The American Mind: The E. T. Earl LecturesPerry, Bliss
History
The American Mind: The E. T. Earl Lectures
Perry, Bliss
American literature -- History and criticism; National characteristics, American
From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties on to the Civil War, one
may constantly detect in American writing the accents of democratic
radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage of the sentiment of the
French Revolution. "My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier, "really
believed in the Preamble of the Bill of Rights, which re-affirmed the
Declaration of Independence." So did the son! Equally clear in the
writings of those thirty years are echoes of the English radicalism
which had so much in common with the democratic movement across the
English Channel. The part which English thinkers and English agitators
played in securing for America the fruits of her own democratic
principles has never been adequately acknowledged.
That the outcome of the Civil War meant a triumph of democratic ideas
as against aristocratic privilege, no one can doubt. There were no
stancher adherents of the democratic idea than our intellectual
aristocrats. The best Union editorials at the time of the Civil War,
says James Ford Rhodes, were written by scholars like Charles Eliot
Norton and James Russell Lowell. I think it was Lowell who once said,
in combatting the old aristocratic notion of white man supremacy, that
no gentleman is willing to accept privileges that are inaccessible to
other men. This is precisely like the famous sentence of Walt Whitman
which first arrested the attention of "Golden Rule Jones," the mayor of
Toledo, and which made him not only a Whitmaniac for the rest of his
life but one of the most useful of American citizens. The line was, "I
will accept nothing which all may not have their counterpart of on the
same terms."
This instinct of fellowship cannot be separated, of course, from the
older instincts of righteousness and justice. It involves, however,
more than giving the other man his due. It means feeling towards him as
towards another "fellow." It involves the sentiment of partnership.
Historians of early mining life in California have noted the new phase
of social feeling in the mining-camps which followed upon the change
from the pan--held and shaken by the solitary miner--to the cradle,
which required the coöperation of at least two men. It was when the
cradle came in that the miners first began to say "partner." As the
cradle gave way to placer mining, larger and larger schemes of
coöperation came into use. In fact, Professor Royce has pointed out in
his _History of California_ that the whole lesson of California
history is precisely the lesson most necessary to be learned by the
country as a whole, namely, that the phase of individual gain-getting
and individualistic power always leads to anarchy and reaction, and
that it becomes necessary, even in the interests of effective
individualism itself, to recognize the compelling and ultimate
authority of society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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