[In] the first days there was a king of the isles of Babylonia who called together his architects and his priests and bade them build him a labyrinth so confused and so subtle that the most prudent men would not venture into it, and those who did would lose their way.
– Jorge Luis Borges, “The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths”
During the late “Gilded Age,” intellectuals (beginning with Mark Twain, who invented the term) and proto-muckrakers, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd, were exposing the signs of capitalism’s flaws and erosion. Researching “muckraking” for this series and knowing how influential* mogul John D. Rockefeller would become by 1890, I quickly noticed Lloyd’s 1881 expose on Standard Oil. The year after this expose, newly ordained Baptist minister Russell Conwell first delivered his famous lecture, Acres of Diamonds. The lecture starts with a parable about a man who loses everything searching for the gems — crystals that others were to discover on the property he had sold when he had decided to search for the gems in distant lands. It then makes the argument that it is each man’s duty to get rich. The following year, Episcopalian clergyman and Yale professor William Graham Sumner published his Social Darwinist book, What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, crediting capital as the reason “man is not altogether a brute.”
Sumner (for what looks like a Yale alumni publication) notes that his family had been “artisans and members of the wages class” and that his grandfather’s “good trade” had been “ruined by machinery.” He continues,
In the year after I was born my father went prospecting through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. He came back convinced that, if a man would live as poorly and educate his children as badly in the East as he would have to in the West, he could do as well in the East. He moved to New England, lived in New Haven a year or two, and settled in Hartford about 1845. A History of the Class of 1863, Yale College
Sumner makes no indication of how his father earned a living after having failed to strike it rich. Whatever sort of “prospecting” he had done, the term doesn’t give me the impression of the work of someone who believed people (at least those who were not born to wealthy parents) should survive by the sweat of their brow or the grace of their intellect. I became even more doubtful of the importance to Sumner and his father of the “self-responsibility” belief when reading that Sumner…
…avoided being drafted to fight in the American Civil War by paying a "substitute" $250, given to him by a friend, to enlist for three years. This and money given to him by his father and friends allowed Sumner to go to Europe for further studies. Entry for Sumner in - Wikipedia.
Such a belief, however, comes across in Sumner’s above-referenced 1883 work. Listen, for instance, to his argument about the meaning of liberty:
It was in England that the modern idea found birth. It has been strengthened by the industrial and commercial development of that country. It has been inherited by all the English-speaking nations, who have made liberty real because they have inherited it, not as a notion, but as a body of institutions. It has been borrowed and imitated by the military and police state of the European continent so fast as they have felt the influence of the expanding industrial civilization; but they have realized it only imperfectly, because they have no body of local institutions or traditions, and it remains for them as yet too much a matter of "declarations" and pronunciamentos.
The notion of civil liberty which we have inherited is that of a status created for the individual by laws and institutions, the effect of which is that each man is guaranteed the use of all his own powers exclusively for his own welfare. - What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (emphasis in original.)
This strikes me as an odd claim for someone whose family English capitalism (and its machines) deprived of the use of its powers. Later, he claims that a free man “cannot escape the deduction that he can call no man to his aid. … A free man in a free democracy derogates from his rank if he takes a favor for which he does not render an equivalent … a man who accepts any share which he has not earned in another man’s capital cannot be an independent citizen.” The hypocrisy especially strikes me when reading his argument against urging wealthier men to educate poorer ones.
I am also struck by the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League‘s obvious belief that imperialism’s beneficiaries are entitled to capital earned from their conquered land:
[T]he unearned increment from land appears in the United States as a gain to the first comers, who have here laid the foundations of a new State. Since the land is a monopoly, the unearned increment lies in the laws of Nature. Then the only question is, Who shall have it?--the man who has the ownership by prescription, or some or all others? It is a beneficent incident of the ownership of land that a pioneer who reduces it to use, and helps to lay the foundations of a new State, finds a profit in the increasing value of land as the new State grows up. It would be unjust to take that profit away from him, or from any successor to whom he has sold it. - ibid.
This passage, and the following one, expose the Social Darwinist racism of his views, despite his libertarian supporters’ protests.**
The history of civilization shows us that the human race has by no means marched on in a solid and even phalanx. It has had its advance-guard, its rear-guard, and its stragglers. It presents us the same picture today; for it embraces every grade, from the most civilized nations down to the lowest surviving types of barbarians. - ibid.
The only other thing I want to point out about the work is that it resounds with the fervor of a clergyman, a position that Sumner had held in his early years.
I had also promised to discuss William James in this entry. I had already written of this philosopher fairly often on this blog, but his work and influence are intimately connected with topics covered in this series. For one thing, he was a teacher and important influence on Walter Lippmann, and he was a friend of John Dewey, the two opponents in a well-known debate about democracy. For another, James and Dewey were both members of the “Metaphysical Club” that inspired James’ turn from psychology to philosophy. (I had established that it most likely began in the early 1870’s — around the same time the Bohemian Club was founded by newspapermen [the latter club being quickly dominated by its wealthy members.]) Third, he was an early member of the Theosophical Society, a society which seems at least temporally connected with oil’s rise to dominance. Quoting my “Oil People” series:
In 1875, the year the Khedive of Egypt was forced to sell the country’s shares of the Suez Canal, Helen Blavatsky and others founded this Society in New York. In 1882, the year the Standard Oil Trust was created and England captured the city of Alexandria, Blavatsky and President Olcott moved the headquarters to Adyar in India.
I mention other temporal connections in my first “Prosperity Gospel” series. Since this entry is getting pretty long, I’ll break here. While I work on my next post, I’ll leave my readers with an interesting pictorial analysis about another “labyrinth” that might help us remember some of the connections we’ve made.
“The ol’ Indian Removal Act” from The Exploding Kinetoscope
* This link is to my first mention of him in my original “Prosperity Gospel” Series. I write more about the family in other posts, if you want to do a word search.
** Note how many references in Sumner’s Wikipedia entry link to the Mises Institute.
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