The New NationPaxson, Frederic L. (Frederic Logan)
History
The New Nation
Paxson, Frederic L. (Frederic Logan)
United States -- History -- 1865-1921
Before Roosevelt was inaugurated for his second term, the national
"revival," in which he and Bryan and other preachers of civic virtue had
played the speaking parts, was sweeping over the country. The menace of
the trusts was seen and exaggerated as railways, corporations, and labor
availed themselves of the means of cooperation. The connection between
the great financial interests and politics was believed to be dangerous
to public welfare. All the mechanical reforms for the recovery of
government by the people, that had been originated between 1889 and
1897, were revived once more, and there was added to confidence in them
a widespread belief in the existence of a malevolent, plundering class.
It was not enough that the trust movement should be explained as an
unavoidable development from modern communication. It was believed to
constitute more than an economic evolution. The public was prone to
place an ethical responsibility upon an individual or groups of
individuals, and there came a series of revelations or exposures that
appeared, in part, to fix the blame. All the old uprisings against
boss-rule were revivified, and capitalistic control was placed upon the
Index.
Miss Ida M. Tarbell, an historical student who had gained an audience
through popular and discriminating lives of Napoleon and Lincoln,
published a history of the Standard Oil Company in _McClure's Magazine_
during 1903. She showed conclusively the connection between
transportation and monopoly in the oil industry, revealing the mastery
of the tools of transportation, by rebates, by control of tank cars, or
by pipe lines, that had enabled John D. Rockefeller to establish his
great trust. She showed also the unlovely methods of competition, long
common to all business, but magnified by their use in the hands of a
monopoly to establish itself. "What we are witnessing," wrote Washington
Gladden a little later, "is a new apocalypse, an uncovering of the
iniquity of the land.... We have found that no society can march
hellward faster than a democracy under the banner of unbridled
individualism."
Three years before Miss Tarbell displayed the tendency of the trusts,
President Hadley, of Yale, had suggested that social ostracism, or
social stigma, might be made an efficient tool for reform. Other writers
used the tool. Lincoln Steffens, in a series of articles on "The Shame
of the Cities," exposed the connection between graft and politics.
Thomas Lawson, with spectacular exaggeration, laid the troubles of
society at the feet of "Frenzied Finance." _Collier's Weekly_ undertook
to reveal the worthlessness and fraud in the trade in patent medicines.
Many of the exposers encroached upon the fields of fiction in their
work, while books of avowed fiction exploited the conditions they
portrayed. _Coniston_, by Winston Churchill, was based upon the control
of a State by a railroad boss. Upton Sinclair wrote _The Jungle_ to
expose the meat-packers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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