[[Schlesinger is a prominent American historian and leading intellectual figure whose historical and political studies have won him both critical and popular acclaim. He was an influential figure in liberal politics, serving as a special assistant to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. In addition, Schlesinger is considered one of the foremost scholars of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies. In the essay that follows, Schlesinger argues that Brownson's theories on political economy presaged those of Karl Marx.]

Conservatives, it has been earnestly pointed out, always confront change with the same war-cries. Throughout American history they have unfailingly demonstrated that every strange proposal, from inoculation to the TVA, is economically unsound, politically dangerous and morally calamitous. The species of novelty may vary, but the arguments against it rarely do—and demurrers from the right have thus become exceedingly unconvincing. Yet conservatives have no monoply on denunciation by formula. Radicals behave with much the same regularity. They also lean on a set of arguments which apply equally to all situations. On both sides the arguments were probably invented in the critical Neanderthal days when conservatives and radicals battled over the infamous suggestion that huts were preferable to caves. They have proved useful ever since in cloaking prejudice with the magic authority of logic. Today, the newspapers of the right show that Mr. Roosevelt's every gesture is a secret signal for collectivism to drive economic law, constitutional morality, national tradition and good sense into the night. With the same beautiful predictability, the pamphlets of the left disclose the class struggle to be nearing its climax and declare that Utopia is just across the barricades. Each depression, in fact, raises up its prophets who revive the arguments of the last one with the charming confidence that they are discovering them. Since conservatives are the more insistent in turning up bogeymen, their blanket indictment is by now well discredited for all but themselves. But radicals employ old arguments with the same unoriginality, even if the intervals between their outbursts deceive them into thinking that the arguments refer intrinsically to each new crisis.

Nearly all the current left-wing shibboleths were in use a century ago in the first major American depression. Overexpansion of credit had thrown the young economy off balance in 1837, and the insolvency of the Barings in England quickly led to bankruptcies, domino-fashion, all through the United States. In May the banks of New York City suspended; in the whole year over one hundred banks failed. Private banks were hopelessly discredited. Everywhere factories were closed, wages cut, men thrown out of work. The depression hit America with added force because of the concentration in cities of laborers with nothing of their own to fall back on. The suffering was new in the national experience.

Such a collapse in the nation's economy speedily produced its critics, of whom the most searching was Orestes A. Brownson, a Boston editor and minister. Brownson was then a man of thirty-five, tall, black-haired, vehement, unpolished and unruly. As a child, he had moved from his birthplace in Vermont to up-state New York. There, after a brief and unhappy experience with old-line Presbyterianism, he became a Universalist minister and then an associate of Robert Dale Owen in the New York Workingmen's Party. He later was attracted to Boston and Unitarianism because of the warm humanity of William Ellery Channing, the great Boston preacher. As the pastor in two small New England towns and finally of an independent society of his own in Boston, Brownson grew to be very important in Unitarianism and Transcendentalist circles. George Ripley, the founder of Brook farm, was his closest friend; Henry Thoreau spent a summer with Brownson which he afterwards regarded as "an era in my life, the morning of a new Lebenstag"; Emerson and Alcott, indeed, pondered for a time the notion of contributing to Brownson's journal, the Boston Quarterly Review instead of starting the magazine of their own which finally became the Dial.

But Brownson was not a man to be satisfied with the reveries of Transcendentalism. He devoted himself to problems that most of the group ignored. Living in Chelsea and preaching largely to workingmen, he saw abundant evidence of the impact of depression on the poor. While Emerson and Thoreau worried about the remote evils of slavery, Brownson confronted the harsh and tangible question of capital and labor. He had once believed with Channing that reform was simply a matter of inner improvement; but such a belief could not easily survive the wretched misery that came in the wake of the Panic of 1837. Plainly it was not enough to be good, for the best intentions in the world must founder in the economic necessity of buying low and selling high. Brownson told Channing that he found more hatred of the rich than he expected. In face of this bitterness, which no appeals to the soul could placate or answer, he had to recast his plans of reform.

The analysis that Orestes Brownson arrived at is perhaps disconcerting to a generation which believes that Marx invented the Marxian theory of history. In 1838, a decade before the Communist Manifesto, Brownson interpreted history in terms of the inescapable conflict between those who profited by the existing order and those on whom its burden chiefly fell. "The war which is ever carried on between these two parties, whatever the name it may bear, or the forms it may assume is always, at bottom, a war of EQUALITY against PRIVILEGE." Elsewhere he wrote, "The feudal nobility is extinct, the Bourgeoisie, or middle class, is now on the throne." It is generally accounted the most virtuous class, he said—perhaps so: "it demands a laboring class to be exploited, but it loves order, peace, and quiet. These, however, it knows are incompatible with the existence in the community of an ignorant, vicious and starving populace; it, therefore, will attend to the wants of the lower classes up to a certain point." It "has a mission to execute, and when it shall have executed its mission it will then give way to the monarchy, not of a class, not of an order, but of Humanity." "All classes, each in its turn have possessed the government; and the time has come for all predominance of class to end; for Man, the People to rule."

Brownson thus obtained the historical warrant for his position; he had the set of doctrines—class conflict, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, and the historic function of capitalism—which form so necessary an apparatus for enlightenment today. He went on to make the deductions which have become sacred through reiteration by each new generation. The class struggle has spread to letters, he pointed out. It was lawful to praise Irving in the respectable reviews; but Cooper, the critic of American folkways, was under the ban of all the quarterlies—save Brownson's; William Cullen Bryant, the liberal editor of the Evening Post could hardly hazard another volume of poems; William Ellery Channing, the pro-labor clergyman, was condemned as a Loco-foco with his eye on Congress; and George Bancroft, the unrepentant Jacksonian, was endured only because a Whig would be inherently incapable of writing American history. As the class lines grew tighter, Brownson decided that the want of a great social crisis explained the timidity and imitativeness of American literature. "The whole matter of wealth and labor . . . must come up, be discussed and disposed of," Brownson told the students at Brown in the fall of 1839. "In the struggle of these two elements, true American literature will be born."

As America continued to flounder in the depths of depression, Brownson grew increasingly gloomy. In spite of a profound dislike for commitments of any kind, he joined the Democratic Party in 1839 because he thought it the only defense against the system of special legislation advocated by the Whigs, "which if not arrested, would bring us under the absolute control of associated wealth." The Constitution was not bad in itself, he thought, but it had been perverted under the pressure of the economic interests behind the Whig party. He was finally driven to remark, a century ahead of Lundberg, that economic legislation had fallen "under the control of, probably, less than two hundred individuals."

The advent of 1840, the election year, marked four years of intent thinking on the problem of capital and labor. The heat of the coming election suddenly ripened Brownson's conclusions and impelled him to give them to the public. In the July 1840 issue of the Boston Quarterly, just as the campaigns were swinging into action, he published the essay on "The Laboring Classes." This was an extraordinary performance, by far the best study of the workings of society written by an American before the Civil War, and probably for some time after. The exigencies of the day somewhat distorted the emphasis: Brownson's bitter anti-clericalism led him to exaggerate the villainy of the church, just as contemporary pamphleteers are moved by their hatred of newspaper owners to overrate the influence of the press. But the main lines of the diagnosis are straight and plausible. The class struggle had become acute, Brownson thought, and in England it would end inevitably in bloody war. The present wage system was intolerable. It was "a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble and odium of being slave-holders"; and the retreat of cheap land was putting the laborer even more at the mercy of his employer. Our duty, Brownson proclaimed, is "to emancipate the proletaries, as the past has emancipated the slaves."

All a bit familiar, of course, though today the same ideas are encrusted with a quasi-theological jargon, without which they can not be officially uttered. But the United States, in its first great depression, was in no mood to admire the brilliance of Brownson's analysis or to examine judicially his proposals for the future. The essay, crammed with social heresies and revolutionary appeals, was thrown into a savagely fought presidential contest and received as a pronouncement from a leading Democrat. The Whigs were suffering from that periodic disease of political parties—the passion to paint the opposition red; and they rushed to reprint "The Laboring Classes" as evidence of the radical leanings of the Democratic high command. The Democrats, suddenly embarrassed to find Brownson disrobing in public, were forced to repudiate him and make clear that he was in no way speaking for the party.

Brownson, however, was not to be deterred or intimidated, and in a second essay he filled in the outlines of his first inquiry into American society. The dominance of agriculture had thus far hindered the formation of classes, he wrote, but the day was now arrived when stratification could no longer be avoided. This provoked more whines of fear and more groans of impending disaster; but in November Van Buren—another New York aristocrat of Dutch ancestry who was condemned as a traitor to his class—went down to defeat, and the forces of Satan were driven from power.

Brownson was compelled by his inexorable logic to become a Catholic, and his name quickly dropped out of American history. But before he went over to Rome he anticipated virtually all the slogans and shibboleths that every depression since has resuscitated, and he applied the tool of economic analysis to the scene before him with a skill which few later commentators have attained. Some of his observations were so far ahead of the so-called science of political economy that his times passed them by without pausing. He pointed, for instance, to the defects of the "vicious method" of distributing the products of labor by which

we destroy the possibility of keeping up an equilibrium between production and consumption. We create a surplus—that is, a surplus, not when we consider the wants of the people, but when we consider the state of the market—and then must slacken our hands till the surplus is worked off. During this time, while we are working off this surplus, while the mills run short time, or stop altogether, the workmen must want employment. The evil is inherent in the system.

The Panic of 1837 had to repeat itself half a dozen times before the professional economists achieved the idea of the business cycle.

Unhappily, few of Brownson's successors have had his remarkable perspicacity. These observations were sharp and fresh with him, but latterly they have grown into clichés, as stale and monotonous as the empty fear of the conservative that hell and Moscow always lie in wait for the person who takes two strides ahead. The United States has unaccountably lived through each depression which the logic of the crystal gazers ruled to be the last. The disappointed seers, in order to preserve the sanctity of their theory, have had to explain away each survival. For many years the free-land hypothesis was a favorite alibi: disaster, the story went, was detained because the unemployed moved away to the frontier instead of starving in the slums and growing class-conscious. Actually, as Brownson pointed out at the time, the workingmen had to stay in the slums, because they lacked money to get to the frontier, and, even if they had the money, few would have cared to exchange the city for the wilderness. In recent years, with the disappearance of the frontier, this convenient fiction has been washed up. Imperialism took its place for a while, but that too is now a dead issue. When the moment comes to explain why the present depression was not fatal, the radicals will hide their embarrassment by pointing to housing or the next war or the WPA and will justify their choice in a highly persuasive theory which observes strictly the etiquette of logic.

But then another depression will come. The conservatives will swing into their well-rehearsed dirges at every suggestion of remedial measures. The American spirit, the iron laws of political economy and the dictates of horse sense will suffer continual insult. The Constitution will face fates worse man death, and communism will be just around the corner. The conservatives will believe that they are following rigorously the laws of logic and sound thinking, and that their arguments arise uniquely out of the conditions at hand. The radicals will point out gleefully that the people on the right are resurrecting old battle cries. Meanwhile, they will themselves engage in mystic communion with their sacred books, and will state solemnly that the class struggle is on its last phase. They will point out that the factors which staved off disaster in all previous depressions cannot possibly affect this one. They will look for a great literature to emerge, full-armored, from the turnmoil. They will believe that they are following rigorously the laws of logic and sound thinking, and that their arguments arise uniquely out of the conditions at hand.

Radicalism, like capitalism, has its folklore.