(click on book cover for full text)
Wilbur Cortez Abbott’s entry into the fearmongering sweepstakes
of the 1920s, a decade full of panics from the Red Scare to Black
Friday, was The New Barbarians (1925). A professor of history at
Harvard, Abbott argued that yes, barbarians were at the gates, and
it wasn’t just the anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti (who were still
appealing their conviction in 1925) we needed to worry about, but
many others: the socialists, communist-internationalists, and
believers in any other form of “proletarianism,” including the
progressives and even the “humanitarians.” Most, but not all, of
the academic reviews of Abbott’s book hastened to note its lack of
scientific analysis, rigor, and data, but the newspapers and
magazines were divided. S.L. Cook in the Boston Transcript praised
its “perfect courage, . . . patriotic purpose, . . . candid honesty,”
and “admirable style”—it was, they wrote, “straightforward, clear
with no verbal vaporings or verbal pose.” The Nation, on the other
hand, called it “dubious.” Saturday Review of Literature said it
demonstrated “calm reason and clear logic.” To today’s eyes it is
reactionary claptrap.
I will quote a sample from his second chapter at length because it
sums up the thinking of many right-wing intellectuals of the day.
Abbot is the kind of writer Tom Buchanan is enamored of in The
Great Gatsby, and it has echoes in our current political discourse:
It is evident that we live in an age not only of revolution but
of revolt. We have seen the rise of an art, ignorant of line and
color and perspective, like and inferior to that of the cave men;
a school of music, innocent of harmony and beauty, echoing
the savagery of Central African tom-toms, accompanied by
dancing which would have roused the envy of the Bacchanals,
and by words adapted to the intellectual capacity of a moron.
We hear “self-expression” urged by those who have the least to
express worth hearing; and we have found in that agreeable
phrase a euphemism for much of what was called by an earlier,
more downright age mere selfishness and egotism.
We read a fiction more subtly decadent than the literature of
the corrupt Roman Empire declining to its fall; and a poetry
inferior in form and content to that of our remote Teutonic
ancestors. We see desperate efforts to break down the family;
to set youth against parental authority; to substitute the State
for the home. We listen to the praises of a moral code like that
of a herd of wild cattle; and we hear critics and so-called
thinkers extolling these manifestations as the last word in
artistic and philosophical achievement. We experience a revival
of Spiritism and superstition, of magic and credulity. It is
nothing less—indeed it is so acclaimed by many of its
devotees—than a return to the primitive, a protest against
“over-civilization”, an even more radical “return to nature”
than was preached by the prophets of revolution in the 18th
century. Such are the decadents.
And what do they mean by “over-civilization”? Is it that we
can produce more goods in less time and greater quantity than
man ever made before; that we can travel faster on insignificant
errands than ever man traveled before; that we are multiplying
the human species almost to suffocation, and extinguishing the
waste spaces, the “lungs of the earth”, more rapidly than ever
before; that, having conquered the earth and the sea and
exterminated their other inhabitants as quickly as we could, we
are proceeding to the conquest of the air—and to what end
save our own material comfort? Are we greater than our fore-
fathers in any concerns save those of the flesh?
Wipe out the tremendous mechanical advance of the past
century, and what have we left? Only Buddha and Confucius
and Mohammed and Christ; only Homer and Virgil and Dante,
Shakespeare and Milton, Goethe and Schiller, Corneille and
Molière; only Copernicus and Galileo and Newton; da Vinci
and Raphael and Titian and Michelangelo, Rembrandt and
Rubens, Velasquez and Vandyck; only, if you like, Alexander
and Caesar and Charlemagne and Napoleon; only Cromwell
and Washington and Lincoln. Only that long line of men who,
from the time of Pericles and Plato, of Euripides and
Aristophanes and Phidias, have made us what we are. We are
great because we stand upon the shoulders of the past; our
greatest glory is that man is the “time-binder” who, unlike all
other animals, preserves the achievements of the generations
and so makes his way forward. This we are urged by many
voices to forget. Verily, declare the prophets of the new order,
verily we are the people, and wisdom began with us. Such is the
cry of the new barbarians, drunk with materialism, the
contemptuous ignorance of the past by the spawn of
industrialism which has no past. Yet, contrary to the apparent
conviction of many of these prophets, the Age of Reason did
not begin about 30 years ago.
But it is not mere primitive vulgarity which threatens us with
submergence. We have seen the rise of pseudo- political cults,
urging experiments in government discredited by the
experience of 50 centuries, and endeavoring, not without
success, to persuade men to throw aside the fruits of that
experience and, in the name of “social justice”, wreck this fabric
we have built. We have seen plunder raids organized behind
smoke screens of words.
And so goes the cry of the American reactionary, always,
lamenting the decadence of the present compared to the glories of
the past, bolstered by references to the savagery of his antagonists.
Abbott was an academic historian who got his degrees in the 1890s
at Wabash, Cornell, and Oxford. He taught at Cornell, Michigan,
Dartmouth, Kansas, and Yale (this last from 1908 to 1920). He
was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1921
and hired by Harvard, where he became Francis Lee Higginson
Professor of History for the rest of his career. His works included
books on European and American history and on Oliver
Cromwell, along with topical writing like The New Barbarians and
other pieces. In 1935 be published Adventures in Reputation: With an
Essay on Some “New” History and Historians, which discussed the way
some famous historians had seen their reputations soar and then
crash and burn. The irony is that his own reputation would fall
from the heights of his endowed chair at Harvard to the sub-
basements of abashed foolishness. Survey assessed Abbott’s
contributions to the public conversation astutely in its review of
The New Barbarians, when it said he “swallows propaganda bait,
hook, and sinker and reiterates the most preposterous falsehoods.”