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AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY |
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Select: Introduction: The Reconstruction Period, The Gilded Age Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. - George Holmes Howison - Josephus Flavius Cook Henry George - John Clark Ridpath - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. - John Fiske Ambrose Bierce |
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The Reconstruction Period: Like the North, the South was transformed by the War Between the States and its aftermath. Southerners had learned lessons in the effectiveness of a strong central government and realized the impossibility of continuing the old ways of the antebellum period. Former Whigs in the South, often called Conservatives, pushed eagerly to build industry and commerce in the Yankee style. Meanwhile, reconstructed southern state governments enacted many reforms, establishing free public schools for all, popular election of all officials, more equitable taxes, and more humane penal laws. Republican Ulysses S. Grant was elected president in 1868 with electoral votes gained in occupied southern states. When evidence of corruption surfaced during the Grant administration, Democrats declared that it proved that the outcome of Republican friendliness to capitalists was graft and plunder. By 1870 the antisouthern mood that had supported Radical Reconstruction had faded, as had the surge of concern for southern blacks. New domestic problems were pushing to the fore. After the disputed election of 1876, amid evidence of electoral corruption, the Republican presidential candidate promised to withdraw the last federal occupation troops from the South. The election was decided by a congressional electoral commission, and Rutherford B. Hayes became president. As promised, he withdrew the troops in 1877; Reconstruction was over. The Gilded Age: The era known as the Gilded Age (1870s to 1890s) was a time of vigorous, exploitative individualism. Despite widespread suffering by industrial workers, southern sharecroppers, displaced American Indians, and other groups, a mood of optimism possessed the United States. The theories of the English biologist Charles Darwin -- expounded in The Origin of Species (1859) -- concerning the natural selection of organisms best suited to survive in their environment began to influence American opinion. Some intellectuals in the United States applied the idea of the survival of the fittest to human societies (Social Darwinism) and arrived at the belief that government aid to the unfortunate was wrong. During the Gilded Age ambitious and imaginative capitalists ranged the continent looking for new opportunities. Business lurched erratically from upswings to slumps, while the country's industrial base grew rapidly. Factories and mines labored heavily through these years to provide the raw materials and finished products needed for expansion of the railroad system. In 1890 the American people numbered 63 million, double the 1860 population. During these years the nation's cities underwent tremendous growth. Many new urbanites came from the American countryside, but many others came from abroad. Gilded Age politics became a contest between evenly balanced Republicans and Democrats. Winning elections by small margins, they alternated in their control of Congress and the White House. Five men served as Republican presidents: Hayes; James A. Garfield (1881); Chester A. Arthur (1881-85), who succeeded Garfield on his assassination; Benjamin Harrison (1889-93); and William McKinley (1897-1901). Their party regarded industrial growth and capitalist leadership with approval, believing that they led to an ever-widening opening of opportunity for all.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809-1894) Oliver Wendell Holmes (picture), professor of anatomy and physiology at Harvard Medical School and a popular figure in Boston, had become an American celebrity by 1860, due to the publication of his Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, a book of conversational charm, abundant in satirical glances at mankind and its good and bad customs, sharp and jovial judgments on life, the expression of common sense, love of nature, knowledge of nature, and a treasury of puns and anecdotes. The book became extremely popular in England too and was translated into French and German. Holmes' poems have sometimes been severely criticized, but among them there are many attractive creations of a sometimes robust, sometimes gracious humor, as well as witty and serious articulations of feelings which are shared by people of various levels of education. Some of them are representative of American sentiments of that time. Others surprise by their artful play with allusions and their skill in turning from joke to tender sensibility. Holmes' mind was less profound than that of his son, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He was a successful teacher, admired and loved by his students, relying more on routine than on research. As a natural scientist, he was an independent yet not a creative thinker. As a physician, he was devoted to the welfare of his patients and eager to support medical progress. He introduced the term "anesthesia" into medical practice by suggesting it to the dentist Morton, who was the first to use ether for making his patients insensible during operation. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
George Holmes Howison (1834-1916) One of America's most inspiring teachers of philosophy, George Holmes Howison (picture) taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan University and the University of California. Howison's philosophy, which he termed "Personal Idealism," is an original, theistic personalism, with God representing the Perfect Person, Final Cause and Center of a Republic of persons. He opposed absolute idealism or cosmic theism as a thoroughgoing monism because of its destruction of the implications of experience, its reduction to solipsism and its resolution into pantheism.
Joseph Flavius Cook (1838-1901) A descendant of the Pilgrim fathers, Josephus Cook achieved his fame as a lecturer. His direction of the Monday noon prayer meeting in Tremont Temple, Boston, received considerable public attention, and for more than twenty years the meetings were among Boston's greatest attractions. So popular were they that he was invited to repeat them throughout the United States, England, and many other countries, and their printed editions were translated into several languages. He was extremely popular as a lecturer because he awakened and confirmed in his audience the conviction that modern science could not disrupt faith in Christianity. Though he was orthodox in his sympathies, he advised his listeners to follow him in a friendly understanding of the sciences. He attempted to prove that where science was not harmonious with Christian religion, it was easily refutable. He frequently used colorful descriptions and quotations to illustrate his points and drew upon his fund of diverse reading and his travels in Germany, Southern Europe, Palestine, Egypt, India, Japan, and Australia. Many of his friends admitted, however, that he often pretended to know that which he had not understood and lacked real erudition. In The Radical Academy
Henry George (picture) was born in Philadelphia on September 2, 1839. He was an American social reformer whose Progress and Poverty (1880) won him international fame. In it he asserted that working the land was a natural right and that landlords were not entitled to reap the profits from it. He advocated a tax on land equal to its total economic rent -- that is, the amount by which its value exceeded the value of land in other, less productive uses. Such a tax, he said, would eliminate the need for other taxes. His exposition of the single tax theory made George a much-sought-after lecturer. In 1886 he ran for mayor of New York City; he was defeated, although he ran ahead of Theodore Roosevelt. John Dewey called Henry George "one of the world's great social philosophers, certainly the greatest which our country has produced." Dewey's appraisal of George has not been shared by many Americans. The great majority of American economists have severely criticized George's insistence on nationalization of land and on the "single tax," the two principal tenets of his system. In 1941, George Geiger stated that Henry George was neglected and even ignored in liberal and progressive circles and that he had been forgotten by his conservative critics. But the statement is true for America only. In England and Germany the doctrine of Henry George always had greater influence than in his homeland, and it still has many adherents there. His Progress and Poverty (1880) became of special consequence for British socialism, as well as for the Socialist League, led by William Morris, and the Fabian Society, the great training school for labor leaders. George regarded political economy as justified only when directed by moral principles and social consciousness. He founded his movement for abolition of private landed property upon both religious and political grounds. Land, he said, is the creation of God; it therefore must be common property for all people. Land, he also argued, is the physical foundation of the entire economic process. Therefore, he concluded, no democracy is secure as long as it is in private hands. George repudiated materialism and evolutionism. He vigorously attacked Herbert Spencer because he had, in 1850, declared that property in land was wrong and in 1882 recanted what George considered the fundamental truth. He died October 29, 1897. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
John Clark Ridpath (1840-1900) John Clark Ridpath (picture), the editor of some of America's most popular encyclopedias, was by nature an encyclopedist, surveying the whole range of knowledge of his time, always working hard, aided by an extraordinarily reliable memory, reading untiringly, learning constantly, and able to teach what he had read and learned. In fact, his great talents for teaching are also the conspicuous quality of his writings. Ridpath was born and grew up on a farm in the frontier community of Putnam County, Indiana, remote from high schools. He owed it to his highly cultivated parents that he could attend Indiana Asbury University, where he later had a brilliant career as teacher, professor, and vice-president. He taught English literature, history and normal instruction. In 1885, he renounced his professorship in order to devote his full time to writing. His principal works are Encyclopedia of Universal History (1880-85), The Great Races of Mankind (1884-94), and The Ridpath Library of Universal Literature, comprising 25 volumes (1898). In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On The Internet
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935) Born in Boston on March 8, 1841, Holmes was a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court so well known for the eloquence, pungency, and abundance of his dissenting opinions that he was called the "Great Dissenter." The son of the physician and literary figure Oliver Wendell Holmes, he came to study at Harvard, where he made many friends and acquired a great deal of knowledge, not exactly what he was supposed to learn, but of the kind that pleased and satisfied himself. He did become, in his senior year, editor of the Harvard Magazine and graduated from Harvard University in 1861 as class poet. Twelve days after the outbreak of the War Between the States, young Holmes enlisted in the Union Army and was given a commission; he stayed long enough around Boston, however, to receive his B.A. in person. In three years of army life he was wounded three times, at Ball's Bluff, near Hagerstown, and at Chancellorsville. But he survived and came home to say (1864) and to continue his education. For a while he hesitated whether to take up law or philosophy. He liked the latter better, but decided that the former was more practical in the long run, and enrolled for a two-year course in the Harvard Law School. Holmes graduated from Harvard Law School in 1866, passed the bar examination and became a Counsellor at Law, and opened a private law practice in 1867. But he devoted most of his energies to legal scholarship. From 1870 to 1873 he served as editor of the American Law Review and taught constitutional law at Harvard. Despite his training in law and his law practice, Holmes still loved philosophy best. In his spare time he acquainted himself, very thoroughly, with the world history of legal philosophy. From time to time he attended meetings of the Metaphysical Club, where one could meet, among others, Abbot, James, Peirce, and Wright. In 1874 he visited England, got acquainted with quite a few well-known thinkers, and formed a lifelong friendship with Frederick Pollock. Now and then Holmes contributed articles to the Law Review, in which he expressed his newly-formed pragmatic philosophy of jurisprudence. In 1880 he was chosen to deliver the Lowell lectures in Boston, traditionally attended by prominent legal authorities in the vicinity. The lectures made a name for Holmes, and he was urged to put them in a book form. Therefore, in 1881, Holmes published The Common Law, representing a new departure in legal philosophy. The opening sentence captures the pragmatic theme of that work and of Holmes' philosophy of law: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." The book was well received, and Holmes was appointed (1882) to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, where he served for 20 years. When Holmes finally gave up the position, it was only to become a Justice of the United States Supreme Court in the nation's capital. In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt, thinking that Holmes was closely attuned to his liberal progressive ideas, appointed him to the Court. There he spent thirty more years, always intensely at work. More and more he was becoming sure of himself, sure that his ideas were right. His fame spread. People somehow sensed Holmes' freedom from prejudice, devotion to human rights, justice for all, and general kindness. His occasional disagreements with fellow judges, expressed in dissenting opinions -- 173 in all -- usually clearly and strongly stated, earned him the admiration of many thoughtful newspaper readers throughout the country. Holmes' legal thinking was too complex to be so easily classified. For example, at that time many state regulatory laws were being declared unconstitutional because the Supreme Court felt that they did not conform to its concept of due process of law. In a dissenting opinion in Lochner v. New York (1905), Holmes declared that the law should develop along with society and that the 14th Amendment did not deny states a right to experiment with social legislation. He also argued for judicial restraint, asserting that the Court should not interpret the Constitution according to its own social philosophy. Speaking for a unanimous Court in Schenck v. United States (1919), however, he stated that judicial review was necessary in cases involving freedom of speech and presented the "clear and present danger" doctrine associated with his name. Holmes remained active on the bench until he was 91. He resigned from the Court in 1932, no longer able to fight or work hard. His health was failing. He died in 1935, two days before his ninety-fourth birthday, with most of his friends long gone. In The Radical Academy Elsewhere On the Internet
Edmund Fisk Greene was born on March 20, 1842, in Hartford, Connecticut. He lost his father at the age of ten and, when his mother remarried, the boy was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in Middletown, Connecticut. It was at this time that his name was legally changed to John Fiske (picture). He had always been bright, but now he became also studious and amazingly precocious. Before he was twenty, he could in many languages, including Sanskrit, Hebrew, and Greek. He was well read in philosophy before he reached the age of ten. While at Harvard University (1860-3) he became acquainted with the writings of Herbert Spencer and published several articles on evolution. Unfortunately for him, the doctrine of evolution was believed at the time to undermine religious and moral traditions and was, therefore, quite unpopular in academic circles. Naturally enough, his outspoken interest in evolution, and particularly his writing on the topic, provoked sharp disapproval among his teachers. As a result, Fiske found little encouragement to pursue a scholarly career and decided to become a lawyer. His chosen field had no attraction to him, however, and he was very happy when Harvard offered him the position of assistant librarian in 1872. The following year he visited England where he met some of the most outstanding evolutionists, including Darwin, Spencer, Huxley, Lewes, and Tyndall. Fiske's first book, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874), contended that societies, like organisms, develop according to laws of evolution, and it turned out to be an immediate success. He soon received a number of invitations to speak. As a lecturer, he was extraordinarily in demand. He was noted for his attempts to show that evolutionary theory and religion are compatible. According to Fiske, the events of the evolutionary process are the results of the imminent causality of the living God, "the infinite and eternal Power that is manifested in every pulsation of the universe." Since the evolutionary process has progressively tended toward the highest ethical and spiritual qualities of man, we recognize the essential kinship of the human soul with God and we affirm as a reasonable faith the "quasi-personal" and moral character of God, the imminently operating Cause. He emphasized that human limitations do not exclude the possibility of superhuman knowledge or power possessed by the Supreme Being conceived as the First Cause as well as the natural object of worship. In so stating, Fiske tried to resolve -- or to reconcile -- the undeniable difference between science and religion. As he claimed in his Through Nature to God (1899), any hostility between the two is a chimera of the imagination. For about thirty years, Fiske was one of the most influential men in America. The philosophy of evolution was brought by him to the attention of the reading public which responded enthusiastically to it and took great interest in the controversies which followed. By that time the whole thing proved to be quite palatable even to religiously-minded persons, for, unlike Spencer, Fiske did not offend them by referring to God in an agnostic fashion as "the Unknowable." He acknowledged that human knowledge is limited to sensory appearances and inferences from them. He contended, however, that the orderliness of nature, as revealed by science, is but so much testimony for the ever-present God. Toward the end of his life, Fiske became exceedingly obese -- weighing over 300 pounds -- and consequently had considerable difficulty in maintaining his heavy schedule of lectures throughout the country. He died on July 4, 1901) Elsewhere On the Internet
Bierce was born on June 24, 1842, to poor Ohio farmers; his father's name was, significantly enough, Marcus Aurelius. Though simple and formally uneducated, the family possessed a surprisingly good collection of informative books. Ambrose was a curious and intelligent boy who, when he learned to read, did not fail to utilize the unusual advantage in those days to have a small library at home. Bierce himself did not have much formal education, but he was growing intelligent, observant, and of a critical disposition. He eventually became an author and journalist whose cynical wit and macabre stories about warfare, horror, and death earned him the nickname "Bitter" Bierce. His fascination with the grotesque probably originated in the War Between the States, during which he fought at Shiloh and Chickamauga and was wounded at the battle of Kennesaw Mountain. Several memorable stories, including "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and "Chickamauga," were derived from these war experiences. Bierce left the army in 1865 and, traveling westward, was soon contributing articles to the San Francisco News Letter, a publication of which he became editor in 1868. His first story, "The Haunted Valley," appeared in 1871, the same year he married Mary Ellen Day, a marriage that was to prove unhappy. With her, he went to England, where his first three books were published: The Fiend's Delight, Nuggets and Dust Panned Out in California (both 1872), and Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874). On his return to the United States, Bierce contributed extensively to the satirical Wasp and conducted a highly influential Sunday column, called "Prattle," in the Examiner, a Hearst newspaper. For about a decade he was the best-known journalist on the Pacific Coast. In 1891 he brought out the first of three works for which he is best known today, In the Midst of Life. The other two are Can Such Things Be? (1893), another collection of stories, and The Devil's Dictionary (1906), a book of mordant and ironic definitions. He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1896 to continue his journalistic career. Though quite successful in his field, Bierce felt lonely, weary and restless in his personal life. Finally, yielding to an impulse, he disappeared into warring Mexico to report on Pancho Villa's revolution, leaving the following strange letter behind (1913): "Goodbye. If you hear of my being stood against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think it a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico -- ah, that is euthanasia!" His message was long delayed in transit. The first news of his death was reported only in 1916, but the exact time, or even year, still remains unknown, although some reports say he may have died in the siege of Ojinaga in January 1914. Bierce's philosophical work reminds us of Voltaire, except that it was much more fragmentary, mainly isolated comments upon life and social criticisms. Elsewhere On the Internet
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