standard he had set for himself. He was as much a prisoner of his methodology as Tocqueville had been of his. While Bryce visited on three separate occasions between 1870 and 1883, his time in America amounted only to nine months, the same length of time Tocqueville had roamed the nation half a century earlier. As a result, Bryce was as dependent on anecdotal information about the United States as Tocqueville was; in some ways, Bryce’s dependence is even more obvious. Bryce’s network of friendships and acquaintances, though arguably larger than Tocqueville’s, was better defined, which meant that the lens through which he observed American society and politics had been ground to a certain curve. Indeed, “the America he entered did not centre on the ward districts or working man’s clubs, or immigrant aid societies, but rather on civil service commissions, universities, reform clubs and the editorial offices of genteel journals.” 46 As one critic put it at the time: “Mr. Bryce sees America through the rim of a champagne glass, to the strains of soft music, and in the smiles of fair women.” 47
For all his pretensions of objectivity, Bryce was very much the prisoner of his class. His view was colored by his basic liberalism, whether of the Gladstone variety at home or the establishment liberals with whom he associated in the United States. Nearly to a man, these were East Coast activists of progressive instincts; nary a one of them was close to being a Southerner or a defender of the rights of states against the increasing presence of the national government. The liberal nationalism they displayed, their confidence in the power of government to reform the inconveniences of the human condition, fit in well with Bryce’s own prejudices about the purposes of government. The circle of American friends in whom he put so much confidence ensured that Bryce’s work, in the end, would inevitably suffer from the subjectivity he sought so strenuously to avoid.
The biases one perceives in The American Commonwealth are largely the result of Bryce’s method of actively involving these acquaintances in the creation of the book. The list of those who served him as de facto research assistants is nothing less than an intellectual and political honor roll of the age. Among those who contributed to The American Commonwealth were Thomas Cooley (on constitutional issues), Oliver Wendell Holmes (on legal education), Senator Carl Schurz (on the Senate), Theodore Roosevelt (on municipal government and civil service reform), Woodrow Wilson (on Congress), Arthur Sedgwick (on the Erie Ring), and Frank Goodnow (on municipal government and the Tweed Ring.)48 The assistance they gave Bryce was not limited to culling facts for his use or to reading and commenting on early drafts and later revisions. Goodnow, for example, actually wrote in his own name the chapter in the first edition entitled “The Tweed Ring in New York City,” as did Seth Low the chapter entitled “An American View of Municipal Government in the United States.” In part, these farmed-out chapters were given over to Goodnow and Low “to prevent the pirating of the work by American publishers, who at that time were not constrained by copyright laws except where the author was an American citizen.” 49 But whatever the legal reasons, the contributions of Low and Goodnow are only the most visible of debts Bryce incurred in writing The American Commonwealth.
In a speech before the Pilgrims’ Society in 1907, Bryce, by then Ambassador to the United States, recollected the sources for his great book.
I am a good listener . . . and I wrote [ The American Commonwealth ] out of conversations to which I listened. I talked to everybody I could find in the United States, not only to statesmen in the halls of Congress, not only at dinner parties, but on the decks of steamers, in smoking cars, to drivers of wagons upon the Western prairies, to ward politicians and city bosses.50
The itineraries of Bryce’s first three journeys through America suggest he was not exaggerating.51 While his closest friends, and those who ultimately exerted the greatest influence on the work as a whole, may have been one or two steps removed from the political fray, Bryce was never inclined to sidestep the nitty and the gritty of American life; he rubbed shoulders with all kinds, from the gun-toting prospectors of Leadville, Colorado, and waitresses in a hotel in the White Mountains to the cigar-chomping pols he met at the New York State Democratic Party Convention, complete with Boss Tweed himself, “a fat, largish man, with an air of self-satisfied good humour and a great deal of shrewd knavery in eye and mouth.” 52 At every turn, Bryce’s methods for getting his original and impressionistic information were “unorthodox.”
He read all parts of newspapers: noting the rates of interest on mortgage loans; counting eighteen advertisements of clairvoyants and soothsayers in a San Francisco newspaper and concluding that they were a sign of a “tendency of this shrewd and educated people to relapse into the oldest and most childish forms of superstition.” He smelt dollar bills in Wisconsin and detected that they had the odor of skins and furs used by the newly arrived Swedes and Norwegians. In a town of the Far West he borrowed a locomotive engine from the stationmaster, in order to run out a few miles to see “a piece of scenery.” He heard or read all sorts of speeches—in legislatures, political party meetings, court trials, Fourth of July celebrations, and at funerals and dinners—and concludes that American oratory was as bad as that of the rest of the world, except that the toasts at public dinners seemed slightly fewer and better than in England.53
Such methods, however unorthodox in a scholarly sense, were essential if Bryce, like Tocqueville before him, were to peek behind the institutional facade of The American Commonwealth and capture the great and motive force of the American people. While Bryce relied for his facts on everything from the great works of the American political order, such as The Federalist, to more practical publications, such as the Ohio Voters’ Manual, in rounding out his picture of America he simply had to move beyond mere “books and documents.” 54 For the deeper, less tangible aspects of American life, Bryce had to “trust to a variety of flying and floating sources, to newspaper paragraphs, to the conversation of American acquaintances, to impressions formed on the spot from seeing incidents and hearing stories and anecdotes, the authority of which, though it seemed sufficient at the time, cannot always be remembered.” 55 Bryce himself estimated that “five-sixths of [ The American Commonwealth ] was derived from conversations with Americans in London and the United States and only one-sixth from books.” 56 His broad purpose was to make America come alive for his readers; words could not always be trusted: “ [T]he United States and their people . . . make on the visitor an impression so strong, so deep, so fascinating, so interwoven with a hundred threads of imagination and emotion, that he cannot hope to reproduce it in words, and to pass it on undiluted to their minds.” 57 While it might be, strictly speaking, impossible to capture such feelings, Bryce was determined to come as close as possible. Through his sprawling collection of hard facts and figures joined with colorful anecdotal recollections, he sought to convey to his readers the basic belief to which he would always cling: “America excites an admiration which must be felt upon the spot to be understood.” It was this emotion, this excitement that Bryce wanted to transport to the common rooms of Oxford, the ministerial cubicles of Whitehall, and the drawing rooms of Mayfair. The immediate success of The American Commonwealth suggests that he did just that.
Bryce’s study was greeted with high praise, both in England and the United States. Woodrow Wilson in the Political Science Quarterly hailed it as “a great work . . . a noble work.” 58 Lord Acton in the English Historical Review (which Bryce had helped to found) thought that Bryce’s “three stout volumes” were indeed “a far deeper study of real life” than Tocqueville had achieved.59 It was, Acton wrote to Bryce, “resolutely actual” in its account of America.60 Gladstone viewed it as nothing less than “an event in the history of the United States.” 61
For all the praise The American Commonwealth enjoyed, there were criticisms. Both Acton and Wilson, for instance, complained that the book was oddly ahistorical. Acton voiced his regret that Bryce had chosen “to address the unhistoric mind,” while Wilson concluded that the primary weakness of the work—its failure to move beyond facts toward any “guiding principles of government” —was the result of Bryce’s “sparing
