creator’s way of working. This Harvard scientist probably did more than anyone else to make evolution acceptable to educated Americans.WEGW 217.2

The evolutionary view had an impact far beyond the fields of biology and religion. The philosophy of social Darwinism, drawn from the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, is a good case in point. Spencer—even before Darwin published Origin of Species—found natural selection, or “survival of the fittest” as he called it, the essential element of evolution and put it forward as the latest discovery in the realm of natural law. According to him, when evolution is interpreted in social terms, it teaches that there should be no interference by government with the social process—no state aid to the poor, no public sanitary supervision, in short, no government activity except for defense and protection of the right of every man to do as he pleases.WEGW 217.3

Spencer’s ideas gained a considerable following among intellectuals in the United States, where Yale professor William Graham Sumner emerged as Spencer’s chief disciple. In his many essays on the subject of social Darwinism, Sumner opposed any attempt by government to improve the condition of the working classes. Social progress depended upon a completely free situation in which “courage, enterprise, good training, intelligence, and perseverance” would come out on top. Aid to the poor would simply perpetuate the existence of those who had already shown their inferiority, and thereby hold back social advance.WEGW 217.4

But the social Darwinism of Spencer and Sumner was not the only means of applying Darwinism to society. An obscure government worker, Lester Frank Ward, published Dynamic Sociology in 1883, a book that gained considerable influence by the late 1890s. He criticized social Darwinism for failing to recognize that once mind developed in the evolutionary process, the human creature was no longer completely subject to natural selection. Man was now a dynamic rather than a passive creature. His task was to observe the laws of nature, appropriate them, and direct them. Ward believed that social reality was pliable and could be manipulated by man. He therefore called for government by social scientists who would study society and determine how best to unlock its creative energy.WEGW 218.1

The essential element in Ward’s evolutionary understanding of society was relativism, the lack of absolutes. This relativism also appeared in such disciplines as law and economics but was especially apparent in the new fields of sociology and anthropology.WEGW 218.2

When he was not advocating social Darwinism, William Graham Sumner was also pioneering the study of values within an evolutionary framework. Folkways, published in 1907, portrayed man’s mores as rooted ultimately in ways of doing things, developed by trial and error, which have proved expedient over the course of centuries. All ethical systems are therefore relative to time and place.WEGW 218.3

Lewis Henry Morgan outlined a similar evolutionary development in his book In Ancient Society, which appeared in 1877. In this work he showed how human institutions had moved through the stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Everything from government to family to property relations had followed this process. No particular institutional form was absolute.WEGW 218.4

The philosophical implications of this new view of things appeared perhaps most fully in the thought of William James. Trained as a medical doctor, James first concentrated his attention on the emerging field of psychology. In his pioneering textbook, Principles of Psychology, James criticized both the materialists who regarded the mind as simply the product of physical properties such as body chemistry, and those who saw it as something spiritual or supernatural. Instead, he described the mind as the biological function of the brain just as digestion is the biological function of the stomach. He went on to argue that the mind is active and purposeful, rather than simply a passive receptor. As he described it, out of the total “stream of consciousness”—i.e., the thoughts, feelings, and impressions that are in constant flux—the mind selects those things in which it is interested. In short, freedom is a basic attribute of human thinking.WEGW 218.5

There was much else of import for psychology in James’s book, but his general view of the mind held the seeds for the philosophy of pragmatism that he developed during the 1890s and early twentieth century. Drawing upon an argument of the American philosopher and mathematician Charles Peirce, namely that the meaning of ideas lies in their practical consequences, James addressed the question of truth.WEGW 219.1

For nearly all previous philosophers, truth had been an absolute to be discovered. James, however, argued that truth was dynamic, not static. The truth of an idea, according to him, depended upon its concrete results when put into action. “The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it,” he said. “Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process; the process namely of its verifying itself, its verification. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation.”WEGW 219.2

This view of truth meant that all truths are tentative and provisional. James’s goal was to make room for religious concepts in a world increasingly ruled by a crude scientific determinism. If, for example, the idea of God helped an individual best explain and cope with the world he faced, then the idea of God was true. If at some later time, though, the idea of God was no longer helpful to that individual, then it was no longer true and should be discarded.WEGW 219.3

In making room for all beliefs as long as they were useful both intellectually and practically, James also removed from them any claim to absoluteness. Reality, as he described it, was an “open universe” in which everything was constantly changing, growing, and developing. Pragmatism offered a concept of truth and a philosophical method that corresponded with an evolutionary universe.WEGW 219.4

While evolution and its implications largely dominated formal thought, on a more popular level it was the development of an industrial-urban society that caught attention. Most Americans probably greeted these social-economic changes with enthusiasm. Popular Science, a magazine addressed to the more educated members of American society, both praised and explained the rapid technological advances.WEGW 219.5

More people, however, were interested in the wealth that the new technology, among other things, produced. Materialism, a staple of American society throughout most of its history, became even more pronounced. Whereas for the intellectuals social Darwinism justified the new economic order, the success myth appealed to a wider audience, including the businessmen themselves. Best-selling books carried titles such as Pushing to the Front and The Poor Boy and the Merchant Prince. Baptist minister Russell Conwell gave his “Acres of Diamonds” speech some 6,000 times, exhorting his audiences to “Get rich, get rich! But get money honestly, or it will be a withering curse.” And countless children read at least a few of Horatio Alger’s more than 100 books chronicling the lives of fictional poor boys who through pluck and luck made their way to financial respectability.WEGW 220.1

In the main, it was a middle-class audience that consumed these retellings of the myth of success; for them the myth kept alive the optimism of the antebellum years, but it was an optimism tinged with anxiety, as the frequent references to the temptations of mammon attest.WEGW 220.2

This anxiety appeared more prominently among some members of the upper-middle class who strongly objected to the social changes taking place. A political movement known as “liberal Republicanism” emerged in the late 1860s, which sought to rid government of the “spoils system” and its accompanying corruption. They finally succeeded in gaining adoption of the Civil Service Act of 1883, which placed some limitations on the power of political parties to hand out government jobs to their friends.WEGW 220.3

The Liberal Republicans (who eventually became Democrats) held a laissez-faire attitude toward business. Consequently, although they disliked much about American enterprise, they were not inclined to attempt any reforms in that arena. Other critics stepped forward, however, who also appealed to an upper-middle-class audience. Henry Demarest Lloyd, for instance, examined the history of Standard Oil in Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894), concluding that industrial monopolies were destroying liberty. In contrast to laissez-faire views, he believed that the public interest must replace individual interest through government ownership of the major industries.WEGW 220.4

Critics such as Lloyd were individual voices indicating that all was not well with American society, but they were not yet part of a general reform movement. They did not reach the working class, the one most affected by an industrializing America, and the middle class was too busy reaping the financial benefits of economic change. The first major wave of reform came from outside their purview, from the rural areas of the South and Midwest.WEGW 221.1

The farmers had felt increasingly threatened by the growing industries and cities. One sign of this attitude was the frequent appearance in agricultural publications of poems describing cities as abodes of poverty, crime, intemperance, and secularism, among other things, in contrast to the practical, natural life of the countryside. When depression struck the farmlands in the late 1880s, brought on by a combination of bad weather, foreign competition, and the changing economic structure of agriculture, the farmers arose in protest. The air rang with accusations of conspiracy—one Populist tract appeared with the title Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People.WEGW 221.2

Nominating a presidential candidate in 1892, the Populists proposed such measures as the graduated income tax, public ownership of railroads, and the secret ballot. Their movement died away when prosperity returned in the late 1890s, but Populism left a legacy of ideas soon to be picked up by another reform movement.WEGW 221.3

The 1890s, though, were a difficult time for many Americans, even outside the agricultural sector. A general depression hit the country in 1893. Labor strife intensified. Immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was increasing rapidly. The “gay nineties” were not so gay.WEGW 221.4

The responses were varied. Anti-Catholicism again reared its head. The American Protective Association, formed in 1887, by the 1890s was emphasizing the subservience of Catholics to a foreign potentate; anti-Semitism also appeared. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner attracted considerable attention in 1893 when he argued that the frontier, which the census bureau had just declared closed, had nurtured American democracy. His argument implied that the problems of the present were but a foretaste of the struggles the country would endure as it sought, now that the frontier was gone, a new basis for freedom. Brooks Adams, descendant of two presidents, wrote The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895), while his brother Henry was theorizing that the second law of thermodynamics indicated that history was moving toward the extinction of life.WEGW 221.5

Most Americans probably did not experience such pessimism as appeared in these movements and writings, but a degree of anxiety does seem to have swept the land in the late 1880s and 1890s. One historian goes so far as to assert that the United States went through a “psychic crisis” during this period. The major manifestation of this crisis was a renewed emphasis on the American mission, or “manifest destiny,” as it has been called. From the founding of the first American colonies the concept that America had a special purpose in the world had been a common idea. With the exception of the Mexican War of the 1840s, most of those who talked and wrote about the American mission had emphasized that America was to be an example to the world. During the 1880s, however, people began speaking of the need to export American civilization elsewhere.WEGW 222.1

This new version of the American mission resulted from several influences: social Darwinism, a cult of Anglo-Saxon superiority that was gaining considerable popularity, Protestant mission work, the example of European imperialism, and the sense—because of the social and political turmoil of the period—that the nation had reached a turning point in its history. Many voices arose saying that America must expand beyond North America. Protestant minister Josiah Strong argued in his 1885 book Our Country that the Anglo-Saxon was “divinely commissioned to be, in a peculiar sense, his brother’s keeper.” Such a mission required a navy and overseas bases, said Alfred T. Mahan in The Influence of Sea Power Upon History (1890).WEGW 222.2

These men were giving voice to ideas that reached fruition in the acquisition of Hawaii in 1898 and the Spanish-American War of the same year. As Americans debated the propriety of taking over such islands as Puerto Rico and the Philippines, for there were those who opposed this imperialism, Senator Albert Beveridge justified the American mission abroad in the strongest possible terms:WEGW 222.3

“Wonderfully has God guided us. Yonder at Bunker Hill and Yorktown His providence was above us. At New Orleans and on ensanguined seas His hand sustained us. Abraham Lincoln was His minister and His was the altar of freedom the Nation’s soldiers set up on a hundred battlefields. His power directed Dewey in the East and delivered the Spanish fleet into our hands, as He delivered the elder Armada into the hands of our English sires two centuries ago. The American people cannot use a dishonest medium of exchange; it is ours to set the world its example of right and honor. We cannot fly from our world duties; it is ours to execute the purpose of a fate that has driven us to be greater than our small intentions. We cannot retreat from any soil where Providence has unfurled our banner; it is ours to save that soil for liberty and civilization.”WEGW 223.1

Beveridge’s speech came after American military victories helped reinvigorate national confidence, something also aided by the return of prosperity in 1898. In any case, the sense of national purpose that appeared in this speech characterized the Progressive movement that arose soon after the war. Much of the anxiety that had emerged during the previous two decades remained, but it was muted, secondary to an overwhelming sense that now was the time to fulfill the destiny assigned by God. As Theodore Roosevelt told a cheering convention in 1912: “We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”WEGW 223.2

The Progressives, a term used to describe those reformers who became active around the turn of the century at all levels of government, drew upon many of the ideas that had caught hold in intellectual circles, as well as programs put forward by the Populists. The evolutionary view of reality taught them that because nothing was fixed or absolute, society could be changed through human effort. Pragmatism, especially as developed by John Dewey, showed how ideas were primarily instruments to bring about social change, to be judged by their effectiveness in achieving one’s goals. From Lester Frank Ward they learned that experts, who studied social problems objectively, were indispensable to the efficient operation of government.WEGW 223.3

Political theorist Herbert Croly pulled these various strands of thought together in his Promise of American Life (1909), where he argued for comprehensive national planning that would include support for strong labor unions and regulation of business. Croly’s ideas were similar to those of Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, promoted in 1912.WEGW 223.4

Woodrow Wilson, although agreeing with Croly and Roosevelt on many items, favored breaking up big businesses or, as he described it, regulating competition rather than monopoly. By 1914, however, Wilson had turned in a New Nationalist direction.WEGW 224.1

Meanwhile, Progressives were at work attempting to improve American democracy by introducing the secret ballot, establishing new forms of urban government such as the city-manager system, and creating local, state, and national regulatory agencies.WEGW 224.2

It was a heady time for the reformers, but the coming of World War I interrupted their work. Wilson, in typically progressive fashion, made the war a conflict “to end all wars.” But experience did not bear him out. As one of the reformers, Frederick Howe, said about the Paris Peace Conference: “We were amateurs, amateurs seeking to right the world by moralistic appeals; we had fought as religious crusaders, and, like Joshua, had expected the old world to fall at a trumpet blast. Our emotions were honest, the sacrifice genuine, wholehearted, but Europe only smiled at our naïveté.” It seemed that once again Americans were having to learn the lessons supposedly taught by the Civil War.WEGW 224.3

These years, from approximately 1830 to 1919, reveal an America struggling to reconcile its optimism and sense of divine election with the anxiety and pessimism produced by sectional conflict and social change. Prior to the Civil War, optimism was dominant; afterward, a darker view of reality prevailed. Although belief in progress still held the allegiance of most Americans in the later nineteenth century, they tended now to interpret it in terms of struggle and mastery. Except for the interlude of Progressivism—and even that held elements of the newer view—American thinkers and the American public at large were increasingly coming to view the world as a complicated place.WEGW 224.4

Bibliographical Note