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i

Democracy Against Domination

ii
iii

Democracy
Against Domination
K. Sabeel Rahman

1
iv

1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

© Oxford University Press 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

Names: Rahman, K. Sabeel, 1983– author.
Title: Democracy against domination / K. Sabeel Rahman.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016022380 | ISBN 9780190468538 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: United States—Economic polic—2009– |
United States—Economic policy—Citizen participation. |
Democracy—Economic aspects—United States. | Capitalism—Political aspects—United States. |
Equality—Economic aspects—United States. |
Financial services industry—Law and legislation—United States. |
United States—Economic conditions—2009
Classification: LCC HC106.84 .R34 2016 | DDC 338.973—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016022380

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
v

We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet … it is a word the

real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the reso-
nance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come,
from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history … remains unwritten,
because that history has yet to be enacted.
—​Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas” (1871)
vi
vii

CON T E N T S

Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii

1. Democracy, Domination, and the Challenge

of Economic Governance   1
2. Managerialism and the New Deal Legacy   31
3. The Progressive Critique of the Market   54
4. Economic Domination and Democratic Action   78
5. Structuring Democratic Agency   97
6. Anti-​Domination as Regulatory Strategy   116
7. Democratic Agency as Regulatory Process   139
8. Democratic Freedom in the New Gilded Age   166

Notes  181
Bibliography  211
Index  227
viii
ix

P R E FACE

On January 3, 2008, Barack Obama won the Iowa caucus, kicking off what
would become one of the most remarkable and surprising primary seasons
in American politics. As he took the stage late that night to thank his sup-
porters, he set aside the symbolism of his role as an African-​American can-
didate with a multi-​racial and global background. “I know you didn’t do this
for me,” he told his supporters. “You did this because you believed in the
most American ideas—​that in the face of impossible odds, people who love
this country can change it.” His campaign slogan, “HOPE,” was to Obama,
not a plea for blind faith but rather a call to action:

Hope is what led a band of colonists to rise up against an empire. What led the great-
est of generations to free a continent and heal a nation. What led young women and
young men to sit at lunch counters and brave fire hoses and march through Selma and
Montgomery for freedom’s cause… . Hope is the bedrock of this nation. The belief that
our destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by all those men and women who are
not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it
should be… . [the belief that] brick by brick, block by block, callused hand by callused
hand, … ordinary people can do extraordinary things.”

It was a thrilling moment, and a singular political experience for me as I sat

with friends huddled in the bitter cold of another Cambridge winter listen-
ing on the radio. Over the next few months, I, along with millions of other
Americans, watched in fascination and growing excitement as Obama’s
campaign marched from state to state. In the protracted battle with Hillary
Clinton over the Democratic nomination, it became a campaign not just for
an individual but for this aspiration to transformational, rather than incre-
mental, change—​to collective democratic action.
Meanwhile, trouble was already brewing in the American economy. The
collapse of Bear Stearns marked an increasingly panicked effort by regula-
tors and financiers to stave off a larger financial collapse, which came in full
force that September with the fall of Lehman Brothers. Often overlooked
x

( x )   Preface

as esoteric, the world of complex financial securities and high finance sud-
denly became the central battleground for efforts to rethink American
political economy. The bailouts of Wall Street giants underscored how, far
from being a pure domain of private and self-​correcting activity, finance
is deeply embedded in, and constituted by, politics. The financial system
seemed very much part of the larger problems in an increasingly unequal
economy. This juxtaposition of economic crisis with the Obama campaign
seemed to set the stage for a potentially transformational administration,
one that might redress long-​brewing anxieties about economic opportu-
nity, inequality, and democratic accountability.
If the Obama administration in the following years fell short of such a
large-​scale economic transformation, it was not for want of effort. Historians
will spend years unpacking the political battles of the Obama era, from the
economic stimulus to financial reform to healthcare; the clashes between
Obama and more radical wings of his own party on the one hand, and the
pressures from a resurgent conservative populism on the other; the battles
between the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. But for
those of us living in the moment, these battles were not only enormously
consequential for the fate of millions of Americans and their economic pros-
pects; they also cast into relief fundamental moral and structural questions
that will continue to shape American politics in the twenty-​first century.
What does a good economy look like? How can aspirations for economic
freedom be reconciled with the realities of corporate power, finance, and
market forces? What political forces, groups, and institutions do we trust
to make these judgments and to govern the modern economy justly and
fairly? As the immediate economic crisis morphed into the long-​running
Great Recession, these concerns were joined by another, more existential
one: Is America still a democracy at all, or has it become an oligarchy, where
the economic and political institutions alike serve the wealthy—​and resist
all best efforts at reform?
As I began to dig deeper into the legal, historical, and normative ques-
tions around financial regulation, I gradually came into contact with a wide
community of scholars, activists, and practitioners studying American
political economy from different angles, and seeking avenues for creating a
more equitable and democratic economic order. Among scholars in fields
as diverse as legal history, American political development, the history of
capitalism, neorepublican political theory, participatory governance, and
empirical law and policy studies, the political battles of the Obama era
have helped accelerate a new wave of interdisciplinary studies of political
economy, examining how the American economy is constructed by law
and public policy over time, and how these features might be reformed
going forward. Among practitioners, I encountered an equally exciting
xi

Preface   ( xi )

community of organizers, policymakers, and advocates working at the fore-

front of economic justice and racial equality movements, increasingly link-
ing these traditional domains of advocacy to deeper structural questions
about economic policy and democratic institutional reform.
Though this book developed as a work of political theory, these diverse
influences have made it necessarily something more interdisciplinary and
cross-​cutting. The real interest of this book is to help lay some concep-
tual groundwork for these scholarly and reform efforts, to help imagine
what the normative foundations might be for a more egalitarian, demo-
cratic political economy. What does economic freedom mean really in the
twenty-​first century? What kinds of practices, institutions, and normative
resources do we need in order to make possible the kind of genuinely
participatory, inclusive democratic agency Obama and other reformers
have called for? In exploring these questions, I found common cause in
the historical thinkers of a century ago, when lawyers, economists, phi-
losophers, labor activists, and political reformers of all stripes grappled
with the political and economic inequities and upheavals of industriali-
zation. As I read more of the work of thinkers like John Dewey and Louis
Brandeis while also studying the contemporary legal and policy issues
around financial regulation, the parallels were too powerful to ignore.
This is not to suggest that these historical figures had the right answers
that we should employ today, but rather that they developed normative
and institutional insights from which today’s scholarship and reform pol-
itics could benefit.
The political theory of this book is therefore not a project of political
philosophy, but rather something more along the lines of what Jeremy
Waldron has called “political political theory”—​a political theory focused
on questions of institutional design and structure; seeking normative and
institutional design principles through which we can better enable we the
democratic public to govern ourselves; and doing so through deep con-
versation with law, political science, and the lived realities of politics. It
is also a work that follows in a more classical tradition of “political econ-
omy” of thinkers like Smith, Marx, Weber, Hayek, and Polanyi, as well as of
American lawyers, theorists, and reformers like Brandeis, Dewey, and oth-
ers. Political economy in this sense connotes both a normative and an insti-
tutional inquiry into the deep structures that constitute our political and
economic systems, and the interrelationships between them. Part of this
inquiry is sociological and empirical: What are these relationships between
economic and political structures? Part of it is normative: How ought we
structure these systems to better promote values of freedom, equality, and
dignity? And part of it is practical: What tools, levers, laws, and policies
might we make use of to make these aspirations real?
xii

( xii )   Preface

Books such as this do not “end”; they merely stop, called to a halt by
deadlines and practicalities—​and by the need to share the ideas, however
tentative and provisional, with a wider range of interlocutors and (in all
likelihood) critics. I have no doubt that the ideas in this book will continue
to evolve and change. But I hope that in their current form they can offer
some insight, inspiration, and a starting point for further debate, research,
and reform.
Brooklyn, New York.
January 2016.
xiii

AC KNOW L E DG M E N T S

I must thank the many friends, advisors, supporters, and interlocutors who
have made this book possible. A multi-​year project such as this cannot be
the work of one person; it is necessarily a product of a community. And
though I alone bear the responsibility for any errors or shortcomings of this
book, the credit such as may be due, is shared.
Early drafts of the book were presented at various venues. Chapter 2 was
presented at the “Beyond the New Deal Order” conference at UC Santa
Barbara (October 2015). Chapter 3 was initially presented at the American
Political Science Association annual convention in 2013. Portions of
Chapter 4 were presented at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History
conference in October 2015, and previously published in “Democracy
Against Domination: Contesting Economic Power in Progressive and
Neorepublican Political Theory,” Contemporary Political Theory (2016).
Chapter 6 was presented at the Harvard University Legal History Workshop
(February 2013), and the American Association of Law Schools annual
convention ( January 2014).
Thanks to Dave McBride, Katie Weaver, Oxford University Press, and
two anonymous reviewers for shepherding this manuscript through pub-
lication and providing great feedback that improved the work dramati-
cally. Thanks to Aaron Taylor-​Waldman for excellent cover design. Eric
Beerbohm, Jerry Frug, Nancy Rosenblum, and Michael Sandel guided
this project from its earliest stages, and above all gave me the license and
encouragement to explore. I am grateful to several mentors and teachers at
Harvard, each of whom helped shape this project in different ways, espe-
cially: David Barron, Tomiko Brown-​Nagin, Dan Carpenter, Chris Desan,
Archon Fung, Lani Guinier, Peter Hall, Mort Horwitz, Alex Keyssar, James
Kloppenberg, Ken Mack, Martha Minow, David Moss, Joe Singer, Dennis
Thompson, Richard Tuck, Adrian Vermeule, and Cass Sunstein. As I began
to engage with the legal academic community outside of Harvard first as a
post-​doctoral fellow, and then as a junior faculty member, I was met with,
and am especially grateful for, the enthusiastic support and encouragement
xiv

( xiv )   Acknowledgments

of Bill Novak and Aziz Rana. Thanks as well to my new colleagues whose
critical engagement and feedback have helped bring this project to conclu-
sion, particularly: Joey Fishkin, Willy Forbath, David Grewal, Bob Hockett,
Herbert Hovenkamp, Alex Lee, Adam Levitin, Nelson Lichtenstein, Alice
O’Connor, Saule Omarova, Elizabeth Pollman, Jed Purdy, Morgan Ricks,
Brishen Rogers, Chuck Sabel, Karen Tani, and Zephyr Teachout.
I am also grateful for support from a number of research centers, work-
shops, and academic communities throughout the course of this project.
Thanks to John Cisternino, and the Tobin Project’s invaluable convening of
scholars of democracy and markets; the conveners and participants in the
Political Theory Workshop in the Harvard Government Department; the
Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics and the Center for American Political
Studies at Harvard University; Akiba Covitz, Randy Kennedy, and the
Reginald Lewis Fellowship at Harvard Law School. Thanks to my col-
leagues at the Roosevelt Institute and New America, where I was fortunate
to be based as a fellow during parts of this project, especially Felicia Wong,
Alan Smith, Taylor Jo Isenberg, Dorian Warren, Mike Konczal, Andy Rich,
Barry Lynn, Mark Schmitt, Peter Bergen, and Reid Cramer. Thanks as well
to my new colleagues at Brooklyn Law School for creating such a dynamic
and vibrant intellectual community where I put the finishing touches on
this project.
In the later stages of this project, I was fortunate to become part of a
new effort to link academic research and reform advocacy through the
Gettysburg Project for Civic Engagement. Through this work, I gained a
deeper appreciation for the kinds of moral and institutional challenges fac-
ing economic and democratic freedom today; the tireless efforts of advo-
cates and reformers on the ground to create a more just and democratic
polity; and the ways in which historical and normative ideas can and must
have purchase in the real world. Thanks in particular to Archon Fung, Anna
Burger, Hollie Russon-​Gillman, Hahrie Han, Xav Briggs, Marshall Ganz,
Jee Kim, Taeku Lee, Edward Walker, Michelle Miller, George Goehl, and
Ari Wallach.
One of the great joys of this work has been to discover and deepen
friendships along the way. Thanks to Peter Buttigieg, Tarun Chhabra,
Marissa Doran, Metin Eren, Scott Grinsell, Ben Kabak, Michael Lamb,
Justin Mutter, Beth Pearson, Ryan Rippel, John Santore, Ganesh Sitaraman,
and Kenny Townsend, who from New York to Oxford to Cambridge and
onward have been an ongoing inspiration in the search for a more progres-
sive future. At Harvard, I was lucky to find a community of friends and
extraordinarily creative thinkers who shared in the commitment to the role
that political theory can and ought to play in the world, including Oliver
Bevan, Jonathan Bruno, Josh Cherniss, Matt Landauer, Adam Lebovitz,
xv

Acknowledgments   ( xv )

Yascha Mounk, Hollie Russon Gilman, Emma Saunders-​Hastings, Andrea

Tivig, and Bernardo Zacka. From our first encounter with Max Weber and
onward into the strange world of academia, Vaughn Tan has been a lifelong
compatriot and source of good eats along the way. Despite our very dif-
ferent careers in the world of academia and technology, Aaron Greenspan
has heard and read more of this project than most, but has been a constant
source of friendship and much-​needed reality checks. Jeremy Farris has as
always pushed me to think deeper, and has been an invaluable friend and
companion political theorist navigating the vagaries of the American legal
system. A special thank you is due to Prithvi Datta, who more than anyone
has been a fellow traveler in this intellectual journey through the worlds
of law, political theory, Progressive Era political thought, and who has the
dubious distinction of having read almost every prior version of this book.
Thanks to my sisters, Wasima and Sadia Rahman, for their love and sup-
port. A mere “thank you” is woefully inadequate to acknowledge my par-
ents, Kazi and Shegufta Rahman, whose sacrifices, unconditional love, and
encouragement manifest in ways large, small, and invisible, and who have
made all this possible.
And finally, I thank my partner, Noorain Khan, who I first met before
this project began; who has been the source of my greatest joys and inspi-
ration; with whom I remain forever grateful to share a life during and now
after this work—​and to whom I will owe more than I can ever say.
xvi
1

CH A P T E R 1

Democracy, Domination,
and the Challenge of
Economic Governance

I n 1892 in Omaha, Nebraska, the upstart People’s Party held its first
national convention to challenge the major political parties in the
upcoming elections. Originating with the Texas Farmers’ Alliance, the
People’s Party had grown rapidly as a movement of rural farmers and work-
ers, increasingly anxious about corporate power, financial elites, economic
inequality, and political corruption. The convention adopted a manifesto
self-​consciously styled as a “Second Declaration of Independence.” Where
Jefferson crafted his famous statement in opposition to the tyranny of
King George, the Populists (as they were colloquially known) saw as their
primary villains private and economic sources of domination. For these
reformers, mega-​corporations like Standard Oil and the railroads, and eco-
nomic elites like J. P. Morgan controlled the economy for their own benefit.
The Populists also feared that such economic power was corrupting politics
itself, as these actors co-​opted parties and the machinery of government
for their own interests. But like the Founders, the Populists argued that for
liberty to be restored, such domination had to be checked through the crea-
tion of new political—​and democratic—​institutions. Their manifesto was a
surprisingly modern call for expansive governmental regulation, from pub-
lic ownership of railroads and finance to greater antitrust regulation and
new social insurance programs. They also called for new democratic institu-
tions like ballot referenda and direct party primaries as a check on political
corruption.
These ideas were not limited to the Populists. Urban Progressive reform-
ers shared many of these views. The problem of private power animated
2

( 2 )   Democracy Against Domination

the third-​party presidential campaign of Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 run-

ning on the Progressive Party ticket—​as it did the campaign of his rival,
Woodrow Wilson. Similar themes emerge in the intellectual thought of
the period, from Wilson’s advisor and later Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis to philosophers like John Dewey to economists like John Ely and
Robert Hale. Across the board, turn-​of-​the-​century thinkers and reformers
saw industrial capitalism as fundamentally a problem of power and domi-
nation, a threat to the American promise of freedom. They saw the solution,
in turn, in efforts to reassert democratic popular sovereignty against such
private and economic power—​whether in the form of new governmental
institutions, new social movements, or a combination of the two.
Today, over a hundred years later, we face a similar confluence of eco-
nomic crisis and political dysfunction. In 2008, the collapse of the finan-
cial giant Lehman Brothers triggered a sudden financial crisis that in turn
led to the deep and long “Great Recession,” the worst economic crisis
since the Great Depression. In the years since then, despite efforts at eco-
nomic stimulus and financial reform, it has become increasingly clear
that we now live in a “Second Gilded Age,” an era of growing income
inequality, economic upheaval and insecurity, and new forms of corpo-
rate power. At the same time, our faith in the effectiveness and account-
ability of governmental institutions has been deeply shaken. A growing
body of empirical research underscores the degree to which state institu-
tions themselves are subverted by disparities in political and economic
power: Despite elections and the separation of powers, the modern state
is generally more responsive to the economic elite, particularly on mat-
ters of economic policy.1 This problem is even more accentuated when
it comes to economic regulation. Whether in the context of finance or
social insurance or macroeconomic growth, we think of economic pol-
icy issues as complex affairs, best suited for insulated expert regulators or
central bankers rather than the mass democratic public. Yet expert regula-
tory agencies, despite their insulation and expertise, are subject to various
forms of capture, influence, and lobbying that undermine their capacity
to identify and pursue the common good.2 More importantly, the econ-
omy is not just a technical domain, but a matter of fundamental moral and
political concern, shaping the prospects for human freedom and flourish-
ing for all.
This book makes two central arguments.
First, I argue here that the fundamental problem of the modern economy
is best understood not as a matter of income inequality or distributive justice,
but rather as a broader problem of power and domination—​manifesting in
the concentration of economic power in large corporations, or the power
relationships baked into the very structure of the diffuse market economy.
3

DEMOCRACY, DOMINATION, ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE   ( 3 )

Corporations, economic elites, and even market forces themselves all exer-
cise a kind of unchecked power over others in the economy. The purpose of
governance in this view is to curtail such forms of economic power, subject-
ing these seemingly powerful and diffuse economic forces to democratic
oversight and control.
This focus on domination points to the need for a range of struc-
tural, power-​shifting reforms to our economy—​for example through
measures to undo concentrations of power such as antitrust limits on
mega-​corporations, social insurance schemes to insulate individuals
from market pressures, or the creation of public utilities to ensure pub-
lic oversight over critical industries. The idea of domination suggests
economic regulation that, rather than prioritizing growth or efficiency,
instead highlights the central moral and political challenge of reform-
ing the basic structure and distribution of economic power to limit the
ability of some actors—​w hether they are mega-​corporations or more
diffuse “market forces”—​to arbitrarily interfere with the life chances of
others.
Second, if our current economic pathologies are rooted in disparities of
economic and political power, then we must find solutions not just in eco-
nomic policy changes, but also through building a more equitable, inclu-
sive, and responsive democratic system. Democracy, on this view, connotes
a constructive, positive commitment to expanding agency, investing in the
institutions, civil society associations, and practices that make possible col-
lective political action.
Just as the domination angle pushes us to reconsider how we address
problems of economic policy, this agency angle pushes us to reconsider
the scope and dynamics of our democratic institutions. Expanding agency,
I argue, entails more than just ensuring voting rights and addressing prob-
lems of campaign finance. It also means reworking policymaking bodies
like regulatory agencies—​the institutions most responsible for the daily
business of governing—​to affirmatively enhance the countervailing power
of ordinary citizens. By citizens, I refer not to the legal and often exclusion-
ary notion of citizenship that has historically excluded women, minorities,
migrants, or the poor; instead I use “citizenship” as a moral and inclusive
status that applies to everyone. As moral beings deserving equal stature,
we are all citizens who therefore deserve equal voice in political and eco-
nomic arrangements. From this viewpoint, “good governance” is not about
expertise or efficiency, but rather about inclusion, about ensuring that
the full range of affected stakeholders have a say and exercise real power.
Democratic mechanisms, must encompass more than voting or public
opinion to also require additional techniques for assuring equal and inclu-
sive voice, whether through representation on decision-​making bodies or
4

( 4 )   Democracy Against Domination

other forms of participatory governance. This democratic commitment to

agency also suggests the value of rebuilding our civil society associations
outside of party politics, expanding the voice and political participation
of ordinary people. Taken together, these reforms can help create a more
“distributed” approach to governance: Instead of placing all our hopes for
progress on a small handful of powerful elected and appointed experts,
we should multiply the ways in which regular people, social movements,
and civil society groups can share in the actual challenge of policymaking.
Democracy, in this view, is not a naïve or utopian aspiration. It is a neces-
sity, a vital weapon in the battle to protect us from unchecked economic
and political power. It is also a system, a combination of regulations, insti-
tutions, civil society associations, and practices that interact to ensure a
government—​and economy—​that is truly of, for, and by the people.
This focus on the problem of domination and the remedy of democratic
action draws on the thinkers and reformers of the late nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries: the Populists, Progressives, and labor republicans who in
the face of the first Gilded Age sought to overcome the confluence of indus-
trialization, inequality, new corporate monopolies, and governmental cor-
ruption. These social movements and intellectual developments advocated
a variety of economic, social, and political reforms, from antitrust meas-
ures to minimum wages to the socialization of the financial system itself.
More importantly, they shared a common conviction that it was through
the mobilization and power of the people themselves that economic and
political domination would be broken. Though the specific proposals of
these turn-​of-​the-​century reformers may not be directly applicable today,
this ethic of seeking a specifically democratic response to the moral chal-
lenges of the market economy is instructive. Combined with currents in
contemporary political theory—​particularly among “neorepublican” theo-
rists revisiting republican ideas of freedom, and theorists of participatory
governance—​this Progressive ethos offers a catalyst for a more robust dem-
ocratic approach to modern government and the modern economy.
This richer account of democracy is especially vital, for we live in an
oddly undemocratic time. Despite the near-​universal lip service to the idea
of democratic rule of the people in American politics, the reality is that
much of contemporary political discourse has absorbed and internalized a
deep skepticism of democracy’s effectiveness and desirability, particularly
on matters of economic governance. For some, it is the market that appears
more likely to produce socially desirable outcomes and be robust to cap-
ture. For others, it is the appeal of managerial rule—​whether by experts,
judges, or political elites—​that takes priority. The market economy is at
the heart of many of the most central moral concerns we face as a soci-
ety: concerns about distribution, welfare, opportunity, and the good life. It
5

DEMOCRACY, DOMINATION, ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE   ( 5 )

is therefore also a central concern for us as citizens in a democratic polity.

But our contemporary institutions for economic governance are distrustful
of the role of the citizen, keeping them at arm’s length, preferring instead
the more efficacious machinations of the market system or expert regu-
lation. The arguments of this book suggest that this divorce of economic
governance from democratic critiques and action is pernicious, and should
be replaced by a more robust effort to rebuild the democratic capacities
through which we as citizens can reshape our economic realities. Achieving
this democratic vision requires overcoming two dominant frameworks for
conceptualizing and addressing problems of the modern economy: the
familiar “managerial” turn to technocratic expertise, and the “laissez-​faire”
preference for free markets over state regulation.

EXPERTS, MARKETS, AND THE LIMITS

OF ANTI-​P OLITICS
Managerialism, from the New Deal to the Present

On a bright but bitterly cold morning, Barack Hussein Obama ascended

the steps of the Capitol balcony to take the oath of office as President of the
United States. It was January 2009, and, following the collapse of financial
giant Lehman Brothers a few months earlier, the United States was staring
down the abyss of the largest financial and economic collapse since 1929.
Obama presented his election—​on the heels of an extraordinary upswell
of grassroots activism and excitement—​as a call to action akin to previous
waves of reform from the Founding to the New Deal to the civil rights move-
ment. “Time and again,” he declared, the men and women of American his-
tory “struggled and sacrificed and worked till their hands were raw so that
we may live a better life… . Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust
ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”3 If there was a
central theme to the Obama candidacy it was this: More than his appeal to a
“new form of politics” or his stature as the first African American President,
Obama based his candidacy on the idea that collectively, we as citizens of a
democratic America could band together to remake our world and change
our fates, through a renewed sense of civic engagement and empowerment.4
With the economy in free fall, the new administration quickly turned to
matters of economic policy. In this domain, the touchstone for debates over
the relationships between market, state, and citizen remains the New Deal.
The imagery around Obama’s own election often evoked the iconography
of Franklin Roosevelt. And indeed much of the politics of the Obama era
have revolved around similar questions about the modern economy, how
it should be regulated and governed, and to what ends. The first two years
6

( 6 )   Democracy Against Domination

of the Obama administration witnessed the most expansive economic

stimulus and financial overhaul efforts since the New Deal itself. For many
reformers, the suddenness and severity of the 2008 financial crash and the
depth of the ensuing “Great Recession” seemed to be a final winning argu-
ment in defense of a renewed and expanded push for economic regulation.
Yet these reform efforts remained dogged by controversy. The political
climate of 2009 was not the permissive and broadly supportive one of 1933.
Franklin Roosevelt inherited a robust debate from turn-​of-​the-​century cri-
tiques of industrial capitalism and reformist efforts to expand the role of
government in response. Obama, by contrast, entered into a very different
conversation, one that had come to revolve around the libertarian and con-
servative attack on the very idea of effective and accountable government
action, alongside ongoing efforts to valorize the efficiency and desirability
of free markets. “The question on the New Dealers’ minds, however naively
they sometimes answered it, was how best to articulate social action and
individual energy to promote the welfare of all,” writes historian Daniel
Rodgers. “By contrast, Obama inherited four decades of public discussion
in which the importance of society has steadily diminished in favor of indi-
vidual choice, personal identities, markets in goods, and markets in selves.
This time the ideas with the loudest megaphones came not from the soli-
daristic left but the libertarian right.”5
There is much to this analysis, but it obscures the degree to which
there are flaws within the mainstream understandings of how we should
govern the modern economy—​understandings rooted in the New Deal
tradition. Obama’s response to the financial crisis evinced a deep-​seated,
and ultimately problematic, faith in professional, technocratic expertise
to solve social problems and transcend the controversies and messiness
of ordinary democratic politics.6 This approach manifested, for exam-
ple, in the focus of financial reform policies on expanding the powers
and resources of insulated, expert regulators at the Federal Reserve and
elsewhere.7
It was this very appeal to expert regulators that comprised the heart of
New Deal. In the late 1930s, despite the ongoing Great Depression, a new
generation of policymakers began to envision an unprecedented mastery
over the vagaries of the market economy. Speaking at Yale University in
1938, James Landis gave what remains one of the most assertive defenses
of the modern administrative and regulatory state. A leading figure in
Roosevelt’s brain trust and one of the chief architects of the newly created
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Landis called for the crea-
tion of new expert-​led institutions to manage the vagaries of the modern
industrial economy. The market could not be relied on to produce a socially
7

DEMOCRACY, DOMINATION, ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE   ( 7 )

optimal economic order on its own. But Landis was equally critical of the
“inadequacy” of traditional institutions of governance: Neither Congress
nor the courts possessed the knowledge or deliberative capacities to make
such complex economic policies.8 Such a task demanded the expert hand
of regulators positioned in institutions like the SEC, insulated from the day-​
to-​day pressures of democratic politics. The professionalism, expertise, and
transparency of regulatory policy would, according to Landis, be more than
sufficient to ensure that the regulators employed their vast authority for the
public good.
Landis’ account captures in its most aggressive form what we can call
a “managerial” approach to economic governance. From Progressive Era
thinkers like Charles Francis Adams to New Dealers like James Landis, to
contemporary advocates of the regulatory state like Stephen Breyer and
Cass Sunstein, this managerial approach to economic governance embod-
ies a commitment to a more active role for government in the economy, not
just in ensuring basic rights of property and contract, but also in correct-
ing market failures, mitigating risks, and protecting vulnerable populations
through public policies, social insurance schemes, and other kinds of reg-
ulation. This framework doubts that disaggregated and decentralized insti-
tutions like the market can on their own yield socially optimal economic
allocations and arrangements. But this vision also doubts the applicability
of conventional democratic policymaking bodies and mechanisms—​from
parties to voting to legislation—​in the context of complex economic issues.
Rather, the public good requires the creation of specialized institutions
where uniquely expert or talented policymakers can, through the judicious
use of their knowledge and public-​spiritedness, craft regulations so as to
promote the public good. This institutional vision calls for economic pol-
icy to be made through bodies that are centralized, expert-​led, and politi-
cally insulated, free to make policy on the basis of morally neutral scientific
knowledge.
This vision of economic governance, however, rests almost entirely
on the faith in such expert management, dissociating the project of eco-
nomic regulation from the kind of moralized and popular mobilizations
characteristic of pre–​New Deal social movements responding to the first
Gilded Age. This faith is exactly what critics of economic regulation have
historically denied: the notion that individuals wielding political power
can be reconciled with individual freedom and can act effectively, respon-
sibly for the public good, rather than being captured or subverted by pri-
vate interests. For all its virtues, the idea of managerialism is therefore
surprisingly brittle, uniquely vulnerable to this rival vision of economic
governance: laissez-​faire.
8

( 8 )   Democracy Against Domination

Laissez-​Faire and the Critique of the State

In the spring of 1945, Friedrich Hayek journeyed to the United States to

give a lecture tour hastily arranged in light of the surprising and escalating
success of his recently published critique of central planning, the Road to
Serfdom. After failing to even find a publisher in Europe, Hayek’s book—​
particularly its abridged version in Reader’s Digest—​became wildly pop-
ular in the United States. Conservative writers and activists appropriated
Hayek’s argument in their critiques of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Hayek himself was dismayed by the characterization of his work as an anti-​
government creed; his own view was in fact much more nuanced, including
support for an extensive role for the state in managing market downturns,
investing in infrastructure, and providing forms of social insurance.9 Indeed,
Hayek’s critique of the state and his defense of the market rested on a dual
foundation: not just a commitment to a negative understanding of liberty
as the freedom from interference, but also a preference for markets as epi-
stemically superior institutions for organizing collective life. Centralized
regulators, Hayek feared, could never possess all the necessary information
to make socially optimal choices for allocating resources; it was only the
diffuse and decentralized system of the market that possessed the capacity
to aggregate and harness the multiplicity of local individual preferences and
understandings in a coherent manner.10
Although at the time Hayek saw himself as part of an endangered minor-
ity of classical liberals eclipsed by the rise of Keynesianism and growing
faith in the modern regulatory state, his ideas would go on to inspire the
resurgence of laissez-​faire thought through his influence on the next gen-
eration of conservative thinkers like Milton Friedman, and an entire ecol-
ogy of free-​market advocacy groups, businesses, and think tanks.11 Hayek’s
account also resonated with the kinds of concerns that animated pre–​New
Deal understandings of markets, and critiques of early efforts to build eco-
nomic regulatory institutions in domains such as labor, railroad, and anti-
trust policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12 As
a vision of economic governance, the laissez-​faire framework thus captures
a tradition in American political thought that bookended the New Deal
era, from the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries. What is most
important about this framework is that it rests on more than a knee-​jerk
anti-​statism. Rather, laissez-​faire economic governance has its roots in two
interrelated commitments, one moral and the other institutional.
First, there is a moral commitment to liberty understood as individual
autonomy, as freedom from the interference specifically of the state. In this
view, state power beyond the minimal requisites of property rights, con-
tracts, and national defense poses a threat to individual autonomy. Second,
9

DEMOCRACY, DOMINATION, ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE   ( 9 )

there is an institutional critique as well: a concern that state political power

can be co-​opted to serve the purposes of particular interests, rather than pro-
moting the general welfare. By contrast, the ability of markets to aggregate
information, allocate resources, and respond to changes in costs, availabil-
ity, and preferences over time makes them more dynamic and adaptable—​
and impervious to the kind of capture and corruption that threatens state
action. In laissez-​faire governance, then, the attack on economic regulation
emerges in part as a bulwark against such corruption or capture. This dual
nature of the laissez-​faire argument explains its resiliency and the relative
brittleness of the technocratic appeal to expert regulation.13
In this sense, conservative critiques of economic regulation as a threat
to liberty and prone to ineffectiveness do in fact pick up on a very real and
legitimate concern over the accountability, responsiveness, and efficacy of
such insulated, expert-​driven regulation. While it may be true that flaws and
failures of market society call for greater state regulation, the case for such
regulation too often rests on a faith that experts themselves are invulnera-
ble to corruption or special interest influence—​a faith that has been shaken
in recent decades among both liberals and conservatives. In responding to
the problems of an alien, threatening, uncontrollable market economy, we
have turned to an equally alien, threatening, and uncontrollable system of
expert regulation, too far removed from the control and agency of the peo-
ple themselves to generate the kind of broad-​based legitimacy needed to
survive. The financial crisis revealed a weakness not only in the appeals to
the self-​correcting market, but also in the very regulatory institutions cre-
ated to address market failures. This anxiety shapes contemporary politics
as well. How then can we contest the problems of economic power, without
recreating these anxieties about managerial governance? This is a moral,
intellectual, and institutional challenge that we must overcome.

The Problem of Anti-​Politics

While usually seen as clashing views of state and market, the laissez-​faire
and managerial visions share a surprising commonality: Both evince a
deep distrust of democratic politics as a viable and effective mode of gov-
erning the modern economy. Markets present themselves as natural forces
to which we as individuals must adapt; they are driven by laws of nature
beyond the reach of human agency. This makes them apolitical—​or even
anti-​political: immune to alteration, lobbying, or corruption, and therefore
more reliable as guarantors of social welfare. Managerialism presents itself
in a similar manner: By removing policy decisions from the reach of demo-
cratic politics, the appeal to expert management depoliticizes these issues,
10

( 10 )   Democracy Against Domination

immunizes them from democratic contest, and in so doing achieves the

necessary latitude to make socially optimal policy decisions on the basis of
rationality rather than politics. In these accounts, democracy recedes into
the background, at worst rejected outright; at best, relegated to the status of
a distant authorizer or delegator of authority to the more effective system of
markets or regulatory agencies.
But the appeal of markets and experts as more rational, effective organiz-
ers of the economy is ultimately illusory. Markets are not neutral, friction-
less optimizers of economic order; rather, they are domains of power and
conflict, riven by inequalities in bargaining power, welfare, and position,
and prone to all sorts of distortions and failures. Similarly, managerialist
policymaking is inextricably bound up in political and moral judgments
that inevitably shape the application of supposedly neutral expertise.
Turning to markets and experts as our preferred modes of economic gov-
ernance does not eliminate these concerns of power, politics, and morality;
it submerges them from view, out of reach. This in turn undermines our
ability to act as democratic citizens, and to address the very pathologies of
markets and expertise in economic policymaking.
It is no wonder we tend to view the market as a force of nature, prone to
tempests and shocks that we must simply weather. Nor is it a surprise that
the technocratic state is so easily vilified as an alien imposition. Both mar-
ket forces and technocratic regulation are the product of rules, laws, and
systems that we as political actors have sanctioned, but we have done so in
ways that deliberately remove these systems from our own control, out of
a distrust of the chaos and corruption that is likely to result from political
involvement in the managing of the economy. By cordoning off more and
more policy space away from the reach of either democracy or politics, the
laissez-​faire and managerial approaches arrogate ever more authority to a
set of institutions held at arm’s length from ordinary channels of demo-
cratic politics: the market and the expert regulatory agency. It also, over
time, contributes to an accelerating emaciation of the domain of demo-
cratic politics, as the central issues of political debate are increasingly real-
located from the domain of democratic decision-​making to the domain
of the neutral, optimizing market, or the realm of technocratic expertise.
Caught between the anti-​politics of the “free market” and the anti-​politics
of technocratic regulation, it is little wonder that our received concep-
tions of democratic vibrancy have little traction in contemporary politics
and discourse. As Dana Villa laments, “What can ‘the public’ and political
institutions be in a world so dramatically constrained by the imperatives
of the global marketplace and the ubiquity of bureaucratic hierarchy and
bureaucratic process?”14 Put another way, how can we have democracy, in
11

DEMOCRACY, DOMINATION, ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE   ( 11 )

any meaningful sense of the term, in a complex modern society driven by

the imperatives of the market, or managed through the insulated authority
of the regulatory bureaucracy?
These rival views of economic governance—​managerial and laissez-​
faire—​thus represent much of the conventional landscape of debates over
economic regulation, and the role of the state in economic affairs. These
visions combine moral views about what a good economy looks like with
institutional assessments about what kinds of institutional regimes (mar-
kets, experts, and the like) will most likely generate a publicly beneficial
economic system. But as visions of political economy, these accounts do
not exhaust the field. The alternative, this book argues, lies in the idea of
democracy itself—​both as a moral critique of economic power and as a
process by which we as citizens claim a more direct role in shaping eco-
nomic arrangements. To get there we need to first rescue a set of views that
both laissez-​faire and managerial political economy are deeply skeptical
of: the importance of democratic participation and citizen agency in eco-
nomic affairs. For this we must turn not to the New Dealers, like Landis,
nor to their critics, like Hayek, but rather to an earlier generation of thinkers
and reformers.

DEMOCRATIC ECONOMIC GOVERNANCE

Recovering Progressive Era Thought

A hundred years ago, dramatic changes to the American economy catalyzed

a diverse and highly mobilized group of reformers and thinkers making up
the Progressive movement. Confronted by corporate entities of unprec-
edented scope and power and troubled by the violence of industrialization
apparent in recurring strikes, financial panics, and economic dislocation,
a number of Progressive Era thinkers developed a rich critique of mar-
ket capitalism.15 Approaching the problem from diverse methodologies
including law, philosophy, sociology, and economics, this critique focused
not on efficiency or distribution so much as a more fundamental problem
of domination. The problem of the market, for these thinkers, was at its root
a problem of disparate economic and political power—​power that had to
first be identified and unmasked before it could be contested and checked
through collective action and reform politics. Popular sovereignty—​the
ability of ordinary people to engage in collective action—​became a crucial
touchstone: The disparities of economic and political power could not and
would not be remedied unless and until ordinary people reclaimed their
role as the true drivers of public policy.
12

( 12 )   Democracy Against Domination

The appeal to democratic collective action as a necessity to address prob-

lems of the modern economy is perhaps most clearly captured in the thought
of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a veteran and central intellectual
figure of the Progressive movement. As an activist and jurist, Brandeis shared
the view of many of his contemporaries, that the industrializing economy
created new threats to liberty, particularly in the “absolutism” of powerful
corporations who dominated their workers, and monopolies that threat-
ened the broader economic and political order.16 The market structure itself
also created more diffuse threats to liberty by tying the prospects for lei-
sure and fulfillment to economic well-​being. In response to these economic
challenges, however, Brandeis turned not to markets or experts, but rather
to a faith in citizens themselves. Echoing Hayekian critiques of the aspira-
tion to technocratic mastery, Brandeis warned that formulating the perfect
rational economic policies would require “some measure of prophecy,” yet
“man is weak and his judgment is at best fallible.” But where for Hayek and
laissez-​faire critics such fallibility would motivate a turn back to the mar-
ket as the preferred institution for economic governance, Brandeis turned
instead to the ideal of democracy: democratic politics, for Brandeis, was
crucial to allow for policy innovation, experimentation, and social learning
over time.17 Not only was this the best institutional arrangement for yielding
policy responses to the dangers of market society; it also represented a moral
imperative, for “only through participation by the many in their responsi-
bilities and determinations of business can Americans secure the moral and
intellectual development which is essential to the maintenance of liberty”
and thus remain “masters of their own destiny.”18
The radicals of the pre–​New Deal period did not have perfect blueprints
or answers to our current dilemmas. Their reforms did not necessarily
advance a single coherent theory. And their vision of inclusion was terribly
limited, excluding African Americans, immigrants, and often women. Yet
these activists shared a common impulse that is instructive for us today.
In the face of new forms of economic power and a crisis of corrupted and
unresponsive political institutions and elites, they turned not to mar-
kets nor to experts, but to citizens as the drivers of an alternative form of
politics. This appeal to democracy against economic power is a universal
one, addressing fundamental moral concerns arising from market capital-
ism. Democracy here is not a utopian ideal, but as a necessity: Without the
political action and pressure from the bottom up, the kinds of structural
political and economic change needed to remedy disparities of economic
power would never happen. And without the efforts of social movements
and institutional reformers to create the capacities and the spaces through
which the people could exercise their rightful role as the primary drivers
of policy in a democratic society, such collective action could not thrive.19
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you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The wild fawn

Author: Mary Imlay Taylor

Release date: February 7, 2024 [eBook #72891]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Moffat, Yard and Company, 1920

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WILD

FAWN ***
THE WILD FAWN
 BOOKS BY
MARY IMLAY TAYLOR

A CANDLE IN THE WIND

THE IMPERSONATOR
THE REAPING
CALEB TRENCH
THE MAN IN THE STREET
 THE
WILD FAWN
BY
MARY IMLAY TAYLOR
AUTHOR OF “A CANDLE IN THE WIND,” “THE IMPERSONATOR,” “THE
REAPING,” “CALEB TRENCH,” “THE MAN IN THE STREET”

NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
1920
 Copyright, 1920, by
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America
THE WILD FAWN
 THE WILD FAWN

I
Mrs. Carter looked up from her breakfast and glanced anxiously at
the clock.
“I wonder where that postman can be!” she exclaimed fretfully. “He’s
always late nowadays.”
“Nonsense!” retorted her husband, unfolding his newspaper. “It’s
because you want a letter from William. The postman will be along
all right.”
Mrs. Carter sighed. She could not understand the gap in her son’s
correspondence. William was her eldest and the pride of her heart.
At twenty-seven he had been a success in business. He had
dominated the family, advising his stout, deliberate father,
overwhelming his lame brother Daniel, and bossing the two younger
children, Leigh and Emily, until, goaded to frenzy, first one and then
the other of the worms turned. As the only girl in the family, Emily
reached the limit of her endurance long before Leigh came into the
battle as a feeble second.
But not even Emily could stem the tide of Mrs. Carter’s devotion to
her first-born. It had cost her many a sleepless night when, more
than a year ago, William Henry Carter had been selected by a well-
known mercantile firm to go to Japan. It had been a crowning
opportunity for William; to his mother it was a source of mingled
pride and anguish. She packed his trunk with unnumbered socks
and collar-buttons—she was sure he couldn’t get them in Japan—
and she smuggled in some jars of strawberry jam, “the kind that dear
Willie always loved.”
Afterward her only solace had been his letters. She overlooked his
ungrateful wrath when the jam jars broke into the socks, and fell
back on her pride in his continuing success, and on the fact that he
had been permitted to come home via the Mediterranean, and was
to act for his firm in Paris.
Now, after an absence of fourteen months, he might be home at any
moment; but there had been a gap in the correspondence—no
letters for more than two months. The maternal anxiety would have
communicated itself to the family, if it had not been that William’s
company had heard from the young man in the interim, and could
assure the anxious Mr. Carter that his son was well and doing
business with eminent talent and success. Mr. Payson, the head of
the establishment, lived in town, and he was liberal in his praise.
Mrs. Carter’s mind dwelt upon this with a feeling of maternal pride,
still tempered with anxiety, when she became aware that Emily and
Leigh were quarreling openly because of the latter’s unfeeling
remark that a girl with a snub nose and freckles should never do her
hair in a Greek knot.
“It’s enough to make a cat laugh,” said Leigh. “What have you got to
balance that knob on the back of your head?”
“Leigh, dear, don’t plague sister so,” Mrs. Carter remonstrated mildly.
“As if a boy like Leigh knew anything about a girl’s hair!” cried Emily
indignantly. “It’s a psyche-knot.”
Leigh laughed derisively; but at this moment, when the quarrel had
become noisy enough to disturb Mr. Carter, it was interrupted by the
entrance of the morning mail. Miranda, the colored maid of all work,
appeared with a replenished coffee-pot and a letter for Mrs. Carter.
The anxious mother gave a cry of joy.
“My goodness—it’s from Willie!”
The interest became general, and five pairs of expectant eyes
focussed on Mrs. Carter as she opened the envelope, her fingers
shaking with eagerness. Miranda, to whom the fifth pair of eyes
belonged, became unusually attentive to Daniel, and insisted on
replenishing his coffee-cup.
“This was written in Paris,” Mrs. Carter exclaimed eagerly, “and—and
posted in New York! I wonder! ‘Dear mother,’” she began reading
aloud, her voice tremulous with joy, “‘I’m coming home on the
Britannic, and I’m bringing you the—the——’”
She stopped short, her mouth open like a fish’s, and a look of horror
glazing the rapture in her eyes.
There was a profound and expectant pause. Daniel, the least
interested member of the group, managed to drink his hot coffee with
apparent relish, and sixteen-year-old Emily ate a biscuit, but Mr.
Carter, who had laid down his newspaper to listen, became
impatient.
“What’s the matter, mama?” he asked peevishly. “You look scared. Is
William going to bring you a crocodile from the Nile?”
Mrs. Carter rallied.
“N-no, not exactly—that is——” She looked absently at the maid.
“Miranda, go down to the ice-box and look it through. Let me know
just what’s left over. I’ve got to ’phone to the market immediately.”
“Yes’m.”
Miranda, descrying a sensation from afar, retired reluctantly. She
couldn’t hear quite as well in the kitchen entry when all the windows
were open.
Mrs. Carter waited until the pantry door closed behind the maid; then
she turned her horrified eyes upon her family.
“William’s married!” she gasped.
“Married?” echoed Mr. Carter angrily. “You’re crazy! William’s got too
much sense. You haven’t read it straight. Give me that letter!”
He stretched out a fiercely impatient hand, but Mrs. Carter ignored
his order.
“Listen! I did read it right. I know my own boy’s writing. I’ll read it
aloud—listen!”
Mr. Carter thumped the table.
“Why in thunder don’t you read it, then? We’re listening! Of all the
crazy notions! Married—you’ll find it’s ‘meandered.’ Go ahead!”
Mrs. Carter rallied her forces again, aware that Daniel and Leigh and
Emily were gaping in amazed incredulity. She turned the letter over
to the first page, caught her breath, and began.
“‘Dear mother,’” she read again, unsteadily this time, “‘I’m coming
home on the Britannic, and I’m bringing you the sweetest daughter-
in-law in the whole world. Her name is Fanchon la Fare, and she’s
the cleverest, the dearest, the most devoted girl in France. I can’t tell
you how beautiful she is, but you’ll fall in love with her at first sight—
just as I did. She’s small, “just as high as my heart,” mother, and
she’s got the eyes of a wild fawn——’”
“Wild fawn—thunder!” ejaculated Mr. Carter, unable to restrain
himself. “Give me that letter!”
This time Mrs. Carter surrendered it. She passed it down via Daniel,
who was looking unusually pale. His face startled her, and, while Mr.
Carter was reading the letter, she met her second son’s eyes. They
gave her another shock.
“Dan,” she whispered in an awe-struck voice, “I—do you think he
was engaged to—to——”
She mouthed a name, unable to finish her sentence under the young
man’s look. Daniel frowned, his white lips closing in a sharp line, but
Emily spoke up unabashed.
“Willie’s engaged to Virginia Denbigh. She’s got his ring. I’ve seen it
on her finger.”
“Oh, Emily!” her mother sank back in her chair, feeling weaker than
ever. Her boy, her Willie! She couldn’t believe that he would do
anything like that. She shook her head indignantly at Emily. “Hush!”
she whispered.
“He is, too!” her daughter insisted. “Why, mama, you know he is!”
Mrs. Carter cast a miserable glance at her husband, who was still
reading the letter. He was a big, broad-shouldered man, with a ruddy
face and bristling gray hair. Although usually a man of fairly equable
temperament, his expression at the moment was almost ferocious.
He had grown very red, and his eyebrows were bushed out over the
bridge of his nose in a scowl that transformed him.
Leigh nudged the unsympathetic Emily under the table.
“Gee, look at father!” he murmured.
Emily, who had resumed her breakfast, nodded with her mouth full.
She had played the trump card, and she was quietly observing
Daniel. He was as white as a sheet, she thought, and those big eyes
of his had a way of smoldering.
“It’s because he’s had a bad night, I suppose,” Emily mused, “or else
——”
She speculated, gazing at him; but she did not arrive at any
conclusion. She was interrupted by a furious sound from the foot of
the table. It was fortunately smothered, but it had the rumble of an
approaching tornado.
“The young donkey!” Mr. Carter exclaimed aloud. “My word, I thought
William Carter had sense!”
Mrs. Carter’s amiable, distressed face emerged a little from behind
the big silver hot-water urn which had descended in the family, along
with a Revolutionary sword and the copper warming-pans.
“Can you find out anything, Johnson?” she asked faintly. “I—I can’t!
He doesn’t even say where they were married or—or anything.”
“Married in a lunatic asylum, I suppose,” Mr. Carter returned fiercely.
“He says—as plain as can be—that he hasn’t known the creature
three months!”
“Good gracious! I didn’t get as far as that, I——”
William’s mother stopped short; she was afraid of making matters
worse. Emily, who had stopped eating to listen, came suddenly to
the surface.
“Listen, mama! She’s French, isn’t she?”
“I—I suppose so, dear.” Mrs. Carter shuddered slightly. “I’m afraid
she is.”
“Then I don’t see how Willie did it in three months. I read somewhere
—in a magazine, I think—that it took months and months to court a
French girl, and both parents have to say ‘yes,’ and you’ve got to
have birth certificates, and the banns have to be posted for three
weeks, and even then you can’t do it in a hurry; you’ve got to have a
civil marriage and a religious marriage, and—and everything!”
“Good Lord, Emmy! How does a fellow run away with his best girl?”
Leigh asked.
“He can’t!” Emily, having the floor, held it proudly. “He just can’t! It
wouldn’t be legal; he’s got to have his birth certificate.”
“Humph!” Mr. Carter glared over the top of William’s letter at his wife.
“William didn’t happen to carry his birth certificate hung around his
neck, did he?”
Mrs. Carter shook her head, her eyes fixed on Emily. For the first
time she felt it was to be her portion to hear wisdom from the mouths
of babes and sucklings.
“Emmy, are you sure you read all that?” she inquired anxiously.
“Of course she did, mother,” said Daniel, speaking for the first time,
his low, deep voice breaking in on the shrill excitement of the family
clamor. “It’s French law.”
That settled it. Daniel had studied law in old Judge Jessup’s office,
and there was nothing in law, domestic and international, that Judge
Jessup didn’t know. Mr. Carter turned his distorted countenance
upon his second son.
“Is that really a fact, Dan?”
Dan nodded. He was not eating. He had thrust aside an almost
untouched breakfast. The hand that he stretched out now for a glass
of water was a little unsteady, but his father did not notice it. Mr.
Carter was scowling at the letter again.
“It’s as plain as day here, he’s known her less than three months.
Take three weeks for the banns out of that, and you get seven or
eight weeks. The young donkey! Where were her people, I’d like to
know?”
Mrs. Carter gasped. Horrible thoughts had been assailing her from
the first, and she could no longer suppress them.
“D-do you think she can be respectable?” she quavered tearfully.
Mr. Carter was mute. He had no adequate language in which to
express his own views upon that point, but his gloomy look was
eloquent.
There was a horrible pause. Leigh and Emily exchanged glances.
There was a little satisfaction in hers; she had exploded a bombshell
second only to William’s letter, and now she interrupted her father’s
forty-second perusal of that document.
“Papa,” she said in her solemn young voice, “Willie was engaged to
Virginia Denbigh, and I don’t believe she’s broken it off at all!”
“Hush up, Emmy!” cried Daniel angrily. “Leave Virginia Denbigh out
of it. You’ve no right to talk about her. William’s married!”
“I guess I’ve got a right to tell the truth!” Emily flared up. “Willie was
engaged to Virginia Denbigh up to last week—and I know it!”
But, to her surprise, it was Leigh who broke out suddenly.
“What does it matter?” he cried. “If William’s fallen in love at first
sight, he can’t help it, can he? It’s too much for a fellow, isn’t it?
When a man sees a woman he loves at first sight—it’s—it’s like a
tornado, it bowls him over!”
“Eh?”
Mr. Carter turned and stared at his youngest son. So did his mother.
Leigh was a high-school boy preparing for college. Emily, blond and
snub-nosed and honest, had missed beauty by the proverbial inch
that’s as good as a mile, but Leigh was a handsome boy. He had the
eyes of a girl, too.
“Love at first sight?” bellowed Mr. Carter, getting his breath. “What
d’you know about it, you—you young idiot?”
Leigh reddened, but he held his ground.
“I know—how I’d feel,” he replied hotly.
“Oh, Leigh!” his mother smiled indulgently. “You’re such a child!”
“I’m not!” he retorted with spirit. “I’m eighteen—I’m a man!”
Emily giggled provokingly, and Mr. Carter struck the table with his
fist.
“Shut up!” he roared. “I’ve got one donkey—I don’t want another!
What did you say, Emily?”
“I said Willie was engaged to Virginia Denbigh and——”
Daniel, with a suppressed groan of anger, rose from the table; but
his father stopped him.
“Wait!” he said sharply. “I want to get the stuffing out of this. What do
you mean, Emily?”
“I mean just exactly what I say, papa,” cried his daughter, giving
Daniel a look of triumph. “Virginia’s got Willie’s ring on the third finger
of her left hand, and he wrote her letters—love-letters—from Japan. I
guess I know; I saw her reading one. I guess any girl could tell that!”
“You’re nothing but a child!” Mr. Carter exclaimed angrily, but he was
searching back in his own mind. He had always planned this match
between his favorite son and Virginia Denbigh, and Emily’s words
went home. He reddened. “Dan, do you know anything about this?”
he demanded, turning on his son.
Daniel, who was standing with his hand on the back of his chair, just
as he had risen, averted his eyes.
“I’d rather not say anything about it, father,” he replied after a
moment. “It’s—it’s not fair to Miss Denbigh, is it, to discuss it?”
His father, who had been observing him narrowly, thrust William’s
letter into his pocket.
“I see it’s true,” he remarked dryly, “Emily’s got more candor than you
have, that’s all.”
Daniel made no reply to this. He reached for his cane and moved
silently toward the door, aware of Emily’s cryptic gaze.
Mr. Carter, meanwhile, broke out stormily again, striking the edge of
the table.
“I’m ashamed of William!” he growled. “My son—and no sense of
honor! I—I’d like to thrash him!”
No one replied to this. Daniel opened the door, went out, and closed
it gently behind him. In the pause they heard his slow, slightly halting
tread as he went across the hall to the front porch and descended
the steps. As the last echo of his footsteps died away, Emily turned
to her father.
“Why, papa, didn’t you know why Dan wouldn’t tell about Willie and
Virginia?” she asked wisely.
Her father cast a startled look at her, his eyes still clouded with wrath
and mortification.
“No. Why?”
Emily smiled across at Leigh.
“Dan’s in love with Virginia himself, and Willie cut him out. That’s
why!”
Mr. Carter stared at her with exasperation. She was going a little too
far, and her annihilation was impending when Mrs. Carter suddenly
uttered a cry of horror. She had picked up the newspaper. It was
local, but it often copied bits from the New York dailies, when the bits
were likely to interest the town.
“Oh, good gracious, here’s a marriage notice from a New York
paper!” she cried, pointing it out with a shaking forefinger: “‘William
Henry Carter and Fanchon la Fare.’ Papa, they weren’t married until
they got to New York—the very day Willie posted that letter!”
Mr. Carter snatched the paper from her hand and read the notice;
then he slammed it down on the table with a violence that made all
the dishes rattle. He was fairly choking with rage now.
“Came over on the steamer with him, of course!” he shouted. “You
get the idea, mama? A French girl! Came over on the same steamer
—seven—nine days at sea—and got married in New York. My word!”
he fairly bellowed. “What kind of a daughter-in-law d’you think we’ve
got? I ask you that!”
“Oh, papa—sh!” gasped his wife weakly. “Think of these children
——”
“Sh?” he shouted. “Sh? With this thing out in black and white? D’you
think people haven’t got eyes? The whole town’ll read it—trust ’em
for that! French laws—birth certificates—banns—chaperons—I’d like
to see ’em—wow!”
There was a crash of china, and Mrs. Carter rose and fairly thrust
Leigh and Emily out of the room. For the first time in her experience
with him, Mr. Carter had become volcanic.
 II
Daniel Carter, having left the family conclave so abruptly,
descended the steps to the garden-path and walked slowly—almost
painfully, it appeared—to the gate.
He was a tall young man of twenty-five, thin from long suffering, and
a little angular, and he was lame. He was not using a crutch now. Dr.
Barbour had succeeded in alleviating the old trouble and Daniel
could do very well with a walking-stick. But his face, pale and hollow-
cheeked, showed the lines of old suffering, and to-day there were
dark rings around his fine eyes. The fact was that, at that moment,
his heart was beating so heavily that its clamor seemed to fill his
ears. A strange thing had befallen him. He had been stricken with
horror and anguish at an insult to one he loved, and—almost at the
same instant—he had felt a wild, unreasoning relief. It would not do,
he must not let his mind dwell upon it. The habit of repression, the
habit of endurance, the older habit of suffering, came to his aid. He
set his teeth and walked straight out of the front gate and down to
the end of the street. Then he paused almost unconsciously,
because this spot, at the side of a hill, gave him a wide view of the
town, and he often stopped here a moment on his way to and from
Judge Jessup’s office, just to catch this glimpse of his native hills.
The poet in Daniel loved this view.
The sun was on the hills to-day, except where the shadow of a
passing cloud moved across the wide vista like a pillar of smoke to
guide the wayfarers toward the Promised Land. The sun shone, too,
on the roofs of the houses that clustered at Daniel’s feet, and it
caught the gilt on a cross-crowned spire and flashed it against the
background of the trees. The only vivid thing, it seemed, in the whole
scene, where the gray of old shingled roofs and the sober tints of the
time-worn houses blended with the greens and browns of nature. For
it’s an old town, nestled in the hills, at the southern edge of one of
the Middle States. A State, by the way, that is a good deal more
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