Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [90]
Writing to Godkin about the Venezuela Message, Norton thought it made “a miserable end for this century” and had done much to increase the “worst spirit in our democracy,… a barbaric spirit of arrogance and unreasonable self-assertion.” What disturbed him more bitterly was the “deeper consideration” that the rise of democracy was not proving, after all, “a safeguard of peace and civilization,” because it brought with it “the rise of the uncivilized whom no school education can suffice to provide with intelligence and reason.” It might have been Lord Salisbury speaking. Norton felt the bitterness of a man who discovers his beloved to be not as beautiful—nor as pure—as he had believed. “I fear that America,” he wrote to an English friend, “is beginning a long course of error and wrong and is likely to become more and more a power for disturbance and barbarism.… It looks as if the world were entering on a new stage of experience in which there must be a new discipline of suffering to fit men for the new conditions.”
Yet his was not the desiccated and disappointed pessimism of Henry Adams, who drifted in and out of Washington and back and forth between Europe and America croaking his endless complaints like a wizened black crow; finding the century “rotten and bankrupt,” society sunk in vulgarity, commonness, imbecility and moral atrophy, himself on the verge of “mental extinction” and “dying of ennui”; finding America unbearable and leaving for Europe, finding Europe insufferable and returning to America, finding “decline is everywhere” and everywhere “the dead water of the fin de siècle … where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content.” The Venezuelan crisis merely confirmed him in the belief that “society today is more rotten than at any time within my personal knowledge. The whole thing is one vast structure of debt and fraud.” This was less a judgment on the current mood than a reflection of the rude shaking his nerves had suffered in the financial panic of 1893. Adams, like most people, saw society in his own image and ascribed his own impotence and paralysis to society at large. “Though rotten with decadence,” he said of himself in 1895, “I have not enough vitality left to be sensual.” The rotten old century, however, was bursting with vitality and he need only have looked at intimates of his own circle in the persons of Lodge and Roosevelt to have found the “ferocious optimism” that Godkin noted all around.
Although a decade older than Adams, Norton would allow himself occasional moments of optimism when he suspected that the loss of the values he loved might be the cost of a compensating gain in human welfare. “There are far more human beings materially well off today than ever before in the history of the world,” he wrote in 1896, and he could not resist the thought, “How interesting our times have been and still are!”
The last few years had indeed been full of incident. Cleveland, for all his good will, was beset by hard times. Industrial unrest gripped the nation. Depression followed the panic of 1893. In 1894 Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marched on Washington, and the bloody Pullman strike angered and frightened both sides in the deepening warfare of labour and capital. In the Congressional elections that November, the Republicans regained the House with a huge majority of 140 (244–104), and when in December, 1895, the new Fifty-fourth Congress assembled, the familiar great black figure with the