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6 Affirming America IN THE TRANSATLANTIC dialogue between the kindred polities that Andrew Carnegie’s book evoked, how would his American reviewers respond to what he had written about their society? Positively, one would imagine, and for the larger part so they did. But the conversation was more with themselves than with their British compeers. The British had to defend themselves against Carnegie’s charges. The Americans were gratified that one of their greatest industrialists, a man who knew both worlds intimately , had written a paean to America. In Britain, Triumphant Democracy was part of an argument in comparative political science. In the United States, it was an internal debate over the validity of America as a polity. The steelmaster’s American correspondents were particularly positive. “You have done a great service to this country,” said George B. Lathrop, a New York City author and editor. “In these days of carping criticism, Triumphant Democracy is much needed,” wrote William T. Hornaday, a notable scientist at the Smithsonian. It gives “a great impulse to the American idea,” said a New York friend, Jeanie Croly. The book will “teach our people lessons of loyalty and inspire more respect and love for our institutions ,” noted Stephen B. Elkins, a New York financier. “You teach both sides of the Atlantic that the U. S. A. is the only country based on the people’s will, which is the only foundation for a state,” wrote John Forrest Dillon, a prominent jurist. “You have rendered a great service to the English -speaking people,” wrote William B. McKinley, then a congressman from Ohio; and, added Henry George, have contributed much to “knitting 95 the English speaking race.” Their comments touched every aspect of the importance of Triumphant Democracy. The book had been widely distributed and it might have been expected that his correspondents would sound their praises. True enough, not all were positive, and not all the newspaper reviewers refrained from entering their misgivings. But, in the main, they sounded a chorus of approval. To say that raises in turn a series of questions . Who were they? Just what did they say? And what did their evaluation of Carnegie’s great book signify? “You give us a tonic breeze,” said T. J. Coffey, a Washington-based diplomat and lawyer, speaking for the editorial class that was reading Carnegie. In that spring of 1886, why were they so grateful for that tonic breeze? The answer is that everywhere they looked in that great American continental expanse they found little that was comforting. What their eyes could not avoid was the new type of conflict between the laboring classes and their employers. Strikes were a bitter struggle, indeed a war, between capital and labor. How could one pass over the violent events of 1877, when federal troops were called out to keep order in the Great Railway Strike? They shuddered at the great strikes of 1885 and 1886: those on the Union Pacific, at the McCormick Harvester Works, and the shocking riots and murders in Chicago’s Haymarket Square in early May 1886, at the very time that Triumphant Democracy was being reviewed. But the strife between capital and labor was part of a larger unsettlement. Many of the strikers came with European ideas and accents. They often clustered within the cities, seeming to be alien groups with threatening cultures. Though not clearly discernible at that time, these were the years of “the new immigration,” when the ethnicity, the languages, the religion, indeed the character and civism of America seemed in peril. The gaps between the rich and the poor seemed wider than ever, and nothing made them more discernible than the rapid concentration of Americans in the growing urban centers. Many prominent writers of the day sounded the tolling of the bells, some of them fearful that the victory they had won to suppress rebellion and keep their union alive was now being overturned.1 In those early months of 1886, how did the American scene appear to the probing eyes of the editors and reviewers? The structure of American life seemed to reduce itself to a litany of problems.2 The currents were real and tangible, their impact was often dire. Two decades after the bloodiest war in American history, what kind of a United States did men who were looking actually see? The two largest political parties were at war with each other. The South had in effect seceded again, setting up a solid bloc of...

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