518 Chapter 19 Intellectual and Cultural Trends in the Late Nineteenth Century
Holmes went on to a long and brilliant judicial
career, during which he repeatedly stressed the right
of the people, through their elected representatives,
to deal with contemporary problems in any reason-
able way, unfettered by outmoded conceptions of the
proper limits of government authority. Like the soci-
eties they regulated, laws should evolve as times and
conditions changed, he said.
This way of reasoning caused no sudden reversal
of judicial practice. Holmes’s most notable opinions
as a judge tended to be dissents. But his philosophy
reflected the advanced thinking of the late nineteenth
century, and his influence grew with every decade of
the twentieth.
The new approach to knowledge did not always
advance the cause of liberal reform. Historians in the
graduate schools became intensely interested in study-
ing the origins and evolution of political institutions.
They concluded, after much “scientific” study of old
charters and law codes, that the roots of democracy
were to be found in the customs of the ancient tribes
of northern Europe. This theory of the “Teutonic ori-
gins” of democracy, which has since been thoroughly
discredited, fitted well with the prejudices of people
of British stock, and it provided ammunition for those
who favored restricting immigration and for those
who argued that blacks were inferior beings.
Out of this work, however, came an essentially
democratic concept, the frontier thesis of Frederick
Jackson Turner, still another scholar trained at Johns
Hopkins. Turner’s essay “The Significance of the
Frontier in American History” (1893) argued that
the frontier experience, through which every section
of the country had passed, had affected the thinking
of the people and the shape of American institutions.
The isolation of the frontier and the need during
each successive westward advance to create civiliza-
tion anew, Turner wrote, account for the individual-
ism of Americans and the democratic character of
their society. Nearly everything unique in our cul-
ture could be traced to the existence of the frontier,
he claimed.
Turner, and still more his many disciples, made
too much of his basic insights. Life on the frontier
was not as democratic as Turner believed, and it cer-
tainly does not “explain” American development as
completely as he said it did. Nevertheless, his work
showed how important it was to investigate the evo-
lution of institutions, and it encouraged historians to
study social and economic, as well as purely political,
subjects. If the claims of the new historians to objec-
tivity and definitiveness were absurdly overstated,
their emphasis on thoroughness, exactitude, and
impartiality did much to raise standards in the pro-
fession. Perhaps the finest product of the new scien-
tific school, a happy combination of meticulous
scholarship and literary artistry, was Henry Adams’s
nine-volumeHistory of the United States During the
Administrations of Jefferson and Madison.
Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of
the Frontier in American History (1893)atwww.myhistorylab.comRealism in Literature
When what Mark Twain called the Gilded Age began,
American literature was dominated by the romantic
mood. All the important writers of the 1840s and
1850s, except Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Poe, were
still living. Longfellow stood at the height of his fame,
and the lachrymose Susan Warner—“tears on almost
every page”—continued to turn out stories in the style
of her popular The Wide, Wide World.Romanticism,
however, had lost its creative force; much of the popu-
lar writing in the decade after 1865 was sentimental
trash pandering to the preconceptions of middle-class
readers. Magazines like the Atlantic Monthlyover-
flowed with stories about fair ladies worshiped from
afar by stainless heroes, women coping selflessly with
drunken husbands, and poor but honest youths rising
through various combinations of virtue and diligence
to positions of wealth and influence. Most writers of
fiction tended to ignore the eternal conflicts inherent
in human nature and the social problems of the age;
polite entertainment and pious moralizing appeared to
be their only objectives.
The patent unreality, even dishonesty, of con-
temporary fiction eventually caused a reaction. The
most important forces giving rise to the Age of
Realism were those that were transforming every
other aspect of American life: industrialism, with its
associated complexities and social problems; the the-
ory of evolution, which made people more aware of
the force of the environment and the basic conflicts
of existence; the new science, which taught dispas-
sionate, empirical observation. Novelists undertook
the examination of social problems such as slum life,
the conflict between capital and labor, and political
corruption. They created multidimensional charac-
ters, depicted persons of every social class, used
dialect and slang to capture the flavor of particular
types, and fashioned painstaking descriptions of the
surroundings into which they placed their subjects.
The romantic novel did not disappear. General Lew
Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) and Frances Hodgson
Burnett’sLittle Lord Fauntleroy(1886) were best-
sellers. But by 1880 realism was the point of view of
the finest literary talents in the country.
Mark Twain, Incident in the Philippines
(1924)atwww.myhistorylab.com
Mark Twain, To the Person Sitting in
Darkness (1901)atwww.myhistorylab.comReadtheDocumentReadtheDocumentReadtheDocument