(Part of a continuing series of illustrative precedents for phenomena that, to present
citizens, might seem relatively new-hatched.)
Of the old reformers, only one was
an active cynic, Charles A. Dana of The
Sun. Dana, for whom Brook Farm
[ndlr: 19th-c. forerunner of the hippie communes of the 1960s ff.]
had once been the hope of the world, was the enemy, in days to come, of all it
stood for: he ridiculed
civil-service reform, opposed the control of monopolies, fought for high
tariffs and huge land-grants for
railroads. … Dana alone, of the disillusioned farmers [i.e., the mostly
intellectual participants in the Brook Farm experiment] seemed to take a bitter
joy in reversing his former convictions.
-- Van Wyck Brooks, New England: Indian Summer (1940), p. 121
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