变化中的时间观念(英文版)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)


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变化中的时间观念(英文版)

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“新闻学与传播学经典丛书·英文原版系列”,选取了在新闻学与传播学历史上具有里程碑意义的大师经典名作,如传播学“四大奠基人”哈罗德·拉斯韦尔、保罗·拉扎斯菲尔德等,及加布里埃尔·塔尔德、罗伯特·帕克、哈罗德·伊尼斯、马歇尔·麦克卢汉、库尔特·卢因、卡尔·霍夫兰等这些学界耳熟能详的名家佳作。这些是传播学与新闻学的奠基之作,也是现代新闻学与传播学发展的基础。许多名作都多次再版,影响深远,历久不衰,成为新闻学与传播学的经典。此套丛书采用英文原版出版,希望读者能读到原汁原味的著作。

随着中国高等教育的教学改革,广大师生已不满足于仅仅阅读国外图书的翻译版,他们迫切希望能读到原版图书,希望能采用国外英文原版图书进行教学,从而保证所讲授的知识体系的完整性、系统性、科学性和文字描绘的准确性。此套丛书的出版便是满足了这种需求,同时可使学生在专业技术方面尽快掌握本学科相应的外语词汇,并了解先进国家的学术发展方向。

本系列在引进英文原版图书的同时,将目录译为中文,作为对原版的一种导读,供读者阅读时参考。

从事经典著作的出版,需要出版人付出不懈的努力,好在有本丛书的主编展江教授和何道宽教授的大力扶持,我们得以在学术出版的道路上走的更远。我们自知本套丛书也许会有很多缺陷,虚心接受读者提出的批评和建议。中国传媒大学出版社

Introduction to this Edition

James W.Carey

The“winner”of the Cold War will inevitably face the imperial problem of using power in global terms but from one particular context of authority,so preponderant and established and unchallenged that its world rule would almost certainly violate basic standards of justice.——Reinhold Niebuhr,The Irony of American History(1952)

In the early summer of 1952 Harold Innis left the hospital where he was being treated for terminal cancer.In the last months of his life,while at home,he edited the page proofs for Changing Concepts of Time,the final manuscript he would deliver to the printer.In early fall,the disease broke through his remaining defenses and he died on November 8,1952.

His illness and death ended four years of intense and productive scholarship undertaken in extreme circumstances.Between 1948 and 1952,in an astonishing burst of creative energy,he wrote virtually all the work for which we today celebrate him as the major theorist and historian of communications in North America.

The books that had brought him fame as an economic historian,geographer,and theorist-The Fur Trade in Canada,The History of the Canadian Pacific Railroad,The Cod Fisheries-are little read today except by biographers and economic specialists and are largely out of print.

However,his works on communications-Empire and Communications,The Bias of Communications,The Press:A Neglected Factor in the Economic History of the Twentieth Century,and now Changing Concepts-are still available and widely influential today.

Unlike his earlier books on economics,the volumes on communications were exclusively comprised of essays,loosely mortised together,that had originally been delivered as lectures.

In the spring of 1948 alone he delivered the Beit Lectures at All Souls College,Oxford,which became Empire and Communications,and,on the same trip to Great Britain,the final two essays of this book were delivered as the Stamp Lecture at the University of London and the Cust Lecture at the University of Nottingham.

The essay form reflected not only the tentativeness of his thinking but also the urgency of his task to,as an even more famous political economist put it,not only analyze the world but change it.He wryly commented that“I once had to choose between going into university work or politics and I decided to go into politics”(Watson,1977,p.45).

The cryptic nature,intensity,and energy of his communications essays reflect not only his struggle against physical decline but also the extraordinary burdens he had assumed.While head of the Department of Political Economy at the University of Toronto(a post he had held since 1937),he was also concurrently dean of the Graduate School.While serving a term as president of the Royal Society of Canada,he simultaneously traveled the country and conducted hearings for the Royal Commission on Transportation,of which he was a member.

Innis was one of those thinkers(Marx was another)whose work is regularly divided into early and late phases,separated by a“gap”

marking an abrupt change of subject matter and philosophical outlook.

The suddenness with which the work on communications appeared,and the contrast between the bold theorizing of the later work and the precise if sometimes numbing detail of his studies in economics,reinforces the belief in a breach between the“young”Innis and the mature scholar.I do not believe such a separation exists;there is no radical disjunction between the early and the late Innis.

His work on communications naturally grows out of and elaborates upon his early studies of the economic and political formation of Canada,as the essays in this volume attest.His subject was always empire,globalization,international trade,

“the longue durée of events and epoch-making forces that transformed economies,states and civilizations”(Drache,1995,p.xix).Innis was an economist of trade rather than production,of routes,movements,flows,and circulations rather than of factories and modes of production.

The international economy of trade was powered,in his view,by progressively improving means of transportation an communications,parallel interacting systems of economic and social expansion and consolidation.

this was as true of the expansion of the European trading system into North America in the seventeenth century,and the growth of imperialism in Africa and Asia in the nineteenth,as it is today in the age of jet aircraft and the Internet.

The contradictory and unintended consequences of technology,when linked to the equally contradictory but thoroughly human desires for economic,political,and cultural domination,provided him with a lifelong subject matter.

In the years after World War Ⅱ,the international system-which had lain dormant in the carnage of two world wars-reawakened in a radically altered technological and political setting.

the year bridging 1948 and 1949 was pivotal both in politics and in Innis’s studies,and that is where this particular story begins.

On February 8,1949,an innocently named“Values Discussion Group”was convened at the University of Toronto.It was chaired by economist Thomas Easterbrook and included as members not only Harold Innis but also an instructor of literature from St.Michael’s College,Marshall McLuhan,who had joined the faculty three years earlier.

they met weekly during the semester with each member of the group in turn presenting a paper and leading the discussion.

Such discussion groups,a hardy perennial of the academic garden,flowered across the continent at this moment.However named,they shared a common purpose:to deal with the widely perceived“crisis of civilization”of the postwar period.

“Crisis”is one of the most widely and idly used terms of the civic vocabulary,and Innis warned against it:“It will not do to join the great chorus of those who create a crisis by saying there is a crisis.”

But the barbarism of the twentieth century,which was fully revealed only when the war ended,and the drift from alliance to cold war that threatened the peace seemed to warrant the word crisis.

All that remains in the archives of the University of Toronto are the minutes of the meetings of the“Values Discussion Group.”Judging from them,most of the gatherings were pretty dreary,focusing on the role of values in scientific research:the so-called fact-value dichotomy.

Marshall McLuhan made the fifth presentation to the group,and that too was pretty tame-a plea for art as against science-particularly considering the intellectual pyrotechnics he set off two decades later.McLuhan was still in his“Mechanical Bride”phase lamenting the decline of literature in an age of mass culture.He was then in the grip of the American cohort of“New Critics,”particularly those like Allan Tate and J.C.Ramson,who recruited him into their rearguard campaign against,in Tate’s phrase,the“all destroying abstraction of [industrial]America.”

McLuhan looked to the American South as an outlet for his preindustrial yearnings.

the South stood as a living,thriving monument of the Pastoral Ideal-if not earthen cottages,clotted cream,and the God-fearing peasant of English romantic poetry-then at least a brackish sanctuary from capitalism and its individualism.

the region nurtured a distinct cluster of values that McLuhan,like others,called the“Southern Quality”:an aristocratic humanism,an agrarian economy,and worship of the cyclical thythms of the land.

the South was heir to an alternative cultural tradition that“took its stand” against the spiritless rationalism of the North.

the arts-those McLuhan admired,at least-were a storehouse of values.

He lionized a period when the arts were not separated from life as they had become in the modern world.He elevated Art and the Artist,now capitalized into cultural exemplars,to the role of explorer and innovator,restless seekers of new continents of meaning who could not tolerace the banal,ordinary,standardized,repetitive,and routine-the archetypal features of industrial civilization.

When Harold Innis rose to speak at the eighth and last meeting of the group,the trivial and romantic aura that had dominated earlier sessions evaporated.One cannot help but infer from the notes that he believed a genuine crisis was in tow,and its nature was not to be found in technical philosophy or romantic poetry.

the crisis was one of politics,economics,and communications.

As World War Ⅱ came to an end,two very large problems loomed on the horizon.

the first was the fear that both national and international economies would slip back into the economic nightmare of the 1930s and replay the hostilities that had recently ended.

Millions of veterans in all the warring powers had to be absorbed into the civilian economy and given productive work.Unemployed veterans wandering the streets were a recipe for civic disaster.

What would happen as defense spending slowed and factory jobs disappeared?

Would consumer demand be strong enough to offset the drop in military production?Would it be possible to govern such societies?And if the route of creating a consumer society,the one eventually followed,were taken,what would happen to the political culture of the 1930s in which citizens organized to protect both the individual and social interest through boycotts,publicity campaigns to oppose child labor,demands for pure food and drug laws,and support for the rights of workers to join unions? Would passive consumers replace active citizens as the necessary price of economic recovery?

The second problem was the outbreak of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race.Innis had traveled through the Soviet Union at the end of the war and had a premonition of the conflict that was to follow as two great empires-Soviet and American-emerged to organize the political world.

the phrase“Cold War”was coined in 1948 by Bernard Baruch and in July,as Innis edited Changing Concepts,the Berlin airlift,with all its associated dangers,began.Canada in particular was in a difficult situation.

It had long been a colonial outpost dominated by Great Britain from which it had inherited its basic institutions and culture.Now Canada was trapped between two modern empires,one of which was on its doorstep.How was Canada to preserve its political and cultural independence and remain true to its British origins? How could it remain politically erect,part of a third bloc,given the pressure,influence,and proximity of the United States? What constructive role could Canada play in the violent and unstable world that loomed ahead?

Moreover,technological innovation,held back and redirected to the war effort for most of the decade,was reemerging as the engine of economic recovery and military competition.By 1948,television had started its relentless colonization of politics and culture as it spread from domestic capitals in both the United States and Canada into the hinterland.In the same year,Norbert Weiner’s(1948)landmark book Cybernetics: Or,Control and Communication in Animals and Machines,which summarized decades of research on self-organizing.systems,argued that electronic servomechanisms were the technological twins of television and the instrument for the automation of work and knowledge.

Weiner suggested that the purpose of communication was to control the environment,but in order to communicate effectively it was essential to consider feedback as the mechanism governing the sending of messages.

to govern,whatever the object-animal,human,or natural processes-requires one to consider the audience(or the receiver or destination in cybernetic terms)in order to alter the message relative to the feedback.But was cybernetic governance,understood as a form of control rather than a mode of participation,in opposition to democratic politics? What were the social consequences of conceiving communication as a control mechanism within a feedback loop? Weiner’s question,posed later,was one Innis posed in a different vocabulary:What,in the age of communication and control,are the“human uses of human,beings”?

Innis began by arguing that increased savagery followed developments in communications and transportation.New techniques upset old values before standards could be developed to control the technology.

the development of printing,with its emphasis on nationalism and the vernacular,had set loose wars of national liberation that overthrew the Holy Roman Empire and gave rise to the modern international system.Similarly,the emergence of the telegraph and telephone,wedded to high-speed oceangoing.navigation,initiated the imperial competition among the European states,climaxing in World War I.Modern warfare illustrated that the truism held for electronics,radio,and aviation as well.

Innis is among the earliest and most trenchant theorists of globalization in both its economic and commnications dimensions.His globe was a more limited one than ours,confined in his major work to the European Atlantic corridors to the New World,but it was the global system of communication and culture,always in relation to Canada,that was his central concern.His early work in economics concerned the creation of North America-the actual shaping of the land and the plantation of foreign cultures-as an outpost of European empires:New France,New England,New Amsterdam,and Nuevo Espanola.

While Europeans came to North America for many reasons-in search of religious freedom,to found new communities-the overwhelming impulse was the exploitation of the commodities of the region:cotton,tobacco,cod,fur,and gold.

to affect this exploitation Europe needed both a reliable commercial communications system and an actual cultural plantation.Both were made possible by the variable capacities of oceangoing navigation and literacy:the ability to move through the“cultureless”void of the ocean without the contaminating effects of human contact and to connect and coordinate imperial outposts via news,newsletters,and the printing press.For the first time in history,the Atlantic shipping lanes carried the furniture of entire cultures in one direction,and,in the other,the natural products of North America transformed into commodities by the demand of nascent capitalist markets.

This first phase of globalization ended in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when Europe outran its lines of communications and was unable to maintain,in his phrase,a monopoly of knowledge and force.Europe’s capacity to dominate space through communication,markets,law,and force was eroded at its most distant margins where alternative cultures,cultures of Creole nationalism,grew up.In the Americas,Europeans were transformed;they found a new identity and,in the practical tasks of adapting to a new environment,created forms of knowledge and self-understanding-a new culture-radically different from the one carried on the voyages of exploration and settlement.Creole nationalism grew in North America along the geographic fault lines implanted by the imperial powers:at the margins of such powers(along the St.Lawrence River,for example)or along lines carved for the administrative convenience of Europe such as in Spanish America.

Innis did not have the contempt for empire typical of today,when even imperial peoples protest their innocence.Empires could be good or bad,republican or authoritarian,benign or destructive,progressive or reactionary.

to inveigh against empire was to tilt against a windmill,for empire is a persistent form of social organization,one practically as old as our knowledge of human history.

the intellectual problem was one of understanding the conditions under which empires were created and dissolved and the standards by which to judge their effectiveness and civilizing potential.

After the first phase of globalization,European empires were redirected toward other continents via newer and more rapid forms of travel and communication-steam and electricity.At the same time,new empires grew in the Americas as nations pursued their own manifest destiny,seeking to expand over neighboring landmasses,in some cases stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific.Prior to World War I there were two kinds of empires:landed empires,products of centuries long expansion over contiguous territories that the United States and Canada imitated in quite different ways;and overseas colonial realms.“Among the first group-Russia,Austria-Hungary,the Ottoman domain,China-the states were empires and were vulnerable to new forces of national self-determination.

Members of the second.group-the British,French,Dutch,Spanish and Portuguese...-had empires.

When the internal crises of the first group combined with the interlocking rivalries of the second,the result was the First World War”(Maier,2002,p.29).

the history of the twentieth century can be viewed as one interlinked history of imperialism-“from the domination and then the destructive rivalries of the Europeans,to the Soviet and American spheres of influence that emerged from the Second World War and finally to the ascendancy of the United States as the only remaining superpower”(Maier,2002,p.29).

Empire building,whether by landed expansion or in overseas colonial realms,was the dubious achievement of the nineteenth century.But that phase of globalization ended when the guns of August sounded in 1914.

the years from 1914 to 1948 marked an interregnum in the international system-marked by a severe and nearly universal economic depression and two great wars that ended in a Cold War and nuclear standoff.States were absorbed in warfare at home,and sometimes in the colonies(the first shot of World War Ⅰ actually came off the coast of Australia),and with it all the other hallmarks of international movement-immigration,capital flows,and trade-declined.International trade and capital flows would remain below 1913 levels until the mid-1970s.

Immigration measured as a proportion of world population has never fully recovered.

Innis’s complex histories of trade,commodities,technology,and communications largely examined the first two phases of globalization:(1)the colonial settlement and expansion of North America and(2)the nineteenthcentury imperial competition to control distant territories.In 1948,the long parenthesis that had enclosed the period from the opening of World War Ⅰ to the closing of World War Ⅱ was about to be breached.How was it to be breached? Two possibilities existed:a global conflict and struggle for power between the East and West,the Soviet Union and the United States,or the replacement of rivalries,old and new,by institutions of collective security and cooperation.

To appraise these questions he needed,in addition to the bag of concepts acquired in economics-concepts such as monopoly,equilibrium,unused capacity,liquidity preference,and market structure-two things:a way to apply these concepts more systematically to the phenomena of communications and,even more desperately,a moral and ethical counterbalance to the bias of modern civilization.

It is an autism of Western scholars,as natural as a plant turning toward the light,that in moments of crisis one turns to the foundation of Western civilization,to Greek mythology and philosophy,as a source of renewal.So,Innis turned to the field of classical studies in“which he mispronounced the names of even the most common authorities”(Watson,1977,p.45).He was aided by the fact that the University of Toronto had a splendid Department of Classics and within the department a great student of Greek thought,Eric Havelock.

Havelock and Innis worked independently and only discovered one another four years after Havelock left Toronto for Harvard.Havelock’s book,Prometheus Bound:The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man(1950)is,as Innis acknowledges in his preface,the persistent background that controls Changing Concepts of Time.Both Innis and Havelock were puzzling through the relation between intelligence and power.Havelock interpreted the Prometheus myth as a drama symbolizing the conflict between the shortrange in telligence of the political class in pursuit of power,as representect by Zeus,and the long-range intelligence of the intellectual class in pursuit of understanding as represented by Prometheus the Forethinker.Havelock applied the myth to the events of World War Ⅰ and its aftermath.Both Innis and Havelock believed that both forms of intelligence were necessary in human affairs,for the short-run intelligence of power represents the problems of space and control while the long-range intelligence of science represents time and the spirit of conversation,dialectic,and compromise.During World Wars Ⅰ and Ⅱ,intelligence deserted its proper role and embraced and served power in what Julien Benda had earlier called“The Great Betrayal.”

As Havelock comments:

The first struggle of the twentieth century,between 1914 and 1918...became a war of factories,cities and total manpower.It was fought with an abandonment of political compromise,by the elimination of all avenues of agreement,by the refusal to consider truce or armistice.

the objectives became unlimited,the peace...was framed to express a complex of hates and fears and revenges,in which scientific calculation...had no part [and] the agreements were little founded in history,in sociology,in economics,or even in physics and chemistry.(Havelock,1950,p.26)

In other words,those in political power exercised a monopoly of knowledge over the public domain.

they were exclusively present-minded,seeking the satisfaction of their own interests,driven by shortsighted hatred and desires for revenge that they systematically implanted and exploited in public discourse.

Power was indifferent to the long run and the larger interests of humankind,The voice of the scholar was silenced or,even worse,co-opted by power into a tool of the state.

this monopoly of knowledge was founded on the media of print and broadcast,which reinforced the tendency to live exclusively in the present,in world defined by the news cycle:the day or increasingly the hour or quarter-hour.We were kept waiting for the news as a substitute for participation in politics.

the temporal horizon collapsed into the present,and forethought,planning for the future,thinking in terms of posterity,became obsolete.

In Changing Concepts of Time,Innis is no longer attempting to elaborate a theory of time,space,and media.

the reader will search in vain for an answer to the question posed in the title:What are the changing concepts of time?Instead,he says,the essays represent an attempt to apply“the thesis developed in The Bias of Communication and Empire and Communication to immediate problems.”What is th at thesis?The spatial bias of modern media,the attempt to extend lines of communication further and further,from center to margin,from the capital to the hinterland,in order to exercise definitive control over the environment,including the humans that inbabit that environment,inevitably shrinks time down to the present,to a one-day world of the immediate and the transitory.

the future disappears into the present;everything changes at a blinding speed,making it difficult to maintain continuity in time and culture.What is the overriding problem? The current crisis,he says,thinking of the Cold War,is“the intellectual organization of political hatreds.”

He attempts to illustrate throughout these pieces one of his favorite maxims:the more the technology of communication improves,the more difficult human communication becomes.“The problems of understanding others have become exceedingly complex partly as a result of improved communication,”for the problem of understanding recedes in the face of the insistent emphasis on the present and the exercise of domination.He concludes:

The present-real,insistent,complex and treated as an independent system-has penetrated the most vulnerable areas of public policy...War has become the result and a cause of the limitations placed on the forethinker.Power,and its assistant force,the natural enemies of intelligence,have become more serious as“the mental processes activated in the pursuit and consolidating of power are essentially short range.”(lnnis,1952,pp.v-vi)

Changing Concepts is essentially an extended essay on a variety of problems that revolve around the emergence of United States as the successor to Great Britain,as the dominant modern empire.“American imperialism has replaced and exploited British imperialism,”and Canada has moved“from colony to nation to colony.”Empires rule not only by force and power but also,and perhaps more importantly,by exercising monopolies of knowledge,controlling not only routes of trade but routes of culture:artistic styles,language,consumer preferences,and intellectual ideas.

But American imperialism,as opposed to British,presents certain unique problems.For one thing,American culture is relentlessly opposed to tradition because the central elements in it are the product of and supported by the system of mechanized communication devoted to a systematic,ruthless destruction of the elements of permanence essential to cultural activity.

“The jackals of communication systems are constantly on the alert to destroy every vestige of sentiment toward Great Britain holding it of no advantage if it threatens the omnipotence of American commercialism.”

Canada faced a postwar onslaught of a resurgent American cultural industry led by film and broadcast but supplemented by renewed efforts of American publishers to dominate the“Canadian market.”The emphasis on change is the only permanent characteristic of American commercial culture.Every movie,every broadcast program,or issue of a newspaper or magazine must be quickly forgotten,rendered obsolete,in order to clear the way for the next film or program or publication,each of which is unique,unprecedented,unparalleled,extraordinary,exceptional-even though indistinguishable-from what has come before.

American culture is not only without permanence,caught in a process of ceaseless change,but,in a vast country,it is dominated by one location-New York,the home of the communications industries.As a result,“Canadian writers must adapt to American standards.Our poets and painters are reduced to the status of sandwich men.”

The power of American culture is reinforced by three underlying tendencies.First,because British books were not afforded copyright protection unless first published in the United States,the number of British books outpaced American books until late in the nineteenth century.As a result,American writers turned to journalism and became expert on that more fragile,less permanent form of publication.Second,the First Amendment was taken to be not only a part of the American Constitution but a universal right to be imposed on others according to American meanings.Innis interpreted the meaning of freedom in the First Amendment to be decidedly parochial,yet it was used as a weapon to grant and guarantee a monopoly to the American periodical press,enforceable without regard to national boundaries and traditions.Many American journalists,for example,have simply ignored Canadian press law when reporting from Canada because they consider such law an offense to the First Amendment.

The First Amendment was also used to extirpate freedom of speech as it was aimed at suppressing the oral tradition,turning readers and viewers into passive spectators who did not speak to one another.And third,American economic and cultural policy intensified divisions within Canada,driving a wedge between those provinces dependent on the American market and those dependent on Europe and between the English-speaking provinces and Quebec.

Innis describes the first chapter in this book,“The Strategy of Culture,”as a footnote to the Massey Commission.

that commission,formally known as the Royal Commission on the National Development in Arts,Sciences,and Letters,argued for the protection and development of an indigenous Canadian culture against the commercialism of the United States.

The view of culture espoused by the commission,descended from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy,is essentially conservative and nationalist,while antipopulist in its support of a largely British tradition of high culture.Innis’s support of tendencies in the report is something of a surprise,for he was generally

“opposed to nationalism as a program or an ideology and even strongly opposed to the exclusivist and intolerant spirit which that doctrine usually incorporated.”

He was led to this extreme position by the belief that in Canada“we are fighting for our lives”and“the pernicious influence of American advertising reflected especially in the periodical press and the powerful persistent impact of commercialism have been evident in all the ramifications of Canadian life....

the effects of these developments on Canadian culture have been disastrous.Indeed they threaten Canadian national life.”

While Innis affirmed Canada’s peripheral location relative to the United States and Europe,he insisted that to be a Canadian is not parochial.

This was not a narrow,inward-turning nationalism.Instead,he was asserting that Canadians were in possession of a valuable body of experience-a genuine culture of knowledge and understanding-developed in the complex process of adapting to a particular geography and history.

In his opposition to monopolies of knowledge and culture,he affirmed a central principle of John Dewey:

left to their own devices,humans multiply cultures like the unforced flowers of spring.

the value of these cultures resides in their sheer variety-the alternative forms of adaptation,knowing,and understanding they contain.But to sustain this variety against the“conservative power of monopolies”compels the development of“technological revolutions in the media of communication in marginal areas.”

For Canada to resist requires government involvement in the development of forms of communications resistant to the lures of American commercialism.Only the state can create conditions where cultural production can flourish.

the conservative side of Innis is demonstrated by his conviction that a cultural heritage is a more enduring foundation for national prestige than political power or commercial gain.

this same conclusion was reached at about the same time by,surprisingly,the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press in the United States.

The postwar period created not only problems surrounding the transnational spread of commercial culture,but,more seriously,problems of military power as well.

throughout these essays Innis reflects on the military impulses within American society and their implications for Canada and the world.Canada has always been faced with the problem of absorption as the fifty-first American state.In the late 1940s,Canada was faced with prospects of being drawn into the Cold War or,worse,into a variety of military adventures.

In chapter 2,Innis argues that certain basic weaknesses of written constitutions in general,the American one in particular,have been exacerbated by “improvements in communication.”

Because America was founded in violent revolution,it is prone,he believes,to excessive nationalism and patriotism.Founded as a mass democracy,at least by the standards of the eighteenth century,the United States had built into the Constitution protections for minorities against the enthusiasms of the crowd,but these had been considerably weakened by improvements in the technology of communications,which favored direct demagogic appeals to national sentiments.

these same improvements favored the presidency over the legislature,thus upsetting the balance of powers among the branches of government and rendering the executive an imperial office.

The two fundamental weaknesses in the Constitution in his view resided,first,in the clauses that make the president the commander in chief of the armed forces with almost uncheckcd control over foreign policy.

While the president must secure consent from Congress for military adventures,once he has achieved it-on however flimsy a basis-he can virtually act as a monarch.Second,by fixing the dates of elections-their occurrcnce is predictable,unlike those in a parliamentary system-foreign policy is sacrificed to political campaigning.Foreign policy and foreign adventure are calculated in terms of their effect on the next election.

This intensifies the obsession with the present and reinforces the willingness to sacrifice long-run political stability to short-run electoral gains.

this results in vacillating,inconsistent policy at the mercy of strategy for winning elections rather than the national interest.He comments:

“An attempt under the second Roosevelt to establish a bi-partisan foreign policy has given greater stability but foreign issues are all too apt to be dominated by the immediate exigencies of party politics.”

Under these circumstances,military domination of foreign policy is inevitable.“The limitations of American foreign policy are largely a result of its lack of tradition and continuity and its consequent emphasis on displays of military strength.”

The propensity of American politics to elevate military generals to positions of civilian leadership contributes to the power of a single person,backed by constitutional authority,to intervene in war despite the will of Congress.What he observed in the opening of the Cold War-think of Senator Joseph McCarthy-were attempts to systematically arouse public opinion,to keep it constantly agitated concerning the need for war even against the most modest of enemies.He compares this to the fanatic fear of mice shown by elephants.

Innis pinned his hopes for Canadian autonomy during the Cold War to the development of a third bloc independent of the two great rival powers,surely a tough thing to pull off in North America.He doubted that the United States could work though consensual principles of politics shared with its allies,for like all empires,the first goal of the American one had to be establishing and stabilizing a periphery through military effort.Empire builders yearn for sitability,but what imperial systems find hard to stabilize is precisely their frontiers.

Empires are constantly drawn to expansion by the disorder seething just outside the last domain they have stabilized,but each stabilized zone generates a further zone of chaos that requires imperial policymakers to intervene anew.

the use of force that stabilizes conditions within any given boundary often upsets a precarious peace among the tribes or weakened states that abut the frontier.

thus,empires must inevitably generate a resistance that rulers will perceive as shortsighted,bloody minded,and fanatic.

I have deliberately cast this interpretation of Innis in the present tense in order to suggest,however indirectly,that he continues to speak to issues of politics,communications,and empire as this book goes to press and we contemplate the meaning of the first military skirmishes following the settlement of the Cold War.Instructive also in this regard,as a new generation of the“best and brightest”seizes the reins of politics,are words he was fond of quoting:

I think that the greatest hindrance to constructive political action in the last thirty years has been the influence on final decisions of experts,especially of experts obsessed with the belief that their own generation has gained a vantage point unprecedented in history.No quality is more important in a political leader than awareness of the accumulated wisdom and experience handed down not only in written documents but also by word of mouth from generation to generation in practical diplomatic,administrative and legislative work.

the more we work with mass statistics and large schemes the more we are in danger of neglecting the dignity and value of the human individual and losing sight of life as a whole.(University of Chicago,Committee on Social Thought,Works of the Mind,pp.116-117)

It is impossible to agree with all the arguments concerning politics,culture,and communications that Harold Innis put forth,and,it must be admitted,his work,in the small window of life he had left to execute it,sometimes took on an exaggerated,even hysterical tone.Nonetheless,this is serious,even exemplary,scholarship in its determined attempt to work on a broad canvas and to integrate history and theory with practical understanding.He understood the study of media,as we now call them,not as some walled-off department of thought,but as a pathway to plunge one into the deepest,most intractable problems of contemporary life.

References

Drache,Daniel.1995.“Introduction”in Staples,Markets and Cultural Change,Selected Essays [of]Harold Innis,pp.xiii-lix.Montreal and Kingston:McGill and Queens University Press.

Havelock,E.A.1950.

the Crucifixion of Intellectual Man,Boston:Beacon Press.

Innis,Harold A.1952.Changing Concepts of Time.

toronto:University of Toronto Press.

Maier,Charles A.2002.“An American Empire?” Harvard Magazine(December):26-31.

Niebuhr,Reinhold.1952.

the Irony of American History.New York:Scribners.

University of Chicago,Committee on Social Thought.1947.

the Works of the Mind,by Mottimer J.Adler et al.Edited by Robert B.Heywood.Chicago:University of Chicago Press.

Watson,A.John.1977.“Harold Innis and Classical Scholarship.”Journal of Canadian Studies 12,No.5:45-61.

Weiner,Norbert,1948.Cybernetics:Or Control and Communication in Animal and Machines.Cambridge,Mass.:MIT Press.

Preface

An attempt is made in this volume to elaborate the thesis developed in The Bias of Communication(Toronto,1951)and Empire and Communications(Oxford,1950)in relation to immediate problems.For that reason,unfortunately,it reflects more sharply the temper of the period.

the first two essays were published in pamphlet form earlier in 1952 under the title,The Strategy of Culture.

the other essays wer printed as lectures and have been revised.I am grateful to the sponsors,to whom specific reference is made in each essay,for permission to reprint them.

It has been assumed that different civilizations regard the concepts of space and time in different ways and that even the same civilization,for example that of the West since the invention of printing,differs widely in attitude at different periods and in different areas.Even within a given political region such as the United States the attitude toward time and space will vary in different areas-notably the east and the west.Indeed the political boundaries and the character of political institutions will reflect the variations in themselves.In an attempt to explain these differences emphasis has been given to technological changes in communication.

the problems of understanding others have become exceedingly complex partly as a result of improved communications.

The general argument has been powerfully developed in the Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus as outlined by E.A.Havelock in The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man(Boston,1951).Intellectual man of the nineteenth century was the first to estimate absolute nullity in time.

the present-real,insistent,complex,and treated as an independent system,the foreshortening of practical prevision in the field of human action,has penetrated the most vulnerable areas of public policy.War has become the result,and a cause,of the limitations placed on the forethinker.Power and its assistant,force,the natural enemies of intelligence,have become more serious as“the mental processes activated in the pursuit and consolidating of power are essentially short range”(p.99).But it will not do to join the great chorus of those who create a crisis by saying there is a crisis.

It remains for me to thank again those who assisted in publishing the articles which have been a basis of this volume and in particular to thank those of my family and others who gave their assistance during a period of prolonged illness.H.A.I.

Note

This volume was just about to go to press when Dean Innis died.In spite of great difficulty he had worked on it through the summer of 1952,and had finished correcting the proofs.

these essays are the last work seen through the press by this distinguished Canadian scholar,whose researches were cut short by his untimely death.

Chapter One The Strategy of Culture

With Special Reference to Canadian Literature——A Footnote to the Massey Report

Pay them well;where there is a Maecenas there will be a Horace and a Virgil also.——artial

Complaints are made that we have no literature;this is the fault of the Minister of the Interior.——Napoleon

The title of this chapter may be regarded as an illustration of the remark of Julien Benda concerning“the intellectual organization of political hatreds”1 and as a further effort to exploit Canadian nationalism.“Political passions rendered universal,coherent,homogeneous,permanent,preponderant-everyone can recognize there to a great extent the work of the cheap daily political newspaper.”

2 Whistler3 and others have contended that art is not to be induced by artificial tactics.

they have pointed to Switzerland as a country without art and it has interesting parallels with Canada,a country of more than one language,a federation,and dependent on the tourist trade.A distinguished Canadian painter has remarked:“I am not sure that future opinion of the contemporary art of our day will not consider the advertising poster,the window and counter card as most representative.”4

Printers’ink threatens to submerge even the literary arts in Canada and it may seem futile to raise the question of cultural possibilities.

the power of nationalism,parochialism,bigotry,and industrialism may seem too great.Cheap supplies of paper produce pulp and paper schools of writing,and literature is provided in series,sold by subscription,and used as an article of furniture.Almost alone Stephen Leacock,by virtue of his mastery of language,escaped into artistic freedom and was recognized universally and even he,as Peter McArthur pointed out,never attacked a publisher.

But we can at least point to the conditions which seem fatal to cultural interests.We can appraise the cultural level of the United States and appreciate the importance of New York as a centre for the publication of books and periodicals,the effects of the higher costs of commercial printing in Chicago,and the dangers to literature and the drama of reliance on the authoritative finality of New York newspaper critics.We should be able to escape the influence of a western American news agency which advised that if you want it to sell“put a New York date line on it.”

We can point to the dangers of exploitation through nationalism,our own and that of others.

to be destructive under these circumstances is to be constructive.Not to be British or American but Canadian is not necessarily to be parochial.We must rely on our own efforts and we must remember that cultural strength comes from Europe.5 We can point to our limitations in literature and to the consequent distortions incidental to the impact of mechanization,notably in photography.

the story has been compelled to recognize the demands of the illustration and has become dominated by it.6 The impact of the machine has been evident in the dependence of Edgar Wallace and Phillips Oppenheim and dictators of the quick action novel on the dictaphone.7

An emphasis on speed and action essential to books produced for individual reading weakens the position of poetry and the drama particularly in new countries swamped by print.

Burckhardt8 in his studies of Western civilization held that religion and the state were stable powers striving to maintain themselves and that civilized culture did not coincide with these two powers,that in its true nature it was actually opposed to them.“Artists,poets and philosophers have just two functions,i.e.,to bring the inner significance of the period and the world to ideal vision and to transmit this as an imperishable record to posterity.”

In the words of Sir Douglas Copland,summarizing the philosophy of P.H.Roxby,“A cultural heritage is a more enduring foundation for national prestige than political power or commercial gain.”9

“It is the cultural approach of one nation to another,which in the long run is the best guarantee for real understanding and friendship and for good commercial and political relations.In the past,it has been,on the whole,sadly neglected,and especially as between western Europe and China”(Roxby).10 It has been scarcely less neglected as between Canada and the United States.In the long list of volumes of“The Relations of Canada and the United States”series,little in terest is shown in cultural relations and the omission is ominous.

Inter-relations between American and Canadian publishing in the nineteenth century had significant implications for Canadian literature in the present century.In the nineteenth century the tyranny of the novel in England had been built up in part because of inadequate protection to English playwrights from translations of French plays,production of which had been systematically encouraged in France,11and by a monopoly of circulating libraries protected by the high price of the three-volume novel which made it,therefore,cheaper to rent than to buy books.12

Restrictive effects of high prices on exports of books from Great Britain,absence of circulating libraries in the United States,lack of protection to foreign,especially English books before the enactment of copyright legislation in America in 1891,and section 5 of the American Copyright Act,May 31,1790,which was“an invitation to reprint the work of English authors,”were factors responsible for large-scale reprinting of English works in the United States and for the publication of English works first in fhe United States.13

In 1874 legislation in the United States reduced postage on newspapers issued weekly or oftener to two cents a pound without regard to the distance carried.Under an act of March 3,1879(par.14),second-class mail matter “must be regularly issued at stated intervals as frequently as four times a year,and bear a date of issue,and be numbered consecutively.”

Again,on July 1,1885,postal charges on paper-covered books were reduced from two cents per pound to one cent and cloth-bound books were carried at eight cents per pound.

the legislation reflected the demands of a vigorous cheap book publishing period,concentrating on English or foreign books for which a market had been created by established publishers.

In the ultimate development of the publication of English books previous to the Copyright Act in 1891,Canadians,emigrants to the United States and undisciplined by the demands of its distributing machinery,played an important role.George Munro,a mathematics teacher in the Free Church College,Halifax,who had emigrated to New York and acquired experience in the handling of dime novels in the firm of Beadle and Adams and in the publishing of the Fireside Companion,a family newspaper started in 1867,launched the“Seaside Library,”a quarto,two or three columns to the page with cheap paper,on May 28,1877.It was estimated that 645 pages in a regular edition could be printed in 152 pages quarto.

As a result of saturation of the market for quartos in the latter part of 1883,Munro started a pocket-size edition in spite of the higher costs of manufacturing.In 1887 he cut wholesale prices from twenty and twenty-five cents to ten cents and from ten cents to five cents,and in 1889 sought protection by publishing a monthly“Library of American Authors,”cheap cloth-bound twelvemos,“sold by the ton.”In 1890 Munro sold the“Seaside Library”to J.W.Love-ll,14 on a three-year option to repurchase arrangement,for $50,000 plus $4,500 monthly.It was estimated that,by 1890,30,000,000 volumes of the“Seaside Library”had been sold,chiefly through the American News Company.

J.W.Lovell was the son of John Lovell,who in 1872 had a printing shop on the American side near Montreal at which he printed British copyright works,free of copyright,and imported them into Canada under 12.5 percent duty to be sold at a lower price than editions imported from Great Britain.15

The son moved to New York in 1875 and engaged in the sale of cheap unauthorized editions.After a failure in 1881 he followed the German plan of producing cheap handy books with neat covers and,in 1882,started publication of handy twelvemos in“Lovell’s Library,”paper-covered books selling at twenty cents,and“Lovell’s Standard Library,”cloth-bound at one dollar.In 1885 he concentrated on“Lovell’s Library”and sold the remainder of his business to Belford and Clarke.

this became a most popular series selling about seven million volumes annually,As a result of the reduction of prices by George Munro in 1887 competition became more intense and in 1888 Lovell bought the“Munro Library”16 from Norman W.Munro,the brother of George Munro.

The“Munro Library”in pocker-size books had been started in 1884 when the owner had returned to the business after failing with the“Riverside Library,”sold between 1877 and 1879.With control over the“Seaside Library”acquired in 1890,and over the plates and stock of other cheap book publishers by purchase or rental to the extent of over half the titles of cloth-bound books and over three-fourths of the titles of paper-covered books,an supported by the Trow Printing Company,Lovell organized the United States Book Company with a reported capital of $3,500,000.

Alexander Belford and James Clarke,members of a firm of Belford brothers in Toronto,moved to Chicago and organized Rose,Belford and Company;it was reorganized in 1879 after a failure as Belford Clarke and Company.

they became publishers of“railroad literature”and built up an elaborate retail system developing a policy of selling to the book trade at artificially high prices,first to jobbers,and then to the regular trade,and later at extremely low prices through dry-goods and department stores.Showy bindings contrasted with the woodpulp,clay,and straw paper inside the books.In 1885 they acquired“Lovell’s Standard Library”and became the largest producers of cheap cloth-bound twelvemos.

As a result of the intensive price cutting after 1887 they failed in 1889.

In the absence of copyright on foreign books,publishers were compelled to rely on their only means of protection,namely,cheapness based on mass production.With efficient systems of distribution through the American News Company and the post office,equipment was steadily improved;cylinder presses were first installed in 1882 and in 1886 three cheap library publishers had their own typesetting,printing,and binding plants.

the cheapest variety of paper was used and slight attention was given to proof reading and corrections.Paper manufacturers were compelled to sell their fine book papers chiefly to the large printing houses and the periodical publishers.

Stereotype establishments or“sawmills”began to sell plates to publishers who then issued their own editions.

typographical unions17 complained,and,following the sharp reduction in prices,recognized the importance of copyright.With lower postal rates on paper-covered editions,and prices from one-sixth to one-tenth those of cloth-bound volumes,it was estimated that almost twothirds of a total of 1,022 books published in 1887 were issued in the cheap libraries.

Demands for new titles led to the publication of poorer classes of fiction.18 The technological changes which lowered the prices of paper19 and of printing widened the gap between the supply of written material and the demand of readers and intensified the need for non-copyright foreign books.Yet the supply of foreign material was limited,the market for lower grade fiction was saturated,it was no longer possible to increase sales by changing formats from quarto to twelvemo,deterioration of paper was not sufficiently rapid,and finally newspapers expanded to absorb supplies of newsprint.Publishers were now compelled to emphasize American writers,to whom copyright was paid.

The basis was laid for the supremacy of the periodical,with significant consequences for American and Canadian literature.National advertising steadily advanced to impose its demands on the reading material of the periodical.

the discrepancy between prices of books in England and in the United States gradually lessened.

the three-volume novel disappeared in England as prices were levelled with those in the United States after the Copyright Act of 1891.

to secure copyright it was necessary to print books in the United States.20

In the last decade of the nineteenth century the advantages of cheap newsprint,of cheap composition following the invention of the linotype,and of the fast press as the basis of large circulations were being fully exploited by newspapers.Every conceivable device to increase circulation was pressed into service,notably in the newspaper war between Pulitzer and Hearst in the late nineties in New York City,including sensational headlines,the comics,and the Spanish American War.Crusades were started in every direction to enhance goodwill for newspapers.

The sudden improvement in technology in the production of newspapers was accompanied by an increase in magazine readers.

the weekly was replaced by the monthly which became a leading factor in modern publishing.

the Copyright Act of 1891,in itself a recognition of the problem of creating a supply of American writers,21 was followed by the training of an army of fiction writers who by 1900 met the demands of magazines.Muck-raking magazines22 were supported by experienced newspaper men such as Lincoln Steffens(who wrote a series on“The Shame of the Cities”).

They followed the tactics,particularly of the Hearst newspapers,in the struggle for circulation.23McClure,for instance,applied the sensational methods of the cheap newspaper to the cheap and new magazine.He sponsored a reform wave which was effectively exploited by Theodore Roosevelt.He built up circulation by paying enormous sums to famous writers and trying to corner a market in them.As a former peddler of coffee pots,he knew the demands of people on farms and in small towns.24 Munsey,25 in the all-fiction magazine which followed the Sunday magazine section of the newspaper with smooth paper and clearer half-tones,made fiction the basis of circulation and earning power by 1896.26

The position of women as purchasers of goods led to concentration on women’s magazines and on advertising.In Philadelphia,Curtis de-veloped the great discovery-reading matter trailed through a periodical compelled readers to turn the pages and to look at the advertising which made up most of the page-into an extensive magazine business.27

Through the national magazine,28advertisers such as the manufacturers of pianos,high cost two-wheeled bicycles,and other commodities were able to reach a large market at less cost than through the daily newspaper and to concentrate on more attractive layouts appealing to people in higher income brackets.

the national magazine made a systematic attack on older advertising media.Religious papers dependent on patent medicine advertising felt the effects of a crusade of the Ladies’Home Journal,which in 189229 refused to handle medical advertising and exposed widely advertised preparations by printing chemical analyses.

With the growth of large-scale printing,the printer assumed the direction of advertising and displaced the single advertiser and agency.Specialization of printing and increased pressure of overhead costs necessitated effective control of publications.Lorimer,an able writer of advertisements,became editor of the Saturday Evening Post and gave advertisements the personality of articles30 A four-colour printing press costing $800,000 and a new building in 1910 led the Curtis publications to add a third magazine to cover agriculture.31

The average circulations of magazines increased from 500,000 to 1,400,000 in the period from 1905 to 1915 and following the boom beginning in 1922 reached 3,000,000 by 1937.32 The Reader’s Digest was started in 1922,Time in 1923,and the New Yorker in 1925.Extension of education and increased use of text-books conditioned youth to acceptance of the printed word and to magazine consumption.

The demand for writers exceeded the supply.After the First World War,women’s magazines,which had begun as pattem makers in the Delineator and other Butterick papers,gained conspicuously in circulation.Women’s magazines reached the largest circulations,paid most highly for articles,and were the chief market for writers.

Competition between magazines for writers with an established reputation brought sky-rocket prices.33The sale of film rights to popular novels brought even more than that of serial rights.An average bestseller in“the slicks”with serial rights,movie,book,and other rights brought returns varying between $70,000 and $125,000.Writers concentrated on magazines rather than books.34

Writing for the great popular magazines built up on advertising implied assiduous attention to their requirements on the part of writers and editors.Dullness was absolutely abhorrent.Serial installments involved consideration of appropriate terminal points at which intense interest might be sustained for the next number.Magazines with the largest circulation were able to carry longer fiction by writers with an established reputation but tended to reduce installments and stories from 12,000 to 5,000 or 4,500 words.35

Since dependence on advertising meant that the magazine“expands and contracts with the activity of the factory chimney”36 writers were particularly affected by fluctuations of the business cycle.

the reputations of authors were built up through advertising by editors of magazines who were thus enabled to sell advertising material,and stories37 became commercialistic.George Ade could write“I guess I can now sell anything I write,even if it’s good.”38

The influence of the newspaper and advertising on the magazine was developed to a sophisticated level in the twenties when magazines such as the New Yorker playfully exposed the foibles of its advertisers and advertisers exploited the foibles of the magazine.More recently the campaign of the New Yorker against loud speaker advertising in public buildings has not been unrelated to competition for advertising-all of course in the spirit of good clean fun.

the rigid limitations in style of advertising copy enabled the New Yorker to succeed by emphasizing the independence of the editor from the business office,and by developing a new style of writing which in turn led to a revolution in the style of advertising copy.

In the Smart Set and the American Mercury H.L.Mencken,a Baltimore newspaperman,was successful in building up circulation in a direct attack on the limitations of asociety dependent on advertising.In reviewing books for newspapers he had become familiar with trends in literature and he attracted to the Smart Set new authors unable to secure publication with old firms and willing to acquire prestige in lieu of high rates of pay.As a columnist Mencken had also gained an intimate knowledge of libel laws.Of German descent,he had suffered from the frenzied propaganda of the First World War.

the American Mercury was started in 1924 as a fifty-cent magazine and practically doubled its average monthly circulation from 38,694 to 77,921 by 1926.39Debunking became a new word and a profitable activity.

In developing the American Mercury as a quality magazine designed to make the common man respectable,40Mencken pursued his attacks on the puritanical and on the English book to the point of recognizing in a powerful fashion the new language of the newspaper and the magazine in his American Language.

The women’s magazines began to feel the restraining influence of puritanism and its effects on advertising.Bok became concerned with the importance of sex education.

theodore Dreiser,editor of Delineator,came into conflict with censorship regulations in his novels and triumphantly conquered in An American Tragedy.Mencken,in the tradition of Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce,secured the support of the Authors’League for Dreiser’s position.41

The Calvinistic obsession of hypocritical people with the subject of sex42 became the centre of attack by Dreiser as chief artist and Mencken as high priest,determined to defeat“the iron madonna who strangles in her fond embrace the American novelist”(H.H.Boyesen).

With a shrewd appreciation of the advertising value of censorship regulations Mencken seized upon the occasion of the banning of a copy of the American Mercury to attack the Boston Watch and Ward Society as the stronghold of Catholic and Protestant puritanism.43 His active interest in the Scopes trial,following a law enacted in Tennessee on March 21,1925,against the teaching of evolution was a part of the general strategy against religious bigotry.

Decline of the practice of reading aloud led to a decline in the importance of censorship.

the individual was taken over by the printing industry and his interest developed in material not suited to general conversation.George Moore in England and H.L.Mencken in the United States exploited the change in their attacks on censorship.

Censorship could no longer be relied upon to secure publicity.Significantly the advertiser had contributed to a change of atmosphere and women no longer feared to smoke cigarettes in public.

Even before the Copyright Act,the effects of advertising,as reflected in the newspaper and the magazine,on the writer had important implications for the book.“Most people now do not read books,but read magazines and newspapers”(H.C.Baird).44

Limited distributing facilities for books evident in the high costs of book agents and subscription publishing45 in the nineties,and the development of special publishers of text-books in the early part of the century were gradually being offset by department stores.Small retail stores for books could not compete with rents paid by diamonds,furs,and bonds Mail order business in books expanded in the early 1900s but the results were perhaps evident in the remark of a publisher’s reader,“this novel is bad enough to succeed.”46

W.D.Howells wrote in 1902:“Most of the best literature now sees the light in the magazines,and most of the second best appears first in book form.”The increasing importance of apartment buildings and lack of space for shelves supported the rapid development of the lending library in the twenties.Book clubs increased rapidly47 after 1926 as a means of securing the economies of mass production.Nevertheless,the inadequacy of book distributing machinery and dependence on British and Continental devices48 showed the limitations of the book in contrast with the newspaper and the magazine.Publishing.firms such as Doubleday,Page and Company entered on policies of direct vigorous advertising,which built up,for instance,the success of O.Henry,49 but their most significant results were in less obvious directions.

The experience of the prominent publishing firm of Scribner’s illustrates directly the impact of advertising on the newspaper and the magazine and in turn on the book.Roger Burlingame,50 trained in a newspaper office,and M.E.Perkins,a reporter on the New York Times,exercised a powerful influence on publications of the firm.Perkins was concerned to arouse a consciousness of the value and importance of the native note in opposition to the imitation of English and European models and“the cynical disparagement of American materialism.”51

To him great books were those which appealed to both the literati and the masses.

the book-buying public was-made up of fairly successful people but to Perkins the reading of Thomas Wolfe’s books“to pieces”in the libraries reflected the truer sense of life of people in the lower economic leve1.52

While he condemned the mad pursuit of best-sellers which developed during the boom period of the twenties and the newspaper policy of playing up the work of authors of best-sellers and criticized the Book of the Month Club of concentrating the attention of the public on one book a month,53 he was concerned primarily with the newspaper public.Writers from the newspaper field included Hemingway,Edmund Wilson,Stanley Pennell,Stephen Crane,and Dreiser.It was his opinion that the teaching of literature and writing in the colleges compelled students to see things through a film of past literature and not with their own eyes.

two years with a newspaper were better than two years in college.54

He favoured what Irving Babbitt called“art without selection.”The demands of commercialism were evident more directly in the avoidance of controversy.“The sales department always want a novel.

they want to turn everything into a novel.”55 The public and the trade preferred books of 100,000 words and works of 25,000 to 30,000 words were padded to give the appearance of books of a larger size.

An orderly revolt against commercialism was significantly delayed and frustrated in literature possibly more than in any other art.Henry James had escaped to England and in the period after the First World War Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot followed.“The historians of Wolfes era...all record this strange phase of our cultural adolescence;the same sad and distraught search for foreign roots.”56“You could always come back”(Hemingway).

But in the words of Pound:“We want a better grade of work than present systems of publishing are willing to pay for.”57“The problem is how,how in hell to exist without over-production.”58“The book-trade,accursed of god,man and nature,makes no provision for any publication that is not one of a series.”59“The American law as it stands or stood is all for the publisher and the printer and all against the author,and more and more against him just in such proportion as he is before or against his time.”60

Books by living authors were,he claimed,kept out of the United States and“the tariff,which is iniquitous and stupid in principle,is made an excuse.”61

Even in Great Britain from about 1912 to 1932 booksellers did“their utmost to keep anything worth reading out of print and out of ordinary distribution.”“Four old bigots”of Fleet Street practically controlled the distribution of printed matter in England.62 Criticism was related to publishers’advertising.63

The distorting effects of industrialism and advertising on culture in the United States have been evident on every hand.Architecture as a sort of tyrant of the arts had the advantage of the utilitarian demands of commerce.Painting and sculpture as allied to it had the support of collectors,private and public,and the encouragement of awards and prizes.64 Poetry was the subject of paragraphers’jokes,a space filler for magazines65 and“must appeal to the barber’s wife of the Middle West.”66

“Poetry had no one to speak for it.”67 In the drama the lack of interest of actors in modern art68 and the support of tradition involved effective reliance on Shakespeare and a terrific handicap to playwrights.69 The commercial theatre mnanager and the newspaper critic have been reluctant to recognize the vitality of a demand for the imaginative artistic work of the little theatre70 particularly in competition with the cinema.In the words of George Jean Nathan the talking picture may be“the drama of a machine age designed for the consumption of robots”and the theatre may have gained enormously by the withdrawal of“shallow and imbecile audiences,” but the change has been costly and painful.71

The overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication.

their entrenched positions involve a continuous,systematic,ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity.

the emphasis on change is the only permanent characteristic.

thomas Hardy complained that narrative and verse were losing organic form and symmetry,the force of reserve,and the emphasis on understatement,and becoming structureless and conglomerate.72

The guarantee of freedom of the press under the Bill of Rights in the United States and its encouragement by postal regulations has meant an unrestricted operation of commercial forces and an impact of technology on communication tempered only by commercialism itself.73

Vast monopolies of communication have shown their power in securing a removal of tariffs on imports of pulp and paper from Canada though their full influence has been checked by provincial governments especially through control over pulpwood cut on Crown lands.

the finished product in the form of advertisements and reading material is imported into Canada with a lack of restraint from the federal government which reflects American influence in an adherence to the principle of freedom of the press and its encouragement of monopoly.Sporadic attempts have been made to check this influence in Canada as in the case of the banning of the Hearst papers in the First World War and in the imposition by the Bennett administration of a tariff based on advertising content in American periodicals.Protests are made by institutions against specific articles in American periodicals but without significant results other than that of advertising the periodical.

To offset possible handicaps Canadian editions of Time,Reader’s Digest and the like are published.Canadians are persistently bombarded with subscription blanks soliciting subscriptions to American magazines,and their conversation shifts with regularity following the appearance of new jokes in American periodicals.Canadian publications supported by the advertising of products of American branch plants and forced to compete with American publications imitate them in format,style and content.Canadian writers must adapt themselves to American standards.74

Our poets an d painters are reduced to the status of sandwich men.

the ludicrous character of the problem may be shown by stating that the only effective means of sponsoring Canadian literature involves a rigid prohibition against all American periodicals with any written material and free admission to all periodicals with advertising only.In this way trade might be fostered and Canadian writers left free to work out their own solutions to the problems of Canadian literature.Indeed they would have the advantage of having access to the highly skilled examples of advertiser’s copy.

Publishers’lists in Canada are revealing in showing the position of Arnerican branches of American agencies in the publication of books.Advertising rates for a wide range of commodities,determined by newspapers and magazines particularly in relation to circulation,are such as to make it extremely difficult for publishers to compete for advertising space,particularly as book advertising is largely deprived of the powerful force of repetition.75

Moreover,the demands of a wide range of industries for advertising compete directly and effectively for raw materials,paper,capital,and labour entering into the production of books,and restrict the possibility of advertising them.American devices such as book clubs and the mass production of pocket books to be sold on news-stand and in cigar stores and drug stores have immediate repercussions in Canada.

the extreme importance of book titles-perhaps the most vital element in American literature-evident in the changing of titles of English books in the United States and of American books in Great Britain and in the interest of the movie industry in the publishing field,76 is felt in Canada also.In the field of the newspaper,dependence on the Associated Press and other agencies,on the New York Times,77 and other media needs no elaboration.In radio and in television accessibility to American stations means a constant bombardment of Canadians.

The impact of commercialism from the United States has been enormously accentuated by war.Prior to the First World War the development of advertising78 stimulated the establishment of schools of commerce and the production of text-books on the psychology of advertising.European countries were influenced by the effectiveness of American propaganda.Young Germans were placed with American newspaper chains and advertising and publishing agencies to learn the art of making and slanting news.American treatises on advertising and publicity were imported and translated.American graduate students were attracted to Germany by scholarships and experiments in municipal government.In turn,German exchange professorships were established,especially with South American universities.

the Hamburg-American Lines became an effective propagandist organization.But German experience79 proved much too short in contrast with that of American80 and English propagandists,81 though their effectiveness is difficult to appraise since the estimates have been provided chiefly by those responsible for the propaganda.

American propaganda82 after the First World War became more intense in the domestic field.Its effectiveness was evident in the emergence of organizations representing industry,labour,agriculture,and other groups.

the Anti-Saloon League pressed its activities to success in prohibition legislation.In the depression the American government83 learned much of the art of propaganda from business and exploited new technological devices such as the radio.With the entry of the United States into the Second World War instruments of propaganda84 were enormously extended.

The effects of these developments on Canadian culture have been disastrous.Indeed they threaten Canadian national life.

the cultural life of Englishspeaking Canadians subjected to constant hammering from American commercialism is increasingly separated from the cultural life of French-speaking Canadians.

American influence on the latter is checked by the barrier of the French language but is much less hampered by visual media.In the period from 1915 to 1920 the theatre in French Canada was replaced by the movie or French influence by American.With the development of the radio,protection of language enabled French Canadians to take an active part in the preparation of script and in the presentation of plays.During the Second World War the revue and the French-Canadian novel received fresh stimulus.

the effects of American technological change on Canadian cultural life have been finally evident in the numerous suggestions of American periodicals that Canada should join the United States.It should be said that this would result in greater consideration of Canadian sentiment by American periodicals than is at present the case when it probably counts for less than that of a religious sect.

The dangers to national existence warrant an energetic programme to offset them.In the new technological developments Canadians can escape American influence in communication media other than those affected by appeals to the“freedom of the press.”The Canadian Press has emphasized Canadian news but American influence is powerful.85 In the radio,on the other hand,the Canadian government in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has undertaken an active role in offsetting the influence of American broadcasters.It may be hoped that its role will be even more active in television.

The Film Board has been set up and designed to weaken the pressure of American films.

the appointment and the report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts and Sciences imply a determination to strengthen our position.

the reluctance of American branch plants to support research in Canadian educational institutions has been met by taxation and federal grants to universities.Universities have taken a zealous interest in Canadian literature but a far greater interest is needed in the whole field of the fine arts.Organizations such as the Canadian Authors’Association have attempted to sponsor Canadian literature by the use of medals and other devices.

the resentment of English and French Canadians over the treatment of a French-Canadian play on Broadway points to powerful latent support for Canadian cultural activity.

We are indeed fighting for our lives.

the pernicious influence of American advertising reflected especially in the periodical press and the powerful persistent impact of commercialism have been evident in all the ramifications of Canadian life.

the jackals of communication systems are constantly on the alert to destroy every vestige of sentiment toward Great Britain holding it of no advantage if it threatens the omnipotence of American commercialism.

this is to strike at the heart of cultural life in Canada.

The pride taken in improving our status in the British Commonwealth of Nations has made it difficult for us to realize that our status on the North American continent is on the verge of disappearing.Continentalism assisted in the achievement of autonomy and has consequently become more dangerous.We can only survive by taking persistent action at strategic points against American imperialism in all its attractive guises.

By attempting constructive efforts to explore the cultural possibilities of various media86 of communication and to develop them along lines free from commercialism,Canadians might make a contribution to the cultural life of the United States by releasing it from dependence on the sale of tobacco and other commodities which would in some way compensate for the damage it did before the enactment of the American Copyright Act.

Notes

1.Julien Benda,The Great Betrayal(London,1928),p.21.

2.Ibid.,p.7.

3.J.M.Whistler,The Gentle Art of Making Enemies(New York,1904).

4.William Colgate,C.W.Jeffreys(Toronto,n.d.),p.28.

5.“Until the English visitor to America comprehends that he is in the midst of a civilization totally different from anything he has known on our side of the Atlantic,he is exposed to countless shocks”(Sir John Pollock,Bt.,Time’s Chariot [London,1950],pp.184-85).Sir John regards the great difference as having developed since 1880 as a result of the Civil War and foreign immigration.In England,with a background of feudalism,it seems possible to keep political differences and personal relationships in separate departments.

6.Whistler’s complaint that painting was subordinate to literature must be offset by the account of Newman Flower of Cassell & Co.He resorted to a cliché department or“bank”of illustrations built up since 1870,selected a promising illustration,and asked a young writer to write around it.Just As It Happened(London,1951),p.27.

7.Ibid.,p.40.On the other hand Edgar Wallace protested that dictaphone stuff was“good Wallace publicity.I write my best stuff with a pen.”Reginald Pound,Their Moods and Mine(London,1939),p.233.“Dictation always is rubbish”(George Moore).Ibid.,p.112 As a result of the influence of the newspaper on reading,novels have been written to be read rapidly and consequently emphasize length and description.“I do not want literature in a newspaper”(E.L.Godkin).

8.See Jacob Burckhardt,Force and Freedom:Reflections on History(New York,1943).

9.D.B.Copland,“Culture versus Power in International Relations”in Liberty and Learning:Essays in Honour of Sir James Hight(Christchurch,1950),p.155.

10.Ibid.,p.154.

11.In France the Thétre Fransais was subsidized by the government,and the Society of Dramatic Authors founded by Beaumarchais and reorganized by Scribe in the nineteenth century fostered an interest in plays rather than novels.See Brander Matthews,Gateways to Literature and Other Essays(New York,1912),p.41 and also H.A.Innis,Political Economy in the Modern State(Toronto,1946),pp.35-55.

12.See introduction by Graham Pollard to I.R.Brussel,Anglo-American First Editions,1826-1900(New York,1935),p.10.

13.Ibid.,p.11.See also H.A.Innis,The Bias of Communication(Toronto,1951),pp.171-72.

14.the funds became the basis of a substantial gift to Dalhousie University.

15.R.H.Shove,Cheap Book Production in the United States,1870 to 1891(Urbana,1937),p.75.

this book is a mine of information.

16.this included 855 sets of plates and 1,500,000 copies of books for which$250,000 was paid.

17.the unions were at first opposed to the Copyright Act but became active in its support;see G.A.

tracy,History of the Typographical Union(Indianapolis,1913),p.450.

18.Brussel,Anglo-American First Editions,p.19.

19.In 1871,newsprint straw paper was twelve cents per pound,fine book paper sixreen to seventeen cents;in 1875 newsprint was nine cents,machine-finish book paper ten to eleven cents;in 1889 newsprint was three and one-quarter cents and calendared book paper six and one-half to seven and one-half cents(Shove,Cheap Book Production,p.4).

20.Cheap unauthorized editions disappeared and the works of authors such as Kipling,which had sold widely in pirated editions,were sold at higher prices and in smaller numbers.

21.the suit brought against the New York World by Harriet Monroe for printing her ode presented at the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair and the award of $5,000 damages strengthened the position of authors(Harriet Monroe,A Poet’s Life:Seventy Years in a Changing World [New York,1938],pp.139-143).

22.C.C.Regier,The Era of the Muckrakers(Chapel Hill,1932).

23.H.L.Mencken,Prejudices,First Series(New York,1929),p.175.

24.S.S.McClure,My Autobiography(New York,1914).

25.F A.Munsey,The Founding of the Munsey Publishing House(New York,1907);also George Britt,Forty Years-Forty Millions:The Career of Frank A.Munsey(New York,1935).

26.Algernon Tassin,The Magazine in America(New York,1916),pp.342-343.

27.Arthur Train,My Day in Court(New York,1929),p.419.

28.Frank Presbrey,The History and Development of Advertising(New York,1929),p.339.

29.Ibid,pp.531-532.See The Americanization of Edward Bok:The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After(New York,1937).Also Edward W.Bok,A Man from Maine(New York,1923).

the campaign against patent medicines provoked the announcement by Eugene Field of the engagement of the granddaughter of Lydia W.Pinkham to Edward W.Bok,the editor of the Ladies’Home Journal.

30.Bok,A Man from Maine,p.171.“The secrets of success as an editor were easily learned;the highest was that of getting advertisements.

ten pages of advertising made an editor a success;five marked him as a failure”(Henry Adams,The Education of Henry Adams:An Autobiography [Boston,1918],p.308).“The art of advertising has outgrown the art of creative writing...

three-fourths of the income of the magazines comes from their advertisers...just take the advertising and rewrite it”(W.E.Woodward,Bunk [New York,1923],p.51).

31.Bok,A Man from Maine,p.183.

32.Train,My Day in Court,p.421.

33.Fairfax Downey,Richard Harding Davis,His Day(New York,1933),p.219.

34.Ibid.,pp.430-431,433.

35.Train,My Day in Court,pp.423-425.In England Gilbert Frankau held that the serial market was disappearing because readers of monthly magazines would not wait and newspapers preferred the short story“in these days of so much frontpage excitement”(Pound,Their Moods and Mine,p.241).

36.train,My Day in Court,p.420.

the limited circulation of Canadian magazines makes for a seasonal expansion.Advertising is sufficient only during the period of the two or three months before Christmas to warrant a full-fledged interest in features,especially short features.Longer features appear after the holiday season.

37.Train,My Day in Court,p.440.

38.F.W.Wile,News Is Where You Find It(Indianapolis,1939),p.36.

39.W.Manchester,Disturber of the Peace:The Life of H.L.Mencken(New York,1951),p.15.

40.Ibid.,p.155.

41.Ibid.,pp.93-94.

42.Ibid.,p.101.

43.Ibid.,p.207 See an account of the failure of attempts by Covici,Friede to secure suppression of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness by the Boston Watch and Ward Society(Donald Friede,The Mechanical Angel [New York,1948],p.94).

44.Cited in J.C.Derby,Fifty Years among Authors,Books and Publishers(New York.,1884),p.559.

45.Subscription selling was accompanied by a development of techniques of salesmanship and depended for its success to an important extent on snob appeal,particularly the prestige attached to owning a large book among the relatively illiterate Estes and Lauriat of Boston,prominent subscription book agents,who came under the control of Walter Jackson and Harry E.Hooper after 1900,were active in developing schemes for the sale of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in connection with the London Times.

46.W.H.Page,A Publisher’s Confession(New York,1905),p.27.

47.E.H.Dodd,The First Hundred Years:A History of the House of Dodd,Mead,1839-1939(New York,1939),p.36.

48.O.M.Sayer,Revolt in the Arts(New York,1930).

49.train,My Day in Court,p.439.

50.Roger Burlingame,Of Making Many Books(New York,1946),p.221.

51.J.H.Wheelock,Editor to Author:The Letters of Maxwell E.Perkins(New York,1950),p.8.

52.Ibid.,p.184.

53.Ibid.,p.128.

54.Ibid.,p.267.“What the eighteenth century thought simply vulgar,and the nineteenth gathered data from,has now become literary material;even the annals of the poor are to be short and simple no longer”(H.W.Boynton,Journalism and Literature and Other Essays[Boston,1904],p.164).

55.Wheelock,Editor to Author,p.84.

56.Maxwell Geismar,Writers in Crisis:The American Novel between Two Wars(Boston,1942),pp.214 and passim.

57.The Letters of Ezra Pound,1970-1941,ed.D.D.Paige.(New York,1950),p.175.

58.Ibid.,p.viii.

59.Ibid.,p.319.

60.Ibid.,p.52.

61.Ibid.,p.53.See J.L.May,John Lane and the Nineties(London,1936),p.159.

62.Letters of Pound,p.239-240.

63.Ibid.,p.337.

64.Harriet Monroe,A Poet’s Life,p.241.

65.Ibid.,p.247.A study of the demands of space on Bliss Carman’s poetry mightprove rewarding.

66.Ibid.,p.288.

67.Ibid.,p.242.

68.Nathan refers to“the mean capacity of the overwhelming number of them,whatever their nationality...

the downright ignorance,often made so conspicuously manifest”(The Intimate Note-books of George Jean Nathan[New York,1932],p.144).

69.See a letter from Mrs.Fiske in Harriet Monroe,A Poet’s Life,pp.176-177.

70.Ibid.,p.419.

71.See St.John Ervine,The Alleged Art of the Cinema(n.p.,March 15,1934).

Actors and,actresses were certainly regarded with far greater interest than they are nowadays.

the outstanding ones inspired something deeper than interest.It was with excitement,with wonder and with reverence,with something akin even to hysteria,that they were gazed upon.Some of the younger of you listeners would,no doubt,if they could,interrupt me at this point by asking,“But surely you don’t mean,do you,that our parents and grandparents were affected by them as we are by cinema stars?”I would assure you that those idols were even more ardently worshipped than are yours.Yours after all,are but images of idols,mere shadows of glory.

Those others were their own selves,creatures of flesh and blood,there,before our eyes.

they were performing in our presence.And of our presence they were aware.Even we,in all our humility,acted as stimulants to them.

the magnetism diffused by them across the footlights was in some degree our own doing.You,on the other hand,have nothing to do with the performances of which you witness.

the result.

Those performances-or rather those innumerable rehearsals-took place in some far-away gaunt studio in Hollywood or elsewhere,months ago.

those moving shadows will be making identically the same movements at the next performance or rather at the next record;and in the inflexions of those voices enlarged and preserved for you there by machinery not one cadence will be altered.

thus the theatre has certain advantages over the cinema,and in virtue of them will continue to survive.(Sir Max Beerbohm in The Listener[Oct.11,1945],p.397).

72.May,John Lane and the Nineties,p.177.

73.See Upton Sinclair,Money Writes! A Study of American Literature(Long Beach,Calif.,1927).

74.One Canadian writer has complained of writing an article of 60,000 words for an American woman’s magazine,cutting it to about 40,000 words to make two installments,and expanding it to 80,000 for the English market.Canadian writers should become efficient concertina players.

75.Wheelock,Editor to Author,p.138.

76.See J.

t.Farrell,The Fate of Writing in America(n.p.,nd.).also W.

t.Miller,The Book Industry(New York,1949).

Before the war British publishers were often told by friends in the Canadian book trade that their public preferred the bigger,handsomer American book.

they wanted value for money,and had been accustomed to measure value by size and weight.

the story has often been told of the Canadian agent who handed one of his travellers an advance copy of a new book from a British publisher and asked,“How many can you sell of that?”The traveller,without opening th e book,handed it back and said,“None.”The agent,somewhat nettled,said,“None? But you haven’t even looked at it.”The traveller replied,“I don’t need to.It doesn’t weigh enough.’”(MichaeI Joseph,The Adventure of Publishing[London,1949],p.131)

77.It“set out to be dull and ponderous and it has achieved its purpose with a fidelity and thoroughness justly commanding the admiration of all lovers of bulk and solidity”(G.M.Fuller,“The Paralysis of the Press,”American Mercury,Feb.1926,p.160).

78.Will Irwin,Propaganda and the News(New York,1936).For an account of the influence of an advertising agent of a Canadian department store on advertising and journalistic ideas in England,see Autobiography of a Journalist edited with an introduction by Michael Joseph(London,n.d.),pp.45,50.

the author,advised by the agent to begin journalism by writing advertisements for shopkeepers,used samples of full-page advertisements of the Canadian store(p.66).Advertising methods were then introduced effectively in political campaigns.

79.G.S.Viereck,Spreading Germs of Hate(New York,1930).

80.James R.Mock and Cedric Larson,Words That Won the War:The Story of the Committee on Public Information ,1917-1919(Princeton,N.J.,1939).

81.See Neville Lytton,The Press and the General Staff(London,1921);Sir Campbell Stuart,Secrets of Crewe House:The Story of a Famous Campaign(London,1920);Walter Millis,Road to War:America 1914-1917(Boston,1935);James Squires,Brirish Propaganda at Home and in the United States from 1914 to 1917(Cambridge,Mass.,1935);H.D.Lasswell,Propaganda Technique in the World War(London,1927).

82.See O.W.Riegel,Mobilizing for Chaos:The Story of the New Propaganda(New Haven,Conn.,1939).

83.See George Michael,Handout(New York,1935);L.C.Rosten,The Washington Correspondents(New York,1937).

84.See Propaganda by Short Wave,ed.H.L.Childs and J.R.Whitton(Princeton,N.J.,1943);C.J.Rolo,Radio Goes to War:The“Fourth Front”(New York,1940).

85.“I am sceptical about the value of 90 per cent of press reports.Most of them tend to say enough to be misleading and not enough to be in any sense informative.”Interview with a veteran Vancouver journalist.See M.L.Ernst,The First Freedom (New York,1946)and Herbert Brucker,Freedom of Information(New York,1949).

86.

the problem to an important extent centers around the confusion as to the distinct possibilities of each medium.Literary agents deliberately exploit the demands of technological innovations,adapting the same artistic piece of work to the book,the magazine,and the film.See Curtis Brown,Contacts(London,1935).

Shaw refused to allow a play to be filmed stating that no one would go to see it after seeing it on the screen and that the author suffered because the play became dull with the dialogue left out(ibid.,p.51).

the studios wanted“a big kick”at the end of every sequence of the film(ibid.,p.33).

Mechanization demands uniformity.

the newspapers are concerned with news and contemporary copics,and books,plays,films,and novels centre around newspaper owners.

the book has been subordinated to the demands of advertising for the movies,business firms in centennial volumes,radio broadcasts,and articles from magazines.Bible scenes are exploited for plays and movies.Shakespeare’s plays for actors are primarily studied in print as texts.Newspaper serials and radio scripts differ from novels and emphasize topics of the widest general interest.Any fresh idea is immediately pounced on and mauled to death.lrvin Cobb remarked concerning the dull conversation of Hollywood that the phrase coiners preserved silence until they had sold the wheeze themselves.

Chapter Two The Military Implications of the American Constitution

This chapter1 is an attempt to understand the policies of the United States.In Canada we are under particular obligations to attempt such an understanding in our own interests as well as in the interests of the rest of the world.

the difficulties involved in any country’s understanding itself,particularly a country with a complex unstable history,are overwhelming and the most penetrating studies of the United States have been made by de Tocqueville,a Frenchman,and by Lord Bryce,an Englishman.A Canadian is too close to make an effective study but he has the most to gain from it.

He is handicapped by tradition especially in English-speaking Canada,evident in the pervasive influence of those who left the United States after the American Revolution,namely the United Empire Loyalists,and by language in French-speaking Canada.

the writer of this chapter can scarcely pretend to the necessary objectivity,nor,I suspect,can most of his readers.Nevertheless we must do our best.

Whatever our view about the American Revolution we must agree that it was achieved by a resort to arms against Great Britain.

to the British it may have been a war of little consequence;we remember the remarks of an Englishman who when told that in the War of 1812 the British forces had burned Washington said he thought he had died in bed.

to Americans the achievement was a result of desperate struggle.Revolutions leave unalterable scars and nations which have been burned over by them have exhibited the most chauvinistic brand of nationalism and crowd-patriotism.2

These nations have developed highly depersonalized social relationships,political structures,and ideals and their counsels are determined most of all by spasms of crowd propaganda.“Public policy sits on the doorstep of every man’s personal conscience.

the citizen in us eats up the man.”3 The founders of the American Constitution appear to have recognized the danger by framing an instrument which put limits on the number of things concerning which a majority could encroach on the position of the individual.4 But the extent of such protection has varied and declined with improvements in the technology of communication and the increasing powers of the executive,as Senator McCarthy has conspicuously shown.

Washington and his successors in the nineteenth century renounced an interest in Europe but steadily expanded their influence in the Americas following the increase in demand for new land on which to raise cotton.

the demand implied steady expansion westward,in the south,and,in order to maintain a balance,in the north.In the south expansion was at the expense of the French empire,notably in Jefferson’s administration when Louisiana was bought from Napoleon,and in the north at the expense of the British empire when Lewis and Clark were sent on a journey of exploration to the northwest and when John Jacob Astor established Astoria on the Columbia River.

Later expansion in the south was safeguarded in the Monroe Doctrine,enunciated in 1823,which warned European powers to keep their hands off South America and was directed to the absorption of Texas,California,and other states at the expense of the Spanish empire and of Mexico.

the remnants of a crumbling Spanish empire were finally taken over after the explosion of the Maine in Cuba(“Remember the Maine”)and when Puerto Rico and the Philippines became American possessions.Expansion in the south to some extent intensified and to some extent eased the pressure on the British empire in the north.

the line was eventually tightened to the present Canadian border and Alaska,“Seward’s icebox,”was purchased from Russia in 1867.

these developments remind us of Disraeli’s comment when Poland had been partitioned by European powers at a meeting at breakfast.“What will they have for lunch?”Ⅱ

The outbreak of the American Revolution marked a return to ideological warfare such as had largely disappeared in England after the Civil War.5Democratic nationalism and the mass army became the new basis of warfare.6 George Washington,an officer in the British army in the Seven Years War against the French,had gained experience which gave him the leadership of the Revolutionary Army.

the immediate significance of the Revolution was evident in the position of this soldier from Virginia.

A mass army could not be built up under a New England general.7 As a result of success in arms he secured not only independence for the colonies but also a stable federal government.He presided over the Convention and was asked to take the chief position in the new government.An interest in western lands was not unrelated to his sympathy with the Federalists in their proposal for a strong central government with“powers competent to all general purposes,”words included in a letter from him to Hamilton in 1783.8 His sympathies found reflection in the views of delegates concerned aloout the dangers implicit in the radical character of state constitutions written by revolutionary legislatures.“Our chief danger rises from the democratic parts of our constitutions”(Edmund Randolph of Virginia to the Convention).9

Conservatism and an emphasis on the theory of divided powers led to provisions strengthening the executive power,such as those making the President Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy and giving him control over patronage.

the Secretaries of State and War were made responsible to the President alone and,with the exception of the Treasury Department,the precedent was followed in the establishment of new Cabinet posts.

the President became a focus of executive power.

the influence and character of Washington finally left their impression on the United States as he secured Virginia’s acceptance of the Constitution in 1787 and gave leadership to the other states which followed.

In the work of establishing a nation,the influence and prestige of the first President left an indelible impression on the operation of government.However,Washington’s efforts to secure the advice of the Senate as a sort of privy council were met with distrust.

the decision of the Senate to receive reports of Cabinet ministers in writing and to exclude them from its meetings drove the Cabinet into the position of being the President’s council.As a further guarantee against presidential interference,in Congress a system of committees was emphasized in which members were protected by secrecy from any group including the press.

John Adams,the second President(1797-1801),whose election implied a recognition of the role of New England in the Revolution and its aftermath,inherited the task of maintaining the prestige of the office,but he found it difficult to maintain the delicate balance between New England and the South,in the face of the power of Alexander Hamilton as a representative of industrial and commercial interests in the middle states.At Hamilton’s insistence,Washington had agreed to call out the militia of four states to put down the Whisky Rebellion in 1794.

In 1798 Hamilton advised his friends in the government to prepare for war with France,and Congress planned for a large emergency army and an increase in the regular army.Under his influence Washington agreed to head the army and by virtue of his prestige could insist on choosing his generals.Strife between Adams and Hamilton was followed by defeat of the former for a second term and by a weakening of the Federalist position.

In opposition to the centralizing tendencies of the Constitution,Jefferson(1801-1809)led a group whose views were reflected in the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation.He emphasized the position of the land,the small farmer,and the labourer against banking and the commercial interests.

On his trip up the Hudson with Madison in 1791 he laid the foundations for the“longest-lived,the most incongruous,and the most effective political alliance in American history:the alliance of southern agrarians and northern city bosses.”10 In contrast with the Federalists who insisted that survival depended on the sword,Jefferson stated:“I hope no American will ever lose sight of the essential policy of interdicting in the seas and territories of both Americas,the ferocious and sanguinary contests of Europe.”“Our first and fundamental maxim should be,never to entangle ourselves in the broils of Europe.”11

As a representative of the South,and in spite of his statement that“our peculiar security is in the possession of a written Constitution,”he accepted the annexation of Louisiana and acquired the port of New Orleans without asking the question of constitutional propriety.

to an alliance between the city bosses of New York and the South,he added the West.

After Jefferson’s two terms,Madison,also a native of Virginia,became President(1809-1817)and acquired additional territory.On April 14,1812,Congress formally divided West Florida at the Pearl River,annexing the western half to the new state of Louisiana,and,a month later,the eastern half to the Mississippi Territory.In 1813 the American army forced the Spanish garrison at Mobile to surrender and took possession.Henry Clay and the Committee on Foreign Affairs persuaded Congress to declare war on Great Britain on June 18,1812.“The conquest of Canada is in your power.”

“This war,the measures which preceded it,and the mode of carrying it on,were all undeniably Southern and Western policy,and not the policy of the commercial states”(Josiah Quincy).12 On December 5,1814,Madison recommended liberal spending on the Army and the Navy and the establishment of military academies.

Following the two terms of Madison,Monroe,again a native of Virginia,and an officer in the Revolutionary Army,became President(1817-1825).

the decline of the Federalist Party meant that there was no official opposition,and also no party discipline.

the President was thus left without any device to secure cohesion in Congress.In the House of Representatives,for example,an Army bill,opposed by the President and the Secretary of War,was “carried notwithstanding many defects in the details of the bill by an overwhelming majority.”13

In 1822 Monroe recognized the independence of the Latin American republics which had been part of the Spanish empire,and,on the insistence of John Quincy Adams,included in his statement of the Monroe Doctrine on December 2,1823,a protest against the encroachment of Russians in the northwest.

The success of the War of 1812 and the re-election of Monroe in 1820 finally destroyed the Federalist Party as a political factor.Decline in prestige and power of the congressional caucus opened the way for a free fight in 1824;New England influence was once more reflected in the election of John Quincy Adams,who like his father,John Adams,served only for one term(1825-1829).

His successor,Andrew Jackson(1829-1837),a native of South Carolina,had suffered at the hands of the British in the Revolutionary War.In the War of 1812 he had led western militiamen against the Indians of Georgia and Alabama and destroyed British troops under General Sir Edward Pakenham in New Orleans.In 1817 he pursued marauding Indians into Spanish territory,marched to Pensacola,and removed the Spanish governor.After his invasion of Florida he became military governor.

As a national figure and a popular hero he introduced a system of military organization to national politics.Beginning in 1825 he built up a national political machine A small,divided,virulent,and undisciplined14 press which had contributed to the disappearance of the Federalist Party and a monopolistic Washington press were replaced by an organized party press designed to provide discipline and propaganda.

the National Intelligencer,15 the organ of Jefferson,Madison,Monroe,and J.Q.Adams,had been the oracle of war sentiment before and after 1812 and had a wide circulation for daily,semi-weekly,and weekly editions.16 In opposition,Jackson and his followers established media to maintain a close contact with voters.After his election the United States Telegraph and the Washington Globe became administrative mouthpieces for partisan purposes.17

Rewards were offered to strengthen the morale of the troops;“no plunder no pay.”Political organizers in state politics such as Van Buren at Albany were brought to the national stage.In 1832 at the time of the nomination of Jackson for a second term,a system of nominating conventions was introduced in which a two-thirds rule was invoked to protect the position of the South.

the news value of the system became evident in the emergence of the presidential candidate as the chief consideration of politics.Under Jackson and his successor,Van Buren(1837-1841),a representative of New York State,campaign techniques were elaborated.Veto messages,written up by journalistic members of the Kitchen Cabinet for popular consumption,had a wide distribution.

The difficulties of the system became evident when attempts were made to meet the demands of regional groups.

the Tariff of Abominations,and the opposition to Vice President Calhoun of South Carolina in the nullification controversy,made the latter a defender of state rights and led to the enactment of the Force Act by which the President was given authority to call out the Army and Navy to enforce laws of Congress.

the dragon’s teeth of secession were sown.

To meet the type of organization built up in support of Jackson and Van Buren,an attempt was made to establish a Whig Party,based chiefly on anti-Masonic feeling,18 following the contest of 1836.In New York State,Seward and Weed,to weaken the position of Van Buren and to exploit the news value of a war hero,secured the nomination of W.H.Harrison,who had been engaged in a battle with the Indians at Tippecanoe Creek in 1811,and was promoted to command the Army of the Northwest in the War of 1812.

A vigorous campaign with an emphasis on such slogans as“log cabin and hard cider”led to his election in 1841 but his death shortly afterwards meant the elevation of the vice president,Tyler,a native of Virginia.

texas,which had seceded from Mexico in 1836,was annexed to the United States near the end of his administration(1841-1845),and formally admitted on July 4,1845.

the Texas issue defeated Clay’s hopes of the presidency in 1844 and weakened the Whig Party.

J.K.Polk(1845-1849),a native of North Carolina,the first dark horse ever nominated for the presidency,aggressively pressed forsettlement of the Oregon boundary dispute under the slogan“Fifty-Four Forty or Fight”and secured recognition of a boundary in 1846.

this aggressiveness was designed to increase the number of states in the north,to parallel the increase in the south with the addition of Texas and the acquisition of New Mexico and California.Americans in California took a hint from Polk and declared an independent state.Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to occupy the left bank of the Rio Grande;at length the exasperating Mexicans committed an overt act,which was followed by a brief successful war.

In 1847,in“the spot”resolutions,Lincoln took an active part in attacking Polk,and to a resolution of Congress thanking General Taylor,secured the addition of a rider that the war had been started by Polk“unnecessarily and unconstitutionally.”19 Polk20 was accused by the Whigs of forcing a war to extend the institution of slavery.Opposition to the aggressiveness of the south in the interests of new territory became more vocal through the activities of Lincoln and organs such as the Chicago Tribune.

Again to capture the electorate,Thurlow Weed,a skilful journalist and politican,played an active role in securing the selection of General Taylor,a native of Virginia,and the hero of Buena Vista(February 1847).He was selected at the Iowa convention within a month of his victory and later triumphantly elected.Vice President Fillmore,a native of New York,became President on his death in 1850 and like most vice presidents not in harmony with the policy of the administration,reversed it.

He was sympathetic to the South,and made the first effort of a president to purge his party by opposing the nomination of Whig congressmen who had voted against the Clay compromise.21 In 1852 the Whigs nominated Winfield Scott,the general who had led the troops to Mexico City,but he was defeated by Pierce (1853-1857).Newspapers exploited such remarks of Scott as“I never read the New York Herald”and“the hasty plate of soup.”

The long struggle between the North and South was drawing to a close as the North was no longer able to offset southern influence by such tactics as nominating generals for President.

these tactics had been to an extent selfdefeating since military power was reinforced by recognition of heroes in elections to the presidency.

the Whig Party22 was replaced by the Republican Party supported by the free soil movement.

the plantation system led to the acquisition of Indian and Mexican lands.

the spoils of Mexico were poisoning the political system-each addition of territory accentuated the rivalry between North and South.

the gold rush in California precipitated a more intense struggle for control over the first transcontinental railway.Jefferson Davis,Secretary of War under Pierce,a native of New Hampshire and a minor national hero at Buena Vista,insisted on a Pacific railway along the Mexican border linking California to the Gulf states and opening the trade of Asia to the plantation society.In the north,on the other hand,Stephen Douglas of Illinois demanded a route through Nebraska.

Mastery of the South was evident in the nomination and election of weak northern presidents-Pierce and Buchanan(1857-1861),the latter with the advantage of having refused to wear court dress in England,23 and the distinction of being the only president from Pennsylvania Compromises between North and South included the reciprocity treaty with the British colonies in 1854 designed to extend the influence of the North as a balance to expansion in the South.Finally the Supreme Court reflected the influence of the South when it appeared as an agent for southern expansion in the Dred Scott decision.

The nomination of Lincoln from the Middle West by the Republican Party and his election brought southern expansionism to an end.Robert E.Lee,a contemporary of Jefferson Davis at West Point,became in 1865 General-in-Chief of the Confederate armies.Withdrawal of able generals to the southern armies compelled the North to build up the effectiveness of a widely separated staff,with activities co-ordinated through the telegraph;the attempt was eventually successful under Grant.Inefficient military leadership in the North meant a longer period of war,greater loss of life,and greater bitterness toward the South.

After the savagery which characterized Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea,reflected in his remark“War is hell”,the prospects of reconciliation were slight.A revival in the Civil War of the savagery of ideological warfare established precedents for the twentieth century.

At the end of the Civil War a national army had emerged to serve a national state.

the President and executive were supreme above the states.Washington became the significant capital and state governments became less important.

the South was invited to join a vastly different union than that she had left,but in turn the war had created a solid and a different South from the one which had left the union.Ideological warfare had been carried to great length.

The North imposed a peace more bitter than war.

the Republican Party,as a result of the costs of civil war and victory,became a sacred cause to New England,the farmers of the Middle West,veterans concerned with pensions,and negroes.Andrew Johnson(1865-1869)was finally disregarded as President.In spite of the Constitution,the President was deprived of control of the Army and governments in the South which had been elected in 1865 were replaced in 1867 by military rule with the whole area divided into five military districts each under a major general.Grant,trained as a general,became the head of an executive which had been built up by a skillful politician but which had deteriorated under Johnson who followed the precedent of vice presidents in reversing policy.Like Jefferson Davis,Grant carried the dominating qualities of a soldier into the administration of civil affairs(1869-1877).

He was thwarted in his ambition to annex San Domingo in the south by Sumner,chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate,who long served as a focus of northern bitterness,following the savage physical attack on him by Brooks of South Carolina on the floor of the Senate,24 and who insisted on the acquisition25 of Canada to the north.

With the aggressive support of Union veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic,Hayes,a brigadier general under Sheridan,was elected to the presidency by a narrow margin in 1876(1877-1881).In his fight with the Senate,the telegraph became an effective instrument in the mobilization of public opinion.He acquired control of th e appointive power and“the long domination of the executive by the Congress was at an end”(H.J.Eckenrode).Grant had been unable to restore the South to white rule because of the Army and the bitterness following the war but under Hayes,as a result of the cohesiveness of white southerners in the Democratic Party,the retreat of the North from the South was begun.It was finally ended in 1894 and the negro was left a third-class citizen,legally free,but deprived of his vote.On the other hand Hayes began the unfortunate precedent of using his power over federal troops to break strikes in West Virginia,Pennsylvania,and Maryland.

Hayes was followed by James A.Garfield,a brigadier general at Shiloh,who to become President defeated General Winfield Scott Hancock,a Union commander at Gettysburg,“a good man weighing 280 pounds”(W.O.Bartlett,in the Sun).

Garfield,supported by Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune,had defeated Conkling and the New York Herald in the attempt in 1880 to nominate Grant for a third term.26 The appointive powers conceded to Hayes led to a concern with the introduction of civil service reform but since domination of the Senate necessitated a rigid control over patronage,a strict merit system was impossible.

Factors responsible for the murder of Lincoln,vicious personal bitterness,the war,disappearance of an interest in great causes,and the growth of the spoils system culminated in the assassination of Garfield,27 the defeat of Blaine and the election of Cleveland,and the return of the Democratic Party.(Arthur,Vice President under Garfield,ecame President in 1881,but contrary to the usual practice did not change his policy.)

On its return to power in 1885 the Democratic Party and its President,though relatively free from the hatreds exploited by the Republican Party,was inexperienced and undisciplined.A forceful leader,Cleveland (1885-1889,1893-1897)strengthened further the position of the executive in opposition to the Senate.He was defeated by his tariff message of December,1887,and by Benjamin Harrison(1889-1893),28 a grandson of President William Henry Harrison elected in 1840,a great grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence,and the last of the aristocrats in

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