CUSHING STROUT
439
another, for a ught he tells us; not a word of the conditions of success."
After all, james reminded him, the Southern secessionists when they
chose battle rather than having Lincoln as President were leading the
strenuous life just as much as the Union forces whom Roosevelt ideal–
ized and for whom justice Holmes as a young man had fought and been
wounded three times. Now the McKinley Administration, james
charged, "was openly engaged in crushing out the sacredest thing in this
great human world-the attempt of a people long enslaved to attain to
the possession of itself, to organize its laws and government, to be free
to follow its internal destinies according to its own ideals."
In attacking Herbert Spencer's sociological determinism, in which
individuals never counted for anything important, james emphasized
the role of great men in history as a kind of Darwinian spontaneous
variation, which the social environment "adopts or rejects, preserves or
destroys, in short
selects,"
and by doing so is modified by the great
man's influence in "an entirely original and peculiar way." The causes
that changed communities from generation to generation, he argued,
have been due to "the accumulated influences of individuals, of their
examples, their initiatives, and their decisions." Yet james's temper was
thoroughly democratic, and it led him to find the exemplary virtues of
courage, endurance, and fidelity in "the daily lives of the laboring
classes," as lived on "freight-trains, the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards
and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen."
Even so, he understood the value of a leader with liberal ambitions who,
when things get dammed up, could make a hole in the dam for "flow–
ing water" to enlarge it, and an educated country would be able "to use
such men for what they are worth, and to cast them off before they vic–
timize it." Robert Penn Warren has said that in the shadow of
All the
King's Men
was the "benign figure of William james" as well as Huey
Long and Mussolini. james would have been quick to see how Long's
populism, for all its genuine reforms, had become warped into a vic–
timizing dictatorship, just as he would have been proud that many Ital–
ian philosophers of Pragmatism lost their lives opposing fascism.
Characteristically, james first formulated Pragmatism in popular lec–
tures before they were published in
1907,
when he resigned from Har–
vard with great relief, feeling free "after thirty-five years of being owned
by others." Rereading Emerson's works in preparation for celebrating
Emerson at Concord in
1903,
James had responded most to Emerson's
tonic example of a man who had kept on his own nonconforming path
with faith in his individual mission. This precedent had encouraged
james to have the confidence to present Pragmatism as his contribution
