CHAPTER XVI: ENFORCING THE NEW REPUBLIC
Industrial Advancement and Who Benefitted
Industrial Advancement and Who Benefitted
While the use of state power and military forces was sometimes the end that the emergent industrialist class used to enforce their new republic, the simplest and most effective means of enforcing this new post-war construction was the emerging network of economic logistics. This is what many people sometimes forget—the great railroads, as I’ve discussed, along with the roads, mining towns, and assortment of economic arrangements propping up across the country, were all intimately interlinked not for the benefits of the commoner but the Boston Brahmin and their New York financiers. The same was true in the Old South with ports linked to the cotton plantations and the New England textile mills in an intricate connective polity of its own right.
Industrial, technological, and general scientific advancements were—on the whole—mostly to the benefit of the elite over the commoner. Even the victory of Edison over Tesla was motivated by the capitalist elite seeking the cheaper and “more affordable” science over the more complex and expansive science.
Marxist historian and literary critic Fredric Jameson said that, “it is first of all a commonplace in Marxist historiography that the initial critiques of the nascent world of capitalism emerge on the Right.”[1] Indeed, many luminaries who are now regarded as quintessential conservative philosophers: From Aristotle’s critique of expansive commercialism in Politics, to Giambattista Vico, Justus Möser, Edmund Burke, to Klemens von Metternich, the normative position of conservative intellectuals on capitalism has been decidedly negative. G.K. Chesterton, above all, may have very well sounded like a Marxist in analyzing the destructive filial consequences of industrial capitalism. The difference, though, is that the determinism of Marx’s dialectical historicism mandates the destruction of the family; for even the family is a source of oppression and control in orthodox Marxist thought. The conservative critics of capitalism lamented the decline of the countryside, the forest, the family, and the possibility of what Johann Fichte called “Dwelling.”
But one of the core outgrowths of capitalism and industrialism was science. Science is not the axiom of modernity, as certain pedants and propagandists will articulate. Science is contingent to capitalism and industrialism. As Immanuel Wallerstein said, “science was the code word for achieving progress.”[2] Science was the instrument of control and progress in the new capitalist world. And so it remains today.
A new world record in train speed! America’s ascendency to scientific and technological powerhouse begins.
Whigs are prone, due to their materialism, to see the industrial revolution as extensively beneficially to the common man. This is because Whig anthropology sees man as a body-being consumer, the homo economicus, the “rational consumer.” Modern luminaries of this same depreciated and impoverished outlook on man and life, continue to peddle the same argument. Since the common man increased in material possession he was, ipso facto, better off. No concern is given to man’s spiritual health, community vitality, and filial integrity. No concern is given to man’s relationship with others. No concern is given to the possibility of man being reduced to a commodified cog in the larger factory of the world and civilization.
Part of Chesterton’s critique of industrial capitalism, and part of the broader Catholic reaction against industrial capitalism that culminated in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, was how industrial capitalism, in breaking down families, breaks down the possibility of finding the common good in society. Since society is built on the family, family is the cornerstone and wellspring for the common good to emerge. Industrial capitalism, as Chesterton wrote, rips families apart as men abandon their homesteads to work in crowded cities and factories for 16 to 18 hours a day. Returning home he eats and rests. Man is completely displaced from his family.
Pope Leo XIII issued the papal bull Rerum Novarum which was harshly critical of the prevailing materialist doctrines of the late 19th century including capitalism and socialism. The Catholic Church became the strongest and most vocal critic of materialist ideologies of progress and revolution during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This cemented the institutional church's reputation for conservative and reactionary sentiment and sympathies.
The industrial revolution that swept across the United States during the 1880s-1890s was the worst fear of the earlier generation of transcendentalists and dark romantics (in literature). The transcendentalists were committed to the world of relationships, primarily man’s relationship with nature. The dark romantics shared much the same outlook; the difference being the break between optimism and pessimism between the two groups. The transcendentalists, like Emerson and Thoreau, were generally optimistic and positive about man’s ability to overcome industrialism and commodification. The dark romantics, like Melville and Poe, were much more starkly conservative in their pessimism.
The dark romantics then, were much like the European romantics. Prophets of sacramentality. Defenders of nature, spirit, and the erotic. Theirs, however, was generally depressive where the European romantics were combative.
With the rise of factories and railroads, the American economy was doing exceptional. The United States rose to being the second most powerful industrial nation in the world by 1891, just behind the United Kingdom and just ahead of an equally rapidly industrializing Germany.[3] Capitalist expansion could be found from Boston to San Francisco. The linking of the Transcontinental Railroad also ensured the connectivity of the elites from coast to coast.
The plight of workers, however, was another matter. The Catholic Church took an active role in the labor movements. As such, Protestant capitalists saw the labor movement as a papal front and did everything in their effort to crush it. But exhaustive working hours for limited pay could not last. I will, in time, explain and examine how this came about; but it suffices to say for now that what was regarded as a “triumph for labor” was really a triumph for the capitalist and technocratic order in granting modest concessions to the working-class thus keeping them passive and servile.
Furthermore, the ramification of industrialism was scientism. The United States started to become the scientific center of the world. In this respect the United States was competing with Germany in the industrial-scientific race. And anyone who has read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World knows who the main beneficiary of the techno-scientific creed is.
[1] Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression, p. 18.
[2] Immanuel Wallerstein, World System Analysis, p. 74.
[3] In-game reality.
