University of Virginia Library

XII
Social Forces in American History[1]

The transformations through which the United States is
passing in our own day are so profound, so far-reaching, that
it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the
birth of a new nation in America. The revolution in the
social and economic structure of this country during the past
two decades is comparable to what occurred when independence
was declared and the constitution was formed, or to the
changes wrought by the era which began half a century ago,
the era of Civil War and Reconstruction.

These changes have been long in preparation and are, in
part, the result of world-wide forces of reorganization incident
to the age of steam production and large-scale industry,
and, in part, the result of the closing of the period of the
colonization of the West. They have been prophesied, and
the course of the movement partly described by students of
American development; but after all, it is with a shock that
the people of the United States are coming to realize that the
fundamental forces which have shaped their society up to the
present are disappearing. Twenty years ago, as I have before
had occasion to point out, the Superintendent of the Census
declared that the frontier line, which its maps had depicted
for decade after decade of the westward march of the nation,

could no longer be described. To-day we must add that the
age of free competition of individuals for the unpossessed
resources of the nation is nearing its end. It is taking less
than a generation to write the chapter which began with the
disappearance of the line of the frontier—the last chapter in
the history of the colonization of the United States, the conclusion
to the annals of its pioneer democracy.

It is a wonderful chapter, this final rush of American energy
upon the remaining wilderness. Even the bare statistics
become eloquent of a new era. They no longer derive their
significance from the exhibit of vast proportions of the public
domain transferred to agriculture, of wildernesses equal to
European nations changed decade after decade into the farm
area of the United States. It is true there was added to the
farms of the nation between 1870 and 1880 a territory equal
to that of France, and between 1880 and 1900 a territory equal
to the European area of France, Germany, England, and Wales
combined. The records of 1910 are not yet available, but
whatever they reveal they will not be so full of meaning as
the figures which tell of upleaping wealth and organization and
concentration of industrial power in the East in the last decade.
As the final provinces of the Western empire have been subdued
to the purposes of civilization and have yielded their
spoils, as the spheres of operation of the great industrial corporations
have extended, with the extension of American settlement,
production and wealth have increased beyond all precedent.

The total deposits in all national banks have more than
trebled in the present decade; the money in circulation has
doubled since 1890. The flood of gold makes it difficult to
gage the full meaning of the incredible increase in values,
for in the decade ending with 1909 over 41,600,000 ounces of
gold were mined in the United States alone. Over four million

ounces have been produced every year since 1905, whereas
between 1880 and 1894 no year showed a production of two
million ounces. As a result of this swelling stream of gold
and instruments of credit, aided by a variety of other causes,
prices have risen until their height has become one of the most
marked features and influential factors in American life, producing
social readjustments and contributing effectively to
party revolutions.

But if we avoid those statistics which require analysis
because of the changing standard of value, we still find that
the decade occupies an exceptional place in American history.
More coal was mined in the United States in the ten years
after 1897 than in all the life of the nation before that time.[2]
Fifty years ago we mined less than fifteen million long tons
of coal. In 1907 we mined nearly 429,000,000. At the present
rate it is estimated that the supply of coal would be
exhausted at a date no farther in the future than the formation
of the constitution is in the past. Iron and coal are the
measures of industrial power. The nation has produced three
times as much iron ore in the past two decades as in all its
previous history; the production of the past ten years was
more than double that of the prior decade. Pig-iron production
is admitted to be an excellent barometer of manufacture
and of transportation. Never until 1898 had this reached
an annual total of ten million long tons. But in the five years
beginning with 1904 it averaged over twice that. By 1907
the United States had surpassed Great Britain, Germany, and
France combined in the production of pig-iron and steel
together, and in the same decade a single great corporation
has established its domination over the iron mines and steel
manufacture of the United States. It is more than a mere
accident that the United States Steel Corporation with its

stocks and bonds aggregating $1,400,000,000 was organized
at the beginning of the present decade. The former wilderness
about Lake Superior has, principally in the past two decades,
established its position as overwhelmingly the preponderant
source of iron ore, present and prospective, in the United
States—a treasury from which Pittsburgh has drawn wealth
and extended its unparalleled industrial empire in these years.
The tremendous energies thus liberated at this center of industrial
power in the United States revolutionized methods of
manufacture In general, and in many indirect ways profoundly
influenced the life of the nation.

Railroad statistics also exhibit unprecedented development,
the formation of a new industrial society. The number of
passengers carried one mile more than doubled between 1890
and 1908; freight carried one mile has nearly trebled in the
same period and has doubled in the past decade. Agricultural
products tell a different story. The corn crop has only risen
from about two billion bushels in 1891 to two and seven-tenths
billions in 1909; wheat from six hundred and eleven million
bushels in 1891 to only seven hundred and thirty-seven million
in 1909; and cotton from about nine million bales in 1891 to
ten and three-tenths million bales in 1909. Population has
increased in the United States proper from about sixty-two
and one-half millions in 1890 to seventy-five and one-half
millions in 1900 and to over ninety millions in 1910.

It is clear from these statistics that the ratio of the nation's
increased production of immediate wealth by the enormously
increased exploitation of its remaining natural resources vastly
exceeds the ratio of increase of population and still more strikingly
exceeds the ratio of increase of agricultural products.
Already population is pressing upon the food supply while
capital consolidates in billion-dollar organizations. The
"Triumphant Democracy" whose achievements the iron-master

celebrated has reached a stature even more imposing than he
could have foreseen; but still less did he perceive the changes
in democracy itself and the conditions of its life which have
accompanied this material growth.

Having colonized the Far West, having mastered its internal
resources, the nation turned at the conclusion of the nineteenth
and the beginning of the twentieth century to deal with the
Far East to engage in the world-politics of the Pacific Ocean.
Having continued its historic expansion into the lands of the
old Spanish empire by the successful outcome of the recent
war, the United States became the mistress of the Philippines
at the same time that it came into possession of the Hawaiian
Islands, and the controlling influence in the Gulf of Mexico.
It provided early in the present decade for connecting its
Atlantic and Pacific coasts by the Isthmian Canal, and became
an imperial republic with dependencies and protectorates—
admittedly a new world-power, with a potential voice in the
problems of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

This extension of power, this undertaking of grave responsibilities
in new fields, this entry into the sisterhood of world-states,
was no isolated event. It was, indeed, in some respects
the logical outcome of the nation's march to the Pacific, the
sequence to the era in which it was engaged in occupying the
free lands and exploiting the resources of the West. When
it had achieved this position among the nations of the earth,
the United States found itself confronted, also, with the need
of constitutional readjustment, arising from the relations of
federal government and territorial acquisitions. It was obliged
to reconsider questions of the rights of man and traditional
American ideals of liberty and democracy, in view of the
task of government of other races politically inexperienced
and undeveloped.

If we turn to consider the effect upon American society and

domestic policy in these two decades of transition we are
met with palpable evidences of the invasion of the old pioneer
democratic order. Obvious among them is the effect of unprecedented
immigration to supply the mobile army of cheap
labor for the centers of industrial life. In the past ten years,
beginning with 1900, over eight million immigrants have
arrived. The newcomers of the eight years since 1900 would,
according to a writer in 1908, "repopulate all the five older
New England States as they stand to-day; or, if properly disseminated
over the newer parts of the country they would
serve to populate no less than nineteen states of the Union as
they stand." In 1907 "there were one and one-quarter million
arrivals. This number would entirely populate both New
Hampshire and Maine, two of our oldest States." "The
arrivals of this one year would found a State with more inhabitants
than any one of twenty-one of our other existing commonwealths
which could be named." Not only has the addition
to the population from Europe been thus extraordinary,
it has come in increasing measure from southern and eastern
Europe. For the year 1907, Professor Ripley,[3] whom I am
quoting, has redistributed the incomers on the basis of physical
type and finds that one-quarter of them were of the Mediterranean
race, one-quarter of the Slavic race, one-eighth Jewish,
and only one-sixth of the Alpine, and one-sixth of the Teutonic.
In 1882 Germans had come to the amount of 250,000;
in 1907 they were replaced by 330,000 South Italians. Thus
it is evident that the ethnic elements of the United States have
undergone startling changes; and instead of spreading over
the nation these immigrants have concentrated especially in
the cities and great industrial centers in the past decade. The
composition of the labor class and its relation to wages and
to the native American employer have been deeply influenced
thereby; the sympathy of the employers with labor has been
unfavorably affected by the pressure of great numbers of immigrants
of alien nationality and of lower standards of life.

The familiar facts of the massing of population in the cities
and the contemporaneous increase of urban power, and of the
massing of capital and production in fewer and vastly greater
industrial units, especially attest the revolution. "It is a
proposition too plain to require elucidation," wrote Richard
Rush, Secretary of the Treasury, in his report of 1827, "that
the creation of capital is retarded rather than accelerated by
the diffusion of a thin population over a great surface of soil."[4]
Thirty years before Rush wrote these words Albert Gallatin
declared in Congress that "if the cause of the happiness of
this country were examined into, it would be found to arise
as much from the great plenty of land in proportion to the
inhabitants which their citizens enjoyed as from the wisdom
of their political institutions." Possibly both of these Pennsylvania
financiers were right under the conditions of the
time; but it is at least significant that capital and labor entered
upon a new era as the end of the free lands approached. A
contemporary of Gallatin in Congress had replied to the argument
that cheap lands would depopulate the Atlantic coast
by saying that if a law were framed to prevent ready access to
western lands it would be tantamount to saying that there is
some class which must remain "and by law be obliged to serve
the others for such wages as they pleased to give." The passage
of the arable public domain into private possession has
raised this question in a new form and has brought forth new
answers. This is peculiarly the era when competitive individualism
in the midst of vast unappropriated opportunities

changed into the monopoly of the fundamental industrial
processes by huge aggregations of capital as the free lands disappeared.
All the tendencies of the large-scale production of
the twentieth century, all the trend to the massing of capital
in large combinations, all of the energies of the age of steam,
found in America exceptional freedom of action and were
offered regions of activity equal to the states of all Western
Europe. Here they reached their highest development.

The decade following 1897 is marked by the work of Mr.
Harriman and his rivals in building up the various railroads
into a few great groups, a process that had gone so far that
before his death Mr. Harriman was ambitious to concentrate
them all under his single control. High finance under the
leadership of Mr. Morgan steadily achieved the consolidation
of the greater industries into trusts or combinations
and effected a community of interests between them and a
few dominant banking organizations, with allied insurance
companies and trust companies. In New York City have
been centered, as never before, the banking reserves of the
nation, and here, by the financial management of capital and
speculative promotion, there has grown up a unified control
over the nation's industrial life. Colossal private fortunes
have arisen. No longer is the per capita wealth of the nation
a real index to the prosperity of the average man. Labor on
the other hand has shown an increasing self-consciousness, is
combining and increasing its demands. In a word, the old
pioneer individualism is disappearing, while the forces of
social combination are manifesting themselves as never before.
The self-made man has become, in popular speech, the coal
baron, the steel king, the oil king, the cattle king, the railroad
magnate, the master of high finance, the monarch of trusts.
The world has never before seen such huge fortunes exercising
combined control over the economic life of a people, and such

luxury as has come out of the individualistic pioneer democracy
of America in the course of competitive evolution.

At the same time the masters of industry, who control interests
which represent billions of dollars, do not admit that they
have broken with pioneer ideals. They regard themselves as
pioneers under changed conditions, carrying on the old work
of developing the natural resources of the nation, compelled
by the constructive fever in their veins, even in ill-health and
old age and after the accumulation of wealth beyond their
power to enjoy, to seek new avenues of action and of power,
to chop new clearings, to find new trails, to expand the horizon
of the nation's activity, and to extend the scope of their
dominion. "This country," said the late Mr. Harriman in an
interview a few years ago, "has been developed by a wonderful
people, flush with enthusiasm, imagination and speculative
bent. . . . They have been magnificent pioneers. They
saw into the future and adapted their work to the possibilities.
. . . Stifle that enthusiasm, deaden that imagination and prohibit
that speculation by restrictive and cramping conservative
law, and you tend to produce a moribund and conservative
people and country." This is an appeal to the historic ideals
of Americans who viewed the republic as the guardian of
individual freedom to compete for the control of the natural
resources of the nation.

On the other hand, we have the voice of the insurgent West,
recently given utterance in the New Nationalism of ex-President
Roosevelt, demanding increase of federal authority to curb the
special interests, the powerful industrial organizations, and
the monopolies, for the sake of the conservation of our natural
resources and the preservation of American democracy.

The past decade has witnessed an extraordinary federal
activity in limiting individual and corporate freedom for the
benefit of society. To that decade belong the conservation

congresses and the effective organization of the Forest Service,
and the Reclamation Service. Taken together these developments
alone would mark a new era, for over three hundred
million acres are, as a result of this policy, reserved from
entry and sale, an area more than equal to that of all the
states which established the constitution, if we exclude their
western claims; and these reserved lands are held for a more
beneficial use of their forests, minerals, arid tracts, and water
rights, by the nation as a whole. Another example is the
extension of the activity of the Department of Agriculture,
which seeks the remotest regions of the earth for crops suitable
to the areas reclaimed by the government, maps and
analyzes the soils, fosters the improvement of seeds and animals,
tells the farmer when and how and what to plant, and
makes war upon diseases of plants and animals and insect pests.
The recent legislation for pure food and meat inspection, and
the whole mass of regulative law under the Interstate Commerce
clause of the constitution, further illustrates the same
tendency.

Two ideals were fundamental in traditional American
thought, ideals that developed in the pioneer era. One was
that of individual freedom to compete unrestrictedly for
the resources of a continent—the squatter ideal. To the
pioneer government was an evil. The other was the ideal of
a democracy—"government of the people, by the people
and for the people." The operation of these ideals took place
contemporaneously with the passing into private possession of
the free public domain and the natural resources of the United
States. But American democracy was based on an abundance
of free lands; these were the very conditions that shaped its
growth and its fundamental traits. Thus time has revealed
that these two ideals of pioneer democracy had elements of
mutual hostility and contained the seeds of its dissolution.

The present finds itself engaged in the task of readjusting its
old ideals to new conditions and is turning increasingly to
government to preserve its traditional democracy. It is not
surprising that socialism shows noteworthy gains as elections
continue; that parties are forming on new lines; that the
demand for primary elections, for popular choice of senators,
initiative, referendum, and recall, is spreading, and that the
regions once the center of pioneer democracy exhibit these
tendencies in the most parked degree. They are efforts to
find substitutes for that former safeguard of democracy, the
disappearing free lands. They are the sequence to the extinction
of the frontier.

It is necessary next to notice that in the midst of all this
national energy, and contemporaneous with the tendency to
turn to the national government for protection to democracy,
there is clear evidence of the persistence and the development
of sectionalism.[5] Whether we observe the grouping of votes
in Congress and in general elections, or the organization and
utterances of business leaders, or the association of scholars,
churches, or other representatives of the things of the spirit,
we find that American life is not only increasing in its national
intensity but that it is integrating by sections. In part this
is due to the factor of great spaces which make sectional rather
than national organization the line of least resistance; but,
in part, it is also the expression of the separate economic, political,
and social interests and the separate spiritual life of the
various geographic provinces or sections. The votes on the
tariff, and in general the location of the strongholds of the
Progressive Republican movement, illustrate this fact. The
difficulty of a national adjustment of railway rates to the

diverse interests of different sections is another example.
Without attempting to enter upon a more extensive discussion
of sectionalism, I desire simply to point out that there are
evidences that now, as formerly, the separate geographical
interests have their leaders and spokesmen, that much Congressional
legislation is determined by the contests, triumphs,
or compromises between the rival sections, and that the real
federal relations of the United States are shaped by the interplay
of sectional with national forces rather than by the relation
of State and Nation. As time goes on and the nation
adjusts itself more durably to the conditions of the differing
geographic sections which make it up, they are coming to a
new self-consciousness and a revived self-assertion. Our
national character is a composite of these sections.[6]

Obviously in attempting to indicate even a portion of the
significant features of our recent history we have been obliged
to take note of a complex of forces. The times are so close
at hand that the relations between events and tendencies force
themselves upon our attention. We have had to deal with the
connections of geography, industrial growth, politics, and government.
With these we must take into consideration the
changing social composition, the inherited beliefs and habitual
attitude of the masses of the people, the psychology of the
nation and of the separate sections, as well as of the leaders.
We must see how these leaders are shaped partly by their
time and section, and how they are in part original, creative,
by virtue of their own genius and initiative. We cannot neglect
the moral tendencies and the ideals. All are related parts
of the same subject and can no more be properly understood

in isolation than the movement as a whole can be understood
by neglecting some of these important factors, or by the use
of a single method of investigation. Whatever be the truth
regarding European history, American history is chiefly concerned
with social forces, shaping and reshaping under the
conditions of a nation changing as it adjusts to its environment.
And this environment progressively reveals new aspects
of itself, exerts new influences, and calls out new social organs
and functions.

I have undertaken this rapid survey of recent history for
two purposes. First, because it has seemed fitting to emphasize
the significance of American development since the passing
of the frontier, and, second, because in the observation of
present conditions we may find assistance in our study of the
past.

It is a familiar doctrine that each age studies its history
anew and with interests determined by the spirit of the time.
Each age finds it necessary to reconsider at least some portion
of the past, from points of view furnished by new conditions
which reveal the influence and significance of forces not adequately
known by the historians of the previous generation.
Unquestionably each investigator and writer is influenced by
the times in which he lives and while this fact exposes the historian
to a bias, at the same time it affords him new instruments
and new insight for dealing with his subject.

If recent history, then, gives new meaning to past events,
if it has to deal with the rise into a commanding position of
forces, the origin and growth of which may have been inadequately
described or even overlooked by historians of the
previous generation, it is important to study the present and
the recent past, not only for themselves but also as the source
of new hypotheses, new lines of inquiry, new criteria of the
perspective of the remoter past. And, moreover, a just public

opinion and a statesmanlike treatment of present problems
demand that they be seen in their historical relations in order
that history may hold the lamp for conservative reform.

Seen from the vantage-ground of present developments what
new light falls upon past events! When we consider what the
Mississippi Valley has come to be in American life, and when
we consider what it is yet to be, the young Washington, crossing
the snows of the wilderness to summon the French to evacuate
the portals of the great valley, becomes the herald of an
empire. When we recall the huge industrial power that has
centered at Pittsburgh, Braddock's advance to the forks of the
Ohio takes on new meaning. Even in defeat, he opened a
road to what is now the center of the world's industrial energy.
The modifications which England proposed in 1794 to John
Jay in the northwestern boundary of the United Stales from
the Lake of the Woods to the Mississippi, seemed to him,
doubtless, significant chiefly as a matter of principle and as a
question of the retention or loss of beaver grounds. The historians
hardly notice the proposals. But they involved, in
fact, the ownership of the richest and most extensive deposits
of iron ore in America, the all-important source of a fundamental
industry of the United States, the occasion for the rise
of some of the most influential forces of our time.

What continuity and meaning are furnished by the outcome
in present times of the movements of minor political parties
and reform agitations! To the historian they have often
seemed to be mere curious side eddies, vexatious distractions
to the course of his literary craft as it navigated the stream
of historical tendency. And yet, by the revelation of the present,
what seemed to be side eddies have not seldom proven
to be the concealed entrances to the main current, and the
course which seemed the central one has led to blind channels
and stagnant waters, important in their day, but cut off like oxbow

lakes from the mighty river of historical progress by the
mere permanent and compelling forces of the neglected currents.

We may trace the contest between the capitalist and the
democratic pioneer from the earliest colonial days. It is influential
in colonial parties. It is seen in the vehement protests
of Kentucky frontiersmen in petition after petition to the Congress
of the Confederation against the "nabobs" and men of
wealth who took out titles to the pioneers' farms while they
themselves were too busy defending those farms from the
Indians to perfect their claims. It is seen in the attitude of
the Ohio Valley in its backwoods days before the rise of the
Whig party, as when in 1811 Henry Clay denounced the Bank
of the United States as a corporation which throve on special
privileges—"a special association of favored individuals
taken from the mass of society, and invested with exemptions
and surrounded by immunities and privileges." Benton voiced
the same contest twenty years later when he denounced the
bank as

"And where," he asked, "would all this power and money
center? In the great cities of the Northeast, which have been
for forty years and that by force of federal legislation, the
lion's den of Southern and Western money—that den into
which all the tracks point inward; from which the returning
track of a solitary dollar has never yet been seen." Declaring,
in words that have a very modern sound, that the bank
tended to multiply nabobs and paupers, and that "a great
moneyed power is favorable to great capitalists, for it is the
principle of capital to favor capital," he appealed to the fact
of the country's extent and its sectional divergences against
the nationalizing of capital.

Even more vehement were the words of Jackson in 1837. "It
is now plain," he wrote, "that the war is to be carried on by
the monied aristocracy of the few against the democracy of
numbers; the [prosperous] to make the honest laborers hewers
of wood and drawers of water through the credit and paper
system."

Van Buren's administration is usually passed hastily over
with hardly more than mention of his Independent Treasury
plan, and with particular consideration of the slavery discussion.
But some of the most important movements in American
social and political history began in these years of Jackson
and Van Buren. Read the demands of the obscure labor
papers and the reports of labor's open-air meetings anew, and
you will find in the utterances of so-called labor visionaries
and the Locofoco champions of "equal rights for all and

special privileges for none," like Evans and Jacques, Byrdsall
and Leggett, the finger points to the currents that now make
the main channel of our history; you will find in them some
of the important planks of the platforms of the triumphant
parties of our own day. As Professor Commons has shown
by his papers and the documents which he has published on
labor history, an idealistic but widespread and influential
humanitarian movement, strikingly similar to that of the present,
arose in the years between 1830 and 1850, dealing with
social forces in American life, animated by a desire to apply
the public lands to social amelioration, eager to find new
forms of democratic development. But the flood of the slavery
struggle swept all of these movements into its mighty
inundation for the time. After the war, other influences
delayed the revival of the movement. The railroads opened
the wide prairies after 1850 and made it easy to reach them;
and decade after decade new sections were reduced to the
purposes of civilization and to the advantages of the common
man as well as the promotion of great individual fortunes.
The nation centered its interests in the development of the
West. It is only in our own day that this humanitarian democratic
wave has reached the level of those earlier years. But
in the meantime there are clear evidences of the persistence of
the forces, even though under strange guise. Read the platforms
of the Greenback-Labor, the Granger, and the Populist
parties, and you will find in those platforms, discredited and
reprobated by the major parties of the time, the basic proposals
of the Democratic party after its revolution under the
leadership of Mr. Bryan, and of the Republican party after
its revolution by Mr. Roosevelt. The Insurgent movement
is so clearly related to the areas and elements that gave strength
to this progressive assertion of old democratic ideals with
new weapons, that it must be regarded as the organized refusal
of these persistent tendencies to be checked by the advocates of
more moderate measures.

I have dealt with these fragments of party history, not, of
course, with the purpose of expressing any present judgment
upon them, but to emphasize and give concreteness to the fact
that there is disclosed by present events a new significance to
these contests of radical democracy and conservative interests;
that they are rather a continuing expression of deep-seated
forces than fragmentary and sporadic curios for the historical
museum.

If we should survey the history of our lands from a similar
point of view, considering the relations of legislation and
administration of the public domain to the structure of American
democracy, it would yield a return far beyond that offered
by the formal treatment of the subject in most of our histories.
We should find in the squatter doctrines and practices, the
seizure of the best soils, the taking of public timber on the
theory of a right to it by the labor expended on it, fruitful
material for understanding the atmosphere and ideals under
which the great corporations developed the West. Men like
Senator Benton and Delegate Sibley in successive generations
defended the trespasses of the pioneer and the lumberman
upon the public forest lands, and denounced the paternal government
that "harassed" these men, who were engaged in
what we should call stealing government timber. It is evident
that at some time between the middle of the nineteenth
century and the present time, when we impose jail sentences
upon Congressmen caught in such violations of the land laws,
a change came over the American conscience and the civic
ideals were modified. That our great industrial enterprises
developed in the midst of these changing ideals is important
to recall when we write the history of their activity.

We should find also that we cannot understand the land

question without seeing its relations to the struggle of sections
and classes bidding against each other and finding in the public
domain a most important topic of political bargaining.
We should find, too, that the settlement of unlike geographic
areas in the course of the nation's progress resulted in changes
in the effect of the land laws; that a system intended for the
humid prairies was ill-adjusted to the grazing lands and coal
fields and to the forests in the days of large-scale exploitation
by corporations commanding great capital. Thus changing
geographic factors as well as the changing character of the
forces which occupied the public domain must be considered,
if we would understand the bearing of legislation and policy
in this field.[7] It is fortunate that suggestive studies of democracy
and the land policy have already begun to appear.

The whole subject of American agriculture viewed in relation
to the economic, political, and social life of the nation
has important contributions to make. If, for example, we study
the maps showing the transition of the wheat belt from the
East to the West, as the virgin soils were conquered and made
new bases for destructive competition with the older wheat
States, we shall see how deeply they affected not only land
values, railroad building, the movement of population, and
the supply of cheap food, but also how the regions once
devoted to single cropping of wheat were forced to turn to
varied and intensive agriculture and to diversified industry,
and we shall see also how these transformations affected party
politics and even the ideals of the Americans of the regions
thus changed. We shall find in the over-production of wheat
in the provinces thus rapidly colonized and in the over-production
of silver in the mountain provinces which were contemporaneously
exploited, important explanations of the peculiar

form which American politics took in the period when
Mr. Bryan mastered the Democratic party, just as we shall
find in the opening of the new gold fields in the years immediately
following, and in the passing of the era of almost free
virgin wheat soils, explanations of the more recent period
when high prices are giving new energy and aggressiveness to
the demands of the new American industrial democracy.

Enough has been said, it may be assumed, to make clear
the point which I am trying to elucidate, namely that a comprehension
of the United States of to-day, an understanding
of the rise and progress of the forces which have made it what
it is, demands that we should rework our history from the
new points of view afforded by the present. If this is done, it
will be seen, for example, that the progress of the struggle
between North and South over slavery and the freed negro,
which held the principal place in American interest in the
two decades after 1850, was, after all, only one of the interests
in the time. The pages of the Congressional debates, the contemporary
newspapers, the public documents of those twenty
years, remain a rich mine for those who will seek therein the
sources of movements dominant in the present day.

The final consideration to which I ask your attention in this
discussion of social forces in American life, is with reference
to the mode of investigating them and the bearing of these
investigations upon the relations and the goal of history. It
has become a precedent, fairly well established by the distinguished
scholars who have held the office which I am about to
lay down, to state a position with reference to the relations
of history and its sister-studies, and even to raise the question
of the attitude of the historian toward the laws of thermodynamics
and to seek to find the key of historical development
or of historical degradation. It is not given to all to bend
the bow of Ulysses. I shall attempt a lesser task.

We may take some lessons from the scientist. He has
enriched knowledge especially in recent years by attacking
the no-man's lands left unexplored by the too sharp delimitation
of spheres of activity. These new conquests have been
especially achieved by the combination of old sciences. Physical
chemistry, electro-chemistry, geo-physics, astro-physics,
and a variety of other scientic unions have led to audacious
hypotheses, veritable flashes of vision, which open new regions
of activity for a generation of investigators. Moreover they
have promoted such investigations by furnishing new instruments
of research. Now in some respects there is an analogy
between geology and history. The new geologist aims to
describe the inorganic earth dynamically in terms of natural
law, using chemistry, physics, mathematics, and even botany
and zoölogy so far as they relate to paleontology. But he does
not insist that the relative importance of physical or chemical
factors shall be determined before he applies the methods
and data of these sciences to his problem. Indeed, he has
learned that a geological area is too complex a thing to be
reduced to a single explanation. He has abandoned the single
hypothesis for the multiple hypothesis. He creates a whole
family of possible explanations of a given problem and thus
avoids the warping influence of partiality for a simple theory.

Have we not here an illustration of what is possible and
necessary for the historian? Is it not well, before attempting
to decide whether history requires an economic interpretation,
or a psychological, or any other ultimate interpretation, to
recognize that the factors in human society are varied and
complex; that the political historian handling his subject in
isolation is certain to miss fundamental facts and relations in
his treatment of a given age or nation; that the economic historian
is exposed to the same danger; and so of all of the
other special historians?

Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the
thing exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with
the difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not
planted on the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the
midst and is itself a part of the changing currents, the complex
and interacting influences of the time, deriving its significance
as a fact from its relations to the deeper-seated movements
of the age, movements so gradual that often only the
passing years can reveal the truth about the fact and its right
to a place on the historian's page.

The economic historian is in danger of making his analysis
and his statement of a law on the basis of present conditions
and then passing to history for justificatory appendixes to his
conclusions. An American economist of high rank has recently
expressed his conception of "the full relation of economic
theory, statistics, and history" in these words:

There is much in this statement by which the historian may
profit, but he may doubt also whether the past should serve
merely as the "illustration" by which to confirm the law
deduced from common experience by a priori reasoning tested
by statistics. In fact the pathway of history is strewn with
the wrecks of the "known and acknowledged truths" of economic
law, due not only to defective analysis and imperfect
statistics, but also to the lack of critical historical methods,
of insufficient historical-mindedness on the part of the economist,
to failure to give due attention to the relativity and
transiency of the conditions from which his laws were deduced.

But the point on which I would lay stress is this. The
economist, the political scientist, the psychologist, the sociologist,
the geographer, the student of literature, of art, of religion
—all the allied laborers in the study of society—have
contributions to make to the equipment of the historian. These
contributions are partly of material, partly of tools, partly
of new points of view, new hypotheses, new suggestions of relations,
causes, and emphasis. Each of these special students is
in some danger of bias by his particular point of view, by
his exposure to see simply the thing in which he is primarily
interested, and also by his effort to deduce the universal laws
of his separate science. The historian, on the other hand, is
exposed to the danger of dealing with the complex and interacting
social forces of a period or of a country, from some
single point of view to which his special training or interest
inclines him. If the truth is to be made known, the historian

must so far familiarize himself with the work, and equip himself
with the training of his sister-subjects that he can at least
avail himself of their results and in some reasonable degree
master the essential tools of their trade. And the followers
of the sister-studies must likewise familiarize themselves and
their students with the work and the methods of the historians,
and coöperate in the difficult task.

It is necessary that the American historian shall aim at this
equipment, not so much that he may possess the key to history
or satisfy himself in regard to its ultimate laws. At present
a different duty is before him. He must see in American
society with its vast spaces, its sections equal to European
nations, its geographic influences, its brief period of development,
its variety of nationalities and races, its extraordinary
industrial growth under the conditions of freedom, its institutions,
culture, ideals, social psychology, and even its religions
forming and changing almost under his eyes, one of the
richest fields ever offered for the preliminary recognition and
study of the forces that operate and interplay in the making
of society.