Immersed in Great Affairs: Allan Nevins and the Heroic Age of American History

Chapter 1. Progressive-era Values and Influences: (1890–1917)

C H A P T E R 1 Progressive-era Values and Influences (1890–1917) Born at the end of the nineteenth century, Allan Nevins came to maturity during a period of transition in American history, a time when rugged individualism and the concept of laissez-faire were giving way to a new ideology based on cooperation and social concern. These values found expression in reform legislation and administrations , political realignments, and shifting economic structures and relationships. Nevins championed many of these new developments, but also voiced his concern when they threatened to upset cherished values. He appreciated the Progressive era’s emphasis on organization , professionalism, and technical competence. He valued the advances of science and technology, understood the importance of a diverse society, and accepted economic concentration as a positive development. At the same time, he warned about material comfort without social unity, diversity without common purpose, and economic power without free institutions. One of those institutions was the press, and he stood steadfast against infringement of its independence . He was cosmopolitan and internationalist in his outlook, but valued the commonplace as much as he did the cultural. He admired intellect, but had high regard for character and for the human condition. He looked up to men of action, yet disparaged those figures that scattered their energies and engaged in activities beyond their capabilities. He loved the romantic literature of the Victorian era, but also countenanced the new realism of twentieth-century writers. His appreciation of both forms of literary expression accounted for his efforts to create a bridge between them. In many ways, Nevins was a nineteenth-century man living out his life in the twentieth century. 9 I Nevins’s parents, his community, and the times in which he grew up influenced his character, attitudes, and intellectual interests. He was born on 20 May 1890 in the village of Camp Point, Illinois, the youngest of five children of Emma Stahl and Joseph Nevins, a hardworking family of Scotch farmers. As Nevins recalled in later life, his family was short of stature and of moderate weight, and, like most Scots, were industrious and busy people who obeyed the law and believed in “doing right to everybody.”1 Nevins’s heritage bore the imprint of mid- to late-nineteenthcentury America and the inexorable westward migration of people in search of new land and economic opportunities. That search informed the history of the Nevinses and the Stahls. Joseph Nevins’s father, a Scottish linen factor, emigrated to America in the 1840s; he settled first in the coal mining area around Allentown, Pennsylvania , but relocated a few years later to Adams County, Illinois, in the westernmost part of the state, where he took up farming. Emma Stahl’s father was a Pennsylvania German cabinetmaker who, because of ill health, sought the “outdoor life of the Illinois farmlands.” The citizens of Adams County were hardworking, thrifty people, fiercely individualistic and materialistic. According to Nevins, “The frontiersman and his farmer sons saw a bright future civilization for which they were laying the foundation. But it was a competitive, not a cooperative, civilization.”2 The townsfolk were made up mostly of Yankees, “genteel” Southerners, and immigrants from Germany and England, who found in the rich soil and excellent drainage of rural Illinois the opportunity for bountiful harvests of corn and grain. There were no Negroes there, a circumstance that, as Nevins recalled in later life, caused him to feel somewhat hampered in understanding black character and culture.3 Camp Point provided a pleasant and fairly progressive setting for raising a child during the 1890s. The citizens valued good morals and education. Large shade trees bordered well-maintained sidewalks and streets, lending an aspect of innocence to a town that shunned saloons and prohibited the sale of liquor, except by prescription for medicinal purposes. The town did not countenance rowdyism, and the police reported few such incidents. The citizens prized education and helped support one of the best high schools in the county, a place where teaching took place both in the “higher and common branches of learning.”4 They also valued free discussion. Adams County had earned a reputation for its liberal attitudes and charitable activities and for its willingness to permit “untrammeled discus10 Immersed in Great Affairs sion” about slavery and states rights in the period leading up to the Civil War.5 The county seat, Quincy, boasted one of the...