Civilization and Its Discontents

As the nineteenth century died, the majority of the American people, especially those comfortably well-off, the residents of small towns, the shopkeepers, and some farmers and skilled workers, remained confirmed optimists and uncritical admirers of their civilization. However, blacks, immigrants, and others who failed to share equitably in the good things of life, along with a growing number of humanitarian reformers, found little to cheer about and much to lament in their increasingly industrialized society. Giant monopolies flourished despite federal restrictions. The gap between rich and poor appeared to be widening while the slum spread its poison and the materially successful made a god of their success. Human values seemed in grave danger of being crushed by impersonal forces typified by the great corporations.

In 1871 Walt Whitman, usually so full of extravagant praise for everything American, had called his

Table 18.1 Reformers and the Urban Poor

Fellow countrymen the “most materialistic and moneymaking people ever known”:

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness of heart than at present, and here in the United States.

By the late 1880s a well-known journalist could write to a friend, “The wheel of progress is to be run over the whole human race and smash us all.” Others noted an alarming jump in the national divorce rate and an increasing taste for all kinds of luxury. “People are made slaves by a desperate struggle to keep up appearances,” a Massachusetts commentator declared, and the economist David A. Wells expressed concern over statistics showing that heart disease and mental illness were on the rise. These “diseases of civilization,” Wells explained, were “one result of the continuous mental and nervous activity which modern high-tension methods of business have necessitated.” Wells was a prominent liberal, but pessimism was no monopoly of liberals. A little later, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, himself a millionaire, complained of the “lawlessness” of “the modern and recent plutocrat” and his “disregard of the rights of others.” Lodge spoke of “the enormous contrast between the sanguine mental attitude prevalent in my youth and that, perhaps wiser, but certainly darker view, so general today.” His one-time Harvard professor, Henry Adams, was still more critical of the way his contemporaries had become moneygrubbers. “All one’s friends,” he complained, along with church and university leaders and other educated people, “had joined the banks to force submission to capitalism.”

Of course intellectuals often tend to be critical of the world they live in, whatever its nature; Thoreau denounced materialism and the worship of progress in the 1840s as vigorously as any late-nineteenth-century prophet of gloom. But the voices of the dissatisfied were rising. Despite the many benefits that industrialization had made possible, it was by no means clear around 1900 that the American people were really better off under the new dispensation.

That the United States was fast becoming a modern nation no one disputed. Physician George M. Beard contended that “modern civilization” overloaded the human nervous system the way burning too many of Thomas Edison’s lightbulbs overloaded an electrical circuit. On the other hand, Edward Bellamy saw the future as a “paradise of order, equity, and felicity.” Most took a more balanced view, believing that the modern world encompassed new possibilities as well as perils. The future beckoned, and yet it also menaced.