Carl L. Becker and the Great War: a Crisis for a Humane Intelligence

• DOI: 10.1177/106591295600900101
• Date: 01 March 1956
• Author: Phil L. Snyder
• Published date: 01 March 1956
• Subject Matter: Articles

The Thesetern
Political Quarterly
CARL L. BECKER AND THE GREAT WAR:
A CRISIS FOR A HUMANE INTELLIGENCE
PHIL L. SNYDER
Cornell University
I
N 1906 Wendell Phillips Garrison relinquished the editorial control of
the Nation. He had served that magazine since its beginnings in 1865,
and his health was beginning to fail him - or so he told the many friends
of the Nation in a former letter, a copy of which went to Assistant Professor
Carl L. Becker at the University of Kansas. Becker was then thirty-two
years old and had been a book reviewer for the Nation since 1903.
Carl Becker responded to Garrison’s note. He wrote: &dquo;The announce,
ment of your retirement from the Editorial control of the Nation comes
with the shock almost of a personal bereavement. No one, I am sure, has
ever more fairly than yourself won relief from the strain of the world’s
work; but in my own case at least you have so constantly repaid a slight offi-
cial service with genuine personal kindliness that I cannot easily separate
the one from the other. Accept my congratulations on having f ought, f or so
many years, and no less uncompromisingly than your ilLustrious f ather, the
Enemies of the Republic. May your remaining years be many, bringing you
the rewards which distinguished service merits.&dquo; 1
Carl Becker’s detached skepticism is one of the most prominent f ea-
tures of his writings. The Becker who joined with the son of William Lloyd
Garrison as a battler of the &dquo;Enemies of the Republic&dquo; is not the Becker
1
Draft copy of letter from Carl Becker to Wendell P. Garrison, undated but filed with
Garrison’s letter of June 28, 1906. Italics added. Carl L. Becker Papers, Collection of
Regional History and University Archives, Cornell University. Thanks are here given
to the Cornell University Library for permission to print certain letters of the late
Carl L. Becker. The Becker Papers consist largely of notes, manuscripts, and letters
received. Quite a few of his own letters have been collected, however, and it is hoped
that these will be added to by Professor Becker’s various correspondents.
1

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2
who wrote the Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers
(1932) and Progress and Power (1936). Becker’s comments on the con-
temporary scene and on his own past were ordinarily as dispassionate as
his books.2
2
Even when desperately ill, Becker could still describe to a
colleague in an almost morbidly detached and graphic manner what the
doctors thought was wrong with his body and what they were trying to do
to it.3 Very much in character is a comment Becker made to Felix Frank-
furter in 1927. &dquo;I admire your valiant championship of the oppressed, your
courageous defense of lost causes, &
only wish I had the generous spirit &
the intelligent optimism which inspires your action.&dquo; 4
No doubt juxtaposing the letter to Garrison and the letter to Frank-
furter does not give an altogether reliable measure of the differences be-
tween the young and the mature Carl Becker. Perhaps the letter to Garri-
son was not wholly in character with Becker’s general view of the world
even when written; perhaps Becker was simply responding to the occasion
of Garrison’s retirement in what he considered an appropriate manner.
Nevertheless the young Carl Becker is a somewhat different person from
the mature Carl Becker. For example, in 1912 Becker called for a scientific
definition of progress. Such a definition, he then thought, would be very
useful in intelligently exploiting the past in the interest of the future. What
was needed was something that would bind men together in a mass move-
ment in the way that Rousseau’s epigram -
&dquo;Man is naturally good, it is
society which corrupts him&dquo; - had been able to do in the eighteenth cen-
tury, yet would assure a permanent movement of social regeneration and
would be in accord both with the scientific knowledge that had rendered
Rousseau’s epigram naive and with man’s emotional faith. But even with-
out such an impossible definition Becker apparently could view the future
as perhaps -
he was seldom unequivocal -
concentrating &dquo;in a second
attempt to bring to fruition those splendid ideals of social justice which
the generous minds of the eighteenth century conceived, and which the
men of the Revolution ... embodied in ’glittering generalities’ for the
edification of mankind.&dquo; 5
It seems significant that in 1936, when Becker did formulate a definition
of progress, it was not on the absolute basis called for in 1912 but on the
relative basis which he had previously thought unsatisfactory. For Becker
in 1936, progress emerges from a survey of 506,000 years of human history,
2
Personal interviews with Miss Gussie Gaskill, a long-time friend of the Becker family,
May 9, 1955 and December 22, 1955. According to Miss Gaskill his comments on
people could be quite as detached and were often devastating, yet were entirely with-
out malice.
3
Personal interview with Dr. Frederick G. Marcham, January 21, 1955.
4
Undated letter. Photostatic copy in Becker Papers.
5
Review of James Harvey Robinson’s The New History, in Dial, LIII (July 1, 1912), 19-22.

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3
with the eventual end not the Heavenly City on earth but an earth ren-
dered uninhabitable by a universe that knows not many Unlike Rousseau’s
epigram, Becker’s definition of progress is bleak and of no use at all as a
basis for a permanent mass movement.
II
The differences between the earlier and the later Carl Becker are pro-
nounced, and it is striking that we find the earlier Becker as late as 1912,
when he was almost forty years old. Is the change a normal development,
to be accounted for simply as intellectual growth in a man who continued
to learn and to change? Certainly this is a part of the answer, is the answer
in a vague sort of way. Without attempting to measure relationships with
precision, however, it seems certain that the major influence operating in
the mature and not in the earlier Carl Becker was the Great War and what
it taught a humane intelligence.
Carl Becker was teaching at the University of Minnesota when the
United States entered the Great War. From the beginning the war divided
the nation; the question of American participation involved bitter antago-
nisms within the nation, antagonisms that American nationalism only
partly assuaged after actual American involvement in April 1917. It is
impossible to determine Becker’s opinion on the problems that the war in
Europe presented to the American citizen. He probably was not a con-
spicuous partisan; at least, though Becker wrote many reviews during the
years 1914-1917, he never used such occasions to present his own views on
the war.
There is no doubt, however, that at least by April 1917 Becker favored
American involvement on the side of the Allies and agreed with the
Wilson Administration’s view of the war. Shortly after the American
declaration of war, Becker wrote an article on &dquo;The...