Henry the famed draft dodger, journalist, and popular historian manages to focus both feelings inside my mental bowel quite sharply, in his (I think justly) praised "autobiography".
Here's a nice passages with timely import:
"nothing could surpass the nonsensity of trying to run so complex and so concentrated a machine [America in the 1890's] by southern and western farmers in grotesque alliance with city day laborers, as had been tried in 1800 and 1828 and had failed even under those simpler conditions."Here's hank's nomination of the "two forces" that fought for control "for a hundred years between 1793-1893", forces that cause the American people to "hesitate, vacillate sway forward and backward": the "simply industrial" vs. "the capitalistic centralizing and mechanical."
Not the finest-edged of cutting instruments, to say the least.
Simply industrial? Huh? That one keeps me up at night trying to figure what it might and might not encompass. One notes the free labor ideal of the era, but here we have a soft-handed, ink-stained rentier, using "industrial", I guess, in the sense of Adam Smith's paradigm of pin-making. It's certain he has an 18th century model in his head; even if not yeoman-romantic it clearly was not Hamiltonian. (Seems Hank was a silver bug, God love him).
And yet he voted for Mckinley, one guesses out of a sense one needed to face the ugly mug of progress head-on.
I see the wellsprings of pwogressivism burbling here.
