The Prophets of Gloom

WHEN Van Wyck Brooks, having followed New England through its flowering and Indian summer, approached its most recent season, he abandoned the task of chronicling its cultural history. Apparently the section had entered upon a dreary winter not worthy of his descriptive powers.

Mr. Brooks has not been alone in the judgment that the best days are over; a wealth of opinion seems to support the conclusion that the Yankee states are indeed withering. Through the seventyyear span between 1870 and 1940 voice after voice grieved for New England; even those who loved her most, in celebrating her past glories, emphasized the fact that they were past, masochistically described the decay of the section.

But what is puzzling about this unanimity of opinion is its depth in time. Apparently, whatever the fate of other prophets, the prophets of gloom were always honored in New England. Go back to Boston of 1836, on the very eve of the great (lowering, and listen to William Ellery Channing: “We are a city too much given to croaking. I have been told that we were on the brink of ruin ever since I knew the place. Those whose duty it is to carry forward society despair of it. They despair of the body of the people, despair of our institutions, despair of liberty through the world. I lament our want of faith in human improvement.” Remember back further, that a governor of Massachusetts in the 1790’s doubted that its free institutions would last out the decade. Back still further, Cotton Mather, troubled by the evils of the times, expressed concern over the declension of New England. And already in the 1650’s Bradford bemoaned the coming of the mixed multitudes who had adulterated the primal purity of the New Canaan.

Such concern has been a constant in the history of the section. And that wants accounting for.

I see in this frame of mind a reflection of the common situation of the people of New England, of the unpromising location and unyielding soil which imposed the necessity of unremitting struggle upon the people who perversely chose to live there. For those compelled ever to fight for their precarious hold, even the magnitude of their achievements was often overshadowed by the bitterness of the battle.

The arduous nature of the contest against the unfriendly elements of the environment can be traced in the familiar story of the New England economy of the early nineteenth century. Backbreaking farming, commerce pursued under the competitive disadvantage of absence of a fertile back country and of inadequate transportation links to the interior, industry that operated without ready access to raw materials and with quickly antiquated sources of power — these were then the dominant characteristics of the region’s system of production. Yet despite these adverse conditions, there were brilliant attempts to resolve them — Merino sheep, the China trade, the clipper ships, the Lowell mills.

That same reaction to an unfavorable situation was also evident in other fields. The dwindling political importance of the section nationally, for instance, was compensated for by the tactical achievements of its statesmen. (I think I could make a case also for the relevance of these difficult conditions to the cultural developments of the 1840’s and 1850’s.)

If therefore the achievements of the seventy years after 1870 are less impressive, that is not due to the greater difficulty of the region’s problems. It is true that New England spent lavishly of its youth in the trial of Civil War, and thereafter continued to contribute from its meager resources to the upbuilding of the West. But comparable losses in manpower had also been characteristic of the Revolutionary period and earlier — witness the Yankee farms in the Mohawk Valley and to the westward, the Yankee merchants in all the Atlantic seaports.

The complaints of degeneration since 1870 have been no different from those heard in the land in the two centuries previous. New England’s troubles are the same; what is different is the failure to cope with them. In transportation, in commerce, in industry, a succession of missed opportunities marks the course of these seven decades. Against obstacles there might have been a thriving trunk line railroad to the west, the Cunarders might have continued to come to Boston, an automobile center might have developed in Duryea’s Springfield. The political importance of the section continued to dwindle, but there were no countervailing statesmen of national importance; there was, as well, a marked decline in the effectiveness of local government. Finally, the most sensitive New England intellectuals of this period were those who left it, men who felt no compulsion to confront and grapple with its problems, but rather preferred to stand off and escape them.

There, I think, is the heart of our problem. The same unfavorable situation which once had been a goad to effective action has become the occasion for a kind of withdrawal, a withdrawal which characteristically often took the form of a flight to the past, but which in any case represented an unwillingness to look upon the realities of the present. Our primary task is to explain the nature of this loss of nerve.

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IT is no coincidence that the change should have come just after the middle of the century, just after the great waves of the migration from across the Atlantic and from across the northern border injected altogether new elements into the New England scene. These waves which, in other parts of the country, were so stimulating in their effect, here had the most disruptive consequences.

For what is this here, this New England of which we speak? We are concerned not simply with a physiographic region, with a geographical section, but with a community; and in this community, immigration was disruptive because it left a deep chasm across which the old and the new elements of the population could rarely cross hands.

The sense of shock as that chasm deepened in New England society accounts, I think, in good measure for the withdrawal to which I have referred. The insecurity of men suddenly surrounded, as it were, by strangers led to a new preoccupation with family life, to an intense need for strengthening family ties among those long settled here. This can be measured in the low rate of divorce, in the growing interest in genealogy, in the concern with questions of ancestry, and in the development of hereditary societies.

The effects of the same preoccupation can be seen in the development in Massachusetts of the Boston Trust, a device for limiting the access of individual heirs to their family fortunes, with the intention, as a prominent lawyer put it, of “providing restraints against alien ideas which might be incompatible with the cherished stability of family standing and dominance.” By 1934, of the estates of more than $25,000 probated in the four eastern counties of Massachusetts, almost 70 per cent (in value) were wrapped up in some such device. This trend, which confined a large part of the region’s available capital in the most conservative forms of investment, discouraged risk-taking and dried up an important source of fluidity in the economy.

The effects of withdrawal were as stultifying upon political life. The decade of the 1890’s saw the last substantial attempts by men of the old tradition to exercise creative political leadership. The rebuffs with which these efforts met (I am thinking particularly of the careers of Josiah Quincy and John Quincy Adams in Boston) left the field clear for the dominance externally by such politicians as Senators Aldrich, Crane, and Lodge, internally by such statesmen as Martin Lomasney and John F. Fitzgerald.

Finally, I see the effects of this withdrawal in a rapid accretion of rigid institutionalisms in many aspects of the social and cultural life of the region. The new lease on life given the Episcopal Church after mid-century was dramatic evidence of that tendency, which was also marked in a variety of philanthropic and educational enterprises that provided additional forms for the maintenance of family solidarity and influence.

With the community thus divided and with their own lives so thoroughly hedged about, what did the young men of the older stocks find worth fighting for, struggling against?

Back in 1843 old William Appleton, then almost seventy, had confided to his diary: “I feel as much interest as I almost ever did in making money; may my zeal last!” Fifty years later Henry James recorded the contempt of the men of his generation for the materialism of the nouveau riche. The cultivation of the gentlemanly virtues took the place of the zest for doing, the zeal for gaining.

Young men from the country for a time continued to vitalize the region’s economy. Native and immigrant out landers from many places gave a fresh term to the organization of trade and merchandising— Eben Jordan, William Filene, Samuel Zemurray, C. Pappas, and Edward Pinanski. It was Theodore Vail, out of Minerva, Ohio, who grasped the implications of the Scotsman Bell’s invention and provided the means for drawing the capital of Massachusetts investors into the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. So too, the universities and publishing houses, the physical attractions of Maine and Vermont, the summer ease of Cape Cod villages, continued to draw creative talent into the region. A respectable proportion of the national output of novels, poetry, and plays, of technical discoveries and philosophical ideas, still came from New England.

But neither Silas Lapham nor William Dean Howells could be satisfied with his situation. Absence of recognition in their community gave their triumphs a hollow ring. For the chasm that immobilized the older elements of the population in the fastness of a secure social and economic position, also immobilized the newer elements — only, in this case, by the insecurity and precariousness of their situation. The order, of family life, of stratified business, educational, and social relations, that kept the members of the one group in, thereby also kept the members of the other out. In this society newcomers often felt the rewards of success dim and unobtainable; only a very few would ever grasp them. These groups too engaged in a kind of withdrawal, remained apart, and completed the division in the society.

The fate of New England’s schools most dramatically reflected the trend of these developments. By 1940 the region could boast of an array of institutions at every level which individually were among the very best in the country, indeed in the world. But the reformers of a century earlier, who had set off the renascence of American education, would not have been satisfied by the work of these fine academies and colleges. For those men regarded the schools as agencies of democracy, as media through which “the whole people would learn to know that they were “inseparably bound together in a community of interest.” The mere suggestion “that there are different classes of our youth requiring different kinds of education" dismayed and horrified them.

Yet already by the middle of the nineteenth century the sons of Boston merchants complained at the prospect of going to the schools their fathers had attended. And by the end of the century the prospect was unthinkable; an old alumnus then told Charles Francis Adams he “wouldn t send a dog to the Latin School.” As this group retreated to the private institutions it crealed for itself, the public schools were further isolated by the parallel growth of a parochial system among the Catholic newcomers to the region. In many places the old proud base of New England education fell into neglect; the public school became the prey of ignorant politicians and the resort only of those who could afford no other mode of instruction.

With these considerations in mind, can the historian properly speak of a withering of New England? I disapprove of the implied analogy. A community is not a plant, not even an organic being. I would not speak of a withering of New England any more than I would of a flowering.

But I do think it possible to speak of the growth of a community in another sense — of a growing consciousness of common identity and mutual interests, of a growing awareness of the realistic elements of its situation and of all its human components, and of a growing effort to direct its energies toward a realization of some communal purpose. Thinking of growth in that sense, there is a dividing line at the middle of the nineteenth century that brought this region into a period of disorganization and disorder.

And there is this practical consideration to the distinction I have drawn. That which has withered cannot be brought to life again; but that which is disorganized can still be set in order.