The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
cohering body of dissenters from the orthodoxies of American life,” explained Lionel Trilling, “The Education of Henry Adams was a sacred book . . . despite, or because of, its hieratic esoteric irony and its reiterated note of patrician condescension.” Henry Adams grounded the intellectual’s alienation from American life in the resentment that superior men feel when they are insufficiently appreciated in America’s common-man culture. Adams’s disdain for the modern and the mechanical and his distrust of the ideal of progress would become leitmotifs of American liberalism and important elements of the environmental movement. Reissued, The Education of Henry Adams won the Pulitzer Prize in 1919. In the wake of WWI, the book was read as prophecy that had foretold the damage done by democracy in the Great War.
Adams resented the new men—the economists, physicians, and chemists whose science-based authority had displaced literary men such as himself. H.G. Wells and the American architecture critic Herbert Croly, two of modern liberalism’s founders, shared Adams’s anti-capitalist sentiments. But Wells and Croly argued in their seminal works that the very experts Adams had despised had a crucial role to play: They could help displace the freewheeling capitalism the literary elites scorned.
H.G. Wells is today best remembered as the author of such late-nineteenth-century best-selling socio-scientific fantasies as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man, all still read today, if only as entertainment or fodder for Hollywood scripts. But he was much more than a fantasist. At the turn of the twentieth century, Wells set forth the two central tropes of liberalism: a sense of superiority and a claim on the future. Liberals thought themselves smarter than other people because they had seen through the supposed Victorian verities to a future not yet born.
“Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation,” George Orwell explained in 1941. “There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers…and here was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined.”
Wells’s 1901 nonfiction book Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought was credited with “the discovery of the future.” He described the book as the “keystone to the main arch of my work.” His programs for deploying scientific remedies to cure social diseases turned the already esteemed author into a social and political seer in England and also in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in The North American Review.
The story of the shift from the “old” nineteenth-century Victorian liberalism of laissez-faire to the “new liberalism” that is the modern statist variety has almost exclusively focused on how the growth of giant industries undercut the old assumptions about individual sovereignty. But there was a parallel shift induced by the concussive intellectual impact of Darwinism. Darwin’s location of human origins in the natural world rather than the spiritual realm begged for prophets of a secular humanity. Wells, who more than any other intellectual understood both shifts, saw himself and was seen by his devotees as just such a prophet.
Anticipations seemed to endow the author with omniscience and made Wells an intellectual hero for reform-minded writers anxious to break with what they saw as the stale orthodoxies of nineteenth-century laissez-faire capitalism, with its business-centered morality and embrace of democracy. “The book,” Wells explained, “was designed to undermine and destroy…monogamy, faith in God & respectability, all under the guise of a speculation about motor cars and electrical heating.” For many young American intellectuals, Wells’s writings were a passport out of provincialism.
Looking back on the century of material and mechanical progress that had just passed, numerous fin de siècle writers commented on both its achievements and its running sore, the seemingly permanent immiseration of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead and asserted that there was as much a pattern to the future as there was to the past. He not only argued inductively about the likely nature of what was to come based on the way the telephone and telegraph and railroad had shrunk the world, but he also conjured up a dramatic cast of characters. His account was peopled with those he loathed, such as the idle, parasitic rich and the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” whom he described as “the people of the abyss.” He similarly despised the yapping politicians and yellow journalists who were, in his view, instruments of patriotism and war.
But if these were the people who were leading the world on the path to hell, there were also the redeemers, the “New Republicans,” “the capable men” of vision who might own the future. These scientist-poets and engineers could, he thought, seize the reins in the Darwinian struggle; rather than descending into savagery, we would follow their lead toward a new and higher ground. They were the heroes of the drama. “Written in the language of sociology,” explain his biographers Norman and Jeanne McKenzie, his fictions were morality plays about the Last Judgment. If the redeemers, the anti-global-warming crusaders of their day, were rejected, then civilization would perish.
For the randy Wells, the choice was clear. On one hand, he could join the ranks of the new men of science—who aimed to discard Anglo-American family mores and replace the politicians—and freely pursue a richly textured life. On the other hand, if he adhered to stale Victorian morality, his life would be one of bleakly conventional routines. Compared with the “normal, ordinary world which is on the whole satisfied with itself” and that encompasses “the great mass of men,” he wrote, “there is the ever advancing better world, pushing through this outworn husk in the minds and wills of creative humanity.” This was the difference between the bovine “Normal Life” of workers, clerks, and small businessmen and the “Great State” led by the creative class. The conflicts between these classes were “not economic but psychological,” he said. The advent of the machine created the possibility of what he called, anticipating Herbert Marcuse, “surplus life.” It was a realm of expanded imagination available to those who eschewed “the normal scheme” and engaged in what John Stuart Mill had portrayed as “life experiments.”
Wells gave an account of his first trip to these shores, in 1906, in The Future in America, which was serialized in U.S. and British magazines. In it, we see that Wells was heartened by the absence of a traditional aristocracy in America but also chagrined that Americans lagged in creating a new aristocratic class of scientists and intellectuals, who were the key to a shining future. “All Americans are, from the English point of view, Liberals of one sort or another,” he wrote. “The American community…does not correspond to an entire European community at all, but only to the middle masses of it—to the trading and manufacturing class between the dimensions of the magnate and the clerk and the skilled artisan. It is the central part of the European organism without either the dreaming head or the subjugated feet.” In England, he noted approvingly, modern men of money “had become part of a responsible ruling class.” But the absence of an aristocracy in the U.S. had a debilitating underside because it left the country without the sense of “state responsibility,” which was needed “to give significance to the whole.” The typical American “has no sense of the state,” Wells complained. “He has no perception that his business activities, his private employments, are constituents in a larger collective process.”
Wells was appalled by the decentralized nature of America’s locally oriented party and country-courthouse politics. He was aghast at the flamboyantly corrupt political machines of the big cities, unchecked by a gentry that might uphold civilized standards. He thought American democracy went too far in providing leeway to the poltroons who ran the political machines and the “fools” who supported them. The “immigrants are being given votes,” but “that does not free them, it only enslaves the country,” he said. In the North, he complained, even “the negroes were given votes.” This was no small matter for Wells, because as an Englishman he saw his country’s path as thoroughly intertwined with America’s. “One cannot look ten years ahead in England, without glancing across the Atlantic,” he wrote in The Future in America. “Our future is extraordinarily bound up in America’s, and in a sense dependent on