The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
blindness,” from “a want of concentration,” sent Wells into further hyperbole. “The place seems to me to reflect…that dispersal of power, the evasion of simple conclusiveness” produced by “a legislature that fails to legislate, a government that cannot govern.” Demonstrating his limited knowledge of European governments, he rated the American government as the bottom of the barrel: “Congress as it is constituted at present is the feeblest, least accessible, and most inefficient central government of any civilized nation in the world West of Russia.”
At a time when “collectivism” and “individualism” were new words that reflected the twin challenge to the Victorian ideal of laissez-faire government, Wells saw the absence of an American collective will as the nation’s greatest weakness. “The greatest work which the coming century has to do…is to build up an aristocracy of thought and feeling which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of mercantilism” and its allies “materialism and Philistinism.” Wells had discarded the Calvinism of his youth but clung fondly to its concept of a deserving elect.
Limning what would become modern American liberalism, Wells saw three social streams that might converge to form the headwaters of the great river of statism. Speaking of “salvation by schools,” he was greatly encouraged by the growth of scientific and professional knowledge in American academia, which was well ahead of its English counterpart that was still struggling, in his view, to shake off the cobwebs of classical learning. Like his teacher Thomas Huxley, who had become famous as “Darwin’s bulldog,” Wells believed that only the intelligentsia could save industrial civilization from self-destruction. Presciently, Wells told his readers, “I write of the universities as the central intellectual organ of a modern state.”
Wells was also inspired by the early-twentieth-century muckrakers who, with their allies in the Progressive movement, led a sharp shift away from America’s ethnic and regional politics. The muckrakers challenged the traditional American sense of certainty and self-satisfaction. Aided by the growth of the penny newspapers and monthly ten-cent magazines, such as those that serialized Wells’s novels, the muckrakers’ assault on the great monopolies and political machines helped create an increasingly national political identity. “The Americans,” Wells wrote, “have become suddenly self-critical, are hot with an unwonted fever for reform and constructive effort.” Can-do commercialism, he argued, was “crushing and maiming a great multitude of souls.” Progressivism, or what Wells innocently called “the revolt of the competent,” pointed to the creation of a Wellsian managerial elite similar to the “voluntary nobility” he idealized as samurai in his 1905 dialogue novel, A Modern Utopia.
In the course of Wells’s 1906 visit to the U.S., Jane Addams, Upton Sinclair, and Lincoln Steffens befriended him. He became part of their world, and it was Steffens who arranged Wells’s first visit to the White House. And though they disagreed on some scores, Wells placed his greatest hopes in the person of President Theodore Roosevelt.
TR, an avid reader, was delighted to sit down at the White House and talk for hours with Wells, who was already an international celebrity at age thirty-nine. Like Wells and Charles Francis Adams Jr., Roosevelt (the warrior President made famous by his role as the leader of the Rough Riders in the Spanish–American War) thought businessmen incapable of political leadership. The president saw them as having the “ideals of pawnbrokers.”
Roosevelt recognized that the confluence of rapid industrialization and high levels of immigration had exacerbated class divisions in America, but he felt that class barriers could be overcome. The eugenically minded Wells, who compared mass immigration to the earlier slave trade, was doubtful. “In the ‘colored population,’ America has already ten million descendants of unassimilated and perhaps unassimilable labor immigrants,” he wrote. “These people are not only half civilized and ignorant, but they have infected the white population with a kindred ignorance.” Roosevelt had read The Time Machine, and he rightly saw it as an anticipation of deepened class divisions hardened over time into an overworld and an underworld; he disagreed with Wells’s pessimism. Discussing the significance of The Time Machine, Roosevelt became “gesticulatory,” his voice “straining.” Roosevelt, as Wells recalled it, considered Wells’s notion that “America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all mankind must culminate and pass” one day: “ ‘Suppose after all,’ [TR] said slowly, ‘that it should prove to be right, and it all ends in butterflies and morlocks. That doesn’t matter now. The [reform] effort’s real. It’s worth going on with it. It’s worth it—even then.’”
“My hero in the confused drama of human life is intelligence; intelligence inspired by constructive passion,” Wells wrote in The Future in America. “There is a demigod imprisoned in mankind.” Three years before Herbert Croly’s pathbreaking book The Promise of American Life, in which Croly offered Roosevelt as the embodiment of a new liberal politics, Wells presented TR as a demigod incarnate, the very symbol of “the creative will in man.” “His range of reading is amazing, and he has receptivity to the pitch of genius,” Wells wrote of Roosevelt. Here was the man of the future—“traditions have no hold on him”—the very model of the philosopher-samurai, seemingly stepped out of one of his own novels. “I know of no other a tithe [tenth] so representative of the creative purpose, the goodwill in men as he.”
The American thinkers who did the most to carve out the enduring assumptions and mental gestures that streamed into liberalism as an ideology were Herbert Croly, editor and co-founder of The New Republic, and Randolph Bourne, a spirited young prophet full of righteous anger. Croly had a slow-fire political piety, and Bourne a tendency to not so much live as burn intensely, but both argued eloquently in the tradition of John Stuart Mill and H.G. Wells for a secular priesthood that could Europeanize America. Their legacy not only endured; it thrives down to the present.
Herbert Croly, whose 1909 book The Promise of American Life was the first political manifesto of modern American liberalism, was admired by both Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. His approach to liberalism, as his economically oriented colleague George Soule explained, was “more fundamental” than that of others who, like Croly, wanted to reshape public institutions. What Croly wanted was to remake American life “for the purpose of liberating a large quantity and higher quality of American manhood and womanhood,” Soule wrote. “What was important was the process of liberation of the personality, not mere achievement of honest city government, regulation of monopolies, or better conditions for labor.”
Croly and Bourne hoped for a re-founded regime that would break with the “monarchism” of a totemic Constitution. “Disinterested” intellectuals, as well as poet-leaders, experts, and social scientists such as themselves would lead the new regime. They saw such men and women as possessing a third eye that allowed them to see not only more of the world but also the world in its proper perspective. And if their talents were not to be wasted or frustrated, it was imperative to constrain the conventional and often corrupt politics of middle-class capitalists so that these far-seeing leaders might obtain the recognition and power that was their due.
Croly had little use for Hamilton’s ideal of a commercial republic and even less for Jefferson’s yeoman individualists; they were the bêtes noires of his philosophy. “To achieve a better future,” he argued, Americans had to be “emancipate[d] from their past.” He rejected American tradition, with its faith in the Constitution and its politics of parties and courts, and argued for rebuilding America’s foundation on higher spiritual and political principles that would transcend traditional ideas of democracy and self-government. Like Wells, Croly called for centralized power that might be, he acknowledged, “injurious to certain aspects of traditional American democracy.” But this was no great loss, because “the average American individual is morally and intellectually inadequate to serious and consistent conceptions of his responsibilities as a democrat.” The “erroneous and misleading” democratic tradition, he concluded, “must yield before the march of a constructive national democracy” remodeled along French lines
Croly had studied in Paris and had “an addiction to French political philosophy,” in the words of his friend, the literary