Banquet at Delmonico's

  ALSO BY BARRY WERTH

  31 Days

  The Scarlet Professor

  Damages

  The Billion-Dollar Molecule

  The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman

  (co-authored by Alexander Tsiaras)

  From Conception to Birth

  (co-authored by Alexander Tsiaras)

  Copyright © 2009 by Barry Werth

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Werth, Barry.

  Banquet at Delmonico’s: great minds, the Gilded Age, and the triumph of evolution in America / Barry Werth.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-798-3

  1. Social Darwinism—United States—History—19th century. 2. Human evolution—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. 3. Social change—United States—History—19th century. 4. Spencer, Herbert, 1820–1903—Influence. 5. Dinners and dining—New York (State)—New York—History—19th century. 6. Delmonico’s Restaurant (New York, N.Y.)—History—19th century. 7. Intellectuals—United States—Biography. 8. United States—Intellectual life—19th century. 9. United States—Social conditions—1865–1918. 10. United States—Social life and customs—1865–1918. I. Title.

  HM631.W47 2009

  303.40973’09034—dc22 2008016567

  www.atrandom.com

  v3.1_r1

  To Kathy

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Principal Characters

  PROLOGUE

  NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 8, 1882

  CHAPTER ONE

  CAMBRIDGE, 1871

  CHAPTER TWO

  NEW HAVEN, 1872

  CHAPTER THREE

  NEW YORK, 1873

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NEW HAVEN, 1874

  CHAPTER FIVE

  BROOKLYN, 1875

  CHAPTER SIX

  WASHINGTON, 1876

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  BALTIMORE, 1877

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  BROOKLYN, 1878

  CHAPTER NINE

  FRENCH RIVIERA, 1879

  CHAPTER TEN

  WASHINGTON, 1880

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NEW YORK, 1881

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  NEW YORK, 1882

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  THE CIVIL WAR THRUST AMERICA into the modern world. When the first shots were fired in 1861, we were an unsettled country composed mostly of farm families and independent local industries and institutions, a young patchwork race, overwhelmingly Christian. We would kill 620,000 of our own—almost two percent of the population—to preserve our idea of ourselves as a united, God-fearing, freedom-loving people. By the time it was done we were hurtling toward becoming a world power. Yet as Lincoln pointed out in his immortal first phrase commemorating the battle of Gettysburg—where more than fifty thousand died in three days of fighting—the nation in the bloody summer of 1863 was just eighty-seven years old; old enough for its people to have conquered the continental lands and set up institutions to rule them, but on the cusp of another, even more colossal challenge: Now what?

  What were we to become, and to think? After decades of struggling over slavery, a revolution in natural science, and an upheaval in the moral role of men and women in society—then the crisis of the terrible war itself—churches and colleges were convulsed over the old truths about the hand of God in human affairs, and about the nature of reason and sin. New York had taken over as the power center of finance, information, and business, and the Republicans controlled the national government, including most urgently how to treat the vanquished South and West. Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, published two years before the war began, was read and obsessed over by scientists and theologians, but it was a biology book, and the country in its upheaval paid it only scant attention.

  Traditional theology crumbled nearly to dust in the new postwar age. Many people craved an alternate system of beliefs—new principles to live and prosper by in the changing world, a creed—but Darwin, an English country gentleman, was a naturalist, not a philosopher. He had done more than anyone else to demonstrate the laws of change in nature, but during the war and for years afterward he publicly avoided the question of what evolution said about human behavior and society, and about right and wrong. It was Herbert Spencer, another Englishman and architect of the new system of science and reason, who first undertook that challenge. Spencer—a fearless and encyclopedic thinker and libertarian political theorist who privately was tortured, lonely, and consumed with his own frailties—set out nearly a decade before the war to explain the universality of evolution not only in nature but in man, society, behavior, morals, history, and ideas; that is, in the entire living world.

  In 1851, in his first major work of political philosophy, Spencer proposed what he called the Law of Equal Freedom: “Every man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.” This was the ethical stance from which all Spencer’s social prescriptions proceeded. Earlier liberals had recognized liberty as the key to life in society, but Spencer alone made equal freedom a general law of nature, the social equivalent of gravity. And in the years after the war, as the nation boomed and anything seemed possible to the rising classes, his philosophy uplifted those who used it to justify and explain everything from their own success in life, to why the North defeated the South, to why some races dominate others, to why the government shouldn’t help the needy or interfere with trade; ultimately, to why America was destined to become the world’s preeminent society. Evolution elevated superiority to a natural imperative, a mark of fitness, and across the spectrum of ideas, thinkers looking both back through history and ahead to the future found Spencer irresistible.

  His adherents extended wide power and influence. Carl Schurz, the country’s most powerful independent political figure, adapted Spencer’s Law of Equal Freedom to government; straddling the party divide, he helped thwart an early stab at imperialism, pressed the Republicans and President Grant to confront rampant corruption in their ranks, and reformed the management of the West, both of the land and of the Indians. The Brooklyn clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, storied equally for his progressive oratory and his scandalous personal life, used the most acclaimed pulpit in America to preach the gospel of evolution; that is, that it was God’s way to build better men and sort the worthy from the wretched. At Yale, Professor William Graham Sumner, a former minister, crusaded to bring economics and sociology under the Law of Equal Freedom by blending Christian virtue with the belief that unfettered competition is both natural and crucial for survival, while paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, discoverer of many of the great dinosaurs and of the first fossils to confirm evolutionary theory, transformed organized science by campaigning for and applying Darwin’s and Spencer’s ideas. Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie exalted Spencer as a prophet of peace. Popular philosopher and historian John Fiske found in Spencer’s writing a basis for asserting that God’s destiny for America was to lead the world.

  Most Americans still believed that sinners rotted in hell and tried to act accordingly, yet within a decade and a half after the war, Spencer influenced nearly every area of mode
rn thought: science, ethics, sociology, anthropology, political theory, philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, economics, and religion. Darwin, who always hoped to see America, suffered from a range of chronic ailments that kept him from ever making the voyage. By the time Spencer, who expanded evolution into a far-reaching cosmology, visited the United States in 1882, he was hailed nearly as a conqueror. His three-month tour was a kind of victory lap for those mostly Republican men of science, religion, business, and government—his proselytizers—who in a few short decades had plugged Darwinism into the main circuitry of the industrial age. His visit climaxed in a grand farewell banquet at Manhattan’s finest and most venerable restaurant, Delmonico’s.

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  (in order of appearance)

  HERBERT SPENCER

  Influential British popular philosopher who adapted the theory of evolution to the study of human society, history, psychology, and ethics. Father of social Darwinism and archdefender of individual liberty and laissez-faire capitalism. Inventor of the phrase “survival of the fittest.”

  EDWARD LIVINGSTON YOUMANS

  Leading writer, lecturer, editor, and scientific popularizer, whose evangelical crusade on behalf of Victorian science—Spencer in particular—evoked comparisons with John the Baptist. Founding editor and publisher of The Popular Science Monthly.

  JOHN FISKE

  Ecstatic Faustian Harvard-based lecturer and author whose cosmic philosophy bridged science and theology, and who electrified audiences with his lectures on America’s divine destiny as the world’s crowning race. Ardent disciple of Spencer.

  LOUIS AGASSIZ

  Swiss-born naturalist at Harvard, the most renowned and influential scientist in mid-nineteenth-century America. An avid anti-Darwinian whose views on separate creations among humans put him in league with the American School of Anthropology, which supported white supremacy and slavery.

  ASA GRAY

  Harvard botany professor and orthodox Christian who, as Darwin’s strongest and most vocal scientific ally in the United States, sought to mediate between science and religion on the question of design in the natural world. Agassiz’s chief rival and antagonist.

  CHARLES DARWIN

  British naturalist and codiscoverer of the theory of evolution through natural selection, whose “big book on species” in 1859 revolutionized nineteenth-century science, religion, society, and morality. Father of modern biology.

  THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

  Influential British physician/naturalist—self-anointed as “Darwin’s bulldog”—whose 1876 tour of the United States galvanized American science and scandalized creationists. Coiner of the term “agnosticism.”

  HENRY WARD BEECHER

  “The most famous man in America,” the country’s leading liberal Christian minister, brother of abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe, who said of Spencer’s works, “They have been meat and bread to me,” and whose adultery trial became the greatest social drama of the century.

  VICTORIA WOODHULL

  America’s first woman candidate for president. Spiritualist, women’s rights advocate, first woman (along with her sister) on Wall Street, publisher, she exposed Beecher’s alleged infidelity.

  CARL SCHURZ

  Transplanted German revolutionary; a Union general in the Civil War. As the nation’s most prominent political independent, became a senior statesman and reformer, serving as senator from Missouri, interior secretary, and intimate adviser to President Rutherford Hayes. Famous for saying, “Our country right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.” Devout follower of Spencer.

  ANDREW CARNEGIE

  Rising titan of the business world and avatar of the Age of Steel; later, world’s richest man, leading anti-imperialist crusader, and educational philanthropist. Rivaled Youmans and Fiske as Spencer’s most prominent American follower.

  CHARLES HODGE

  Orthodox Princeton theologian with a passion for the natural sciences. Believed Darwinism led logically to atheism because it denied intelligence (the argument from design) in the material world.

  WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER

  Episcopal rector turned Yale professor of political economy who provoked the marquee academic freedom battle of the century by teaching Spencer’s works to undergraduates. America’s foremost social Darwinist.

  OTHNIEL CHARLES (O. C.) MARSH

  Yale paleontologist whose discoveries in the American West were pronounced by Huxley to be the strongest physical evidence in support of evolutionary theory. Discoverer of giant dinosaurs including Tyrannosaurus and Apatosaurus. The country’s leading scientific spokesman after Agassiz’s demise.

  WILLIAM EVARTS

  Powerful Boston-born lawyer, statesman, and orator. Defended Beecher at his adultery trial, President Andrew Johnson against impeachment, and the Republican Party in the contested 1876 presidential election; served as U.S. attorney general and secretary of state and New York senator. Touted Spencer as the smartest man in the world.

  PROLOGUE

  NOVEMBER 8, 1882

  New York

  The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of their folly is to fill the world with fools.

  —HERBERT SPENCER

  AFTER NEARLY THREE MONTHS in America, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer arose alone in his room at the Windsor Hotel in a fitful state. Always an intolerably poor sleeper, he dragged himself to the mirror, exhausted and out of sorts. Gaunt and angular, Spencer wore thick side-whiskers, his massive overarching crown was all but bald, and light locks of gray hair enswirled his ears. He guarded his time and privacy as if his life depended on it, yet pressures now intruded from all sides. All he hoped was to survive the next few days of crippling social obligations and board the White Star steamship Germanic for the voyage home. The whole expedition, he believed, had been unwise, a grievous blunder—“another step downwards1 towards invalid life” he should not have undertaken.

  Little had gone right from the beginning, despite exaggerated efforts by his friends to shield him, at age sixty-two, from the public clamor generated by his first American visit. Here, unlike in Britain, Spencer was the most celebrated thinker of the day2; many of the most influential men in politics, law, industry, scholarship, and religion revered him and exalted his social and scientific doctrines. Probably no other man of ideas had ever enjoyed such a vogue. But Spencer had seldom felt weaker or less sure of himself. Since to say no was impossible, he had agreed to the unavoidable necessity of a farewell dinner in his honor. “The prospect before me3 was sufficiently alarming,” he would recall. “An occasion on which perhaps more than any other in my life I ought to have been in good condition, bodily and mental, came when I was in a condition worse than I had been in six-and-twenty years.”

  Spencer had booked the trip in January after much hesitation, yielding to the mild but persistent urging of his irreplaceable friend and promoter, the American publisher Edward Livingston Youmans. Spencer took great pains never to do more than he ought to, while Youmans never ceased doing more than he should, immolating himself in work on Spencer’s behalf. Six months earlier, Spencer hinted in a letter that he was entertaining the thought of a visit, and Youmans at once took up the cause of selling him on the idea. “Our fifty million people4 will soon be a hundred million,” he replied, “and they are developing a continent at a rate which must be seen to be understood.” Anticipating Spencer’s need for rest and distraction, Youmans sought to tempt him further by offering to arrange a salmon fishing trip to Canada. Spencer declined, having heard that the place was infested with flies and mosquitoes. “I like to take my pleasure neat5,” he wrote back. “If the drawbacks are considerable, I would rather not have it at all.”

  Spencer had likewise turned down a lucrative lecture tour. “I absolutely decline to make myself a show6,” he explained adamantly.

  What I do while with you I mean to make entirely subordinate to relaxation and amusement; and I shall resist p
ositively anything which in any considerable way entails on me responsibilities or considerable excitements. I suppose you have long ago discovered that I have a faculty of saying No, and that when I say No I mean No.

  Foreign notables, especially those from mother England, could anticipate major crowds and front page headlines across America, but Youmans knew Spencer too well to allow him to be run after by the public and the press. For months, newspapers heralded his visit, even as they dampened expectations. “Being one of the great thinkers7 of the day,” The Washington Post warned, “he comes here not to exhibit himself [and] he is not available for tea parties… . We must remember that he will not only see us, but see through us.” Such forbidding obstinacy had its rewards: Spencer would see America on his own terms or not at all—yet only, it would turn out, at the price of yielding to Youmans’s suggestion in a subsequent letter that he submit to a public dinner with at least some of those who hungered to see him. “To decline,” he wrote Youmans in June, two months before setting out on the Cunarder Servia from Liverpool, “would be awkward.”8

  Now in his room at the Windsor, Spencer cursed his decision to agree to the banquet: “Would that my boasted ability9 to say ‘No’ had been more fully justified!” Almost from the start, he had suffered the wear, tear, and aggravations of travel. Spencer prided himself, and was known, as an obsessively critical thinker: the class of Americans who considered him one of the great men and giant intellects of history—an Aristotle, a Newton—thought that his genius stemmed precisely from this thorough, exacting, and unconventional turn of mind. But when he arranged passage he had accepted the common wisdom that berths were best amidships because the pitching motion was least there, only to discover on retiring for the night—an elaborate ritual, according to a friend, in which he soaked his head with brine, covered his wet hair with a flannel nightcap, then donned a waterproof cap to keep the moisture from evaporating—the shrieks of the Servia’s fog whistle just overhead. “A horrible night from the noises,” he wrote in his diary. When Youmans came on board off Staten Island to greet him, he found Spencer “in so low a nervous state10 that the excitement of ordinary conversation was too much for him.”