The American Commonwealth. Viscount James Bryce
97 The New Transmarine Dominions
98 Laissez Faire
99 Woman Suffrage
100 The Supposed Faults of Democracy
101 The True Faults of American Democracy
102 The Strength of American Democracy
103 How Far American Experience Is Available for Europe
PART VI
Social Institutions
104 The Bar
105 The Bench
106 Railroads
107 Wall Street
108 The Universities and Colleges
109 Further Observations on the Universities
110 The Churches and the Clergy
111 The Influence of Religion
112 The Position of Women
113 Equality
114 The Influence of Democracy on Thought
115 Creative Intellectual Power
116 The Relation of the United States to Europe
117 The Absence of a Capital
118 American Oratory
119 The Pleasantness of American Life
120 The Uniformity of American Life
121 The Temper of the West
122 The Future of Political Institutions
123 Social and Economic Future
Appendix I
Explanation (by Mr. G. Bradford) of the Nominating Machinery and Its Procedure in the State of Massachusetts
Remarks by Mr. Denis Kearney on “Kearneyism in California”
Appendix II
“The Predictions of Hamilton and de Tocqueville,” by James Bryce
Appendix III
“Bryce’s American Commonwealth: A Review,” by Woodrow Wilson
Appendix IV
“Review of The American Commonwealth,” by Lord Acton
Index
Notes
He knew us better than we know ourselves, and he went about and among us and gave us the boon of his illuminating wisdom derived from the lessons of the past.
Chief Justice William Howard Taft
October 12, 1922
James Bryce’s The American Commonwealth is a classic work, not only of American politics but of political science. Eschewing the theoretical depths of democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville had plumbed, and lacking the partisan purposes for which Alexander Hamilton and his colleagues had penned The Federalist, Bryce sought to capture the America of his time, to present “within reasonable compass, a full and clear view of the facts of today.” 1 As Bryce’s biographer would later put it, The American Commonwealth “was a photograph taken and exhibited by a political philosopher, not a history, not a picture of what was, not an account of how it had come to be.” 2 But, as with photographs that aspire to art, the more one studies Bryce’s snapshot of a long-vanished America, the more one sees.
Bryce’s fascination with America began in earnest on his first visit to the United States in 1870. It is worth remembering that the country he first saw was only five years past the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and but a year after the first transcontinental railway had been completed; it would be another seven years before the last of the federal troops of Reconstruction were finally withdrawn from the South in 1877. The America of which Bryce first took note was a geographically sprawling society kept only loosely in touch by telegraph and newspapers—telephones and radios being still decades away.
When The American Commonwealth appeared in 1888, America was the youngest nation in a world still defined by ancient orders. The British Empire bustled beneath Victoria’s scepter and Russia creaked beneath the feudal splendor of Tsar Alexander III. The devastation of the Great War and the loss of innocence it would bring was more than a quarter of a century away; Lenin was but a schoolboy of eighteen, and Hitler would not be born until 1889.
The America of Bryce’s observations has long since passed; indeed, it was already gone by the time of his death in 1922. When he first published The American Commonwealth, the population of the entire country, then only thirty-eight states strong, was a mere sixty million; New York took the lead with 5,082,871, while California boasted a meager 864,694 spread across its 155,980 square miles. Nevada peaked at 62,266 isolated souls. Dakota (which would be divided the next year into North Dakota and South Dakota), Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona were all still territories; and Oklahoma was Indian Territory, not to become a state until 1907.
By the end of Bryce’s life, the 1920 census had sketched a nation with a population of 105,710,620 (not including the territories of Alaska and Hawaii) divided among forty-eight states. New York’s population had nearly doubled to 10,385,000; California’s had quadrupled to 3,427,000. Even Nevada had grown to 77,000. By 1920, America was an increasingly urban nation with problems Bryce could not have envisioned when he began writing The American Commonwealth in 1884.3
Demographic changes were not all; nor were they the most important changes. Constitutionally and politically, The American Commonwealth of 1922 was much changed from that of the 1880s. Between the publication of the first edition of The American Commonwealth and Bryce’s death there had been four constitutional amendments, three serious and one frivolous. In addition to the ill-fated 18th Amendment prohibiting intoxicating liquors (repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933), the fundamental structure of the Constitution was altered by allowing the income tax (16th Amendment in 1913), by providing for the direct election of Senators (17th Amendment, also in 1913), and by giving women the right to vote (19th Amendment in 1920). The politics of the Gilded Age that Bryce first chronicled had passed into the Progressive Era, and with that passage had come a plethora of social reform legislation. The creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887 had been but a foreshadowing of the coming age of national regulation: the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890); the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906); and the Child Labor Act (1916), among many others, quickly followed.
The America that Bryce first saw was also a nation of buoyant optimism, a country fairly bursting with the democratic zeal and commercial impatience Tocqueville had celebrated half a century earlier. Like Tocqueville before him, but for different reasons, Bryce saw in America more than America. “The institutions of the United States,” he wrote, “are something more than an experiment, for they are believed to disclose and display the type of institutions towards which, as if by a law of fate, the rest of civilized mankind are forced to move, some with swifter, others with slower, but all with unresting feet.” The United States was a nation of “enormous and daily increasing influence.” 4 It was essential, Bryce believed, that the world be given a clear account of what made up this robust and rambunctious republic. For good or ill, America was simply the most exceptional nation in the history of the world. And James Bryce was just the man to capture that exceptionalism in all its glory.
I
James Bryce was a Scotsman of sturdy Presbyterian