The collectivist intellectuals believed that the Civil War held important lessons for the new America. It wasn’t war itself that they valued, but the things that war brought. John W. Draper, for example, wrote that war taught subordination and stimulated an appreciation of order. Men, said Draper, “love to obey” those they believe are their intellectual superiors. “In military life they learn to practice that obedience openly,” he said, adding that individualism was to blame for the war.

What intellectuals such as Francis A. Walker, Charles Francis Adams Jr., and future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wished for was, in Frederickson’s words, a “continuance ... of the crisis mentality of war.” That mentality would maintain the sense of duty to society that was palpable during the war. While those men wanted conservative objectives served, others, such as John Wesley Powell, had “humanitarian” ends in mind.

The problem for these thinkers was that peacetime did not inspire service and sacrifice to the nation. People became centered on their own lives, their families, and immediate communities. But war was a call to duty and the “strenuous life.” If only a substitute for war could be found, a call to duty that did not involve bloodshed. “There is one thing I do not doubt,” said Holmes, “and that is that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.”

The philosopher William James also wished for a “moral equivalent of war,” a way to marshal the spirit of selfless service under government direction without the unpleasantness of combat. He advocated conscription of young people for civilian service in mines, road building, and fishing boats “to get the childishness knocked out of them.” Praising the “martial virtues,” James called for the “surrender of private interest” in favor of “obedience to command.”
  

Individualism and selfishness

The theme that individual liberty, private property, and laissez faire were “selfish” recurs throughout the postwar collectivist and Progressive literature. Thus, if selfishness was bad, then its institutions were thereby condemned. This fitted nicely with the religious views of many of the reformers. Baptist theologian and reformer Samuel Zane Batten wrote in The Christian State, “Just so far as democracy means the enthronement of self-interest and the apotheosis of individual desire . so far it becomes an iniquitous and dangerous thing.” He also said, “True liberty means the voluntary sacrifice of self for the common life.” Another clergyman-activist, George Herron was blunter: “Sin is pure individualism.”