The New Star Chamber and Other Essays

First published more than a century ago, Edgar Lee Masters's political thoughts have been unearthed and shared with readers and students in this new annotated edition published by Southern Illinois University Press. The combative and contrarian tone displayed may shock those only familiar with Masters's best-known work, his Spoon River Anthology of poems.Masters delights in skewering icons of American history. For example, Masters writes of Supreme Court justice John Marshall that his “mental cast was of that inferior order which gave him mere ingenuity in sophisticating legal questions to a preconceived idea” (p. 51). Alexander Hamilton, now celebrated in a musical bearing his name, “launched the schemata of a monarchial system to be set up in America” (p. 73). President William McKinley “was a dissembler” and his successor Theodore Roosevelt was a demagogue who appealed “to the brutal tendencies in man” (p. 38). Even Abraham Lincoln is viewed with suspicion and disdain, though Masters saved the full dose of vitriol for his 1931 book, Lincoln: The Man, a work “so polarizing in its critique of the sixteenth president that Masters received hate mail, mutilated pictures of himself, and an endorsement from the Sons of Confederate Veterans.”All these essays highlight an alternative view of late nineteenth-century America, one suffused with anger over judicial power—used to quash unions and thwart social reform—and the rise of American imperialism, most notably in the brutal suppression of the Philippine insurrection.After the 1900 presidential campaign, Masters decided to publish these essays, most previously appeared in the Chicago Chronicle, along with a few others in a book whose title, The New Star Chamber, comes from an essay denouncing anti-union judicial efforts, primarily through use of the injunction. The essays were part of Masters's support for William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, whom he declared history would place on a “pedestal” from which “nothing at all probably can dethrone him.”The book's tone and contents reflect the anger and disappointment of a reformer and a thinker battling for an early nineteenth-century Jeffersonian philosophy and vision that, in historical retrospect, was undermined by the times.Editor Jason Stacy, a history professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, points out the wrinkles in the poet's political thought, a mix of Bryan's “free silver” and denunciations of corporate power and colonialism, along with a romanticized view of America's past, specifically represented by Masters's grandfather, Squire Davis Masters, a successful Menard County farmer. Stacy provides an excellent analysis of his subject's ideology, one impossible to compare with modern politics. Masters, Stacy writes, held “conflicting ideologies and experiences . . . ; an urban lawyer whose most famous book focused on rural life, an advocate for the downtrodden who blamed Abraham Lincoln for modern injustice, and an anti-imperialist who celebrated America's pioneering past” (p. 3).Stacy and several of his students (named in the “Contributors” section) took on the project of annotating the book. They are to be commended for their thoroughness in identifying individuals, events, and issues raised in the essays that might otherwise mystify modern readers.Readers may find a few things from Masters's pen that resonate or have relevance to present times, but it is by chance. Masters was, as decisively shown in his own work, a man tied irrevocably to a vanished world. As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed of Jay Gatsby, he “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Yet, disclaiming the conceit of the present, one should credit Masters for battling against the abuses and tragedies of his day.This revival of Masters's essays is valuable in at least two ways. First, those wishing to learn more about Masters will gain a clearer understanding of his complexity and combativeness. Second, the contradictions and ideals of the writing mirror a Democratic Party struggling to respond to industrial growth and urban conditions, a contest only gradually resolved by the election of Woodrow Wilson and the coming of FDR and the New Deal.