tration of economic power had laid the foundations of a new order in which the masses would simply expropriate the collectivized forces of production and use them for the common good. George understood that collectivization is equally disastrous whether it occurs under capitalism or under socialism. Whatever can be said against his own ideal—a world of small proprietors, based on common ownership of land—at least it did not pretend to reconcile democracy and republican institutions with the social conditions that "compel every worker to seek a master."

George was not alone in his attempt to revive an understanding of the "law of civilization and decay," as Brooks Adams called it. By 1895, when Adams published his own version of the cyclical view of history, Americans had more reason than ever to worry about the future. As the simple market economy of the early nineteenth century gave way to an industrial economy elaborately organized on an international scale, small producers fell victim to corporate monopolists, farmers were forced off the land, and workers struggled without much success against the brutalizing effects of modern mass production. The Populist movement gave a political direction to many of the same apprehensions that troubled Henry George and Brooks Adams, including the fear that a growing concentration of power in the hands of investment bankers would not only impoverish the masses and reduce democratic institutions to empty forms but choke off the sources of creative energy in American culture, inaugurating a vulgar cult of success. The Law of Civilization and Decay might have become part of a searching discussion of the choices still open to America at the end of the nineteenth century. Instead, like the Populist movement itself, it was either brushed aside as a cranky, ineffectual protest against a future the country had no choice except to embrace or selectively absorbed (with considerable assistance from Adams himself) into the new imperialist rhetoric that upheld overseas expansion as a means of reviving the martial spirit.

Even those who admitted that Adams's "powerful" and "melancholy" book contained a "very ugly element of truth," as Theodore Roosevelt wrote in a long review, refused to take seriously the possibility that a further development of industrial civilization, along the lines already laid out, might lead in the long run to ruin. Nor could they accept the proposition that industrialism inevitably led to inequality. The idea that yeomen farmers were helpless in the hands of the moneylenders, Roosevelt said, was "really quite unworthy of Mr. Adams, or of anyone above the intel

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