Synopses & Reviews
MEN OF GOOD HOPE A Story of American Progressives DANIEL AARON New York OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1951 Copyright 1951 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Printed in the United States of America For Charles Aaron ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research for this book, begun in the fall of 1947 5 was made possible by a fellowship from the John Simon Guggen heim Memorial Foundation. I should like to express my gratitude to the Foundation for this grant. Many friends have given me assistance and criticism. I cannot mention them all, but I am particularly indebted to the following Newton Arvin, for reading and criticizing my manuscript and help ing me in innumerable ways Foster Rhea and Marian Dulles, for reading the manuscript and making valuable recommendations on arrangement and structure and William Leuchtenburg, for his many criticisms and suggestions. I am also indebted to George H. Geiger for reading the chapter on Henry George, to Bernard Barber and Charles Page for read ing the chapter on Veblen, and to Henry May for reading the last chapter, In Retrospect. The following people gave me ideas, made corrections, and facilitated the job of research Henry David, Robert G. Davis, Chester M. Destler, Bernard DeVoto, David Donald, Harold Faulkner, Richard Hofstadter, Howard Mumford Jones, Alfred Kazin, Richard Lewis, F. O. Matthiessen, Stewart Mitchell, John C. Ranney, Max Salvadori, Peter Viereck, and Conrad Wright. I am grateful to Margaret Johnson, the Librarian of Smith College, for her many services. I should also like to thank Agnes Inglis, Curator of the Joseph A. Labadie Collection of Labor Materials at the University of Michigan Library Anne S. Pratt, Reference Librarian of the Yale UniversityLibrary Robert W. Hill, Keeper of Manuscripts of the New York Public Library William A. Jackson, Carolyn E. Jakeman, and the late Mrs. Frederick Winslow, all of the Houghton Library of Harvard vii Vill ACKNOWLEDGMENTS University St. George L. Sioussot, Chief of the Division of Manu scripts of the Library of Congress Nora E. Cordingley, in charge of the Theodore Roosevelt Collection at Harvard University and the Librarians of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. I am greatly indebted to Agnes De Mille for permitting me to consult her mothers manuscript life of Henry George and for showing me pictures and other mementos of her grandfather to Marian Bellamy Eamshaw, for reading my chapter on Edward Bellamy and furnishing me with interesting details of her fathers life to Abigail Adams Homans, for giving me access to the letters of Brooks Adams to his brother Henry and for her illuminating comments about the characters and personalities of her uncles and to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., for permission to quote portions of the correspondence between his grandfather and Brooks Adams. Short sections of this book have appeared in modified form in The New England Quarterly, The Antioch Review, and American Quarterly. D. A. Northampton, Mass. October 1950 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION xi PART ONE Precursors 1. Emerson and the Progressive Tradition 3 2. Theodore Parker The Battle of the Nineteenth Century 21 PART Two Prophetic Agitators 3 3. Henry George The Great Paradox 55 4. Edward Bellamy Village Utopian 92 5. Henry Demarest Lloyd The Middle-Class Conscience 133 6. William Dean Howells The Gentleman from Altruria 172 7. Thorstein Veblen Moralist and Rhetorician 208 PART THREE Latter-dayProgressives 8. Theodore Roosevelt and Brooks Adams Pseudo-Progressives-245 9. In Retrospect 1912-1950 281 NOTES ON SOURCES 309 INDEX 323 INTRODUCTION This is a book about American progressives. It is also an attempt to rehabilitate the progressive tradition, currently under attack by both liberals and anti-liberals, and to show that progressivism was not always the shabby thing it is now made out to be. Progressivism 5 is conceived today either as the sentimental maunderings of the soft-minded and the muddle-headed or as communism in disguise...