America Aflame Read Online Free Page A

the cornucopia of opportunity opened up by innovation, invention, and industrialization. The South was only a peripheral concern. And then it was not a concern at all. In fact, many northerners felt they understood the concerns of white southerners, with their allegedly incompetent and corrupt Republican governments. White northerners felt similarly burdened by incompetence and corruption, though in their case the culprits were immigrants and venal local politicians rather than blacks and white outsiders. The mutual empathy caused the northern press and citizens to underplay or even excuse the mounting violence against Republicans in the South. Just as the failed revolutions of 1848 gave many Americans pause concerning the potential for democratic movements to spin out of control and result in a greater despotism, so the news of the Paris Commune in 1871 affirmed the evils of too much democracy. Given the racial attitudes of most white northerners, such empathy was not difficult to come by. Also, the scientific wisdom of the period mandated a more cautious role for government in the affairs of men.
    Science assumed the reputation of religion after the Civil War: infallible and ignored at one’s own peril. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) became enormously popular in the United States, not only for its value in explaining the process of evolution but also because it seemed to offer a blueprint for ordering society—and order was a perennial concern of Americans. The popularization of scientific theories is not always a good thing, however. Subtleties become lost in translation. “Survival of the fittest,” a term Darwin never used, became shorthand for natural selection.
    Society, like the animal world, worked on immutable natural laws, Darwin’s social interpreters claimed. Uninformed intervention in these natural processes was not only unwise but also potentially destructive. While it was appropriate for government to complement these processes by assisting lesser races in attaining their fullest potential, paternalism could only go so far. Legislatures and other policy-making institutions, public and private, must devise actions based on scientific data and facts. Research must displace intuition in the public sphere.
    Americans also interpreted Darwin as positing a natural hierarchy. Darwin himself wrote of inferior races. These ideas circulated at a time when Americans were making major decisions on Indians and African Americans. For both the red and the black, the consensus was that sedentary farm work or simple mechanical labor in environments controlled by whites provided the best opportunities for these lesser races to reach their full, though limited, potentials.
    Science replaced evangelical Protestantism as the nation’s primary faith and policy arbiter. Science did not posit an end to government, but rather a public policy carefully calibrated to incorporate scientific evidence as the basis for legislation. In that respect, the advocates of a political science were more measured than their evangelical Christian predecessors, who wanted to use the government as an arm of the Lord. They wanted a Protestant constitution and a Protestant public policy to speed the millennial advent. Political scientists looked less to the millennium than to professional stewardship as their ultimate goal.
    Evangelical Christianity did not disappear after the war. Rather, it was increasingly secular, a function of the prevailing postwar culture rather than the other way around. Dwight L. Moody packed his revivals with the simple message of eternal salvation and banned politics from his pulpit. He offered little in the way of theological exegesis. Most of his “sermons” took the form of secular stories sprinkled with treacly aphorisms much more than biblical texts. As the Wild West and minstrel shows made caricatures of Indians and blacks, Moody succeeded in making religion a