Scapegoat

One hundred years ago, when England was in the flood-tide of its industrial revolution, John Stuart Mill was able to put his finger unerringly on the main reason for the dull, grey mediocrity that was descending upon his country: it was that the spokesmen for the middle classes had become the arbiters of taste, manners, action, and thought. The tyranny of opinion, that is, middle-class opinion, was making “eccentricity a reproach”; it had to be smashed so that uncommon men might once more arise. And Mill went on to say: “Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

Beginning some sixty years ago in America, a similar assault, and from the same quarter, began to take place against a group of uncommon men who had been largely responsible for the rapid industrialization and the rising standards of living of the United States; it was the middle-class intellectuals who singled out the “captains of industry” (not until 1935 did Mr. Matthew Josephson coin the rubric “robber barons”) as the chief agents in the debasement of America. They were predators; they exploited workers and farmers and wasted the land’s natural resources; they corrupted its politics, debauched its taste, and destroyed its civility and moral standards.

LH

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Louis M. Hacker

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

One hundred years ago, when England was in the flood-tide of its industrial revolution, John Stuart Mill was able to put his finger unerringly on the main reason for the dull, grey mediocrity that was descending upon his country: it was that the spokesmen for the middle classes had become the arbiters of taste, manners, action, and thought. The tyranny of opinion, that is, middle-class opinion, was making “eccentricity a reproach”; it had to be smashed so that uncommon men might once more arise. And Mill went on to say: “Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time.”

Beginning some sixty years ago in America, a similar assault, and from the same quarter, began to take place against a group of uncommon men who had been largely responsible for the rapid industrialization and the rising standards of living of the United States; it was the middle-class intellectuals who singled out the “captains of industry” (not until 1935 did Mr. Matthew Josephson coin the rubric “robber barons”) as the chief agents in the debasement of America. They were predators; they exploited workers and farmers and wasted the land’s natural resources; they corrupted its politics, debauched its taste, and destroyed its civility and moral standards.