American History through Literature
1870–1920
Editorial Board EDITORS IN CHIEF Tom Quirk
Professor of English Univer...
38 downloads
835 Views
26MB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
American History through Literature
1870–1920
Editorial Board EDITORS IN CHIEF Tom Quirk
Professor of English University of Missouri–Columbia Gary Scharnhorst
Professor of English University of New Mexico ADVISORY EDITORS William L. Andrews
E. Maynard Adams Professor of English University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Louis J. Budd
James B. Duke Professor of English (Emeritus) Duke University Lawrence J. Buell
Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Harvard University Susan K. Harris
Joyce and Elizabeth Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture University of Kansas Denise D. Knight
Professor of English State University of New York at Cortland William J. Scheick
J. R. Millikan Centennial Professor, Department of English University of Texas at Austin
American History through Literature
1870–1920
V O L U M E
3
PRAGMATISM to “THE YELLOW WALL-PAPER” INDEX
TOM QUIRK & GARY SCHARNHORST
Editors in Chief
American History through Literature, 1870–1920 Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, Editors in Chief
© 2006 Thomson Gale, a part of The Thomson Corporation Thomson and Star logo are trademarks and Gale and Charles Scribner’s Sons are registered trademarks used herein under license. For more information, contact Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Or visit our Internet site at http://www.gale.com ALL RIGHTS RESERVED No part of this work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic,
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, Web distribution, or information storage retrieval systems— without the written permission of the publisher. For permission to use material from this product, submit your request via the Web at http://www.gale-edit.com/permissions, or you may download our Permissions Request form and submit your request by fax or mail to: Permissions Department Thomson Gale 27500 Drake Road Farmington Hills, MI 48331-3535 Permissions hotline: 248-699-8006 or 800-877-4253, ext. 8006 Fax: 248-688-8074 or 800-762-4058
Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all copyright notices, the acknowledgments constitute an extension of the copyright notice. While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in this publication, Thomson Gale does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. Thomson Gale accepts no payment for listing; and inclusion in the publication of any organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher will be corrected in future editions.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA American History through Literature, 1870–1920 / Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, editors-in-chief. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-684-31464-9 (set hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-684-31465-7 (v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-684-31466-5 (v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-684-31467-3 (v. 3 : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-684-31493-2 (e-book) 1. American literature—19th century—Encyclopedias. 2. Literature and history— United States—History—19th century—Encyclopedias. 3. Literature and history—United States—History—20th century—Encyclopedias. 4. United States—History—19th century— Historiography—Encyclopedias. 5. United States—History—20th century—Historiography— Encyclopedias. 6. American literature—20th century—Encyclopedias. 7. History in literature—Encyclopedias. I. Quirk, Tom, 1946– II. Scharnhorst, Gary. PS217.H57A843 2005 810.9’358’09034—dc22
2005023736
This title is also available as an e-book ISBN 0-684-31493-2 And may be purchased with its companion set, American History through Literature, 1820–1870 ISBN 0-684-31468-1 (6-vol. print set) Contact your Thomson Gale sales representative for ordering information Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Editorial and Production Staff Senior Editor:
Stephen Wasserstein
Project Editor:
Alja Kooistra Collar
Assisting Editors:
Joann Cerrito, Jennifer Wisinski
Editorial Assistant:
Angela Doolin
Susan Carol Barnett, Lisa Dixon, Gretchen Gordon, Jeffrey J. Hill, Teresa Jesionowski, Robert E. Jones, Jean Fortune Kaplan, Eric Lagergren, Maggie Paley, Janet Patterson, Linda Sanders, Jane Marie Todd, Julie Van Pelt
Manuscript Editors:
Proofreader: Indexer:
Carol Holmes
Katharyn Dunham
Senior Art Director:
Pamela Galbreath
Image Acquisitions:
Kelly Quin, Jillean McCommons
Imaging:
Lezlie Light, Michael Logusz
Cartographer:
XNR Productions
Manufacturing Buyer:
Wendy Blurton
Assistant Composition Manager: Publisher:
Frank Menchaca
Evi Seoud
Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . PREFACE .
.
.
.
.
.
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
. .
xv xvii
Anarchism . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Suzanne Clark
Anglo-Saxonism . . . . . . . . . . . 70 John N. Swift
Annexation and Expansion
. . . . . . .
74
Joseph L. Coulombe
Volume 1
Anti-Intellectualism . . . . . . . . . . 79
A
Tim Sougstad
Addiction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Appeal to Reason . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Nancy Morrow
Roger Forseth
Adolescence . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Art and Architecture. . . . . . . . . . 86 Joseph J. Wydeven
Caren J. Town
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . . . . . .
13
Arts and Crafts
Louis J. Budd
Aestheticism . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Assimilation . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Lori Jirousek
Christian Berkemeier
Aging and Death . . . . . . . . . . . 27
The Atlantic Monthly . . . . . . . . . 106 Ellery Sedgwick
Virgil Mathes
Agnosticism and Atheism . . . . . . . . 31
Autobiography . . . . . . . . . . . 111 William Pannapacker
S. T. Joshi
The Ambassadors . . . . . . . . . . . 35
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
. . . . . . . . 43
120
The Awakening . . . . . . . . . . . 123 William Nelles
Rick Waters
The American Language
. .
Cristina L. Ruotolo
Richard A. Hocks
American Indian Stories
. . . . . . . . . . . 97
Nancy Morrow
. . . . . . . . 46
Connie Eble
American Literature . . . . . . . . . . 49 Joseph Csicsila
Americans Abroad . . . . . . . . . . 55 Horst Kruse
The American Scene . . . . . . . . . . 61 Mary Esteve
B Banking and Finance . . . . . . . . . 129 Roark Mulligan
Battle of the Little Bighorn . .
. . . . .
133
Caren J. Town
vii
CONTENTS
Best-Sellers . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
Civil War Memoirs . . . . . . . . . . 258
John J. Han
Maurice S. Lee
The Bible . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Civil War Memorials and Monuments
John J. Murphy
. . .
Billy Budd. . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
Clubs and Salons . . . . . . . . . . 267
Richard A. Hocks
Michael Smedshammer
Biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150
The Conjure Woman . . . . . . . . . 273
William Pannapacker
Henry B. Wonham
The Birth of a Nation . . . . . . . . . 158 Paul Young
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court . . . . . . . . . . . 278 Joe B. Fulton
Blacks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164 Licia Morrow Calloway
Copyright . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283
Bohemians and Vagabondia . . . . . . .
Martin T. Buinicki
171
Kevin J. Hayes
The Country of the Pointed Firs . . . . . .
Book Publishing
263
Timothy S. Sedore
Megan Benton
Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce . . . . .
292
Kimberly A. Freeman
Boston and Concord . . . . . . . . . 182 Len Gougeon
287
Sarah Way Sherman
. . . . . . . . . . 176
Cross-Dressing . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Mary P. Anderson
Boxing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 John Dudley
Business and Industry Novels . . . . . .
191
Richard Adams
D Daisy Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Michael Anesko
C
The Damnation of Theron Ware . . . . . .
308
Fritz Oehlschlaeger
Capital Punishment
. . . . . . . . . 199
Nancy Morrow
Elizabeth Miller Lewis
Catholics . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 John J. Han
Centennial
Darwinism
. . . . . . . . . . . . 317
Deirdre Ray
. . . . . . . . . . . . 207
Robert W. Rydell
Dime Novels . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 J. Randolph Cox
Century Magazine . . . . . . . . . . 211 James Arthur Bond
Disasters . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Nancy Morrow
Chicago . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Keith Gumery
Diseases and Epidemics . . . . . . . . 331 K. Patrick Ober
Children’s Literature . . . . . . . . . 220 J. D. Stahl
Chinese
Dance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311
Domestic and Sentimental Fiction . . . . .
338
Anne E. Boyd
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Elizabeth Archuleta
Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 Cole P. Dawson
Christianity and the Social Crisis . . . . .
236
E Editors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345
Susan Curtis
Ann Mauger Colbert
Christian Science
. . . . . . . . . . 238
Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350
Susan Albertine
Gary Scharnhorst
Circuses . . . . . . . . . . . . . 242
The Education of Henry Adams . . . . . .
William L. Slout
City Dwellers
. . . . . . . . . . . 246
The Emperor Jones . . . . . . . . . . 360
James R. Giles
Brenda Murphy
Civil Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . 252
Ethnology
Licia Morrow Calloway
viii
356
Len Gougeon
. . . . . . . . . . . . 363
Elizabeth Archuleta
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
CONTENTS
F
I
Farmers and Ranchers . . . . . . . . . 371
Illustrations and Cartoons
Diane Dufva Quantic
Fashion
. . . . . . .
479
Henry B. Wonham
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 376
Imagism . . . . . . . . . . . . . 483
Stephanie A. Smith
Timothy Materer
Feminism . . . . . . . . . . . . . 380
Immigration . . . . . . . . . . . . 486
Kerry Driscoll
Lori Jirousek
Folklore and Oral Traditions
. . . . . .
386
Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism . . . . .
Ronald L. Baker
Food and Drink . . . . . . . . . . . 391
Impressionism . . . . . . . . . . . 504
Jennifer Cognard-Black
Sonja Froiland Lynch Robert Lee Lynch Jr.
Foreign Visitors . . . . . . . . . . . 395
Indians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508
Steven Goldleaf
The Four Million
496
Susan K. Harris
Maureen Konkle
. . . . . . . . . . 400
Indian Wars . . . . . . . . . . . . 518
Helen Killoran
Maureen Konkle
Free Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
In the Tennessee Mountains . . . . . . . 523
Paul Hadella
Grace Toney Edwards
Frontier . . . . . . . . . . . . . 407
Iola Leroy . . . . . . . . . . . . . 526
Richard W. Etulain Gary Topping
John Bird
Irish. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 529 Stacey L. Donohue
G Genteel Tradition . . . . . . . . . . 413 Matthew Teorey
Ghost Stories
J, K
. . . . . . . . . . . 417
S. T. Joshi
Jews
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 535
Sanford E. Marovitz
Jim Crow . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543
Volume 2
Elizabeth Archuleta
Journalism
H
. . . . . . . . . . . . 546
Jean Marie Lutes
Harper & Brothers . . . . . . . . . . 425
The Jungle. . . . . . . . . . . . . 552
Gib Prettyman
Tim Sougstad
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine . . . . .
429
Jurisprudence
Ann Mauger Colbert
. . . . . . . . . . . 556
John N. Swift
Haymarket Square . . . . . . . . . . 432
Ku Klux Klan
Timothy Parrish
. . . . . . . . . . . 562
James S. Leonard
A Hazard of New Fortunes . . . . . . .
437
Gib Prettyman
Health and Medicine . . . . . . . . . 443 Jennifer S. Tuttle
Historical Romance
. . . . . . . . . 450
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 454
The Land of Little Rain . . . . . . . . 577 William J. Scheick
Ferenc M. Szasz
Houghton Mifflin . . . . . . . . . . 463
Law Enforcement . . . . . . . . . . 581 Matthew Teorey
Ellery Sedgwick
The House of Mirth . . . . . . . . . . 466
Lectures . . . . . . . . . . . . . 585 Gary Scharnhorst
Carol J. Singley
Humor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 471
Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . 588 Mark Woodhouse
Louis J. Budd
A M E R I C A N
Labor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569 Andrew Rennick
George Dekker
History
L
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
ix
CONTENTS
Literary Colonies . . . . . . . . . . 593
Motion Pictures . . . . . . . . . . . 703
Richard S. Randolph
Paul Young
Literary Criticism . . . . . . . . . . 598
Mrs. Spring Fragrance . . . . . . . . . 709
Aaron Urbanczyk
Literary Friendships
Martha J. Cutter
. . . . . . . . . 603
Muckrakers and Yellow Journalism
Peter Messent
Literary Marketplace . . . . . . . . . 608
712
Museums . . . . . . . . . . . . . 717
Steven H. Jobe
Liza Ann Acosta
Little Magazines and Small Presses
. . . . 616
Music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 721
Kevin J. Hayes
Lochner v. New York
. . . .
Brian Black
Michael J. Budds
. . . . . . . . . 622
My Ántonia . . . . . . . . . . . . 730
John N. Swift
Janis P. Stout
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” . . .
625
My First Summer in the Sierra . . . . . .
Sanford Pinsker
734
Michael P. Branch
Lynching . . . . . . . . . . . . . 628
Mystery and Detective Fiction . . . . . .
Emmett H. Carroll
737
Laura L. Behling
Lyric Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . . 632 Paul Crumbley
Lyrics of Lowly Life . . . . . . . . . . 638 John Bird
N The Nation . . . . . . . . . . . . 743 Louis J. Budd
M
Naturalism
McClure’s Magazine . . . . . . . . . 643 Charles Johanningsmeier
McTeague . . . . . . . . . . . . . 647 Joseph R. McElrath Jr.
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets . . . . . . .
651
Paul Sorrentino
Main Street . . . . . . . . . . . . 656 James M. Hutchisson
Main-Travelled Roads . . . . . . . . . 659 Joseph B. McCullough
The Man against the Sky . . . . . . . . 662 Tom Quirk
The Marrow of Tradition . . . . . . . . 666 William L. Andrews
. . . . . . . . . . . . 746
Donald Pizer
Nature Writing . . . . . . . . . . . 754 Michael P. Branch
A New England Nun and Other Stories . . .
760
Leah Blatt Glasser
New Orleans . . . . . . . . . . . . 765 Kris Lackey
New South . . . . . . . . . . . . 770 Martin Griffin
Newspaper Syndicates . . . . . . . . . 773 Charles Johanningsmeier
New York . . . . . . . . . . . . . 778 Susan K. Harris
North of Boston . . . . . . . . . . . 783 Helen Killoran
“The Marshes of Glynn” . . . . . . . . 670 Rosemary D. Cox
Mass Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . 674 June Johnson Bube
Mexican Revolution
. . . . . . . . . 683
Antonio C. Márquez
Migration . . . . . . . . . . . . . 687
O Oratory
Kelvin Beliele
Miscegenation . . . . . . . . . . . 692
Orientalism . . . . . . . . . . . . 796
Joe B. Fulton
Moon-Calf
David A. Boxwell
. . . . . . . . . . . . 696
Other People’s Money . . . . . . . . . 801
Keith Gumery
Melvin I. Urofsky
Mormons . . . . . . . . . . . . . 699
Overland Monthly . . . . . . . . . . 803
William R. Handley
x
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 789
Wendy Dasler Johnson
Tara Penry
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
CONTENTS
Prostitution . . . . . . . . . . . . 914
P
Kevin J. Hayes
Parks and Wilderness Areas . . . . . . .
807
Seth Bovey
Martha D. Patton
Penitentiaries and Prisons
. . . . . . .
812
Mary P. Anderson
Periodicals
Pseudoscience . . . . . . . . . . . 916 Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . 923 Priscilla Perkins
. . . . . . . . . . . . 816
Martin Green
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant
. . . . .
823
Maurice S. Lee
Philippine-American War . . . . . . . . 827
R
Terry Oggel
Philosophy
. . . . . . . . . . . . 832
Race Novels . . . . . . . . . . . . 929 Kenneth W. Warren
Michael Eldridge
Photography . . . . . . . . . . . . 839
Racial Uplift . . . . . . . . . . . . 933 Jeffrey R. Williams
Andrew Smith
“Plain Language from Truthful James” . . .
843
Ramona . . . . . . . . . . . . . 940 Stephen Brandon
Gary Scharnhorst
Plessy v. Ferguson. . . . . . . . . . . 847
Realism
Brook Thomas
Poetry: A Magazine of Verse . . . . . . .
850
Reconstruction . . . . . . . . . . . 953 Sharon Carson
Timothy Materer
Political Parties . . . . . . . . . . . 853
The Red Badge of Courage Reform
Resorts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 977 Carolyn L. Mathews
Resource Management
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 882
. . . . . . . . 980
Nicolas S. Witschi
Jonathan Freedman
Poverty
971
Donna M. Campbell
Joseph W. Slade
The Portrait of a Lady . . . . . . . . . 876
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 963
Regionalism and Local Color Fiction . . . .
David Cochran
Pornography . . . . . . . . . . . . 872
958
Bruce Levy
Christoph Irmscher
Populism . . . . . . . . . . . . . 867
. . . . . . .
John Clendenning
Matthew Teorey
Popular Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . 859
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 943
James S. Leonard
The Rise of David Levinsky . . . . . . .
985
Sanford E. Marovitz
Chad Rohman
S
Volume 3
St. Louis World’s Fair . . . . . . . . . 991
P
Keith Gumery
Pragmatism . . . . . . . . . . . . 889 Pragmatism . . . . . . . . . . . . 894
San Francisco
. . . . . . . . . . . 999
David Fine
Jan Whitt
Presidential Elections . . . . . . . . . 896 Professionalism . . . . . . . . . . . 903 The Promised Land . . . . . . . . . . 908
Science and Technology. . . . . . . . 1007 Science Fiction. . . . . . . . . . . 1015 Steve Anderson
Timothy Parrish
. . . . . .
911
Scientific Materialism. . . . . . . . . 1018 Tom Quirk
David W. Levy
H I S T O R Y
1003
Klaus Benesch
Jennifer Cognard-Black
The Promise of American Life
Satire, Burlesque, and Parody . . . . . . Richard Fusco
Steven Goldleaf
A M E R I C A N
Same-Sex Love . . . . . . . . . . . 994 Christopher Looby
Patrick K. Dooley
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
xi
CONTENTS
Scribner’s Magazine . . . . . . . . . 1023
Tourism and Travel Writing
James Arthur Bond
The Sea-Wolf
. . . . . . . . . . . 1026
1131
Tramps and Hobos . . . . . . . . . 1135
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
Self-Help Manuals
. . . . . .
Jeffrey Melton Holger Kersten
. . . . . . . . . 1031
Transportation . . . . . . . . . . . 1141
Carolyn L. Mathews
Kevin J. Hayes
Sex Education . . . . . . . . . . . 1034 Paul Hadella
Short Story . . . . . . . . . . . . 1039 Kirk Curnutt
Sister Carrie
U . . . . . . . . . . . 1046 Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings
Leonard Cassuto
Slang, Dialect, and Other Types of Marked Language . . . . . . . . . 1051
. . 1147
R. Bruce Bickley Jr.
Up from Slavery
. . . . . . . . . . 1152
Keith E. Byerman
Matthew J. Gordon
Social Darwinism . . . . . . . . . . 1055
Utopias and Dystopias . . . . . . . . 1155 Carol A. Kolmerten
Deirdre Ray
Socialism. . . . . . . . . . . . . 1060 John Samson
“Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism” . . . . . . . . . . . 1064
V
Arthur Wrobel
. . . . . . . . 1067
Village Dwellers . . . . . . . . . . 1161
Spanish-American War . . . . . . . . 1070
Violence . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1165
The Souls of Black Folk
Joe B. Fulton
Keith E. Byerman
Terry Oggel
Terry Oggel
Spiritualism . . . . . . . . . . . . 1075
The Voice of the People
. . . . . . . . 1173
Pamela R. Matthews
Martha D. Patton
Sports. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1079 Michael Oriard
The Squatter and the Don . . . . . . .
1086
Jesse Alemán
The Strenuous Life . . . . . . . . . . 1089 Michael L. Collins
Success . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1092 Carol Nackenoff
W, Y War Writing. . . . . . . . . . . . 1177 James Dawes
Wealth
. . . . . . . . . . . . . 1180
John Samson
Weaponry . . . . . . . . . . . . 1186 Virgil Mathes
The Western
T Tales of Soldiers and Civilians . . . . . .
1101
Wild West Shows . . . . . . . . . . 1194
Lawrence I. Berkove
Paul Reddin
Tarzan of the Apes. . . . . . . . . . 1105
Winesburg, Ohio . . . . . . . . . . 1197
Phillip Howerton
Jan Whitt
Temperance. . . . . . . . . . . . 1108
Woman’s Journal . . . . . . . . . . 1200
Debra J. Rosenthal
Cynthia J. Davis
Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1114
Women and Economics . . . . . . . . 1203
Roger A. Hall
Jennifer S. Tuttle
The Theory of the Leisure Class . . . . . .
1122
Women’s Suffrage. . . . . . . . . . 1207
Clare Eby
Joanne B. Karpinski
This Side of Paradise . . . . . . . . . 1127
World’s Columbian Exposition
Kirk Curnutt
xii
. . . . . . . . . . . 1190
Gary Scharnhorst
. . . . .
1214
Keith Gumery
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
CONTENTS
World War I
. . . . . . . . . . . 1218
Martin Griffin
Wounded Knee
. . . . . . . . . . 1224
Rick Waters
“The Yellow Wall-Paper” . . . . . . .
1227
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
1231
THEMATIC OUTLINE .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
1245
LIST OF ENTRIES TO COMPANION SET .
.
.
.
.
.
1249
.
.
.
1253
.
.
.
1255
.
.
.
.
PRIMARY SOURCES FOR FURTHER READING
Denise D. Knight INDEX .
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
.
.
.
.
.
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
xiii
PRAGMATISM
P
It is a commonplace to describe Americans as pragmatic—sometimes that tag is a compliment; more often it is a slur. However, the philosophy referred to as “pragmatic” involves stances on the nature of reality (metaphysics) and the nature of knowledge (epistemology) even as it embraces an agenda of psychological, social, and ethical positions. While philosophical pragmatism eventually evolved into a sophisticated and subtle body of doctrines, initially it was a response to a cultural endowment of concepts and problems. That is, a common matrix energized the intellectuals—the artists, jurists, clergy, journalists, scientists, philosophers, and novelists—of the turn of the nineteenth century in America even as the big three pragmatists, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842– 1910), and John Dewey (1859–1952) systematically worked out the details of philosophical pragmatism. Any treatment of classical American pragmatism must begin with C. S. Peirce’s seminal pair of articles, “The Fixation of Belief” (1877) and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878), both of which first appeared in Popular Science Monthly. Peirce’s approach repudiates the whole project of René Descartes (1596– 1650), the father of modern philosophy, who postulated methodic doubt to establish an indubitable foundation from which humans embark upon the project of achieving certitude. John Dewey echoes Peirce’s stance, explaining that postmodern philosophy had abandoned “the quest for certainty.” Peirce argued that Descartes’s goal of certitude was unrealistic, even impossible, and that his strategy of
C O N T I N U E D
manufactured doubt was, at best, a make-believe exercise and, at worst, could undermine confidence in one’s ability to understand and deal with the world. In his 1868 paper “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities,” describing Cartesian doubt as alternatively feigned and corrosive, Peirce states: We cannot begin with complete doubt. . . . Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up. . . . Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts. (Collected Papers 5:265)
Instead, Peirce offers a triad of belief (defined as a habit of action), doubt (described as an irritation prompted by failure), and inquiry (characterized as the process of fixing a problematic situation by proposing a satisfactory plan of action in the form of a replacement belief). In place of wondering whether my hand is before my eyes, whether I am now dreaming, or whether I am being deceived by an evil genius, as Descartes urges us to do, the founder of pragmatism suggests that the paradigm for intellectual inquiry is real-life problem solving. When my car will not start I experience real doubt. The situation demands that I inquire in order to fix the problem so that when the solution is found I can drive down the road in a calm and satisfactory state of belief. In a masterfully compressed sketch of the intellectual development of individuals as well as the human race, Peirce argues that four strategies for fixing belief have evolved: first, tenacity, then authority,
889
P R A G M AT I S M
THE LITERARY NATURALISTS FRANK NORRIS AND JACK LONDON PRAGMATIZE The classical American pragmatic philosophers would be hard-pressed to improve upon Frank Norris’s account of pragmatic truth in his essay “The Need of a Literary Conscience,” which appeared in the December 1901 World’s Work. Norris explains that though unreflective persons may think truth is “an abstraction, a vague idea,” it has instead “to do with practical, tangible, concrete work-aday life. . . . [It is] as concrete as the lamp-post on the corner, as practical as a cable-car, as real and homely and work-a-day and commonplace as a boot-jack” (p. 1158). Also noteworthy in their nod to pragmatism are the last chapters of The Sea-Wolf and Jack London’s description of the wildly implausible success that Humphrey Van Weyden (society dandy recently become able-bodied sailor with minimal help from his fiancée, Maud) has in rehabilitating the wrecked and gutted sealing schooner the Ghost. When Humphrey tells Maud he is certain that the foremast he has heroically hoisted and refitted will work, she asks, “Do you know Dr. Jordan’s final test of truth?” And then she eloquently pragmaticizes, “‘Can we make it work? Can we trust our lives to it?’ is the test” (London, Novels and Stories, p. 755). Her source, Donald Pizer points out, was an article by David Starr Jordan, “The Stability of Truth,” which appeared in Popular Science Monthly in March 1897 (London, The Sea-Wolf, p. 1017). This was the journal that had, a decade earlier, published the seminal statements of pragmatism, “The Fixation of Belief” and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” by C. S. Peirce.
then reasonableness, and finally the scientific method. The first three methods are infected with subjectivity and a full range of human biases. Only the fourth method allows reality itself to shape, objectively and systematically, one’s beliefs instead of vice versa. Moreover, the scientific method is self-corrective and is the only method that can use doubt as an opportunity (instead of a threat) as it turns difficulties into additional hypotheses waiting testing. Close at hand are redefinitions of both meaning and truth.
890
A M E R I C A N
If the hypothetical-deductive method is to become the strategy to fix beliefs, then all questions, problems, concepts, and issues will have to be translatable (without loss of content) into patterns of action. Thereby, the meaning of an idea is the behavior it prompts, and its fruitfulness (or failure) will measure its truth (or falsity) as a pattern of action. In the nearly seventy-five years between the publication of Peirce’s seminal articles and John Dewey’s death in 1952, American pragmatists worked out the profit of and the problems with this radical redefinition of truth and meaning and more generally proposed, as a consequence, a fundamental recasting of the nature of philosophy. (After Dewey’s death, classical American pragmatism’s influence declined precipitously only to experience a stunning renaissance triggered by the publication of critical editions of the works of Peirce, James, and Dewey in the early 1970s and the emergence of the high-energy, high-profile neopragmatism of Richard Rorty in the 1980s and 1990s.) Though there are many individual differences of detail and emphasis among even the big three pragmatists— Peirce, James, and Dewey—a cluster of six commonly shared commitments can be discerned. THE REPUDIATION OF THE PROJECT OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY
As noted above, the American pragmatists rejected the search for certain, timeless, universal answers to ultimate questions about Reality, Truth, God, and the Good. Rather than a theoretical pursuit, philosophy is seen as an instrument responding to concrete and tractable real problems. In his seminal essay, “The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy”(1909), Dewey explains that “the bearing of Darwinian ideas upon philosophy” is that “the new logic outlaws, flanks, dismisses—what you will—one type of problems and substitutes for it another type. Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities in order to explore specific values and the specific conditions that generate them” (Collected Writings: Middle Works 4:10). Dewey further argued that all forms of intelligence are inherently critical; philosophy, because of its generality and fundamental nature, is “criticism of criticisms.” Accordingly, philosophy’s duty of cultural critique is in the service of social reconstruction and the amelioration of human suffering. “Philosophy,” he wrote in a 1917 paper (“The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy”), “recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men” (Collected Writings: Middle Works 10:46).
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
P R A G M AT I S M
PHILOSOPHY AS A PLURALISTIC AND HUMANISTIC ENTERPRISE
Pragmatists deem a comprehensive perspective and a total picture beyond the ken of humans. Philosophy’s claims are understood to be inherently partial, contextdependent, tentative, and transactional articulations of the human perspective. William James is especially keen on these characteristics. Note these comments from his highly influential Pragmatism (1907): first on pluralism and then on humanism: But as the sciences have developed farther, the notion has gained ground that most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approximations. The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them may from some point of view be useful. Their great use is to summarize old facts and to lead to new ones. They are only a man-made language, a conceptual shorthand, as someone calls them, in which we write our reports of nature; and languages, as is well known, tolerate much choice of expression and many dialects. (Works: Pragmatism, p. 33) Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made: things. Mr. Schiller [a contemporary European pragmatist] applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of “Humanism” to the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products too. Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist. . . . You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you can’t weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them. Mathematics and logic are themselves fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy and biology follow massive cues of human preference. (Works: Pragmatism, pp. 116–117, 122)
Note how sweeping is James’s claim: not just philosophy, literature, and the humanities in general but also mathematics, logic, and the empirical sciences are humanistic enterprises. Humans, insists James, must continually acknowledge the irreducible plurality of experience and the inescapable lens of perspective. AN EXPERIENTIAL, EVOLUTIONARY, AND PROCESS ORIENTATION
Pragmatists see Experience, not Reality, as the subject matter for reflection and analysis. John Dewey, for A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
example, describes the project of metaphysics as the discovery of the generic traits of reality. Among the traits that Dewey examines are experience as stable, precarious, eventful, active, genuine, spurious, nurturing, hazardous, changing, continuous, practical and experimental, filled with initiations and consummations, funded with meanings, and social. Pragmatism replaces the spectator view of knowledge, including its assumption that one’s ideas “copy” a static universe, with the view that, as a knower, one is an involved participant who makes and remakes the universe. As part of pragmatism’s war campaign against all dualisms (subject/object, matter/spirit, appearance/reality, means/ends), James and Dewey looked for terms that would get behind (or under) the known/knower opposition. Dewey, in particular, was adamant that experience (not reality or things or consciousness) is problematic and in need of investigation. To further stress the active and interactive process involved in knowing, Dewey initially described knowledge as a “transaction”; later he preferred the term “negotiation.” “Experience,” he writes in “The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy,” is primarily a process of undergoing: a process of standing something; of suffering and passion, of affection, in the literal sense of these words. The organism has to endure, to undergo, the consequences of its own actions. Experience is no slipping along in a path fixed by inner consciousness. . . . Undergoing, however, is never mere passivity. . . . Experience, in other words, is a matter of simultaneous doings and sufferings. Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of events; our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves. (Collected Writings: Middle Works 10:8–10)
The impact of Darwinian evolution is pervasive in pragmatic philosophy. If all of reality is in evolutionary flux, there are no immutable natures to anchor knowledge or to ground values. Given the ascent of Darwin, everything is in process. A SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM FOR PHILOSOPHY
As also noted above, if the scientific method is the only trustworthy and defensible method of inquiry, then ideas are best understood as tools. If every belief is corrigible, one’s standards for knowledge must be modestly downgraded to an expectation of high probability. Dewey offers “warranted assertability” (instead of certainty or Truth) as a realistic and assessable goal for true beliefs. Pragmatism’s antifoundational stance treats every belief as criticizable and revisable. Peirce writing in 1897 observed that “no man of self-respect ever now states his result without affixing to it its probable error” (Collected Papers 1:9)— a posture he
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
891
P R A G M AT I S M
dubbed “fallibilism.” He further urged that all dogmas be greeted with extreme skepticism. Peirce kept every issue open to reexamination, offering as “the first rule of reason. . . . ‘Do not block the road to inquiry’” (Collected Papers 1:136). In his famous “The Will to Believe” essay, James stresses the importance of sustaining a tension between trusting and questioning our beliefs. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be re-interpretable or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the whole history of philosophy will bear me out. (Works: The Will to Believe, p. 22)
The pragmatic notion of ideas as trustworthy tools can be highlighted by a favorite paradigm: an idea as map. Ideas do not duplicate sensations or impressions nor do they picture reality; ideas guide. A map is an extraordinarily compact summary of past experience that literally leads us. A reliable map gets one to one’s destination (and a faulty one gets one lost). Note that one more naturally speaks of a reliable or good or useful map instead of a true one. In Pragmatism, James puts it this way: Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it. The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. . . . Her only test of probable truth is what works best in the way of leading us, what fits every part of life best and combines with the collectivity of experience’s demands, nothing being omitted. (Works: Pragmatism, pp. 42, 44)
In short, for the pragmatists reflective thought is a response to concrete, real-life problems, and truth is proximately measured by its effectiveness in accomplishing specific, practical goals and ultimately gauged by its ability to promote long-term human flourishing.
MELIORISM, HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY, AND A FINITE GOD
Pragmatists reject both pessimism and optimism in favor of the view that improvement is possible. Accordingly humans are responsible for designing workable, ongoing, revisable solutions to better the lot of their fellows. Lest human freedom, initiative, and responsibility be compromised, God is seen as a powerful, though finite, partner in improving the world. In the final chapter of
892
A M E R I C A N
Pragmatism, James asks his readers to imagine God, at the moment of creation, putting the following case to his human cocreators: I am going to make a world not certain to be saved, a world the perfection of which shall be conditional merely, the condition being that each several agent does its own “level best.” I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted. It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. It is a social scheme of co-operative work genuinely to be done. Will you join the procession? Will you trust yourself and trust other agents enough to face the risk? (Works: Pragmatism, p. 139)
With regard to religion, the pragmatists are, predictably, more interested in assessing the valuable (and sometimes deleterious) effects of belief in God (rather than in engaging in debate about the perennial philosophical questions regarding the existence and attributes of God). In this connection, James argues that with no other reasons to believe in God, “men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest” (Works: The Will to Believe, p. 161). In other words, religion’s chief value is as a catalyst for the strenuous mood. AN EMERGENT, COMMUNAL, AND SOCIAL SELF
Because pragmatism sees the assessment of social and public policies as an essential task, concerns with individual insight and personal satisfaction are relegated to the periphery. Even more fundamentally, a preexistent, inner transcendental self is supplanted by a model of selfhood in which both self-awareness and selfconstitution are socially and behaviorally generated. The pragmatists’ interest in psychology is striking. Following the publication of his monumental and groundbreaking two-volume masterpiece The Principles of Psychology (1890), James turned in 1895 to applied psychology, giving summer school lectures in Boston, at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, and as far west as Colorado Springs. These lectures were published as Talks to Teachers in 1899. Dewey’s work followed the same pattern. Beginning with several volumes devoted to psychological issues, he then turned to pedagogy and related educational issues. His sustained critique of the American educational establishment’s misguided views of human development and its faulty emphasis on recitation and memorization in the curricula had a profound impact upon American society. With regard to human development, the contributions of a second-generation pragmatist, George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), are also noteworthy. Mead—who had been a disciple of John Dewey at the
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
P R A G M AT I S M
University of Chicago—was neither a prolific nor a popular philosopher, but his theories were revolutionary and influential. His approach to selfhood is explicitly developmental and behavioristic. The title of one of his influential essays asked: “Mind Approached through Behavior—Can Its Study Be Made Scientific?” Mead’s response to his own question was, of course, “yes”—as his study of the gestures of lower animals (concentrating on the growls and barks of dogs) led to his theories about human development: How can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to himself? This is the essential psychological problem of selfhood or of self-consciousness; and its solution is to found by referring to the process of social conduct or activity in which the given person or individual is implicated. . . . The individual experiences himself as such, not directly, but only indirectly from the particular standpoints of other individual members of the same social group, or from the generalized standpoint of the social group as a whole to which he belongs. . . . in so far as he first becomes an object to himself just as other individuals are objects to him or in his experience; and he becomes an object to himself only by taking the attitudes of other individuals toward himself within a social environment or context of experience and behavior in which both he and they are involved. . . . It is impossible to conceive a self arising outside of social experience. (Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, pp. 138–140)
Most of Mead’s writings appeared from the mid1930s onward. There is, therefore, good reason to believe that, in this case, the clear vector of influence was from literature to philosophy (and psychology). That is, American literary realism and naturalism— the focus upon behavior, environment, materialism, and the human animal, found in the work of such authors as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser—were undoubtedly the decisive influences upon philosophers, not vice versa.
London, Jack. Novels and Stories. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982. London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf. 1904. Edited by Donald Pizer. New York: Library of America, 1986. Mead, George Herbert. The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Work of George Herbert Mead. Edited by David L. Miller. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Mead, George Herbert. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934. Norris, Frank. “The Need of a Literary Conscience.” In his Novels and Essays, pp. 1157–1160. New York: Library of American, 1986 Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected Papers. 8 vols. Edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Wiess. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960. Includes “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” (1868), “The Fixation of Belief” (1877), and “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878). Peirce, Charles Sanders. Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition. 6 vols. Edited by Max W. Fisch, Nathan Houser et al. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982–2002. Thirty volumes are projected to complete this edition. Rorty, Richard. The Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Secondary Works
Dooley, Patrick. “William James on the Human Way of Being.” Personalist Forum 6 (1990): 75–85. McDermott, John J. Streams of Experience: Reflections on the History and Philosophy of American Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986. Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Menand, Louis. “The Return of Pragmatism.” American Heritage 89 (October 1997): 48–63.
See also Philosophy; Pragmatism; Realism
Singer, Marcus G., ed. American Philosophy. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Dewey, John. The Collected Writings of John Dewey, 1882– 1953. 37 vols. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969–1991. James, William. The Correspondence of William James. 11 vols. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2003. Twelve volumes are projected.
A M E R I C A N
James, William. The Works of William James. 19 vols. Edited by Frederick Burkhardt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975–1988.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Stuhr, John J., ed. Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy: Essential Readings and Interpretative Essays. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wilshire, Bruce. “But Where Are the Metaphysics?” Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 2002, pp. 28–29. Review of Menand’s The Metaphysical Club.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
Patrick K. Dooley
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
893
PRAGMATISM
PRAGMATISM Pragmatism is a philosophical approach that measures the truth of an idea by experimentation and by examining its practical outcome. Pragmatists believe that truth can be modified; that human values are essential to academic inquiry; that truth is not absolute; that meaning and action are intimately connected; and that ideas are to be evaluated by whether they promote consistency and predictability. One of the staunchest advocates of pragmatism was William James (1842– 1910), whose ability to translate difficult philosophical principles for laypersons helped spread the tenets of pragmatism during the 1890s and the first quarter of the twentieth century, although James himself died in 1910. One of James’s most important contributions to the study of pragmatism is his concern with religion. According to James, truth should be evaluated based on its impact on human behavior; therefore, one’s religious faith can be justified if it makes a positive difference in one’s life. A professor in the Department of Humanistic Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, Bryan Vescio argues in his introduction to Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking that words such as “pragmatism” and “pragmatist” are used constantly in conversation, but the words have taken on a negative connotation; Vescio suggests that they have come to “denote merely a general willingness to compromise principles, even to the point of selfishness or irresponsibility, not the specific philosophical alternative to essentialism and foundationalism that James articulated” (p. ix). William James, the son of philosopher Henry James Sr. and brother of novelist Henry James, is considered one of the most influential American philosophers and an example of how theories of knowledge may be applied to contemporary questions. James turned from physiology to psychology when he began teaching at Harvard in 1875. Then he was drawn to the philosophy of Charles Renouvier, and during the 1890s he responded to Renouvier’s theories with a series of lectures, which were collected as Pragmatism. The book was James’s last major academic achievement: he retired from teaching in 1907 and died three years later. THE IMPORTANCE OF PRAGMATISM
In both Pragmatism (1907) and The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (1909), James argues that the “need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast” (Pragmatism, p. 47). Written to provide access to the ideals of one philosophical system for those interested in bettering their
894
A M E R I C A N
William James, c. 1900.
© BETTMANN/CORBIS
lives, Pragmatism acquired its subtitle, A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, when James published the collection of eight essays some ten years after he had begun to compose them. James presented the lectures that constitute Pragmatism at the Lowell Institute in Boston in the winter of 1906 and again at Columbia University in the winter of 1907. According to Bryan Vescio’s introduction to the 2003 edition of Pragmatism, the “purpose of the lectures and the book they became was at once to popularize contemporary trends in philosophy and to offer a new position to mediate its disputes” (p. xi). Its publication sparked what Vescio calls “wild popularity among lay readers and resentment among professional philosophers” (p. xi). The book is essential to those interested in philosophy because James’s pragmatism suggests that the “foundations of ultimate beliefs are generally non-rational and demands that theory be answerable to concrete experience” (Vescio, p. xi). Darwinism and other scientific approaches, which held sway among philosophers in James’s time, suggested that human beings were controlled by laws of
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PRAGMATISM
nature. Such an approach left little room for free will. James, a follower of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a nineteenth-century transcendentalist who celebrated individual choice and intellectual inquiry, was concerned about the limitations of such scientific and philosophical theories. He was reassured by Renouvier’s argument that the capacity to hold a belief when others are available is proof of the existence of free will. This led to James’s famous declaration that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. James also turned to the work of his friend Charles Sanders Peirce, who coined the term “pragmatism” during conversations at the Metaphysical Club, a group formed in the 1870s that included writers and thinkers such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “Pragmatism” was the view that a thought’s value lay in its practical consequences and it connected James to Socrates and Aristotle, both of whom used ordinary experience as a test for their theories. (Here, incidentally, lies one explanation for the subtitle. James’s book relies on ideas held by Peirce but it marks the first time anyone attempted consistently and thoroughly to consider the implications of pragmatist thought.) THE COLLECTED LECTURES
In “Lecture I: The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” James puts pragmatism in the context of previous philosophical movements, arguing for its preeminence and suggesting similarities between it and other philosophical approaches. Most important, he addresses his lay audience directly, reassuring them and making them part of his quest for applicable knowledge. For example, James writes, “For the philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos” (p. 1). He suggests that there is a “curious fascination in hearing deep things talked about, even though neither we nor the disputants understand them. We get the problematic thrill, we feel the presence of the vastness” (p. 2). It is this vastness that James’s essays address. For example, he writes: Philosophy is at once the most sublime and the most trivial of human pursuits. It works in the minutest crannies and it opens out the widest vistas. It “bakes no bread,” as has been said, but it can inspire our souls with courage; and repugnant as its manners, its doubting and challenging, its quibbling and dialectics, often are to common people, no one of us can get along without the far-flashing beams of light it sends over the world’s perspectives. (P. 2)
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
In his second lecture, “What Pragmatism Means,” James explains how pragmatism can provide real approaches to ideas that seem impenetrable, since “new truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions” (p. 27) and that “pragmatism may be a happy harmonizer of empiricist ways of thinking with the more religious demands of human beings” (p. 31). The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable. Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right. (P. 20)
In the third lecture, “Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered,” James addresses the difference between what he calls material and spiritual substance. The heart of his argument lies in the following paragraph: Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for all irrevocably given. Imagine it to end this very moment, and to have no future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival explanations to its history. The theist shows how a God made it; the materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted from blind physical forces. Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose between their theories. How can he apply his test if a world is already completed? Concepts for him are things to come back into experience with, things to make us look for differences. But by hypothesis there is to be no more experience and no possible differences can now be looked for: Both theories have shown all their consequences and, by the hypothesis we are adopting, these are identical. The pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, in spite of their different-sounding names, mean exactly the same thing, and that the dispute is purely verbal. (P. 42)
In the fifth lecture, James explains “common sense,” a phrase that has a different meaning in philosophical discussions than in everyday conversations. “In practical talk, a man’s common sense means his good judgment, his freedom from eccentricity, his gumption, to use the vernacular word. In philosophy it
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
895
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought” (pp. 74–75). In the sixth lecture, James explains his definition of truth: “True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we can not. . . The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it. Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events” (p. 88). In lectures seven and eight, on humanism and religion respectively, James grapples with the human desire to find one truth—what he calls “all the great single-word answers to the world’s riddle, such as God, the One, Reason, Law, Spirit, Matter, Nature, Polarity, the Dialectic Process, the Idea, the Self, the Oversoul” (p. 105)—and suggests new ways of thinking about one’s humanity and one’s need for belief in a higher being or concept. Here again is evidence of James’s best and most distinctive quality as a philosopher and human being. He identifies with his audience and readers, and with vulnerability and wisdom acknowledges how difficult the concepts of pragmatism might be to embrace. “There are moments of discouragement in us all, when we are sick of self and tired of vainly striving. . . . There can be no doubt that when men are reduced to their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme” (pp. 129–30). In his final lectures, James argues that pragmatism can be called “religious” if one is willing to embrace a pluralistic faith. He suggests that by virtue of its central truths, it will draw followers who are willing to “postpone dogmatic answer” (p. 133). For those willing to live in the intellectual limbo he describes in Pragmatism, James’s philosophical system may be its own reassurance: “Between the two extremes of crude naturalism on the one hand and transcendental absolutism on the other, you may find that what I take the liberty of calling the pragmatistic or melioristic type of theism is exactly what you require” (p. 134). The impact of Pragmatism is undeniable. The philosophical perspective espoused in the landmark book bears similarities to the modern and postmodern ideas expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida. For many reasons, not the least its readability, the book remains central to those interested in philosophy. “The unmistakable personal style of William James is everywhere in the book,” says Vescio, “from its homey metaphors and examples drawn from ordinary experience to its pleas to its readers for indulgence to its often exultant celebration of human potential” (p. xv). See also Philosophy; Pragmatism
896
A M E R I C A N
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Work
James, William. Pragmatism. 1907. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003. Secondary Works
Allen, Gay Wilson. William James. New York: Viking, 1967. Ayer, Alfred Jules. The Origins of Pragmatism: Studies in the Philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. San Francisco: Freeman and Cooper, 1968. Cooper, Wesley. The Unity of William James’s Thought. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2002. Dooley, Patrick Kiaran. Pragmatism as Humanism: The Philosophy of William James. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1974. Gale, Richard M. The Divided Self of William James. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Knox, Howard Vicente. The Philosophy of William James. London: Constable, 1914. Moore, Edward Center. American Pragmatism: Peirce, James, and Dewey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996. Roth, John K. Freedom and the Moral Life: The Ethics of William James. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1969. Scheffler, Israel. Four Pragmatists: A Critical Introduction to Peirce, James, Mead, and Dewey. New York: Humanities Press, 1974. Seigfried, Charlene Haddock. Chaos and Context: A Study in William James. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978. Suckiel, Ellen Kappy. The Pragmatic Philosophy of William James. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982. Jan Whitt
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS Although the Civil War had been over for five years by 1870, its deathlock grip on electoral politics remained tight through the century, and perhaps beyond. Appointing two former Confederates to his first cabinet in 1885 was a controversial act for President Grover Cleveland (1837–1908), the only Democrat elected to the White House between the Civil War and 1912. The Republican Party depended on its base of pro-Union voters to respond loyally to its platform, which favored the interests of business over those of farmers, workers, debtors, former Confederates, immigrants, and other seemingly disparate single-issues groups, whom the Democratic
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
Party found difficult to herd under a common banner throughout the period of 1870 to 1920. Often, those separate groups splintered into third parties. Both major parties, for example, supported some form of tariff on imported goods—the Democrats wanted a tariff high enough to bring in needed revenue, and the Republicans wanted the tariff even higher, to protect American business from foreign competition. Tariff policy remained a constant problem through the late nineteenth century, yet the eventual solution— raising revenue by a national income tax—was the program of neither major party. These third parties—such as the Greenback Party, the Socialist Party, the Prohibition Party, the Populist Party, the Progressive Party, and many others—drew millions of popular votes for presidential candidates whose positions, radical at the time, often came to be embraced by one or both major parties by the midtwentieth century. Men and women with prescient ideas (the Equal Rights Party nominated women for the presidency in 1884 and 1888) expressed their ideas in political campaigns and in their writing, some of which was remarkably popular: Edward Bellamy’s bestselling utopian novel of 1888, Looking Backward, 2000–1887, foresaw a twentieth century that abounded in equity, progressive thought, and peace. No major party, of course, came close to endorsing Bellamy’s vision, but the short-lived Nationalist Party did support his utopian views. The appeal of Bellamy’s ideas, as such, was due to their “fictive impact” (as Jay Martin argues in Harvests of Change), which allowed the ideas to reach a wider audience than an economist like Thorstein Veblen, for example, could hope to reach. Other visionaries tried projecting political ideas into literary forms—William Dean Howells wrote utopias, A Traveler from Altruria in 1894 and Through the Eye of the Needle in 1907, as did Charlotte Perkins Gilman in Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916). Bellamy himself wrote a less successful sequel in Equality in 1897, but such imaginative thinking was decades ahead of the hardheaded, practical politics of this era. Writers of dystopias, too, flourished: Minnesota Congressman Ignatius Donnelly, author of the widely read novel Caesar’s Column (1889), foretelling a totalitarian twentieth century, also wrote the 1892 Populist Party platform denouncing the Democratic and Republican pursuit of “power and plunder” while masking their true venality behind “a sham battle over the tariff.” PASSIVE PRESIDENCIES
Between the Grant administration and the Harding administration, the American president generally occupied a less prominent place than the leading American A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Increase in electoral votes from 1872 to 1920 State California Colorado Illinois Kansas Louisiana Massachusetts Minnesota Nebraska New Jersey New York North Dakota Oklahoma Pennsylvania South Dakota Texas Washington
1872
1920
5 — 21 5 8 13 5 3 9 35 — — 29 — 8 —
13 6 29 10 10 18 12 8 14 45 5 10 38 5 20 7
Note: Included are those states where there was an increase in 5 or more electoral votes from 1872 to 1920. Colorado, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Washington were territories in 1872.
businessmen. As capitalists such as John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller invented new ways to make money, government considered carefully whether restraining that moneymaking urge could be in the public interest, and if so, what methods of restraint could be employed, both practically and legally. Some of the most powerful fiction of the period featured businessmen as protagonists devoting themselves to amassing great wealth and power, acts at which they prove far more successful than at finding ways to restrain themselves from immoral behavior: Theodore Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood, Howells’s Silas Lapham, and Frank Norris’s Curtis Jadwin all exemplify this figure of the grasping, morally obtuse American businessman of the time. As the Gilded Age endured, fictional portraits of business leaders grew less and less admiring, but even at the outset astute observers saw the need to control big business’s appetite: “The depravity of the business classes,” Walt Whitman observed in 1871, “is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater” (p. 214). While big businesses prospered, presidents, starting with Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885), surrendered the active role to other branches of government: when legislators “visited the White House,” said a member of Congress during Grant’s administration, “it was to give, not to receive advice” (Nelson, p. 88). The scandals erupting from this lack of leadership—the gold crisis of 1869, the Crédit Mobilier scandal unearthed just before the 1872 election, the Whiskey Ring discovered after it, and numerous lesser scandals—inspired Mark Twain (and Charles Dudley Warner to dub the period (and their coauthored 1874 novel) “The Gilded Age,” in
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
897
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
honor of the superficial probity of the lackluster leaders whose policy of laissez-faire capitalism enabled the voracious and ethically dubious business practices of the late nineteenth century to dominate American culture. The efficiency of wealth and power concentrated into large corporations was not questioned by either major political party or the courts, as third parties and journalists loudly but fruitlessly decried their excesses, rarely even slowing their progress. Saddled with a hopelessly corrupt administration as he strove for re-election in 1872, Ulysses S. Grant ran against former fellow Republican Horace Greeley (1811–1872). Lacking an effective candidate of its own, the Democratic Party endorsed Greeley out of sheer desperation, although Supreme Court Justice Salmon B. Chase and diplomat Charles Francis Adams vied for the nomination. An ardent abolitionist, Greeley gained the support of Southern Democrats, who preferred his plans for the withdrawal of federal troops from southern soil to a second Grant administration enforcing radical reconstruction of the south. Former slaves continued to support the Grant administration with their votes, contributing heavily to Grant’s political success. An energetic campaigner against Grant’s ineffective intervention in the scandals of his appointees, Greeley was derided during the campaign as a do-gooder and too incompetent, according to Mark Twain’s 1872 volume Roughing It, to answer a farmer’s simple question about turnips. Greeley’s editorials in his New York Tribune had long advocated for unpopular positions, such as temperance and women’s rights, a record that now emerged in the increasingly vituperative campaign. Although the unkempt Greeley was a strong speaker who enjoyed enthusiastic support among his followers, he lacked the dignified, statesmanlike bearing that Grant projected. (Twain lampooned Greeley as a careful dresser who would spend hours searching through his discarded laundry for a suitably soiled shirt to wear on the campaign trail.) Grant’s record as a war hero, still overshadowing his appointees’ record for unprecedented corruption, won him a comfortable majority of popular votes, and 286 Electoral College votes. Greeley earned some 63 electoral votes but never lived to receive a single one: shortly after Election Day, Greeley suffered a massive breakdown, both physically and emotionally, and he died within a month of the election. Because of further scandal in the second Grant administration, such as the Whiskey Ring, and economic hard times caused by the panic of 1873, the Democrats took back the house of representatives in 1874 and looked to consolidate their gains in the upcoming presidential election. They nominated Samuel Tilden
898
A M E R I C A N
(1814–1886), who had been elected governor of New York on the basis of his exposure of the infamously corrupt Tammany Hall ring led by William “Boss” Tweed. As governor, Tilden then went on to the Canal Ring, a conspiracy to defraud the state budget, and seemed an ideal candidate to campaign against the Grant administration’s besmirched record. Also running as a reformer was Ohio Governor Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893), a former Civil War general. After simmering for the past decade in national campaigns, the passions of the Civil War boiled over in the election of 1876, nearly causing a second Civil War. THE ELECTORAL CRISIS OF 1876
Hayes’s supporters, like Grant’s, had waved “the bloody shirt” to rally Republican voters; Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899), campaigning for Hayes, reminded Union veterans that “every man that shot Union soldiers was a Democrat.” Republicans characterized their political opponents as traitors, creating a rancorous climate that grew only worse as the campaign continued. Tilden easily won the majority of popular votes. In the Electoral College, he stood only a single electoral vote shy of a majority, with fifteen electoral votes from Florida, South Carolina, Oregon, and Louisiana in dispute. To break the virtual deadlock, Congress appointed a fourteen-member commission, equally split between Democrats and Republicans: five senators, five congressmen, and four Supreme Court justices, who were then empowered to appoint a fifteenth member, ultimately a Republican replacement felt capable by Democrats of rendering a nonpartisan decision. In February, three months after the voting was concluded and one month before the new president would be inaugurated, the commission voted 8 to 7, in favor of Hayes, along party lines. Since the Republicans had demonized Southern Democrats in the “bloody shirt” campaign, the Democrats stood on the brink of rejecting the commission’s judgment. Had they done so, a second Civil War might have erupted, but Governor Tilden persuaded his supporters to abide by the commission’s ruling. In conceding defeat, Tilden told supporters, “I can retire to private life with the consciousness that I shall receive from posterity the credit of having been elected to the highest position in the gift of the people, without any of the cares and responsibilities of the office,” an expression of relief some found too convincing. But settling the election of 1876 also involved brokering a deal that would affect generations of Americans: over the course of reaching a compromise solution, the Republicans agreed to concessions that Southern Democrats particularly wanted: to withdraw federal
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
troops from the South and to allow Southern whites to control voting in their states. This last concession nullified the Southern black vote and, in effect, allowed the American South to practice segregation within its own borders while nominally subject to federal law. The betrayal felt by black Americans after the resolution of the 1876 election was voiced by such writers as Paul Laurence Dunbar, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson. Farmers, and other borrowers of money, were hoping for a softer money policy resulting in inflated dollars that would be easier to pay back, but they, too, were disappointed to have Hayes elected, in that his hard-money fiscal policies were aimed at shoring up the dollar, not at relieving the problem of debtors. Fiction writers, most notably Hamlin Garland (1860– 1940) in his 1891 collection Main-Travelled Roads, described “the endless drudgery” of farming, while chroniclers of urban misery, such as Henry Fuller (1857–1929), author of The Cliff-Dwellers (1892), described squelched lives as dreary as those of their rural counterparts. The Democratic Party would continue to be divided for at least another generation, as its constituencies, of big-city labor, rural farmers, immigrants, and blacks, had varied and often conflicting needs. The Republicans were also divided: deeply unpopular, President Hayes let it be known that he was unwilling to run for re-election in 1880. Hayes had virtually courted the disdain of Washington by applying his own rectitude to the office. He refused, for example, a presidential appointment to his own nominator at the 1876 convention, Robert G. Ingersoll, on moral and religious grounds. Praised in The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1956) as “the silver-tongued infidel,” Ingersoll, an effective and flamboyant orator, was famous for his denunciations of religion. (Ingersoll played a small but interesting role in the genesis of one of the most popular novels of the late nineteenth century, made even more popular on stage and on screen in the twentieth as well. After discussing religion with the notoriously nonbelieving Ingersoll, Lew Wallace came away determined to write a novel about his own personal beliefs, which turned out to be Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ [1880].) Ingersoll denounced Hayes for his cowardice in denying him political preference, and he was not alone in finding Hayes finally lacking in strong leadership. With Hayes out of the running, Ulysses S. Grant let it be known that he was willing to serve a third term as president. The conservative wing of the Republican Party, known as “Stalwarts,” supported the front-runner, Grant, while the more moderate wing, the “Half Breeds,” favored Senators James G. Blaine (1830– 1893) of Maine or John Sherman (1823–1900) of Ohio. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
In nominating Sherman for the presidency, Ohio Congressman James A. Garfield delivered a low-key reasoned address, and his manner impressed the delegates with his potential as a compromise candidate. They nominated the astounded Garfield on the thirtysixth ballot. A major issue of division in the party was that of patronage: the Stalwart wing of the party opposed large-scale civil service reform, regarding such appointments as the just reward for political services rendered. The Half Breeds sought to advance President Hayes’s tepid attempts to introduce merit into civil service appointments, and Garfield’s acceptance of a Stalwart, Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886) of New York, as his vice presidential candidate united the party for the general election. Now that Reconstruction of the South, a divisive point of contention in previous election campaigns, was over, the parties needed to find other issues by which to distinguish themselves for the electorate. Feeling cheated by the results of the previous election, Democrats attacked Garfield’s service on the election commission that had selected President Hayes as the winner in 1876, and they criticized Garfield’s involvement in the Credit Mobilier scandal during the Grant administration, in which Garfield received a small sum intended to influence his vote in Congress. A deciding factor may have been the still-lingering Greenback Party, which won over 300,000 votes on a platform of inflationary paper currency, aimed at relieving debtors. The Democrats, headed by former the Civil War general Winfield Scott Hancock, lost the popular vote by a smaller margin than the vote total of the Greenback Party, which siphoned votes away from the Democrats. Concentrating their strength in the South, the Democrats lost by fewer than 10,000 popular votes and by a 214 to 155 margin in the Electoral College. Garfield’s choice of Chester A. Arthur proved critical when four months into the new administration, Garfield was assassinated. Unlike Garfield, Arthur had achieved distinction prior to his vice presidency primarily at a patronage job. As Collector of the Port of New York City, Arthur had been responsible for collecting much of the nation’s tariff revenues. Although patronage had been the bane of presidents for decades, wasting much of their time and energy squabbling with local leaders over whose candidate got which petty job in repayment for political services rendered, it was so deeply entrenched that it remained in force as powerful as ever until, as president, Arthur surprisingly turned against it and was able to institute some mild Civil Service reforms, such as the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, which required candidates for federal positions to take competitive examinations. Garfield’s assassin, in publicly proclaiming his Stalwart
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
899
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
loyalties, may have created suspicion that Arthur was somehow involved in the assassination, so Arthur felt obliged to pursue reforms to clear his administration of partisan suspicions. ARTHUR AND CLEVELAND TRY REFORM
Unhappily for him, Arthur’s own political base, the Stalwart wing of the Republican Party, failed to appreciate the conciliatory strategy. Having no interest in nominating Arthur for a term of his own, the Republicans considered the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, whose lack of ambition for the presidency was expressed in his famously firm disavowal: “If nominated. I will not accept; If elected, I will not serve.” Thus squelched, they turned once more to James G. Blaine, who had served as Arthur’s own secretary of state. Along with the Stalwarts, the more liberal elements of the Republican Party also mistrusted Arthur, probably from a lack of familiarity with him, and they bolted the Republican Party. These disaffected Republican liberals, calling themselves “Mugwumps,” felt that Blaine represented corruption, having become wealthy in a life of public service positions. (The anonymously written 1880 novel Democracy—of which Henry Adams was posthumously revealed the author in 1918—was read as a titillating roman-à-clef, with its villainous political manueverer thought to be a thinly disguised James G. Blaine suavely arguing against what he termed a government “artificially” purer than the society it represented.) Refusing to explain whence his personal fortune had come, Blaine defended his record by claiming that no proof had been offered against him. When letters surfaced showing Blaine’s unethical practices (Blaine’s incriminating postscript asked its recipient to “Burn this letter”) the Mugwumps supported the Democratic candidate. That turned out to be Grover Cleveland, the effective reformist governor of New York State, and enemy of Tammany Hall. “We love him for the enemies he has made” was a Cleveland slogan of 1884, indicating the strong partisan nature of the campaign. When Cleveland admitted to fathering an illegitimate child, Republicans chanted “Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa?” (Democrats topped that with: “Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha”). The election of 1884 also marked the first presidential election in twenty years not to have on the ballot at least one former Union general: neither Blaine nor Cleveland had served in the Civil War. But the “bloody shirt” was nonetheless again waved: a minister, in Blaine’s presence, characterized the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism and rebellion.” When Blaine did not repudiate that charge, he lost crucial Irish American support. For their part, Democrats referred to Blaine’s evasiveness about his
900
A M E R I C A N
own financial history by rhyming, “Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine, Monumental liar from the state of Maine!” (Nelson, p. 288). Cleveland’s margin of victory, 219 to 182, seems less narrow than it was, in that New York State, with thirty-six electoral votes, went Democratic by the slimmest of margins, barely over a thousand votes. Had six hundred New Yorkers voted Republican instead, New York and thus the nation would have elected Blaine. The only Democrat elected president in the late nineteenth century, Cleveland attempted to reform long-standing policies of his Republican predecessors he considered corrupt, with marginal success. He supported the ill-fated Dawes Act of 1887, which sought to give citizenship and land ownership to tribal Indians, passionately sought by Helen Hunt Jackson in her 1881 exposé Century of Dishonor and her 1884 novel Ramona. Cleveland also tried to stem the flow of pension moneys granted to Union veterans, a source of hardcore Republican support. He was less effective in reducing the tariff, which, coupled with his appointment of two former Confederates to his Cabinet, became an issue in Cleveland’s re-election campaign of 1888. Indiana Senator Benjamin Harrison (1833–1901), the Republican nominee in 1888, made the tariff into the main issue of the campaign, which was generally perceived as decorous and issues-oriented, following the raucous campaign of 1884. The election of 1888 was the first in which both parties’ candidates campaigned via written-out position papers arguing the merits of the issues. Lew Wallace, best-selling novelist, governor of the New Mexico territory, and (like Harrison) another former Union general in the Civil War, contributed a campaign biography of Harrison, whose stiff personality resisted all attempts to package him as the “Grandson of Tippecanoe.” In another close election, Harrison won both his home state of Indiana and Cleveland’s home state of New York by narrow margins, beating Cleveland in the electoral vote, although Cleveland gathered some 100,000 more popular votes than Harrison. Re-elected to a second (nonconsecutive) term in 1892, however, Cleveland saw the national economy almost immediately collapse. The depression emboldened Cleveland to act assertively. Backed up by the courts, this assertiveness allowed future presidents to take more active roles in leading the government. Cleveland’s method of combating the 1894 strike against Pullman workers, for example, was to call out federal troops, citing the “danger and public distress” caused by the strike. Hoping to draw conservative support to his bold policy, Cleveland instead drove
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
Labor’s support from it. The Democratic Party turned to William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), a thirty-sixyear-old populist orator from Nebraska, as their candidate in 1896. Bryan electrified the 1896 convention with his powerful plea for monetary reform, charging his listeners not to “crucify Mankind on a cross of gold.” Ultimately as unsuccessful in running for the presidency as anyone has been (Bryan would be defeated in 1896, 1900, and 1908), the populist Bryan set an agenda for the Democratic Party that was sharply distinct from the Republican platform, and the 1896 election was deeply inspiring to many who had been disenchanted with the bland similarity of the two major parties’ policies. Bryan’s first evangelical campaign was characterized in a nostalgic 1919 poem that was perhaps Vachel Lindsay’s (1879–1931) most focused: “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” spoke of its hero’s losing effort as a triumph of American independence. He castigated Bryan’s Republican opponent, Ohio Governor William McKinley (1843–1901), hand-chosen by Republican Party boss Mark Hanna (1837–1904), asking “Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna’s McKinley, / His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes?” And, while attacking other enemies, like President Cleveland and future President Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), Lindsay celebrated “that Heaven-born Bryan / That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West,” whose song Lindsay recalled as the “Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.” Charisma and eloquence were defeated, at least in 1896, by the force of money, as Hanna raised many times the money for McKinley’s campaign as Bryan was able to raise. The decidedly uncharismatic and ineloquent McKinley ran over Bryan like one of the railroads that underwrote the Republican campaign. In opposing the prevailing conservative fiscal policy, Bryan’s pro-silver forces distributed copies of William Hope Harvey’s popular 1893 tract Coin’s Financial School and his 1894 novel A Tale of Two Nations, both of which traced a conspiracy resisting conversion of the monetary standard to London-based Jewish financiers.
THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
This xenophobic vein of populism divided the left for years while McKinley pursued a foreign policy equally intolerant of foreigners. Somewhat reluctantly at first, McKinley seized from Spain the territories of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, disappointing those who believed that the United States was liberating these oppressed lands from imperialism. Mark Twain, in his 1901 philippic “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” thundered against American hypocrisy in wresting the mantle of oppression from Spain’s shoulders only to place it on its own. What made the A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
hypocrisy particularly galling was the absurd claim that America would bring Christianity to the Spanish possessions, which had been Christian for longer than the United States had been a nation. Many prose writers, including William Dean Howells and W. E. B Du Bois, joined Mark Twain in denouncing U.S. imperialism, among other social ills of the day. Verse writers, too, spoke out: William Vaughn Moody (1869–1910) followed up his 1899 poem “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines” with his “Ode in a Time of Hesitation” (1900), in which he juxtaposed long-standing American ideals with those of a country that has “stooped to cheat / And scramble in the marketplace of war” (p. 19). Like Twain, an early supporter of the Spanish-American War, Moody felt betrayed by the turn taken by the United States. The most widely read poet of the day, Edwin Markham (1852–1940), published his poem “The Man with the Hoe,” in 1899, arguing that American laborers in a system of laissezfaire capitalism were treated as disposable commodities. Markham’s poem was reviled by critics ranging from his former admirer Ambrose Bierce, who accused the poem of spreading the gospel of hate called “industrial brotherhood,” to Bierce’s adversary, the wealthy industrialist Collis P. Huntington, who sponsored a prize for a poem to argue against Markham. Shortly after McKinley again defeated Bryan, even more decisively than in the previous election, McKinley was assassinated. His vice president, former New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt, combined McKinley’s aggressive foreign policy with some of his own swashbuckling style (Roosevelt had been a much-celebrated hero of the campaign in Cuba) and with his own peculiar brand of domestic reformism, undercutting one of the Democrats’ main issues of contention. A ferocious yet highly selective critic of big business, Roosevelt turned his trust-busting and the general approval of U.S. foreign policy to his electoral advantage, soundly defeating the weak Democratic candidate, New York’s Alton B. Parker, in 1904, restricting Parker’s vote-getting to the Deep South. Outspoken on literary as well as social matters, Roosevelt actively encouraged men and women of letters, breaking racial precedent in inviting a black man (and author) Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House, and elevating the then-obscure Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935) to renown by praising his work in print and placing him in a sinecure in the New York customs house. The enthusiastic Roosevelt wrote that he was not sure if he understood “Luke Havergal,” one of Robinson’s more cryptic poems, but he knew that he liked it. Roosevelt also invited to the White House such writers as Henry James, who thought Roosevelt a “dangerous and ominous jingo,”
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
901
PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS
and Edith Wharton, upon whose first novel (The Valley of Decision, 1902) the sitting president offered his editorial suggestions. Appreciative of artists, Roosevelt jostled against those writers who entered the political arena with him. Willa Cather, as editor of McClure’s magazine before embarking on her career as a fiction writer, was responsible for the publication of many articles whose “muckraking” particularly irritated Roosevelt. The most effective muckraker was the socialist Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), whose 1906 novel The Jungle described conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry that quickly compelled new legislation in the form of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, with Roosevelt’s approval. (When Sinclair had initially called on the president, however, to act on the evils exposed by The Jungle, Roosevelt wrote to Sinclair that he must keep his head.) Although Frank Norris (1870–1902) died young, early in Roosevelt’s first administration, his novels also dramatized forces that Roosevelt would soon seek to control: the railroads’ tyranny over the smaller landholders in The Octopus (1901) and the “malefactors of great wealth” (as Roosevelt would term financiers) in The Pit (1903). Whether in fiction or in journalism, muckraking exposed truths about American culture that Roosevelt preferred to expose himself or else to defend. When Roosevelt pledged not to seek the Republican nomination in 1908, that promise much amused Mark Twain, who was disinclined to credit Roosevelt much for simply keeping his word. Instead, Roosevelt threw his support behind his protégé William Howard Taft (1857–1930), the former governor of the Philippines, who easily defeated William Jennings Bryan in the 1908 election, marking the end of the Populist Party. Although Taft’s policies simply sought to continue Roosevelt’s, arguably more effectively in such areas as opposing trusts, the mercurial Roosevelt soon came to regret stepping aside and, in 1912, formed the Progressive Party in an attempt to unseat Taft. What he accomplished, however, was merely to divide the Republican majority, allowing New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) to win the presidency with only 42 percent of the popular vote (but a commanding 435 to 96 electoral edge over Roosevelt and Taft combined). Roosevelt rationalized his decision to run again by claiming that in disqualifying himself in 1908, he had only meant he would not serve a third consecutive term in the White House. Although Wilson campaigned for re-election in 1916 on the slogan “He kept us out of war,” he was not able to maintain American neutrality far past his second inauguration. When the United States emerged from the war in 1918, less brutalized than the European powers who had fought in it much longer and had their
902
A M E R I C A N
own countries ravaged by it, young Americans who had served in the war, such as Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings, would feel alienated from the high-minded idealism Wilson professed. The country had become, almost by a process of elimination, a world power, and the relationship between its writers and its leaders would now change too. See also Centennial; Journalism; Political Parties; Populism; Reform BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Adams, Henry. Democracy: An American Novel. 1880. With an introduction by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Bellamy, Edward. Equality. 1897. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. 1888. Indianapolis: Cork Hill Press, 2003. Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century. 1889. Edited by Walter B. Rideout. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960. Fuller, Henry. The Cliff-Dwellers. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893. Garland, Hamlin. Main-Travelled Roads. 1891. With an introduction by William Dean Howells. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Garland, Hamlin. A Spoil of Office: A Story of the Modern West. Boston: Arena, 1892. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland. 1915. Edited by Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “Moving the Mountain.” 1911. In The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader, edited by Ann J. Lane. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. With Her in Ourland: Sequel to Herland. 1916. Edited by Mary Jo Deegan and Michael R. Hill. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Harvey, William Hope. Coin’s Financial School. Chicago: Coin, 1894. Harvey, William Hope. A Tale of Two Nations. Chicago: Coin, 1894. Hay, John. The Bread-Winners: A Social Study. 1883. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg Press, 1967. Howells, William Dean. My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms. 1910. Edited by Marilyn Austin Baldwin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967. Howells, William Dean. Through the Eye of the Needle: A Romance. 1907. New York: AMS Press, 1977. Howells, William Dean. A Traveler from Altruria. 1894. Edited by David W. Levy. Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PROFESSIONALISM
Jackson, Helen Hunt. Century of Dishonor: The Classic Exposé of the Plight of the Native Americans. 1881. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003. Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona. 1884. New York: Modern Library, 2005. Lindsay, Vachel. The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay: Complete & with Lindsay’s Drawings. Edited by Dennis Camp. Peoria, Ill.: Spoon River Poetry Press, 1985. Markham, Edwin. “The Man with the Hoe.” 1899. New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1900. Moody, William Vaughn. The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody. New York: AMS Press, 1969. Norris, Frank. The Octopus: A Story of California. 1901. Edited by Kenneth S. Lynn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Norris, Frank The Pit: A Story of Chicago. 1903. Edited by Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Gwendolyn Jones. New York: Penguin, 1994. Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle: An Authoritative Text, Contexts and Backgrounds, Criticism. 1906. Edited by Clare Virginia Eby. New York: Norton, 2003. Twain, Mark. The Autobiography of Mark Twain. 1959. Edited by Charles Neider. New York: HarperCollins, 2000. Twain, Mark. Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events. Edited by Bernard DeVoto. New York: Harper, 1940. Twain, Mark. Roughing It. 1872. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Twain, Mark, and Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. 1874. Edited by Louis J. Budd. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Wallace Lew. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. 1880. With an introduction by Blake Allmendinger. New York: Modern Library, 2002. Wharton, Edith. The Valley of Decision. 1902. New York: AMS Press, 1970. Whitman, Walt. “Democratic Vistas.” 1871. In The Complete Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, vol. 2, pp. 208–263. New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1948. Secondary Works
Blotner, Joseph. The Political Novel. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955. Boller, Paul F., Jr. Presidential Campaigns: From George Washington to George W. Bush. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Chace, James. 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs—The Election that Changed the Country. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004. Hofstader, Richard. The Age of Reform; from Bryan to F. D. R. New York: Knopf, 1955. Hofstader, Richard. The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It. New York: Knopf, 1973.
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
McMath, Robert C. American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865– 1914. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Nelson, Michael, ed. Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to the Presidency. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1989. Rosenstone, Steven J., Roy L. Behr, and Edward H. Lazarus. Third Parties in America: Citizen Response to Major Party Failure. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr. “Henry Adams’s ‘Democracy.’” New York Review of Books, 27 March 2003. Weibe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. Steven Goldleaf
PROFESSIONALISM Spanning the Civil War to the First World War, the rise of American professionalism brought about the model of a modern career: a vocation that claims service, not moneymaking, as its aim; that privileges expertise; that defines and protects systems of education that confer such expertise; and that takes for granted the professional’s desire for upward mobility. For writers, the advent of professionalism meant a shift in literary taste from an amateur, romantic, and passively “feminized” style of authorship to one that was typified by training, realism, and traditional masculinity. In 1855 the poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) expressed his idea of artistic inspiration as “I loafe and invite my Soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass” (“Song of myself” ll. 4–5). By 1903, however, in “Getting into Print,” an article in the Editor magazine, the novelist and short story writer Jack London (1876–1916) responded, “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it” (p. 57). Replacing Whitman’s reified muse with “something that looks remarkably like it,” London’s description of authorship reveals professionalism’s link to the seemingly unrelated nineteenthcentury developments of the steamship, railroad, telegraph, and telephone: technologies of mass communication that created and maintained the literary professions through the buying and selling of words as commodities. Thus, although the progressivist London and his contemporaries favored the reflection of “the real” in writing, at the turn of the twentieth century the profession of literature became increasingly aligned
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
903
PROFESSIONALISM
with commercialism—with the look of inspiration instead of its substance. This point is crucial to understanding a central tension for professional authors writing from 1870 to 1920: the tension between high art—intellectual work supposedly performed for social good—and texts that were marketed for individual or corporate profit through systems of mass media. THE CULTURE OF PROFESSIONALISM
The historian Burton Bledstein identifies the late nineteenth century in America as a “culture of professionalism”—a culture stemming from the delimitation of clearly defined, service-oriented careers occupied by experts; sustained by schooling; restricted by gatekeeping; and made popular by the association with the traditional American values of radical individualism, productivity, progress, and universal education. Not surprisingly, the Franklinian ideal of the self-made man thrived under professionalism. In an 1889 North American Review essay titled “Wealth,” Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) claimed that self-made millionaires should and would become the professional arbiters of American life, advancing all citizens with their expert distribution of the nation’s resources. “Individualism, Private Property, the Law of the Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition,” Carnegie claimed, “are the highest results of human experience. . . . We shall have an ideal state, in which the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many, because administered for the common good, and this wealth, passing through the hands of the few, can be made a much more potent force for the elevation of our race than if it had been distributed in small sums to the people themselves” (pp. 657, 660). In part, Carnegie’s vision of this ideal state resulted in his endowment of large public libraries throughout the 1880s and 1890s to assist the working and middle classes of industrial cities. His libraries are but one example of numerous professional institutions that claimed a kind of manifest destiny—in which the overall improvement of the nation’s citizens seemed inevitable—while simultaneously helping to shape and preserve class stratification in America. Professionalism’s inherent stratification was aided by the widespread industrialization that took place at the beginning of the century and the rapid increase of commodity manufacture and exchange that ensued. Commodity culture revolutionized jobs as disparate as bricklaying and city planning; representational systems as varied as novels, paintings, and clothes; and even the very language Americans used to talk about possessions—words such as “thingamajig,” “gadget,” and “jigger.” During these years world fairs abounded,
904
A M E R I C A N
dedicated to professionalizing commodity exchange. At the first of these, the 1851 Great Exhibition in London, a hundred thousand thingamajigs were on display; in 1876 Philadelphia hosted the Centennial Exhibition, where a massive Corliss engine was shown along with international works of art. In his Atlantic Monthly essay “A Sennight of the Centennial,” William Dean Howells (1837–1920) identified America’s elevation of the commodity over the objet d’art. “American art ha[s] made vast advances on the technical side, but . . . it lack[s] what English art has got from its intimate association with literature.” And yet, Howells admitted, the Centennial “would be a barren place without the American machinery” (p. 95). Though varied in focus, these exhibitions had a similar professional purpose: to display these commodities as marks of national value by making a show of the nation’s newly professionalized industries. In turn, in buying these products, citizens participated in professionalism by purchasing the moral and literal wealth of the nation. In this manner, middle-class consumerism created a new sphere of highbrow culture, presided over by professional highbrows; one accessed this sphere by shopping for the right goods and then displayed one’s familiarity with it by presenting those goods on one’s body and in one’s home: an 1880 Punch cartoon typifies this exchange, showing a bride holding up a decorative teapot to her husband, exclaiming, “Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!” As such, the material relationships of buying and selling commodities were constantly remade as noneconomic, professional exchanges. Thus, the consumer took the advice of the professional aesthete in order to buy the perfect teapot to display her or his good taste—or, in the same vein, the reader took the advice of the professional author in order to better treat the poor and thereby improve his or her own morality. In either case, an economic interaction (buying a teapot, buying a book) was recast as the passing on of knowledge from an expert to an amateur. As such, knowledge became its own commodity, and this development spawned the establishment of a number of professional associations as well as the formation of the modern university. Prior to the 1870s, American men and women of means pursued the work of studying history, practicing politics, or writing poetry; vocations such as medicine, law, and teaching were deemed lesser insofar as they necessitated working with one’s hands or interacting with the great unwashed. After the Civil War, however, as areas of expertise from demography to American history began to garner respect and take on the form of discrete disciplines, professional organizations flourished. Largely due to class bias against their occupations as second-rate, medical
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PROFESSIONALISM
practitioners founded professional societies as early as the 1840s: psychiatry organized itself under the Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutes for the Insane in 1844, while the American Medical Association was established in 1847. The latter half of the nineteenth century was the time of an unprecedented incorporation of professional associations. To name but a few, the American Bar Association was formed in 1878, the Modern Language Association in 1883, the American Historical Association in 1884, the American Folklore Society and American Economics Association in 1888, the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1898, the American Public Health Association in 1899, the Association of American Law Schools in 1900, and the American Political Science Association in 1903. These associations all had similar aims: to bring together as well as to regulate professors, teachers, and specialists through membership, annual meetings, and a hierarchical infrastructure; to spread the language and ideas of professionals through journals published by the associations; and to influence local and national policy making by publishing reports, building archives, and directly affecting the development of educational curricula as well as programs to improve social welfare. To achieve further cohesion and regulation among the new professions, the American university emerged as a primary locus of professional activity, indoctrinating its faculty, staff, and students under the twin principles of public service and individual ambition. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, universities began appointing the first professors of disciplines such as history, politics, and social work, and by the turn of the century nearly half of American college graduates were taking up service-oriented jobs in public administration, government, and teaching. These graduates were novitiates under an ideal professional system: they had been screened as applicants, followed a proscribed course of study, read standardized textbooks to take standardized tests, and assumed that their intellectual expertise would grant them a position of wealth and leadership in society. Contemptuous of attacks on their professional authority, they believed an entrepreneurial spirit was the key to an ever-improving society; a largely ignorant and even fearful clientele made up of women, the poor, ethnic minorities, and the uneducated justified their intervention into such social issues as poverty, hysteria, disease, intemperance, promiscuity, miscegenation, secularism, and sexual “deviance.” As the popular novelist and commentator Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) explained in her 1897 memoir Chapters from a Life, “I wished to say something [in my novels] that would comfort some few . . . of the women whose misery crowded the land. . . . The women—the helpless, outnumbering, unconsulted A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
women; they whom war trampled down, without a choice or protest; the patient, limited, domestic women, who thought little, but loved much, and, loving, had lost all, —to them I would have spoken” (p. 97–99). This rhetoric of reform cut across economic class, gender, and race, and yet professionals such as Phelps had to marginalize certain groups—in this case “helpless, outnumbering, unconsulted” women—at the same time that they “uplifted” them into the values and practices of the professional class.
LITERARY PROFESSIONALS
After the Civil War, the figure of the professional made its way into the pages of the American novel. Some writers idealized this figure: in 1871 Edward Eggleston’s (1837–1902) The Hoosier Schoolmaster popularized the idea of the professional teacher. No longer would the stereotypical schoolmaster be the incompetent and austere Mr. Creakle of David Copperfield fame; Eggleston fashioned his Mr. Hartsook as an educational hero, a man whose professional expertise led boys from ignorance to understanding. In turn, other writers sought to reflect various ideological struggles within the new professions. In The Story of Avis (1877), Phelps created Avis Dobell, a female painter who wrestled with professional objectivity against subjective passions, and in 1884 Howells published The Rise of Silas Lapham, a novel that warned against the perils of professional businesspeople seeking profit over spiritual worth. As its own profession, popular authorship had become fairly systematized and even lucrative by the 1850s as the literary marketplace sustained a period of major growth. For instance, the sales and distribution patterns of Uncle Tom’s Cabin invented the very category of the latter-day “best-seller.” After the 1851– 1852 serialization in the National Era, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) made roughly $10,000 from the first three months of sales, and in the first year Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 American copies. The novel sold even better abroad; by the end of 1852 various legitimate and pirated editions made for 1.5 million sales in England, and the book had been translated into more than 40 languages. However, despite the advent of the professional as a worthy subject—and the clear potential for a thoroughly professional book trade—at mid-century the literary marketplace continued to operate under the dual ideas of the “amateur author” and the “gentleman publisher,” relegating authorship to an inspired side effect of leisure. The women writers who were most successful at mid-century—writers such as Stowe, Phelps, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Gail Hamilton— persisted in sustaining an older model of amateur
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
905
PROFESSIONALISM
authorship by rejecting market value in favor of moral instruction and by insisting that a story was more important than mere information. Authors’ discontent over the growing preference for information over storytelling was prompted, in part, by the laying of the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable on 5 August 1858. As Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) had foreseen in his 1854 memoir Walden, “[Though we] are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new . . . perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough” (p. 307). Instead of sequential, coherent stories connected to an international, national, or local purpose, telegraphic news became a series of competing headlines from people and places both distant and strange. In everyday terms, the technology worked more to fracture and isolate than it did to unify. One of the primary reasons the telegraph encouraged nonlinear news was that its language traded in fact—disconnected dates, names, figures, and events. Fact gave a professional doctor, statesman, lawyer, or journalist scientific legitimacy; with the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, sources of professional proof in all fields were increasingly built on fact over emotion, intuition, or faith. Yet for a number of American authors writing in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, the turn away from storytelling as the basis for human understanding was more than irritating or perplexing; they believed it was culturally lethal. Thus, this professional primacy of fact was met with a paradoxical fictionality, a revision of the professional languages of telegraphy, law, and science into emotionally driven novels of connection and unity. Even toward the end of the century, with the institution of realism (the faithful representation of the everyday in art and literature) as the primary high-art genre in America, professional fact was often remade into idealized fiction. A celebrated realist, Henry James (1843–1916) remarked in his notice of George Eliot’s 1876 Daniel Deronda, “The ‘sense of the universal’ [in the novel] is constant, omnipresent. . . . It gives us the feeling that the threads of the narrative, as we gather them into our hands, are not of the usual commercial measurement, but long electric wires capable of transmitting messages from mysterious regions” (p. 131). In utilizing this metaphor, James remakes the “commercial measurement” of telegraphic cable into a mystical experience, suggesting that the social progress of humanity is cumulative and
906
A M E R I C A N
inevitable and that hidden universal truths might be gained through reading novels. These self-consciously realist writers, however, distinguished between the feminized sentimental and sensational fictions that had become popular at mid-century and the kinds of expert, professional fictions they themselves wrote. Many successful authors writing in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s—including James, Howells, Mark Twain, and Theodore Dreiser as well as former sentimental writers such as Stowe and Phelps—worked to establish their work as “high art,” separate from the likes of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Mrs. Henry (Ellen) Wood. Though seemingly contradictory, Howells’s definition of literary realism in his 1897 preface to English Society by George du Maurier (1834–1896) encapsulated the new professional realist’s sense of purpose: “the very highest fiction is that which treats itself as fact” (p. 76). Within the larger culture of professionalism, then, the technical supplanted the moral; or, rather, the technical was the moral. Even though professional writing shunned subjectivity and held up data and method as the things that “spoke,” the new professional and realist authors alike provided images of and for their culture that were meant to excite an appropriate sympathy, a morality with qualities more culturally sustaining than what Howells once disparaged in his 1895 Literary Passions as the “artfully-wrought sensations” of the newspaper or sentimental novel. These professional discriminations between high and low culture coincided with similar trends in all avenues of art, from painting to music to theater. Because fiction was simultaneously popular and elite— as Lawrence Levine notes, much like nineteenth-century opera and Shakespearean drama—novels were read by large numbers of people, primarily made up of the new middle class in America as well as a much smaller cadre of the economically and socially privileged. Even the word “culture” itself became increasingly joined with “art” and “aesthetics.” “The new meanings,” notes Levine in his 1988 study Highbrow/ Lowbrow, “symbolized the consciousness that conceived of the fine, the worthy, and the beautiful as existing apart from ordinary society” (p. 225). In other words, as with “knowledge,” “culture” itself became its own professional commodity, and those who wielded words as—or in the service of— culture made writing a professional commodity as well. Paradoxically, however, once the word was professionalized (a product of elite training, a marker of expertise, chosen or created for precision, hoarded and protected as intellectual capital, and employed in the service of social reform), it was simultaneously commercialized. As a result, “lowbrow” wordsmith occupations such as muckraking, technical writing,
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PROFESSIONALISM
and political propagandizing embraced the same precepts of professionalism as late-century literary authors, thus making their labor increasingly more precise (fact-based or “scientific”), realistic (“true”), and socially aware—more “masculine.” Aided by new technologies that lowered production costs and virtually guaranteed the instantaneous transmittal of the word to a mass Anglo-American readership, modern features of mass professional discourse had been established by the turn of the twentieth century: literary agents, promotional campaigns for books and periodicals, headlines and bylines, and a full synergy of visual advertisements (goods) with text (ideas). Thus, by the early 1900s, a new cadre of professional writers came to the fore as popular and highly influential authors. Designated as “progressive,” writers such as Dreiser, Frank Norris, Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Upton Sinclair had once been journalists, a profession previously held in low esteem. Among these professional progressives, differences in region, politics, or class mattered less than a common language with which to engage concepts of efficiency, social progress, industrial deregulation, and a democratic, nonpartisan access to ideas. As such, the culture of professionalism radically shifted the popular image of an “author” from the previous century’s man or woman of leisure and learning to a “voice of the people” who continually had to convince the public of the validity of that voice. Ultimately, then, the legacy of professional authorship in America is a complex one. Professional authorship holds in perpetual tension high culture with low, timeless aesthetics with immediate commercialism, social reform with authorial ambition, sentimentality with realism, fiction with fact, and democratic access with elite gatekeeping. With seeming prescience of contemporary struggles with professionalism, F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) commented in 1936 in The Crack-Up, “no decent career was ever founded on a public” (p. 89). Fitzgerald aptly articulates perhaps the keenest tension for the professional author: the tension between individual art and public celebrity. To succeed, professional authors had to found their own expert, reform-oriented careers on the amateur whims of their consuming public. In other words, such authors muckraked themselves, becoming their own commodities. See also American Literature; Health and Medicine; Jurisprudence BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Carnegie, Andrew. “Wealth.” North American Review, June 1889, pp. 653–664.
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Crack-Up. New York: New Directions, 1956. Howells, William Dean. “Preface to English Society by George du Maurier.” 1897. In Prefaces to Contemporaries (1882– 1920), edited by George Arms, William M. Gibson, and Frederic C. Marston Jr., pp. 73–77. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1957. Howells, William Dean. “A Sennight of the Centennial.” Atlantic Monthly, July 1876, pp. 92–107. James, Henry. “Notice of Daniel Deronda.” Nation, 24 February 1876, p. 131. London, Jack. “Getting into Print.” 1903. In No Mentor but Myself: Jack London on Writers and Writing, edited by Dale L. Walker and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, pp. 54–57. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. Phelps [Ward], Elizabeth Stuart. Chapters from a Life. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1897. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. 1854. In The Portable Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode, pp. 258–572. New York and London: Penguin Books, 1975. Secondary Works
Bledstein, Burton J. The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. New York: Norton, 1976. Blumin, Stuart M. The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870. 1968. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990. Geison, Gerald L., ed. Professions and Professional Ideologies in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Larson, Magali Sarfatti. The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
907
THE PROMISED LAND
Merish, Lori. Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Wilson, Christopher P. The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Jennifer Cognard-Black
PROGRESSIVISM See Political Parties; Reform
THE PROMISED LAND Mary Antin’s (1881–1949) autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), was published as American fears concerning masses of immigrants entering the country were reaching a climax. In 1911 the Dillingham Commission issued a report to Congress that argued that immigrants entering the country from southern and eastern Europe were not as racially or culturally desirable as ones who entered from northern and western Europe. Against the commission’s recommendation that immigration be restricted, Antin celebrated both the immigrant experience and the transformation being wrought in America by eastern European immigrants such as herself. Although she did not conceal the hardships of the immigrant experience, her example seemed to suggest that America could lift any willing person up and make him or her one with the country. Excerpts of The Promised Land had first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and the book became something of a sensation when it was published. Readers responded enthusiastically to Antin’s assurance that the American dream did work and that even an immigrant Jewish girl from Poland could become a well-adjusted, patriotic American. Offering herself as an example of what was happening for millions of immigrants, Antin conveyed a hopeful message for the country’s future. Her story describes how a girl born in a small, backward Jewish village on the edge of Russia becomes a prize-winning American author. She presents herself as an exemplary, but still typical, product of the U.S. public school system, proof that American institutions were absorbing its millions of immigrants and transforming them to create a better nation. One contemporary reviewer said that Antin’s work “will do much to dissolve the gentle cynicism we take toward our so-called democracy,” providing “encouragement as to our inherent possibilities.”
908
A M E R I C A N
For many, her life became a perfect example of how democratic institutions, and especially the public school, were working to renew America without changing its essential character. For others, however, Antin’s story obscured the dark side of the immigrant’s American dream. According to this view, Antin is not the bold and optimistic immigrant who overcomes all obstacles to become a happy American but a Jew who had to sacrifice her cultural heritage in order to be accepted as an American. The educator Horace M. Kallen, who favored what he called cultural pluralism rather than melting-pot notions of American identity, describes The Promised Land “as the climax of the wave of gratulatory exhibition,” the work of a “successful and happy” product of “the melting pot,” who is more “self-consciously flatteringly American than the Americans” (p. 86). A NEW NOTION OF ASSIMILATION
Antin’s story is more complicated than Kallen’s formulation suggests—indeed its lesson was that she could be neither American nor Jewish without being both “American” and “Jewish.” The writer Randolph S. Bourne recognized the complexity of Antin’s story in his important 1916 essay “Trans-National America,” published in the Atlantic Monthly. Bourne argued that in The Promised Land Antin does not merely adapt herself to America but also absorbs the America who reads her into her story. By positioning her assimilated audience so that they would identify with her story, Antin challenged what the notion of “assimilation” is conventionally understood to mean. Indeed, to the mixed dismay and approval of her audience, Antin wanted to convey not merely that “she” was one of “you,” but that “you,” whomever that you in her audience may have been, were also one with “her.” Antin signals her audience to the complexity of her Americanization in her introduction to the book, where she announces that her story is one of discarded selves: I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to write my life’s story? I am just as much out of the way as if I were dead, for I am absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell. . . . I could speak in the third person and not feel that I was masquerading. . . . for she, and not I, is my real heroine. My life I still have to live; her life ended when mine began. (P. 1)
Throughout her autobiography Antin’s narrative is driven by her recognition of her own “otherness,” and the discrepancy that exists between the self of the story and the self that tells it. She creates the distance between her authorial self and her third-person self, between her Americanization and her prior
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
THE PROMISED LAND
Photograph from the 1912 edition of The Promised Land. The original caption reads “Union Place (Boston) where my new home waited for me.” GRADUATE LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
“otherness,” only so that she may collapse it. Antin’s story of her Americanization is also the dramatization of her own otherness. Antin structures her autobiography so that its first half is concerned exclusively with her “as if” dead other, the little girl Mashke, who grew up in a Polish village called Polotzk in the outer Russian territories. During the time Antin lived there, “the Pale,” as this area was known, contained more than 90 percent of Russia’s Jews. Identity in Polotzk was rigidly either/or. As Antin says over and over, “one was a Jew, leading a righteous life; or one was a gentile, existing to harass the Jews, while making a living off Jewish enterprise” (p. 98). At once a Jew confined to the Pale and a woman constrained by the patriarchal Jewish law, Antin’s identity was defined only in terms of race and gender. Antin therefore occupied a sort of double identity, each one a form of repression to Mashke who knew in her heart that “a greater life [d]awned in me” (p. 72). “Can this be I?”Antin asks at the outset of her story (p. 65). As a Russian Jew, this question intimates the bewilderment with which her inner life confronts the A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
facts of her outer life; as an American, it reflects her ability to refashion the seemingly immutable principles of race and gender into an identity that embraces the self’s capacity to be transformed. Ultimately, the contrast between her experience in America and her life in the Pale enabled Antin to recognize and express the nearly buried inner conflicts she experienced in Polotzk. Her autobiography implies that were she an American-born child, she could simply deny her parents, their heritage, and run away from home. This is the action taken by the protagonist in Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New (1925), a novel by the Polish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska (c. 1883– 1970). To make this break in Polotzk, however, would have required Mashke to transgress a sacrosanct boundary: she would have to become gentile. Indulging such fantasies is futile since even escape from the Pale would still leave her to be known as a Jew and then either to be returned home or killed. If these thoughts are not available to the young Mashke, then they frame the perspective of the mature Antin who writes to transform her heroine into the American, Mary. Addressing her fellow Americans, Antin knows that her heroine requires a material host for her spiritual rebellion. In this respect, Antin encourages her audience to participate in the creation of herself as an American. Antin acknowledges that some readers might be skeptical of her transformation from Russian Jew into assimilated American. She writes: “it is doubtful that the conversion of the Jew to any alien belief is ever thoroughly accomplished” (p. 195). Here Antin is concerned with cultural rather than religious difference. As if to ally her audience, she divides Judaism into “kernel” and “husk,” suggesting that one may “drop” the kernel and retain the husk. In other words, cultural identity is voluntary: one can choose to be American. Antin never apologizes for her choice— indeed she celebrates it—but her joy in throwing off a repressive past to become American provokes some readers to wonder if she has betrayed her cultural identity. While some may argue that Antin sacrificed her Jewishness for a hollow Americanness, actually what she did was more complex. She rejected claims of pure cultural identity to reveal how malleable identity— even ethnic identity—is. Antin recognizes that the very existence of immigrants like her transformed the identity of those whom she had joined. More subtly, Antin invites her audience to accept her story and therefore partake of this recognition. Insofar as the audience accepts the American claims of this irreducibly “Jewish” woman, the American identity of both Antin and her audience has been complicated and altered.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
909
THE PROMISED LAND
The concluding lines to The Promised Land nicely express the manner in which Antin makes her identity one with that of America. Her language, appropriately, recalls Whitman. She suggests that not only is she the embodiment of America’s future but also the fulfillment of its past. In this way Antin is both the culmination of American history and its owner.
No! it is not that I belong to the past, but that the past belongs to me. America is the youngest of the nations, and inherits all that went before it in history. And I am the youngest of America’s children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage, to the last white star espied through the telescope, to the last great thought of the philosopher. Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future. Antin, The Promised Land, p. 286.
REINTERPRETING AMERICAN VALUES
Antin suggests her story, and others like it, prove how the American commitment to freedom and equality is more than just words. She frequently refers to the awe with which she holds the Declaration of Independence because it applies not only to 1776 but to those like herself who revolt against their life’s circumstances and choose to embrace America. Praising the public school as a version of the declaration come to life, she tells her audience that “you born Americans” should be happy to hear her story because “it is the story of the growth of your country; of the flocking of your brothers and sister from the far ends of the earth to the flag you love” (p. 175). Antin frames her audience as her judge as she submits to them her fundamental situation of “otherness”: the immigrant who is no longer a foreigner but not yet an American. Yet she also undermines her audience’s authority by implying that their collaboration in her story reveals the extent to which they participate in the process that is her transformation. Antin’s shrewd manipulation of her audience so that they embrace their story as her story can be seen in the poem she writes for school about George Washington. This poem would eventually win her an award from the city of Boston—it would begin her career as a kind of public intellectual. She prefaces her account of the poem’s success by relating how as an immigrant child she fell in love with the tales of Washington that were written
910
A M E R I C A N
by Parson Mason Locke Weems (1759–1825). She gives this image of Washington the devotion she could never give a rabbi. “Never had I prayed, never had I chanted the songs of David, never had I called upon the Most Holy, in such utter reverence and worship as I repeated the simple sentences of my child’s story of the patriot.” Having her poem read aloud gives her the opportunity to tell her classmates “what George Washington had done for their country—for our country—for me” (p. 181). Here the situation remembered in the classroom predicts the relationship she creates in her autobiography: the poem that her assimilated classmates hear with rapture is a version of the life she now shares with her American audience. Her point is that Antin and her readers are united in that they are all fellow citizens bound by their commitment to a shared American history. As is true in The Promised Land itself, she has a double relationship with her audience. On the one hand, she acknowledges that “there ran a special note through my poem” that only the other Jewish students could fully understand since her poem expresses the grateful appreciation of the “weary Hebrew children” who have found a haven in America (p. 183). In other words, Antin cannot sing her American song without inflecting it with her Jewish history. On the other hand, Antin also knows that her poem’s performance is not complete until she impresses students such as Lizzie McDee, a native-born American. The knowledge of Lizzie’s approbation excites Antin because, as she says, her rival first “knew her as a vain boastful, curly-headed little Jew.” This recognition— from immigrant to American—is the point Antin wanted her “born Americans” to stumble upon when they joined her teachers and her classmates in praising her story, her Americanization. Accept my universal story as part of yours, she seems to say, and you must accept that your identity has been transformed too. The point is not that Antin renounces her Jewish identity, though she is free to do so. In becoming “American,” Antin nonetheless preserves and reinvents her Jewish identity within an American context. See also Assimilation; Immigration; Jews
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Antin, Mary. From Plotzk to Boston. Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1899. Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. 1912. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. Antin, Mary. They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE
Secondary Works
Avery, Evelyn. “Oh My ‘Mishpocha!’ Some Jewish Women Writers from Antin to Kaplan View the Family.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 5 (1986): 44–53. Boelhower, William. “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States.” In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by John Paul Eakin, pp. 123– 141. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Bourne, Randolph. The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911–1918. New York: Urizen, 1977. Girgus, Sam B. The New Covenant: Jewish Writers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Guttman, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Handlin, Oscar. Introduction to The Promised Land, by Mary Antin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969. Handlin, Oscar. The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1951. Harap, Louis. Creative Awakening: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-century American Literature, 1900–1940s. New York: Greenwood Press, 1959. Higham, John. Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America. 1975. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Kallen, Horace. Culture and Democracy in the United States. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924. Kramer, Michael P. “Assimilation in The Promised Land: Mary Antin and the Jewish Origins of the American Self.” Prooftexts 18, no. 2 (1998): 121–148. Parrish, Timothy. “Whose Americanization?: Self and Other in Mary Antin’s The Promised Land.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 13 New Voices in an Old Tradition (1994): 27–38. Proefriedt, William A. “The Education of Mary Antin.” The Journal of Ethnic Studies 17, no. 4 (winter 1990): 81–100. Rubin, Steven J. “Style and Meaning in Mary Antin’s The Promised Land: A Reevaluation.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 5 (1986): 35–43. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Sollors, Werner. Introduction to The Promised Land, by Mary Antin. New York: Penguin, 1997. Tuerk, Richard. “The Youngest of America’s Children in The Promised Land.” Studies in American Jewish Fiction 5 (1986): 29–34. Timothy Parrish
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE By the time of Herbert Croly’s death in 1930, his friends were certain that his book of 1909 had played an important part in transforming the political culture of the United States. “If I were attempting anything like an appraisal of Herbert Croly,” wrote the distinguished political journalist Walter Lippmann (1889–1974), I should say, I think, that he was the first important political philosopher who appeared in America in the twentieth century. I should say that The Promise of American Life was the political classic which announced the end of the Age of Innocence with its romantic faith in American destiny and inaugurated the process of self-examination. (P. 250)
Another of Croly’s friends, the Harvard law professor and future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, thought that “to omit Croly’s Promise from any list of half a dozen books on American politics since 1900 would be grotesque” (p. 248). Frankfurter thought that his friend’s book “became a reservoir for all political writing after its publication. [Theodore] Roosevelt’s New Nationalism was countered by Wilson’s New Freedom, but both derived from Croly” (p. 248). If more recent assessments have been somewhat less unrestrained, in general the book has retained its reputation as an influential work of political philosophy and one that shaped the course of twentieth-century American liberalism. THE AUTHOR
Herbert Croly was born on 23 January 1869 in New York City. His mother, Jane Cunningham Croly, who wrote under the name “Jennie June,” was a nationally known author on women’s topics and a pioneer in the creation of women’s clubs across the country. His father, David Goodman Croly, was a respected New York journalist, editor of the New York World, and a spirited evangelist in America for the positivist views of the French thinker Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Young Herbert, therefore, grew up in a home swirling with books and ideas and frequented by stimulating visitors, a home where conveying ideas through writing was practically a daily way of life. Croly was, from an early age, bookish and reserved. By the time he reached manhood he was abnormally shy and reserved. Social situations and small talk were painful to him, and speaking in public was an ordeal he attempted to avoid at all costs. Despite these traits, however, he was able to attract a group of close friends who valued his seriousness, his intelligence, and his character. His educational career was erratic: he entered Harvard in 1886 and left in
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
911
THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE
1899, still not the recipient of a bachelor’s degree. He had toyed with the idea of studying and teaching philosophy (taking classes with the illustrious philosophers William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana) but deemed himself unsuited for that vocation. From 1900 until 1906, Croly edited the Architectural Record, a professional periodical that had been started by his father, writing numerous articles on architecture, landscaping, and urban planning. But Croly’s thoughts were always on American politics. By 1905 he found himself absorbed by the growing political ferment that was about to erupt into progressive reform, and he came to believe that he had something of importance to contribute to the national discussion, a way of thinking about and bringing order and direction to the increasingly insistent calls for social change. He loosened his connection with the Architectural Record, and for four hours every morning he worked on the book that was to be his masterpiece. He completed a first draft in 1905, pored over revising it for the next two years, and in late 1908 and early 1909 rewrote it one last time. The Promise of American Life was published by Macmillan in early November 1909. THE ARGUMENT
In The Promise of American Life, Croly argued that the pioneer period of American history—roughly the time between the Revolution and the Civil War—bequeathed to the nation three formative legacies. The first was a persistent tension in political philosophy between the views of Thomas Jefferson (individual liberty and a small, noninterfering federal government) and those of Alexander Hamilton (distrust of unbridled democracy and a strong government capable of acting decisively in the national interest). Throughout most of the nation’s history, Croly asserted, the views of Jefferson prevailed, and the great majority of Americans placed their faith in free individualism and harbored grave suspicions about their government. The second inheritance from early American history was an iconic individual, who came to symbolize America: the western democrat. This “typical” and emblematic American possessed some commendable traits: energetic individualism, admirable informality and neighborliness, practicality. Yet this western democrat was also devoted almost exclusively to furthering private economic interests; was suspicious of expertise, specialization, and excellence; and had a very limited sense of the community’s needs or of personal responsibilities to the larger society. Finally, Americans also inherited an enduring belief in the promise of American life, an optimistic faith that their country’s future would be characterized by increasing prosperity, increasing freedom, and increasing democracy.
912
A M E R I C A N
In the past, according to Croly, these three legacies functioned in general harmony with one another. In America’s wide-open economic environment, private selfishness, operating under a minimum of government regulations, resulted in a steadily improving nation. Individual Americans wanted wealth, so they built farms and railroads and factories; because the country needed farms and railroads and factories, these ambitious and selfish men and women furthered the American promise while a weak central government stood passively aside. But in modern America—an America of huge corporations, crowded cities, sophisticated industrial processes, and reducing economic opportunities— the sort of individual and the sort of government that had once served the American promise so well now seemed likely to frustrate its achievement. An ambitious entrepreneur could grow wealthy by wrecking a railroad or by otherwise behaving detrimentally and unscrupulously. Croly suggested that the country now required a different sort of citizen from the pioneer democrat; it needed citizens schooled to look beyond their private interests, who could demonstrate loyalty to the community and the nation, who could play a part in fulfilling civic responsibilities, and who were not fearful of expertise and intellectual excellence. And (perhaps the best-known contention of his book), Croly proposed an active, interfering, powerful central government, one that could detect the difference between those private actions that furthered the national interest and those that threatened it, a government that stood ready to further the former and prevent the latter. In short, he said, from now on Jeffersonian ends will have to be attained by Hamiltonian means. Within this overarching historical framework, Croly considered almost every economic and political issue before the American people. He discussed everything from the tariff and taxation and municipal corruption to labor unions and foreign policy. But the book received special attention for its comments on the trusts. Croly argued that those who advocated merely breaking up those large conglomerations of private economic power were shortsighted and simpleminded. In the first place, the trusts were inevitable outgrowths of American capitalism, called into being by considerations of efficiency and the result of free competition—break them up and they would spring into existence again in some other form. In the second place, most trusts performed valuable services—they provided high quality products at reasonable prices, employed their workers steadily, and took advantage of scientific research and technological advances in ways that their small, usually less responsible, often
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
THE PROMISE OF AMERICAN LIFE
struggling and ephemeral competitors could not. In general, therefore, the trusts should be allowed to go about their business. Croly also acknowledged that trusts could sometimes misbehave; they sometimes used unfair methods of competition, mistreated their workers, or in other ways operated in a manner that was harmful to society. To meet those cases, the nation needed a government strong enough to regulate misbehaving corporations, equipped with sufficient power to hold quasi-judicial hearings and drag back into line those that persisted in their wrongful conduct.
INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS OF THE BOOK
Croly himself explained that he was initially inspired to write The Promise of American Life by reading Robert Grant’s (1852–1940) Unleavened Bread, a novel of 1900 that explored the difficulties of an architect struggling to express his creativity in an American culture that did not value creativity. Historians have generally concluded that the origins of Croly’s ideas are far more complicated and multifaceted. But they have not agreed about the precise sources that lay at the heart of the book. It is difficult to escape the view that the positivism of Auguste Comte, as first applied to American conditions by Croly’s father, is an important component of Croly’s thought. Particular scholars have suggested other ingredients that may have played a part in shaping the work. These range from William James’s (1842– 1910) pragmatism and G. W. F. Hegel’s ideas on the nation-state to the views of Croly’s Harvard teachers Royce, Santayana, and Charles Eliot Norton. Still others point to the importance of a group of English and continental social democratic thinkers or to the influence of the stirring of American progressive politics and the critical questions that were thrown into the air by the general agitation. No doubt, as the historian James T. Kloppenberg put it, “There is no reason to deny the evidence that Croly’s ideas were shaped by a variety of sources that were in no way consistent with one another” (p. 489). THE BOOK’S INFLUENCE
Shortly after its publication, Croly’s book came into the hands of the former president Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), who found many of his own views confirmed and rationalized in the book and who was probably suitably flattered by Croly’s warm praise of him. When Roosevelt publicly praised the book in a widely noticed review and then adopted Croly’s phrase, “the new nationalism,” as the name for his own political outlook, the book and its author became instantly fashionable. The Promise of American A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Life, despite its sometimes ponderous style, was reviewed in dozens of magazines and newspapers and read and discussed by numerous progressives. Croly himself benefited directly from his new fame. He was asked to write other books—a biography of the political boss Mark Hanna and a second book of political commentary titled Progressive Democracy (1914). In 1914 he was discovered by a wealthy socialite couple who were attracted by the ideas of The Promise of American Life. They agreed to start a journal of political opinion, the New Republic, under Croly’s editorship. He, together with a talented group of other writers, made the magazine one of the most important voices of American liberalism in the twentieth century. Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life has appeared in at least ten editions since 1909. It is recognized as one of those landmark works signaling the end of liberalism’s traditional faith in unregulated capitalist free enterprise, severely restricted government, and unbridled individualism. In its celebration of community, its acceptance of expertise and efficiency, and its confidence in the ability of government to address and resolve social problems while still remaining democratic in form and spirit, the book pointed the way to the future of American reformist thought in the twentieth century. See also Reform BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Croly, Herbert. “My Aim in The Promise of American Life: Why I Wrote My Latest Book.” World’s Work 20 (June 1910): 13,086. Croly, Herbert. The Promise of American Life. New York: Macmillan, 1909. Secondary Works
Forcey, Charles. The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Frankfurter, Felix. “Herbert Croly and American Political Opinion.” New Republic 63 (16 July 1930): 247–250. Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Levy, David W. Herbert Croly of the “New Republic”: The Life and Thought of an American Progressive. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985. Lippmann, Walter. “Notes for a Biography.” New Republic 63 (16 July 1930): 250–252.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
913
PROSTITUTION
Noble, David W. “Herbert Croly and American Progressive Thought.” Western Political Quarterly 7 (1954): 537– 553. Stettner, Edward A. Shaping Modern Liberalism: Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. David W. Levy
PROSTITUTION Prostitution reached a new level of public awareness in the United States during the waning decades of the nineteenth century. While few Americans had ever really denied its existence, many were forced to recognize it as a serious social problem. Sociological studies, newspaper accounts, and novels all prompted people to rethink the idea of prostitution in terms of both its causes and its effects. Traditionally people had assumed that women turned to prostitution only after they had been seduced and abandoned, but empirical studies suggested that the reasons women turned to prostitution were far more complex. STATISTICS
William W. Sanger, resident physician at the correctional facility on Blackwell’s Island, New York, prepared The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World (1858) as an official report to the governor of the Alms-House of the City of New York. The first two-thirds of this nearly sevenhundred-page tome, largely compiled from other sources, traces the history of prostitution around the world. The last third of the book is based on primary research. At the time of its publication, Sanger’s History of Prostitution was recognized as the most important sociological study of prostitution ever conducted. It became the standard authority on the subject and was reprinted many times into the twentieth century. In the course of his research, Sanger interviewed two thousand prostitutes on Blackwell’s Island and gathered information about age, nationality, marital status, family upbringing, religion, and literacy. Of all the questions he asked, Sanger considered one the most important: “What was the cause of your becoming a prostitute?” The results of this survey astonished Sanger and his contemporaries. Expecting “seduced and abandoned” to be named the overwhelming cause of prostitution, they were amazed to learn that over a quarter of the women interviewed listed “inclination” as the reason they became prostitutes. At the time, few were
914
A M E R I C A N
willing to acknowledge the existence of female sexual desire let alone to see it as a motivating factor for prostitution. Instead, people preferred to accept the stereotype that women were chaste beings who would not degrade themselves for the purposes of satisfying their baser instincts. Poverty, according to Sanger’s statistics, also proved to be a prevalent cause of prostitution. The idea that women would become prostitutes from starvation or homelessness was also difficult for Americans to accept. Few wanted to admit that social conditions in the United States could be responsible for such poverty. Furthermore, many seriously believed that women would starve to death before they resigned themselves to prostitution. “Seduced and abandoned” came in a distant third, as only one-eighth of Sanger’s two thousand interviewees named this cause as the reason why they became prostitutes. Analyzing the results of his survey, Sanger himself appears unable to accept them. In his analysis he downplayed the significance of the number of prostitutes who answered either “inclination” or “destitution” and reasserted the importance of the traditional reason for prostitution. Disregarding his own statistics, Sanger made “seduced and abandoned” the most significant cause of prostitution. Better to do that than to admit that women could have sexual desires or that poverty represented a significant social problem in democratic, egalitarian America. Three decades later a different sort of empirical study yielded information about the relationship between social conditions and prostitution. During the intervening time, women had begun to enter the workforce in increasing numbers, and new stereotypes were forming to characterize working women. With the rise of the department store during the second half of the nineteenth century, many young single women entered the workforce as store clerks. Of all working women at the time, retail clerks were the most visible to the public, and many people thought they had the loosest morals of all working women. Some believed that becoming a store clerk was the first step toward prostitution. In 1889 the U.S. Bureau of Labor released its fourth annual report, which outlined the demographics of working women. Correlating the previous occupations of prostitutes, the report authoritatively disproved any connection between morality and occupation, but the stereotype continued to live on nonetheless. SKETCHES OF THE CITY
With the title of his book The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872), the reformer Charles Loring Brace (1826–1890) coined an apt phrase that entered the vernacular. In a chapter titled “Street Girls,” Brace presents his impressions on prostitution. Much of
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PROSTITUTION
Brace’s book contains exciting, graphically told episodes of crime and privation, but when he comes to the subject of prostitution, he resorts to generalizations instead of offering specific examples of individual prostitutes. Once a young woman has turned to prostitution, she begins a downward spiral that is impossible to reverse. Every encounter, every experience forces her farther downward: “The diabolical women who support and plunder her, the vile society she keeps, the literature she reads, the business she has chosen or fallen into, serve continually more and more to degrade and defile her” (Brace, “Street Girls,” p. 275). Like other contemporary observers, Brace refused to acknowledge that women became prostitutes out of inclination, but he did expose the “seduced and abandoned” excuse as a convenient fiction. Brace put the greatest blame on poverty as the root cause of prostitution. Other contemporary collections of city sketches similar to Brace’s that explore the haunts of such dangerous classes include Edward Crapsey’s The Nether Side of New York; or, The Vice, Crime, and Poverty of the Great Metropolis (1872) and James W. Buel’s Metropolitan Life Unveiled; or, The Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities (1882). Both of these works include sections describing prostitutes that combine firsthand observation with imagination. In The Nether Side of New York, Crapsey delineates several different classes of prostitutes, describes the appearance and behavior of women in each class, and notes the areas of New York where they make their homes and ply their nefarious trade. As Buel (1849–1920) discusses the subject of prostitution in Metropolitan Life Revealed he gradually abandons realism for sentiment. Rather than taking a real prostitute for example, Buel invents an example. The result is a syrupy tale of a sweet young woman who, having been seduced and abandoned, must choose between the only two courses of action available to her, prostitution or suicide. Though eager to visit the neighborhoods where prostitutes worked as they explored the dark side of the modern city, both Crapsey and Buel stopped short of entering brothels. Their accounts begin with vivid and realistic descriptions but end with conjectural depictions of the prostitute crowded with stereotype and cliché. “The Case of Rose Haggerty,” one of the finest contemporary sketches of a prostitute, first appeared in the New York Tribune at a time when this paper was aggressively cultivating female readers. Written by Helen Stuart Campbell (1839–1918), who later incorporated it into Prisoners of Poverty: Women WageWorkers, Their Trades, and Their Lives (1887), “The Case of Rose Haggerty” presents a realistic portrait of a woman driven to prostitution by poverty. Campbell’s anecdote suggests that the causes of prostitution are A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
much more complex than either the general public or the urbane male commentators were willing to admit. Her title character is a survivor. Instead of committing suicide, she continues working as a prostitute, sacrificing herself so that her family may live a better life. PROSTITUTES IN LITERATURE
From the waning decades of the nineteenth century to the early decades of the twentieth, the prostitute as a fictional character in American literature went from being a secondary figure to being the protagonist of major works. An early novel of the period, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s (1811–1896) We and Our Neighbors; or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street (1875) tells the story of a young woman named Maggie—a commonplace nickname for a prostitute at the time— whose story embodies the contemporary stereotypes about prostitutes prevalent in the United States. A secondary character in the novel, Maggie leaves her position as a domestic and later finds employment in a department store, where she meets a man who seduces her and then places her in a house of prostitution. After some time she seeks shelter in a Magdalen home, a place of refuge patterned after the homes run by local Magdalen societies that sheltered prostitutes and helped them leave their trade and regain their dignity. Eva Henderson, the heroine of Stowe’s novel, takes Maggie into her home as a servant, an effort her family strongly disapproves. Eva tolerates the verbal abuse of her mother and her aunt, but Maggie eventually leaves their home to save her benefactor from such cruelty and returns to the vice district. Eva locates Maggie and brings her to a Methodist mission home, where she becomes a devout Christian. Maggie ultimately returns to Eva and works for her as a seamstress. In We and Our Neighbors, Maggie becomes a good seamstress as well as a good Christian, but Stowe never allows her to become a good wife. Her first transgression has eliminated that possibility. In The Evil That Men Do (1889), Edgar Fawcett (1847–1904) also used a typical seduction plot, but otherwise the novel has little in common with Stowe’s. The Evil That Men Do tells the story of Cora Strang, a young woman who works at a series of low-paying jobs. Unemployed and without a place to live, she eventually obtains a position as a personal maid in a fine household, where she is discovered by the wealthy young man-about-town Caspar Drummond. Predictably Drummond seduces Cora with the promise of marriage and abandons her to marry a society woman. Cora goes to a disorderly house, as houses of prostitution were called, becomes a prostitute, takes to drink, and ultimately descends to streetwalking. A friend kills Cora to put her out of her misery. In terms of realism
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
915
PSEUDOSCIENCE
The Evil That Men Do marks an advance over earlier prostitute novels because Fawcett emphasizes how poverty contributes to prostitution. Still, he stops short of making poverty the main cause. There is no ambiguity in The Evil That Men Do: Fawcett makes absolutely clear from his title page where he locates the responsibility for this social evil. Maggie Johnson, the title character of Stephen Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), may be the most memorable prostitute in American literature. Crane (1871–1900) too incorporated a traditional seduction plot but changed it sufficiently to elevate his story above earlier seduction novels. Maggie Johnson’s seducer differs greatly from the stereotype. In The Evil That Men Do, Caspar Drummond is rich and promises Cora marriage and a life of wealth. In Crane’s novel, Pete and Maggie basically come from the same social class. The promise of a better life exists in Maggie’s romantic imagination, not in Pete’s words. The character of Maggie’s brother Jimmie contributes moral ambiguity to the story and makes the novel more complex than earlier tales of seduction. A staunch defender of his sister’s purity, Jimmie has more than one woman seeking child support from him. Enhancing the story’s moral ambiguity, Crane purposely avoids any explicit moralizing. As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and naturalism gave way to modernism, sexual mores changed. The prostitute in literature was not only allowed to survive but also to succeed. In the posthumously published Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), David Graham Phillips (1867–1911) makes his title character an illegitimate child who strikes out on her own as a teenager. Poverty forces her into prostitution, which she tries to escape, yet she repeatedly returns to her life as a prostitute. Finally befriended by a distinguished playwright, she is able to succeed as an actress. Susan Lenox marks the start of a more complex, more nuanced depiction of the prostitute in literature that subsequent authors would continue to develop with a greater degree of sympathy and forgiveness. See also Diseases and Epidemics; Feminism; Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; Poverty BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Brace, Charles Loring. The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work among Them. New York: Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1872. Brace, Charles Loring. “Street Girls.” In Maggie, a Girl of the Streets: A Story of New York, by Stephen Crane, edited by Kevin J. Hayes, pp. 273–276. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.
916
A M E R I C A N
Buel, James W. Metropolitan Life Unveiled; or, The Mysteries and Miseries of America’s Great Cities, Embracing New York, Washington City, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and New Orleans. St. Louis: Historical Publishing, 1882. Campbell, Helen Stuart. Prisoners of Poverty: Women WageWorkers, Their Trades, and Their Lives. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887. Crane, Stephen. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets: A Story of New York. 1893. Edited by Kevin J. Hayes. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 1999. Crapsey, Edward. The Nether Side of New York; or, The Vice, Crime, and Poverty of the Great Metropolis. New York: Sheldon, 1872. Fawcett, Edgar. The Evil That Men Do. New York: Belford, 1889. Phillips, David Graham. Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise. New York: D. Appleton, 1917. Sanger, William W. The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World. New York: Harper, 1858. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. We and Our Neighbors; or, The Records of an Unfashionable Street. New York: J. B. Ford, 1875. U.S. Bureau of Labor. Working Women in Large Cities. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1889. Secondary Works
Hapke, Laura. Girls Who Went Wrong: Prostitutes in American Fiction, 1885–1917. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Hayes, Kevin J. Stephen Crane. Tavistock, Northumberland, U.K.: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 2004. Horn, Pierre L., and Mary Beth Pringle. The Image of the Prostitute in Modern Literature. New York: F. Ungar, 1984. Kevin J. Hayes
PSEUDOSCIENCE The term “pseudoscience,” which literally means “false science,” is sometimes contrasted unambiguously with “true science,” as if we can make an easy distinction between the two terms or as if only a fraud or ignoramus would put forward as scientific something that is not. Once in a while that clear-cut distinction is warranted. Albert Abrams (1863–1924), a medical doctor, is a case in point. For his quack medicine the American Medical Association later dubbed him the “dean of twentieth-century charlatans.”
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PSEUDOSCIENCE
Abrams devised all sorts of diagnostic machines, including the Dynamizer, the Biodynamometer, and the Reflexophone. Another diagnostic machine, the Omnipotent Oscilloclast, could determine from one drop of blood, Abrams claimed, not only a person’s disease but also his or her religious affiliation. Although some pseudoscience of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century can be traced to the ingenuities of con artists like Abrams, most pseudoscience of the period arose under much more complex circumstances. Among those circumstances were unprecedented scientific discoveries, a burgeoning popular interest in science, a widening gap between general literacy and scientific literacy, and a great deal of uncertainty about the implications of new scientific discoveries. With the uncertainties came a hunger for mystery as well as for some assurance that an understanding of the material world would not undermine a spiritual and ethical sensibility. Perhaps traces of these hungers exist in all cultures, but the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century had a particularly acute longing for them. These hungers and uncertainties provided rich material for contemporary writers. Mark Twain and other American writers responded both to the conditions that invited pseudoscience and to specific pseudoscientific fads, including mesmerism, physiognomy, phrenology, electrotherapy, wonder medicines, water therapy, and occultism— as well as to new archaeological “discoveries.” As already suggested, some definitions of “pseudoscience” imply that “false science” can be distinguished unambiguously from “true science.” For example, in The Skeptic’s Dictionary (2003), Robert Todd defines “pseudoscience” as a “set of ideas based on theories put forth as scientific when they are not scientific.” Todd implies that the distinction between science and nonscience is clear-cut; he elsewhere implies that a good skeptic would spot dubious evidence and would not fall prey to the claims of pseudoscientists such as Abrams. However, for the purposes of this article, the most useful definitions of pseudoscience will be those that allow for some ambiguity, such as the definition in the American Heritage Dictionary. There “pseudoscience” is defined as “an unscientific or trivial scientific theory, methodology, or activity that appears to be or is presented as scientific.” This definition permits one to consider pseudoscience from a number of perspectives, including its presentation (at one extreme, by charlatans), its reception (at one extreme, by the scientifically illiterate), and tensions in science itself between appearance and reality, between the intuitive and the counterintuitive. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
The line between pseudoscience and science, between dogma and theory, is often clearer in hindsight than it is in the present. Nonetheless, the conditions under which pseudoscience has thrived in the past include those conditions noted by Mark Twain: situations in which individuals stop asking questions and seekers reach too readily for answers.
I have seen several entirely sincere people who . . . believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. That was the end of the search. The man spent the rest of his life hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather. Twain, What Is Man? and Other Essays, p. 15.
THE CHICANERY OF CON ARTISTS
“There’s a sucker born every minute.” This insight, first quipped in 1869, was not lost on charlatans such as George Hull, Stub Newell, Charles Dawson, and Smith Woodward. Hull created a sensation when in 1868 he and his brother-in-law, Stub Newell, manufactured a fossil later dubbed the “Cardiff Giant.” Hull was an atheist who had argued with an evangelical Christian about a line from Genesis: “There were giants in the earth in those days” (Gen. 6:4). Hull schemed with his brother-in-law to add one more “fossil” to the many already discovered in a region near Cardiff, New York. After ordering three thousand pounds of gypsum and hiring a stonecutter to make a “petrified giant,” Hull and Newell buried the fake giant in a marsh, where it was “discovered” in 1869 by well diggers. For the next year, thousands of curiosity seekers flocked to Cardiff, undeterred by the skepticism of scientists who declared that the giant was either a statue or a hoax. Hull and Newell’s fortunes grew as each tourist dropped fifty cents for a look at the fossilized giant. However, Hull and Newell were P. T. Barnum’s ultimate “suckers.” Barnum attempted to buy interests in the Cardiff Giant, and when he was turned down he made a fake of the fake and claimed that Hull had sold him the original and was now displaying the fake. Not only did Barnum’s fake fake giant allegedly draw larger crowds, the “sucker” quote is misattributed to Barnum when in fact it was uttered by Hull’s banker, David Hannum. If Barnum, Hull, and Newell were able to prey on gullible nonscientists, Dawson and Woodward in 1912
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
917
PSEUDOSCIENCE
and again in 1915 showed that paleontologists could be equally gullible. In the gravel pits of Piltdown, England, Dawson “found” several parts of a prehistoric man hailed as a “missing link” between apes and humans. Presumably Dawson and his companion Woodward were the ones who buried the fake “missing link,” which was later determined to be a human skull wired together with an apish jaw. Although the American paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn was skeptical upon Dawson’s first “discovery,” he became an enthusiastic believer when Dawson “found” the second skull fragment. Unlike the Cardiff Giant, which was exposed as a hoax within a year, the Piltdown fragments were accepted as authentic for nearly fifty years.
piano teacher turned circus bareback rider who became world famous for her psychic claims; Eva C. (1886–?), born Marthe Béraud, who “materialized spirit faces” by presenting crumpled pictures in darkened rooms; and Edgar Cayce (1877–1945), a photographer who believed that he had clairvoyant powers. Blavatsky, Cayce, and another medium, Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), all claimed that they could consult the Akashic records, records supposed to contain data on everything future, present, and past, in order to contact spirits. In 1875 Max Auzinger developed a “black art principle,” a conjuring trick of covering scaffolds and supports when featuring such objects as “floating” trumpets and tambourines during séances.
In the half-century between the fake discoveries of the Cardiff Giant and the Piltdown Man, pseudoscientific fads thrived on both sides of the Atlantic. Among con artists of the period were some who allegedly hoped to teach a lesson. In 1908 Douglas Blackburn admitted that he and G. A. Smith had never communicated telepathically, as they had been claiming for the last quarter of a century. In trying to justify their chicanery, Blackburn claimed that their hoax “originated in the honest desire of two youths to show how easily men of scientific mind and training could be deceived when seeking evidence in support of a theory they were wishful to establish” (Kurtz, p. 235).
Some pseudoscientific fads simply appealed to a common appetite for amazing and awesome events. Among the most skillful conjurers was Harry Houdini (1874–1926), world famous as an escape artist and magician. The “mentalists” Washington Irving Bishop (1856–1889), Joseph Dunninger (1892–1975), and Erik Jan Hanussen (1889–1933) claimed that they had paranormal powers enabling them to accomplish superhuman feats such as the “blindfold drive” (navigating a carriage while blindfolded), mind reading, and psychokinesis (making objects move, allegedly by mind power). In 1882 F. W. Myers coined the term “telepathy” to describe the ability of humans or animals to perceive others’ thoughts without depending on the senses. Not only people but animals were featured for their marvelous talents. Clever Hans, a horse, attracted crowds throughout the 1890s because of his “ability” to do mathematical calculations. Perhaps the most amazing theory of the period was the “hollow earth” theory, first suggested by the astronomer Edmond Halley and “improved” upon in 1870 by Cyrus Reed Teed, who believed that the world is hollow and people live on the inside of it.
Whether or not most pseudoscientists were clever enough to recognize the vulnerabilities of “men of scientific mind,” they were certainly clever enough to recognize the vulnerabilities of those who lacked scientific training. It was the heyday of unqualified capitalism and of ways to make a fast buck at the expense of others’ gullibility. Practitioners of phrenology, physiognomy, mesmerism, theosophy, and spiritualism thrived. Frequently the fakers who carried on these trades pandered to prevailing prejudices—racism, for example, in the case of phrenologists and physiognomists—as well as to prevailing desires—for marvels, miracles, and spiritual connections. In the wake of Darwin’s evolutionary theory, many people feared that science would undermine religion, which perhaps fueled interest in the occult and spiritualism. Spirit mediums, as used here, refers to charlatans who claimed that they could summon spirits and ghosts and communicate with them, sometimes with the aid of devices such as a heart-shaped pointer called a planchette, which would spell out answers on a Ouija board, sometimes during séances, sessions held in semidarkened rooms, where the medium would seem to go into a trance to summon her spirits. Among the best-known spirit mediums were Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), a
918
A M E R I C A N
Perhaps the richest sampling of the pseudoscience craze of the late nineteenth century is found in the fiction of Mark Twain, where one finds references to bloodletting (“A Majestic Literary Fossil”), fraudulent patent medicines (The Gilded Age), electrotherapy (A Connecticut Yankee), water treatments (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), and mesmerism (his autobiography), among many others. Much of the humor in The Innocents Abroad depends on his readers’ familiarity with current scientific and pseudoscientific topics. At one point in The Innocents Abroad, Twain lampoons a human tendency to project motivations when no evidence exists for them and to dream up theories with no foundation. His American innocents discover a cut in a hillside exposing several veins not of gold, copper, or any other mineral but of oyster shells mixed
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PSEUDOSCIENCE
with crockery. The innocents wonder how those oysters got up the hill and, after rejecting several natural and biblical explanations, theorize that the oysters climbed up there to look at the scenery. This theory, though, is rejected because oysters, with their retiring dispositions, actually scorn beautiful scenery. Later his innocents arrive in a Greek church, only to discover that one unusually short column marks the center of the earth, a reference to the Flat Earth Society, a group that flourished on both sides of the Atlantic after Samuel Birley Rowbotham calculated in 1849 that the North Pole is at the center of the earth and that the earth is indeed flat. (Interestingly, Rowbotham’s pseudoscientific theory, fueled by discrepancies between biblical and scientific versions of geography, is based on data about lighthouses and the point at which mariners sight them. Using numbers available in Lighthouses of the World, Rowbotham’s calculations actually stand up to scrutiny, but his sampling procedures do not.) Twain’s fictional believers conclude that the column in the Greek chapel exists as a “withering rebuke to those philosophers who would make us believe that it is not possible,” while Twain’s skeptic climbs the dome of the church to see if he can see his shadow. The skeptic concludes that the church must be the center of the earth since he sees no shadow, even though it is a cloudy day. Twain’s fictional innocents then discover under the roof of the Greek church a sign identifying Adam’s tomb in an episode reminiscent of the Cardiff Giant and pseudoscientific spoofs on biblical authority. Twain’s innocent narrator is ecstatic to find Adam’s tomb in this land of strangers, for it is the tomb of one of his blood relatives. “True,” he acknowledges, “a distant one, but still a relation” ( p. 211). Whether Twain humorously jabs at science or pseudoscience, his writing reflects the era’s preoccupation with both. THE “SCIENCE” OF THE SCIENTIFICALLY ILLITERATE
The word “scientist” did not exist until William Whewell coined it in 1822 to describe the people who attended the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). By mid-century science had become a marker of national status; by the turn of the century the Nobel Prize was established as one of the most prestigious international prizes ever to have existed. Scientists were held in high regard, and many Americans wanted to know more about them and their discoveries. Most Americans, however, lacked the scientific training to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. The popular interest in science was not due to the amount of information the new sciences produced. Nineteenth-century science was not yet “big science,” A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
An advertisement for the Phrenological Journal, 1869. Drawing erroneous conclusions from the essentially sound idea that different regions of the brain are responsible for different functions, phrenology became one of the most commonly practiced pseudosciences of the period and was even used by police to develop profiles of potential criminals. © CORBIS
a term coined by Alvin Weinberg in 1961 to describe the multibillion-dollar network of corporate- and government-funded research that pumps out massive amounts of information. What was unprecedented, however—and what fascinated and troubled ordinary nineteenth-century newspaper readers—was the degree to which scientific assumptions challenged many of the prevailing religious and social “ways of knowing.” If scientists were stirring an epistemological pot, ordinary men and women were left wondering what the basis could be for answering life’s most basic questions, what the basis could be for seeking truth. The discomfort some people felt left them vulnerable to the “quick fixes” offered by con men such as Abrams. The longing for a lost, less-material world left others hungering for the pseudoscience of various
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
919
PSEUDOSCIENCE
occultists and spiritualists. The mere novelty of unprecedented scientific changes whetted the appetites of those who sought the sensational and who subsequently sought any wondrous or miraculous device. Whether or not ordinary Americans liked what science might be showing them, they could not help reacting to the issues that science put before them. More and more Americans were able to read in the nineteenth century. The agrarian and Industrial revolutions in the early part of the century led to falling mortality rates and a huge spike in population. Paralleling the spike in population was a spike in literacy, partly due to the early-nineteenth-century selfhelp movements and Jacksonian “we can do it ourselves” democracy. The nineteenth century also witnessed a huge increase in publications, including many unrefereed magazines that would allow their authors to raise controversial—and perhaps pseudoscientific—issues unchecked. The sizable literate public and its freedom of expression in the nineteenth century may have been double-sided: on one hand, more people had the potential to read about scientific issues; on the other hand, there were more venues for outright fraud and deliberate pseudoscience. While ordinary readers of novels and newspapers were frequently interested in scientific issues, few were prepared to critique what they might be reading. By what standards would one judge the merits of a scientific claim? These standards were just being established within newly emerging scientific subdisciplines, and they were often lost on the average reader. Part of the gap between the general reader and the scientist was due to changes in professionalization. Earlier in the century scholars were respected for being Renaissance men, for being generalists who knew a little bit about a lot of different things; by the end of the century scholars had specialized, and the Renaissance ideal was largely forgotten. According to Mary Jo Nye, the scientific changes that took place during the nineteenth century outstripped changes before and since. It was during this period that scientific training and research practices that had in many ways remained unchanged since medieval times shifted to the modern model of government-funded universities outfitted with research labs, where faculty members are expected to produce and publish original research. It was during this century too that the peerreviewed journals that publish original research became established within disciplinary norms, together with an increase in specialized societies that served as gateways. The number of scientists and scientific papers had doubled approximately every fifteen years since the beginning of the seventeenth
920
A M E R I C A N
century; by the mid-nineteenth century publication in the sciences had become specialized, often coinciding with the legitimization of new subdisciplines. Representative of the shift from general to specialized literacy is the shift in Nature, first published in 1869. David Roos argues that the editors of Nature initially aimed to “create a higher-level but still general and accessible forum for the discussion of scientific matters” (p. 162) but that specialization shortly eclipsed accessibility. The average American reader, then, was likely to be interested in scientific issues but was unlikely to find accessible the papers published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Whatever this average American read was likely to be mediated by a nonscientist, often in novels, periodicals, and poetry. Thus the nineteenth-century “Age of Science” was populated largely by nonscientists who learned about science in texts penned by nonscientists. By 1870 periodicals such as Galaxy, Atlantic Monthly, Appleton’s Journal, North American Review, and Harper’s New Monthly had begun to accommodate their readers’ interest in science even though their “science columns” may not have been reviewed by practicing scientists. It was 1920 before journalists established professional standards for science reporting, and then only under pressure from the American Medical Association, which objected to lurid tales in popular publications such as William Randolph Hearst’s American Weekly. As Martin Gardner notes, this weekly would publish stories about “men who could hear radio broadcasts through gold inlays in their teeth” and “frogs found alive in the cornerstones of ancient buildings” (p. 4). As suggested earlier, some pseudoscientific theories may have thrived in this period because of fears about the difficulty of reconciling religious doctrine with evolutionary theory. Another fear, concern about the future of race relations after Reconstruction, may have fueled pseudoscientific theories of white supremacy, ranging from Samuel George Morton’s and Paul Broca’s work with craniometry to Joseph Le Conte’s biological justification for the “race line,” which, he maintained, resulted from a “necessary instinct” to preserve the blood purity of the “higher race.” Further stimulating pseudoscientific arguments about race were Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism and widespread interest in physiognomy, the art of reading character and fate from the features of the face, whereby white features were equated with good character and black features with bad. For some writers, both physiognomy and phrenology could be tools for suggesting so-called
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PSEUDOSCIENCE
natural relationships between physical features and character. One finds in the literature of Thomas Dixon, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charles Chesnutt, and James Weldon Johnson, among others, widespread response to pseudoscientific theories of race, ranging from Dixon’s white supremacist The Leopard’s Spots (1902) to Johnson’s critique of representations of race in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Twain’s most direct treatment of slavery, resists easy interpretation, while William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty (1892) and Charles Chesnutt’s The House behind the Cedars (1900) represent the relationship between race and character ironically. With the emergence of science fiction came narratives that for the most part critically reflected upon real issues in science and society through the medium of fantastic scientific schemes. For example, Edward BulwerLytton’s 1871 utopian fantasy The Coming Race features an engineer who stumbles into a mine and finds there a whole civilization of mystics who have at their disposal the powerful force of Vril, an electricity-like force that is both more creative and destructive than anything known to ordinary humans. While the Vril-yas are depicted as proscience and the novel suggests that Bulwer-Lytton was well versed in scientific issues, the novel also addresses pseudoscientific subjects such as Social Darwinism, eugenics, and clairvoyance. Arguably, this novel responds to the same public ambivalence about evolutionary theory and technological progress that prompted public interest in many of the pseudoscientific issues of the day. By the end of the century science fiction as a self-conscious genre was well established with the publication of H. G. Wells’s “The Man of the Year Million,” The Time Machine, and War of the Worlds. While these texts include “false science” in the sense of imaginary schemes, Wells expected his readers to know that they were imaginary. Even when the reader knows a novel is fiction, though, some elements from the fiction may live on in pseudoscientific lore, as was the case with Vril, the cosmic energy described in The Coming Race, which captured the imagination of the occultist Madame Blavatsky and the “inventor” John Keely. Also ambiguous is the “pseudoscience” in Ignatius Donnelly’s wildly successful novel Ragnarok, published in 1883. Was Donnelly a pseudoscientist? He was a lawyer, a U.S. congressman, and a dabbler in science. He was obsessed by the existence of Atlantis and the belief that a visiting comet would have catastrophic effects. His novel Ragnarok describes a comet colliding with Earth. Was he using fiction to perpetuate ideas that he really believed? A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
UNFINISHED SCIENCE OR SCIENCE IN THE MAKING
By the mid-nineteenth century science was no longer primarily an avocation for gentlemen amateurs but a vocation for professionals. However, scientists too could make mistakes and pseudoscientific claims. Sometimes the same individual was spectacularly wrong about one thing and brilliantly right about another. While nonscientists lacked the training to be able to distinguish science from pseudoscience, scientists had training but often could not distinguish absolutely between pseudoscience and science except in hindsight. Among famous physicists who generalized from the physical to the metaphysical were Rudolf Clausius, who in 1865 coined the term “entropy,” and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), who in 1854 coined the term “thermodynamics.” In 1875 Lord Kelvin coauthored a book, The Unseen Universe, that argued that energy moves between visible and invisible worlds. These physicists’ metaphysical claims would be considered pseudoscientific by most physicists in the twenty-first century. Psychologists as well as physicists sought a unified theory of spirit and material forces. William James, who contributed much to nineteenth-century psychology, believed in the mediumship of the spiritualist Leonora Piper (1857–1950), a Boston housewife who conducted pseudoscientific séances. Again, some of the brightest individuals of the period also accepted as factual things that were not. Moreover, some fields that one thinks of as “sciences” in the early twenty-first century were really closer to “arts” in the nineteenth century, including medicine. Between the limited understanding of bacteriology, infection, and disease on the one hand and the rise in advertising and unlabeled patent medicines on the other, sincere medical practitioners could make nearly as many mistakes as their quack counterparts, something Mark Twain will not let one forget. While snake-oil salesmen may have represented quackery at its worst, the sincere medical doctor may not have been much more help until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 forced labeling of medicines and until penicillin and other antibiotics were discovered two decades later. Within scientific institutions, little happened in the last half of the nineteenth century in the absence of intense debate, whether about mental capacities, the periodic table, probabilistic interpretations of thermodynamics, the electron, X-rays, or general relativity. In the heat of these debates, weak and pseudoscientific theories competed with those eventually accepted as scientific. Generally it is only in hindsight, after the debates have been settled, that one can determine what is “true science” and what is “false science.”
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
921
PSEUDOSCIENCE
Furthermore, on occasion “false science” serves as a placeholder for a subsequent “true” theory. James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist who died in 1879, claimed that “it is a good thing to have two ways of looking at a subject and to admit there are two ways of looking at it. I hold that the chief merit of a temporary theory is that it shall guide the experiment without impeding the progress of the true theory when it appears” (quoted in Nye, p. 72). While Maxwell understood that his scientific claims were tentative at best and would not be confirmed until some time in the future, some scientists were less critical and made claims that edge closer to “false science,” to pseudoscience. Even so, the boundary between “true” and “false” is not always clear. Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828), a medical doctor and the father of phrenology, paved the way for legions of quacks who bilked nineteenth-century curiosity seekers with fatuous character analyses and the reading of head bumps. Yet while phrenology was a thriving pseudoscientific industry for much of the nineteenth century, one cannot say that Gall was a simple pseudoscientist. His assumption that bumps on the head correlate to certain character traits is false, but his idea that different sites of the brain may be responsible for different functions is not entirely mistaken. One can perhaps empathize with the plight of ordinary victims of pseudoscience when one looks at the experiences of scientists who, although trained to be skeptical, suspended their critical faculties in the face of some overwhelming desire. For instance, in 1903, shortly after the discovery of X-rays, the French physicist René Blondlot believed that he had discovered a new form of radiation, which he named N-rays after his university in Nancy, France. The American physicist Robert Wood secretly removed Blondlot’s “radioactive” object during one of Blondlot’s demonstrations, but Blondlot proceeded to count N-rays. There is no reason to doubt his sincerity, although there is every reason to think his will to believe led him to imagine specks of light when there were none. About the same time, Gustav Geley looked into the pseudoscientific spiritualism of Eva C., even though he was an established physicist. Similarly Charles Richet, the 1913 Nobel laureate for physiology and medicine, endorsed the claims of spirit mediums such as Eva C. and William Eglinton. In the early twentieth century Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, a scientist who did pioneer work in early radio and research on lightning, believed that he had contact with his son Raymond, killed in World War I. Peter Demianovich Ouspensk, a Russian mathematician and mystic, tried to reconcile Western rationalism and Eastern mysticism, and Sir William Matthew
922
A M E R I C A N
Flinders Petrie, a talented archaeologist, believed that the Great Pyramid of Egypt was constructed in the form of a prophetic message. In all of these instances one might speculate that the scientists’ overwhelming desires led them to believe in the existence of something for which there is no evidence. If such highly trained individuals as these could have lapses in scientific skepticism, one can surely understand the enthusiasms of the scientifically illiterate majority in the nineteenth century. See also Circuses; Darwinism; Health and Medicine; Museums; Science and Technology; Spiritualism BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Bulwer-Lytton, Edward. The Coming Race. 1871. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. Chesnutt, Charles. The House behind the Cedars. 1900. New York: Penguin, 1993. Dixon, Thomas. The Leopard’s Spots. 1902. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Donnelly, Ignatius. Ragnarok. 1883 Kila, Mo.: Kessinger, 1997. Howells, William Dean. An Imperative Duty. New York: Harper, 1892. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an ExColored Man. 1912. New York: Dover, 1995. Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 1876. New York: World, 1946. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court. 1889. New York: Harper, 1917. Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress. 1869. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Twain, Mark. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson. 1894. Avon, Conn.: Limited Editions Club, 1974. Twain, Mark. What Is Man? and Other Essays. New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1917. Twain, Mark, and C. D. Warner. The Gilded Age. 1873. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Wells, H. G. “The Man of the Year Million.” 1893. In Apeman, Spaceman, edited by Leon E. Stover and Harry Harrison. London: Penguin, 1968. Wells, H. G. The Time Machine. 1893. New York: Limited Editions Club, 1964. Wells, H. G. War of the Worlds. 1898. London: Heinemann, 1951. Secondary Works
Boeckmann, Cathy. A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892–1912. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PSYCHOLOGY
Gardner, Martin. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. New York: Dover, 1957. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. Rev. ed. New York: Norton, 1996. Gould, Stephen Jay. “Piltdown Revisited.” In his The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. New York: Norton, 1980. Jastrow, Joseph, ed. The Story of Human Error. New York: Appleton-Century, 1936. Jay, Ricky. Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women. New York: Villard, 1986. Kerr, Howard. Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850– 1900. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Kurtz, Paul, ed. A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1985. Langmuir, Irving. “Pathological Science.” Transcribed and edited by Robert N. Hall. Physics Today 42 (October 1989): 36–48. Nye, Mary Jo. Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Randi, James. An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995. Roos, David. “The Aims and Intentions of Nature.” In Victorian Science and Victorian Values, edited by James Paradis and Thomas Postelwait. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1985. Martha D. Patton
PSYCHOLOGY The development of experimental and clinical psychology had implications for diverse areas of U.S. social and intellectual life between 1870 and 1920; after 1910, psychological ideas and practices also influenced the American political and economic system. Currents of psychological theory and practice—most of which fall into the categories of philosophical, organic/somatic, experimental, psychometric, forensic, and psychoanalytic—appear in literary and popular texts throughout the period. Some writers incorporated new theories into their writings as information about these ideas became available in popular U.S. magazines and/or English translations of German and French texts; at times, these writers used multiple, potentially contradictory theories in the same texts or in the same period. PRE-EXPERIMENTAL METHODS
Before the experimental methods of the German Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) spread throughout U.S. universities (via Wundtian protégés such as Edward A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Titchener), the sources and implications of human mental activity were theorized by professors of philosophy, while mental pathologies—especially “nervous exhaustion,” or “neurasthenia” (similar to the currentday diagnosis of depression with anxiety and assorted physical symptoms), and alcoholism—were treated by medical doctors and clergy. Even after Wundtian practices were becoming widespread, academic philosophers, physicians, and ministers were treated as public authorities on both normal and abnormal mental functioning. Organic (or “somatic”) practitioners, usually medical doctors, believed that behavioral and cognitive disorders could be traced to problems with digestion, the blood, reproductive organs, or the central nervous system; the best-known theorists of somatic psychology were Silas Weir Mitchell (Wear and Tear [1871] and Fat and Blood [1877]) and George Miller Beard (American Nervousness [1903]). Mitchell (1829– 1914) built his reputation treating traumatized Civil War soldiers with a combination of physical rest and mental inactivity; middle-class businessmen and housewives were later prescribed this regimen. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” a proto-modernist, feminist critique of Mitchell’s treatment, vividly depicts the “rest cure” from the perspective of a middle-class housewife whose postpartum depression deteriorates into psychosis by the end of the text. Somewhere between the orientations of philosophical, medical, and religious psychologists, but operating on the cultural margins were practitioners of Christian Science (founded in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy) and New Thought (associated with Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Horatio W. Dresser), two movements that emphasized individuals’ abilities to influence the course of both physical and mental complaints through guided, positive thinking. In his novel The “Genius” (1916), Theodore Dreiser shows the novel’s protagonist, Eugene Witla, and his estranged wife consulting a Christian Science practitioner in hopes of both healing Witla’s mental anguish and steeling his frail wife against the demands of a high-risk pregnancy. EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
The philosophical exploration of everyday mental activity, begun in the eighteenth century by “common sense” thinkers such as John Locke and Thomas Reid, started being challenged in the 1870s by the anthropometric laboratory methods of Wundt (University of Leipzig) and William James (Harvard). By measuring reaction times, visual and auditory perception, memory, and other neurologically based abilities, physiologically oriented psychologists tried to construct an objective, scientific base for the study of human consciousness. Though, for the most part, they avoided asking larger
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
923
PSYCHOLOGY
questions about the roots or purposes of complex human behaviors, their work was explicitly influenced by Spencerian philosophy and Darwinian theories of adaptation and natural selection. Especially between 1890 and 1910, the ideas of Wundtian psychologists were sometimes invoked in the scientific and popular press to justify racist, sexist, and imperialist public policies. Intellectual unease with Wundtian psychology had less to do with some of its social/political uses than with a more general sense that the discipline (and the Spencerian/Darwinian theories that influenced it) had no need for the Christian underpinnings of American moral philosophy. For a genteel novelist like William Dean Howells (1837–1920), Spencerian determinism tended to emphasize biological and environmental determinism at the expense of human free will. Howells’s late-career speculative fiction A Traveller from Altruria (1894), however, showed him embracing the implicitly Christian version of Spencerian thinking popularized by Howells’s common sense philosopher friend, John Fiske. Altruria reflects Howells’s hope that environmental determinism, exerted through socially just public policies, could, over many generations, improve the moral and ethical behaviors typical of the human species. Wundtian psychologists like Titchener (Cornell), James McKeen Cattell (Columbia), Joseph Jastrow (Wisconsin), and Hugo Munsterberg (Harvard) trained university students to test and record each other’s physical responses so that students could, in turn, compile anthropometric data from specific segments of their communities. The thousands of visitors to the 1893 Columbian World Exposition in Chicago tested by the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students spread public awareness of brass instrument psychology (so called because of the use of scientific instruments in the psychology of the time) and prepared Americans for the large-scale progressive-movement testing and measurement policies that would affect millions of schoolchildren, prisoners, immigrants, and workers in the first decades of the twentieth century. Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), the Californiaborn writer whose modernist language experiments would later bring her work artistic acclaim and public celebrity (as well as ridicule), was an undergraduate student of both William James (1842–1910) and Hugo Munsterberg (1863–1916) at the Harvard Annex (later called Radcliffe College) in 1893 and 1894. In her 1933 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein would rightly claim that James—best known in literary circles for his description (in his 1890 Principles of Psychology) of consciousness as “a stream”—strongly influenced her personal and intel-
924
A M E R I C A N
lectual development. Her college compositions and early narratives such as “Melanctha” and “The Gentle Lena,” however, show that she was preoccupied with mental normality and pathology, as well as by comparisons between “quicker” and “slower,” or “bright” and “stupid” characters. These concerns reflect her “brass instrument” training under Munsterberg—and her subsequent medical school education at Johns Hopkins—more than the comparatively humanistic influence of James. Stein’s mammoth novel The Making of Americans (composed between 1908 and 1911), by contrast, experiments with theories about what Stein called “bottom nature,” which she developed in part after reading Viennese philosopher Otto Weininger’s 1903 Sex and Character (translated into English in 1906). In her personal life, Stein took comfort in Weininger’s patently misogynist ideas about homosexuality, which the sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, in his 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis, called “inversion”: he argued that the “mannishness” of some lesbians made them superior to most heterosexual women, whose identification with and proximity to physical reproductive processes proved their intellectual inferiority. In letters and notebooks, as well as (in a more coded way) in published texts like Tender Buttons (1914), Stein expresses ambivalence toward the “messy” femaleness of women such as her sister Bertha and even her longtime partner, Alice Toklas. Stein’s uses of experimental psychology are noteworthy in part because the literary texts she produced with their help are also explicitly experimental. In Three Lives (1903) and The Making of Americans, she tests the implications of newer theories of consciousness, personality, and intelligence for narrative structure. Her narrative representations of individual emotional development over time (as in her depiction of Jeff Campbell in “Melanctha”) reflect James’s contention that, to the perceiving human mind, there is only the present moment: instead of describing Jeff’s feelings for Melanctha as evolving toward and later away from love, Stein’s narrator repeatedly presents discrete and absolute impressions of Jeff’s attitudes, using words like “always” and “never.” Likewise, her portrayal of Melanctha’s friend Rose Johnson, which was influenced by Stein’s medical school encounters with uneducated black women, echoes developing psychomedical discourses about the eugenic dangers presented by “feeble-minded” African Americans and immigrants. “Melanctha” opens with the death of Rose’s baby from neglect, an event that is narrated without emotion and then “forgotten” until much later in the text, much in the same way that Rose “forgets” the baby itself. The disengaged, emotionally flat narrative style and chronology of “Melanctha” are presented as
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PSYCHOLOGY
analogous to the underdeveloped, disordered mind of Rose Johnson, a woman whose inability to respond to Melanctha’s emotional pain ultimately contributes to the death of the text’s title character. Though Stein’s experimental work with psychological theories was unusual in the period, she was obviously not the first American writer to weave contemporary psychology into fiction. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Charles Brockden Brown had infused Lockean ideas about perception and reason into Edgar Huntley (1799), whereas both Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall (1854) and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855) referred at many points to phrenological theories of personality popular at mid-century. Insofar as the phrenological penchant for categories of thought and behavior may have influenced Whitman’s development of a “cataloging” style, his use of contemporary psychology might also be said to be experimental in somewhat the same way as Stein’s was. By the end of the nineteenth century, U.S. novels—like their realist counterparts in England and France—regularly incorporated what might be called “lay” or philosophical/psychological observations about region, social class, and gender into their closely focused treatments of individual thinking and perception. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FREUD’S 1909 CLARK UNIVERSITY LECTURES
Around 1910, as somatic psychology waned, the currents of experimental, psychometric, forensic, and psychoanalytic psychology flowed with increasing force into both literary and journalistic discourse. In the decade that followed this infusion, the English translation of Sigmund Freud’s 1909 Clark University lectures would appear to have been the most influential psychological event in U.S. culture; as the examples of Howells, Mark Twain (1835–1910), Pauline Hopkins, Henry James (1843–1916), Edith Wharton (1862– 1937), Kate Chopin (1851–1904), Frank Norris (1870–1902), Theodore Dreiser (1871– 1945), and Jack London (1876–1916) attest, however, the literary importance of psychoanalytic theory needs to be assessed within the contexts of the psychological discourses (academic and otherwise) that had been developing over the previous two decades. In keeping with the hegemonic tradition of philosophical/theological psychology, a writer such as Mark Twain, for instance, refined realist techniques for representing consciousness in order to explore Huck Finn’s uncertainties about the ethical bonds of friendship with a slave. In The Ambassadors (1903) and The House of Mirth (1905), likewise, James and Wharton narrated fictional minds capable of the most A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
subtle moral equivocation in the areas of social class and marital politics. Within Pauline Hopkins’s novel Contending Forces (1900), William James’s ideas about double consciousness and spiritualism help explain her African American character’s decision to pass as a white American. As Cynthia Schrager (1997) has shown, James’s theory probably influenced African American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois’s own version of double consciousness, articulated in his 1903 The Souls of Black Folk. Writers who experimented with the extreme version of realism known as “naturalism”—a narrative form first practiced in the 1870s by the French novelist Émile Zola (L’Assommoir [1877], Germinal [1885])— tested the roles of heredity, environment, and individual choice for characters themselves functioning in settings of extreme poverty, physical danger, or moral ambiguity. For writers like Norris, Dreiser, and London, the growth of state-run institutions for “mentally defective” children and adults, combined with increased public awareness of educational and medical discourses about individual differences in intelligence, led to the creation of characters whose intellectual deficiencies limit their personal freedom and responsibility. The most famous of these characters was Norris’s “slow-witted” dentist, McTeague (1899), a giant Irishman who functions more or less competently in a socially supportive environment, but who becomes a menacing, drunken “brute” when the state prevents him from practicing his trade. In his short story “Told in the Drooling Ward” (1914), London creates a borderline “feeble-minded” male who comments articulately on the politics of institutional life, but who clearly cannot survive beyond the walls of the state “home.” Both Norris and London had personal connections to the California Home for the Care and Training of Feeble Minded Children in Eldridge, California. Norris was the longtime friend of William Lawlor, director of the Home, whereas London, whose “Beauty Ranch” bordered the grounds of the large facility, boasted of his friendships with “imbeciles” living there. In 1916 Dreiser, whose descriptions of characters frequently included blunt assessments of their intelligence, shocked New York theater audiences with The Hand of the Potter, a forensic drama about the mental life of an epileptic child molester and murderer. Everyone in this poorly received play—from the police, to the murderer’s Russian Jewish family, to the murderer Isadore Berchansky himself—debates the “causes and consequences” (to borrow the title of Clark-trained psychologist H. H. Goddard’s 1917 compendium on “idiocy,” “imbecility,” and “moronism”) of Berchansky’s frightening form of feeblemindedness.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
925
PSYCHOLOGY
In Theodore Dreiser’s 1916 play The Hand of the Potter, Quinn, an Irish American reporter, informs his colleagues (and the play’s audience) of the current research on sexual pathology:
Now ye were sayin’ a while ago that ye can’t understand why a man like that should be attackin’ a little girl, unless he were a low, vile creature, even if he wasn’t balanced quite right— but I can. If ye’d ever made a study ave the passion ave love in the sense that Freud an’ some others have ye’d understand it well enough. It’s a great force about which we know naathing as yet an’ which we’re just beginnin’ to look into—what it manes, how it affects people. Dreiser, The Hand of the Potter.
FREUD’S IMPACT ON AMERICAN CULTURE, 1910–1920
Establishing the thoroughly psychological character of U.S. narrative before Freud is important because, as Steven Marcus and other literary scholars have shown, the medical/philosophical orientation, Darwinist worldview, and narrative structure of Freudian theory closely paralleled the developmental bent and internally focused structure of much European and American fiction. In other words, Freud’s writings (especially his case studies) looked a lot like the narratives that literary scholars would later analyze with Freud’s help. For example, ten or more years before Freud’s U.S. debut, Frank Norris wrote (but did not publish) Vandover and the Brute, in which the protagonist’s childhood psychosexual trauma plants the seed of his eventual mental deterioration. Similarly, in her 1899 The Awakening, Kate Chopin explored the emotional effects of middle-class sexual repression on a character who resembles the patients (or heroines) in some of Freud’s case studies. How best to account for the overlap between psychological developments in the narrative and theory of this period? As historian John Demos (1997) argues, Freud’s theories about infantile sexuality and the emotional (dys)function of the nuclear mother/father/ child triad grew out of the same “hothouse family” structure that animated so much late-nineteenth-century realist fiction. Both the psychological novels and psychoanalytic theories were logical products of a middle-class family structure
926
A M E R I C A N
in which socially disempowered mothers were rewarded by their husbands and communities for investing most of their emotional energy in the nurturance of children (especially sons); likewise, fathers’ work in the capitalist marketplace rendered their authority over their children more symbolic (and hence open to children’s interpretation and fantasy) than it had been in previous eras. For their part, children in the “hothouse family” learned to see their same-sex parent as rivals for the affection of their opposite-sex parent. While the Victorian glorification of the nuclear family and taboos against open discussion of sexuality meant that most novels of the period would not revolve around overtly sexualized parentchild conflicts, realist narratives frequently emphasized competition between sons and fathers or overly intense mother/ child bonds. Freud’s theories provided a technical vocabulary for analyzing both latenineteenth-century middle-class subjects and the narratives they produced. Between 1914 and 1916, popular American magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Republic familiarized educated readers with basic psychoanalytic terms and concepts, usually in simplified form; further simplified (and perhaps distorted) borrowings soon appeared in explicitly literary contexts. Since its introduction to the United States, both proponents and critics of psychoanalysis have lamented the widespread “liberatory” interpretation that Freud’s ideas received from American intellectuals between 1911 and 1930: while Freud and his professional disciples emphasized the hard work of sublimating or integrating instinctual drives (especially for sexual satisfaction and parental approval) to form a productive adult psyche, lay followers used Freudian insights about sexual repression and expression to authorize “free love” and other transgressions of middle-class sexual convention. In his 1918 play The Angel Intrudes, for instance, Freudian enthusiast Floyd Dell (1887–1969; one of the founders, with George Cook Cram and Susan Glaspell, of the influential Provincetown Players) presented a man and his much younger partner (played by the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay) whose tryst is interrupted by the appearance of the man’s guardian angel. Far from intending to redirect the man’s sensuality, however, the angel wants to emulate it—to dress, drink, and love the way his human charge does. Faced with a choice between the sexually predictable man and his naive, “utterly depraved” guardian, Annabelle (named, perhaps, after the child lover in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1849 poem “Annabelle Lee”) runs away with the angel, promising the angel, “I shall never hold you against your will. I do not want to burn your wings. I really don’t!”
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
PSYCHOLOGY
While the tone of his play is ironic, Dell wants audiences to see the spontaneous, pleasure-seeking angel as the taboo-ridden man’s better self. Dell’s embrace of (what he saw as) Freudian freedom may have been partly a rejection of the Iowan’s midwestern background in favor of the cosmopolitan ethos of his adopted home in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Orthodox Freudians saw such interpretations as dangerous oversimplifications, but their currency would spread, especially with the popularity of Eugene O’Neill’s plays from 1920 on. In his 1918 story “Seeds,” included in his 1920 short story collection The Triumph of the Egg, Chicagoan Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) takes what professional psychologists might have seen as a pessimistic, but nonetheless more responsible, approach to the therapeutic value of sexual expression. His caution reflected the reserved culture of the midwestern characters he created: far from believing that sexual activity could cure what later philosophers would describe as existential angst, Anderson saw sexuality as a force that might be biologically innate but was still constructed by culture. As such, it was just as likely as other forms of expression to be confused or misunderstood; because so many taboos surrounded the “language” of sex, miscommunications of the body and of emotional desire were harder than verbal ones to resolve. While a story like “Seeds” suggests that Anderson the modernist writer saw artistic value in Freudian insights about human development and sexuality, his characters make it clear that the writer had little faith in psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice. Even more than Sherwood Anderson, Jack London disagreed with “liberatory” uses of Freudian thought; at the same time, however, London praised Freud as a crucial connector of human biological and cultural behaviors. Writing in California, far from the New York City hub of Freudian fans, London may have been following developments in Freud’s thinking (among other psychologists, scientists, and philosophers) as they were being discussed by scholars, even before their translation into English. Deeply influenced by Darwin and Spencer, London understood whatever theories he read in terms of evolutionary ideas of natural selection. His interpretations of psychologists Freud, Havelock Ellis, Carl Jung, and Otto Rank emphasized his belief that psychological adjustment occurred in the evolutionary service of biological reproduction. In London’s 1913 novel The Valley of the Moon, for example, Freud’s and Ellis’s ideas about female hysteria help London show how the example of what he sometimes called “primitives”—in this case, wild animals and a dark-skinned woman—helps his heroine, Saxon, learn an evolutionarily healthy sexuality. Saxon’s self-aware sexuality is not A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
a tool for what later psychoanalytic devotees might call “self-actualization,” but a key to what London saw as a responsible, reproductively oriented adulthood. In a late, partly autobiographical novel like The Little Lady of the Big House (1916), by contrast, the suicide of the female protagonist demonstrates London’s belief that emotionally complicated adults are unlikely to be freed of their mental pain and neuroses by loosened sexual conventions. The number of practicing Freudian psychoanalysts in the United States was never large in the years immediately following Freud’s Clark lectures, but, thanks to popularizers like Dell, Max Eastman, and Walter Lippmann, Freudian ideas directly influenced legal, social, and educational policy; trends in public policy, in turn, influenced literary texts by writers who might not themselves have read Freud before 1920. An especially vivid example appears in Dreiser’s The Hand of the Potter (1918). Near the end of the play, Dreiser shows one police detective (saddled by Dreiser with the broadest possible Irish accent) chastising another for not knowing current psychological theories about deviant sexuality. Dreiser’s invocation of Freud to explain behavior that was far beyond the pale of any of Freud’s own subjects anticipates by six years the defense attorney Clarence Darrow’s use of Freudian theory to exculpate teenage “thrill-kill” murderers Leopold and Loeb, who, in 1924, would (inexplicably, to most observers) kill a younger boy and dump his body in a marshland outside of Chicago. By 1920 Freudian “slips,” “inferiority complexes,” “death drives,” “Oedipal complexes,” and other concepts from his writings had been thoroughly absorbed into educated public discourse and were well on their way to becoming clichés. See also Pseudoscience; Realism; Science and Technology BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Dell, Floyd. The Angel Intrudes: A Play in One Act. New York: E. Arens, 1918. Available at http://gutenberg .teleglobe.net/etext04/kgrts10.txt. Dreiser, Theodore. The Hand of the Potter. 1916. In The Collected Plays of Theodore Dreiser, edited by Keith Newlin and Frederic E. Rusch. Albany: Whitston, 2000. Freud, Sigmund. “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis.” American Journal of Psychology 21 (1910): 181–218. Available at http://psychclassics. yorku.ca/ Freud/Origin/. Goddard, Henry Herbert. Feeble-Mindedness: Its Causes and Consequences. New York: Macmillan, 1914. London, Jack. The Valley of the Moon. 1913. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
927
PSYCHOLOGY
edited by Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, pp. 56–91. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.
Secondary Works
Alkana, Joseph. The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997. Auerbach, Jonathan. Male Call: Becoming Jack London. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Demos, John. “History and the Psychosocial: Reflections on ‘Oedipus and America.’” In Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, edited by Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog, pp. 79–83. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997. Hale, Nathan G. Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. Marcus, Steven. “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History.” In In Dora’s Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism,
928
A M E R I C A N
Perkins, Priscilla. “‘A Little Body with a Very Large Head’: Composition, Psychopathology, and the Making of Stein’s Normal Self.” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 3 (1996): 529–546. Perkins, Priscilla. “Self-Generation in a Post-Eugenic Utopia: Dreiser’s Conception of the ‘Matronized’ Genius.” American Literary Realism 32, no. 1 (1999): 12–34. Schrager, Cynthia. “Pauline Hopkins and William James: The New Psychology and the Politics of Race.” In Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen, pp. 307–329. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
H I S T O R Y
Priscilla Perkins
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RACE NOVELS
R
In many ways “race” is everywhere one looks in American literature, and the decades from the end of the Civil War through the beginning of literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance in the 1910s and 1920s, respectively, are no exception. Even Henry James and Edith Wharton, whose fictional worlds centered on the nation’s white middle and upper classes, concerned themselves on occasion with the problem of depicting nonwhite characters. More importantly, in selecting the centers of consciousness for their novels or in constructing the knowable communities of their literary worlds, James and Wharton intertwined matters of social and aesthetic discrimination. If we credit at all Ernest Hemingway’s assertion that the literature of the United States begins with Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) (1885), a novel that centers on the relationship between a black man and a white adolescent, then we might be justified in asking whether any American novel escapes being a race novel. A major thrust of recent scholarly engagements with the period is to see race as a constituent feature of the American literary imagination. This suggests that labeling a body of work as race novels is somewhat problematic. It would probably make more sense to reiterate Ralph Ellison’s contention that neither the national identity nor the literature of the United States through the mid-twentieth century exists outside of the problem of race. This being said, what may justify describing some novels from this period as “race” novels is that many writers composed and published their works with the
hope of affecting the laws, practices, and attitudes directed at former slaves and the nation’s other subordinated population groups. Race, as a term, obviously encompasses more than the social and political differences between blacks and whites, and to some extent the literature of this period reflects this broader awareness. For example, Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) attempted to awaken the nation’s conscience to the atrocities whites had perpetrated against Native Americans by writing a work of nonfiction, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (1881), which she mailed to every member of the United States Senate in an effort to change national policy. Unsatisfied with the response to her efforts, Jackson supplemented her exposé with her 1884 novel, Ramona: A Story, a tale of love in which a mixed-race heroine discovers her Native American heritage. Jackson’s novel was only one indication that such factors as the midcentury appropriation of lands in the American West and the Southwest along with increasing immigration from southern and eastern Europe and China contributed to a hyperawareness of human difference. Reflecting these differences was a proliferation of short stories in the major monthly magazines focusing on local customs and linguistic differences. The term “race novel,” however, tended to be reserved for fiction such as Jackson’s Ramona that addressed itself to solving a significant social problem—and during this era, the problem to which most of these novels addressed themselves was the ongoing discrimination against African Americans in their effort to secure their rights as citizens.
929
RACE NOVELS
THE NOVEL AND RECONSTRUCTION
The early pattern for this work was set as the Civil War was coming to a close. John William De Forest (1826– 1906), who coined the term “the great American novel,” wrote Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) about the war and its aftermath. Not only did his novel include an attempt by one of its characters to reorganize black labor in the South, but De Forest, who had served in the Union Army, also went on himself to work for the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (more familiarly known as the Freedmen’s Bureau) in South Carolina from 1866 through 1868. The Freedmen’s Bureau was the institution most directly responsible for protecting the rights and the livelihoods of former slaves in the south during the period of Reconstruction (1866–1877). De Forest’s novel, despite his sympathy for the former slaves, did not represent optimistically the prospects for full and equal citizenship for blacks after the war. Also combining fictional endeavors with official and unofficial advocacy on behalf of black Americans were two other white authors, Albion W. Tourgée (1838– 1905) and George Washington Cable (1844–1925). Tourgée, who also served in the Union Army during the war, became a staunch supporter of Reconstruction in North Carolina, where he was a Republican Party official and a Superior Court Judge. He is perhaps best known for having argued on behalf of Homer A. Plessy, who unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of segregated rail cars in the landmark 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. Long before Plessy, however, Tourgée had castigated the Republican Party for its lukewarm support of the former slaves in two novels, A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), both of which drew upon his experiences in North Carolina. Likewise a Civil War veteran, but on the side of the Confederacy, George Washington Cable became, after the war, perhaps the most prominent southern advocate for black civil rights of his generation, arguing against such ills as the convict-lease system. His most prominent race-related novel is The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880), which takes up the plight of free people of color under slavery as a way of pointing up the wrong of racial prejudice. Closer to the center of the American literary mainstream, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, who were to all intents and purposes Civil War noncombatants, wrote novels that drew attention, albeit sometimes ambivalently, to racial inequality. The moral heart of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Huck’s decision to “go to Hell,” rather than return Jim to slavery. A later novel, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), uses the device of switching two
930
A M E R I C A N
babies in their cradles as a way of demonstrating that racial behavior and language were the result of social conditioning. Yet the novel’s satire leaves intact the possibility that certain racial traits are innate. Howells, who from his editorial perches at the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s had advocated for realist approaches to novel writing, engaged directly the problem of black/white racial difference in An Imperative Duty (1891). The novel focuses on a genteel female character who learns of her black ancestry only as she reaches the stage of courtship. In keeping with his distaste for sentimentalism, Howells prevents his heroine from making the self-sacrifice of foregoing marriage to a white suitor for an educational career in the South, working on behalf of the race she has newly discovered as her own. Instead, her suitor, a white doctor who is fully aware of her background, cajoles her into accepting her proposal. THE MUTED VOICES OF THE FORMER SLAVES
If white American authors were first out of the gate in establishing the racial themes of the postbellum period, they did so fully expecting to be overtaken by African Americans themselves. In an essay entitled “The South as a Field for Fiction” (1888), Tourgée declared that the lives of the former slaves, as well as those of poor white southerners, constituted the most promising source for distinctive American writing. Tourgée argues that the future of American literature lay in championing those forms, melodramatic and romantic, best suited to the epic sweep of war, reunion, and reaction in the South. The African American essayist and social critic Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) warned that until black authors, particularly black female authors, had told their stories both American society and American literature would fall short of their fulfillment. Cooper’s voice was seconded by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), a novelist, poet, and social crusader, who concluded her novel Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) with a note observing that while the “race has not had very long to straighten its hands from the hoe, to grasp the pen and wield it as a power for good,” there was reason for optimism (p. 282). According to this line of thinking, the turn-oftwentieth-century literary world should have expected to see many former slaves abandoning the kitchen and cotton field for the writing desk, recapitulating the itineraries of antebellum authors such as Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Wells Brown (1813– 1884), and Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813–1896), each of whom had written memorably of their escapes from slavery to freedom. Brown had also authored Clotel;
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RACE NOVELS
or, the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, which appeared in 1853, the first novel published by an African American. That same year Douglass published his only work of fiction, “The Heroic Slave,” a novella about a slave rebellion. Both works were written in the wake of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811– 1896), which had galvanized abolitionist literature the year before and had become a model and a foil for writers, black and white. The evils of slavery and the problem of racial prejudice were the issues to which antebellum race fiction addressed itself. So many of these works were published that in 1858 John Mercer Langston hailed the “splendid achievement” of the antislavery movement in having established “its own literature” (Langston, p. 61). In the years after the war, with the matter of slavery presumably settled, the issue of race revolved around questions of how completely African Americans would be incorporated into the polity. The literary issue was whether or not this quest for full citizenship would find its imaginative chroniclers among the former slaves. Had a system of universal public education based on the classical liberal curriculum of New England’s schools been established in the South, more of the writers who emerged at the turn of the twentieth century might have been former slaves. Instead, because many whites, including those from the north, opposed the former slaves’ demands for universal education, a large proportion of the schools for blacks that did open employed curricula designed to produce contented agricultural and industrial workers rather than equal citizens. And while these schools did not achieve their aim of reconciling the mass of black Americans to second-class citizenship, they did garner resources and support that might otherwise have gone to schools more in line with African American aspirations. Somewhat ironically, the most visible node of opposition to the classical liberal education model centered on Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), himself a former slave, whose Tuskegee Institute championed an industrial education model. Speaking to the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, Washington disparaged literary aspirations among the former slaves, declaiming, “no race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem” (p. 220). THE FICTION OF THE BLACK ELITE
Washington’s opposition to the humanistic educational aims embraced by many African Americans was voiced against the backdrop of severe reprisals and A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
state-sanctioned terrorism in the nation’s southern states against those black Americans who sought to exercise the rights granted them by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The early 1890s witnessed a dramatic increase in brutal lynchings, as state after state rolled back the political, civil, and economic gains made during Reconstruction. Much of the black voting that had taken place since Reconstruction was suppressed by rewriting state constitutions and by looking the other way when what rights that remained were not enforced. The latter years of the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century were pockmarked by race riots in such cities as Wilmington, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Not surprisingly, then, the most prominent black novelists of this period were not individuals who had experienced directly the oppressive regime of southern field and domestic labor. Rather, while turn-of-the-twentiethcentury black authors suffered economically, politically, psychologically, and sometimes physically from Jim Crow strictures, they wrote their novels not as former slaves but on behalf of the former slaves. Consequently, the sympathy and sensitivity these writers brought to bear in portraying the plight of both the freed slaves and their better-educated fellow citizens did not prevent them from reproducing a social vision in which former field hands and cooks deferred to characters displaying gentility, literacy, and conventional beauty. Even though black political equality was not up for grabs in these works, their authors tended to acquiesce in the belief that a majority of the former slaves and their descendants needed moral, intellectual, and political guidance before they could exercise their political rights responsibly. Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy exemplifies this problem. In representing the speech of illiterate black characters early in the novel, Harper stresses that the slaves’ broken English does not indicate their intellectual incapacity but rather their political astuteness about the implications for them of the Civil War. Harper remarks, “some of the shrewder slaves, coming in contact with their masters and overhearing their conversations, invented a phraseology to convey in the most unsuspected manner news to each other from the battle-field” (pp. 8–9). Yet later in the same novel one of Harper’s exemplary characters, upon reading in the newspapers that black women were no longer fit to work as servants for whites, comes to the conclusion that these same black women must also be “unfit to be mothers to their own children, and she conceived the idea of opening a school to train future wives and mothers” (p. 199). This oscillation between viewing the freed slaves as ready to act on their own
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
931
RACE NOVELS
behalf and, alternately, as a disorganized populace awaiting direction from a college-educated elite—the group that Du Bois was to call the “Talented Tenth”— reflects how this elite stratum was pushed to rebut charges of black inferiority even as its spokespersons argued for the necessity of racial uplift. In order to depict racial inequality as a caste system and to dramatize racial pride, most of these fictions focused on characters whose skin color and educational status would have allowed them to be taken for white. Although antebellum authors had used this character type—whom critics have termed the “tragic mulatto”—to highlight the irrationality and injustice of slavery, race novels of the postbellum era tended to employ these characters to dramatize black racial identity as something worth choosing. Harper’s Iola Leroy repeatedly draws her readers’ attention to the decisions made by her main characters to insist on being black even when the material inducements to assuming a white identity are considerable. Likewise, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930) underwrote a commitment to the race with interracial marriage among the black upper classes in several of her plots. Hopkins, who edited Colored American Magazine, published four novels between 1900 and 1903, including Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). More ambivalent about the capacity of a mixedrace elite to consolidate itself for class leadership were two novels by Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858– 1932), The House behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). The former is a tragedy of racial passing, which subordinates condemnation of passing to a criticism of the hypocrisy of whites who make race the only criterion of human judgment. The latter, one of only three black-authored race novels to respond to the aesthetics of literary realism (the others being Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), fictionalized the violent white attack on the black citizenry of Wilmington, North Carolina. This race riot targeted the city’s black middle class, and Chesnutt’s novel uses this violence to delineate the sources and consequences of white supremacy. The Sport of the Gods (1902) by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was the author’s only novel focusing on black characters and chronicles the ill fortunes of a black family forced to migrate from the South to the North after the father is falsely convicted of stealing money. The novel offers a naturalist examination of the effects of the urban environment on character development.
932
A M E R I C A N
RESPONDING TO THE LITERATURE OF WHITE SUPREMACY
Not only did black novelists from the turn of the twentieth century write against actual lynchings, race riots, and political disenfranchisement, but also against popular novels that defended the white supremacist order of the Jim Crow South. In 1898 Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922) published Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction, which echoed the historiography of William A. Dunning and others in excoriating Reconstruction as an unjustified imperialist assault on the South. This view was underscored when Thomas Dixon (1864–1946) published The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden 1865–1900 (1902) and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Both novels depicted black demands for the franchise as a sexual threat to white womanhood, and Dixon, in particular, justified the use of violence against black men. Dixon’s novel provided the basis for D. W. Griffith’s racist feature film The Birth of A Nation (1915), the success of which indicated how the tenets of Southern white supremacy were truly national in scope. One of the African American authors challenging these racist depictions was Sutton Elbert Griggs (1872–1930), a Texas-born Baptist minister who published five novels between 1899 and 1908. The first, Imperium in Imperio (1899), has often been remarked for the attention that it gives to black separatism, although Griggs’s commitment throughout his works is to black equality within the United States. Griggs was specifically asked to write The Hindered Hand; or, The Reign of the Repressionist (1905) as a response to Dixon’s work, which he did, but without garnering anywhere near the attention that rewarded Dixon’s efforts. W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois (1868–1963), who in 1903 published his landmark book The Souls of Black Folk, a text that, among other things, celebrates the distinctiveness of black musical expression, also wrote his first novel during this period. The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) weaves an exposé of the cotton economy and Du Bois’s ambivalent relation to the untutored folk into a plot that also reveals the economic basis of Southern opposition to black education. The work that both caps the race novels of the turnof-the-century and opens onto the era of the Harlem Renaissance is James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), which was first published in 1912 and re-published in 1927. The fictionalized autobiography of an accomplished pianist who successfully passes for white, the novel recycles many of the themes and problems of the earlier race novels. Yet by extending Du Bois’s celebration of black
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RACIAL UPLIFT
spirituals to include secular forms of expression like ragtime, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man delineates what was to become a major premise of twentieth-century African American fiction: the belief that the nurturing of a distinctively black culture was a necessary component of black political activity. See also The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man; Blacks; Civil Rights; Iola Leroy; Jim Crow; Ku Klux Klan; Lynching;The Marrow of Tradition; Miscegenation; Racial Uplift; Reform
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. De Forest, John William. Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. 1867. New York: Penguin, 2000. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Vintage Library of America, 1990. Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted. 1892. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an ExColored Man. 1912. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Langston, John Mercer. Freedom and Citizenship: Selected Lectures and Addresses. 1883. Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne, 1969. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery: The Autobiography of Booker T. Washington, The Foremost Educator of His Times. 1901. New York: University Books, 1989. Secondary Works
Anderson, James. D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. Carby, Hazel V. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Fishkin, Shelly Fisher. Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Warren, Kenneth W. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Kenneth W. Warren
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
RACIAL UPLIFT In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most whites viewed African Americans as “a homogenous mass of degraded people” (Gatewood, p. 7). The African presence was perceived as a national liability in the imagined community, a “body of death” chained to the larger body politic. Despite the inability of whites to think in terms of a stratified black society, by the late nineteenth century, a small but growing African American middle class regarded its own existence as prima facie evidence of racial progress. This African American elite, whose culture and style of living often more closely resembled that of the better class of whites, shouldered the burden of “uplifting the race” during the period that the historian Rayford W. Logan has labeled “the Nadir” (1880–1915). During this turbulent era, the voting and civil rights gains of Reconstruction (1864–1876) were systematically dismantled. Confronting violence and extra-legal terrorism of often-barbaric intensity and a virulent racial discourse in which science and the rhetoric of lynching converged, these black elites sought to rehabilitate the image of the race by embodying “respectability” and an ethos of service to the masses. Believing that improvement of their material and moral condition through self-help would diminish white racism, African American elites emphasized education, achievement, and propriety as marks of personal distinction that would refute racial distinctions and establish a basis for positive black identities. The origins of racial uplift ideology can be traced to the race relations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (1776–1840), a period characterized by an open struggle for respectability and citizenship between various social groups, including free African Americans in the states “north of slavery.” Despite such struggles, the black image in the white mind was one of incapacity and degradation. Responding to the ostracizing power of a hegemonic racial discourse that focused on black “degradation,” African American elites sought to develop independent institutions that would enable free people of color to “uplift” themselves to conditions of respectability. As James Brewer Stewart writes in “Modernizing ‘Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States, 1776–1840” (1999), this approach stressed “patient incrementalism, strenuous self-improvement, deference from ordinary community members, and the guidance of patriarchal leaders” (p. 694). It gave rise to many of the themes and tensions associated with later conceptions of racial uplift ideology. Facing the deep-rooted racial prejudice of this period, black leaders insisted on the responsibility of each individual
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
933
RACIAL UPLIFT
to uplift all by “striving to embrace piety, practice thrift and temperance, comport one’s self with wellmannered dignity, and seek all advantage that education offered” (Stewart, p. 695). African American leaders of the period sought to demonstrate cultural parity with whites of the highest attainment, to challenge judgments of black capacity based on the behavior of a “degenerate few” (p. 696) and to assert African American manhood and citizenship. Respectability connoted possession of the intellectual and literary skills necessary for African Americans to contribute their own authoritative voices as equals to the nation’s ongoing civic discussions. The evolving ideological formations and social relations of this period provide a template for the period 1870–1920. Mirroring the dynamics of this earlier historical period, efforts by African Americans to uplift themselves into conditions of respectability provoked violent resistance from the vast majority of whites, particularly in the South. The intrusion of the black body into white social space led to mythic discourses and mob violence. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, circumstances initially favored the efforts of newly emancipated bondsmen to integrate into the civic and political affairs of the South. For a brief period, Radical Republicans experienced mild success in their efforts to extend the franchise to black Americans. A civil rights bill, passed in 1866 over President Johnson’s veto, declared that former slaves were citizens of the United States and should receive equal treatment under the law. To forestall anticipated debate over the constitutionality of the law, and to further protect the newly freed blacks, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed by Congress and ratified by the necessary three-fourths of the states in 1868, making African Americans citizens of the country. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, subsequently insured that a man’s right to vote could not be prohibited on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. As a consequence of these advances, African Americans served admirably in state and local governments and in the United States Congress. At the state level, they helped to create state-supported schools for blacks and whites, to liberalize suffrage, and to abolish dueling, imprisonment for debt, and punishment by the whipping post and the branding iron. They also instituted reforms in county administrations. In sum, significant progress toward the goal of granting full citizenship to blacks occurred during Reconstruction. In The Negro in the United States (1970), Rayford W. Logan links the demise of Reconstruction to the infamous Tilden-Hayes compromise of 1877. The
934
A M E R I C A N
withdrawal of federal troops from the South proved a watershed event in the subsequent disfranchisement of African Americans, leading to the low point in race relations that Logan labels as the Nadir. Without secure promises from southerners that they would faithfully observe the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the fate of African Americans was left to the “great mass of intelligent white men” (Logan, p. 38). A series of adverse Supreme Court decisions, most notably Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), eroded the short-lived gains made by African Americans during Reconstruction. As Logan notes, “Southern state laws, railway regulations, and customs began to fix the pattern of segregation which was to become even more rigid until the middle of the twentieth century” (p. 40). But perhaps more important, this decline in political and civil rights was accompanied by an upsurge in racial violence and terrorism against African Americans. The lynch mob was commonplace in a campaign of violence and intimidation intended to disfranchise African Americans politically and socially. This occurred against the backdrop of pseudoscientific theories of racism, eugenics, and Social Darwinism. In the rhetoric of lynching and in novels of national reconciliation, African Americans were depicted as a biologically inferior and immoral race that would never achieve parity with white Americans. As they had in earlier periods, white Americans imagined a community in which black Americans were figured as “the other.” As in earlier periods, the themes and tensions of racial uplift ideology in the late nineteenth century were conceived in response to a pervasive racial discourse. In Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Kevin K. Gaines notes that black elites, concerned with improving the collective social fortunes of the race, placed emphasis on “self-help, racial solidarity, temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth” (p. 2). Due to the network of institutions for group elevation established within antebellum free black communities and to the efforts of early leaders to uplift themselves to conditions of respectability, racial uplift ideology had indeed stressed deference from “the lower orders.” (Stewart, p. 5). Despite such emphasis, uplift was initially conceived in collectivist terms. This connotation of racial uplift persisted in the wake of Emancipation, when a view of education as the key to liberation reflects its subsequent manifestation as a group struggle for freedom and social advancement. In the post-Reconstruction era, however, uplift ideology was transformed by the imperatives of Jim Crow terror and New South economic development and by the values of a transatlantic Victorian culture.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RACIAL UPLIFT
In this context, uplift became an ideology of self-help articulated mainly in racial- and middle-class-specific terms rather than in a broader, egalitarian social context. Consistent with the late Victorian emphasis on autonomous individualism and personal achievement, black elites opposed racism by pointing to class distinctions within the race as evidence of evolutionary progress. Retreating from natural-rights arguments, they regarded freedom as a reward for upright, cultured behavior. Gaines charges that an “unconscious, internalized racism” fostered an ambivalent relationship with the black masses. “Amidst legal and extralegal repression,” Gaines writes, “many black elites sought status, moral authority, and recognition of their humanity by distinguishing themselves, as bourgeois agents of civilization, from the presumably undeveloped black majority; hence the phrase, so purposeful and earnest, yet so often of ambiguous significance, ‘uplifting the race’” (p. 2). According to Wilson Jeremiah Moses in The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (1978), a distinctive feature of African American elites committed to racial improvement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the quest for gentility. African American elites argued their capacity for assimilation into the larger society by displaying external evidence of culture, refinement, and character. Guided by the rules of the “genteel performance” they regarded manners and morals, rather than material possessions, as the true measure of success and social class. Gentility forbade loud talking and laughing in public, or any behavior considered vulgar, annoying, or crude. Self-restraint, the prime attribute of gentility, important in all matters from emotion and expression to dress, was the basis for collective racial improvement. Further, black gentility dictated that “race men” rationalize personal success in terms of the collective advance of the race. The quest for black gentility went beyond a simple emphasis on proper conduct. African American elites sought to fulfill the majority society’s normative gender conventions and to adopt its sexual attitudes. Educated African Americans regarded the family and patriarchal gender relations as crucial markers of respectability and racial progress. Seeking to counter the charge of sexual immorality directed at black females, the black women’s club movement adopted the motto “lifting as we climb,” reflecting its efforts to elevate the race by teaching women the importance of the home and the woman’s moral influence within it. In their paeans to patriarchal family life, black elites explicitly celebrated Victorian standards of genteel courtship and premarital chastity. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
The quest for black gentility, in all of its dimensions, fostered the development of the stratified African American society, “successive classes with higher and higher sexual morals,” called for by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) in The Negro American Family (1908). Defining themselves in relation to the masses, African American elites posited that the two groups were in different phases of development. “Contrasting their own adherence to the genteel performance with the crude behavior with which they credited the lower classes,” writes Willard B. Gatewood in Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 (1990), the elites often “assumed the obligation of instructing the lower classes in the essentials of the genteel performance” (pp. 187–188). Others, replicating the racial fictions used to justify segregation even as they contested them, believed that little could be done to improve the collective fortunes of the race. In their minds, the measure of gentility was the distance between themselves and the masses. The tensions of racial uplift ideology are visible in Gatewood’s assertion that “some aristocrats of color alternated between the uplift approach and the stratagem of placing distance between themselves and the ill-mannered masses. Or, on occasion, they attempted both approaches simultaneously” (p. 188). Those race strategists concerned with altering the behavior of the African American masses believed that by establishing self-restraint as a communal norm, they would foster collective racial advancement. In “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization” (found in The Future of the Race), Cornel West examines the various “Victorian strategies” enacted by black men and women in the late ninteteenth century to accomplish their didactic aims. As a sacrificial cultural elite dedicated to improving the material and moral conditions of the race, they believed it their role to “shape and mold the values and viewpoints of the masses by managing educational and political bureaucracies” (p. 65). Further, they believed that “the effective management of institutions by the educated few for the benefit of many would promote material and spiritual progress” (p. 65). These black Victorians created a network of religious, educational, and social institutions to prepare black Americans for citizenship participation. Albert G. Miller, in Elevating the Race: Theophilus G. Steward, Black Theology, and the Making of an African American Civil Society, 1865–1924 (2003), writes that this “civil society,” comprised of “churches, the Free African Society, the Prince Hall Masons, literary societies, schools, and newspapers,” provided a social space for discussion of public concerns. Created as “buffers from white society and as tools of liberation” (p. xvii),
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
935
RACIAL UPLIFT
these entities formed an institutional base for African American leaders who surpassed the often hollow, abstract rhetoric of racial uplift with practical service. Their techniques of persuasion and instruction, of selfimprovement and the improvement of others, were manifestations of Victorianism.
racial assault” (Aristocrats of Color, p. 218). Consistent with Victorian strategies of racial uplift, the role of the educated figures invited to join the academy was to shape and direct the behavior of the crude masses. Such an elite was needed as an indigenous missionary force, as bearers of culture that would guide the race in the creation of a black civilization.
BLACK VICTORIANS: THE ORIGINS AND EVOLVING MEANINGS OF RACIAL UPLIFT IDEOLOGY
The death of Crummell and Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) in the 1890s left Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) and W. E. B. Du Bois as black America’s most visible leaders in the project of racial uplift. Their seemingly antagonistic race strategies similarly reflected the values of Victorian culture. Typically, scholars contrast Du Bois’s belief in liberal culture with Washington’s views on agriculture. Washington’s “pedagogy of the oppressed,” reflecting the influence of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, his Hampton mentor, was designed to rehabilitate the rural peasantry. Educated at Fisk and Harvard Universities, Du Bois believed that liberal culture was essential for an educated citizenry. Washington associated Du Bois with an artificial class that violated natural laws by being so detached from productive labor. Du Bois charged that Washington’s gospel of work and money threatened to overshadow the higher aims of life.
Various figures embody the contradictions associated with the ambivalent ideology of racial uplift, which included resistance to and immersion in the values of the larger white culture. Spanning the greater part of the nineteenth century, from the premodern period to the Nadir, the life of Alexander Crummell (1819– 1898) typified the antebellum origins and evolving meanings of a racial uplift ideology. Examined against the backdrop of nineteenth-century racial discourse, Crummell was a “disconcerting anomaly, a black man of letters before the Civil War,” in the opinion of Wilson Jeremiah Moses, author of Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (1989). “Knowledgeable in the classics at a time when the average black American was an illiterate slave” (p. 5), Crummell graduated from Queens College, Cambridge, in 1853 and was ordained a priest of the Episcopal Church. As a civilizing missionary among black people, he embodied the deep-seated and abiding commitment to the ideals of “racial uplift, Negro improvement, African Civilization, race progress, and African development” and preached “Civilization” as the “primal need of the race” (Moses, Alexander Crummell, p. 262). Crummell spent nearly twenty years in Liberia as a missionary, an educator, and a public moralist. His lifelong project of humanistic self-cultivation, Protestant self-denial, and bourgeois self-control reflected his belief that a weak and degraded race needed moral and intellectual uplift. Because he believed that the basis for collective racial progress was the disciplined autonomous self, Crummell “associated upward social mobility with bourgeois morality, sober behavior, and temperance” (p. 217). Crummell was the founder and first president of the American Negro Academy (ANA) in 1897, and perhaps the ideological parent of W. E. B. Du Bois, who expressed similar concerns with uplifting the race through character building and the elevation of moral life. Willard B. Gatewood writes that the objectives of the ANA were “the promotion of Negro culture and unity through literary and scholarly works, aid of youths of genius in the attainment of high culture, the establishment of historical and literary archives, and assistance to publications that vindicated the race from
936
A M E R I C A N
In reality, as William Toll points out in The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (1979), Washington’s program of “social rehabilitation” and Du Bois’s strategy of “cultural revitalization” were alternate conceptions of racial uplift. Both men believed that the backwardness of the masses necessitated a specially trained elite to expunge the social primitivism that was the product of the slave experience and to combat the stigma attached to the race. Both promoted Victorian ideals associated with modernization—a high valuation of time, a concern with rational order, and, above all, sense of moral urgency. And, as Daniel Walker Howe notes in “Victorian Culture in America” (1976), both Washington and Du Bois “taught people to work hard, to postpone gratification, to repress themselves sexually, to ‘improve’ themselves, to be sober, conscientious, even compulsive” (p. 17). Impatient with mere book learning, Washington taught black students the dignity of toil so that they might benefit from the modernization of the region. In his most famous public utterance on the virtue of work, Washington counseled black Americans to cast down their buckets in “agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions” (p. 153). Preaching the “Gospel of Wealth,” the “Wizard of Tuskegee” believed that discipline— both individually and collectively—was necessary for
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RACIAL UPLIFT
the race to become part of the world capitalist economy. Washington created a rigid daily schedule at Tuskegee in order to foster habits of self-discipline. Consistent with the collective sensibility of racial uplift ideology, he believed that individual self-control would foster a pattern of communal organization. Du Bois’s more academic moralizing and his program of cultural revitalization were products of a didacticism that assumed that everyone would benefit from the pursuit of “culture.” Addressing “the Negro Problem” in “The Conservation of Races,” he spoke of the need to correct “the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage from slavery” (A Reader, p. 27). Preaching the “Gospel of Sacrifice” in The Souls of Black Folk, and from the pages of The Crisis, he called for a “talented tenth” to “scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself ” (The Souls of Black Folk, p. 81). Traced to its origins, however, Du Bois’s notion of cultural revitalization was not mutually exclusive with Washington’s program of social rehabilitation. William Toll notes that Du Bois’s spiritual mentor Alexander Crummell emphasized the dignity of skilled labor and “tied individual achievement to racial rebirth” (p. 40). Indeed, Crummell’s “particular proposals—to learn trades, to work humbly when young, to save money, to buy farms—could have provided the philosophical basis for Booker T. Washington” (Toll, p. 40). But Crummell’s praise of skilled labor was tempered by his defense of the “‘natural right’ of all persons to aspire to occupations commensurate with their talents” (p. 40). In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois would similarly argue the need to “teach workers to work, teach thinkers to think” (p. 72). Like Crummell, Du Bois embraced the need for broader training in order to combat racial stereotypes. Clearly, both Du Bois and Washington wanted to refine and cultivate persons of African descent. Despite their celebrated differences, the two principal architects of racial uplift strategies during the Nadir shared a fundamental belief that ignorance was the major obstacle to black advancement. As Cornel West notes in The Future of the Race, Victorian strategies of racial uplift were predicated on the assumption that if “the black masses were educated—in order to acquire skills and culture—black America would thrive” (p. 60). Because of their obvious roles in the formation of African American civil society Washington and Du Bois often eclipse black women who were equally committed to uplifting the race. The masculinist imperatives of uplift, however, not only barred black women like Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) from A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
The Crisis. Cover of the first issue of W. E. B. Du Bois’s journal, November 1910. © BETTMANN/CORBIS
inclusion in organizations such as the ANA, it asked black women to choose racial concerns over those of gender. In 1897, the year the ANA was founded, Cooper, the daughter of a former slave woman and her white master, was a teacher of mathematics and science at Washington Colored High School in the District of Columbia. She would later serve as principal and teacher of classics at this institution, which was successively known as the M Street School and finally as Dunbar High School. The venerable institution was famous for the learning of its teachers and its role in preparing the children of black elites for the rigors of top-rank northern universities. With a B.A. and an M.A. from Oberlin College, Cooper rivaled her male counterparts in the ANA. Cooper was known, however, for her firm stances on issues of the day, as well as her commitment to
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
937
RACIAL UPLIFT
improving the collective fortunes of black women. Dismissed as the school’s principal by forces committed to vocational and industrial training, she earned a Ph.D. from the University of Paris at the age of sixtyseven. Anticipating the themes and classical allusiveness of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Cooper’s A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892) challenged male attitudes regarding the dictates of gentility. Using domesticity as a site of resistance she critiqued both male patriarchy and the hypocrisy of the suffrage movement. Cooper sought the moral and educational elevation of black womanhood as the “vital element in the regeneration and progress of a race” (p. 9). Arguing for black women to lead the way in the redemption of the racial family, she embodied purity and piety if not submissiveness. Black women like Mary Church Terrell (1863– 1954) and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931) also contested the attitudes of men who believed that higher education or public visibility somehow “unsexed” women. The daughter of Robert Church, a wealthy man from Memphis, Terrell, like Cooper, encountered opposition to her educational aspirations. Her decision to teach at Wilberforce College led her father to threaten disinheritance. Ultimately married to Robert Terrell, an influential judge in Washington, D.C., the “capital of the colored aristocracy” (Gatewood, p. 39), she subverted the traditional housewife’s role in order to engage in activist pursuits. Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s work as an anti-lynching crusader did not always enjoy the blessing of black male leaders, who felt it inappropriate for her to assume such a role. The difficulties encountered by these women further illustrate the tensions inherent within racial uplift ideology and its inability to foster progressive change. The values associated with racial uplift ideology declined significantly after World War I, due in part to changes associated with industrialization and urbanization, but perhaps in greater measure to changes in the black aristocracy. As a new generation of prosperous black businesspeople, politicians, and professionals emerged that placed less emphasis on the pursuit of gentility, the prestige and influence of an older black upper class eroded. THE AESTHETICS OF RACIAL UPLIFT
The values of racial uplift influenced both the aesthetic mandates and the themes of African American expression from the post-Reconstruction era up through the New Negro Movement of the 1920s. Because they shared in and lived life according to the dominant values of the larger society, a crucial force
938
A M E R I C A N
in black expression was the interaction of racism and the middle-class character of black writers. Reflecting the tensions and ambiguities of racial uplift, ambivalence was a key structural element of African American expression. Even those writers known for their celebrations of black folk culture, such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), and Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932), viewed art as an instrument of social change. Their attempts to gain “civil rights by copyrights” (Lewis, p. 13) reflected their faith that literary endeavor would challenge white beliefs in black inferiority. Protest and gentility, the development of inner virtue through the cultivation of proper thoughts and feelings, were key characteristics during a period of literary assimilationism. While striving for assimilation into the larger white culture, however, many black elites worried that the race would lose its identity in the process. As a result, many African American writers found themselves committed, simultaneously and paradoxically, to the “racial ideal,” that is, a belief that blacks exhibited a clear “racial particularity” and therefore had a distinctive message for humanity. The resultant tensions— between the desire to put the best foot forward and the desire to celebrate the black folk tradition— shaped the literature of black writers. This tension is apparent in stories like Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” (1899). Due to his genius for social leadership Mr. Ryder is regarded as dean of the “Blue Veins” (a term that refers to the light skin color possessed by many of the elite African Americans). Maligned for its “colorphobia,” the group nonetheless views its purpose as that of racial uplift. Having distanced himself from his folk past and his former identity as “Sam Taylor,” Ryder exhibits the accoutrements of culture: a fine house, social standing, and an affinity for European literature. Ryder dramatizes the tensions of racial uplift: “I have no race prejudice,” he would say, “but we people of mixed blood are ground between the upper and the nether millstone. Our fate lies between absorption by the white race and extinction in the black. The one doesn’t want us yet, but may take us in time. The other would welcome us, but it would be for us a backward step.” (P. 7)
The story finds Mr. Ryder on the eve of his engagement to Molly Dixon, a near-white widow who embodies the virtues of domestic gentility. Perusing a volume of Tennyson in search of quotations appropriate to the occasion, Ryder is interrupted by “’Liza Jane,” the wife of his youth, who has searched faithfully for her husband for over twenty years. In contrast with Molly Dixon, she is old, and her garments suggest a life of
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RACIAL UPLIFT
servitude. Further, she is “very black,” indeed, “so black that her toothless gums, revealed when she opened her mouth to speak, were not red, but blue.” As “a bit of the old plantation life” (p. 10), she compels Mr. Ryder to choose between an elite conception of racial uplift that values class distinctions as evidence of progress or a more democratic conception that defends the humanity of the “folk.” Ryder’s choice, made possible by ’Liza Jane’s genteel virtue, is ultimately one for racial unity versus the politics of respectability. The unnamed narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) by James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938) similarly embodies the tensions inherent in racial uplift ideology—between the desire for assimilation and a belief in black distinctiveness. As a “perfect little aristocrat” who acknowledges his aversion to being classed with other black students, he feels a tinge of race pride when “Shiny” gives a wonderful speech. This pride causes him “to form wild dreams of bringing glory and honour to the Negro race” (p. 46). Trained as a classical pianist, he is the race genius who can create symphonic scores from ragtime. His efforts to tame and routinize the folk spirit are compromised, however, by his ambivalence toward the black masses. Describing his initial encounter with the “folk,” he confesses, “the unkempt appearance, the shambling slouching gait and loud talk and laughter of these people aroused in me a feeling of almost repulsion” (p. 56). Throughout the text, Johnson’s narrator contrasts his own gentility with the crude behavior of the lower classes and alternates between the uplift approach and that of distancing himself from the black masses. His desire to explicate black folk culture is certainly a project of racial uplift. His unwillingness to identify with a despised people, however, leads him, by the novel’s end, to forfeit his “birthright” for “a mess of pottage” (p. 211). An understanding of racial uplift ideology furnishes a useful way of examining African American literary expression from the post-Reconstruction era well into the 1930s. During the Harlem Renaissance, however, younger artists and intellectuals like Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Henry Thurman rejected the aesthetic mandates inherent in racial uplift while examining its myriad contradictions. See also Assimilation; Blacks; Genteel Tradition; Race Novels; Reform; The Souls of Black Folk; Success BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Chesnutt, Charles W. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line. 1899. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968.
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South. 1892. Reprinted as A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Conservation of Races.” In W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, edited by David Levering Lewis. New York: H. Holt, 1995. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1989. Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1785. New York: Harper and Row, 1964. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an ExColoured man. 1912. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. 1901. New York.: Penguin Putnam, 2000. Secondary Works
Gaines, Kevin K. Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Cornel West. The Future of the Race. New York: Knopf, 1996. Gatewood, Willard B. Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Gatewood, Willard B., Jr. “Aristocrats of Color: South and North The Black Elite, 1880–1920.” Journal of Southern History 54, no. 1 (February 1988): 3–20. Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact on Black Women of Race and Sex in America. New York: W. Morrow, 1984. Howe, Daniel Walker. “Victorian Culture in America.” In Victorian America, edited by Daniel Walker Howe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976. Lewis, David Levering. When Harlem Was in Vogue. New York: Knopf, 1981; reprint New York: Penguin, 1997. Logan, Rayford W. The Negro in the United States. Vol. 1, A History to 1945: From Slavery to Second-class Citizenship. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970. Miller, Albert G. Elevating the Race: Theophilus G. Steward, Black Theology, and the Making of an African American Civil Society, 1865–1924. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978. Stewart, James Brewer. “Modernizing ‘Difference’: The Political Meanings of Color in the Free States,
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
939
RAMONA
1776–1840.” Journal of the Early Republic 19, no. 4 (winter 1999): 691–712. Toll, William. The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979. Jeffrey R. Williams
RAMONA Ramona: A True Story (1884) by Helen Hunt (a.k.a. Helen Hunt Jackson, 1830–1885) has been called the American West’s most enduring romance novel. Nearly three hundred editions of it have appeared since its initial publication in 1884, and it has shaped the historical mythos of southern California and helped to spawn California’s tourism industry. However, these
were hardly the results Hunt had hoped the novel would prompt. For Hunt, Ramona began as a response to the failure of her nonfiction work A Century of Dishonor to have the impact for which she hoped. Hunt published A Century of Dishonor in 1881 as a factual, uncompromising account of the history of broken treaties and systemic mistreatment of American Indians by the United States. Hunt saw A Century of Dishonor as a means of documenting and changing America’s relationship with American Indians, and in 1881, at her own expense, she sent inscribed copies to every member of Congress. The inscription read, “Look upon your hands: they are stained with the blood of your relations.” If Hunt expected a groundswell of reaction from Congress, she was disappointed. Little, if anything, changed. THE STORY AND ITS BACKGROUND
Ramona is written in a highly sentimental style, and Hunt used melodrama as a means of helping Anglo readers understand the emotional costs of unjust confiscation of Indian lands. The following exchange occurs between Alessandro and Ramona the day white settlers show up to take their land:
[H]e said, “I will plough no more land for the robbers.” But after his fields were all planted, and the beneficent rains still kept on, and the hills all along the valley wall began to turn green earlier than ever before was known, he said to Ramona one morning, “I think I will make one more field of wheat. There will be a great yield this year. Maybe we will be left unmolested till the harvest is over.” “Oh, yes, and for many more harvests, dear Alessandro!” said Ramona, cheerily. “You are always looking on the black side.” “There is no other but the black side, Majella,” he replied. “Strain my eyes as I may, on all sides all is black. You will see. Never any more harvests in San Pasquale for us, after this. If we get this, we are lucky. I have seen the white men riding up and down in the valley, and I found some of their cursed bits of wood with figures on them set up on my land the other day; and I pulled them up and burned them to ashes.” Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona.
940
A M E R I C A N
Between December 1883 and March 1884 Hunt sat in the Berkeley Hotel in downtown Manhattan and wrote the 150,000-word Ramona in something of a creative frenzy, regularly producing 1,000 to 2,000 words per day (May, Helen Hunt Jackson, pp. 106–112). She saw the novel as a way to invoke an emotional response to the Indian Question that A Century of Dishonor, with its intellectual appeal, had failed to produce. In a letter to a friend in southern California, Hunt described Ramona as “a way to move people’s hearts” (May, Helen Hunt Jackson, p. 106). In the same letter she went on to describe her audience as those who “will read a novel when they will not read serious books.” Hunt hoped Ramona would do for Indians what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s equally sentimental Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for African Americans, and she wrote to her friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson that “The success of it, if it succeeds, will be that I do not even suggest any Indian history till the interest is so aroused in the heroine and hero, that the people will not want to lay the book down” (May, Helen Hunt Jackson, p. 110). Hunt’s chief modern biographer describes the novel as a “sugar pill” (May, Helen Hunt Jackson, p. 112). According to Antoinette May, Hunt sentimentalized the story in order to seduce the reader into swallowing the bitter medicine of a realistic depiction of the brutal mistreatment of California Indians and, through this depiction, to recognize the oppression of all Indians. She introduced elements of romance and set the story in exotic Old California, replete with missions, haciendas, dons, stunning landscapes, and land battles among Americans, Mexicans, and Indians. Even though Hunt creates only one fully developed Indian character, Alessandro, she saw her depictions of southern California and the introduction
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RAMONA
of Mexicans and Americas as a means, as she said, of introducing “variety” (May, Helen Hunt Jackson, p. 106). The novel focuses on Ramona, who is half-Indian, and her Indian lover, Alessandro. As the story opens, Ramona is the ward of her aristocratic, haughty stepmother, Señora Moreno. Even though the romance is forbidden by Señora Moreno, Ramona falls in love with Alessandro, and they flee Moreno’s hacienda and are married by a sympathetic priest. The parallels between Ramona’s romance and that of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet are quite clear. Just as the prejudices and animosities of the great, warring houses of the Montagues and the Capulets lead to a tragic end regretted by both parties, the allusions to Romeo and Juliet suggest that the prejudices and mistreatment of Indians by whites will also end tragically, foreclosing the possibility that Indians will be assimilated. However, while the allusions to Romeo and Juliet suggest a tragic end for Alessandro and Ramona, to provide contrast, Hunt depicts the beginning of Alessandro and Ramona’s married life as happy. Ramona adapts quickly to Indian ways, finding much to admire, and is accepted into the community. At this point in the story the future looks rosy—that is, until Anglos take over tribal lands, forcing Ramona and Alessandro to move. They attempt to establish themselves in a lovely, remote valley near Saboba, and again they are forced to move by the arrival of Anglo settlers. Finally taking refuge in the mountains, Ramona and Alessandro’s baby dies, and, unable to deal with this final tragedy, Alessandro suffers a breakdown. In the midst of this breakdown a confused Alessandro steals an American’s horse, which he inadvertently mistakes for his own. The final outrage occurs when the American owner tracks down Alessandro and kills him in Ramona’s presence. In all, the greed and bigotry of the Anglo landowners, the shared hardships with other Mission Indians, and the tragic murder of Ramona’s husband underscore the social injustices suffered by all Indians. The shooting of Alessandro is loosely based on actual events, and a host of articles published over the decades purport to have found “the real Ramona” or to document Hunt’s supposed writing of the novel in various California locations. The best of these— one supported by Hunt’s letters and court documents—was written by the historian George Wharton James in 1910. James traveled through the area depicted in the novel and was introduced to a Cahuillan Indian woman named Ramona. She claimed to be the real Ramona on whose story Hunt’s novel is loosely based. James recorded Ramona’s story into a gramophone. A letter written to a friend, Mary Sheriff, by Hunt substantiates much of the story A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
recorded by this Ramona. In the letter Hunt asks Sheriff to make an inquiry into the killing of a Juan Diego by a Sam Temple, an Anglo settler, and into Temple’s subsequent trial (May, Helen Hunt Jackson, p. 107). According to the account recorded by James, Juan Diego was the husband of the Cahuillian Ramona, who had met Hunt while she was visiting California. According to Ramona’s story, her husband suffered from a condition that caused mental lapses. During a trip into town, Diego suffered one of these lapses, and he took Temple’s horse, leaving his own pony in its place. Temple tracked down Diego. At Ramona and Diego’s home, Temple repeatedly shot Diego in front of Ramona and her baby, leaving her husband’s body riddled with bullets. Even though he bragged of shooting an Indian, he was acquitted of murder. Temple would later profit from the killing, making public appearances billing himself as “the man who shot Alessandro” and who, hence, inspired Ramona (May, The Annotated Ramona, p. 206). RECEPTION AND INFLUENCE
Ramona proved an instant popular success; however, much of its message of social injustice was ignored, with critical opinion focusing on the novel’s success as romantic fiction. Ramona was initially serialized in the Christian Union in 1884. The Union’s announcement of the forthcoming novel lauded it as “an intensely dramatic and thoroughly modern story” (Byers, p. 236). Roberts Brothers produced the first booklength edition for Christmas 1884. Early reviews were mixed, but most tended to be laudatory. The New York Independent’s review, appearing only a few weeks after the release of the Roberts Brothers’ edition, exemplifies these early reviews. It noted that Ramona was written in a new style for Hunt and praised its “excellence, breadth, and force,” noting that it far surpassed anything she had produced heretofore. The review praised the romance of the story, its exceptional characterization, and its use of local color. However, the reviewer criticized its didacticism, particularly in the latter chapters. Other reviews were less kind (Byers, pp. 236–237). The London Athenaeum described the novel as a “slight but graceful story,” noting that the characterization was rather unreal and that Hunt was unfamiliar with “pioneer camps and American rowdies” (Byers, p. 214). Other critics, particularly those in the West, panned the novel, citing its romanticized treatment of Indians and harsh treatment of settlers. The reading public, however, embraced Ramona, and it soon became a best-seller (May, Helen Hunt Jackson, p. 131). The novel sold 7,000 copies in the
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
941
RAMONA
“The Love Story of the Ages.” During the high point of southern California’s Ramona boom there were roadside attractions advertising themselves as “Ramona’s Marriage Place,” many offering the chance to meet the “real” Ramona. This early advertisement is from the best known of these tourist attractions, today known as the Casa de Estudillo in Old Town San Diego State Historic Park. COURTESY OF STEPHEN BRANDON
three months following its initial release and 15,000 copies prior to Hunt’s death in August 1885 (Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson, p. 81). Hunt died certain that Ramona and Century of Dishonor were the best of all her writings. However, in the months prior to her death she worried that the reviewers and the public would continue to focus on the romance of Alessandro and Ramona and not on the “Indian side of the story” (Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson, p. 83). Hunt’s death only added to the novel’s mystique. In the two decades following its publication, Ramona was described as “an exquisite work of art” (Byers,
942
A M E R I C A N
p. 209) and “unquestionably the best novel yet produced by an American woman” (Byers, p. 229). Ralph Waldo Emerson and Higginson ranked Hunt among the best women writers of the period (Byers, p. 228). If anything, the novel’s popular appeal far outstripped early critical praise. In 1931 Publishers Weekly noted that since 1884 over 400,000 copies of Ramona had been sold and that it was still selling at the rate of 10,000 copies per year. New editions of the novel appeared well into the 1940s (Byers, p. 231). Among Indian rights groups Ramona and Hunt came to enjoy the kind—if not the degree—of influence that Hunt had hoped for the novel. The Women’s National Indian Association, for example, established the Ramona Mission among the California Indians (Mathes, Helen Hunt Jackson, p. 92), and the novel influenced the 1887 passage of the Dawes Act, which provided for individual allotment of tribal lands and was believed by many liberal thinkers at the time to be the first step toward the eventual assimilation of Indians into American society as equals. The novel’s popular appeal, however, continued to be focused on the romance of Alessandro and Ramona and its setting. Accepted by its early readers not so much as inspired by a true story but as a true story, the novel seems to have captured a romantic Old Mission California that the public embraced. Hunt’s social justice agenda was generally ignored. Instead it became an icon in American popular culture. The novel inspired a silent movie by D. W. Griffith and two subsequent Hollywood adaptations. It also inspired a 1920s hit song, and in 1923 the Ramona Pageant began in the southern California town of Hemet. The pageant featured a staged production of Ramona that is currently billed as both the largest and the longestrunning American outdoor drama. Most important for southern California, the novel inspired what has been called the “Ramona boom,” an influx of tourists seeking the California depicted in the novel. A report in 1916 noted that over 50 million tourism dollars could be directly linked to the popularity of Ramona (May, The Annotated Ramona, p. 231). Everything from olive and fruit groves to a Catholic convent has honored the novel by taking its name. Despite the novel’s wide popular appeal, its sentimentality caused Ramona’s critical star to dim from the late 1940s through the early 1980s. The novel was largely ignored by cultural critics and literary historians, who dismissed it as overly melodramatic. The late twentieth century saw renewed interest in the novel, however, and some scholars turned their attention to Hunt and her work. In 1987 Antoinette May produced the first modern biography of Hunt; in 2003 Kate Phillips published a fully documented, scholarly biography.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REALISM
In 1989 May capitalized on the success of her biography to issue an annotated edition of Ramona. Valerie Mathes has also written a monograph on Hunt’s legacy as an Indian activist (1990) and edited a collection of Hunt’s Indian reform letters (1998). Given the continuing interest in ethnic and women’s literature, it seems likely that critical attention to Hunt and Ramona will increase in the years to come as scholars recover Hunt as a western regional writer, a nineteenth-century professional woman author, and, to a lesser extent, an author of children’s literature.
Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1881.
tenets of realism in the 1870s and 1880s—emphasizing the near-at-hand as opposed to the remote, the probable rather than the extraordinary, the ethically complex in preference to the idealized. They believed that literature should portray people such as one might meet, in situations that those people might actually encounter. Realism concerned itself almost entirely with fiction, although the work of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen was influential, especially in the movement’s later stages, and the work of the period’s two major American poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, was to some degree compatible with realist theories. Howells, James, and Mark Twain (1835–1910) are often specified as the great trio of American realistic novelists—though it might be more accurate to say that Twain and James are great novelists who can be identified with realism, while Howells is a great realist who (among other things) wrote novels.
Jackson, Helen Hunt. Ramona. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884.
THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN REALISM
See also Indians BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Secondary Works
Byers, John and Elizabeth. “Helen Hunt Jackson: A Critical Bibliography of Secondary Comment.” American Literary Realism 6, no. 3 (summer 1973): 196–241. Mathes, Valerie Sherer. Helen Hunt Jackson and Her Indian Reform Legacy. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Mathes, Valerie Sherer. The Indian Reform Letters of Helen Hunt Jackson, 1879–1885. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. May, Antoinette. Helen Hunt Jackson: A Lonely Voice of Conscience. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1987. May, Antoinette, ed. The Annotated Ramona. San Carlos, Calif.: Wide World Publishing, 1989. Phillips, Kate. Helen Hunt Jackson: A Literary Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Stephen Brandon
REALISM The era of American realism is most commonly defined as the period from the end of the Civil War to about 1900. Within this, the somewhat shorter span of 1870–1890 can be delineated as the time when realism was clearly the dominant literary idea in the United States. Yet even during this shorter period its dominance was more as a topic of critical debate than as a pervasive practice. Theorists such as William Dean Howells (1837–1920), Thomas Sergeant Perry (1845– 1928), and Henry James (1843–1916) laid out the A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
The literary mode known as realism began not in the United States but in France and Russia. Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert were early exemplars in France, and Émile Zola became one of the most controversial figures in the American critical debate. Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy were the most influential Russian figures. Among British novelists, Howells pointed to Jane Austen as exemplary for her uncompromisingly hardheaded portrayals of the conflicts that arise in ordinary life, and both Howells and James saw George Eliot (though in James’s case with some reservations) as a positive force among their contemporaries. In the United States the pre–Civil War vogue for regional fiction—like that of Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Washington Harris, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe—moved toward an interest in the distinctive characteristics of individuals and cultural settings, though there was little attention to the nuances of psychological experience. In poetry, Whitman’s description of actual people in ordinary situations and his broadly democratic embrace of those people were important realistic elements, and his Drum-Taps poems explored the gritty actuality of suffering in the Civil War, while Dickinson’s poetry turned inward to explore the landscape of individual psychology in moments of joy, perplexity, and pain. Realism also had its origin in a repudiation of romanticism, with novelists Sir Walter Scott (1771– 1832) and James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) as favorite targets. Scott was criticized for his interest in distant times and places, especially the medieval, and for the lack of subtlety in his characterizations. His
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
943
REALISM
THE TENETS OF REALISM: HOWELLS, PERRY, LATHROP
William Dean Howells in 1896.
THE GRANGER COLLECTION,
NEW YORK
novels were seen to promote a kind of exaggerated notion of aristocracy, both false in its depiction of humankind and antithetical to the democratic ideals that Americans revere. A truer depiction of humanity would focus on the natural dignity and innate equality of all human beings without elevating a few individuals to heroic status. As for Cooper, he was attacked for inattention to detail in plot construction, stereotyping of characters, improbability of events, and stylistic imprecision. In “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895), Twain states that “Cooper’s eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom saw anything correctly. He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly” (p. 1244). From the point of view of the realists, the most important failing of Romantics like Cooper and Scott was sentimentality—seeming emotion that was not, in fact, true to the ways in which actual human beings respond to events and situations. The realists wanted to set this matter right. In an oftenquoted definition, Howells called realism “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” (“Editor’s Study,” p. 966). Realists tried to present the truth of human experience without the distortions of sentimentality.
944
A M E R I C A N
The great theorist of American realism was unquestionably William Dean Howells. In fact, it might be said with some justice that without Howells there is little basis for identifying an “Age of Realism” in the United States at all. Howells was himself a prolific novelist who crafted his works in accordance with realist principles. But more important, as assistant editor (1866–1871) and then editor (1871–1881) of the Atlantic Monthly and later (1886–1892) as columnist (“Editor’s Study”) for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, he both articulated the principles of realism and promoted the careers of the great figures of the period— especially James and Twain, but also including (among others) Hamlin Garland, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Stephen Crane. Howells persistently and effectively argued for “realistic” fiction that would leave behind the sentimental excesses of many popular nineteenthcentury novelists, representing instead the situations and experience of “real” people and truthfully exploring problems and possibilities pertinent to actual existence. Fiction, by this view, emerges more as a matter of fact than of genius—a departure from the Romantic view of the writer as a sort of mystical seer. Indeed, Howells confided to his readers that the belief in “genius” seemed to him “rather a mischievous superstition.” In the 1870s and early 1880s, Howells’s friend Thomas Sergeant Perry produced a series of critical reviews praising the European realists and, along with Howells, working out the principles for an American realism. In a very early essay titled “American Novels” (1872), Perry proposed that the important action in a novel lies in the experience of its characters, not in the structure of events the novel describes: “In the true novel the scene, the incidents, are subordinated to the sufferings, actions, and qualities of the characters” (p. 369). The novel, then, is not an adventure story but a study in ethical behavior, and the trajectory of the study is inward: “the real story lies beneath the hats and bonnets of those concerned, not in the distant cataracts that wet them, nor the bullets that scar them” (p. 369). It might be said that what both Howells and Perry were calling for was greater patience on the part of both author and reader—the patience to get to know the characters and to attend not just to the events in the story but to the characters’ anticipations, responses, and afterthoughts concerning those events. For Perry the novel should—by means of its careful description of physical details, realistic rendering of conversation, and attention to nuance—take readers deep into the psyches of its characters. Another essay by Perry, “Ivan Turgénieff,” which appeared two years later in the Atlantic
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REALISM
Monthly, praises the Russian novelist Turgenev for the naturalness of his characters, his keen observation, the vividness of detail in his work, and the absence of an “avowed purpose” (p. 567) to be read between the lines. Turgenev wrote, according to Perry, “as if his aim were entirely of another sort, simply to describe certain Russian peculiarities” (p. 567). He also praised Turgenev for “hiding himself ” (p. 569) in his narrative, avoiding unnecessary authorial comment and simply presenting his characters as living people who could speak for themselves. These qualities were among those that realists were expected to exhibit, and Turgenev came to be regarded by American realists as a model to emulate. Another very early advocate of realism, George Parsons Lathrop (1851–1898), in an 1874 essay titled “The Novel and Its Future,” proposed that while the improbable may produce potent momentary effects, attention to the more usual occurrence and the more commonplace character can take one deeper into the true nature of things. The realist takes characters and events that seem to have little of interest to offer and, by “profound and sympathetic penetration” (p. 318) reveals their “full value and true meaning,” bringing to light “the connection between the familiar and the extraordinary, and the seen and unseen of human nature” (p. 321). This, Lathrop believed, is an exercise of imagination far higher than the creation by Romantic writers of fantasies with little connection to the lives of ordinary people. The heroes and heroines of fiction of realist fiction were “taken from the rank and file of the race” and thus would “represent people whom we daily encounter” (p. 324). In Criticism and Fiction (1894), Howells himself maintained that in fiction, “we must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true?—true to the motives, the impulses, the principles, that shape the life of actual men and women” (p. 49). And in this focus on the “truthful,” he believed, the “marvelous” would be revealed in a new and unsentimental light. The “foolish man,” Howells quotes Emerson, “wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual” (p. 40). A cornerstone of this realist approach to fiction was his rejection of the falsely “ideal”—a rejection that he conveyed by comparing the writing of fiction to studying a grasshopper. The realistic novelist in this analogy is a scientist in the tradition of Baconian and Cartesian reasoning who does not begin with an idea of a grasshopper (thus, the “ideal”) but by looking at a real one. The Romantic, on the other hand, gives us a perfected grasshopper, beautiful to look at but not real. For Howells, “what is true is always beautiful and good” (p. 10). He concludes that the artist (and the artist’s A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
SMILING REALISM Howells believed that American fiction should reflect the American character and American conditions. Since life in the United States is predominantly pleasant, a realistic portrayal would emphasize the “smiling aspects.”
Whatever their deserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth; and in a land where journeymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the wrong from class to class has been almost inappreciable, though all this is changing for the worse. Our novelists, therefore, concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests. It is worth while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities; the very passions themselves seem to be softened and modified by conditions which formerly at least could not be said to wrong any one, to cramp endeavor, or to cross lawful desire. Howells, Criticism and Fiction, p. 62.
audience) must “reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not ‘simple, natural, and honest,’ because it is not like a real grasshopper” (p. 13). It can be objected, of course, that, like Howells’s definition of realism as “the truthful treatment of material,” this emphasis on “truth” as a clearly identifiable entity ignores the epistemologically problematic status of both “truth” and “the real.” After all, the Romantics, like the realists, believed that their creations were profoundly truthful in ways that their predecessors’ had not been. It would be more philosophically accurate to say that Howells is recommending that the writer attend not to the “real” itself but to the appearances of things. There is a faith here that appearances bear a relation to the truth that is not ironic—as opposed, for instance, to the Platonic view that appearance conceals truth (a view romanticism generally accepts). The realist
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
945
REALISM
tends to believe that appearances are in important ways straightforwardly revealing to the observer who can read them accurately. The great novelists and their comprehending readers must be such insightful observers. If the accurate observation recommended by Howells is crucial to the novelist’s art, it readily follows that the novelist must write about things within his or her field of vision. This means for the American author that, as a rule, the subject should be American, and this is particularly so in Howells’s opinion because accurate seeing and actions based on such seeing are characteristic of Americans. Howells also believed that life in the United States, as compared to that in other countries, consists for the most part of pleasant experience: “the sum of hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the wrong from class to class has been almost inappreciable” (Criticism and Fiction, p. 62). It is therefore appropriate for American fiction to “be true to our well-to-do actualities,” concerning itself with “the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal in the individual rather than in the social interests” (p. 62). In this Howells formulates what came to be known as “smiling realism”—his belief that optimistic tone and subject matter in fiction are appropriate to the happy destinies of life in the United States. For Howells’s later detractors, this made him an easy target for the claim that his doctrines had the effect of trivializing fiction. As for the ethics of fiction writing, aside from the ethical implications of the emphasis on “truthfulness,” Howells portrays realism as being in some sense devout because it cherishes God’s creation as it is, rather than escaping into unreal fantasy. The true realist, in Howells’s opinion, finds significance in everything that he or she encounters: “All tells of destiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. He cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice” (Criticism and Fiction, p. 15). And while fiction should bring individual experience to light, the result for Howells is to reveal how much all humanity has in common and to “make them know one another better, that they may all be humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity” (p. 87). PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM: HENRY JAMES
James made his most important contribution to realism theory in his essay “The Art of Fiction” (originally published in Longman’s Magazine in September 1884), which is regarded as one of America’s classic statements of literary criticism. In this essay James pro-
946
A M E R I C A N
REPRESENTING LIFE Henry James, like other realists, maintained that the primary task of the writer of fiction is to show life as it really is—not to substitute for that reality a contrived version of life. In “The Art of Fiction” (1884), he expressed this as “life without rearrangement” versus “life with rearrangement.”
Catching the very note and trick, the strange irregular rhythm of life, that is the attempt whose strenuous force keeps Fiction upon her feet. In proportion as in what she offers us we see life without rearrangement do we feel that we are touching the truth; in proportion as we see it with rearrangement do we feel that we are being put off with a substitute, a compromise and convention. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” p. 16.
claims the writing of fiction to be one of the fine arts and examines at length the comparison between fiction and painting (whereas many of Howells’s detractors compared his approach to photography). James, like Howells and Perry, regarded the novelist more as a craftsman than as a creative genius. The writer of fiction must meticulously observe, and turn his or her impressions into art. For James the only reason for existence of a novel or short story is that it “represents life.” The “supreme virtue of the novel,” in his view, is “the air of reality,” which he explains as “solidity of specification” (p. 12). That is, the novelist must create a convincing image of life, one that seems as if it might really happen. James also agrees with Perry that the crucial action in a story should be internal. Extending the comparison between fiction and painting he remarks, “A psychological reason is, to my imagination, an object adorably pictorial; to catch the tint of its complexion—I feel as if that idea might inspire one to Titianesque efforts” (p. 19). Here we see James’s conversion of realism to something less literal than Howells’s model. James advocated and practiced what came to be known as “psychological realism”—a devotion not to the precise reproduction of external detail but to a rendering of the nuances of the inner lives of his characters. However, for all his advocacy of careful observation, he gave at least equal
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REALISM
weight to what he called in 1909 the “crucible of the imagination”—a notion not far removed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “secondary imagination,” which “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.” Thus, James effected a sort of fusion (sometimes identified with impressionism) of the realistic with the Romantic that moved in the direction of twentiethcentury modernism. Howells identified James as the “chief exemplar” of a “new school” of fiction writing deriving from Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Eliot. James’s fiction, like Howells’s, avoids the exotic and the superficially dramatic, but he plumbs the psyches of his characters much more deeply than Howells. His fictions revolve around such situations as a governess trying to understand the moral and psychological forces that have been working on the children in her charge (The Turn of the Screw); a man wondering what his life might have been like if he had stayed in America and had a “career” instead of going to Europe and having none (“The Jolly Corner”); a man too obsessed with his own destiny, failing to make the human connection that he might have made if he had simply been attentive to the world around him (“The Beast in the Jungle”). In each case James gives readers a “central consciousness” through whom they can understand the events not simply in terms of the details of their occurrence but also in terms of their significance. James’s fiction satisfies his own and Perry’s criterion that the real action of the story should be in the minds of the characters, yet he makes that action visible by means of symbolic entities that he uses, as he says, to “paint” the “psychological reasons”—entities such as ghosts, “the beast,” the subtly flawed golden bowl in the novel by that title, and so forth. In this, again, he is part realist and part “modernist.” Other important writers who produced works related to Jamesian psychological realism were Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton. Bierce mined his own traumatic experiences in the Civil War to craft stories that explored the psychological effects of violence and the nearness of death. Crane (1871–1900), who was himself too young to have personally experienced the Civil War, nonetheless chose it as his setting for The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which considers how an ordinary person might react to being thrown into a bewildering situation that demands heroic courage and stamina. Wharton is often characterized as a lesser version of James himself, though her works were actually more popular than his. Like James she wrote stories that treated the psychological nuances of social life among the culturally sophisticated, in whose conversations the unsaid was frequently as significant as the said. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
MARK TWAIN AND LOCAL COLOR
Twain’s novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)—notable for its realistic detail, the psychologically realistic portrayal of its protagonist (and other characters), the meaningful ethical dilemmas that the novel poses, and the effective use of dialect—is undoubtedly one of the great literary achievements of American realism. Although Huck Finn is an uncommon character in an uncommon situation, such moments as his decision to try to save the lives of the murderers trapped on the Walter Scott and his efforts to free the slave Jim, in spite of his acceptance of the primacy of property rights over human rights, reach deep into the ethical and psychological realms for any human being. Perry, in his review of Twain’s novel in Century Magazine, found that it demonstrates how “Life teaches its lessons by implications, not by didactic preaching; and literature is at its best when it is an imitation of life and not an excuse for instruction” (p. 171). Twain’s realistic disposition is revealed, albeit humorously, in his prefatory materials, which on one hand deny the existence of plot or moral in the novel but on the other hand self-consciously insist on the accuracy of the dialects. Twain also broke new ground in the use of realism in his quasi-fictional travel books, which played off the standard travel book conventions to deflate conventional expectations. The Innocents Abroad (1869), for instance, was regarded as offensive by some because it accurately described the desolate barrenness of the Holy Land, in direct contradiction of the romanticized portraits that travel books usually offered. Unlike Howells and James, whose work tends to move within mainstream culture, Twain, in Huckleberry Finn and in other novels and tales, takes the reader to more remote and primitive locations, such as the Mississippi River valley and the California mining camps. In doing so he demonstrates his ties to regionalism and regional literature, a variety of realistic literature that attempts to capture the flavor of particular regions of the United States—an attempt particularly congenial to Howells’s and Perry’s notion that realism is democratic in its interest in ordinary people in common situations. However, regionalism also adds the element of the exotic—that is, it takes its readers on an exploration of cultural settings with which they are not likely to be familiar; one of its attractions is the opportunity to travel to new places through the experience of reading. Local color fiction was a particularly popular species of regionalism that thrived at the same time (1870–1890) as realism proper. Local color stories attempted to capture the uniqueness of the regions in which they were set. Twain began his career as a local colorist writing about the Far West, earning his first national fame for “The Celebrated Jumping
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
947
REALISM
Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), set in a mining camp in California. Bret Harte likewise wrote local color stories capturing the curious characters and settings of the mining camps and the West in general. Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman were important local colorists using New England settings, and George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, and Mary N. Murfree wrote local color fiction set in the South. Although local color tended to be nostalgic, often to the point of sentimentality, for the lifestyles of the areas in which it was set, it was realistic in its attention to actual settings and speech patterns, often including a heavy reliance on dialect to produce its effects. THE REALISM WAR
By the early 1880s Howells, Perry, and other realists were engaged in a resolute battle against sentimental, “undemocratic,” “untruthful” literature. Perry’s essay “William Dean Howells,” published in Century Magazine in March 1882, praises Howells as America’s great practitioner of realism, whose work “has proved that realism does not mean groping in the mire” (p. 685). Howells’s fiction, Perry says, fulfills the novelist’s responsibility “to tell us what he sees, not to pervert the truth according to his whims or prejudices” (p. 684). And he praises realism itself as the enemy of superstition, injustice, and the old-fashioned: “Just as the scientific spirit digs the ground from beneath superstition, so does its fellow-worker, realism, tend to prick the bubble of abstract types. Realism is the tool of the democratic spirit, the modern spirit by means of which the truth is elicited” (p. 683). In the same year Howells proclaimed the triumph of realism and the resulting elevation of fiction writing: “The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. . . . These great men are of the past” (“Henry James, Jr.,” p. 28). Realism was of the present. Richard Watson Gilder (1844– 1909) remarked in an essay several years later (New Princeton Review, 1887), “Realism is, in fact, something in the air which even those who do not think of it by name must necessarily feel” (p. 3). Yet even as the triumph and current predominance of realism were being proclaimed, there was an equally vigorous and vocal countercurrent of critical opinion condemning the new “realistic” literature as unentertaining, immoral (or at least amoral), and even atheistic. The clash between these two sometimes violently opposed camps became known as the “realism war.” Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900), best remembered as the coauthor of Mark Twain’s first novel, The Gilded Age (1873), issued one of the first answering shots, remarking in an 1883 essay titled “Modern
948
A M E R I C A N
Fiction”: “One of the worst characteristics of modern fiction is its so-called truth to nature” (p. 464). Art, in Warner’s view, requires idealization, but realism prides itself on a “photographic fidelity to nature” (p. 464), which he regards as an insufficient criterion for art. Warner complains that the realists, writing in a style that lacks the elevating enrichment of imaginative seeing, appear intent on representing the most sordid aspects of society: “it is held to be artistic to look almost altogether upon the shady and the seamy side of life, giving to this view the name of ‘realism’; to select the disagreeable, the vicious, the unwholesome” (p. 471). The realism war heated up with the publication of Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), which was viewed by critics, both friendly and hostile, as the purest application to date of the principles espoused by Howells and Perry. As such, it became a center of critical controversy between those who agreed with realist principles and those who opposed them. The novel is set in contemporary Boston, Howells’s home base while he was working for the Atlantic Monthly. Its protagonist, Silas Lapham, is a successful businessman who encounters a situation that forces him to choose between his material well-being and his desire to do the right thing. Howells succeeds in embedding a dilemma that calls for heroism within an ordinary, seemingly unheroic context, and in doing so suggests that heroism is not something removed from everyday life. The events of the novel are mundane—business transactions and domestic arrangements—and trace what is in material terms the fall of the protagonist, but the title ironically implies that the rises and falls that matter are the moral ones. Howells’s other novels of the 1870s and 1880s, including Their Wedding Journey (1872) and A Modern Instance (1882), follow similar trajectories. James said of Howells, in a piece published in Harper’s Weekly in June 1886, “He is animated by a love of the common, the immediate, the familiar and vulgar elements of life, and holds that in proportion as we move into the rare and strange we become vague and arbitrary” (“William Dean Howells,” p. 394). In listing Howells’s intentions and the qualities for which he was striving, James might also have mentioned a kind of authorial objectivity that would reveal the mixture of strength and weakness typical of actual human beings. Fellow realist H. H. Boyesen (1848–1895) exclaimed, “In ‘A Modern Instance,’ and ‘The Rise of Silas Lapham,’ [Howells] has penetrated more deeply into the heart of reality, as it manifests itself on this side of the Atlantic, than any previous novelist” (“Why We Have No Great Novelists”). A less sympathetic critic calling himself “R. P.” conceded in his essay
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REALISM
“Novel-Writing as a Science” that Silas Lapham was “the most scientifically realistic novel that has yet been written” (p. 276), that Howells’s fictional methods were revolutionary, and that he believed Howells intended his novels to serve admirable purposes. But such a scientific approach was, in his view, “a descent, a degradation” (p. 278). He saw in Howells’s novel “the logic of the downward progress of godless science” (p. 279). Howells, according to R. P., studied “men and women as a naturalist does insects. . . . he investigates and expounds his theme with the same soullessness and absence of all emotion” (p. 277). The editor and literary critic Hamilton Wright Mabie (1845–1916), in his review of Silas Lapham, agreed with R. P. on the matter of soullessness. While granting that the novel was often precise in its depictions, he found that it remained cold, lacking the “vital spark” that brings literature to life. Mabie accused Howells and the other realists of “crowding the world of fiction with commonplace people; people whom one would positively avoid coming in contact with in real life” (“A Typical Novel,” p. 423). True art, according to Mabie, reveals spiritual laws and universal facts, embodying them in noble forms. He found in Howells’s fiction a “lack of unforced and triumphant faith in the worth, the dignity, and the significance for art of human experience in its whole range” (p. 421). Without this faith, he believed, Howells was unable to communicate a deep feeling for his subject and, thus, “A true art is impossible” (p. 421). For Mabie (and others) the problem was not so much a matter of subject matter or of style, but of the lack of an intention to promote a certain view of the world. In Mabie’s view realism was “practical atheism applied to art” (p. 426). Like Mabie, Maurice Thompson (1844–1901), in The Ethics of Literary Art (1893), perceived a need for what he called a “moral bias” transcending the objectivity that realists like Howells were striving for. Moral bias, he believed, is “the initial impulse” from which “every art movement springs; for it is moral bias that controls every conception of the form and the function of art” (p. 16). However, Thompson suggested that Howells’s saving grace, to the extent that he had one at all, was that his novels were not entirely in keeping with the theories he articulated. Thompson, himself a novelist and poet, found in Howells’s novels substantial evidence of “romance disguised as realism.” In his judgment Howells must not be a realist after all but a Romantic in disguise, since “his literary tissue is healthy, the spirit of his work is even, calm, just, and his purpose is pure.” The work of genuine realists, like Émile Zola (1840–1902), he found to be A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
decadent, focusing on “the vulgar, the commonplace, and the insignificant.” The dramatist and biographer William Roscoe Thayer (1859–1923), who held a similar opinion of Zola, coined the term “epidermism” to describe realism in his essay “The New Story-tellers and the Doom of Realism” (1894). He claimed that the French authors and their American imitators investigated “only the surface, the cuticle of life, usually with a preference for very dirty skin” (p. 477). Referring to Howells as one of the epidermists, he condemned Howells’s work as photographic reproduction that revealed only the surface appearance and not the meaningful depth of things. Realism/epidermism was doomed, he judged, because the human element was missing; the realists had “mistaken the dead actual for reality” (p. 477). This decadence of fiction could lead only to moral anarchy because “the Real without the Ideal is as the body without life” (p. 480). In the same year, H. C. Vedder, a Baptist clergyman and literary critic, asked, after exclaiming over the flatness of Howells’s fiction, “Has he never known anybody who has a soul above the buttons?” In fairness to the American realists it should be noted that they for the most part shared their attackers’ disdain for the “filth” of French realism, especially Zola. Although Thayer rather bizarrely pictured Howells “smacking his lips” over Zola’s “filth” during the composition of The Rise of Silas Lapham, Howells actually condemned Zola’s uncritical depiction of vice, as did James and Perry. Perry, in “Zola’s Last Novel” (1880), maintained that the men and women in Zola’s novels were “beasts” and that his work was “more shameless and disgusting than anything in modern literature” (p. 694). Nonetheless, the accusation of moral decadence, carrying over from Americans’ shock at such French “realists” as Zola—who are more accurately described as naturalists—continued to be applied to American realists, especially to Howells. Along with the realists’ continued justifications of their methods and theories, there also were some efforts at peacemaking. Gilder proposed that the differences between Romantics and realists had been exaggerated because all fiction contains elements of both: “There are few realists who have no ideality, and few idealists, few romanticists, who do not make use of the real” (p. 1). George Pellew, who had been a student of Perry at Harvard, agreed. In “The New Battle of the Books” (1888), he maintained that the ultimate intentions of Romantics and realists were not significantly different, although they employed different methods. He found that, while the Romantic approached the object as a “mechanical
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
949
REALISM
draughtsman” (p. 572) and the realist was like a photographer, both wanted to reveal the truth of the object. CRITICAL REALISM
In time the steady attention to truthful reproduction of reality became wearisome even to the realists, who were also troubled by the social-economic turmoil of the 1880s, and—led by Howells, Boyesen, and Hamlin Garland—the turn was made from a nonideological fiction to one intended to foster social progress. The term given to this new direction was “critical realism.” Critical realism, which thrived especially in the 1890s, was in some ways a more reasonable application of Howells’s and Perry’s ideas, because culture-specific fiction is likely to speak more directly to culture-specific issues than to universal concerns. Howells himself was drawn into the notion of fiction as a force for reforming society partly as a reaction to the Haymarket labor riot in 1886, which demonstrated the willingness of those in authority to harshly repress labor uprisings—and in their aftermath showed the general lack of sympathy that Americans held for the plight of the workingman or workingwoman. His response was to turn his attention toward fiction that would show the true complexity of societal problems and in a way that would move people to try to find solutions. A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), which some regard as his best novel, was the most notable result in his own work. Howells was also a mentor to the promising young novelist Stephen Crane and greatly admired Crane’s brutal account of life in the urban slums in his first novel, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893). Hamlin Garland (1860–1940), another novelist who found a supportive friend in Howells, championed what he called “veritism,” a variant of realism that, by its reference to veritas, changed the focus more specifically to truthfulness. In his essay, “Productive Conditions of American Literature” (1894), Garland proposed that “American literature must be faithful to American conditions. . . . It should rise out of our conditions as naturally as the corn grows” (p. 690). This emphasis on “our conditions” reflects his concern with the effects of environment on the individual, and his fiction chronicles the lives of ordinary people making their way under difficult circumstances. Garland was also a local colorist, setting his fiction in what he called the “middle border”—the north central portion of the United States. His best-known work is MainTravelled Roads (1891), a book of short stories that, like many of his works, exposes the harsh lives led by farmers in the middle border region but finds in those lives a heroism unappreciated by the world at large. His commitment to revealing sympathetically but
950
A M E R I C A N
unflinchingly the grim actuality of his characters’ lives is very much in line with Howells’s intention in the turn to critical realism. Boyesen, in 1894, judged Garland to be “the most vigorous realist in America” (Literary and Social Silhouettes, p. 77). Boyesen, a Norwegian immigrant known in his own time as both novelist and critic, believed that American novelists had paid too little attention to the “strong forces which are visibly and invisibly at work in our society, fashioning our destinies as a nation” (p. 46). Like Garland and Crane, Boyesen took a somewhat deterministic view of human conduct, emphasizing its direct relation to environment and heredity, and like other realists he complained about the persistence of sentimentality in American fiction. In an essay titled “Why We Have No Great Novelists” (1887), Boyesen offered the provocative opinion that the market for American fiction revolved around the delicate sensibilities of adolescent girls: “The readers of novels are chiefly young girls, and a popular novel is a novel which pleases them” (p. 616). Thus, the young American girl functioned, in his view, as an “Iron Madonna who strangles in her iron embrace the American novelist” (p. 619). The result was, he thought, an insipid body of literature, momentarily entertaining but reluctant to face issues seriously. But eight years later, perceiving a turn in the direction of critical realism, he offered, in “The Progressive Realism of American Fiction,” the judgment that American fiction had “devoted itself to the serious task of studying and chronicling our own social conditions” and consequently “is to-day commanding the attention of the civilized world” (Literary and Social Silhouettes, p. 78). Another strong advocate of critical realism was the lawyer Clarence Darrow (1857–1938), a real-world activist and defender of those prosecuted in the Haymarket affair. Darrow, in an essay titled “Realism in Literature and Art” (1893), disagreed with Howells’s notion of “smiling realism,” maintaining, “The true artist has no right to choose only the lovely spots, and make us think that this is life” (p. 118). Rather the novelist should face the ugly truths in the world and, by bringing those truths to the world’s attention, contribute to their correction. Instead of beginning with the Romantic faith that the good, the true, and the beautiful inherently coincide, the novelist must work to make them so. He or she must “write and work until the world shall learn so much, and grow so good, that the true will be all beautiful, and all the real be ideal” (p. 118). The turn to critical realism also brought the realists closer to a contemporaneous literature of social activism directed toward special issues. Rebecca Harding Davis was an early practitioner of such fiction, focusing on
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REALISM
REALISM’S MORAL LESSONS Clarence Darrow, a prominent lawyer and social activist, in his essay “Realism in Literature and Art” (1893), maintained that realism does teach morality—a morality that springs naturally from the truthful treatment of its characters and situations. In fact, he suggests that this is the most compelling sort of moral lesson.
The realist would teach a lesson, too, but he would not violate a single fact for all the theories in the world, for a theory could not be true if it did violence to life. He paints his picture so true and perfect that all men who look upon it know that it is a likeness of the world that they have seen; they know that these are men and women and little children whom they meet upon the streets, and they see the conditions of their lives, and the moral of the picture sinks deeply into their minds. Clarence Darrow, “Realism in Literature and Art,” p.109.
humanity, and its characters tended to be driven by internal or external forces that they could neither understand nor control. It was, in other words, the philosophical counterpoint to romanticism’s belief in the inherent rightness and connectedness of all things. Realism had experimented with an idea of truthfulness that attempted to record the actualities of human experience without fitting them into a preconceived mold. But in the progression to critical realism and then to naturalism, the photographic method fell more and more into the service of the thematizing intention. See also Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Ambassadors; The Atlantic Monthly; A Hazard of New Fortunes; Naturalism; The Portrait of a Lady; Regionalism and Local Color Fiction BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Crane, Stephen. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets. New York: D. Appleton, 1896. Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. New York, D. Appleton, 1895. Garland, Hamlin. Main-Travelled Roads: Being Six Stories of the Mississippi Valley. Cambridge, U.K.: Stone and Kimball, 1893. Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891.
issues of gender, race, and poverty, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its debunking of the myths of the happy slave and the benevolent slaveholder, likewise was a precursor of critical realism. The fiction of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (himself an African American) also turned a realistic eye on the life of African Americans in the slaveholding and post-slaveholding South, as did the fiction of George Washington Cable on the mixed racial situation in New Orleans and vicinity. Meanwhile, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Kate Chopin wrote fiction that showcased the problems of women caught in the rigid framework of stereotyped gender expectations.
Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham. Boston: Ticknor, 1885. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881. James, Henry. The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End. New York: Macmillan, 1898. Thompson, Maurice. The Ethics of Literary Art. Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Seminary Press, 1893. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885. Twain, Mark. Sketches, New and Old. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1875. Secondary Works
THE TURN TO NATURALISM
Just as realism led naturally into critical realism, the same trajectory led logically from critical realism into naturalism—which took the realistic tendency to the opposite pole of Howells’s “smiling realism.” Writers such as Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser examined the lives of characters in society’s lowest reaches. Whereas realism had tried for a sort of philosophical neutrality, naturalism posited a universe indifferent, or even hostile, to the fate of A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Anesko, Michael, ed. Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Bell, Michael D. The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Benardete, Jane, ed. American Realism. New York: Putnam, 1972. Berthoff, Warner. The Ferment of Realism: American Literature, 1884–1919. New York: Free Press, 1965.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
951
REALISM
Boyesen, H. H. Literary and Social Silhouettes. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894.
Nagel, James, and Tom Quirk, eds. The Portable American Realism Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
Boyesen, H. H. “Why We Have No Great Novelists.” Forum 2 (February 1887): 615–622.
Parrington, Vernon L. The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860–1920: Completed to 1900 Only. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1930.
Cady, Edwin H. The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.
Pellew, George. “The New Battle of the Books.” Forum 5 (July 1888): 564–573.
Carter, Everett. Howells and the Age of Realism. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1954.
Perry, Thomas Sergeant. “American Novels.” North American Review 115 (October 1872): 366–379.
Darrow, Clarence. “Realism in Literature and Art.” The Arena (December 1893): 98–113.
Perry, Thomas Sergeant. “Ivan Turgénieff.” Atlantic Monthly 33 (May 1874): 565–576.
Fishkin, Shelley F. From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Perry, Thomas Sergeant. Review of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Century Magazine 30 (May 1885): 171–173.
Garland, Hamlin. “Productive Conditions of American Literature.” Forum 27 (August 1894): 690–694.
Perry, Thomas Sergeant. “William Dean Howells.” Century Magazine 23 (March 1882): 680–685.
Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a Literary Institution. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997.
Perry, Thomas Sergeant. “Zola’s Last Novel.” Atlantic Monthly 45 (May 1880): 693–699.
Gilder, Richard Watson. “Certain Tendencies in Current Literature.” New Princeton Review (July 1887): 1–13.
Pizer, Donald. Realism and Naturalism in NineteenthCentury American Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1966.
Greenwald, Elissa. Realism and the Romance: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and American Fiction. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989.
Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism, Howells to London. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Hochman, Barbara. Getting at the Author: Reimaging Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001.
Pizer, Donald, ed. Documents of American Realism and Naturalism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998.
Howells, William Dean. “Criticism and Fiction.” 1894. In Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, edited by Clara Marburg Kirk and Rudolf Kirk. New York: New York University Press, 1959.
Pizer, Donald, and Earl Harbert, eds. American Realists and Naturalists. Vol. 12 of Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982.
Howells, William Dean. “Editor’s Study.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (November 1889): 962–967. Howells, William Dean. “Henry James, Jr.” Century 25 (November 1882): 24–29. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” 1884. In The Art of Fiction and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948. James, Henry. “William Dean Howells.” Harper’s Weekly, 19 June 1886, pp. 394–395. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Lathrop, George Parsons. “The Novel and Its Future.” Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874): 313–324. Lucie-Smith, Edward. American Realism. New York: Abrams, 1994. Mabie, Hamilton Wright. “A Typical Novel.” Andover Review 4 (November 1885): 417–429. McKay, Janet H. Narration and Discourse in American Realistic Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.
952
A M E R I C A N
Quirk, Tom, and Gary Scharnhorst, eds. American Realism and the Canon. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Rawlings, Peter, ed. Americans on Fiction, 1776–1900. 3 vols. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002. Contains many of the essays from nineteenth-century literary magazines quoted here. R. P. “Novel Writing as a Science.” Catholic World 42 (November 1885): 274–282. Smith, Christopher, ed. American Realism. San Diego, Calif.: Greenhaven Press, 2000. Sundquist, Eric J., ed. American Realism: New Essays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Thayer, William Roscoe. “The New Story-Tellers and the Doom of Realism.” Forum 18 (December 1894): 470–480. Twain, Mark. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” 1895. In The Unabridged Mark Twain, edited by Lawrence Teacher, pp. 1239–1250. Philadephia: Running Press, 1976. Vedder, H. C. American Writers of Today. New York: Silver Burdett and Co., 1894.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RECONSTRUCTION
Warner, Charles Dudley. “Modern Fiction.” Atlantic Monthly 51 (April 1883): 464–474. Warren, Kenneth. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. James S. Leonard
RECONSTRUCTION The Reconstruction era following the end of the American Civil War in 1865, like any postwar period, was a turbulent historical context for the production of a national literature. Until well into the twentieth century, literary artists, scholars, orators, and journalists grappled with the legacies of slavery and war within the uniquely American dynamics of race and democracy. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
When the Civil War ended, the United States faced the challenge of reconstructing a newly expanded civil democracy amid the rubble of war. Reconstruction called on the energies of the entire nation but was most contested within the radically redefined legal and social relationships of the American South. Not surprisingly, there was intense political conflict over the terms under which Reconstruction would proceed in the region, and at times violent conflict erupted over who would define those terms. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibited slavery in 1865 and freed close to 4 million people of African descent from chattel slavery, where they had been denied all rights of citizenship and prevented by law from learning to read and write. In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) granted citizenship rights to black Americans and the Fifteenth (1870) guaranteed suffrage to all male U.S. citizens. The project of rebuilding a fractured nation began in the wake of these legal redefinitions of who was to be considered a citizen. The term “Federal Reconstruction” (sometimes called “Radical Reconstruction”) refers to the period between 1867 and 1877, when the federal government officially occupied the South and national policy focused on enforcing new civil rights and legal protections for black citizens in the former Confederate states. During this period, the Freedmen’s Bureau was established to support free black communities in the South. Continuing the long labors of the black abolitionist movement, thousands of black activists, along with their white allies, worked to build schools, elect African American representatives to state legislatures, and build social institutions that were controlled by black citA M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
izens: colleges, businesses, newspapers, churches, civic organizations. At the same time, some whites in both the North and South remained committed to racial segregation and white supremacy. They launched concerted efforts to suppress the black vote, to institute “black codes” that restricted the social and legal freedom of recently emancipated black citizens, and to reestablish the legal and social racial hierarchies of the slavery period through intimidation, resistance to federal authority, and violent aggression toward blacks. This official Reconstruction ended in 1877 with a political compromise hammered out among white political leaders to settle the hotly contested 1876 presidential election, leading to the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederate states and to renewed political power for Southern whites. The formal end of Federal Reconstruction also relieved Southern whites of political pressure to honor the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and opened a new era of uninhibited white supremacy, political inequality, and racial segregation for black America. The term “Reconstruction,” however, is also used for the decades following 1877, when the project of rebuilding American democracy continued, sometimes along lines that advanced black freedom, sometimes along lines aimed at keeping democracy closed to millions of newly emancipated citizens. This longer period of Reconstruction, continuing well into the early decades of the twentieth century, was characterized both by substantial social and economic progress and by persisting racial, social, and economic conflict. Some American thinkers, in fact, argue that Reconstruction continued into the twenty-first century, though they differ about its relative purposes, successes, and failures. CONTEXTUAL ISSUES
From 1870 to 1920, a number of historical issues were both central to the Reconstruction context within which writers were working and symbolically important within the American literature being produced. These included the particular legacies of slavery and the Civil War: displaced communities; catastrophic damage to persons, landscapes, and towns; broken and separated families; psychological trauma; the struggle for literacy and education; redefined gender roles in the wake of war and emancipation; Christian churches struggling over different and often conflicting interpretations of the gospel during and after the slavery era; economic shifts from rural to urban economies and from agrarian to industrial labor; immigration and expanding cultural diversity; the emergence of greater religious pluralism in a nation that had been dominated
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
953
RECONSTRUCTION
Reconstruction 6 May 1861
Date of secession 25 June 1868 Date of readmission 14 July 1868 Military control withdrawn Military district boundary Both Union and Confederate governments, 1861–1865
Wisconsin
New York Michigan
Virginia 17 April 1861
Illinois
Indiana
West Virginia
Delaware Maryland
Separated from Virginia 20 August 1862, admitted to Union 20 June 1863
Kansas Missouri
New Jersey
16 January 1870 16 January 1870
Ohio
MILITARY DISTRICT No. 1
Kentucky
North Carolina 20 May 1861
Tennessee
Indiana Territory
25 June 1868 14 July 1868
Under military executive control, 1862–1865
Arkansas 6 May 1861
MILITARY DISTRICT No. 2
22 June 1868 30 June 1868
MILITARY DISTRICT No. 4
Alabama
Georgia
11 January 1861
18 January 1861
14 July 1868 14 July 1868
15 July 1870 18 July 1870
MILITARY DISTRICT No. 5
South Carolina 20 December 1860
25 June 1868 15 April 1877
MILITARY DISTRICT No. 3
Texas 1 February 1861
ATLANTIC OCEAN
30 March 1870 15 April 1870
Louisiana 16 January 1861
25 June 1868 15 April 1877
N
Florida
Mississippi
10 January 1861
25 June 1868 31 December 1876
9 January 1861
23 February 1870 26 February 1870
Gulf of Mexico 0 0
100 100
200 mi.
200 km
by white Protestant Christianity; developments in science and philosophy that sharpened tensions—for some—between traditional religion and the resources of “modernity”; and westward expansionism, which under the ideology of Manifest Destiny continued to obliterate or displace American Indians. SLAVERY AS SETTING AND SYMBOL
For over two centuries, unpaid slave labor had built the U.S. economy, but in 1865 the 4 million newly freed slaves shared with poorer people of all races the reality of serious economic obstacles to personal and collective security. Literary treatments of race and democracy during Reconstruction were often closely intertwined with economic issues. The legacy of persisting material
954
A M E R I C A N
hardship for black Americans was a theme that emerged across genres, especially—but not exclusively—in the works of writers who were themselves African American. For example, the ironic and highly symbolic stories in Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) repeatedly place black and white characters in situations where economic and political hierarchies are shifting along color lines. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s novel Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) both weave explicitly economic themes into narratives set both before and after the Civil War. Important nonfiction works such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (1892), and
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RECONSTRUCTION
Booker T. Washington’s “Atlantic Exposition Address” (1895) and Up from Slavery (1901) directly address the political economy of slavery and the impact on Reconstruction of economic relationships established during the slavery period. Economic themes in Reconstruction literature include the postwar challenges facing free black labor, racial conflict among the laboring classes generally, and white efforts to restrict and control black labor and black economic self-determination. The broader topic of “slavery,” as subject matter and as metaphor, also emerged as an important symbolic resource for a wide range of American authors during the Reconstruction era. American writers often offered sharply different images of the past and of what American life, democracy, and the nation’s future should look like. Poets such as Albery Allson Whitman (Not a Man and Yet a Man, 1877), Frances E. W. Harper (Sketches of Southern Life, 1872), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Lyrics of a Lowly Life, 1897; Lyrics of the Hearthside, 1899), and Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, 1871–1872 edition; Democratic Vistas, 1871) use slavery figuratively in their work. Slavery was also a central theme for Reconstruction fiction writers as politically and culturally diverse as Joel Chandler Harris (Nights with Uncle Remus, 1883), Mark Twain (The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894), Victoria Earle (Aunt Lindy: A Story Founded on Real Life, 1893), and Paul Laurence Dunbar (In Old Plantation Days, 1903; The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories, 1900). Reconstruction-era playwrights who used slavery as a theme or setting include Bartley Campbell (The White Slave, 1882), Edward Sheldon (The Nigger, 1909), and Pauline E. Hopkins (Slaves’ Escape: or, The Underground Railroad, 1880). In addition, during Reconstruction in the broader sense, hundreds of “Tom Troupes” toured the country, performing scenes adapted from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and caricaturing black people and the slave experience in accordance with prevailing late-nineteenth-century white racist stereotypes. In contrast, slave narratives published after the Civil War expanded on some of the narrative patterns characteristic of the genre in the antebellum years, but also portrayed African Americans looking back on slavery and placed new emphasis on the realities facing free black Americans during Reconstruction. THE CIVIL WAR AS SETTING AND SYMBOL
Not surprisingly, the Civil War itself appears extensively as a topic, setting, and symbol in literature of the Reconstruction period. For example, a number of A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Writing in 1935, during the heyday of Jim Crow segregation, W. E. B. Du Bois concluded his groundbreaking historical study Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 with a chapter entitled “The Propaganda of History,” in which he took American historians (and educators) to task for ignoring African American contributions to American democracy. American students, argued Du Bois, would complete their educations lacking any accurate sense of the realities of Reconstruction. But the problem was even deeper, as he showed by recounting his own experience as a writer:
Herein lies more than mere omission and difference of emphasis. The treatment of the period of Reconstruction reflects small credit upon American historians as scientists. We have too often a deliberate attempt so to change the facts of history that the story will make pleasant reading for Americans. The editors of the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica asked me for an article on the history of the American Negro. From my manuscript they cut out all my references to Reconstruction. I insisted on including the following statement: “White historians have ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance and corruption. But the Negro insists that it was Negro loyalty and the Negro vote alone that restored the South to the Union; established the new democracy, both for white and black, and instituted the public schools.” This the editor refused to print. . . . I was not satisfied and refused to allow the article to appear. After illustrating this deliberate exclusion of black perspective from the scholarly record, Du Bois added: Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable? Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880, pp. 713–714.
white writers lament the loss of the war by the Confederacy, in some cases by explicitly embracing old norms of white supremacy and in other cases by focusing on the loss of southern (white) community and
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
955
RECONSTRUCTION
identity. These include Jefferson Davis’s nonfiction The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881); Constance Fenimore Woolson’s For the Major, an 1883 novel sympathetic toward the Confederacy; Mary Boykin Chesnut’s A Diary from Dixie (1905); and John William De Forest’s 1881 The Bloody Chasm, a novel set in Charleston, South Carolina. Other writers—poets, playwrights, fiction writers, essayists, and social theorists—from all regions of the country and across the cultural, racial, and political spectrum grappled with the legacy of the Civil War on its own terms or addressed the general problem of war as a philosophical and political problem: Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage, 1895), Walt Whitman (Drum-Taps and Sequel, 1865; Memorandum during the War, 1875; Specimen Days and Collect, 1882), Ethel Lynn Beers (All Quiet along the Potomac and Other Poems, 1879), Louisa May Alcott (Proverb Stories, 1882), George Wilbur Peck (How Private Geo. W. Peck Put Down the Rebellion, 1887), Ambrose Bierce (Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, 1891, a collection including famous stories such as “Chickamauga” and “The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), Paul Laurence Dunbar (Lyrics of Love and Laughter, 1903), Augustus Thomas (Alabama, 1891; The Copperhead, 1918), William Dean Howells (The Undiscovered Country, 1880), and Grace Elizabeth King (Monsieur Motte, 1888; Tales of a Time and Place, 1892; Balcony Stories, 1893). Many of the writers who used slavery as a literary trope also used the Civil War as setting and symbol. A number of themes related to the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and to the legacy of slavery during Reconstruction emerged in both fiction and nonfiction between 1865 and 1920. These themes include: the importance of literacy and the need for schools controlled by newly freed black communities; the problems emerging within white communities—in the North and South—as new dynamics of civic equality and democratic access for black citizens sparked progressive change and a virulent white backlash; the rampant civic destruction during the war and the resulting struggle by communities to define themselves under new postwar social conditions; displaced populations and broken families (these two themes were especially prominent among African American writers during this period); redefined gender roles; the imperative for what might be called “theological Reconstruction,” as American Christianity, sharply divided along racial lines in the antebellum era, entered the Reconstruction period with the problem of race still looming large and the reality of greater religious pluralism ahead; and finally, the persisting legacy of widespread social violence.
956
A M E R I C A N
RACE
Many Reconstruction-era writers worked “the color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) called it, making use especially of skin color as a symbol for personal identity and the state of American democracy. Literary tropes related to race abound in Reconstruction writing, including “mixed race heritage,” the “tragic mulatto,” “blackness,” “whiteness,” “Indian-ness,” and skin color used as a code for social and economic conflict within black communities. Interracial sexuality is a common theme among writers with dramatically different attitudes toward and artistic interests in race. Within this complex symbolic matrix, many Reconstruction-era writers set stories and nonfiction within a “then” (slavery) and “now” (Reconstruction) conceptual framework. This technique often allowed them to illuminate the dynamics of racial progress or regress in Reconstruction America. Works by William Wells Brown (My Southern Home; or, The South and Its People, 1880) and James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 1912), as well as by the white writers Constance Fenimore Woolson (Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches, 1880) and George Washington Cable (John March, Southerner, 1895) make use of this method. Similarly, the historical period of Reconstruction itself frequently appears as a symbol for America’s glories or failures where race is concerned, presenting a wide range of perspectives on the American democracy’s past, present, and future. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy uses Reconstruction as symbol, as do works by Charles Chesnutt (The Wife of His Youth, 1899; The House behind the Cedars, 1900; The Marrow of Tradition, 1901), Albion W. Tourgée (Fool’s Errand, 1879; Bricks without Straw, 1880), George Washington Cable (The Grandissimes, 1880); The Silent South, 1885), Pauline Hopkins (Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South, 1900), and W. E. B. Du Bois (Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, 1920). One aspect of Reconstruction often overlooked because of the tendency to focus on black/white dynamics is the increased occupation of Indian Country by white settlers and recently emancipated blacks fleeing white violence in the South. American Indian oratory was recorded in writing during this period. Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa; 1858–1939), displaying interesting philosophical parallels to W. E. B. Du Bois, grappled with cultural and religious “double consciousness” in The Soul of the Indian (1911) and From the Deep Woods to Civilization (1916). The apocalyptic voice of the Ghost Dance Songs composed by various tribes in the later nineteenth century
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RECONSTRUCTION
exemplifies Native American resistance to forced displacement, which sometimes came at the hands of African American soldiers, for whom service in the American military offered professional opportunity after the Civil War. The persisting problem in the United States of violent and institutionalized white supremacy was a frequent subject of Reconstruction-era literature. Many writers dealt directly with the theme, but two writers with profoundly different philosophies about race made it central to their work: Thomas Dixon (1864–1946) and Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931). Notorious for his unapologetic embrace of white superiority and the Ku Klux Klan, Thomas Dixon celebrated white supremacist forms of Protestant Christianity and implicitly sanctioned white racial violence in his novels The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), and The Traitor: A Story of the Fall of the Invisible Empire (1907). D. W. Griffith adapted The Clansman as the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a “blockbuster” that drew long lines to theaters all around the country at a time when Ku Klux Klan membership in the United States surged for a second time since the Civil War. In contrast, Ida B. Wells-Barnett worked as an activist and writer to confront Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and white race riots. Her now-famous pamphlets include: Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A Red Record (1895), and Mob Rule in New Orleans (1900). Wells-Barnett exemplifies the refusal of black Americans and others to accept white supremacy as a national norm. Her use of the pen in combination with political activism was characteristic of the work of many social issue writers between 1870 and 1920. INTERPRETIVE ISSUES
Both Federal Reconstruction and the broader Reconstruction period presented significant challenges over the years for historians and literary critics. Much initial historiography of the era was written by white scholars who were sometimes “unreconstructed” sympathizers with white southern segregationist thinking or were unsympathetic either to full black emancipation or to the complete restructuring of American democratic life based on racial equality. W. E. B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking study Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880 (1935) was an early—or belated, depending on one’s perspective— break with this white bias in social analysis, offering an interpretation of Reconstruction grounded in black historical experience and perspectives. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
In the years since the publication of Black Reconstruction in America, historical and sociological analysis has expanded to consider a much wider range of sources and points of view. Additionally, Black studies, Africana studies, and American Indian studies, all interdisciplinary traditions of scholarship, have provided more balance in the American historical, literary, and interpretive record. In fact, some literary historians of Reconstruction believe it is important to treat historiography and other forms of narrative social analysis as distinct literary genres and to investigate the literary history of “histories of Reconstruction.” Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars in literary criticism and literary history have availed themselves of previously undervalued primary sources from the Reconstruction era (oral traditions, pamphlets, journalism) and have also made available a more representative selection of works from traditional literary genres such as autobiography, novels, plays, poetry, and short fiction. One interpretive framework that has proven helpful for American thinkers has been the placement of Reconstruction within international contexts for the purpose of comparison. For example, various approaches to postcolonial theory in history, sociology, and literary studies can illuminate the history and literature of Reconstruction in new ways, as can crossnational or comparative work that considers American Reconstruction in relation to the history and literature of other nations such as South Africa, where racially coded hierarchies are also entrenched. Interpreters from outside the United States often see American social and literary history in terms that put American interpretive habits into sharper relief and sometimes introduce a necessary tension. American society often exhibits what scholars call “historical amnesia,” the tendency to repress or forget the true complexity of history in the United States. Reconstruction, charged with postwar tension and the often violent racial legacies of slavery and Manifest Destiny, offers scholars and students of American history and literature ample opportunity to confront head-on and overcome this historical amnesia. See also Jim Crow; Ku Klux Klan; New South BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. New York: Penguin, 1993. Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. 1905. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
957
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America: 1860–1880. 1935. New York: Free Press, 1999. Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted. 1892. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. New York: Penguin Classics, 2002. Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Edited by William Andrews. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1995. Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Edited by Trudier Harris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Secondary Works
Burt, Daniel S., ed. The Chronology of American Literature: America’s Literary Achievement from the Colonial Era to Modern Times. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2004. Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 1865–1965. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965. Edwards, Laura F. Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Perennial Classics, Illustrated Edition, 2002. Foner, Eric, and Olivia Mahoney. American Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Fredrickson, George. Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Gossett, Thomas F. Race: The History of an Idea in America. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Nieman, Donald G., ed. African Americans and the Emergence of Segregation, 1865–1900. New York: Garland, 1994. Packard, Jerrold M. American Nightmare: The History of Jim Crow. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002. Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919. New York: Norton, 1987. Trelease, Allen W. Reconstruction: The Great Experiment. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. Turkel, Studs. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1993. Sharon Carson
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE A classic in the tradition of realism, generally considered the most important novel of the American Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage was written by a young author who had never seen a battle. Stephen Crane,
958
A M E R I C A N
who was born six years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, began the novel when he was twenty-one and finished his revisions a year later. The book was published by Appleton in 1895, a few days before Crane celebrated his twenty-fourth birthday. Given the vivid descriptions of battle scenes, the youth and inexperience of the author seem strange, even in the early twenty-first century. Stranger still is the fact that The Red Badge of Courage seems utterly remote from the issues—such as slavery and secession—that are usually cited as the causes of the Civil War. Except for the subtitle, An Episode of the American Civil War, and the distinctive local color that defines its social, temporal, and spatial milieus, the war depicted in Crane’s novel might have occurred in a thousand different settings. COMPOSITION AND PUBLICATION
The youngest son of a Methodist minister, Stephen Crane (1871–1900) was born in Newark, New Jersey. In 1878 the family moved to Port Jervis, New York, a railroad hub in Appalachia on the Pennsylvania border. He was schooled at the Pennington Seminary and at Claverack College, a military prep school on the Hudson River. In 1890 he entered Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, but transferred to Syracuse University in 1891 for one desultory term, excusing himself from classes and specializing in baseball. Sponsored by his brother, Townley, he became a stringer or reporter for the New York Tribune covering the Jersey Coast, but he lost his job when his callow satire caused a minor brouhaha. By 1892 Crane was living with fraternity brothers on Avenue A in Manhattan. There he wrote Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York) (1893) and published it with the inheritance he received from his mother’s estate. Crane began The Red Badge of Courage, as a “potboiler” (Wertheim and Sorrentino, p. 91), while living with his brother, Edmund, in Lake View, New Jersey, in the summer and early autumn of 1893. He continued its composition when he moved to the old Art Students’ League at East Twenty-third Street in Manhattan, where, as an impoverished bohemian, he shared a large studio with struggling artists. Crane became a nocturnal writer, working often after midnight until dawn. A chief source for The Red Badge of Courage, according to Crane’s artist friends, was the series of Civil War memoirs published in the Century between 1884 and 1887. Corwin Knapp Linson, for example, remembered Crane “poring over the Civil War articles” in 1893 (p. 19). Presumably, the stories of veterans in Port Jervis were an oral source; the movements of Crane’s fictional
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
Stampede of the Eleventh Corps on the Plank Road. Illustration by A. C. Redwood for “The Chancellorsville Campaign” by Darius N. Cough in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, 1887–1888. Chancellorsville, Virginia, is the site of the battle in Crane’s novel. GRADUATE LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
regiment, the 304th New York, parallel those of the 124th New York State Volunteer Regiment (called the Orange Blossoms), which saw its first combat at Chancellorsville, Virginia, the site of the battle in the novel. Another oral source, John B. Van Petten, one of Crane’s teachers at Claverack and a noted raconteur of war stories, had been a chaplain and lieutenant colonel in the Union army. Seriously wounded and decorated for bravery, Van Petten served in the battles of Antietam and Winchester, where he witnessed the panic and confusion of terrified soldiers running from the enemy. Several literary works—notably Leo Tolstoy’s Sebastopol (1855), Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed (1890), and Émile Zola’s La Débâcle (1892)—have been cited as possible sources of The Red Badge of Courage, but although the similarities are sometimes striking, there is no evidence that Crane read these books. Again, he may have been influenced by the perspectives of infantry soldiers in such works as Wilbur F. Hinman’s Corporal Si Klegg and His “Pard”: How They A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Lived and Talked and What They Did and Suffered While Fighting for the Flag (1887) and by the vivid fictional descriptions of warfare in John W. De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), Joseph Kirkland’s The Captain of Company K (1891), and Ambrose Bierce’s Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891). Without conclusive evidence, however, the influence of these works remains controversial. In April 1894 Crane showed Hamlin Garland the first half of his manuscript (the other half being held “in hock” with a typist for $15). Garland immediately recognized the novel as “a work of genius” (Roadside Meetings, pp. 196–197). In penciled comments on the manuscript, Garland advised Crane to regularize the regional speech of his characters. Initially Crane followed this advice, but he eventually restored most of the Appalachian dialect except for Henry Fleming’s speech. At about this time Crane also substituted epithets for the names of his characters: Fleming became “the youth,” Wilson “the loud soldier,” and Conklin “the tall soldier.” Their names appear only in direct address.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
959
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
The original title, “Private Fleming: His Various Battles,” now became The Red Badge of Courage. With Garland’s supporting letter, Crane offered the novel to S. S. McClure for publication in either McClure’s Magazine or in his Newspaper Features Syndicate. McClure postponed making a commitment to publish the novel. Six months later Crane lost patience with McClure and took the manuscript to his competitor, Irving Bacheller, who, impressed by its power and vividness, immediately arranged to publish a syndicated version of The Red Badge of Courage in December 1894. An abridged version of the novel was published by Bacheller in at least seven newspapers, including the Philadelphia Press, where it was most enthusiastically received (Wertheim and Sorrentino, pp. 104–117). In December 1894 Ripley Hitchcock, a senior editor at D. Appleton and Company, tentatively accepted the novel for publication. For five months—January through May 1895—Crane was traveling in the West and Mexico on assignment with the Bacheller syndicate. On 17 June 1895 he signed a contract with Appleton for the publication of The Red Badge of Courage. The novel was published by Appleton in the United States in September and by William Heinemann in England in November 1895.
alleged censorship ever occurred. Crane never objected to the published version of his novel or suggested that he was forced to cut anything. The typescript that served as the printer’s copy or the printer’s proof would probably help to resolve these issues, but unfortunately these items are lost. This is not merely a pedantic quarrel; the chosen text affects one’s overall evaluation of the novel and impinges crucially on matters of interpretation. The Parker-Binder version intensifies Crane’s ironic treatment of Henry Fleming and blatantly supports an antiwar reading of the novel. In the early twenty-first century, however, most scholars accept the authority of the Appleton text. The manuscript contributes to the understanding of Crane’s imaginative process, but as Christopher Benfey has succinctly observed: “a manuscript is not a book” (p. 108). The manuscript also helps to correct printing and proofreading errors. Among the editors who adopt the 1895 version as their copy text, Bowers accepts manuscript readings that make Crane’s use of regional speech consistent. Donald Pizer is conservative with emendations; J. C. Levenson is more so. Because no two editors agree at every point, there is no single authoritative edition of The Red Badge of Courage.
TEXTUAL ISSUES
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Discrepancies between the manuscript and the first book edition of The Red Badge of Courage have sparked a heated debate among Crane scholars, including Fredson Bowers, the editor of the University of Virginia edition of The Works of Stephen Crane, and Hershel Parker, a distinguished Herman Melville scholar and a severe critic of Bowers’s editorial procedures. Parker and his graduate student at the University of Southern California, Henry Binder, have argued that the Virginia edition of The Red Badge of Courage violates Crane’s intentions. Parker and Binder insist that the manuscript—not the Appleton first edition—be established as the authoritative text of The Red Badge of Courage (see Parker in Mitchell, pp. 25–47). They reason that Hitchcock must have pressured Crane to delete many passages (including all of the manuscript’s chapter 12) in which Fleming’s reflections seem especially deluded, pompous, and petulant. According to this argument, Hitchcock intervened in order to produce a book that was acceptable to patriotic readers in the 1890s. The last few pages were heavily revised, and the final paragraph— “Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds”—does not appear in the manuscript. Parker and Binder believe that Hitchcock’s invasive role is conspicuous here. This argument, however, is flawed because there is no evidence that the
The first reviews that appeared in U.S. newspapers noted the vivid detail and terrifying realism of the novel. The Detroit Free Press (7 October 1895) found it “so vivid a picture of the emotions and the horrors of the battlefield that you will pray your eyes may never look upon the reality.” To Edward Marshall in the New York Press (13 October 1895), “the description is so vivid as to be almost suffocating.” The Boston Times (27 October 1895) stressed its “pitiless vividness”: “the most realistic and ghastly picture of the late war which has ever come to our notice.” The Philadelphia Press (13 October 1895) praised the novel “as a most impressive and accurate record of actual personal experiences.” Similarly the New York Times (19 October 1895) found it “extraordinarily true.” Among the negative reviews, the New York Tribune (13 October 1895), still with a grudge against Crane, denounced the novel as “tedious,” “grotesque,” “ridiculous,” and “exaggerated.” William Dean Howells, one of Crane’s steadfast mentors, wrote a bland review for Harper’s Weekly (26 October 1895). Psychologically, he wrote, “the book is worth while as an earnest of the greater things we may hope from a new talent” (Wertheim and Sorrentino, pp. 141–146). While The Red Badge of Courage was, in general, an instant success in the United States, in England it was a sensation. Arthur Waugh, in a “London Letter” for the Critic (28 December 1895), wrote that “everyone is
960
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
asking about [Crane]; and his Red Badge of Courage is being read all over the country.” A reviewer for the London Sketch (18 December 1895) found it “fascinating,” “almost diabolically clever,” “amazing—indeed, Zolaesque.” In the Pall Mall Gazette (26 November 1895), H. B. Marriott-Watson wrote: “Mr. Crane . . . has written a remarkable book. His insight and his power of realization amount to genius” (Wertheim and Sorrentino, pp. 152–157). The most sustained and penetrating analysis was written by George Wyndham for the New Review (January 1896). Wyndham was among the first to note Crane’s innovations in prose style and narrative method. Crane, he said, has hit on a new device. . . . In order to show the features of modern war, he takes a subject—a youth with a peculiar temperament, capable of exaltation and yet morbidly sensitive. Then he traces the successive impressions made on such a temperament, from minute to minute, during two days of heavy fighting. He stages the drama of war, so to speak, within the mind of one man, and then admits you as to a theatre.
Wyndham repeatedly compared Crane to Tolstoy and Zola and concluded: “Mr. Crane, as an artist, achieves by his singleness of purpose a truer and completer picture of war than either” (reprinted in Crane, The Red Badge of Courage, Norton Critical edition, pp. 175–182). A hot exchange was provoked by a letter written to the Dial, 16 April 1896, by Alexander C. McClurg, the magazine’s owner and a decorated hero of the Civil War. The Red Badge of Courage, McClurg wrote, “is a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies.” Henry Fleming “is an ignorant and stupid country lad [who] acts throughout like a madman. . . . [He] first rushes madly to the rear in a crazy panic, and afterwards plunges forward to the rescue of the colors under exactly the same influences,” McClurg complained. “Nowhere are seen the quiet, manly selfrespecting, and patriotic men, influenced by the highest sense of duty, who in reality fought our battles.” McClurg suggested that the novel was an expression of British anti-American prejudice. Replies to McClurg by Appleton and Sidney Brooks were printed in the Dial in May but were offset by a renewed burst of criticism by J. L. Onderdonk and by a letter in Harper’s Weekly by William M. Payne supporting McClurg’s attack on Crane’s “monstrous extravagance” (Wertheim and Sorrentino, pp. 179–184). INTERPRETATION
Most readers agree that The Red Badge of Courage is a masterpiece of social and psychological realism. Many readers also see it as a classic in the tradition of A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
naturalism. Others, by observing its painterly style, link it to impressionism. Still other readers find a mythic or philosophic subtext that lifts the novel above its historical context to a more universal level. The Red Badge of Courage may be read as a document in the social history of the Civil War. The novel is known to have been based on the battle of Chancellorsville. Harold Hungerford points out that the battle is mentioned explicitly in “The Veteran,” a short story that Crane published a year after The Red Badge of Courage, in which an older Henry Fleming says, “That was at Chancellorsville” (p. 223). Crane presumably studied the history of this campaign in the Century and interviewed veterans in order to develop an exact knowledge of the relevant historical background. The geography, troop movements, and details of battle scenes in the novel consistently correspond to actual events. Late in April 1863 the Union army massed at Falmouth, Virginia, then crossed the Rappahannock River, and attacked Confederates on 2 May. It was the first battle of the year and the first military action for many of the soldiers. Thus, Chancellorsville served as an apt framework for studying the responses of a raw recruit in his first battle. This campaign probably attracted Crane’s attention also because of its ironic nuances: after only two days it ended in a stalemate and was a humiliating defeat of Union troops under the inept Joseph Hooker, whose vastly superior manpower (two to one) was defeated through the ingenuity of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, commanders of the Confederate army. The Red Badge of Courage may also be read in the context of the 1890s—that is, as a reinterpretation of the Civil War as it was popularly understood when Crane wrote and published his novel. Similarly, cultural and political issues that were being played out at the end of the nineteenth century found their way metaphorically into The Red Badge of Courage. Images of violent class conflicts between workers and owners, the results of a modern industrialized machine, are obliquely depicted in Crane’s novel. As Amy Kaplan points out (in Mitchell’s New Essays), it also anticipates the Spanish-American War and the global wars of the twentieth century. Irony is often seen as the key to The Red Badge of Courage. Henry is the romantic dreamer: in fantasy he sees himself as a Homeric or chivalric hero, when in reality he is an ignorant farm boy and a self-centered antihero who becomes consumed with “wild battle madness.” Eric Solomon has concluded that Crane’s war novel is therefore a parody of traditional popular historical fiction. Other critics, notably William Bysshe Stein and Florence Leaver, argue that the novel should
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
961
THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE
be read ironically. To Stein, who draws a parallel to the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre, Henry Fleming is an absurdist hero. Leaver reads The Red Badge of Courage through the lens of David Reisman’s 1950 study The Lonely Crowd. She maintains that Fleming is a prototype of the “other-directed” outsider, emphatically not a Civil War hero. While most critics prefer the ironic approach to The Red Badge of Courage, they often debate the degrees of irony that can be found throughout the novel, especially in its ending. In the realm of mythic and archetypal interpretation, one name stands out: R. W. Stallman. In an introduction to the Modern Library edition (1951) of The Red Badge of Courage, Stallman reinterpreted the novel as a religious allegory, a timeless story of sin, suffering, and redemption. Stallman found religious symbolism throughout the novel, but most notably he located it in the death of Jim Conklin, Crane’s “intended” Christ figure. At the end of chapter 9, the blood-drenched, wafer-like sun symbolizes the crucified redeemer, and Fleming’s “spiritual rebirth begins” at this moment (pp. xxxiv–xxxv). For at least twenty years, Stallman was the center of a fierce academic debate, and he kept the issues alive by rewriting his interpretation six times. Finally he totally contradicted himself by arguing that Fleming is not spiritually saved; rather, the whole redemption myth is an intended irony: “Proud Henry . . . [thinking] that he is reborn . . . is self-deceived” (Stephen Crane, p. 175). With the decline of archetypal criticism, Stallman’s eccentric interpretation has virtually disappeared from hermeneutic discourse. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell provides a lens for another mythic reading of The Red Badge of Courage. Using Campbell’s model, John E. Hart sees Henry Fleming as a hero who passes through the successive stages of separation, initiation, and return. The dominance of brute instinct over reason, of environment over personal choice, and of natural processes over teleology—in short, naturalism, is another popular framework for reading The Red Badge of Courage. Some scholars, such as Lars Åhnebrink, have drawn parallels to European antecedents, principally Émile Zola. Others, such as Charles C. Walcutt, believe that with a close reading of the text one sees Henry moving lockstep from naive idealism to challenging circumstance and then to panic and flight. The often-cited “chapel” scene in The Red Badge of Courage illustrates this type of naturalism: Henry enters a verdant, quasi-religious enclosure where he faces a dead soldier, a corpse rotting and being eaten by black ants that seem surrealistically to pursue the
962
A M E R I C A N
terrified, fleeing recruit. Elsewhere, human beings are reduced to devils, barbarians, hell-roosters, wolves, and wildcats. Unlike Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, however, Crane does not interrupt the narrative flow to preach a naturalistic philosophy; he simply places his characters in a life-threatening environment and lets “nature” run its course. Distinct from naturalism, impressionism—a prose technique involving the interaction of light and color— offers an alternative context. Garland’s initial response to the manuscript indicates an early interest in this feature of Crane’s style, for “veritism”—Garland’s personal theory of realism—includes impressionism as a vital component. Harold Frederic noted the pictorial aspect of The Red Badge of Courage, and Joseph Conrad also stressed Crane’s impressionism. Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism (1980) by James Nagel is the fullest and most convincing discussion of this approach. The presentation of war as spectacle provides another context for reading The Red Badge of Courage. Battles are depicted as football games or other sporting events, circus parades, and theatrical tableaus. Bill Brown maintains that the entertainment industry, which expanded dramatically in the 1890s, seeped unconsciously into Crane’s works, where grotesque parallels are often drawn between violence and amusement. Lastly, Crane’s family background in the temperance movement provides still another context for understanding the novel. Both of Crane’s devout parents actively supported the relentless war against alcohol. Their writings on the subject, as well as the enormous body of temperance literature, must have been repeatedly brought to Crane’s attention during childhood. George Monteiro argues that the upturned faces of corpses on the battlefield, including the soldier that Fleming encounters in the green chapel, derive from temperance descriptions of ragged men lying dead drunk in the dirt and covered with bugs. The ravings of Jim Conklin in his death scene suggest the temperance accounts of delirium tremens. A review of the scholarship pertaining to The Red Badge of Courage, including the books by Brown and Monteiro, shows that Crane’s novel has evoked and continues to evoke fresh interpretations. If a test of a literary classic is its complexity and therefore its ability to generate multiple interpretations, then surely The Red Badge of Courage is a classic. See also Civil War Memoirs; Historical Romance; Impressionism; Naturalism; Realism
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REFORM
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Crane, Stephen. The Correspondence of Stephen Crane. Edited by Stanley Wertheim and Paul M. Sorrentino. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Nagel, James. Stephen Crane and Literary Impressionism. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980. Solomon, Eric. Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966.
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Edited by Donald Pizer. Norton Critical edition, 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1994.
Stallman, R. W. “Introduction.” In The Red Badge of Courage. Modern Library edition. New York: Random House, 1951.
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage. Edited by Fredson Bowers. In The Works of Stephen Crane, vol. 2. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.
Stallman, R. W. Stephen Crane: A Biography. New York: Braziller, 1968.
Crane, Stephen. Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry. Edited by J. C. Levenson. New York: Library of America, 1984. Crane, Stephen. “The Veteran.” McClure’s Magazine 7 (August 1896): 222–224. Secondary Works
Åhnebrink, Lars. The Beginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction. Uppsala, Sweden: American Institute of the University of Uppsala, 1950. Bassan, Maurice, ed. Stephen Crane: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
Stein, William Bysshe. “Stephen Crane’s Homo Absurdus.” Bucknell Review 8 (1959): 168–188. Walcutt, Charles C. American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. Weatherford, Richard M. Stephen Crane: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. Wertheim, Stanley, and Paul M. Sorrentino. The Crane Log: A Documentary Life of Stephen Crane, 1871–1900. New York: G. K. Hall, 1994. John Clendenning
Benfey, Christopher. The Double Life of Stephen Crane. New York: Knopf, 1992. Brown, Bill. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economics of Play. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Commemorative edition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Garland, Hamlin. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting, and the Drama. 1894. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960. Garland, Hamlin. Roadside Meetings. New York: Macmillan, 1930. Hart, John E. “The Red Badge of Courage as Myth and Symbol.” University of Kansas City Review 19 (1953): 249–256. Hungerford, Harold R. “‘That Was at Chancellorsville’: The Factual Framework for The Red Badge of Courage.” American Literature 34 (1963): 520–531. Leaver, Florence. “Isolation in the Work of Stephen Crane.” South Atlantic Quarterly 61 (1962): 521–532. Linson, Corwin Knapp. “Little Stories of ‘Steve’ Crane.” Saturday Evening Post, 11 April 1903, pp. 19–20. Mitchell, Lee Clark. New Essays on “The Red Badge of Courage.” Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Includes Hershel Parker, “Getting Used to the ‘Original Form’ of The Red Badge of Courage,” pp. 25–47; and Amy Kaplan, “The Spectacle of War in Crane’s Revision of History,” pp. 77–108. Monteiro, George. Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000.
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
REFORM Throughout the fifty-year span from 1870 to 1920, American authors sought increasingly to link their writing to the mission of social reform. For many members of the literary generation that came of age during the 1860s, the carnage of civil war created a crisis in representation, in which forms of literature that were popular before the war now seemed increasingly evasive and banal. To better link writing more directly to emerging social realities, a coterie of younger authors embraced the techniques of literary realism developed by European authors in the first half of the nineteenth century. A literature of the real, they argued, would shake popular American writing out of its tendency toward escapism and would reorient the audiences that dominated the antebellum literary marketplace. One was the audience of women readers who frequently favored writing that the realists found melodramatic, sentimental, and out of touch. Another was the growing genteel middle-class readership that equated literature with a sense of refinement and decorum, seeking to isolate itself from the gritty realities of American life. Literary realism, this new generation argued, would embrace this grittiness—and by so doing alter the goals of American writing. By representing the realities of poverty (rural and urban), prejudice (racial and ethnic), and financial malfeasance (municipal and corporate), these writers sought to elevate their role within American society. Not only
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
963
REFORM
IMPORTANT DATES FOR REFORM, 1870–1920 1870: John D. Rockefeller founds the Standard Oil
1900: Theodore Dreiser publishes Sister Carrie
Company
Frank Norris publishes The Octopus
1873: Financial panic of 1873
1902: Ida Tarbell publishes The History of the
1874: Tompkins Square Labor Riot in New York
Standard Oil Company
1877: Federal and state troops crush nationwide rail-
Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle
road strike 1879: Henry George publishes Progress and Poverty
Lincoln Steffens publishes The Shame of the Cities
1882: Thirty thousand workers march in the first
W. E. B. Du Bois publishes The Souls of Black Folk
Labor Day parade in New York City
1903: Department of Commerce and Labor created
by Congress
1884: William Dean Howells publishes The Rise of
Silas Lapham
1905: Industrial Workers of the World founded in
Chicago
1886: In Chicago 350,000 workers demonstrate for
the eight-hour workday
1906: Upton Sinclair publishes The Jungle
1887: Seven anarchists sentenced to death for the
1909: National Association for the Advancement of
Haymarket bombing
Colored People founded
1888: Edward Bellamy publishes Looking Backward
1910: Jane Addams publishes Twenty Years at Hull-
House
1889: Jane Addams opens Hull-House 1890: William Dean Howells publishes A Hazard of
1911: Fire kills 146 workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist
New Fortunes
Factory in New York City
Jacob Riis publishes How the Other Half Lives 1891: People’s (Populist) Party formed
1913: U.S. Department of Labor established 1915: Van Wyck Brooks publishes America’s Coming-
of-Age
Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel strike Hamlin Garland publishes Main-Travelled Roads
1916: Congress passes Federal Child Labor Law
Eight-hour day becomes federal law
1893: Depression begins
Stephen Crane publishes Maggie, A Girl of the Streets
1917: United States enters World War I
Abraham Cahan publishes The Rise of David Levinsky
1894: Coxey’s Army of the unemployed marches on
Washington, D.C.
1919: Postwar strikes sweep across the nation
Labor Day becomes an official U.S. holiday
Communist Party of America founded
would they instruct, entertain, and sell through their writing, but they would also impel social action and political reform. THE ARRIVAL OF REALISM
Edward Eggleston (1837–1902), one of the more popular American writers of the 1870s, articulated as well as any member of his generation the desire to use postwar writing as a vehicle for social change. Reflecting in 1892 on his forty-year career as an author, minister, and social activist, Eggleston wrote: “Two manner of men were born in me, and for the greater part of my life there has been an enduring
964
A M E R I C A N
struggle between the lover of literary art and the religionist, the reformer, the philanthropist, the man with a mission.” The link Eggleston draws between religion and social reform is instructive. American literary realists were often people of deep faith who sought to reproduce in postwar America the altruistic “Christian capitalism” they associated with their antebellum youths. They often combined this desire with an urge to re-create the moral universe (a universe more often imagined than real) of prewar republicanism—the idealized values of personal and local autonomy, civic participation, and moderation in economic and civic affairs. Not all realists shared this vision of
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REFORM
reform, nor for that matter did they share the desire to reform society at all. Some, such as Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Henry James, were indifferent, skeptical, or contemptuous of the reformist impulse. But others, such as William Dean Howells and Hamlin Garland, consistently claimed that writers had an ethical duty to confront social reality, particularly the turbulent forms of industrial capitalism emerging throughout the period. They felt their mission as writers was both aesthetic and social. On the one hand, they sought to elevate American writing to “art,” and on the other, they desired to propel their readers toward active, participatory citizenship. “Realistic” accounts of American life, they argued, would revivify sentiments for the equitable system of economic and social relations they believed were passing from everyday American life. Once again, Eggleston said it as well as anyone: he insisted that this new American writing should represent “facts bearing on the subtle principles of social development” (“Social Science at the West,” p. 4). Postwar writing, he continued, should chronicle the “very unformed and plastic state of society,” so that “the principles of its development shall be understood [and] remedies for its evils shall be known and applied” (“Western Correspondence,” p. 4). Henry George (1839–1897) is a central figure for both American reform and American writing in the late nineteenth century. An occasional neighbor of Howells, and much admired by him and Garland, George shared with them a desire to maintain a system of values and virtues they saw corrupted by commercial capitalism’s ability to amass and concentrate extraordinary wealth into the hands of the few. George’s influence can be seen throughout the fiction of the period, but is perhaps most vividly invoked in Eggleston’s Mystery of Metropolisville (1873). In its desire to unravel the mysterious economic processes at work in Gilded Age America, the novel functions as a companion piece to George’s Progress and Poverty (1879), one of the most influential books of the period. Like George, Eggleston saw in the speculation and “concentration” of land major causes of the growing inequalities within American life. The story concerns corrupt land speculators in a small Minnesota town, which, as the title of the novel suggests, is being absorbed into the metropolitan system of commercial capitalism making inroads throughout the period into the hinterlands. After the Civil War, speculative financial panics, which were once localized and thus minimally disruptive, tended to intensify and cascade throughout the increasingly interconnected national economic matrix. These economic disruptions lead to the further consolidation of previously semiautonomous local economies as A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
smaller localized producers were unable to maintain their market position against larger, more efficient, national firms. In the aftermath of war, an economy of scale emerged that was literally unimaginable to most Americans ten years earlier. Through speculation and industrial consolidation, enormous personal fortunes and new economic entities—trusts, corporations, combinations—began to control the national economy. George was one of the most forceful and influential critics of the emerging order. He wrote in a vocabulary that resonated with the prewar memories through which many members of the postwar generation processed the extraordinary and often inexplicable changes reshaping American life in the 1870s. His solution for economic problems was a “single tax” on land used for speculation rather than homesteading. George surmised that a heavily progressive tax on speculative land purchases would restore order and a human scale to the economy. George’s call for a single tax was unrealistic politically and economically (Karl Marx called him a “panacea monger”), yet as much as any literary realist, he articulated the aesthetic credo at the very heart of realistic reform. Consider, for example, this passage from George’s “Our Land and Land Policy” an essay from 1872 that anticipated the main arguments of Progress and Poverty, published seven years later: When the monopolization of land is not permitted, where a man can only take land which he wants to use, unused land can have no value, at least none above the price fixed by the state for the privilege of occupying it. But as land becomes occupied, most of it would acquire a value either from the possession of natural advantages superior to that still unoccupied, or from its more central position as respects the population. This we may call the necessary or real value of land, in contradistinction to the unnecessary or fictitious value of land which results from monopolization. (P. 35)
George’s setting of real value against fictitious value captures an issue at the heart of realistic literary reform. The realists knew, of course, that they were writing fiction, but it was a fiction that alluded constantly, almost compulsively, to its grounding in the “real.” It rarely interrogated the idea of the “real” as the product of a particular cultural point of view, a social construct, so to speak, that could possibly have different valences depending on the class, ethnicity, or gender of the observer. This considerable blind spot aside, George’s sense of real value touches upon the tendency among literary reformers to condemn a set of postwar cultural values many of them considered false and misguided. The issue of land proved an effective
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
965
REFORM
means through which to discuss questions of cultural value, providing a vocabulary of sorts through which Americans of the 1870s and 1880s debated the future of their society. THE REVOLT OF THE PROVINCES
In spite of the ascendancy of industrialization, Gilded Age America remained predominantly an agrarian nation. The promise of accessible land resonated deeply within the Jeffersonian-Lincolnian vision of a moral social economy comprised of small agrarian shareholders. But this was also an economy increasingly overwhelmed by the forces of rapacious overaccumulation, fueled particularly by railroads and the postwar settlement of the Far West, where monopolistic ownership of land provided greater economic efficiency than the more egalitarian settlement patterns of the older Midwest. Monopolistic land ownership, frequently by the railroads, allowed carriers to fix rates for shipping goods to market, usually to the detriment of the small farmer, and gave rise to one of the most powerful reform movements in American history— populism. Populism produced a number of literary works, the most noteworthy being Ignatius Donnelly’s dystopian novel Caesar’s Column (1890). The stranglehold railroads held over rural societies aroused populist—and popular—outrage throughout the Gilded Age, receiving its most in-depth literary treatment in Frank Norris’s (1870–1902) California novel The Octopus (1901). Although not usually viewed as an example of local color writing, The Octopus draws upon a major impulse within regionalist writing that prevailed within American literature for four decades after the Civil War. Widely divergent in scope and intention, both local color and regionalist writing often focused on the symbolic force of land—and communities based on landed economies—as besieged vestiges of “authentic” cultural values. Though local color writing could be ineffectual nostalgia, at its most powerful it used accounts of rural space to critique the “fictitious” values of corporate consolidation and commercial capitalism emanating from the metropolis. This is certainly true of Eggleston’s Mystery of Metropolisville but also of the work of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland—and at times even Mark Twain. GENTEEL SOCIALISM
William Dean Howells, Twain’s friend and champion, took some of the most thoughtful and courageous political positions assumed by mainstream writers throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Near the end of his career, Howells’s reputation suffered at the hands of a new generation of writers and critics led by
966
A M E R I C A N
H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, who resented his generation-long hold upon American letters. Their critique of his work was haphazard, and tended to harp upon an essay he wrote in 1886 in which he observed that American novelists “concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American” (“Editor’s Study,” p. 642). Yet in his own novels and social practice, Howells was quick to confront many aspects of American life he found increasingly disturbing, although to many of his later critics he tended do so in a register that was overly tame. Nonetheless, few novelists of the era articulated as clearly and consistently as Howells the idea that the drive toward economic expansion and accumulation had led post–Civil War middle- and upper-class Americans to replace civic and religious responsibility with the pursuit of personal gain. The corruption of middle-class values was a central theme of Howells’s most successful novels: The Minister’s Charge (1887), The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). It also informed his utopian tract, A Traveller from Altruria (1892). Howells also displayed extraordinary personal integrity and courage when he bucked popular middle-class and elite opinion by defending the group of immigrant anarchists falsely convicted of inciting the Haymarket labor riot in 1886, which left eight Chicago policemen dead. Howells’s public defense of the anarchists marked a quickening in the relationship between writers and reformist politics unknown in America since the days of abolitionism. By the late 1880s, tensions between labor and capital had reached unprecedented levels, with many Americans imagining a new civil war based on class rather than race and geopolitics. The tension over class and industrialization shaped Howells’s most mature work and also explains the reception of the most popular novel of the postwar period, Edward Bellamy’s utopian story Looking Backward (1888). Bellamy’s novel of a future society that had solved the problems of the present provided comfort to a population increasingly haunted by strikes, labor violence, and the growth of urban poverty. Told from the imaginative vantage point of the late twentieth century, Looking Backward offered in prescient detail the promise of a future industrial utopia in which the “shocking social consequences” of “the modern industrial system” were solved through a combination of statist planning and spirituality (p. 93). Bellamy called this solution nationalism, a civic and emotional force fueled by an almost mystical sense of social comity he termed the “the religion of solidarity.” Remarkable in its own right for its anticipation of many of the social and material technologies of modernist America
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REFORM
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 was the most popular American book of the second half of the nineteenth century. Bellamy’s vision of a future industrial utopia clashed with the everyday realities of his contemporaries, who feared that industrialism was producing a social cataclysm, pitting rich against poor, capital against labor.
Living as we do in the closing year of the twentieth century, enjoying the blessings of a social order at once so simple and logical that it seems but the triumph of common sense, it is no doubt difficult for those whose studies have not been largely historical to realize that the present organization of society is, in its completeness, less than a century old. No historical fact is, however, better established than that till nearly the end of the nineteenth century it was the general belief that the ancient industrial system, with all its shocking social consequences, was destined to last, with possibly a little patching, to the end of time. How strange and wellnigh incredible does it seem that so prodigious a moral and material transformation as has taken place since then could have been accomplished in so brief an interval! The readiness with which men accustom themselves, as matters of course, to improvements in their condition, which, when anticipated, seemed to leave nothing more to be desired, could not be more strikingly illustrated. What reflection could be better calculated to moderate the enthusiasm of reformers who count for their reward on the lively gratitude of future ages! Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000–1887.
(and, in some ways, fascism), Looking Backward was also remarkable for another reason: it was one of the few novels in American history to initiate a political movement. Acting on the phenomenal success of the novel, Bellamy and his readers (who now became followers and converts) established the Nationalist magazine and nationalist clubs, which sprang up throughout the country. The magazine and the clubs championed a social vision that was to form the basis of the modernist liberal state: centralized planning and statist mechanisms for wealth redistribution, desires that fueled both the rise of progressivism in the early twentieth A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
century and the New Deal of the 1930s. The nationalist clubs and magazine were, in fact, part of a larger cultural movement through which writers, cultural critics, and social reformers assumed active roles in political life. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, writers engaged in the Social Gospel movement, Christian socialism, populism, and the settlement house movements produced an array of fiction and nonfiction works that imagined a society based on principles of religious altruism, social equality, and shared wealth, most prominently Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). Another major figure in this movement was the Boston-based socialist B. O. Flower (1858–1918), one of Hamlin Garland’s earliest mentors. Flower’s journal the Arena became one of the leading literary and political organs for reformist and at times radical politics. He understood the uses of literature in making his case for social reform, and he urged Garland to explore through his short stories the social contours of contemporary American life. Many of the chapters of Garland’s Main-Travelled Roads (1891) first appeared in the Arena. Arena clubs also appeared around the country, fostering Flower’s brand of socialist reform and like Bellamy’s nationalist clubs paving the way for progressivism, which was less radical but deeply informed by the visions of Flower and Bellamy. PROGRESSIVE LITERARY REFORM
By the 1890s the tradition of literary reform established after the Civil War—and intensified by the breakdown of labor-capital relations throughout the 1880s—experienced a “second wave,” as a new generation of writers (novelists, journalists, social critics) began to emerge who would prove enormously influential in fueling progressive reform in the early twentieth century. From a purely literary standpoint, first and foremost among them was Stephen Crane, whose short novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) provided a “stylistic leap” that marked a major turning point in the history of American representation, popular taste, and political reform. Although far more interested in aesthetics than social change, Crane influenced a coterie of Progressive Era novelists whose interest in reform went far deeper than his own. Crane’s work affected the writing of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), whose novel of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle, provided one of the most explicit and politically influential exposés of the abusive labor practices of the period. Sinclair later ran unsuccessfully as a Socialist for governor of California. Crane also influenced the muckrakers, journalists such as Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Jacob Riis, whose exposés of corporate corruption and
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
967
REFORM
urban mismanagement created the new field of investigative journalism, and in Riis’s case, investigative photojournalism. The shift in representation that occurred in the 1890s was part of a larger moment of change within the decade. The historian Paul Boyer has noted that in the 1890s a major transformation occurred in the way many Americans viewed reform. Previously, many citizens adhered to a strictly individualist religious model he calls “coercive reform.” Coercive reform held people fully responsible for their problems and actions, denying the role that social forces might play in an individual’s success or failure. Churches and missionary societies following this model sought to coerce “sinners” to change their lives by changing their behavior—by developing the “character” to reform themselves, which in the Christian vocabulary of coercive reform meant accepting Jesus into their lives. However, to some members of a younger generation of reform-minded writers, many of whom were raised in the church, this model seemed increasingly ineffective against mounting systemic urban social ills. In response, they developed a new model— environmental reform—which argued that in order to change behavior, society needed to change the circumstances in which people lived. Churches would still play a role in reform activities, but duties previously assumed by the church would shift, following Bellamy’s argument in Looking Backward, to a much larger, more effective instrument of social change: the national, secular state. Instead of concerning itself with individual moral degradation, the state (and a good deal of literary realism) would focus on the degraded environments inhabited by both the urban and rural poor. This attitude was a cornerstone of progressive political and literary reform, and although earlier intimations of it could be found in state-run charity boards that began to appear in the 1870s, it was only in the 1890s that this model came to dominate national reformist thinking. By the first decade of the twentieth century, environmental reform and statism began to take hold. During the Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations, the federal government passed hundreds of laws regulating business and commerce. This transfer of cultural authority from the churches to the state was neither sudden nor absolute but rather part of a larger cultural shift that sought to combine in the spirit of Bellamy’s Looking Backward a sense of national consensus built upon a secular “religion of solidarity.” The Social Gospel movement of the 1890s and the rise of Christian socialism were complementary movements to progressivism. All three drew upon values derived from religious sentiments and sought to use government as a vehicle for applying these values to social reform. Influenced by the work
968
A M E R I C A N
of Tolstoy, Howells, for example, identified himself as a Christian socialist and understood his novels to be something more than literature: they were part of a larger political movement for social justice. At the same time, the Social Gospel movement around the turn of the century produced a spate of novels and tracts, the most influential among them Charles Sheldon’s enormously popular work In His Steps (1896), which asked readers to consider contemporary social inequalities as spiritual and religious dilemmas. Sheldon’s work presented familiar social problems to its readers and asked them to consider a question that for many of them was both compelling and timely: “What would Jesus do?” A pairing of texts from the 1890s uncannily chronicles the tensions and transitions within literary reform (both secular and religious) during this period: Crane’s Maggie and an obscure text published two years later, The Story about “Meg,” a vignette concerning “Meg of the street” that appeared in Reverend T. De Witt Talmage’s (1832–1902) book Evils of the Cities (1892). Similar in title and subject, the stories are radically different in presentation, and together they highlight the multifaceted nature of reform and representation in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Crane’s short novel was influential and innovative, whereas Talmage’s work was popular and prosaic, a literary dead end. Yet both stood at the crossroads of reformist sensibilities and demonstrate the transition between coercive and environmental reform Boyer has in mind. Like Crane’s Maggie, Talmage’s Meg becomes a “lost wanderer of the street” (p. 270), a young woman overwhelmed by the attractions of the urban world, easily seduced by the promise the city holds for her. Crane’s Maggie dwells in a Darwinian social universe at once harshly cruel and indifferent to human longing; Talmage’s Meg lives in a tragic world of individual suffering, yet one guided by spiritual transcendence and redemption. In Maggie, Crane creates another kind of world, pioneering the genre of literary naturalism, an offshoot of realism in which social forces dominate the action of the novel, becoming in effect the driving force of plot and character. Maggie’s world is an urban world of grinding poverty, alcoholism, violence, degraded labor, lust, and unbridled desire, forces that consistently trump the individual’s ability to triumph over misery and despair. It is a bleak world lacking in moral or spiritual transcendence. For Talmage, on the other hand, social forces seem to exist hardly at all; it is not as if they are entirely absent from the story of Meg, but they are presented with a startling lack of detail, all but reducing Meg to a stock figure in a timeworn morality play. There is nothing real or natural about her. In
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REFORM
Meg’s world, an ossified sense of moral certitude prevails; the reader gets no sense of her motivations or psychology, no sense of her relation to the social universe she inhabits. In this world, abstract selves simply choose to succeed or fail through wise or poor choices; it is a world in which death always has a higher meaning and a moral lesson attached to it. It is a worldview increasingly at odds with progressive reform and literary realism, but one that many reform-minded Americans still held to fastly and devoutly. Scorned by her family, Crane’s Maggie dies a fallen woman, a prostitute who wanders off into the darkness of the New York Harbor to meet death without redemption. Talmage’s Meg dies a saved woman, redeemed by her family and by “a pardoning Jesus” who takes “back one whom the world rejected” (p. 272). Crane initiated a form of stark, detailed, militantly antisentimental literary representation that would prove useful, indeed necessary, for mainstream political writers and reformers. Yet arguably, at the century’s turn the most significant relation between writing and reform occurred within subaltern populations: blacks, immigrants, and women, who often found themselves the objects of mainstream white male realist representation, but who had little political or cultural power to represent themselves outside of dominant literary conventions. For example, Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) moved the African American literary tradition to new ground. Drawing upon the slave narrative tradition, they moved black writing beyond it, issuing powerful cultural critiques of race relations within black culture and between whites and blacks. Additionally, white women, many of whom pointedly felt their second class status even as members of the white cultural elite, used fiction to plot positions of feminist resistance to patriarchal power: for example, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1899) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). And immigrant writers such as Anzia Yezierska, Mary Antin, and Abraham Cahan detailed the lives of ethnic minorities from a position far more politically informed—and politically charged—than Crane’s rendering of Maggie, which is at once sympathetic and contemptuous. RACE AND RECOIL
Within this upsurge in turn-of-the-century subaltern writing, the most significant and far reaching work was W. E. B. Du Bois’s magisterial The Souls of Black Folk (1902). Deeply embroiled in the politics of contemporary African American life, Du Bois (1868–1963) was the first African American to receive a PhD from Harvard. A sociologist by training, Du Bois felt A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
powerfully the burden of living and being between cultures. Central to this feeling is Du Bois’s complex and slippery concept of double consciousness, one of the most significant rhetorical constructs of the twentieth century, with implications for psychology, anthropology, sociology, literary modernism, and later in the century, postcolonialism. “It is a peculiar sensation, this doubleconsciousness,” Du Bois wrote in understated fashion: This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (P. 3)
Double consciousness, Du Bois argued, was both a gift and a curse. On the one hand, it internalized the racist gaze of the dominant white culture and required African Americans to see themselves as constant objects of racial scrutiny. On the other hand, it gave African Americans an ability to see white culture more clearly than did whites themselves; it gave them insights into the workings of white dominance to which whites were often indifferent or oblivious. It was simultaneously a form of painful self-scrutiny and powerful social critique. Indeed, Du Bois’s writing was both deeply personal and deeply political and was meant first and foremost to serve as a vehicle for social transformation. In 1909 along with the black activist Ida Wells-Barnett, the white publisher of the Nation, Oswald Garrison Villard, and a group of other advocates for racial justice, Du Bois played a key role in founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the more significant American reform organizations of the twentieth century. Van Wyck Brooks’s essay America’s Coming-ofAge (1915) provides a useful end point for plotting the entanglement of literature and reform that marked the period between the Civil War and World War I. The period of war and Wilsonian internationalism that accompanied it marked a redirection of progressive energies that left many older writers and reformers fatigued, disillusioned, or at loose ends. Brooks (1886– 1963) pioneers in this cultural manifesto a new social role that was soon to become a commonplace: the cultural critic who uses the American literary tradition as a means for waging debates about contemporary American life. Through his critiques of American life, Brooks sought what he called “a usable past,” a sense of a shared cultural tradition that might enrich and direct social energies more productively and profoundly than social reform movements. “Movements of Reform,” Brooks argued, are “external” and “superficial.” “The
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
969
REFORM
impetus of reform,” he added “is evidently derived from the hope that a sufficient number of reformers can be trained and brought into the field to match the forces of business—the one group canceling the other group. The ideal of reform, in short, is the attainment of zero” (p. 30). Redirecting the energies of the public reform movements that began with Reconstruction and later fueled progressivism, Brooks argued that the only serious approach to society is the personal approach, and that more than economic justice or social equality, what “the majority of Americans” need is “an object of living,” a shared sense of individual and national purpose (p. 34). In a retreat from two decades of activist social reform, Brooks claims that “the center of gravity in American affairs has shifted wholly from the plane of politics to the plane of psychology and morals.” “So long as we fail to realize this,” he adds, “politics can only continue to the old endless unfruitful seesaw of corruption and reform” (p. 168). Like Ralph Waldo Emerson almost one hundred years earlier, Brooks chose self-help over social action. In terms of literature, the search for self-fulfillment that Brooks championed led many of the best American authors of the 1920s to leave America—and led them to produce in a short span of time the finest collection of American writing since the 1850s. Yet this writing had little consequence for American political life. And when Americans did produce a politically powerful literature, Brooks seemed unable to see it. He missed entirely the work toward racial justice—“an object for living” if ever there was one—that produced the Harlem Renaissance. For most of the citizens and writers he had in mind, the decade-long depression that began in 1929 redirected energies away from a counterfeit form of selffulfillment—Jazz Age hedonism—and toward the “catchpenny realities” of economic deprivation (p. 7). The Great Depression led many writers back to politics and reform and in many cases took them even further into political radicalism. Indeed, the momentary breakdown of global capitalism led many writers during the depression toward socialism, communism, and antifascism. In charting new political territory, these writers tended to disavow the generation of mainstream literary reformers who came before them—and on whose books they were raised. Yet it was these generations—the generations from 1870 to 1920—that, in fact, created part of the “usable past” for which Brooks longed. It was a guiding tradition for the ways in which literary reformers and the literature of reform might begin the work of creating a new kind of reader-citizen, one who would equate the personal with the political and come to see that self-realization and social justice are inseparable goals.
970
A M E R I C A N
See also The Jungle; Jurisprudence; Muckrakers and Yellow Journalism; Poverty; Presidential Elections; The Souls of Black Folk; Temperance; Women’s Suffrage BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Addams, Jane. Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes. New York: Macmillan, 1910. Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. 1888. Edited by John L. Thomas. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967. Bellamy, Edward. The Religion of Solidarity. Edited by Arthur E. Morgan. Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Bookplate, 1940. Brooks, Van Wyck. America’s Coming of Age. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell. The Marrow of Tradition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901. Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Chicago: H. S. Stone, 1899. Crane, Stephen. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets. New York: Appleton, 1896. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903. Eggleston, Edward. The Mystery of Metropolisville. New York: O. Judd, 1873. Eggleston, Edward. “Social Science at the West.” Independent, 7 May 1868, p. 4. Eggleston, Edward. “Western Correspondence.” Independent, 25 December 1968, p. 4. Garland, Hamlin. Main-Travelled Roads: Six Mississippi Valley Stories. Boston: Arena, 1891. George, Henry. Our Land and Land Policy. San Francisco: White and Bauer, 1871. George, Henry. Progress and Poverty: An Enquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth—the Remedy. San Francisco: H. George, 1879. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Yellow Wall-Paper. Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899. Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. Boston: Colored Cooperative Publishing Company, 1900. Howells, William Dean. “Editor’s Study: Dostoyevsky and the More Smiling Aspects of Life.” Harper’s Weekly 73 (1886): 642. Howells, William Dean. A Hazard of New Fortunes. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1890. Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. New York: Scribners, 1890.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR FICTION
Steffens, Lincoln. The Shame of the Cities. New York: Peter Smith, 1901. Talmage, T. De Witt. Evils of the Cities. Chicago: Rhodes and McClure, 1891. Tarbell, Ida. The History of the Standard Oil Company. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904. Secondary Works
Boyer, Paul. Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Dombroski, James. The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America. New York: Octagon Books, 1977. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. May, Henry F. Protestant Churches and Industrial America. New York: Harper, 1949. Pizer, Donald, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: From Howells to London. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Thomas, John L. Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demerest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1983. Wiebe, Robert. The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. Bruce Levy
REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR FICTION The terms “regionalism” and “local color fiction” refer to a literary movement that flourished from the close of the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century. Although most fiction is regional in that it makes use of a specific setting, for regionalist writers the setting was not incidental but central, and the “local color” details that established that setting gave a name to the movement. In writing regional fiction, authors focused on representing the unique locales of what they saw as a vanishing American past whose customs, dialect, and characters they sought to preserve. Furthermore, as writers of a continuing national narrative implicitly focused on what it meant to be American, they often presented characters as types, sometimes as representatives of the collective traits of a community or region and sometimes as outsiders or eccentrics whose attempts to fit into a community exposed both the community’s values and their own. In addition to this emphasis on setting and its effect upon character, local color stories feature dialect that lends authenticity to the tale. Another element A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
common to local color fiction is a degree of narrative distance rendered through the character of a narrator differing in class or place of origin from the region’s residents; a variation on this is a narrative voice distanced through educated diction or an ironic tone. In the late nineteenth century, local color fiction appeared in the great literary journals of the day such as Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the Century, and the Atlantic Monthly as well as in newspapers and popular magazines, as Nancy Glazener, Richard Brodhead, and Charles Johanningsmeier have shown. It differed from mainstream realism in its choice of local or rural instead of urban subjects and its interest in the customs of populations otherwise invisible in the literary landscape, such as the poor, ethnic minorities, and the elderly; moreover, unlike mainstream realism, the market for local color encouraged writers who might otherwise find difficulty publishing their work because of gender, geography, class, or ethnicity. Describing a locale, a time, and a set of characters removed from the concerns of city dwellers who read high-culture journals, local color stories provided an imagined space containing the roots of the nation, a site of unchanging values and authentic traditions against which to view the uncertainties of industrial urban life. Such a perspective later led to claims that regionalism was too limited in its subjects and too nostalgic or sentimental in its approach, charges that contributed to its disappearance early in the twentieth century. Twentiethcentury critics saw local color fiction as a marginal offshoot of mainstream realism, with women’s regional fiction a “literature of impoverishment,” in Ann Douglas Wood’s words, that lacked the aesthetic sophistication of modernist works, the vigor of writing by male social realists, and even the rich detail of domestic fiction written in the 1850s and 1860s. Some commentators have challenged both the denunciation of local color fiction and the conditions of its literary revival. Like realism, local color fiction now seems a significant staging-ground for late-nineteenth-century debates over citizenship and nationhood, although the criteria for establishing that significance have shifted. For example, beginning in the 1970s feminist critics such as Josephine Donovan, Marjorie Pryse, and Judith Fetterley found in the form a vibrant celebration of community that resisted the Gilded Age’s preoccupation with national wealth and industrial power, whereas twenty years later Sandra Zagarell, Susan Gillman, and Elizabeth Ammons denounced its promotion of racist, nationalist, and imperialist ideologies and, by virtue of its celebration of community, its strategies for resisting social change and reinforcing an oppressive status quo. Opinions also differ as to the whether the focus on region that
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
971
REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR FICTION
provided access to publishing markets for populations for women and ethnic minorities was an unmixed blessing, for as James Cox notes, the local colorists’ “region was a refuge for imaginative expression, yet it was also the enclosure that kept them in their place” (p. 767). As Tom Lutz sums up the controversies in Cosmopolitan Vistas:
Most central, however, as Lutz suggests, is the issue of whether local color exploits the region as a site for cultural tourism, as Richard Brodhead and Amy Kaplan contend, or whether this exploitation occurs only in certain kinds of fiction. In Writing Out of Place, for example, Fetterley and Pryse differentiate “local color” from “regionalist” fiction: “local color” writing exploits regional materials for the benefit of an urban elite, but “regionalist” fiction, with its sympathetic approach, does not. With the exception of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932), Fetterley and Pryse see regionalism as a woman’s genre. Any account of local color’s origins, rise, and fall can therefore present only a partial view of the ways in which local color fiction was received and interpreted by its nineteenth-century audiences. At issue is the very nature of the “cultural work” that local color performed: Did it rebuild and unite a nation fractured by the Civil War? Or did it create a false narrative of national origins that conspired to suppress the clamoring of immigrants, people of color, and the poor for political and cultural power?
literary tastes. The Civil War had made the regions all too aware of one another as their inhabitants traveled to, or experienced vicariously through letters and newspapers, areas of the country that now had names and significance even for remote villages. Unsettled by rapidly changing technologies, such as the railroad and the telegraph, by the increasing racial and ethnic diversity fed by successive waves of immigration and internal migration, and by crumbling class structures and uncertain social mobility, the middle-class reading public looked toward an imagined past located in the very regions which many of them had abandoned for an urban existence. According to Amy Kaplan, this imaginary harmonious past is a “Janus-faced nostalgia” through which readers in an industrial present project images of their desire for a simpler time onto the past as represented by a region (p. 242). Stephanie Foote sees a further paradox in the construction of regionalism in that its narrative techniques, such as dialect, run counter to its program of reinforcing harmony and sameness; however, the speech of rural, uneducated characters also preserves a comfortable distance from standard English, with dialect exotic enough to be fresh and interesting without evoking the accents of immigrants or the urban poor. Yet to imagine the local color landscape as a placid escape from modern life is to ignore the problems that the writers depict. Local color settings may differ from one another, but the problems are universal, such as the threat of violence and child abuse, as in Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s (1852–1930) Pembroke (1894) and “Old Woman Magoun” (1905); the desperate straits of the elderly poor, as in Sarah Orne Jewett’s (1849–1909) “The Town Poor” (1890) and Freeman’s “A Church Mouse” (1891); the abuses of the mill system, as in Jewett’s “The Gray Mills of Farley” (1898); and the injustices of the banking system in Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw” (1891).
ORIGINS
REGIONS
Even before the Civil War, types of local color fiction such as regional humor and frontier tales had found favor with the public. Among the most prominent examples of regional humor were the stories of the southwestern humorists, vivid tales of characters such as Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Ransy Sniffle (Georgia Scenes, 1835), George Washington Harris’s Sut Lovingood (collected as Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool,” 1867), and Johnson Jones Hooper’s Simon Suggs (Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers, 1845). The great wave of local color stories that began appearing in literary magazines during the late 1860s owed as much to historical and cultural forces as to
New England writers were among the earliest to appear in “Atlantic group” magazines; for example, Rose Terry Cooke’s (1827–1892) “Sally Parson’s Duty” was one of the stories published in the inaugural issue of the Atlantic Monthly in November 1857, and her stories and poetry appeared regularly in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Scribner’s Magazine, and the New England Magazine until shortly before her death in 1892. Although Cooke’s poetry was regular in meter and often conventional in sentiment, her fiction depicted a New England in which a decayed Puritan self-righteousness led to stunted emotional lives; more tellingly, Cooke’s characters suffer physical cruelty and domestic abuse, too, as in “The Ring Fetter: A New
There are many other debates in the history of criticism . . . having to do with local color’s “minor status” (pro and con), the genre’s relation to gender (it’s women’s province; no, it isn’t), to ethnic literature (ethnic lit is also local color; no, it’s something else), to political progressivism (local color is fer it; no, it’s agin it), to realism (it is a degraded popular offshoot, it is where true realism begins and develops), and to regional identity. (P. 26)
972
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR FICTION
England Tragedy” (1859) and “Freedom Wheeler’s Controversy with Providence” (1877). Other major writers of New England local color fiction include Celia Thaxter (1835–1894), Alice Brown (1857– 1948), Philander Deming (1829–1915), Rowland Robinson (1833–1900), Jewett, and Freeman. Invoking Herman Melville’s sketches of the Encantadas as a touchstone for her work, Celia Thaxter described the terrain of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire in a series of essays for the Atlantic Monthly in 1879 and 1880, also publishing poetry and a late work, An Island Garden (1894), before her death the same year. Alice Brown wrote of the fictional New Hampshire village of Tiverton in Meadow Grass (1886) and Tiverton Tales (1899). Brown’s work illustrates what Glazener, Ann Romines, and others see as a common feature of women’s regional fiction: a vision of the domestic sphere as “unapologetically dedicated to women’s pleasure in homemaking and friendship” (Glazener, p. 225). Turning to the wilderness as well as the village as a subject, Philander Deming wrote spare stories of the mountain regions of New York state in Adirondack Stories (1880) and Tompkins, and Other Folks (1885) while Rowland E. Robinson’s sketches and stories of Vermont included essays on rural industries such as sugar-making and marble-quarrying as well as tales of the imaginary town of Danvis. Among the most critically esteemed of the New England local colorists were Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary E. Wilkins (later Freeman). Considered by Willa Cather (1873–1947) to be one of the three masterpieces of American literature, Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in four parts from January through September 1896 and contains several features of New England women’s local color fiction. Its unnamed urban narrator moves for the summer to the small, coastal village of Dunnet Landing and becomes the friend and disciple of Mrs. Todd, an herbalist and symbolically a keeper of what Josephine Donovan has called the “subjugated knowledges” of a richly symbolic preindustrial women’s culture. In listening to the residents’ stories, she hears tales of isolation and loss, such as those of Poor Joanna, Captain Littlepage, and Elijah Tilley, and participates in the community’s social gatherings, including the Bowden family reunion. Read by some as the narrator’s initiation into the Dunnet Landing community, the Bowden reunion also affirms “racial purity, global dominance, and white ethnic superiority and solidarity,” according to Elizabeth Ammons (p. 97). Freeman, like Jewett, provided alternative models for women’s lives in her fiction, frequently emphasizing issues of power within communities and characters’ struggles for independence. In the title story of Freeman’s A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
In the Garden (Celia Thaxter in Her Garden). Painting by Childe Hassam, 1892. Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Thaxter spent much of her life on the nearby Isles of Shoals, which she celebrated in her writings. SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, WASHINGTON, DC/ART RESOURCE, NY
A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891), for example, Louisa Ellis breaks off her long engagement with Joe Dagget and renounces marriage in favor of the pleasures of the orderly and domestic life she has forged for herself, and Hetty Fifield of “A Church Mouse” (1891) barricades herself in the church and faces down the church elders who want to deny her both a place to live and a means of making a living as the sexton. Contemporary reviewers frequently paired Jewett and Freeman, with Jewett cast as a fine and learned writer of delicate perceptions and Freeman a lesstutored but no less striking example of native genius whose humor redeemed her grim subject matter. An 1891 review essay, “New England in the Short Story,” compares Freeman’s A New England Nun and Other Stories with Sarah Orne Jewett’s Strangers and Wayfarers in terms characteristic of the time: Freeman’s humor and Jewett’s charity toward her characters signify their superior artistry. More striking is the essay’s praise for Jewett’s attempts to portray New England
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
973
REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR FICTION
work is considered a precursor to the naturalist school of fiction. Similarly, reviewers compared Joseph Kirkland to Thomas Hardy for his realistic representation of rural Illinois in Zury, the Meanest Man in Spring County (1887) and its sequel, The McVeys (1888). Later midwestern regionalists such as Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) and Booth Tarkington (1869–1946) drew from these earlier models; Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is modernist in tone and in its portraits of alienated grotesques and fragmented lives, while Tarkington’s novels such as The Magnificent Ambersons (1918) and Alice Adams (1921) present a sociological picture of class disintegration due to external forces and stubborn protagonists. In The Magnificent Ambersons, for example, the hero, George Amberson Minafer, defies change by resting on class privilege until the twin forces of industrialism and the automobile figuratively and literally drive him away from the once-great Amberson estate. A different view of the midwestern plains, this time of South Dakota, and the destructive powers of encroaching civilization implicitly informs Zitkala-Sˇa’s Old Indian Legends (1901) and the autobiographical narratives such as “The School Days of an Indian Girl” which she published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900. Sarah Orne Jewett.
© BETTMANN/CORBIS
Irish life—a hint that the writer, and the public, would prefer more tales of “contemporaneous New England” rather than the typical tales of “rural New England of two generations back” (p. 849). In the Midwest, regionalist writers frequently focused on the raw conditions and grim details of life in the region, although works such as Alice Cary’s Clovernook; or, Recollections of our Neighborhood in the West (1852) and Clovernook, Second Series (1853), are less stark in their presentation. Stories of a Western Town (1893) by Octave Thanet (1850–1934), the pseudonym of Alice French, are set in a lightly fictionalized Davenport, Iowa, although Thanet also wrote stories of southern local color. Like Thanet, Constance Fenimore Woolson wrote local color fiction based in two regions: Michigan in Castle Nowhere: Lake Country Sketches (1875) and North Carolina in “Rodman the Keeper” (1877), For the Major (1883), and other works. Edward Eggleston’s The Hoosier School-Master (1871) and especially E. W. Howe’s The Story of a Country Town (1883) exposed the inverse side of small-town life—its violence at a community rather than a domestic level—in such a manner that Howe’s
974
A M E R I C A N
The most important of the first generation of midwestern regionalists, Hamlin Garland (1860–1940), is as important for his manifesto Crumbling Idols (1894) as for his collection Main-Travelled Roads (1891). In stories such as “Under the Lion’s Paw,” Garland promoted populist ideas, a departure from the ostensibly apolitical writings of the New England local colorists, and his declaration of sentiments on local color is equally provocative. For Garland, local color “means that [the work] has such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by any one else than a native” (p. 54), a direct challenge to those who, like Jewett, were less natives than visitors, and a sentiment that ignored one of the paradoxes of local color fiction: those closest to the region, the natives of several generations’ standing who were untouched by the outside world, were also those least likely to have the education, critical distance, and literary contacts to have their work published. Yet in promoting regionalism as the best hope for a national literature and in defending his version of realistic regionalism during a celebrated debate with romantic regionalist Mary Hartwell Catherwood at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, Garland reinforced the critical legitimacy of local color as a mainstream art form, much as William Dean Howells (1837–1920) had done in his “Editor’s Study” columns (1886–1892) for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR FICTION
Southern local color developed as regions within regions, with stories of the Tennessee hill country such as In the Tennessee Mountains (1884) by Mary N. Murfree (1850–1922), who used Charles Egbert Craddock as her pseudonym; Murfree’s immensely popular work inspired Sherwood Bonner to visit Murfree and, according to Richard Brodhead’s lessthan-flattering assessment, “learn how to ‘do’ Tennessee mountain folk and cash in on Murfree’s success” (p. 119). Worlds away from this smaller region was the Creole culture of Louisiana portrayed by Kate Chopin (1851–1904), Grace King (1852–1932), and Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935). Set against the social dislocations of the war and of Reconstruction, Chopin’s Bayou Folk (1894) and other tales of Creole and Cajun culture explored the region’s complex distinctions of class and race. So incensed was Grace King at what she believed to be the inaccuracies of George Washington Cable’s Old Creole Days (1879) that she wrote Balcony Stories (1893) in response. DunbarNelson’s The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories (1899) and Violets and Other Tales (1895) mix conventional local color stories with coded tales of racial identity like “Sister Josepha,” in which a young girl possibly of mixed race stays in the convent rather than risk sexual exploitation from a prospective guardian. In a subgenre of local color fiction called the “plantation tradition,” stories such as “Marse Chan” from Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia (1887) presented an idealized version of the South and harmonious relationships between kindly masters and happy, subservient slaves before the Civil War. Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, dialect versions of African American folktales, borrow somewhat from this tradition, but the subversive messages of the tales undercut the idea of white authority central to the plantation tradition. Also choosing to follow the plantation tradition in form, Charles W. Chesnutt subtly reverses its meaning in The Conjure Woman (1899). Although Chesnutt follows the formula by having the storytelling ex-slave, Uncle Julius, living on a ruined plantation, Uncle Julius tells his tales only to manipulate the Northern narrator and his wife into granting him the property or privileges that he feels are his by rights. The meanings of Julius’s stories, always understood by the narrator’s sympathetic wife, Annie, and ignored by the narrator himself, reinforce the idea of the inhumanity of slavery. In the West, writers such as Mark Twain (1835– 1910), Bret Harte (1836–1902), Mary Hallock Foote (1847–1938), Owen Wister (1860–1938), Mary Austin (1868–1934), and María Cristina Mena (1893–1965) sought to interpret unfamiliar occupations, such as mining and ranching, as well as unfamiliar Spanish and A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Native American cultures for a curious eastern audience. Early in his career, Twain published sketches and hoaxes in the western humor vein, such as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), which relies on a deadpan delivery, carefully nuanced dialect, contrasts between western and eastern characters, and a plot of a would-be trickster who is tricked. The tensions between literary East and roughneck West also inform Twain’s infamous performance at a dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) on 17 December 1877. Delivered to an august company that included Whittier, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), and Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894), “The Whittier Birthday Dinner Speech” caricatured these eminent authors as hard-drinking, knife-carrying card cheats traveling in the California mining camps, a piece of western humor that according to Twain’s friend William Dean Howells provoked not laughter but “a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch” on the part of the “appalled and appalling listeners” (p. 60). Although not a conventional piece of local color fiction, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) bears traces of southwestern humor and regional stories in its accurate use of dialect, its depiction of village life, and its employment of character types. Twain’s sometime friend and later rival, Bret Harte, gained fame with quietly humorous tales of mining towns such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” which established such western types as the principled, well-educated gambler and the “soiled dove” with a heart of gold; later and lesser-known stories such as “Wan Lee, the Pagan” (1874) and “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” (1900), however, protest racial violence against Chinese immigrants and Native Americans. In the former, Wan Lee, a lively, intelligent, but impish boy who works in a printing office, is “stoned to death . . . by a mob of half-grown boys and Christian school children” (p. 137), an incident that Harte based on antiChinese rioting in San Francisco (p. 292). The “overtly anti-imperialist satire” (p. xxi) “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” evokes and deliberately reverses the Jackson’s Island episode of Huckleberry Finn: in it, Li Tee and “Injin Jim” escape to an island after a series of misadventures, rightly fearing a possible lynching at the hands of those who, like prominent citizen Mr. Parkin Skinner, believe it is their “manifest destiny to clar them out” (p. 160). Their sanctuary is invaded by Skinner’s son Bob, who first wastes their provisions and then betrays them to a murderous mob of townspeople. Owen Wister remains best known as the author of The Virginian (1902), but several of his stories of the West appeared in Harper’s in the early 1890s, including at least three featuring the young ranch hand Lin McLean. The earliest of this series of stories, which were
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
975
REGIONALISM AND LOCAL COLOR FICTION
later collected and expanded as Lin McLean (1897), is “How Lin McLean Went East” (December 1892), a chronicle of its protagonist’s long-announced and often delayed trip to Boston and his decision after a few days there to buy a ticket back to Rawlins, Wyoming. Less typical is the unromantic view of Wister’s “The Promised Land” (April 1894), in which a pioneer family traveling to the Okanogan River is beset by random violence brought on by Indians despoiled by what the story suggests is the imperfect flotsam of the East: a weak-willed man who illegally sells liquor to the Indians and cares for his epileptic son. Although their characters sometimes tend toward the conventional, Mary Hallock Foote’s stories and novels set in western mining country, such as The Lead-Horse Claim (1882) and Coeur d’Alene (1894), are notable for their portrayal of a fresh and inhospitable terrain, one that can decisively determine a character’s fate, as when Rose Gilroy disappears into the “skeleton flood” (p. 96) of the lava fields near the Snake River in “Maverick” (1894). Adaptation to an inhospitable landscape, this time the Southwest, is the subject of Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1903); framed by a narrative voice that establishes the land as a character, the sketches in this volume feature regionalism as ecological and ethnographic observation. Although they often take place in Mexico and Spain, María Cristina Mena’s stories such as “The Education of Popo” (Century, March 1914) explore the clash of Anglo and Mexican cultures and class hierarchies in the border regions of the Southwest. Like the South, the West is less a single region than a multitude of regions; it is united by habits of mind that go far beyond simply defining the space as wild or as existing in opposition to the East. EPILOGUE
By the late 1890s local color as a genre was dying out, eclipsed by the popular historical romances of the day, by tales of Americans adventuring in distant lands, including the work of Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Richard Harding Davis, and by other forms of realism, such as naturalism and Jamesian dramas of consciousness, that made local color fiction seem limited by comparison. As Charles Dudley Warner wrote in his “Editor’s Study” column for Harper’s in 1896, “We do not hear much now of ‘local color’; that has rather gone out. . . . [S]o much color was produced that the market broke down” (p. 961). Although dialect stories and rural novels such as E. N. Westcott’s David Harum (1898) and Irving Bacheller’s Eben Holden (1900) continued to be popular in the first decades of the twentieth century, the market for serious rather than popular local color fiction dwindled. Other regional writers would thrive in the twentieth
976
A M E R I C A N
century, among them Willa Cather and William Faulkner, but the influence of modernism, a disdain for what was thought to be local color’s nostalgia and sentimentality, and an impatience with the limitations of the form ensured that the new literatures of regions announced themselves as art on a national scale rather than as regional representations on a small one. See also The Country of the Pointed Firs; In the Tennessee Mountains; A New England Nun and Other Stories; New South; Realism; Slang, Dialect, and Other Types of Marked Language; Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Foote, Mary Hallock. The Cup of Trembling and Other Stories. 1895. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970. Garland, Hamlin. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting, and the Drama. 1894. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960. Harte, Bret. The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings. Edited and introduced by Gary Scharnhorst. New York: Penguin, 2001. Howells, William Dean. My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910. Lowell, James Russell. The Biglow Papers, Second Series. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1867. Secondary Works
Ammons, Elizabeth. “Material Culture, Empire, and Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs.” In New Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs, edited by June Howard, pp. 81–100. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Brodhead, Richard H. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Cox, James M. “Regionalism: A Diminished Thing.” In Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott et al., pp. 761–784. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. Fetterley, Judith, and Marjorie Pryse. Writing out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Foote, Stephanie. Regional Fictions: Culture and Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000. Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850–1910. New Americanists. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Johanningsmeier, Charles. Fiction and the American Literary Marketplace: The Role of Newspaper Syndicates
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RESORTS
in America, 1860–1900. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Kaplan, Amy. “Nation, Region, and Empire.” In The Columbia History of the American Novel, edited by Emory Elliott, pp. 240–266. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Lutz, Tom. Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. “New England in the Short Story.” Atlantic Monthly 67 (1891): 845–850. Nickels, Cameron C. New England Humor: From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War. 1st ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993. Pryse, Marjorie. “Origins of American Literary Regionalism: Gender in Irving, Stowe, and Longstreet.” In Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, edited by Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, pp. 17–37. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997. Warner, Charles Dudley. “Editor’s Study.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 92 (1896): 961–962. Wood, Ann D. “The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local Colorists in America, 1865–1914.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1 (1972): 3–46. Donna M. Campbell
RELIGION See The Bible; Catholics; Christianity; Christian Science; Jews; Mormons
RESORTS By 1870 vacation and travel destinations where visitors could enjoy the pleasures of time away from work and home had become an established part of American life. Though resorts varied in size, cost, and variety of entertainments offered, their numbers grew exponentially as the size of America’s vacationing public expanded. While the elite had been “taking the waters” for both health and amusement at resorts such as White Sulphur Springs, Virginia; Newport, Rhode Island; Long Branch, New Jersey; and Saratoga Springs, New York, since the eighteenth century, many historians argue that as early as the 1820s, members of the emerging middle class were touring New York State’s Hudson River Valley, Ballston Spa, and the Lake Champlain and Niagara Falls regions. With the rapid expansion of the middle class, as businesses required increasing numbers of white-collar A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
workers, the demand for vacation accommodations for this group fueled development. No longer primarily the province of the elite, resorts by the 1870s catered to a middle class who had come to view summer vacations as a necessity. Newspapers and magazines depicted resorts as destinations that offered businessmen rest and rejuvenation from their constant “brain work” and relieved their families of the swelter of summers in the city. Yearly visits to resorts by this time had become a marker of middle-class life and identity, and the period between 1850 and 1900 saw a vast development of such facilities, which sprang up along lakes and the seashore, in the mountains and countryside of all regions. While newspaper society columns continued charting the movements of the rich and famous at the fashionable eastern resorts such as Saratoga, Long Branch, and Newport, more affordable resorts were in such demand that any small village along a rail line could market its location as a summer travel destination. Historians studying resorts in the United States note their importance as locations for carving out social class identity. Thomas Chambers, for example, investigates early resorts, contending that mineral springs resorts were sites where the “nation’s social and political leaders experimented with the idea that they formed a coherent culture and an elite class” (p. xiii). Cindy Aron’s history of vacationing in the United States, though not restricted to resorts, shows how resorts began as locations for the elite but later appealed to first a middle-class and then, by the first decades of the twentieth century, working-class clientele. The tension between leisure and work, particularly middle-class anxiety about the morally dangerous aspects of leisure, is central to her study. Jon Sterngass, examining Saratoga Springs, New York; Newport, Rhode Island; and Coney Island, New York, traces the shift in resorts’ cultural meanings during the nineteenth century; he argues that while early in the century resorts functioned as places where visitors could act out behaviors not indulged in everyday life, by the end of the century they had become a commodity, marketed to consumers at different social and economic levels of society. Theodore Corbett, using Saratoga Springs as his prime example, argues that a resort’s success depended upon the hosts (i.e., developers) who created the attractions “that would appeal to the broadest respectable public” (p. 11). Novels of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century bear out interpretations focused on social class. In 1873, for example, Mark Twain (1835– 1910) and Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1911) caricatured in The Gilded Age gradations of American society, depicting Newport as the resort of choice of
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
977
RESORTS
Broadway, Saratoga Springs, New York. Illustration by Harry Ogden for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 21 August 1875. The dazzling spectacle of an afternoon promenade along Saratoga’s Broadway is shown. Morning and afternoon promenades, givens of the resort experience, encouraged the display of fashionable attire. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
society’s highest tier. Though one of the characters admits that Newport is damp, cold, windy, and disagreeable, she insists that it is the only acceptable choice because it is “select.” William Dean Howells (1837– 1920) was particularly interested in the resort as a place where the so-called respectable classes might commingle and where members of the middle class might edge upward through contact with the more elite. In Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), his nouveau riche character Dryfoos sends his daughters to Saratoga because it was known for fashion, but their lack of refinement prevents them from establishing alliances there. SARATOGA SPRINGS AND CONGRESS WATER
Saratoga Springs lay two hundred miles inland from New York City and grew up around sets of springs that in the late eighteenth century began to attract visitors.
978
A M E R I C A N
Gideon Putnam’s opening of a three-story tavern in the first decade of the nineteenth century and his subsequent development of a grandiose village with treelined streets leading to public fountains made the village an attractive vacation destination, and by 1870 ten grand hotels lined its main thoroughfare, each offering the amenities and amusements expected of a fashionable resort hotel. Between three of them— the Grand Union, United States Hotel, and Congress Hall—five thousand guests could stay at any one time. Amusements at Saratoga changed somewhat over the course of the nineteenth century, although a given of the experience remained the stroll to Congress Spring where a dipper boy offered guests tumblers of mineral water. Sought out for its health-giving powers, Congress Spring waters had become available throughout the United States in 1820 in the form of Congress Water, which was bottled at a plant owned by John Clark. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, water
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RESORTS
bars throughout the resort served tumblers of the famous drink, and visitors partook several times a day. Morning and afternoon promenades encouraged a display of fashionable attire as visitors came “to see and be seen,” and the round of activities—the dances and concerts, the day trips to Glens Falls or Lake George or the Indian encampments that offered tourists a momentary glance at Native American life—each required a change of costume. After the British writer and aesthete Oscar Wilde visited Saratoga in 1882, a period of male dandyism commenced, as exemplified in the legendary forty changes of costume completed in one day by Evander Berry Wall. Overdressing remained synonymous with a stay at Saratoga, and this emphasis on fashion was satirized by Marietta Holley in her 1887 best-selling novel Samantha at Saratoga; or, Racin’ after Fashion by Josiah Allen’s Wife. The period after 1870 also saw added emphasis on gambling, shopping, and commercial entertainments. John Morrissey, who had opened Saratoga’s first gaming house in 1862, initiated the development of a race course, and during the second half of the century, women and men alike were enjoying betting on the races. Minstrels, theatricals, panoramas, lantern slide lectures, Swiss bell ringers, tableaux vivants, and circus acts are but a few of the diverse amusements that made life at Saratoga a frenzied round of activities and the quintessential resort experience. NEWPORT
The most exclusive of all U.S. resorts, Newport, Rhode Island, had since the eighteenth century catered to an exclusive clientele. Whereas Saratoga’s popularity and capacity to accommodate visitors escalated throughout the nineteenth century, Newport reached its zenith as a summer haven for fashionable multitudes before the 1860s. Henry James, who lived in Newport from 1858 to 1864, wrote in 1870 comparing what he disparagingly called Saratoga’s “democratization of elegance” to the “substantial and civilized” Newport (Sterngass, p. 182). By the 1870s Newport’s grand hotels had closed or were closing, and private “cottages”—the mansions and villas of America’s wealthiest class—were on the rise. Newport’s shift from hotel culture to a private and distanced exclusivity is the focus of Charles Dudley Warner’s novel Their Pilgrimage (1886). His protagonist bungles his efforts at social climbing when he finds himself walking with butlers and maids on his Sunday stroll along the Cliff Walk. The period of privatization brought Newport mansions such as William K. Vanderbilt’s $11 million Marble House or the even more ostentatious The Breakers, commissioned by Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Homes such as these became the stages for extravagant private parties, ornate balls, and performances; in the fiction of Edith Wharton they A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
became models for the homes of the elite who people the pages of novels such as The House of Mirth (1905). LONG BRANCH
Like its rivals, Long Branch, located on the seashore of New Jersey, began in the late 1700s, attracting wealthy visitors who came in pursuit of health and relaxation. By the 1870s it was more popular than either Saratoga or Newport, but popularity tended to preclude the exclusiveness enjoyed by its competitors. Enjoying its distinction as Summer Capitol or Summer White House, Long Branch served as headquarters for the U.S. presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Chester A. Arthur, William McKinley, and Woodrow Wilson and as backdrop for the passing of the wounded president James A. Garfield. At its zenith during the 1880s and 1890s, Long Branch was the resort of choice of actresses Lillie Langtry, Lillian Russell, and Fanny Davenport, and they, along with its magnificent hotels and attractions such as the Monmouth Park racetrack and Hoey’s Gardens, attracted huge summer crowds. Sundays brought an additional twenty thousand day-trippers, who came to bathe and to watch the parade of fine carriages conducting the famous and fashionable down Ocean Avenue. After antigambling legislation closed Monmouth Park, the other racetracks, and the gaming clubs, Saratoga won back the fashionable set, and though the crowds remained through the 1910s, they came more for rest and relaxation than for the luxurious gaiety that marked its triumph just decades before. CONEY ISLAND
Coney Island developed later than the other early resorts, but its proximity to New York and Brooklyn allowed it to emerge in the late 1870s as the “people’s playground,” where the urban working class could travel for a day’s pleasure at the beach bathing or strolling amid the dime museums, shooting galleries, carousels, bandstands, and racetracks. By 1879, nine steamboat lines and 250 trains daily served the island. Summer railway travel averaged 23,000 on weekdays and 100,000 on Sundays. Although Coney Island was unique in that from the start it attracted working-class patrons, an 1878 Harper’s Weekly article deemed it the best of American seaside resorts, a “playground where rich and poor alike may take their pleasure” (Sterngass, p. 105). Although people of all social classes were attracted by Coney’s mass entertainment offerings, stratification of these groups followed a distinctly geographic path east to west. The wealthy frequented Manhattan Beach on the island’s eastern end, staying at two of
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
979
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
the resorts grand hotels—the Manhattan Beach Hotel and the Oriental Hotel. Here they enjoyed pyrotechnic spectacles and panoramas of historical events within a ten-thousand-seat fireworks arena, hot air balloon rides, and concerts featuring celebrity conductors. Not more than three quarters of a mile west of the elite zone, Brighton Beach offered Coney’s third grand hotel, which appealed to the middle class. Pavilions, bathhouses, and attractions such as the Seaside Aquarium, with its zoological garden, aviary, music hall, and collection of sea creatures in tanks, or the three-hundredfoot-high observatory, the Iron Tower, which had acted as centerpiece of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, made Brighton Beach a favored destination for middle-class vacationers. West Brighton’s amusement district, replete with rides, lights, catchpenny attractions, and curiosities of all sorts, attracted both middle-class travelers and working-class daytrippers, the latter of whom, according to an 1889 Harper’s Weekly article, formed “a motley throng. . . . The struggling many, who here find their only summer outing” (Immerso, pp. 41–42). Finally, Norton’s Point at the west end of the island was resort of the underclasses. While stratified, these areas had quite permeable boundaries, and reformers of the late nineteenth century wrote of Coney as a thoroughly democratic environment where the mingling of classes would benefit all. Resorts played a major role in establishing the vacation as an institution of twentieth- and twentyfirst-century life. Fashionable resorts lent their green lawns and grand hotels as backdrops first for the elite and the middle class to work out social class identities, while the less-fashionable resorts made their marks as early vacation spots for an ever broadening spectrum of visitors. Though the glory days of the grand resort have passed, their legacy remains in those cherished weeks away—the vacation—which have become so much a part of American culture. See also Health and Medicine; Wealth BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Brownell, William. “Newport.” Scribner’s (August 1894): 142–143. Creedmore, Walter. “The Real Coney Island.” Munsey’s (August 1899): 746. Sweeney, Beatrice. The Grand Union Hotel: A Memorial and a Lament. Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: Historical Society, 1982. “Where Life Is Like a Story: Fashionable Summer Life at Gay Newport.” Ladies Home Journal (August 1890): 2.
980
A M E R I C A N
Secondary Works
Aron, Cindy S. Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Chambers, Thomas A. Drinking the Waters: Creating an American Leisure Class at Nineteenth-Century Mineral Springs. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. Corbett, Theodore. The Making of American Resorts: Saratoga Springs, Ballston Spa, and Lake George. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Immerso, Michael. Coney Island: The People’s Playground. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Sterngass, Jon. First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Carolyn L. Mathews
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Bret Harte (1836–1902) did not, by himself, invent local color or regionalist fiction. However, his California gold rush tales did garner an immense amount of international acclaim, an acclaim that clearly testifies to Harte’s status as a leading contributor to post–Civil War efforts to develop a literary form supple enough to render the unique qualities by which regions are constituted or understood. Moreover, Harte’s fame affirms the importance to regionalist fiction of the American West and, more broadly, of rural and frontier literature. Not coincidentally, as Harte was helping to turn western topics into vital elements of regional literature, so too were western American natural resources (gold and silver, water, lumber, and eventually oil) contributing significantly to the United States’ phenomenal postbellum growth. Which is to say that such tales as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1869) helped to set the stage for literary productions that were, at the very least, responsive to the predominant economic engines of a great many American locales. So much of what concerns regional writing—the interaction of people with place and nature, the promise (or threat) of population diversification through immigration, the stability of gender categories, and the relationship of any given region to the nation as a whole—may be found in the literary record of those regions, western or otherwise, where the earth’s raw materials provided the bases for economic, social, and cultural development. The phrase “resource management” euphemistically describes the practice of exploiting found objects for material and economic gain. In a
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
more figurative sense, it also provides a framework for understanding the efforts of a number of significant late-nineteenth-century artists to represent their regions. That is, the representation of natural resources and their attendant industries offered the literary regionalist a useful means of taking the measure of, responding to, and even shaping the nation’s increasing pace of industrial and territorial expansion. MINERAL RICHES
By 1859, when a not-yet-famous Bret Harte was working as a printer’s devil in a remote area to the north of San Francisco, the initial California boom had calmed considerably and opportunities for individuals to locate and acquire wealth were greatly diminished. Thus it was that new discoveries in the territories of Nevada and Colorado touched off the next wave of rushes for silver and gold, the cultural effects of which are very much part of American culture to the early twenty-first century. For one, in the frenzied development of a mining industry in a silver-bearing region along Nevada’s sagebrush desert known as the Comstock Lode, a style of literary humor emerged that paralleled Harte’s early satirical tendencies and, more importantly, allowed for the first-ever appearance in print of the byline “Mark Twain.” Having come West in large part to avoid the Civil War, an aspiring miner and writer named Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910) cut his teeth as a reporter for the Virginia City Daily Territorial Enterprise. Given a tremendous amount of freedom by his editor Joseph T. Goodman and working with a talented group of writers and newspapermen that included William Wright, Rollin Daggett, and Alf Doten, Clemens rapidly developed into a devastatingly insightful satirist. And while there is still some disagreement about the true origin of Clemens’s famous pseudonym, Mark Twain, most scholars now generally agree that the saloon culture of Virginia City, Nevada, probably played a significant role in its creation. What is less in doubt is the extent to which this rowdy but humor-rich milieu aided in the creation of Twain’s early persona, the foolhardy naïf of Roughing It (1872), whose adventures provide trenchant insight into the prides and prejudices of both locals and strangers. Twain may be known as a southern writer, but his career-long skepticism about the accuracy of representations received a significant boost in western mining towns, where speculative fortunes could be gained or lost literally overnight, usually on the evidence of dubious or downright fraudulent claims. Chief among Twain’s mentors in Virginia City was William Wright (1829–1898), who under the pseudonym “Dan De Quille” published scores of A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
sketches, satires, and hoaxes. When asked about his talented stable of writers, Joe Goodman recalled that in 1863 he would have chosen De Quille, not Twain, as the writer who would become nationally known for his humor and literary talent. Less inclined than his fellow pseudonymous journalist to seek self-promotion, De Quille spent his career almost exclusively in the Virginia City area. His sketches and stories, however, were routinely picked up by newspapers and magazines throughout the West, some even as far away as Europe. De Quille specialized in what he called “quaints,” literary hoaxes designed to draw in readers whose level of credulity about what they assumed to be the American West’s uniqueness could easily be stretched. For instance, his 1874 report on “solar armor,” about a refrigerated rubber suit that protects against desert heat but which, unfortunately, leads to its inventor’s freezing to death on a summer day in Death Valley (where temperatures rarely dip below 100° F), was picked up by the London Daily Telegraph and noted in Scientific American. When asked about the credibility of this report, De Quille published a clarification that provided even more detail. Earlier, in 1865, De Quille had published a quaint inspired by Twain’s 1862 “petrified man” hoax, pointing out that underground conditions are much more favorable to petrifaction via pure silver rather than via limestone sediment. This technique of clarifying an implausible scenario by “correcting” it with an ostensibly more authoritative detail is one that De Quille used repeatedly with great success, and it is a technique that anticipates the manner in which Twain’s Huckleberry Finn repeatedly confesses to his own lies with newer falsehoods that have a tone of confession about them. By the end of 1872, the initial flurry of activity on the Comstock had tapered off, Twain had moved east for marriage and celebrity status, and De Quille had begun planning a collection of literary sketches that might advance his own reputation as an author of regional fiction. Within just a handful of years, however, both De Quille’s and Virginia City’s fortunes would experience tremendous changes. The discovery of a silver deposit far in excess of anything previously found on the Comstock touched off another tremendous boom period, and the local silver barons began to pressure De Quille to write not a collection of literary sketches but instead an informational guidebook to the region. At the same time, Twain wrote to his old friend suggesting he capitalize on the Comstock’s renewed popularity by writing a Roughing It–style book about the new boom. Guided by Twain, with whom he stayed in Hartford, Connecticut, for several months while writing and collating his material, De Quille ultimately opted to combine the two book
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
981
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
spent both contributing to and taking advantage of, through humor, popular conceptions about the Far West.
Miners in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, c. 1876. Gold was discovered near Deadwood Gulch in 1874. As with other sites in the West, the discovery quickly created the kind of exploitative community described by Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and other western writers. © CORBIS
ideas into one, thus producing The Big Bonanza (1876). A wonderful and complex regionalist representation of the Comstock, this book mixes straightforward, statistic-laden reportage with fictions, tall tales, burlesques, and satires. One of De Quille’s more notable accomplishments in The Big Bonanza is the subtle manner in which he simultaneously praises and lampoons his benefactors, the rich and powerful industrialists in whose pockets could be found the majority of Virginia City’s mining operations. The final event chronicled in the book is, sadly, the destruction of the greater part of Virginia City by fire in October 1875. The city was rapidly rebuilt; however, within a year the supply of silver ore played out as quickly as it had appeared, the boom ended, and the town never again fully recovered its stature. Similarly, The Big Bonanza failed to gain a widespread audience, and De Quille continued as he had before, writing local journalism and publishing the occasional sketch or quaint but without the national prominence enjoyed by his erstwhile colleague. Nevertheless, De Quille’s writings collectively offer an enduring testament to a career
982
A M E R I C A N
As the Comstock had drawn immigrants to Virginia City, so did the discovery of massive silver carbonate deposits high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado attract wealth seekers to the unlikely little town of Leadville. By the summer of 1879 and in the wake of Virginia City’s decline, over forty thousand immigrants contributed to the making of Leadville as the next destination of choice for laborers and literati alike. So attractive was the cachet of a trip to this encampment, almost two miles above sea level, that even Walt Whitman (1819–1892) claimed in the sketches assembled in Specimen Days and Collect (1882) that in 1879 he, too, had been to this town. In fact, Whitman had made it only as far as the first crest of the Front Range beyond Denver, a full day’s trail ride and one more crest away from Leadville. Nevertheless, he included Leadville among the marvelous sights he had encountered in the West, sights which for him demonstrated that western American nature could trump the aesthetic appeal of European culture every time. The example of Clarence King (1842–1901) is even more instructive. The author of the popular Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872) and a close friend of Henry Adams, King had passed through Virginia City in 1868 during his decade-long conduct of the U.S. Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. In his company had been one of the nation’s preeminent landscape photographers, Timothy H. O’Sullivan, whose extraordinarily detailed, epic-scaled, and often sublime images from the exploration have become photographic touchstones in the history of western landscape representation. Newly appointed (in 1879) as the nation’s first director of the U.S. Geological Exploration, King traveled to Leadville in the summer of 1879 to conduct a public lands inventory; while in town, he helped with his very presence to establish the distinction that Walt Whitman would seek several months later. He did so largely by becoming an honored guest in the local literary salon established in the home of a local mining engineer named Arthur Foote and his wife, Mary. Mary Hallock Foote (1847–1938), in fact, did perhaps more than any other single person to put Colorado’s early mining industry on the literary map. She did so in part as host of a salon that regularly welcomed the likes of not only King but also Helen Hunt Jackson, the mining financier’s wife who would in a few years write Ramona (1884), the book credited with almost single-handedly inspiring an intensively
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
regionalist nostalgia for California’s Spanish past that reached its peak in the mission revival style of architecture. However, Foote’s greatest contributions are as an author and illustrator in her own right. She first made a name for herself with a series of essays and stories she had written and illustrated for Scribner’s Monthly on the mines around Santa Cruz, California, where she had lived prior to arriving in Leadville. By 1882 Foote began publishing in Century Magazine a serial novel called The Led-Horse Claim (1883), the first of three Leadville-inspired novels that would firmly establish her reputation as a writer about the western region. The story of star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of a mining-claim dispute, The LedHorse Claim successfully blends realistic-seeming detail with the sort of sentimental plot that made for nineteenth-century best-sellers. Moreover, the eventual marriage of a mine superintendent to the sister of a competing mine’s superintendent offers a meditation on both the consolidation of capital and the supposed “civilizing” influence of women in the West. With the publication of her first novel, Foote inaugurated a career of writing about the West’s social fabric that poses crucial questions about gender relations and economic realities. She would continue to do so as she further migrated, with her husband, to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where her growing awareness of western water issues would lead to such novels as The Chosen Valley (1892), a story about the disastrous consequences of an ill-conceived irrigation project. HYDRAULIC TREASURES
In 1875 an intrepid and indefatigable one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell (1834–1902) published a government report detailing his journey by raft through the Grand Canyon, a trip which no Anglo-European had until then successfully completed. With later refinements and amplifications, the text of Powell’s Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries provided both a valuable scientific survey of geology and geography and one of the first and most engaging introductions that Americans would have to the regions of the canyon. Indeed, the book’s spare, present-tense, almost matter-of-fact narrative is still hailed as one of the most compelling and readable accounts of a trip down the Colorado River. After his book’s publication, Powell established himself in Washington, D.C., where, through his influence and legislative connections, he succeeded in creating the U.S. Geological Exploration with his friend Clarence King as its first director (Powell himself became director in 1881 after King stepped down). As a government scientist and policy maker, Powell spent much of the remainder of his career arguing that A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
the arid western regions, because of their resourcebased economies, required a fundamentally different approach to land ownership and use. In short, he repeatedly called for people to recognize that water would very soon supplant mineral ore as the West’s most vital resource. Without water, miners could not effectively separate precious metals from the rocks in which they were embedded, farmers could not adequately irrigate their fields, and above all, cities such as Los Angeles, Denver, and Phoenix could not begin to approach the scale of urbanization they presently enjoy. Published at a time when the Comstock was still at its height, Leadville only just beginning to brew, and the rush for gold in the Klondike that would inspire Jack London still several decades off, the Exploration in its various manifestations, however, did not immediately gain recognition as a story about water. Nevertheless, Powell’s contention that water would be the defining factor in the West’s regional identity did eventually prove prophetic. Mary Austin’s (1868–1934) The Land of Little Rain (1903), for example, describes the Owens Valley area of eastern California as a region intimately tied, both culturally and materially, to its local water resources. More to the point, it does so at the very historical moment when the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 began to re-create the American West as a region governed not by mining entrepreneurs or railroads but by federal water policies. In the wake of Newlands, most of the Owens Valley’s sparse water reserves were redirected to the booming city of Los Angeles, leading, by some accounts, to the impoverishment of local agriculture and community. Austin spent many years fulminating against this appropriation, even when her attention shifted in the 1920s to the political battles over the allocation of the Colorado River. Another best-selling writer, however, took inspiration from the Owens Valley situation in a very different way. Harold Bell Wright (1872–1944), who in his day sold more books than almost anyone else, praised such reclamation projects as those in California’s Owens and Imperial valleys for their success in promoting economic growth through resource exploitation. Wright’s melodramatic western water novel, The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), even acknowledges the work of William Mulholland, the enterprising chief engineer who took the water from Austin’s land of little rain and delivered it to the orange groves and front lawns of suburban Los Angeles. Together, these texts represent the two poles of a debate that continues into the twenty-first century about western water, and they are indicative of the extent to which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, regional sensibilities shifted
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
983
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
toward an understanding of the West’s status as a hydraulic society. WHAT ABOUT TREES?
There is something keenly ironic in the fact that timber, the resource most materially related to literature (insofar as literature has long been published on paper products derived from harvested trees), is least represented in regional writing, western or otherwise. But this is not to say that it does not appear at all. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) bemoans the wholesale depletion of the northeastern forests in The Maine Woods (1864) when he observes that “the Anglo-American . . . ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them” (p. 314). Similarly, in The Big Bonanza, Dan De Quille laments that “the Comstock Lode may truthfully be said to be the tomb of the forests of the Sierras” (p. 174). Referring to the mining industry’s insatiable need for lumber in the fight against mine shaft cave-ins, De Quille succinctly puts his finger on the interdependence of the various resource industries. And John Muir (1838–1914) based much of his advocacy for national parks and nature preservation on the assumption that forests must be protected from human encroachment. This attitude is most evident in the dozens of articles on California’s Sierra Nevada areas such as Yosemite Valley that Muir published in Scribner’s and Century from the 1870s through the 1910s. In popular fiction, however, the “resource management” philosophies associated with Gifford Pinchot, appointed by Theodore Roosevelt as the nation’s first chief of the Forest Service, are much more in evidence. Roosevelt’s friend Owen Wister, for instance, has his title character in The Virginian (1902) retire from ranching life to become, on the last page, a lumber baron. Stewart Edward White (1873–1946), also a friend of Roosevelt and a fellow big-game hunting aficionado, first established himself as a best-selling author with the 1902 publication of The Blazed Trail, a tale about northern Michigan lumber camps and the dynamic young logger-investor who creates a successful business in the face of corporate corruption (in 1901 White had also published The Claim Jumpers, a novel about South Dakota’s gold rush). White’s career soon took him from Michigan to California, where he continued to publish a variety of genre-based adventure novels as well as nonfictional, regionally inflected books such as The Forest (1903) and The Cabin (1911). In these latter two publications, White deftly mixes personal memoir with naturist essays and reflections on the value of carefully husbanded forest resources. In all, the beginning of the twentieth century heralded
984
A M E R I C A N
the advent of Roosevelt’s conservationist ethos, a resource-management culture in which popular fiction frequently espoused the conservationist attitude of centralized authority and profit management while nonfiction prose was generally put to the service of preservationist or environmentalist philosophies. See also Frontier; The Land of Little Rain; Nature Writing BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
De Quille, Dan. The Big Bonanza: An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History, and Working of the WorldRenowned Comstock Lode of Nevada. 1876. New York: Knopf, 1947. De Quille, Dan. The Fighting Horse of the Stanislaus: Stories and Essays. Edited by Lawrence I. Berkove. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990. Foote, Mary Hallock. The Led-Horse Claim: A Romance of a Mining Camp. Boston: Osgood, 1883. Powell, John Wesley. Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries. 1875. Revised and reprinted as Canyons of the Colorado, 1895. Reprinted as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. New York: Penguin, 1987. Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods. 1864. New York: Penguin, 1988. White, Stewart Edward. The Blazed Trail. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1902. Secondary Works
Berkove, Lawrence I. Dan De Quille. Western Writers Series, no. 136. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University, 1999. Fender, Stephen. Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Henderson, George L. California and the Fictions of Capital. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Robbins, William G. Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Transformation of the American West. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1994. Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Teague, David W. The Southwest in American Literature and Art: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997. Trachtenberg, Alan. “Naming the View.” In his Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans, pp. 119–165. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
T H E R I S E O F D AV I D L E V I N S K Y
Walker, Franklin. Jack London and the Klondike. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966. Witschi, Nicolas S. Traces of Gold: California’s Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Nicolas S. Witschi
THE RISE OF DAVID LEVINSKY When Abraham Cahan began drafting the narrative that ultimately became his most important novel, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), he had neither the idea nor the intention of writing another long work of fiction. Cahan was principally a journalist with the Yiddish press; he edited the Socialist Labor Party’s Arbeter tsaytung and Tsukunft through the mid-1890s, and he was a founding editor of the Jewish daily Forwerts, or Forward; under his direction for nearly fifty years, the Forward became the most widely read Yiddish newspaper in the world. He was also a major influence in the development of organized labor on New York’s Lower East Side, almost from the time he arrived in that city from Russia in 1882 as a committed socialist, having fled from the tsar’s police at twenty-two because of his leftist leanings. Thirty years later his wide reputation as an influential socialist, Jewish leader, and journalist, in support of organized labor, was firm. He had also gained stature as a writer of fiction in English and had spent about four years (late 1897 through 1901) as a reporter for the New York Commercial Advertiser, then under the city editorship of Lincoln Steffens. In 1912 Burton J. Hendrick, associate editor of McClure’s Magazine, a monthly known for its muckraking exposés of corruption and chicanery in industry at the turn of the century, invited Cahan to compose a short series of two articles on the success of the Jewish immigrant in the garment trade. Cahan immediately accepted the offer. He did not expect the series to take much time, and he thought that informing readers how successfully the Jewish immigrants had established themselves in a major American industry—clothing manufacturing and trade in the United States had been dominated by Jews since at least 1880—would prove beneficial not only to them but to the American public as well. Initially he intended to write expository articles, specifically to convey information about Jews in the garment trade, but he immediately oriented his material toward fiction by creating a first-person narrator. His first article was so successful that readers wanted more, and he agreed to extend the two-part series to A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Abraham Cahan.
JEWISH DAILY FORWARD
four sections under the title “The Autobiography of an American Jew: The Rise of David Levinsky,” published from April through July 1913. A literary realist devoted to presenting real life in fiction, Cahan drew the subtitle of his series from The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) by William Dean Howells, the most influential advocate for realism in the United States late in the preceding century. Howells was at the height of his influence when he befriended Cahan in 1895 and supported the aspiring Jewish author with a highly favorable review of his first novel in English, Yekl, A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896). By then, Cahan had read with great admiration nearly all of Howells’s earlier fiction; inspired by the Dean’s realism, he was determined to reveal the truth of East Side life as he knew it, with all its grimness and suffering. To do this, however, he had to transcend Howells’s ideas that morality is universal and decency has bounds outside of which respectable fiction cannot go. To fulfill his own ethic as an author and present a true picture of life in the tenement district, Cahan understood that he might have to create figures of dubious character and depict the sordid ghetto environment naturalistically. Thus he risked offending many readers, Jewish and Gentile alike, with his series, but he felt he could not do otherwise.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
985
T H E R I S E O F D AV I D L E V I N S K Y
What Cahan did not know, however, and perhaps never fully realized, is that he was being set up by Hendrick and McClure’s to make Jews in business fit the stereotype of shrewd, manipulative schemers whose sole aim was to acquire wealth and power. Jules Chametzky gives an illuminating account of this editorial duplicity in his introduction to the Penguin edition (1993) of The Rise of David Levinsky and points to the way that the repugnance of Cahan’s narrator was dramatized in effect by the grotesque depictions of Jews in illustrations accompanying the text. OVERVIEW
For the title of his novel, Cahan used only the subtitle of his McClure’s series. On the surface The Rise of David Levinsky covers the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century and the first fifteen of the twentieth. The novel combines a naturalistic exposition of Jewish immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side with a history of the burgeoning American garment industry, including its development and operation from the lowest echelon of workers to the owners, with dramatic views of the persistent labor unrest that agitates it. But on a more subtle level, it is simultaneously a study of the depressed, hypocritical, alienated narrator, Levinsky, who relates the story of his life from his grim childhood in Antomir, a Russian shtetl, to his middle years as a wealthy industrialist in New York City. No longer simply a device by which the development of a major industry is exposed, Levinsky is a fully realized character in the novel, with a principal role not only in the evolution of the garment trade but also in the lives of the numerous secondary and tertiary figures, nearly all of whom in one way or another are involved with it. The characters are highly individualized, and they reappear in different contexts from time to time like motifs in a large musical composition; whenever they return they bring with them echoes of their past associations with Levinsky, all of which adds to the depth and drama of their scenes. One by one they illustrate the two primary components of Levinsky’s narrative: his rise in an industrial community comprised predominantly of East European Jewish immigrants like himself and the psychological peculiarities he exposes during the course of relating his candid autobiography. For example, Naphtali, his free-thinking companion at the yeshiva in Antomir, is an alter-ego who helps Levinsky break with his past. Reb Bender, his benign teacher, ineffectually counsels him at the yeshiva. Matilda, a young divorcee, tempts the naive Talmud student Levinsky to seduce her, then ridicules him, gives him money to emigrate, and finally, years later, when she visits
986
A M E R I C A N
America as an ardent socialist, contemptuously dismisses him as a union-hating millionaire. Argentine Rachael, the shrewd prostitute from Antomir, sells her favors to Levinsky and educates him about East Side politics. Gussie, an unattractive coworker he seduces in an attempt to gain her savings, later contributes part of her wages to support a strike and rejects his invitation to work in his factory. Mrs. Chaikin, the cautious, shrewish wife of his first designer, tries to outwit Levinsky and fails. “Maximum Max” Margolis, a street peddler, teaches Levinsky the ropes, assuring him that any woman can be won with the right effort and thus inadvertently sets up the seduction of his own lovely wife, Dora, despite her earnest resistance to Levinsky’s overbearing solicitations. After having his way with her, however, Levinsky cannot persuade Dora to become his mistress; the moving scene in Stuyvesant Park that leads to her break with him is worthy of comparison with James. Themes alone do not make a novel; these figures and numerous other characters in a succession of dramatic scenes constitute the texture that vitalizes the themes and brings the fiction to life. Yet as both narrator and participant, Levinsky is the axis on which the whole massive novel turns. Having made his fortune through extraordinary chutzpah and exploitation, he finds life meaningless. Responsible to no one, he has everything to share but no one with whom to share it. Structurally Levinsky’s state of mind is of particular interest, because he confesses on the opening page that despite his wealth and power his life still “seems devoid of significance” (p. 3). By beginning his autobiography at the end, after the action has occurred, he leaves readers to learn not how well the poor young immigrant fares after his arrival in America but why, with all his money, he is so despondent. As the novel progresses and Levinsky’s life story unfolds, the perceptive reader gradually apprehends that the industrialist’s emotional and moral limitations helped him rise financially while they continue to undermine the possibility of his spiritual fulfillment. The essential question, never answered, is whether or not he realizes even as he begins his account that the apparent lack of significance in his life is attributable wholly to his own shortcomings. JEWISH IMMIGRATION AND THE GARMENT INDUSTRY
The nearly half a century between 1880 and 1924 brought an influx of some 2.5 million Jewish immigrants into the United States, predominantly from eastern Europe, and most of them remained in New York. In 1915 the Jewish population of New York City
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
T H E R I S E O F D AV I D L E V I N S K Y
The paragraph below, which begins The Rise of David Levinsky, exhibits in a few lines much of the thematic substance of Cahan’s novel. Levinsky himself is the autobiographical narrator who exposes in these few lines his material status and spiritual vacuity, his rise to wealth and fame that ironically has left him alienated and alone. The questions he implicitly asks here are how did he become so wealthy, and what has caused his despondency? Through the course of the novel, he explains his answer to the first in great and candid detail, but it remains dubious that he himself has ever determined an answer to the second.
Sometimes, when I think of my past in a superficial, casual way, the metamorphosis I have gone through strikes me as nothing short of a miracle. I was born and reared in the lowest depths of poverty and I arrived in America—in 1885—with four cents in my pocket. I am now worth more than two million dollars and recognized as one of the two or three leading men in the cloak-andsuit trade in the United States. And yet when I take a look at my inner identity it impresses me as being precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago. My present station, power, the amount of worldly happiness at my command, and the rest of it, seem to be devoid of significance. Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky, p. 3.
was nearly a million and a half, roughly 28 percent of the total, and a disproportionate percentage of the immigrants were crowded into the tenements of the Lower East Side. The twenty-year-old David Levinsky arrives at Castle Garden in 1885, two years younger than Cahan when he immigrated at twenty-two. When Levinsky commences his autobiography, however, he is fiftytwo, precisely Cahan’s age as he began to draft his series of articles for McClure’s. Like Cahan, after being admitted to the country, Levinsky remains on the Lower East Side where he, too, must learn English while struggling to earn a living, going so far as to attend public-school English classes with the children. For Levinsky, people who speak English as a native language are superior by birth, and he is as determined to become fluent as Cahan himself had become. These similarities and numerous others between the author and his eponymous hero have led such critics as Louis A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Harap to consider Levinsky as Cahan’s surrogate, reviewing his own past and views. But the essential differences between the author and his creation are far more significant than such correspondences in circumstances and events. Having arrived at Castle Garden with little money, Cahan had gained a position of great influence by the time he wrote Levinsky, yet unlike his narrator, he neither sought nor acquired riches. Instead, he aspired to improve the lives of other eastern European immigrant Jews by promoting Americanization in advice columns in the Forward and pressing hard for labor reform. Cahan’s benevolent personal aims, however, are not evident in his narrator. Instead, Levinsky illustrates how financial success can be managed without initial capital or serious moral scruples, with the aid of shrewdness, exploitation, and luck. Typically, he begins his career in the United States with a few unsatisfactory odd jobs before he becomes a modestly successful peddler by hawking and bargaining while he observes what goes on around him. Advised by an acquaintance to learn how to operate a sewing machine for more lucrative earnings, Levinsky becomes adept with a Singer and quickly finds a position with a contractor working fifteen-hour days; then he joins a union. Dissatisfied with the first shop, he moves to one owned by the Manheimer brothers. Meanwhile he gives private English lessons to supplement his earnings; the wealthy manufacturer he tutors, Meyer Nodleman, becomes Levinsky’s benefactor when he opens his own factory. During each stage of his rise in fortune, Levinsky takes advantage of the gullibility or limitations of others, as he borrows with dubious security, writes checks with inadequate backing, secretly copies new fashion designs from competitors, supports the union initially only to undermine it later, and so forth. Simultaneously, he learns more about business and people from fellow workers in shops and on the streets; from drummers on trains when he travels to hawk his own merchandise; and from managers and owners. Having been told that he has a “credit face,” he takes advantage of his appearance of honesty to gain people’s trust. “We are all actors, more or less” (p. 194), he confesses, thus justifying his hypocrisy in his own eyes. With every person Levinsky meets and each new position he gains in his ascension to wealth, Cahan exhibits another aspect of East Side life, seedy elements included. Historically on the edge of the red-light district, the Lower East Side was notorious for prostitution. After his first visit to a prostitute, Levinsky persistently succumbs to his passions. He returns repetitively to
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
987
T H E R I S E O F D AV I D L E V I N S K Y
Argentine Rachael, who sells him sex and counsels him on how the local police and politicians operate. A clever businesswoman, Argentine Rachael becomes Levinsky’s confidante, thereby abetting his social and economic ascent.
sacrifices her life for him. Although he is over eighteen at the time, his chief concern over her death is that she has abandoned him to fare for himself; this traumatic incident occurs about a year before he departs for America.
Not all those with whom Levinsky associates are Jewish, of course, but most are, particularly in his early years on the streets and in the sweatshops. By living among the immigrants before achieving his wealth, Levinsky has no serious problems with antiSemitism, which was present in the United States only in a subdued form until the years of mass east European migration, when it steadily increased. In 1924, only seven years after Levinsky was published, an antiimmigration bill was passed by Congress and signed by the president.
His father died many years earlier, leaving little David as the man of the family. Throughout his boyhood and youth, he is attracted to girls as sex objects, and he allows himself to be exploited by them because their attention satisfies his vanity. From the local heder, David advances to a yeshiva, where he studies to become learned in Jewish thought. But sexual fantasies squelch his interest in Talmud, an interest that he has forced on himself from the beginning. When an opportunity comes to emigrate, he takes advantage of it and sails to America, where his life as an immigrant commences. Unlike his perception of most immigrants, however, he undergoes no essential transformation in the United States, no “second birth” (p. 93), because the seeds of change germinated long before he left Antomir.
PORTRAIT OF AN AMBIVALENT NARRATOR
Readers of The Rise of David Levinsky interested chiefly in the history of American business and labor, Jewish immigration, or New York’s Lower East Side late in the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth will find Cahan’s novel instructive. Readers who peruse the novel on a deeper level will find it no less engaging for its humanistic and literary values. In his psychological portrait of Levinsky, Cahan has created an ambiguous autobiographer whose ambivalence throughout the novel may be traced to roots deep in his past. His narrative is divided into fourteen sections, only one of which, “On the Road,” describing his experiences while traveling to sell his merchandise, even implies a business interest. The other titles refer specifically to Levinsky’s personal life. That is one reason his candid and realistic self-portrait equals his grand sociohistorical panorama in importance to the novel. At age fifty-two the millionaire industrialist cannot understand why he remains unfulfilled. Having discovered Herbert Spencer’s theory of Social Darwinism, in which only the fittest can survive in a life based on competition, Levinsky operates accordingly. When he deceives someone and gains by it, he justifies his action on the grounds of survival of the fittest; for him, Spencer’s theory has become a way of life, replacing the sound moral behavior he learned from his mother and his teachers at the yeshiva back in Antomir. People who treat him with respect are either patronized, exploited, or brushed aside and neglected. He dreams of love, marriage, and children, a family he can call his own, but although he seeks a wife through the marriage market and nearly finds one in Fanny Kaplan, he never weds. To a large extent his alienation and failure with women may be explained by the way as a child and adolescent he dotes on his mother, who impulsively
988
A M E R I C A N
From the first few days after his arrival in America until he starts to achieve success in the garment manufactory, by which time his dubious interest in Talmud has completely atrophied, he expresses a strong desire to continue his education by attending college but not to study anything in particular. With the approach of financial success his dream of college gives way to his desire for wealth and his longing for an ideal woman, a combination of his mother and some of the girls and women he has known or seen. Each new woman he meets is an object of seduction or wishful thinking but not love—until he becomes infatuated with Anna Tevkin, whom he first sees playing tennis at the Rigi Kulm House, a posh Jewish hotel in the Catskills where fashionable vulgarity prevails among those guests whom Cahan called “olraytniks” (from “all right”). Levinsky has stopped at the Rigi Kulm overnight to avoid riding on the Sabbath while on his way to visit his fiancée and her family at their summer cottage in the mountains; he feels that violating the Hebrew restriction against Sabbath travel might offend his future father-in-law. But he is captivated when he notices Anna, the appealing young daughter of a poet whose romantic love story is known to him. Her image, enhanced in his ever-active imagination by her parents’ romance, proves fatal to his engagement. His attraction to Anna becomes an obsession that leads him to lose nearly all he owns when he over-invests in a real-estate boom to gain favor with Anna’s father. The aging Russian poet, brilliantly portrayed with his New York houseful of radicals and eccentrics, is as obsessed with real estate as
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
T H E R I S E O F D AV I D L E V I N S K Y
Illustration by Jay Hambridge for The Rise of David Levinsky from the June 1913 issue of McClure’s Magazine. David Levinsky is gazing at an attractive, fashionably dressed young woman, in a cloak probably designed and manufactured in his garment factory. GRADUATE LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
Levinsky is with his daughter. Appalled by Levinsky’s chutzpah when he proposes for the second time, Anna dismisses him with finality. When the real-estate boom collapses and Levinsky regains financial stability with A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
the aid of a Gentile with whom he’s done business, he seems to relinquish his romantic dream; he remains a despondent millionaire longing for a past that never was and a future that appears beyond his reach.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
989
T H E R I S E O F D AV I D L E V I N S K Y
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Cahan’s novel was generally praised by the critics for its realism, although it drew complaints about the unfavorable portrait of its Jewish protagonist. Some readers considered it borderline anti-Semitism—an understandable response because Levinsky has few if any redeeming features. Others found it altogether detestable, but whether they were criticizing the novel or its East Side content is subject to question. Harper & Brothers sold about eight thousand copies of Levinsky in 1917 and 1918, a respectable sales figure for the time; the novel was republished ten years later by Grosset and Dunlap (1928), who kept it in print for another decade. CONCLUSION
The Rise of David Levinsky has deservedly been praised as one of the best immigration novels published in America. Written by a Jewish immigrant with a strong commitment to his people and his adoptive country alike, it authentically depicts how an industry grew in the United States, making some people wealthy but keeping a multitude of others destitute through exploitation. Yet it also reveals the impact of organized labor—a popular force toward which Cahan was greatly sympathetic—when the abuses became more severe than the laborers were willing to bear. For Cahan, life in the ghetto was not entirely grim despite the constant struggle of its inhabitants to survive and eventually progress. Although Levinsky, the narrator, is central, many of the secondary and tertiary characters represent such struggles on a more typical level. All of the major figures in the novel, and most of the minor ones, are Jewish, yet Cahan depicted a remarkable variety of characters on the Lower East Side and individualized them all, thereby enhancing the authenticity of his narrative. One of the novel’s cardinal achievements is the complex portrait of its eponymous narrator. Levinsky presents himself as objectively as possible from his own limited perspective. He exposes his eccentricities; his bewilderment over his chronically despondent state of mind; his constant self-justification based on his reading of Herbert Spencer; his exploitation of anyone in a position to provide him with what he needs, male or female, worker or financier, friend or competitor. He is far more honest with readers than with himself or any of acquaintances, for he enables readers to apprehend what he cannot see reflectively. The Rise of David Levinsky was Cahan’s final novel and a stunning achievement. The novel represents the garment trade in all its complexity, both feeding off and depending on the hands of millions of struggling immigrants, who drive themselves day by day to earn a wretched living in the Jewish ghettos. Simul-
990
A M E R I C A N
taneously, the narrator exposes himself as shrewd, exploitative, and laden with emotional and psychological burdens. The greater depth and increased length of The Rise of David Levinsky gives it the literary stature that the original serialized “autobiography” lacks. Ironically, Cahan wrote his grandest novel almost as an afterthought, in order to fill out the story he had begun a few years earlier in four magazine articles. Had the offer from McClure’s not come, The Rise of David Levinsky would never have been written. This serendipitous sequence appears to confirm the significant role of luck in real life and thereby justify its place in realistic and naturalistic fiction, however unlikely it may seem to skeptical readers. See also Assimilation; Immigration; Jews; Labor; New York; Realism; Success BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Cahan, Abraham. “The Autobiography of an American Jew: The Rise of David Levinsky.” Illustrated by Jay Hambridge. McClure’s Magazine, April 1913, pp. 92– 106; May 1913, pp. 73–85; June 1913, pp. 131–132; 134, 138, 141–142; 145, 147–148; 151–152; July 1913, pp. 116–128. Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917. Howells, William Dean. Criticism and Fiction. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891. Secondary Works
Chametzky, Jules. From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. Chametzky, Jules. Introduction and Notes. In The Rise of David Levinsky, by Abraham Cahan. 1917. New York: Penguin, 1993. Harap, Louis. The Image of the Jew in American Literature from Early Republic to Mass Immigration. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974. Higham, John. Introduction. In The Rise of David Levinsky. 1917. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960. Howe, Irving. World of Our Fathers. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976. Marovitz, Sanford E. Abraham Cahan. New York: Twayne/ Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1996. Pollock, Theodore Marvin. “The Solitary Clarinetist: A Critical Biography of Abraham Cahan, 1860–1917.” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1959. Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
H I S T O R Y
Sanford E. Marovitz
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
ST. LOUIS WORLD’S FAIR
S
The St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, technically the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition, was held to celebrate the centenary of the purchase of a huge tract of land from the French. Despite being originally scheduled to be held in 1903, planning and scale meant that the fair didn’t open until 30 April 1904. The gates of the fairground in Forest Park, St. Louis, stayed open until 1 December 1904, and an average of 100,000 people attended each day. In total over twenty million people saw the exhibition. Many innovations in the fields of science and technology were debuted in St. Louis, including the X-ray machine, the electric typewriter, the coffeemaker, the dishwasher, and a prototype of the telephone answering machine called the Paulson Telegraphone. The fair was the brainchild of the former Missouri governor David R. Francis, who headed the planning committee. Forest Park was chosen as the site for the exhibition, and the city of St. Louis raised $5 million, which was matched by the U.S. government and by public subscription. One of the conditions of using the site was that it would be relandscaped as a park at the end of the fair. The site covered a huge area, larger than any other world’s fair before or since: 1,272 acres, including 615 acres of private property and all of the land owned by Washington University (founded by William Greenleaf Eliot, the grandfather of the poet T. S. Eliot, in 1853). Francis Field, on the campus of Washington University, was used to host the 1904 Olympic Games, the first to be held on U.S. soil and the only Olympics to take place during a world’s fair.
The Louisiana Purchase Exposition seems to have taken its model from the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, for many of the buildings echoed the architecture seen in Illinois eleven years earlier, with enormous white palaces surrounded by specially constructed waterways and lakes and spectacular landscaping. Another echo of the Chicago fair was the presence of George Ferris’s big wheel, which gave aerial views of the fair to visitors as it had in Chicago on the Midway Plaisance in 1893. The central building in St. Louis was the Festival Hall, and in front of it the Cascades—a massively tiered set of waterfalls—led down Art Hill to the Grand Lagoon. Fifteen exhibit palaces outlined with electric lights (which were used liberally throughout the site) covered 128 acres (about 10 percent) of the fairgrounds. Each hall had a theme, such as education, mines and metallurgy, electricity, liberal arts, and manufacture. A visitor could visit a sunken Japanese garden, a re-creation of the walled city of Jerusalem, or the actual log cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born. All told the site contained nine hundred separate buildings spread around the custom-built rolling landscape that raised the land from forty to sixty-five feet above base level. For visitors, it required a month to do any real justice to the exhibits because the fair spread over seventy-five miles of paths and roadways. St. Louis’s equivalent of the Chicago Plaisance was the street known as the Pike. Running for a mile, the Pike was lined with amusements that were run by an army of attendants. At night, when the exhibition halls closed down, the crowds funneled into the Pike to promenade and to be serenaded by brass bands and
991
S T. L O U I S W O R L D ’ S F A I R
A view of the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1905. Seen here are the vast exhibition halls and a canal, one of many water features of the fair’s landscape. Even the design of the grounds was intended to be instructive, presenting a model of an ideal city. © CORBIS
vocal groups vying with each other with megaphones. The expression “coming down the Pike” originated here, because visitors never knew what they would encounter next along the pathway. The entertainment included a replica of the Blarney Castle, a Parisian fashion show, an interactive deep-sea diving exhibit, and the sea battle of Santiago, staged with model ships in a miniature lake. Rides were available on camels, turtles, and elephants. Food was of course in plentiful supply, and the fair of 1904 is credited with introducing the world’s first ice cream cone and iced tea. Twenty-two countries were represented in pavilions, including the Philippines, Ceylon, and China. The United States was of course well represented. Forty-four cities, states, and territories built their own display buildings. One of the chief draws was a huge
992
A M E R I C A N
aviary, funded by the federal government, which was big enough for birds to fly freely within it. A working replica of a coal mine was set up to highlight U.S. industry and resources, and much to the surprise of the construction crew, real coal was found underneath the model when the shaft was sunk. Literary figures were witnesses and participants. A young T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) visited the fair in his native city and spent many hours in the Igorot Village, one part of the exhibition from the Philippines. A couple of months later he wrote a number of pieces concerning primitive life, including a short story called “The Man Who Was King” for the Smith Academy Record. Set in Polynesia, the description of the village in the story is close to contemporary reports of the Filipino exhibit. Eliot pursued
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S T. L O U I S W O R L D ’ S F A I R
MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS, LOUIS The St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 had an official song written for it. This song was also heavily featured in the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis and gave the movie its name. (Note: In this song “Louis” is pronounced “Louie.”)
When Louis came home to the flat, He hung up his coat and his hat, He gazed all around, but no wifey he found, So he said “where can Flossie be at?” A note on the table he spied, He read it just once, then he cried. It ran, “Louis dear, it’s too slow for me here, So I think I will go for a ride.”
The dresses that hung in the hall, Were gone, she had taken them all; She took all his rings and the rest of his things; The picture he missed from the wall. “What! moving!” the janitor said, “Your rent is paid three months ahead.” “What good is the flat?” said poor Louis, “Read that.” And the janitor smiled as he read.
“Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, Meet me at the fair, Don’t tell me the lights are shining any place but there; We will dance the Hoochee Koochee, I will be your tootsie wootsie, If you will meet in St. Louis, Louis, Meet me at the fair.”
“Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, Meet me at the fair, Don’t tell me the lights are shining any place but there; We will dance the Hoochee Koochee, I will be your tootsie wootsie, If you will meet in St. Louis, Louis, Meet me at the fair.”
Lyrics by Andrew B. Sterling, music by Frederick Allen “Kerry” Mills. Published 1904 by F. A. Mills, 48 West Twenty-ninth Street, New York.
his anthropological interests during his study at Harvard, and his interests in native and primitive cultures inform much of his best-known poetry. The novelist and short story writer Kate Chopin (1851–1904) visited the fair on 20 August 1904 and spent a long day touring the exhibits. Returning home in the evening, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died two days later. While the majority of acclaim and appreciation for Chopin’s work was still some decades away, Mark Twain (1835–1910) was already established as a literary giant. Although hailing from Missouri, Twain did not manage to attend the fair itself, but he had been involved from afar. In 1902, when he was granted an honorary degree from the University of Missouri, Twain embarked on a journey down the Mississippi to receive it. Beginning his journey in Hannibal, his childhood home, Twain was received warmly at every stop on his way to Columbia, where he received his degree on 4 June. A riverboat was renamed in Twain’s honor to mark the occasion. In St. Louis the next day he participated in groundbreaking ceremonies to mark the inauguration of construction for the World’s Fair. Although Twain did not travel to St. Louis when the fair A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
opened two years later, he did (unsuccessfully) suggest holding a steamboat race down the Mississippi in commemoration of the event. Two requests were made to the writer asking for his blessing for a Mark Twain Day at the fair, and twice Twain refused. In his second letter to decline the honor he wrote that “such compliments are not proper for the living; they are proper and safe for the dead only. . . . So long as we remain alive we are not safe from doing things which, however righteously and honorably intended, can wreck our repute and extinguish our friendships” (Letter to T. F. Gatts, 1903). The St. Louis World’s Fair also had its own song, written by Andrew B. Sterling and Frederick Allen “Kerry” Mills. It was this song that gave the name to the movie Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), directed by Vincente Minnelli. The song’s refrain is sung frequently throughout the movie, and it becomes a point of reference and contact for the characters. It encapsulates their excitement about the fair, and the movie ends with the whole family at the showgrounds, thrilled by the display of electric light. See also World’s Columbian Exposition
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
993
SAME-SEX LOVE
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Work
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Letters. Vol. 5, 1901–1905. 2004. Edited by Albert Bigelow Paine. Project Gutenberg EBook of The Letters of Mark Twain. Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/1/9/3197/3197. txt. Secondary Works
Breitbart, Eric. A World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. Minkin, Bert. Legacies of the St. Louis World’s Fair. Lynchburg: Virginia Publishing, 1998. Primm, James Neal. Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 1764–1980. 3rd ed. St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1998. Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Keith Gumery
SAME-SEX LOVE Same-sex love changed dramatically between 1870 and 1920. The word “homosexual” was coined and gradually entered popular speech. While the mere coining of a term cannot be credited alone with introducing and spreading the belief that some people are intrinsically defined by an erotic orientation toward persons of the same sex (or the opposite sex), along with the new term came a distinct concept of homosexual identity or personhood. Significantly, the term “heterosexual” was only coined later, in reaction to and in distinction from the category of “homosexual.” Some historians have argued that the very idea of sexuality (of a more or less stable inner predisposition toward certain objects of desire, either same-sex or opposite-sex) was a new idea during this period: in earlier eras people did not seem to think of themselves as having “sexuality” at all, and they would not necessarily have understood all dimensions of what we understand as sexuality in the early twenty-first century. These are quite complicated historical and theoretical issues, still awaiting further research that may clarify if not resolve them. What seems evident, however, is that few if any people in the mid-nineteenth century thought that they belonged to a distinct category of person, defined by and grounded in their habitual sexual behavior or usual erotic preferences. But by the end of the century, and even more powerfully in the
994
A M E R I C A N
early twentieth century, sexual identities as we now know them had begun to shape people’s lives in farreaching ways.
SEXUAL IDENTITY IN LITERATURE
Imaginative literature of various kinds played a central role in this process of creating and promulgating sexual identities: patterns of behavior, ways of speech, and modes of consciousness associated with same-sex love were observed and represented, established and tested, and circulated and transformed by novels, plays, poems, autobiographies, and other literary forms. And the images and patterns of same-sex love we encounter around 1870 are, on the whole, very different from those we can find in the literature that appeared by 1920. Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), for instance, published her immensely successful novel Little Women in two parts in 1868 and 1869, and in it she depicts a female-centric world featuring a tomboyish heroine (Jo March) toward whom lesbian readers later looked as a model. Alcott did have Jo marry in the end, and in the sequels to Little Women—Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886)—she has Jo live a fairly conventional life as a wife, mother, and schoolteacher. But Alcott herself dismissed these tales, perhaps unfairly, as “moral pap for the young” (Little Women, p. 1075) and meanwhile was busy writing (but publishing only anonymously) much racier newspaper tales that featured all kinds of relatively deviant behavior and feeling. For instance, in Alcott’s 1869 tale “My Mysterious Mademoiselle,” the plot features an English bachelor, en route to see his ailing sister; he consents to share his train carriage with a “slender girl of sixteen or so” (p. 112) whose hand he eventually kisses and from whom he exacts a flirtatious promise that in exchange for his protection during their travels she shall bestow upon him at the end of their journey a kiss on the mouth. The “mademoiselle” is eventually revealed to be a fifteen-year-old young man named George Vane escaping from his private school to visit his sick mother; in fact he is the nephew of the traveling bachelor, and they are headed to the same place. The boy often “played girl-parts” (p. 124) on stage at his school, and thus had experience crossdressing. At the end of their journey, he offers to make good on his promised kiss on the lips, but his uncle declines, shakes his hand “manfully,” and off they go together. The narrative’s pleasure in erotic ambiguity is palpable, and its teasing approach to the possibility of a male-male kiss is more daring than what Alcott would attempt in the respectable fiction she published under her own name. Scenes of cross-dressing and erotic ambiguity are plentiful in the literature of the postbellum United States (from Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SAME-SEX LOVE
1869 Malbone to Mark Twain’s 1885 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), and in many cases seem to presage later homosexual styles. At the same time, novels like Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend (1870), Frederick W. Loring’s Two College Friends (1871), Henry James’s Roderick Hudson (1875), William Dean Howells’s Private Theatricals (1876) and The Shadow of a Dream (1890), as well as short stories like James Lane Allen’s “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” (1888) all feature pairs of men whose intimacy—usually categorized as a “romantic friendship,” as the scholar Axel Nissen notes—seems to carry a special charge that exceeds social norms. Although novels played a central role in exploring the contours and boundaries of same-sex relationships in this period, short stories often seem to have provided the opportunity for particularly daring and searching depictions, and perhaps even more so in the case of female same-sex feeling than for male same-sex love. In the pioneering anthology Two Friends and Other Nineteenth-Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers (1994), Susan Koppelman collects fascinating tales by Rose Terry Cooke, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Kate Chopin, Alice French (Octave Thanet), Alice Brown, and Sara Orne Jewett. Like many of the stories of male “romantic friendship,” these tales may seem, in retrospect, identifiably “lesbian” (as Koppelman’s title puts it), but they must also have seemed fundamentally unobjectionable to the magazine editors who published them. For women of this period who chose to live together in intimate emotional attachment, there was a term—“Boston marriage”— that was readily available. Jewett herself lived for twentyseven years in a Boston marriage with Annie Adams Fields (the widow of Jewett’s Atlantic Monthly editor James T. Fields). The emotional interior of Jewett’s and Fields’s life together is necessarily inaccessible to us, but it is not implausible to suggest that the close emotional bonds between women in stories like Jewett’s “Martha’s Lady” (1897) or Woolson’s “Felipa” (1876) or Freeman’s “Two Friends” (1887) were in fact fictional explorations of new modes of affection and new styles of life that were being created by the stories’ realworld counterparts, including their authors. THE CONCEPT OF SEXUALITY
Recovering anything like an authentic account of the radically different ways in which people from earlier eras thought about the various feelings and experiences we now usually lump together and call “sexuality” is extremely difficult. Sexuality, which we tend to think of as a more or less discrete and unitary phenomenon (however complex and vexing), something one “has” A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
or “is,” can actually be more reasonably thought of as a composite entity (a lumping together of various separable elements), and these distinct elements can be teased apart. Michel Foucault, whose multivolume The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) is probably the most influential work on the subject, argued forcefully that we ought to stop thinking of sexuality as a “natural given” and see sexuality itself as a historical construction, a concept linking together “the stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, [and] the strengthening of controls and resistances” (pp. 105–106). These various elements do not naturally and necessarily go together, Foucault argued, but he observed that we have come to think of them as essentially linked, comprising a natural whole. This analysis of Foucault’s has potentially important implications for reading the literature of the past with an eye toward learning about same-sex love. Instead of reading a novel, for example, and trying to find characters who resemble homosexuals of today or relationships that resemble later gay or lesbian relationships, we might instead watch for the subtler, separate elements that were not in earlier times always aggregated and called “sexuality.” That is, we could read the imaginative literature of the past and look for “the stimulation of bodies” (when and how do characters get excited?) or “the formation of special knowledges” (when do we see some kind of professional expertise employed to identify erotic deviance?) without presupposing that these individual elements are coded exactly as they are today. Thus in Walt Whitman’s poetry, which is thought to celebrate gay love, it might be a valuable exercise for readers to examine how various kinds of sensual pleasure are depicted in (and stimulated by) his poetry. Whitman (1819–1892) wrote rapturously about bodies, pleasure, acts, interpersonal encounters, separate singularity, and affective collectivity, and Michael Moon, among others, has demonstrated the way that over the course of many years Whitman revised and expanded Leaves of Grass repeatedly, all while the social organization of erotic experience was drastically changing around him. Leaves of Grass first appeared as a slim volume in 1855, and upon its first publication one hostile reviewer denounced it as “a mass of stupid filth,” characterized by “a degrading, beastly sensuality,” but could only bring himself to specify this sensuality in Latin, “Peccatum illud horribile, inter Christianos non nominandum”—that is “that horrible sin, not to be named among Christians” (quoted in Katz, Love Stories, pp. 105– 106). This is an ancient phrase, long associated with homosexual sodomy, but while we might consider the reviewer to be prescient in detecting the same-sex the-
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
995
SAME-SEX LOVE
Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. The two women, who are known to have had a “Boston marriage,” in their library at 148 Charles Street, Boston, Massachusetts. COURTESY OF HISTORIC NEW ENGLAND/SPNEA
matics of Leaves of Grass, it is noteworthy that other reviewers did not appear to notice anything objectionable, and this reviewer reverted to an archaic theological condemnation of acts (sodomy) rather than a critique of a type of person (a homosexual). In his 1976 anthology Gay American History, Jonathan Ned Katz recounts that in the last years of Whitman’s life, he was revered and sought out by some of the leading spokesmen and theorists of the early homosexual rights movement, including the English writers Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) and John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), the latter of whom, in particular, pestered Whitman to declare unequivocally that his poetry was defending and advocating homosexuality. Symonds in an 1890 letter to Whitman professed his own belief that “some men have a strong natural bias toward persons of their own sex” and ventured his opinion that the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass was “calculated to encourage ardent and physical intimacies” (p. 348). Whitman, in irritation, replied
996
A M E R I C A N
to Symonds in what may seem to us a puzzling fashion, refusing to be slotted neatly into such a category and perversely declaring that Symonds was utterly mistaken in making such “morbid inferences” (p. 349). What to make of this? Was Whitman unhappy to be “outed”? Or did he believe that the rich inner life of feeling, and the complex experience of embodiment—not to mention the relationship between these subjective phenomena and literary expression—could not be reduced to newly established categories like “homosexual” and “heterosexual” except at great cost? Whatever we conclude, and whatever our interpretation of Whitman’s poetry, we can at least observe that Whitman lived through the radical transformations of (or the emergence of) sexuality that occurred in this period, wrote and revised his poetry over the long span of years from 1855 to the 1891 “deathbed edition,” and registered those transformations sensitively. Some contemporary readers, like Carpenter and Symonds, adopted Whitman as an avatar of homosexual love, and
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SAME-SEX LOVE
thus his writing—regardless of his intentions or wishes— played an instrumental role in establishing homosexual consciousness and founding a modern homosexual movement. The same could be said of many other authors, including Herman Melville (1819–1891), who was largely forgotten by the general public and disregarded by literary critics for the last decades of his life, when he lived in relative obscurity and virtually ceased publishing. But at his death in 1891 he left in manuscript a long story titled “Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative),” which was eventually published in 1924. The recovery of this tale, and the rehabilitation of Melville’s reputation, were partly instigated by coteries of homosexual readers who believed they detected in his writing a proto-gay sensibility. Had Melville been able, like Whitman, to respond to such ardent readers, his reaction would have great value for those who wish to understand how same-sex love impinges on literary creation (and vice versa). Literary scholars including James Creech and Robert K. Martin point to the dilemma that, in the absence of such evidence, we are left to wonder whether Melville was bestowing on his posterity a tale that made relatively explicit the same-sex thematics that readers have also found somewhat more cloudily available in his earlier writings such as Typee (1846), MobyDick (1851), and Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852). THE EMBRACE OF HOMOSEXUALITY
Although many literary texts from the nineteenth century pose difficult problems of historical interpretation— do their depictions of same-sex love anticipate later homosexual identities, or do we misrecognize them if we characterize them in that way?—by the early twentieth century there were literary works that are unmistakably modern in their depiction of love between persons of the same sex who have internalized a distinctly homosexual (or, for that matter, heterosexual) self-concept. In 1901, for instance, Claude Hartland’s The Story of a Life offered a candid depiction of a man struggling with the shame he felt due to his sexual desire for other men. The subtitle of the narrative, For the Consideration of the Medical Fraternity, suggests that Hartland was aware of the way the medical establishment was coming to think of homosexuality. In 1902, a nineteen-year-old woman from Butte, Montana, created a literary sensation when she published The Story of Mary MacLane, by Herself, in which she unabashedly proclaimed her own odd genius, expressed her powerful dissatisfaction with life in Butte, and professed her devotion to the high school teacher she referred to as “the anemone lady.” “I feel in the anemone lady a strange attraction of sex,” MacLane wrote. “There is in me a masculine element that, when I am thinking of A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
her, arises and overshadows all the others” (p. 77). MacLane’s weird self-narrative illustrates, among other things, that a young person in a remote place who feels different from her family and surroundings, and who is understood by no one around her, will often turn to reading to provide an imaginative world in which she can feel at least somewhat better oriented, if not exactly comfortable. MacLane tells frequently of the authors she likes and with whom she identifies. Charles Warren Stoddard, who had been publishing homoerotic tales of same-sex love since his South Sea Idyls (1869), published in 1903 an autobiographical novel depicting bohemian literary, theatrical, and artistic circles in San Francisco in which homoerotic interest is represented obliquely. What is sometimes called the first openly gay novel, Imre: A Memorandum (1906), by Edward Prime-Stevenson, approached homosexual love more directly than Stoddard did, but the novel had to be published abroad (in Naples) by private arrangement and under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne. James Gifford, who edited a 2003 edition of Imre, has likewise drawn our attention to an obscure short story by Stevenson, “Out of the Sun” (1913), also published by a vanity press in Italy, in which many of the contents of the library of a turn-of-the-century homosexual named Dayneford are helpfully listed. Dayneford has grouped and sequestered those books in his library that pertain to his same-sex erotic interests. In Dayneford’s Library (1995), Gifford lists the titles, and besides the specific makeup of this set of books, what is striking is that the construction of homosexuality is shown to be supported by literary canon-making. This connection between literary interest and emerging homosexual identity is pronounced as well in the novel published late in the life of the onceprominent Henry Blake Fuller, in which the eponymous hero is a graduate student in literature at a thinly disguised Northwestern University. Bertram Cope’s Year (1919) is fascinating, among other reasons, for the way it depicts the coexistence in one place and time of what seem to be several different styles of same-sex attachment and love, harking back to the earlier romantic friendship model, on the one hand, and anticipating a later style of urban gay identity, on the other. Fuller’s novel came out roughly at the same time as two other texts with which it can profitably be compared. Earl Lind’s Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) describes a highly developed urban subculture in New York City, composed mainly of transvestite homosexuals, or fairies, whose headquarters was a beer garden called Paresis Hall on the Lower East Side. Lind, who was also called Ralph Werther and Jennie June at
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
997
SAME-SEX LOVE
times, describes a circle of men who have a highly articulate and politically astute account of their own sexual orientation. When Bertram, having narrowly escaped his friends’ attempts to get him married, leaves Chicago for a position at a university in the East at the end of the novel, an older woman who has taken a great interest in him believes he will settle into his new job and then resume what she imagines is his romance with one of the girls who boards with her, eventually sending for her to marry him. The older bachelor who has cultivated a friendship with Bertram believes, on the contrary, that in the new city Bertram will set up housekeeping with his flamboyant and effeminate friend Arthur Lemoyne, who embarrassed him in Chicago but would probably fit in with Earl Lind’s fairies at Paresis Hall. If Arthur and Bertram were to end up at Paresis Hall or a similar urban homosexual resort, they would luckily have avoided the sad fate of Sherwood Anderson’s Wing Biddelbaum in the story “Hands”—part of Winesburg, Ohio (1919)—who, nearly lynched by the panicked residents of a small town where he taught school and was falsely accused of improper conduct with the boys under his care, has sought fearful refuge in Winesburg with an elderly aunt. In provincial Winesburg he protects himself against renewed suspicion by carefully avoiding social interaction, suppressing what he thinks are revealing gestures, and stifling his imagination. Thus, approaching 1920 American literature reflected the status of same-sex love in the United States: although violent prejudice against homosexuality was rife a bold embrace of homosexual dignity was becoming possible. See also Sex Education
Lind, Earl. Autobiography of an Androgyne. New York: Medico-Legal Journal, 1918. MacLane, Mary. The Story of Mary MacLane, by Herself. 1902. In Tender Darkness: A Mary MacLane Anthology, edited by Elizabeth Pruitt. Belmont, Calif.: Abernathy and Brown, 1993. Nissen, Axel, ed. The Romantic Friendship Reader: Love Stories between Men in Victorian America. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Prime-Stevenson, Edward. Imre: A Memorandum. 1906. Edited by James J. Gifford. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003. Stoddard, Charles Warren. For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City. San Francisco: A. M. Robertson, 1903. Stoddard, Charles Warren. South Sea Idyls. 1869. In Cruising the South Seas: Stories by Charles Warren Stoddard, edited by Winston Leyland. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987. Secondary Works
Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. New York: Basic Books, 1994. Creech, James. Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Faderman, Lillian. Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women, from the Renaissance to the Present. New York: Morrow, 1981. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1, An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. See pp. 105–106. Gifford, James. Dayneford’s Library: American Homosexual Writing, 1900–1913. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys. New York: Library of America, 2005. Alcott, Louisa May. “My Mysterious Mademoiselle.” In From Jo March’s Attic: Stories of Intrigue and Suspense, edited by Madeleine B. Stern and Daniel Shealy, pp. 111–126. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1919. Fuller, Henry Blake. Bertram Cope’s Year. Chicago: R. F. Seymour, 1919.
Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.: A Documentary. New York: Crowell, 1976. Katz, Jonathan Ned. Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Kent, Kathryn R. Making Girls into Women: American Women’s Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.
Hartland, Claude. Claude Hartland: The Story of a Life: For the Consideration of the Medical Fraternity. 1901. San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1985.
Martin, Robert K. Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.
Koppelman, Susan, ed. Two Friends and Other NineteenthCentury Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers. New York: Meridian, 1994.
Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991.
998
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SAN FRANCISCO
Vicinus, Martha. Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Christopher Looby
SAN FRANCISCO In the wake of the 1848–1849 gold rush, San Francisco did not so much evolve as erupt as a frontier boomtown. And a decade later, in the 1860s, it emerged as a literary frontier when an impressive group of young writers began showing up in town and writing for a number of new lively local journals. Among the arriving writers were Bret Harte, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens), Charles Warren Stoddard, Ina Coolbrith, Cincinnatus H. “Joaquin” Miller, and Ambrose Bierce. As outsiders—some just passing through—they wrote about a city of outsiders, largely for an audience of outsiders. In exaggerated glimpses of a wayward city on the far edge of the continent, they confirmed for eastern readers their preconceptions of the new city as raw, unruly “other”—as everything the East was not. In its 1860s literary construction, San Francisco was an outpost of wealth and wildness, sophistication and lawlessness, a motley gathering of drifters, outcasts, gamblers, and speculators. Nineteenth-century western literature, implicitly at least, was always about the interplay between East and West, civilization and lawlessness, and early San Francisco provided the ground for this kind of cultural exchange. WRITERS AT THE END OF AN ERA
By the 1870s most of the literary pioneers were gone. Bret Harte (1836–1902) and Mark Twain (1835– 1910) were not to return, though each would continue to write about San Francisco and the West in the years ahead, Twain revisiting his western years in Roughing It (1872) and Harte doggedly plodding on for thirty post-California years with his sentimental tales about “redshirt” Sierra miners. Among those who stayed in the city or returned after a time away were Coolbrith, Bierce, and Miller. Ina Coolbrith (1841– 1928), who assisted Harte in launching the ambitious new Overland Monthly in 1868, worked as a librarian at Oakland’s Free Library; published a collection of her poetry, Songs of the Golden Gate (1895); and presided over literary salons, encouraging such diverse figures as Miller, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the dancer Isadora Duncan, and the young Jack London. She was named the state’s first poet laureate in 1915. With Coolbrith’s encouragement, the histrionic Joaquin Miller (1837– 1913) took his act to the London stage, performing, in A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
buckskins and a ten-gallon hat, the role of “western bard,” the “real McCoy” from the American West. On his return he built a monumental estate, the Hights, in the Oakland Hills. The dark, cynical Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?), after several years abroad, returned to issue scathing attacks for a new journal—the Wasp—and for William Randolph Hearst’s Examiner, his chief targets being Dennis Kearney and his racist Workingmen’s Party and the graft of the Big Four railroad monopolists (Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker). Then in 1914, at age seventyone, he disappeared in Mexico, presumably trying to join up with Pancho Villa. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, San Francisco emerged as a cosmopolitan, multiethnic enclave, stretching across the peninsula from bay to ocean. The transcontinental railroad arrived in 1869 (and a young Henry George was writing in the Overland Monthly about the economic hardships the rail lines would bring), and four years later the first cable car was introduced on Clay Street. Golden Gate Park, on the western edge of the city, was opened in 1870. In the westward expansion, distinct class and ethnic neighborhoods emerged: the older settlers and the wealthy concentrated in the hills, the newer immigrants and the poor in the flatlands, and the middle class increasingly in the newer western neighborhoods. While 60 percent of the population was of immigrant stock in 1880—largely first- and second-generation Irish, Germans, and Italians—a shift in the national origin of immigrants occurred in the closing years of the century. The majority of newcomers were no longer of northern and western European stock but of southern and eastern European heritage—southern Italians and Sicilians, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians, and Russian Jews. The shift, which was occurring then in all large American cities, engendered a fierce nativist response in the East, but because San Francisco was largely a second area of American settlement for Europeans (who often came with a knowledge of English) and because the city was too new to develop rigid social structures and barriers, there was less overt opposition to their arrival than in eastern cities. The great exception to the relatively tolerant San Francisco was the prejudice directed at the Chinese, who began arriving by boatloads in the 1850s. The city welcomed them at first as a source of cheap labor, but in the hard times of the 1870s, businesses that hired only white labor turned to the Chinese, who were compelled to work for less pay—for “coolie wages.” Kearney’s Workingmen’s Party spearheaded a drive to deport the Chinese and stop their continuing arrival, presenting them not only as a threat to Irish labor but as a dangerous, alien race, a menace to the city’s health
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
999
SAN FRANCISCO
and safety. Anti-Chinese hysteria peaked in a Chinatown riot in 1877, followed in 1882 by the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act—America’s first significant antiimmigration law. In 1910 a detention center on Angel Island was set up, essentially for the still-arriving Chinese. Poems of despair the Chinese detainees carved on the walls of their cells have become part of the American social and literary record. At the same time the incarcerated Chinese wrote their bitter poems, they wrote letters home to family members of the success, wealth, and respect they were achieving as “Celestials” on “Gold Mountain” (California). The contrast between the fanciful letters sent home and the despairing poems inscribed on cell walls offers, as contrast between dream and reality, one of the most poignant spectacles in American history. The first notable writer of Chinese descent to publish fiction about the Chinese on the West Coast was Edith Maude Eaton (1865–1914), the daughter of an English father and Chinese mother, who, under the name Sui Sin Far, wrote stories and children’s tales about the Chinese ordeal and the dilemmas of mixed Anglo-Chinese parentage. Set mostly in San Francisco’s and Los Angeles’s Chinatowns, her stories were collected as Mrs. Spring Fragrance in 1912 (out of print until its expanded reissue in 1995). Perhaps, though, the most famous, or infamous, work about the Chinese to come out of early San Francisco was Bret Harte’s 1870 poem, “Plain Language from Truthful James” (also known as “The Heathen Chinee”), about two gamblers cheating at euchre, one Chinese, the other a Yankee. The cheating William Nye, discovering his opponent is also hiding cards, cries out, irrelevantly, “We are ruined by Chinese cheap labour” (p. 132). Although Nye castigates Ah Sin in familiar anti-Chinese language, Harte’s poem seems more clearly an indictment of racism than an expression of it, an ironic statement consistent not only with the irony that pervades Harte’s writing but also with his earlier defense of the Chinese in the dispatches he sent to eastern journals. SAN FRANCISCO FICTION IN THE AGE OF REALISM
The conclusion of the Spanish-American War in the opening years of the twentieth century persuaded San Francisco that it would be the center of a new Pacificfacing nation. Anticipating its new role, the city embarked on a major renaissance in city planning, a “City Beautiful” project on classical and European models, sparked by the reform mayor James Phelan and engineered by the architect and city planner Daniel Hudson Burnham. San Francisco would be another “White City,” like the Chicago constructed for its 1893 exposition and echoed on a smaller scale in San
1000
A M E R I C A N
Francisco’s 1894 Midwinter International Exposition in Golden Gate Park. The city would, moreover, demonstrate its hegemony over its new rival four hundred miles to the south, Los Angeles, which was then attracting hundreds of thousands of migrants. The earthquake disrupted the plans. On 18 April 1906 the city was rocked by a series of major jolts. Brick buildings south of Market Street, the financial district, and much of downtown collapsed. The worst was yet to come in the fires that followed. Before the flames were stopped on Van Ness Street, half the residential portions of the city were destroyed. The city recovered quickly, though. Most of the downtown area was rebuilt in the next four years, and the city celebrated its recovery in the 1915 PanamaPacific International Exposition. When the quake struck, the San Francisco–born writer Jack London (1876–1916), not yet thirty and with his best-known books behind him, had bought a ranch in Glen Ellen in Sonoma County (fifty miles north of the city) and was building his ketch, the Snark, in preparation for a round-the-world cruise. The quake held up construction and delayed the start. Then a skin infection he contracted caused the journey to be aborted in Australia, and in 1909 he was back in Glen Ellen, where he began work on two of his last novels, Burning Daylight (1910) and Valley of the Moon (1913), journey novels that retrace London’s own discovery of Glen Ellen (the Valley of the Moon), setting the bucolic landscape against the brutal, life-destroying experiences in the Bay Area cities—San Francisco and Oakland. In Burning Daylight, Elam Harnish, one of London’s Yukon warriors, having made a fortune in Klondike gold, returns to a San Francisco that, a generation after its own gold fever, has become a frontier of mad financial speculation, a Darwinian battleground for economic supremacy. As a naive newcomer to the city, he is swindled out of a big chunk of money, and in a showdown that might have come right out of a conventional western—that in fact reads like a parody of Bret Harte or even Owen Wister—he faces down the swindlers, a Colt .44 in his hand. From this point his Nietzschean will to power takes over. As urban capitalist, he wheels and deals his way to control vast holdings across the bay in Oakland—oil lines, ferries, and whole neighborhoods. The price he pays, though, for his ruthless individualism is nervous exhaustion and physical deterioration, and as London envisioned his own recuperation in his second marriage and settlement on the land, Harnish falls in love and finds a new destiny in Sonoma Valley, a land of rolling hills, manzanitas, madrones, and redwoods. It is a rebirth for the hero after his emotional death in San Francisco.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SAN FRANCISCO
Reconstruction efforts in San Francisco. Looking west toward San Francisco Bay, after the 1906 earthquake. CALIFORNIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, FN-32841
The Valley of the Moon is similarly a return-to-theland novel, Sonoma Valley rescuing Billy and Saxon Roberts from their struggle to survive in the urban jungle. The first part of the novel is a long, harrowing account of their life on the Oakland waterfront—the same land that Elam Harnish developed into an industrial zone—an urban pit of violent labor warfare, police brutality, drunkenness, prostitution, and near starvation. It is the site of the failed promise of the California City—and by extension, the American City; the urban passages might well have come from books like Stephen Crane’s Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), or Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). London was a socialist, but he also believed in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority; the return to the land is construed as the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon in America. Billy and Saxon (their names a not-toosubtle reminder of their heritage) are rendered as the dispossessed descendants of their pioneer forebears, who crossed a continent to claim the West only to A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
lose it to foreigners—industrious European and Asian farmers. In journeying out of the city to reclaim the land, the novel implies, the couple is reclaiming what rightfully, historically, belongs to them. With the emergence of writers born in, or raised in, San Francisco—like London, Gertrude Atherton, and Frank Norris—the city could no longer be appropriated simply as exotic frontier or local color venue; the boomtown had become a metropolis with a population that exceeded 300,000 at century’s end and then doubled to over 600,000 by 1920. Significantly, the writers in this second wave of San Francisco writing employed not only tougher brands of urban realism but also a deeper consciousness of the past, of the city’s local and regional sources. For the visiting journalists of the 1860s, writing more for eastern audiences than for locals, the dialectic is geographical (East-West); in the fiction by homegrown writers in the next generation the dialectic is temporal. The present is prefigured, contained, in the past.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1001
SAN FRANCISCO
Gertrude Atherton (1857–1948), the first significant San Francisco–born novelist, was concerned throughout her long career (from the 1880s to the 1940s) with the historic reconstruction of San Francisco and its surroundings (including the city of Atherton, south of San Francisco, named after her husband’s family) from the pre-Yankee era to the multiethnic present. In her story collection The Splendid, Idle Forties (1902), she created a romantic, Arcadian myth of ranchos, missions, and haciendas before the American conquest. Thirteen of her novels, including (among her better-known works) The Californians (1898) and Ancestors (1907), belong to what she called her “story chronicle” of San Francisco, tracing the evolution of the city through the eyes of genteel, sympathetic young women trying to find useful places for themselves in a city undergoing tumultuous growth and expansion. Chicago-born Frank Norris (1870–1902), who arrived in San Francisco at age fourteen in 1884, served his literary apprenticeship in the 1890s writing for two new journals, the Lark and the Wave. Fascinated by the city’s ethnic and racial mix living in proximity on the peninsula, he wrote in the Wave of such local oddities as a red-haired child who was half Jewish and half Chinese and a man working in a Portuguese wine shop whose father was Negro and his mother Chinese. In his major San Francisco novel, McTeague (1899), the denizens of working-class Polk Street, where “Mac” has his dental parlors, constitute an ethnic stew of Anglos, Swiss German, Polish Jews, and Mexicans. But Norris was no latter-day Bret Harte, who considered himself a “foreign correspondent” in the city, observing its quaint, polyglot life; Norris’s concern in the novel is less with the city’s ethnic makeup than with the hereditary disposition of his protagonist and the irresistible pull of history. A year spent at the university in Berkeley put Norris under the influence of the evolutionary scientist Joseph Le Conte, who stressed the shaping force of heredity and the precarious mid-position human beings occupied between civilization and savagery. Le Conte and Émile Zola (whom Norris was reading then) became the principal sources both for McTeague and for another San Francisco novel, Vandover and the Brute (completed in the mid-1890s but not published until 1914, a dozen years after his death). Both trace the devolution of their title characters, who, unable to repress their primitive, instinctual sides, degenerate to a state of atavism. Mac has been born and raised in the Sierra mining country, and after his time as a Polk Street dentist comes to an end through the betrayal of a jealous friend, followed by a string of events that culminate in the murder of his wife, he returns to the territory of his childhood,
1002
A M E R I C A N
Two years before publishing McTeague, his novel of degeneracy in San Francisco, Frank Norris offered a more upbeat appraisal of literary opportunities in a new city geographically isolated from the rest of America.
Perhaps no great city in the world is as isolated as we are. . . . There is no great city to the north of us, to the south none nearer than Mexico, to the west the waste of the Pacific, to the east the waste of the deserts. Here we are set down as a pin point in a vast circle of solitude. Isolation produces individuality, originality. . . . and we have time to develop unhampered types and characters and habits unbiased by outside influences, types that are admirably suited to fictitious treatment. Frank Norris, “An Opening for Novelists: Great Opportunities for Fiction-Writers in San Francisco,” Wave 16 (22 May 1897): 7.
one step ahead of his pursuers. His animalistic side, no longer held in check by the middle-class trappings of his city life, takes over. He becomes what his heredity has dictated, sliding into the gravitational field of his primitive past. His flight takes him instinctively (by a kind of animalistic sixth sense) to the Placer mining country of his youth and then, in further flight from the present, to that most primordial landscape, Death Valley, where he finds his own death, handcuffed to his dead pursuer on the sun-scorched desert floor. Out in the endless California desert, a landscape as old as the earth, Norris offers one of the most freakish and claustrophobic scenes in literature. McTeague is chained to his hereditary past. If the West, in the national mythology, represents desire, promise, and the future, it also represents, for the major San Francisco novelists in the period considered here, the impossibility of escaping history. We carry our histories with us to the West. Memory and desire, past and future, coexist. The past may be a world elsewhere—across an ocean, as it was for the Chinese immigrants—or it may be discovered or recovered on the regional landscape, as it was for London, Atherton, and Norris. The city positioned at the end of the land is the city that engenders such returns to history. See also Chinese; Disasters; Immigration; McTeague; Mrs. Spring Fragrance; Overland Monthly; “Plain Language from Truthful James”
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S AT I R E , B U R L E S Q U E , A N D PA R O D Y
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Harte, Francis Bret. “Plain Language from Truthful James.” 1870. In The Complete Works of Bret Harte, vol.1, pp. 131– 133. London: Chatto and Windus, 1880. Hicks, Jack, James D. Houston, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Al Young, eds. The Literature of California: Writing from the Golden State. Vol. 1, Native American Beginnings to 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Contains samplings of such San Francisco writers as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Charles Warren Stoddard, Ina Coolbrith, Joaquin Miller, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Maude Eaton (Sui Sin Far), Gertrude Atherton, Jack London, Frank Norris, and an anonymous Chinese immigrant poet. London, Jack. Burning Daylight. 1910. Oakland, Calif.: Star Rover, 1987. London, Jack. The Valley of the Moon. 1913. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Peregrine Smith, 1975. Norris, Frank. McTeague.1899. In Novels and Essays, edited by Donald Pizer. New York: Library of America, 1986. Secondary Works
Fine, David, and Paul Skenazy, eds. San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Contains an introduction to San Francisco writing and includes essays on Harte, Twain, Norris, London, Atherton, and Chinese literature. Lyon, Thomas, et al., eds. A Literary History of the American West. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987. Contains essays on Harte, Twain, Norris, and London. Scharnhorst, Gary. “Bret Harte and the Literary Construction of the American West.” In A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America, edited by Charles L. Crow. New York: Blackwell, 2003. Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Walker, Franklin. San Francisco’s Literary Frontier. New York: Knopf, 1939. Wollenberg, Charles. Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives on Bay Area History. Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, 1985. Wyatt, David. The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986. David Fine
SATIRE, BURLESQUE, AND PARODY During his tenure as Professor of Belles Lettres at Harvard, James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) lectured on the attributes that distinguished “Humor, Wit, Fun, A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
and Satire.” Of the four, satire was the most difficult to grasp and appreciate: “Of satirists I have hitherto said nothing, because some, perhaps the most eminent of them, do not come under the head either of wit or humor. With them, as Juvenal said of himself, ‘facit indignatio versus,’ and wrath is the element, as a general rule, neither of wit nor humor” (p. 52). For Lowell, writers who performed more “as censors and moralists than as movers of laughter” (p. 56) were, like Horace, deservedly consigned to Dante’s limbo, an apt symbol of their literary merit. Nevertheless, Lowell did value those who could fuse “fun” with political and social commentary, such as Aristophanes and Miguel de Cervantes. Himself a practitioner in two series of The Biglow Papers (published in 1848 and 1862), Lowell’s heightened sensitivity on the subject here is telling. Although he would continue to produce until his death in 1891, Lowell was more the product of antebellum America. His literary and cultural ideals had been informed by the Romantic tradition. However, the horrors of the Civil War had all but trashed such aesthetic idealism. Postbellum writers emerged with different agendas and tastes, and like most new schools of art, they attacked the values of their predecessors. In their literary, social, and philosophical assault upon the old order, these new American realists used satire to overturn Romantic concepts. While Lowell’s lecture does not fend off such attacks, it does caution that satire mired in its own rebelliousness is intellectually shallow. Only when the satirist taps other resources of humor can such criticism become palatable and influential. DEFINITIONS
Although informed by a realist’s sensibility, American satire from the Civil War to World War I adhered to a tradition over 2,000 years old, whose definers include Horace (also known as Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65 B.C.E.–8 B.C.E.) and Juvenal (also known as Decimus Junius Juvenalis, c. 50–127 C.E.). The satirist ridicules human folly and corruption in order to raise public awareness about a salient problem, ostensibly to a point where the resulting controversy forces a reluctant authority to address the issue. Since satirists seldom hold any influential civic position, they resort to the pen to effect social, political, or aesthetic change. Because he or she lacks political power, the critic selects tactful weapons. Regardless of the intensity of his or her invective, he or she tempers it with humor so as to delineate the ludicrousness of a commonly held value, a behavior, or a state of affairs. Ideally, amid their laughter, readers will be spurred to action—to call for reform, to reject false or antiquated practices, to recognize social folly, and the like. At the very least, the
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1003
S AT I R E , B U R L E S Q U E , A N D PA R O D Y
satirist hopes to make the audience realize that a problem exists or persists. Satire’s Latin root, satura, translates as “medley,” which attests to the multiple rhetorical weapons available to the writer. Favorite devices of the satirist are irony and sarcasm. The former invites readers to fathom hidden meaning below superficial images and statements. With sarcasm, the author’s true meaning is obviously opposite to the rhetorical content of the sentence. Two suborders of satire are burlesque and parody. The word “burlesque” derives from the Italian word for mockery. The targets of burlesques are usually broad, such as the practices and aesthetic virtues of a rival literary tradition. Heavily reliant upon caricature, burlesques have two extremes. High burlesque exults with lofty language and inappropriate dignity subjects that are low in character or communal standing. Low burlesque, also known as travesty, degrades with absurdity and informality topics that are held in high regard by society. In contrast to burlesque, parody specifies a target, which is usually a particular literary work or an author’s style. Clearly imitating a rival’s text, the parodist uses humor to reveal flaws in its aesthetic assumptions, the lapses in its prose or poetic techniques, and the pretentiousness of its philosophy.
tial election of 1876, writers found much grist to grind for their satiric mill. After mocking civilian responses to the Civil War in Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), John William DeForest (1826–1906) exposed the inherently poisoning effect that American politics had upon individual character in Honest John Vane (1873). The novel traces the descent of the election slogan “Honest John Vane” from an unsubstantiated sobriquet to a sarcastic indictment of the politician, who comes to symbolize how democratic elections tend to send immoral and otherwise unqualified representatives to Congress. Midway in the plot, Vane sells his office, a folly that DeForest underscores with cynical humor: “I’ll tell you what we want, . . . a bill to stop the collection of interest until the loan falls due, when we will pay the one hundred and thirty millions at once, if we can. Second, we want a bill to change the government lien from a first to a second mortgage, so that we can issue a batch of first-mortgage bonds and raise money for current expenses. That’s all we want now, Vane, and I’m sure it’s moderate.” “O ain’t it, though?” grinned Honest John, half indignant and half amused at this imprudent rapacity. “I’m sure it’s very kind of you not to ask Uncle Sam to throw in the whole loan as a present. I dare say you might get it.” “O, we’re not a bit greedy,” Dorman continued to chuckle. (Pp. 167–168)
CULTURAL SATIRE
Ultimately, parody, burlesque, and satire have the same goal—to empower an outsider to influence attitudes toward commonly accepted cultural institutions. By infusing the outrageous with humor, postbellum American satirists sought to reassert their voices amid the din of democracy. Their targets were many—the unhealthy persistence of Romantic ideals after the Civil War, ill-conceived new trends in American letters, the unremitting relapses of corruption in American politics, the insufferable self-importance of the American ego, the delusions of predestined human progress, and the materialistic greed of the American character and economy. As the western frontier closed, as the nation meandered through a succession of ineffectual federal administrations, as the economy suffered periodic crippling downswings, as the United States struggled to redefine its democratic form of government and find its proper place in the world, these critics found much hypocrisy, vice, and self indulgence to lampoon. The public’s fascination with and horror at the political corruption that infested national and local politics during and after Reconstruction was quickly addressed in fiction. From the disillusion inspired by scandals such as the Crédit Mobilier affair during the Grant administration to the hijacking of the presiden-
1004
A M E R I C A N
Note DeForest’s employment of understatement: what is called “moderate” is criminally audacious; and Dorman’s greed is indeed boundless. Like others in the novel, the scene is uncomfortably humorous. We smile at the dark negotiations between politicians and crooks, but that response only heightens the cultural grotesqueness of the business. Speaking with his authorial voice, DeForest concludes his novel with a sober assessment, warning that the current political system fosters bribery and corruption to a degree that “Congress will surely and quickly become, what some sad souls claim that it already is, a den of thieves” (p. 232). Around the same time, Mark Twain (1835–1910) teamed with Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900) to write in three months The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), which chronicles the shenanigans pursued by financiers, land speculators, and dishonest politicians for the sake of wealth and power. The catalyst for American greed is a lax monetary policy:
H I S T O R Y
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S AT I R E , B U R L E S Q U E , A N D PA R O D Y
point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark:—“I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.” (Pp. 195–196)
Such irony mocks capitalism with unsettling import for the American ethic. Based upon Twain’s relative James Lampton, the comic Colonel Sellers embodies the lustful quest for wealth that drives the speculators in the novel. When one scheme falls apart, Sellers manages to talk and bribe his way out of a lynching. Shortly after, however, “when the men’s minds had cooled and Sellers was gone, they hated themselves for letting him beguile them with fine speeches, but it was too late, now—they agreed to hang him another time—such time as Providence should appoint” (p. 188). This passage, attributed to Twain, suggests that the novel targeted two groups: those who maliciously pursue money and power, and those who through inaction or indifference permit such absurdity. Thus the moral vacillations of the lynch mob equate to politically sleepy readers whom the authors wish to arouse by exasperating them. Despite its literary flaws, The Gilded Age so effectively savaged American society and politics that historians subsequently borrowed the title to label the era. Twain’s other works likewise mixed social satire amid their general humor. The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (1869) lampoons American bravado against the backdrop of European hypocrisy. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) (1885) comically questions many aspects of America life, from the pretension of religious evangelicalism, through racial and social injustice, to the burdensome legacy of Romantic idealism. Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) chronicles with a hint of cynicism the misadventures resulting from a slave’s switching her near-white baby with her master’s child. Through the resulting confusion of identities, which questions the notion of racial birthrights, Twain isolates for ridicule the America’s discriminatory caste system. Other writers of the period likewise employed humor with an edge to raise public awareness of the cultural ills of the day. Disguised somewhat in entertaining fables, the collections of Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris allegorically satirize the racial divide between white and black America. My Opinions and Betsy Bobbet’s (1873) by Marietta Holley employs various comedic devices to champion woman’s suffrage and temperance. In Mr. Dooley in Peace and War (1898), Finley Peter Dunne uses an Irish-born barkeeper as his spokesman to comment with wry broguery about the excessive urbanization of the United States A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
(as especially symbolized by Chicago’s city government) and about national political topics from the 1896 election to the Spanish-American War. Fables in Slang (1900) and its sequels by George Ade question the American dream, especially given the suspect motives of those who pursue it. All of the above titles are collections of short pieces. Many satires of the period were first published through either newspaper syndicates—such as the chains set up by Samuel Sidney McClure and William Randolph Hearst—or in American magazines, especially ones devoted to humor such as Puck and Judge. One of the notables of the Hearst syndicate was Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914?), who in 1881 began publishing highly ironic alternative definitions of words, often epigrammatic in length, which commented cynically upon the sorry state of human affairs. Originally collected under the title The Cynic’s Word Book (1906), the work was retitled The Devil’s Dictionary (1911) when it was published as part of The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce. Many of Bierce’s observations take aim at the politics of the day: Congress, n. A body of men who meet to repeal laws. Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. Agitator, n. A statesman who shakes the fruit trees of his neighbors—to dislodge the worms. Nepotism, n. Appointing your grandmother to office for the good of the party. (Pp. 20, 54–55, 228)
But other sorts of social targets provided Bierce with fair game: “Religion, n. A daughter of Hope and Fear, explaining to Ignorance the nature of the Unknowable” (p. 288). Bierce’s penchant to interpret matters darkly and pithily inspired future iconoclasts such as H. L. Mencken, who in A Book of Burlesques (1916, rev. ed. 1921) quipped that civilization is a “concerted effort to remedy the blunders and check the practical joking of God” (p. 202). Bierce lamented the state of satire in his definition of the word: “Satire, n. An obsolete kind of literary composition in which the vices and follies of the author’s enemies were expounded with imperfect tenderness. In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient, the humor that we mistake for it, like all humor, being tolerant and sympathetic. . . .” (pp. 308–309). This assessment notes how, because of the alienating nature of the genre, the satirist must stand apart from all he hopes to reform, believing that his berating
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1005
S AT I R E , B U R L E S Q U E , A N D PA R O D Y
tioned tremendous facts under its breath with certain effort at concealment to seven not-dwarfed poplars on an un-distant mauve hilltop. The Mere Boy was a brilliant blue color. The effect of the scene was not un-kaleidoscopic. (P. 1122)
humor will sway the public out of its political and social inertia. PARODIES AND BURLESQUES
The cultural milieu at the turn of the century was not satire’s only target. Using the forms of burlesque and parody, American writers challenged the literary tastes of the public as well as the stylistic and thematic foibles of their fellow authors. Some critics made fun of a long-established literary trend as it was going out of fashion. Others parodied the works of rivals. Popularity invited adverse attention, as evident in this Bierce definition: “Nihilism, n. A Russian who denies the existence of anything but Tolstoi. The leader of the school is Tolstoi” (p. 228). Parodies and burlesques abound in the literature published between the Civil War and World War I. In Versatilities (1871) Robert Henry Newell parodied the poetry of the stalwarts of American romanticism— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Cullen Bryant, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Idle Idylls (1900) and subsequent volumes, Carolyn Wells selected her targets from among the nineteenth century’s most popular poets, including William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Rudyard Kipling. Among Mark Twain’s many burlesques in long and short fiction is “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” (1902), which comically imitates the genre made famous by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales. Both Frank Norris (1870–1902) and Bret Harte (1836–1902) made concerted efforts at parody. In “Perverted Tales” (1897), Norris singled out six of his contemporaries for brief and humorous imitation— Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Bret Harte, Richard Harding Davis, Ambrose Bierce, and Anthony Hope. Being the most renowned writer of fiction and poetry living during the 1890s, Kipling was an obvious choice to parody. Harte, Davis, Bierce, and Hope all had well-established reputations. The inclusion of Stephen Crane, however, demonstrates Norris’s remarkable powers of literary assessment. It had been only two years since the publication of The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which had catapulted Crane to public acclaim. In “The Green Stone of Unrest,” Norris had a parodic field day with Crane’s preference for simple syntaxes, his impressionistic eye for color, and his universalizing characters through epithets: A Mere Boy stood on a pile of blue stones. His attitude was regardant. The day was seal brown. There was a vermillion valley containing a church. The church’s steeple aspired strenuously in a direction tangent to the earth’s center. A pale wind men-
1006
A M E R I C A N
Obviously, Norris exaggerates rhetorical effects to highlight nuances of Crane’s style. On one hand, such imitation calls attention to those prose traits that make Crane’s voice unique. On the other, Norris’s observations suggest that Crane’s techniques ultimately fail to provide his audience with a rich reading experience. Bret Harte found great success with Condensed Novels, and Other Papers (1867), in which he comically manhandles the works of writers from Charles Dickens to James Fenimore Cooper. The sequel, Condensed Novels, Second Series: New Burlesques (1902), presents seven more send-ups, which include tongue-in-cheek imitations of Hope, Conan Doyle, and Kipling. The last was perhaps the most parodied writer of his day. Harte’s burlesque “Stories Three” attacks three of Kipling’s interests—life in India, life in the British military, and literature for children. For instance, Harte delights in emulating Kipling’s hyperbolic plots about the exploits of roguish soldiers. Here, a regimental colonel complains about the behavior of three of his men: But there are some things I cannot ignore. The carrying off of the great god Vishnu from the Sacred Shrine at Ducidbad by The Three for the sake of the Priceless opals in its eyes. . . . Yet I would have overlooked the theft of the opals if they had not substituted two of the Queen’s regimental buttons for the eyes of the god. This, while it did not deceive the ignorant priests, had a deep political and racial significance. (Pp. 180–181)
Punctuated by the comic understatement at the end, this low-burlesque approach to Kipling’s view of adventure stresses the improbabilities of such events, thus reinforcing in the minds of the audience Harte’s partiality for the values of realism. A literary hoax of 1916 reveals one difficulty that satire sometimes presents for readers—that is, an audience must be aware of the parodist’s intent. Wanting to lay waste to modernist trends in poetry, particularly imagism, Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke fabricated a fictitious new school of poetry called Spectra, composed vapid poetry, and submitted their doggerel to literary magazines. The unsuspecting editors of these publications treated the poems as serious submissions. They not only published these works but also hailed the emergence of a vital new poetic tradition. Only after the hoax began to unravel did the American literary scene recognize the parodying intent of the hoaxers.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
As is true in other nations and at other times, the better satirists tend to be the better general writers of the day. Satire clarifies the cultural and aesthetic values the parodist would rather not practice. Thus Twain’s hilarious “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895) articulates why he rejects romanticism. Norris’s “Perverted Tales” reinforces his own dedication to naturalism’s themes and rhetorical demands. On a larger scale, the radical changes in American democracy from 1870 to 1920 drew many to a cultural debate, where those adept in the art of satire were certain to be heard. See also Humor; Realism; Regionalism and Local Color Fiction BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Bierce, Ambrose. The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce. Vol. 7, The Devil’s Dictionary. 1911. New York: Gordian Press, 1966. DeForest, John William. Honest John Vane. 1873. College Park, Pa.: Bald Eagle Press, 1960. Harte, Bret. Condensed Novels, Second Series: New Burlesques. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902. Lowell, James Russell. “Humor, Wit, Fun, and Satire.” 1893. In The Function of the Poet and Other Essays, edited by Albert Mordell. 1920. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1967. Mencken, H. L. A Book of Burlesques. 1916. Rev. ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1921. Norris, Frank. “Perverted Tales.” 1897. In Novels and Essays. New York: Library of America, 1986. Twain, Mark, and Charles Dudley Warner. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. 1873. In The Gilded Age and Later Novels. New York: Library of America, 2002. Secondary Works
Dane, Joseph A. Parody: Critical Concepts Versus Literary Practices: Aristophanes to Sterne. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Elliott, Robert C. The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960. Richard Fusco
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY In many ways—political, sociological, economic, and technological—the end of the nineteenth century marked a decisive turning point in American history. Irrevocably shaping the understanding of “modern times,” the decades after 1870 were crucial for the A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
shift in American society from a weak agrarian republic in 1800 to a powerful industrial nation at the dawn of the twentieth century. SCIENCE, INDUSTRIALIZATION, AND ACCELERATION IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The population of the United States exploded from roughly five million in 1800 to more than seventy seven million in 1900. At the turn of the nineteenth century only 322,000, or a mere 6 percent, of all Americans lived in cities. A hundred years later, the proportion was 40 percent or more than thirty million people. Simultaneously, new technological devices rapidly and dramatically altered the lifestyle of almost every American. Earlier inventions such as the power loom, the sewing machine, the steam-driven flatbed press, the steamboat, the locomotive, the telegraph, the camera, and the spectroscope had strongly influenced the attitudes and mind-sets of nineteenth-century Americans. The large-scale application of these devices to industrial processes and further insight into their underlying scientific principles led to a number of complementary innovations during the final decades of the century (the telephone, the phonograph, moving pictures, the steam turbine, the internal combustion engine, the airplane, and so on) and transformed the physical and psychological conditions of life in America. The second half of the century, then, saw the implementation of the groundbreaking, major discoveries made by the end of the 1850s. The later phase systematized and applied the sciences to industry and technology on a large scale. By the end of the century, technology became the primary model for progress. Scientific invention based on systematic research and experimentation replaced the older, republican tradition of ingenious tinkering, which depended on tedious trial-and-error procedures or more often, sheer luck. In keeping with this new orientation, and despite its obvious elitist underpinnings, progressive Americans increasingly embraced a culture of technological expertise that valued highly specialized knowledge and favored scientific solutions for practical, everyday problems. Every area of life now demanded “expert” wisdom, from the conservation of nature, agricultural development, mining and steel production, or factory administration and office organization to railroad and street building, city planning, welfare programs, the domestic economy, and even leisure and sports. If, as Carolyn Marvin points out, the retooling of American industries from steam to electricity fostered “a new class of managers of machines and techniques” (p. 9), the idea behind such specialization, namely, that in a complex social system
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1007
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
science holds a remedy for every individual and societal problem, became a national creed. This crucial period in American history was also about speed and acceleration, which some saw as the most distinctive characteristics of American society, and about how they became a determining factor in scientific, industrial, and cultural production. The invention of faster means of transportation such as the train, the automobile and, somewhat later, the airplane, decisively altered the way people perceived the world. Physically, these modes shaped and transformed the landscape by requiring an extensive grid of tracks and roads; psychologically, they changed human perception by destabilizing the relation between the fast-moving passenger and the world outside. The impact of these inventions clearly went beyond their physical existence to challenge perceptions of both self and the world. In 1925 the philosopher of science Alfred North Whitehead reflected that “in the past human life was lived in the bullock cart; in the future it will be lived in an aeroplane; and the change of speed amounts to a difference in quality” (p. 137). Yet to many of his contemporaries, firsthand experience with rapid movement had already become commonplace. By the early 1920s they were riding on turbine-driven high-speed trains, eating fast food in streamlined diners, or rushing to work in the latest Ford or GM models. By that time also, Albert Einstein (1879–1955) had articulated his special theory of relativity (1905), predicated on a universe in fast motion, and Frederick Winslow Taylor (1865–1915), in response to what he perceived as the deliberate hampering of the speed of industrial production by inefficient workers, had published The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), a manifesto that turned workers into virtual human machines. Although much of the modern preoccupation with speed was associated with twentieth-century machine technology, the enthusiasm inspired by airplanes or internal combustion engine automobiles that set new records for speed was anticipated in the final decades of the preceding century by increased attention to rationalization and the shrinking of time and space in practically all areas of American culture. Communication and voice recording are a good case in point. Driven by new scientific insights into the nature of electromagnetic waves (Hans Christian Ørsted, James Clerk Maxwell, Heinrich Rudolph Hertz), experiments in rapid communication finally led to the invention of the telephone (Alexander Graham Bell), the phonograph, and the dictating machine (both developed by Thomas Edison). These inventions in turn facilitated the rapid growth of modern cities, whose administrations and office networks depended on instant communication without the delays of hand-carried messages and documents. The
1008
A M E R I C A N
telephone, according to Stephen Kern, “accelerated business transactions by increasing the liquidity of securities and the speed of fundraising. J. P. Morgan averted a financial panic in 1907 when, over the telephone, he extended $25 million credit to several major banks threatened with excessive withdrawals” (p. 114). By 1900 Americans so thoroughly and efficiently put to use the new time-saving electrical devices that one stunned English traveler remarked, “Life in the United States is one perpetual whirl of telephones, telegrams, phonographs, electric bells, motors, lifts, and automatic instruments” (quoted in Mowry, pp. 1–2). Artists and writers confronted, and quite frequently subverted, the shifting attitudes, mores, and behavioral patterns of Americans living in a culture dominated by science. Far from being a mere reflection of the larger society and its sociohistorical dynamics, art served to register the subtle changes that marked the dawn of a new era and helped to negotiate the tensions accompanying technological progress and the shift in scientific and economic paradigms. What is more, it gave voice to growing concerns about these developments, even while its own styles and formal structures already betrayed the impact and power of the new system. Although the artistic mind often appeared at odds with new trends and changing material conditions, much of modernist art and literature incorporated the new machine culture and its popular representations in photography and film with astonishing ease. What Thomas Eakins (1844–1916), a prominent voice in the nascent realist movement, represented in his famous painting The Gross Clinic (1875) was not just the wonder, awe, and disgust some felt toward the latest progress in anatomy, but also a formal affinity with scientific methods and objectivity. Eakins’s emphasis on the human body as an object of study and observation was evidently out of sync with dominant Victorian aesthetics and the painting was consigned to the medical section of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, rather than the fine arts section.
VISIONS OF THE PAST, ENVISIONING THE FUTURE
Not all writers, however, adopted the new trend toward “authenticity” and realism to articulate their take on the rampant materiality and fast-paced technological progress of America’s “Gilded Age.” Some used the well-established model of utopian writing, retooling its fantastic elements to launch scathing critiques of the times or to extrapolate a new and better form of society from the wonder-working prospects of contemporary science and technology. One of the most important and enduring examples of a critique is
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
The Gross Clinic, 1875. Painting by Thomas Eakins. © GEOFFREY CLEMENTS/CORBIS
Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889); Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1887) exemplifies the more optimistic view. Both are steeped in the determinist ideologies of Social Darwinism and the “new” behavioral sciences and treat modern technology as a juggernaut, a historical force that cannot be annihilated or reversed. Yet while Bellamy (1850– 1898) stresses the inherent capacity of modern technology to “heal” the widespread social tensions that threatened to divide American society at the turn of the century, Twain (1835–1910) envisions a technological apocalypse with fatal consequences for the future of nature and human civilization. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
James M. Cox has suggested (p. 89) that Connecticut Yankee occupies in Twain’s oeuvre approximately the same position that Pierre occupies in that of Herman Melville’s. But although both works followed towering masterpieces (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick, respectively), Twain’s satire of nineteenth-century ingenuity and entrepreneurship might more easily be compared to Melville’s The Confidence-Man (1857), also a disturbing, stylistically and structurally flawed critique of corporate America. Even though in Connecticut Yankee criticism of latenineteenth-century progressivist ideology is partly defused by the story’s humorous narrative frame, Twain’s backward-in-time travelogue still stands as
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1009
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
one of the most radical and deeply analytical revisions of the American technological dream. On the surface a story about an unlikely clash of cultures and historical periods (sixth-century Britain versus nineteenthcentury Connecticut), its thematic scope extends to issues of writing and representation, mass media, communication networks, capitalist economics, ethics in authoritarian society, and, most prominently, science and the mystery of human nature. The novel centers on how a modern American technophile who, after a head injury, loses consciousness and upon reawakening finds himself amid the knights at King Arthur’s court, navigates his cultural alienation and the surplus of scientific knowledge arising from his advanced, nineteenth-century background. Much of its narrative thrust explores the enormous material progress Anglo-Saxon culture had made over the elapsed thirteen hundred years and also engages the changed psychological conditions that such progress entails. What is more, it asks the crucial question: To what degree can these changes be attributed to individual cultural responses? Or are they innate in human beings generally? Especially in the middle parts of the book, where human behavior is thoroughly discussed, Twain juxtaposes diverging concepts of personality that reflect his transitional position between Romantic idealism and late-nineteenthcentury behaviorist social determinism. In one of the most symbolically loaded moments of the text, Hank Morgan, a former superintendent at the Colt arms factory in Hartford, Connecticut, and his sixth-century ally Clarence prepare for final battle with the Roman Catholic church. To this end they rig the cave of their longtime opponent Merlin with modern explosives, turning the site into a veritable technological limbo. What makes this scene important, however, is less the display of fancy weaponry such as a battery of Gatling guns set off by a huge dynamo, or numerous glass cylinder dynamite torpedoes, but the underlying economics of rationalization, which became a major driving force in the history of modern society. Here is Morgan and Clarence’s discussion of the rationale of their various contrivances: “The wires have no ground-connection outside of the cave. . . . Each is grounded independently.” “No-no, that won’t do!” “Why?” “It’s too expensive—uses up force for nothing. You don’t want any ground-connection except the one through the negative brush. The other end of every wire must be brought back into the cave and fastened independently, and without any ground-connection. Now, then, observe the
1010
A M E R I C A N
economy of it. A cavalry charge hurls itself against the fence; you are using no power, you are spending no money, for there is only one ground-connection till those horses come against the wire; . . . Don’t you see?—you are using no energy until it is needed; your lightning is there, and ready, like the load in a gun; but it isn’t costing you a cent till you touch it off.” (P. 421)
Twain’s story abounds in references to eliminating waste and accelerating production, transportation, and communication. While in the above example it seems that the responsibility for ruthless economizing still lies with the person, the rugged, businessminded Yankee, Twain also offers a more universal and much bleaker explanation. Upon finishing his report on how they blow up the cave and its adjacent area, Clarence proudly exclaims: “It’s an innocent looking garden, but you let a man start in to hoe it once, and you’ll see” (p. 422). Once cultivation begins and human ingenuity is put to work, there is no way to avoid the total destruction of both nature and human beings. Influenced by contemporary social science, in particular the determinism of Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893) and Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), Twain depicts technological societies as essentially destructive and doomed to self-annihilation. The novel ends with a gruesome Armageddon of burnt flesh and a growing pile of dead bodies that foreshadow not only the horrors associated with modern technological warfare but also the ambiguous blessings of yet another late-century invention, the “electric chair.” Whereas in Connecticut Yankee the wedding of science and technology to democratic, republican agendas inexorably leads to disaster (it is, after all, Morgan’s deep aversion to the centralist institutions of church and crown that triggers the final carnage), in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward scientific and technological know-how prove advantageous in creating a truly democratic, Christian socialist society. And where Twain’s bleak cultural critique invokes Melville’s The Confidence-Man as its literary predecessor, Looking Backward follows in the tradition of American utopian reformist writing, associated with authors as diverse as Benjamin Rush, Thomas Paine, Robert Owen, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Like them, Bellamy strongly believed that human beings are rational, eternally struggling to better social conditions and, over the long term, to eradicate tensions arising from ill-conceived notions of class and gender. In its celebration of technology put to democratic, socially stabilizing uses, Bellamy’s utopian novel is a very American text. It tapped into a powerful desire among Americans at the turn of the twentieth century
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
The Progress of the Century. Lithograph by Currier & Ives, c. 1876. The print celebrates nineteenth-century technology in the form of the telegraph, the steam-powered printing press, the locomotive, and the steam paddle-wheel boat. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
to eclipse the negativity expressed in Twain’s and Charles Dudley Warner’s Gilded Age (1873), for example, and to envision instead modern American society in the not too distant future as a “Golden Age,” a technological paradise regained. Although Bellamy initially admits that he “sought to alleviate the instructive quality of the book by casting it in the form of a romantic narrative” (p. 35), Looking Backward is far from a fantastic tale of America’s bright technological prospects. As a former lawyer, muckraking journalist, and political activist, Bellamy took great care to address the social unrest and widespread economic fears lamented by most contemporary Americans. To every conceivable social plight, Looking Backward offers a solution, A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
often backed by modern labor- and time-saving devices. It explores the impact on society of mass media such as radio and introduces a monetary system (including, in a surprisingly visionary insight, the use of credit cards) in which money no longer figures as a substitute for an imagined value but as a representative of everyone’s true share of the gross national product. By merging the socialist convictions Bellamy encountered during a trip to Germany with progressivist technophilia, scientific determinism, the Puritan work ethic, and a millennialist belief that the promises of the New Testament will be fulfilled on American soil, he hoped to overcome the innate contradictions and paradoxes of end-of-century social and scientific discourse.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1011
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
One of the tensions arising from an ever-accelerating market economy lay in the creation of large, powerful corporations and the growing influence they brought to bear on politics and the future of the nation. Another lay in the adaptation and redefinition of evolutionary social theory to ensure that it would not lead to the disruption of national consensus or spawn an all-out struggle for survival between rugged individuals. Put another way, in Looking Backward Bellamy tried to remedy nagging social problems with the very instruments that many suspected were playing a crucial role in the creation of these problems. And while he was convinced that much in contemporary American society had gone awry, he still believed that “the army of industry” he envisioned for America’s utopian nationalist future would be an “army not alone by virtue of its perfect organization, but by reason also of the ardor of self-devotion which animates its members” (p. 89). His acute awareness of social ills and their underlying economic causes notwithstanding, Bellamy, like many of his nineteenth-century reformist predecessors, turns out to be an indefatigable idealist whose unremitting trust in the natural goodness of human beings led him to design a Christian socialist society where everyone, by dint of diligence in service to the nation, would be granted an appropriate rank and place. Although he abandons formal legislation, his is a system based on a codification of the “law of nature,” or, in his own terms, “the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions” (pp. 100–101). Looking Backward exemplifies the ongoing attempt of modern writers and intellectuals to close the widening gap between the specialized spheres of science, technology, and the arts. Bellamy, who considered himself a writer first and only second a political visionary and activist, was careful to design his utopian state as a haven for all professions, including the fine arts, which, according to many of his contemporaries, were of only minor import to the wellbeing and further prosperity of the nation. Time and again, Dr. Leete, the author’s mouthpiece and scientific tour guide of the novel, emphasizes the confluence of material and moral evolution, maintaining that what ultimately distinguishes the “new” from the “old” order is the recognition of merit in all fields of original genius, in science and mechanical invention as well as in music, art, writing, and design. As he tells a receptive Julian West, when Americans pushed on to a “new plane of existence with an illimitable vista of progress, their minds were affected in all their faculties. . . . There ensued an era of mechanical invention, scientific discovery, art, musical and literary productiveness to which no previous age of the world
1012
A M E R I C A N
offers anything comparable” (p. 128). Significantly, Bellamy’s plea for a more encompassing understanding of what it means to be productive coincides with his criticism of the dwindling authority of the “real” in modern capitalist society and the accompanying proliferation of signs that refer only to other signs rather than to material objects (a vicious dilution/ delusion of responsibility he saw at work, for example, in the thriving American credit system). While in the new society all business is executed in direct relation to “real” things, in the old money and credit figured as their “misleading representatives” (p. 174). Rereading evolutionary development as a movement toward greater simplicity and thus authenticity, Bellamy expresses a desire for the “real thing” that became constitutive of modernist culture at large. Although this desire frequently conflicted with the harsh social and economic realities of late-nineteenth-century America, in Looking Backward it becomes the cornerstone of a meticulously reformed, “new” society and, in its wake, a more systematic, that is, scientific use of industrial power.
TECHNOLOGY, GENDER, AND THE ARTS AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY
Few of Bellamy’s fellow writers were prepared to view the differences between the reigning scientific materialism and the artistic imagination as anything but insurmountable. This is particularly true of women authors, who often denounced the positivist scientific worldview as in direct opposition to their own agendas. In the classic short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1850–1935), the clash of science, gender, and the imagination is dramatized in such a way that it becomes the epicenter of mutual misunderstanding and discrimination. The story turns on the male “scientific” obsession with order, regularity, discipline, and self-control as personified by the husband/physician of the female protagonist. It also revolves around the imagery of the wallpaper and its elusive, ever-changing patterns, which introduce an elaborate play on essence versus appearance, on the real as a given versus reality as created by the imagination. And while the physician’s wife represents the imaginative process, the story illuminates the quashing of the imagination by scientific rationalism and the toll such rationalism takes on a woman who does not submit to its limited, gendered propositions. Critics repeatedly claimed that Gilman’s intricately woven, double-voiced text should be read as a testament to the stamina and willpower of the female writer who, under circumstances adverse to her professional career, continued to confront current Social Darwinian
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
stereotypes about differences between men and women and the social roles suitable for each. Gilman’s own life as a mother, writer, and political activist stands as a glaring example of that stamina. A one-time follower of Bellamy and one of the most influential feminist thinkers of the pre–World War I period, Gilman wrote a utopian novel of her own, Herland (1915), based on ideas articulated in her earlier study Women and Economics (1898). Contrary to Bellamy, she believed that to restrict women in their intellectual and professional evolution amounted to hampering the evolution of the species as such. Although she shared his emphasis on the principles of evolution and human progress, hers was a program that included all members of society, regardless of gender or physical ability. Moreover, in “The Yellow Wall-Paper” she repudiated the pervasive positivist worldview (associated with the French sociologist Auguste Comte) by juxtaposing it with the female poetic imagination and female ingenuity. Late-nineteenth-century feminist writers often conceived of the lingering opposition between science, technology, and art in terms of a struggle between the sexes and the respective social roles traditionally ascribed to each. In contrast to these efforts, two of their male contemporaries, Frank Norris (1870–1902) and Henry Adams (1838–1918), posited a more fundamental and ultimately futile battle between the past and the future, between the waning influence of a bygone era and the sweeping forces of the new century. In the first installment of his “epic of the wheat” trilogy The Octopus (1901), Norris dramatized a gigantic clash between nature and culture driven by the worldwide demand for natural resources and the ensuing ruthless exploitation of them. There is neither good nor bad in this novel of the post-frontier American West, only a universe of relentless forces connected to varying degrees with the economic interests of farmers, railroad corporations, and the political machine. Norris introduces, as alienated outsiders to this naturalist universe, two artist figures: Presley, a hopeless romantic aspiring to write the great poem of the West; and his former friend the shepherd Vanamee, who lives close to nature and has developed a poetic attitude by instinct. The two learn different lessons from the new order, yet they both eventually acknowledge their anachronistic marginality in view of the overriding presence of the machine. While in the rapidly industrializing West the creative powers of the imagination are utterly out of place, the merging of nature, machine, and corporate culture has spawned its own generative force: the dynamics of the marketplace and its sole objective, economic growth. Against the inexorable onrush of social evolution, the fate of the individual, which had long been the focus of artistic activity, is but a grain of sand in the cogs of the A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
great organic machinery that constitutes and drives the world. There is no malevolence, no heroism or sacrifice in Norris’s sobering modern American epic, only forces, conditions, laws. The other American writer who came to a devastating conclusion about the future of art in modern society is Henry Adams. Standing amid the aweinspiring machinery at the Great Exposition of 1900, Adams wrote, in an oft-quoted passage of The Education of Henry Adams (1907), that he “began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross” (p. 380). What he finds especially striking in this new electro-mechanical environment is the smooth, noiseless way that the dynamo wields its enormous power: “Barely murmuring— scarcely humming an audible warning to stand a hair’s breadth’s further for respect of power—while it would not wake the baby lying close against its frame” (p. 380). The image of the machine lulling a baby to sleep drives home the writer’s concern about modern technology and his increasing estrangement from latenineteenth- or early-twentieth-century American culture. Adams metaphorically describes the ongoing replacement of the creative power of art by the overwhelming reproductive potential of the machine. In the modern scientific-technological environment, as his distancing stance of third-person autobiographical narration suggests, the writer ceases to be a producer and creator and adopts the role of commentator and disconnected observer. By stubbornly clinging to outmoded aesthetic models such as the female procreative power he saw embodied in both the Epicurean Venus and the Christian Virgin, powers that had never been duly acknowledged by Protestant America, this avowedly nineteenth-century author finally surrendered to having “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new” (p. 382). To be sure, the authorship, publication, and distribution of literary texts survived well into the days of word processing, e-books, and blogs. Moreover, battles over the role and fate of the writer in a new, fastchanging nation date back at least as far as the American Renaissance and Jacksonian democracy. Yet by foregrounding issues of creativity and the representation of the real within the technological framework of modern society, both male and female end-of-century writers paved the way for modernist debates. The influential German critic Walter Benjamin (1829–1940) described the state of art at the turn of the century as involving a fundamental shift from originality to repetition, from unique, authentic works of art to mechanically reproduced, dissimulating works. “Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1013
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes” (Illuminations, pp. 219– 220). One of the key terms of this essay is “aura,” the ritual function of art, its ongoing negotiation of distance and presence, authenticity and artificiality. Aura, according to Benjamin, is ontologically connected to the original, unique work of art and for this reason does not permit of reproduction or replication. Benjamin is mainly concerned with painting, photography, and film, yet his general argument applies to written texts as well. With technological progress and the concomitant proliferation of forums for amateur writers (newspapers, professional and special interest magazines, dime novels, serials, and so forth), the distinction between author and reader, between the “real” and the “sham” writer, became increasingly blurred. In the age of mechanical reproduction, as Benjamin explains elsewhere, “the reader is at all times ready to become a writer.” Because of the division of labor, the majority of the workforce are “experts” in something (if only in a very circumscribed and specialized area), that is, potential authors: “As an expert—even if not on a subject but only on the post he occupies—he gains access to authorship” (Reflections, p. 225).
See also Centennial; Darwinism; Health and Medicine; Pseudoscience; Psychology; Transportation; Weaponry BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Adams, Henry. 1907. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. Bellamy, Edward. 1887. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. Edited by Cecelia Tichi. New York: Penguin, 1982. Carnegie, Andrew. 1908. Problems of To-day: Wealth, Labor, Socialism. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1933. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1915. Herland. Introduction by Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon Books, 1979. Twain, Mark. 1889. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Edited by Bernard L. Stein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan, 1925. Secondary Works
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflection. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1968.
MODERNISM AND THE NEW AESTHETICS OF SPEED
Inasmuch as Benjamin attributed the disappearance of traditional authorship to technological progress, he evoked a recurring theme in Western cultural criticism: the widespread anxiety about the loss of authorial control in a scientific-technological environment, which resurfaced with every new and more powerful technology. Yet this is only half the story. Along with such anxieties there had always been an effort to co-opt the scientific and technological paradigms in art. And while Adams’s and Norris’s negative stances foreshadow the elegiac disgust with contemporary mass society that informs the later works of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, they in no way reflect the enthusiasm about that same modern environment by the early vorticist Pound, by much of popular literature, dime novels, and books for adolescent readers (such as the widely popular Tom Swift series), or by the many writers, poets, painters, photographers, and musicians committed to forging from an increasingly machine-engineered world a new form of aesthetics. To a large degree this new modernist aesthetics is predicated on the encroachment of science and technology into practically every sphere of society, and, as a result, on the ever-accelerating pulse of everyday life. Eager to respond to the fast pace of modern life, authors presented their own view of the formative and deforming power of speed, translating
1014
the dynamic potential of urban space into an abstract, kinetic verbal construction.
A M E R I C A N
Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. Cox, James M. “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: The Machinery of Self-Preservation.” Yale Review 50 (autumn 1960): 89–102. Cummings, Sherwood. Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Golden, Catherine, ed. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow Wallpaper.” New York: Feminist Press, 1992. Kenner, Hugh. The Mechanic Muse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Kern, Stephen. 1983. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003. Licht, Walter. Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SCIENCE FICTION
Mowry, George E. The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America 1900–1912. New York: Harper, 1958. Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934. Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Pacey, Arnold. The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology. 2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1992. Patai, Daphne, ed. Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. United States Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975. Klaus Benesch
SCIENCE FICTION In the period following the Civil War (1861–1865), American writers worked in several of the common forms of science fiction. On one hand, they wrote fiction that focused on the growing technological and scientific development; on the other, they dealt with the social consequences of this new knowledge. Some also used science and technology merely as props in tales of romantic adventure. AMERICA’S CONTRIBUTION
America has contributed substantially to the development of science fiction, a literary genre that seems at home in industrialized, scientific cultures. In the nineteenth century, every major American fiction writer of canonical stature wrote works that could qualify as science fiction, given a definition broad enough to include utopian visions. The contribution of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) is of such magnitude that it is difficult to imagine the shape of science fiction without his influence, and he stands with Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells as an architect of the genre. Writers of the post–Civil War period also had their influence, practicing varieties of the genre that are still recognizable to modern readers. Then as now, “hard” science fiction, focusing on scientific facts and real A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
feats of engineering, occupied one end of the spectrum while a “softer” form based on social developments occupied the other. The early twentieth century saw the appearance of heroic science fiction, a form in which larger-than-life heroes fight monsters and save princesses on alien worlds. MARK TWAIN AS A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER
In at least one case, somewhat “hard” science fiction comes from a surprising source, Mark Twain (1835– 1910), who is often identified with the rural settings of his best-known work. But Twain had an avid interest in science and the newly emerging technologies and it is not surprising that this interest should find its way into his writing. His story “The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton” (1878), introduces the telephone, a device Alonzo, who is unable to read his own clock, uses to call his aunt to learn the time of day. While on the line, he manages to speak to his aunt’s houseguest, a young lady—Rosannah—with whom Alonzo is soon enthralled. What makes the story science fiction is that Alonzo’s call is long-distance, reaching from frozen Maine to his aunt’s home in rainy and gloomy San Francisco—which comes as a surprise to the reader. Telephones were available for home installation in 1878, but long-distance calling was not available until 1915. The science fiction element makes it possible for people on opposite ends of America to become acquainted and interested in each other. Within weeks—time to exchange photographs—the pair’s conversations flower into full-blown love. Although we first see the positive possibilities of the new technology, events take a disastrous turn. Rosannah’s former suitor, taking exception to the loss of her attention, sets out to foil her new romance. Illustrating the ills that might attend a telephone-only relationship, the disappointed suitor, disguising his voice as Alonzo’s, speaks to her in a way that cools her interest in Alonzo. She never wants to speak to him again. But, as readily as they are parted, the two lovers are reunited by telephone, and, in another surprise development for the reader, they are married by telephone, though Rosannah by this time is in the Hawaiian Islands while Alonzo has never left Maine. The power of the new electrical device to transcend space and time and affect personal relationships is clearly illustrated. In this instance, however, Twain stops short of spelling out the social implications. He puts most of his energy into the literary forms he handles with confidence, parody and burlesque, which he applies here to Victorian courting practices, drawing on the strength of his comedic talent rather than his vision of the future.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1015
SCIENCE FICTION
Readers of today may be surprised that Mark Twain was aware of the awesome dimensions of time and space as they were newly described by science. “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (published in two parts in 1907 and 1908), which he was working on as early as 1868, would strike even twenty-first century readers as astounding. In this dream tale, the recently deceased Captain Stormfield is on his way to his final destination, about which he assumes the worst. As it turns out, however, he arrives in heaven. The cognitive issue is immediately broached when we learn that the departed Captain Stormfield is traveling at 186,000 miles per second, the scientifically calculated speed of light. In fact, this particular piece of data introduces the novelty at the heart of the story, the awesome scale and diversity of existence in a universe in which humankind occupies only one very small corner. So vast is the universe that a slight navigation error delivers Stormfield at the wrong heavenly gate, billions of miles from the one he should have entered by. Heaven is fathomless, and souls from all parts of the universe are pouring in by the millions. The celestial clerks he encounters have never heard of San Francisco, or California, or, for that matter, America. When he finally identifies his point of origin as the “World,” the clerk scoffs: “There’s billions of them.” At that point, he gives up his place in line to “a skyblue man with seven heads and only one leg” (Twain, Science Fiction, p. 26). When the clerks finally locate Earth on a map, they find that it is designated as “the Wart.” As might be expected, Mark Twain is mindful of the humorous potential of the material. Even his bona fide science fiction masterpiece, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), avoids directly confronting the catastrophic potential of technological know-how wedded to rampant capitalism. Instead, Twain transplants this development to the medieval era, where Gilded Age readers could observe the disastrous consequences without being directly threatened by them. This science fiction device—time travel—allows him to entertain with broad humor (depicting medieval peasants perplexed by modern technology) while presenting a bleak social vision in which, according to contemporary accounts, his readers had less interest. JACK LONDON THE SOCIAL CRITIC
By contrast, Jack London (1876–1916) is more concerned with using science fiction as a means to make his readers directly confront social issues. For example, “The Enemy of All the World,” published in 1908, is set in 1933 to 1941. While London pays lip service to technological gadgetry, he focuses primarily on the predictable actions of human beings. A disgruntled genius, in an attempt to realize the fantasy of ultimate
1016
A M E R I C A N
power, sets out to destroy everyone who has offended him. The agency of destruction is a technique he has discovered by which he can deliver an electrical charge to any location he chooses, thus making it possible to explode rounds of ammunition in firearms that others are holding or ignite explosives stored aboard ships or anywhere else. Eventually, the evil culprit is captured and executed, and the secret of his deadly invention dies with him. As much as this aspect of the story captures the reader’s interest, the story’s thematic strength lies in London’s treatment of the events leading up to the genius’s disgruntlement. He is refused medical treatment by his family, persecuted by the press for statements that they misinterpret, unjustly beaten by a man who suspects him of cheating with his wife, and falsely imprisoned for murder. London implies that the injustices that society inflicts on the unfortunate may have negative repercussions for that society. In “The Scarlet Plague,” London depicts an epidemic, the Scarlet Death, that in the year 2013 will all but wipe out humanity. While he expends some effort to explain the technical aspects of the plague, his interest is in the behavior of the human species, seen without romantic bias. As the plague begins to decimate the population, panic and chaos produce extraordinary selfishness as well as great heroism and sacrifice. But it ends in death to all but the one in a million who, irrespective of social class, are immune. The insight of the oldest survivor is that civilization will rise again, then fall once more, just as past civilizations have come and gone one after another. He accepts the fact that human nature is flawed and will never achieve perfection. In fact, the technologically advanced civilization that has just collapsed was far from perfect. Similar to what we see in The Iron Heel (1907), the ruling property owners have established a new nobility that holds itself far above ordinary workers. In one major scene, the brutish chauffeur of a powerful family is now the lord and abusive master of a woman who was once heir to one of the great fortunes. Culture, the story suggests, can preserve social relationships for the moment, but in the long run, nature will wipe the slate clean. In The Iron Heel, London systematically works out the class conflicts of the world to come. It is a grim future in which worldwide capitalism beats down organized labor (though we are told that ultimately labor will prevail). The science of the story is not drawn primarily from the hard sciences that underlie technology; rather, London bases his projections on the behavioral and social sciences—the “soft” sciences— and in doing so anticipates the utopian visions that mark the rest of the twentieth century.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SCIENCE FICTION
AMBROSE BIERCE AND THE HORROR TRADITION
Ambrose Bierce (1842?–1914), known for his bitter irony and cynicism, was not immune to the allure of science fiction. He wrote a number of stories for straightforwardly sensational purposes—ghost and horror tales—and on at least a few occasions ventured into reasoning about the inexplicable, which led him to science fiction. “Moxon’s Master” (1910) is a remarkably timely story given the current interest in artificial intelligence. In arguing with a friend (the narrator of the story), Moxon presents a series of definitions, theories, and examples to assert that we cannot preclude the possibility of a thinking machine. The story comes to a disastrous conclusion when a chess-playing automaton, enraged at losing a chess match, attacks and kills his creator, Moxon. What Moxon has been arguing in theory, he has, to his misfortune, brought about in fact, the creation of machines that think (and also become angry). While the purpose of the story is to entertain the reader through mystery and terror, Bierce does not take the more direct route to these effects, that is, he does not invoke the supernatural. By appealing to science, he places the terror in our world of possibility, not in a supernatural world of impossibility. In so doing, he enhances the terror of the story. Bierce used a similar strategy in “The Damned Thing” (1893), in which a seemingly supernatural creature mauls and kills a human being. The reader learns, however, that the creature may not be supernatural; it may simply exist in a part of the color spectrum that human beings cannot detect. Thus, the story raises the fear that dangers lurk in the completely real, but totally unperceivable, domain outside human sensory perception. Bierce’s use of scientific explanation to increase the terror—an approach drawn from Poe, among others—remains one of the standard techniques of science fiction. EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS AND THE POPULAR FORMULA
Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950) is the science fiction writer who found the most receptive audience during this period, and it is therefore instructive to consider the nature of his ideas. In A Princess of Mars (1912), the first of his ten Martian tales, his hero, John Carter, travels to his destination in a most unscientific fashion (essentially, he wishes himself there). Burroughs’s Mars—known by the Martians as “Barsoom”—is consistent with many of the “facts” available at the time. In the late nineteenth century, the Italian astronomer G. V. Schiaparelli (1835– 1910) reported seeing through his telescope a Mars covered A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
with “canali,” by which he meant channels, or natural waterways, but many readers saw the word and envisioned constructed waterways, Martian “canals.” No amount of later correction could dispel the popular misconception. Between 1896 and 1911, the American astronomer Percival Lowell (1855–1916) added to the misunderstanding by publishing a series of books—with titles such as Mars as the Abode of Life (1908) and Mars and Its Canals (1906)—building on the notion that intelligent life on Mars could have been responsible for planetwide engineering projects by which an ancient race fought to preserve a dwindling water supply. This is the world Carter finds, a dry and ancient planet that is losing its atmosphere and whose life forms (some of them intelligent) are threatened with extinction. Because there is less gravitational pull, John Carter finds—with scientific plausibility—that his leaping ability is far greater on Mars than on Earth. (Mars’s gravitational pull is about one-third that of Earth.) Thus Carter has a strength and speed advantage because Martians are “muscled only in proportion to the gravitation which they must overcome.” Burroughs populates the planet with the confidence of a trained zoologist (or exobiologist). Carter notes that “a multiplicity of legs . . . is a characteristic feature of the fauna of Mars. The higher type of man and the one other animal, the only mammal existing on Mars, alone have well-formed nails, and there are absolutely no hoofed animals in existence there” (p. 18). Writing with certitude, Burroughs convinced many readers of the concrete actuality of his alien world. When overwhelmed by the absence of facts, however, he appeals to the miraculous technology of a climate machine, which is his explanation for the presence of a breathable atmosphere on what is, scientifically considered, an oxygen-depleted Mars. Burroughs usually did not pursue careful scientific reasoning, and the direction he took made for a popularity and fame that he might not otherwise have achieved. His themes are power, domination, and submission, with some references to love, honor, and revenge. The plots are driven by flight, pursuit, capture, and recapture. While these narratives may serve as dark allegories, they are not the science-based visions that science fiction promises. In the end, it was Burroughs’s intellectually vacuous science fiction that captured the attention of the general population. To this day, nonspecialist readers have to be reminded that Mark Twain, Jack London, and Ambrose Bierce even wrote stories that could be classified as science fiction. See also Mystery and Detective Fiction; Ghost Stories and Gothic Fiction; Pseudoscience
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1017
S C I E N T I F I C M AT E R I A L I S M
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Bierce, Ambrose. Ghost and Horror Stories. Edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover, 1964. Burroughs, Edgar Rice. A Princess of Mars. 1912. New York: Modern Library, 2003. London, Jack. The Iron Heel. 1907. New York: Sagamore Press, 1957. London, Jack. The Science Fiction Stories of Jack London. Edited by James Bankes. Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1993. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. 1889. Edited by Bernard L. Stein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Twain, Mark. The Science Fiction of Mark Twain. Edited by David Ketterer. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1984. Secondary Works
their system in any rigorous way. Instead they lived, as James phrased it, “vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit the temptations of successive hours” (p. 5). Nevertheless the building-block philosophy of scientific materialism contributed in a hundred subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways to the disquieting erosion of faith and conviction throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. In a lecture in 1913 the historian of ideas A. O. Lovejoy observed that a “mechanistic cosmology and a quasi-mechanical biology bred much of that mid-Victorian melancholy which is so conspicuous a phase of the English literature of the past century” (p. 30). Lovejoy quoted from James Thomson’s despairing poem “The City of Dreadful Night” to convey the troubling implications of a universe in which all is but “mouldering flesh / Whose elements dissolved and merged afresh” (p. 30):
Alkon, Paul K. Science Fiction before 1900: Imagination Discovers Technology. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.
Infinite aeons ere our world began, Infinite aeons after the last man Has joined the mammoth in earth’s tomb and womb. (P. 30)
Franklin, H. Bruce. Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1974.
William Vaughn Moody, in “The Menagerie” (1901), put the matter more comically but no less pungently: Helpless I stood among those awful cages; The beasts were walking loose, and I was bagged! I, I, last product of the toiling ages, Goal of heroic feet that never lagged,— A little man in trousers, slightly jagged. (P. 580)
Steve Anderson
SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM In the first chapter of his Pragmatism (1907), “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” the American philosopher William James (1842–1910) sought to define the terms of the reigning intellectual debate of the day by dividing the members of opposing camps into two temperaments: the “Tender-Minded” and the “ToughMinded.” Members of the first camp were “intellectualistic,” “idealistic,” “religious,” and “dogmatical”; those in the second were “sensationalistic,” “materialistic,” “irreligious,” and “sceptical.” In practical terms, the contest between the two was in fact quite lopsided, however, for the tough-minded crew had at its disposal, or so it seemed, the entire scientific community, a mountainous array of “facts,” a stock of immutable “natural laws,” and the almost daily disclosure of some technological innovation or improvement that constituted a latter-day miracle of progress. The tender-minded, more often than not, were forced to retreat behind genteel “principles” or established social convention or to take comfort in some vague religious feeling or idealistic absolute. But most men and women, insofar as they had a philosophy at all, never straightened out
1018
A M E R I C A N
How such a bleak outlook should gain so much as a toehold, much less the ascendancy in the temperament of a natively hopeful people, is an interesting chapter in American cultural history. THE CONSERVATION OF FORCE
Two scientific discoveries in the nineteenth century combined to make a mechanistic point of view of the universe not merely plausible but seemingly comprehensive. The first was the law of conservation of force, arrived at independently by several scientists in the 1840s. This law, combined with the related law of the conservation of matter, provided a systematic framework that paved the way for scientific advances that were both theoretically consistent and practically beneficial. Scientific discovery and technological innovation enjoyed the mutual advantage of not merely studying phenomena but creating them, both in the laboratory and in the marketplace. The mechanistic regularity of the heavens was replicated in steam engines, threshing machines, and interchangeable parts, and the concrete application of these principles seemed to corroborate a mechanistic physical
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S C I E N T I F I C M AT E R I A L I S M
theory at the same time that it created a self-validating environment. The law of the conservation of force had important social as well as scientific implications. As Ronald E. Martin has observed, “One of the most pervasive and oppressive consequences of nineteenth-century science and its theory of force conservation was the force-cause-determinism it forged out of mechanics and metaphysics” (p. 30). This law enabled one to treat inorganic matter with meticulous calculation, for it allowed one to suppose that in any particular system the amount of matter and energy was constant and that change could be considered as the predictable transformation of matter and the distribution of force according to demonstrable physical laws. Organic matter posed a different problem, and chemists and biologists often found it necessary to bring in some concept of a vital inner principle to account for the biological transformations of adaptation, growth, regeneration, and repair. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), however, there appeared an avenue of inquiry that might reconcile the incompatible laws of inorganic and organic matter. For the principle of natural selection proposed that the evolution and function of life could be entirely explained in terms of environmental conditions, without reference to any internal life force. For Herbert Spencer and others this meant that life could be studied empirically and at last be shown to participate in the universal laws of the redistribution of matter and energy. SPENCER’S SYNTHETIC PHILOSOPHY
More than Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer (1820– 1903) enjoyed widespread popularity and exerted enormous intellectual and social influence in America. Between 1862 and 1903, authorized editions of Spencer’s works sold some 370,000 copies. A civil engineer by training, Spencer, as self-appointed philosopher and moralist, had been concerned with evolutionary principles, especially as they related to human psychology, well before Darwin published his revolutionary findings. But with the assistance of Darwinian principles converted to his own purposes, Spencer constructed a vast architecture of the universe based on evolutionary principles, but he did so in ways that did not seem to challenge religious orthodoxy, at least in no deliberately confrontational ways. His First Principles (1862) had consigned God or any other transcendent explanation of the cosmos to the realm of the “Unknowable” and then had proceeded to sketch out with great particularity, but also with great vagueness, his own “synthetic” philosophy. In subsequent works he would extend the reach of his vision into such diverse areas as sociology, A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
psychology, politics, and ethics and find them all to be consistent with his overarching explanation of evolutionary change. It was in the universal application of his philosophy to diverse fields and disciplines that his thinking acquired its “synthetic” character. Though himself an agnostic, Spencer did not challenge religious sensibility the way that Darwin had done, particularly in The Descent of Man (1871), by detecting a simian ancestor in the great family tree. To the contrary, a host of Spencerians gladly adopted the evolutionary point of view and assisted in the work of claiming new intellectual and cultural territory and reconciling the claims of science with religious faith. Among others, John Fiske, in Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874), Henry Ward Beecher, in Evolution and Religion (1885), and Lyman Abbott, in The Theology of an Evolutionist (1897), were able to embrace a Spencerian evolutionary perspective without severely damaging religious orthodoxy. Fiske and Abbott in fact insisted that Darwinism and evolutionism were not synonymous, whereas Spencerism and evolutionism were. More concretely, the laws of physics and biology could, with some finesse, be introduced to the average man or woman in ways that reinforced rather than disturbed religious conviction. J. Dorman Steele, in his Fourteen Weeks in Natural Philosophy (1872), one of a series of his high school textbooks in the sciences, insisted that nature is “interwoven everywhere with proofs of a common plan and a common Author.” Steele moved effortlessly from the explanation of particular laws of mechanics to spiritualized observations, such as that the “confused” noises of nature, softened by distance, adjust to the key of F and therefore combine in an “anthem of praise which Nature sings for His ear alone” (p. 182). Similarly, in the concluding paragraphs of the book Steele echoes the synthetic, mechanistic philosophy but with an evangelical tang added: No force can be destroyed. A hammer falls by the force of gravity and comes to rest, but its motion as a mass is converted into a motion of atoms, and reveals itself to the sense of touch as heat. Thus force changes its form continually, but the eye of philosophy detects it and enables us to drive it from its various hiding-places still undiminished. (P. 316)
“The Correllation of the Physical Forces” is the grand and inspiring law of nature and, at the same time, palpable evidence of a “Divine Hand” at work in the universe. Thus might scientific materialism be adjusted to existent, and transcendent, prepossessions. But Spencer’s appeal, particularly in the United States, was the result of other factors as well. First, he was accessible in ways that Darwin was not. William
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1019
S C I E N T I F I C M AT E R I A L I S M
As the following passage, published in 1857, makes clear, Herbert Spencer had certain ideas about progress and evolution even before Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species (1859). Darwin gave Spencerian notions a certain legitimacy, however, and encouraged the philosopher to give ever broader application to evolutionary principles in what became known as Social Darwinism. Among Spencer’s more influential and controversial works are The Study of Sociology (1873), Man versus the State (1884), and The Principles of Ethics (1892). Spencer was even more influential in the United States than in Europe, and his reputation was at its highest point in the 1870s and early 1880s.
We believe we have shown beyond question, that that which the German physiologists have found to be the law of organic development, is the law of all development. The advance from the simple to the complex, through a process of successive differentiations, is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe to which we can reason our way back, and in the earliest changes which we can inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic evolution of the Earth, and of every single organism on its surface; it is seen in the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the civilized individual, or in the aggregation of races; it is seen in the evolution of Society in respect both of its political and economical organization; and it is seen in the evolution of all those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity which constitute the environment of our daily life. From the remotest past which Science can fathom, down to the novelties of yesterday, that in which Progress essentially consists, is the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous. Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Causes,” Westminster Review 67 (April 1857), p. 465.
James once remarked that Herbert Spencer was the right philosopher for those who had no special interest in philosophy. Second, despite certain leaps in logic, his work was saturated with “facts,” and these facts in turn were enlisted on behalf of an overarching argument that, on the one hand, seemed particular enough to be convincing and, on the other, capacious enough to be recognizably harmonious. Finally, Spencerian evolution was decidedly upbeat—it was
1020
A M E R I C A N
progressive, reassuring (if not altogether hopeful), and confident. It became, in T. J. Jackson Lears’s words, a “secular religion of progress, a social scientific version of the optimistic, liberal Protestantism which pervaded the educated bourgeoisie” (p. 22). And, one might add, it occasionally appealed to the self-educated proletariat as well. The naturalist writer Jack London (1876–1916), in the largely autobiographical character of Martin Eden, spoke his admiration unmistakably: Here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him [Eden], reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization that it was like the model of a ship such as sailors make to put into glass bottles. . . . All the hidden things were laying their secrets bare. He was drunken with comprehension. (Pp. 99–100)
Quite as much as Émile Zola, Herbert Spencer was an important influence on several American literary naturalists. The unified vision of scientific materialism articulated a universal philosophy undergirded by a single principle that evolved inevitably and progressively forward, a philosophy that could be wholly understood in terms of matter, motion, and force. In fact, for Spencer, progress of any sort should not be measured by the degree to which it contributes to human happiness; instead, progress was in and of itself constant differentiation and a movement toward more and more complex forms. Spencer’s law of evolution was stated straightforwardly, if rather obscurely, in his First Principles: It was “an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation” (p. 396, his italics). Thus, for example, the homogeneous fertilized egg of a mammal, through ongoing differentiation, multiplies not only in mass but also in its several distributed functions (sight, digestion, circulation, and the like) to become a coherent and complex organism capable of acting efficiently in the world. This same process is evidenced in the development of societies—from “primitive” tribes, wherein its members perform more or less the same functions, to “advanced” industrialized societies in which individual members perform highly specialized tasks that contribute to a complex and heterogeneous (and hence progressive) civilization. For the idealist philosopher Josiah Royce (1855–1916) this definition illustrated the “beautiful logical naïveté” of the synthetic philosophy: “If you found a bag big enough to hold all the facts, that was a unification of science” (p. 115). More
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S C I E N T I F I C M AT E R I A L I S M
jocularly, William James translated Spencer’s definition of evolution as a “change from a no-howish untalkable all-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous sticktogetherations and somethingelseifications” (Miller, p. xxxv). SOCIAL PROGRESS
For the less skeptical (or the more canny), however, scientific materialism provided a foundation for a uniquely Western version of progress, one that might be extended as a warrant for the way things are and should be. It could be applied as the sanctification of industrialization, the division of labor, and the concentration of capital and energy in the hands of the “fittest” (Spencer’s word, not Darwin’s). It could justify colonial imperialism that forcibly dragged “primitive” (which is to say homogeneous) peoples and whole cultures into the “modern” (highly specialized and therefore heterogeneous) world of the nineteenth century. It might serve to reinforce a “scientific racism” that declared the inferiority of nonwhites as self-evidently a matter of evolutionary law, not social justice. On the other hand, the same system could be enlisted on behalf of social reform; for if natural organisms are shaped by external surroundings, then one should seek to improve the social and natural environment of the woe-begotten instead of making vain appeals to Christian redemption or moral suasion. Jacob Riis in How the Other Half Lives (1890), for example, revealed in prose and in photographs the appalling condition of life in the slums, and in blueprints and diagrams he documented the crowded spaces and unhealthy lack of ventilation and natural light. Stephen Crane was affected by Riis’s work, and as he wrote on the cover of the copy of Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893) that he presented to Hamlin Garland, he sought in that novel to show that “environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless.” Less grandly, perhaps, it could provide the premise for science fiction, as in Ambrose Bierce’s (1842–1914?) fanciful tale of a chess-playing robot, “Moxon’s Monster” (1893). Bierce in fact quotes Spencer’s definition of life as a way of overcoming the reader’s disbelief in the animating principle of any machine, organic or inorganic, natural or contrived. Consciousness, insists Moxon, is merely the “rhythm” of matter, and the full significance of that remark dawns upon the narrator: “If consciousness is the product of rhythm all things are conscious, for all have motion, and all motion is rhythmic” (p. 131). In the right hands, the same system could supply the stuff of comic advocacy, as in Mark Twain’s (1835–1910) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Hank Morgan undertakes A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
to transform Arthurian England into a thoroughly efficient, technologically sophisticated republic, a “man factory.” Morgan clearly sees opportunities for such changes all about him. When he comes across a famous religious hermit who for some twenty years has been on a high pillar ceaselessly bowing up and down, Hank deplores the wasted energy: I timed him with a stopwatch, and he made twelve hundred forty-four revolutions in twenty-four minutes and forty-six seconds. It seemed a pity to have all this power going to waste. It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics, the pedal movement; so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing some day to apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewing machine with it. I afterwards carried out that scheme, and got five years’ good service out of him. . . . I worked him Sundays and all; he was going Sundays the same as weekdays, and it was no use to waste the power. (Pp. 259–260)
In later works, such as What Is Man? (1906), Twain was not so sanguine about the implications of a materialistic world in which there was no room for soul or even individuality, much less the sorts of values (loyalty, courage, honor, or free will) that dignified human purposes. For the British poet T. E. Hulme, this sort of world was a “nightmare”; for Joseph Conrad, it seemed a “tragic accident” in which nothing matters except perhaps matter itself. Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935), refusing the materialism of the day, still perceived that current wisdom would have it that one has embarked on some blind atomic pilgrimage Whereon by crass chance billeted we go Because our brains and bones and cartilage Will have it so. (P. 143)
The felt oppressiveness of a mechanical explanation of the universe was not an overt rejection of science, of course. Most people were willing to concede that this positivistic system explained something, but what was disturbing was that it purported to explain everything, from one-celled organisms to entire galaxies. THE LAW OF ENTROPY
Spencerian materialism was deterministic, but like classical Newtonian physics itself, it was also unified and comprehensive, even elegant. It was progressive and therefore provided a basis for measured optimism, and it was grounded in natural laws. Even so, there existed another scientific law that absolutely contradicted a progressive model of evolution. The second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy, had been demonstrated in the 1850s, and even though the disturbing
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1021
S C I E N T I F I C M AT E R I A L I S M
implications of this discovery were pointed out to him, Spencer chose to ignore them. The law of entropy holds that, though the amount of energy remains a constant throughout the universe, in any conversion process that same energy (in a steam engine, say) tends to dissipate and therefore become unusable to humans. In his Pragmatism, William James quoted the British philosopher and statesman Lord Balfour on the apparent degradation of the universe: The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish. . . . “Imperishable monuments” and “immortal deeds,” death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as if they had not been. (P. 40)
The lower, not the higher forces of the universe will eventually prevail; in the meantime, human beings are living on borrowed time. Why this worm at the core of Spencer’s system should have slept there for nearly forty years and not received the attention that Lord Balfour and others gave it at the end of the century is something of a mystery. Perhaps this neglect, even willful blindness, says more about the common tendency to accept and be convinced by positive formulations over those that, like the law of entropy, offered such dire prospects. At any rate the idea had sufficient currency in the early years of the twentieth century for Sherwood Anderson (1876– 1941), in Winesburg, Ohio (1919), to dramatize in antic fashion a prophet of bad news in the character of Joe Welling, a “man of ideas.” Not so coincidentally Welling is an agent for the Standard Oil Company and therefore makes his living by supplying energy to his neighbors. But his real passion is for ideas, which he in turn eagerly foists upon his fellow townspeople. Among those ideas is his belief in ceaseless energy depletion, that the whole world is on fire: “Now what is decay? It’s fire. . . . This sidewalk here and this feed store, the trees down the street there—they’re all on fire. They’re burning up. Decay you see is always going on. It don’t stop” (p. 106). Robert Frost took up the same theme in his poem “The Wood-Pile” (1914). By the close of the nineteenth century a unified, mechanistic explanation of the universe was beginning to break down under the weight of recent scientific disclosures. Studies of light and electricity had years before indicated that light was not mechanical but electromagnetic and had undermined the attendant assumption of classical physics that there existed a cosmic ether through which light passed. Marie and Pierre Curie’s experiments with radium called into question the conservation of force and the indivisibil-
1022
A M E R I C A N
ity of matter. In 1905 Albert Einstein deduced that time, space, and mass could not be absolutes. Around the same time, several philosophers and scientists were even beginning to question whether the “laws” of science in fact were either absolute or immutable: Might not these laws themselves evolve over time? Henry Adams (1838–1918), more assiduously than most nonspecialists, had attempted to keep up with the science of his day, and he was more troubled by the evident chaos that the twentieth century promised than by the material uniformity that had characterized the nineteenth. As a historian he could comprehend the shifts of the past so long as the “swerves” were part of a continuous movement. But as he wrote in his third-person autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams (printed privately in 1907), in 1900 the “continuity snapped”: Vaguely conscious of the cataclysm, the world dated it from 1893, by the Roentgen rays, or from 1898, by Curie’s radium; but in 1904, Arthur Balfour announced on the part of British science that the human race without exception had lived and died in a world of illusion until the last year of the century. The date was convenient, and convenience was truth. The child born in 1900 would, then, be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple. (P. 457)
The synthetic philosophy of scientific materialism had been scattered to the winds, and Adams’s hypothetical child born in 1900 would be hard-pressed to discover even traces of it by, say, 1920. Even Herbert Spencer himself knew before he died in 1903 that his beautiful system had become nothing more than a monument to dead ideas. See also Darwinism; The Man against the Sky; Naturalism; Philosophy; Science and Technology; Social Darwinism BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Edited by Ernest Samuels. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973. Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. 1919. New York: Penguin Books, 1960. Bierce, Ambrose. Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories. Edited by Tom Quirk. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000. James, William. Pragmatism. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. London, Jack. Martin Eden. 1908. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1956.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SCRIBNER’S MAGAZINE
Lovejoy, A. O. Bergson and Romantic Evolutionism: Two Lectures Delivered before the Union, September 5 and 12, 1913. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1914. Moody, William Vaughn. “The Menagerie.” In Nation and Region: 1860–1900, edited by Milton R. Stern and Seymour L. Gross. New York: Viking Press, 1962. Robinson, Edwin Arlington. The Man against the Sky. New York: Macmillan, 1916. Royce, Josiah. Herbert Spencer: An Estimate and Review. New York: Fox, Duffield, 1904. Spencer, Herbert. First Principles. 1867. New York: Appleton, 1894. Steele, J. Dorman. Fourteen Weeks in Natural Philosophy. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1872. Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Edited by Bernard Stein. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979.
quickly became a respected quality monthly in the late 1880s, joining the work of the other prominent family house magazines of the period, including Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the Century Magazine, and the Atlantic Monthly. Associated with the reputable Scribner publishing firm, the magazine was aimed at middleclass readers who were interested in a high-quality monthly at a slightly lower price than its competitors— twenty-five cents per issue and three dollars for an annual subscription, versus thirty-five cents per issue and four dollars for an annual subscription to Harper’s, Century, or the Atlantic. Although some periodical historians have noticed an American emphasis in the magazine, Scribner’s is more accurately characterized as a distinctively cosmopolitan monthly with a particular focus on the arts, one that consistently attracted both discriminating readers and aspiring authors.
Secondary Works
INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY
Boeckmann, Cathy. A Question of Character: Scientific Racism and the Genres of American Fiction, 1892–1912. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000.
Although the Scribner publishing firm had been associated with two earlier monthly magazines—Hours at Home (1865–1870) and Scribner’s Monthly (1870– 1881)—it was with Scribner’s Magazine (1887–1939) that the publisher made its mark in the periodical world. Founded in 1887, just six years after the firm severed its ties with the earlier Scribner’s Monthly, which had been reorganized as the Century in 1881, the new magazine was edited for nearly three decades by Edward Livermore Burlingame (1848–1922). Burlingame brought impressive intellectual rigor, a cosmopolitan perspective, and practical newspaper and publishing experience to the enterprise. Before the age of fourteen, he had attended Harvard University and served as a private secretary to his father, Anson Burlingame, who had been appointed the U.S. minister to China in 1861. Over the next several years, Burlingame not only assisted his father but also continued his education, becoming fluent in French and German and studying in Berlin, Paris, and St. Petersburg before earning a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Heidelberg in 1869. After his father’s death in 1870, Burlingame returned to the United States, where he gained experience working for the New York Tribune and the Appleton publishing firm. He also translated a volume of essays by the German composer Richard Wagner (Roberson, p. 90). Burlingame’s extensive travel, European education, and social connections with world leaders, artists, and writers no doubt attracted the interest of the Scribner publishing firm; his early publishing experience also made him a viable candidate. Charles Scribner’s Sons hired him as a book editor in 1879 and appointed him the editor of Scribner’s Magazine in 1886; the firm was planning the first number of the magazine for
Hofstader, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Rev. ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Jones, Howard Mumford. The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865–1915. New York: Viking Press, 1970. Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture. New York: Pantheon, 1981. Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change: American Literature, 1865– 1914. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Martin, Ronald. American Literature and the Universe of Force. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1981. Miller, Perry. Introduction to American Thought: Civil War to World War I. Edited by Perry Miller, pp. ix–lii. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1954. Person, Stow, ed. Evolutionary Thought in America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950. Quirk, Tom. Bergson and American Culture: The Worlds of Willa Cather and Wallace Stevens. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Russett, Cynthia Eagle. Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865–1912. San Francisco: Freeman, 1976. Tom Quirk
SCRIBNER’S MAGAZINE Remembered chiefly for its comprehensive art criticism, beautiful illustrations, detailed cultural and social studies, and diverse literary offerings, Scribner’s Magazine A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1023
SCRIBNER’S MAGAZINE
January 1887. Until he retired from this post in 1914, Burlingame and his able staff and contributors created a monthly that was well received both nationally and internationally. He had sound editorial skills and was particularly adept at negotiating with writers to contribute stories, articles, and series to the magazine. During the height of Scribner’s success in the early twentieth century, the Scribner firm sent Burlingame to Europe almost every summer to seek suitable material from writers and artists (Roberson, p. 93). Although the first few years of Scribner’s Magazine were difficult because of the financial strain of offering a monthly at a reduced price, circulation rose to about 110,000 by the early 1890s and continued to grow until it reached slightly more than 200,000 by 1909 (Mott, p. 723). Soon after reaching this peak, however, circulation dropped sharply to 100,000 in 1911, primarily because of increased competition from cheaper periodicals and a shift in the taste of the middle-class reading public. Following Burlingame’s retirement in 1914, the associate editor, Robert Bridges (1858– 1941), took the helm, maintaining most of the successful policies initiated by Burlingame (Mott, pp. 723, 729). Bridges was correct to continue Burlingame’s emphasis on quality contributions and sound editorial standards, but without strategic changes in format or content, it was inevitable that the circulation of Scribner’s would continue to decline. In an attempt to shore up its financial base by making the magazine more attractive to advertisers, the magazine decreased its advertising rate from $300 a page to $250. Despite this adjustment, the magazine was only able to muster about eighty pages of advertising per month, down from the one hundred pages in its most successful period. Circulation fell to about seventy thousand in 1924 and continued to drop during most of the rest of Bridges’s tenure, except for a brief return to seventy thousand in 1930, the year of Bridges’s retirement (Mott, pp. 726, 729). ILLUSTRATION AND ART CRITICISM
Although Scribner’s Magazine did not immediately reach the high standard for quality illustration set by the Century Magazine, within a few years it was attracting almost as much interest from readers and critics. Like the Century, Scribner’s at first featured mostly wood engravings by the new school of American engravers, whose work was praised for its accurate representation of the original. Wood engravers such as W. B. Closson, G. T. Andrew, George Kruell, Frederick Juengling, and Elbridge Kingsley filled the early numbers of the magazine with detailed engravings that often appeared to transcend the restrictions of wood by simulating brushstrokes, crayon textures, or the
1024
A M E R I C A N
Scribner’s Magazine. Advertising poster for the April 1898 issue. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
intricate degrees of light and shade of the work of art it was rendering. In the early 1890s Scribner’s added to its illustration processes halftone engraving and chromolithographs, which allowed it to reproduce the work of many prominent artists, including J. W. Alexander, W. L. Taylor, R. F. Zogbaum, Charles Dana Gibson, Kenyon Cox, Will H. Low, W. T. Smedley, A. B. Frost, Robert Blum, Ernest C. Peixotto, and Maxfield Parrish. In the late 1890s and following, Scribner’s was highly regarded for its color illustrations. One of the most striking examples may be found in John La Farge’s essay “Puvis de Chavannes” (1900), which included full-color plates of the artist’s work. Scribner’s innovative experiments in illustration were highly praised by both readers and critics (Mott, p. 726). Scribner’s was best known in the art world for its art criticism. In 1896 the magazine founded the department “The Field of Art,” which included signed contributions by Russell Sturgis, Frank Weitenkampf,
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SCRIBNER’S MAGAZINE
Will H. Low, and many others. This department covered the entire range of visual art by including pieces on architectural decoration, portraiture, sculpture, painting, interior design, posters, and even bookbinding. In addition, nearly every number included a substantial essay on either an artist or some aspect of the art world. Scribner’s was strategic in finding ways to reach readers who might not otherwise read an essay focused explicitly on art. For example, Robert Blum’s popular and beautifully illustrated series “An Artist in Japan” (1893) was primarily a travel piece, but it included Blum’s astute visual perspective on the arts and crafts of Japan, even in his description and illustration of a “clog maker.” By blending the discussion of art into other essay topics, Scribner’s gradually introduced readers to the aesthetic aims of the magazine. LITERATURE AND LITERARY CRITICISM
Part of the success of Scribner’s in its first three decades stemmed from Burlingame’s ability to balance challenging literary scholarship, fiction, and poetry with lighter literary fare. In the first several years, for example, Scribner’s printed Jane Octavia Brookfield’s edited series “Unpublished Letters of Thackeray” (1887) and Andrew Lang’s biographical piece “Molière” (1889). These serious offerings were carefully balanced by lighter contributions of fiction and literary biography, including Andrew D. White’s illustrated piece “Walter Scott at Work” (1889) and Margaret Sutton Briscoe’s sentimental story “Apples of Gold” (1892). Scribner’s was especially strong in local color fiction, a mode that nicely complemented its illustrated travel articles. During the same years that Scribner’s printed local color stories by Sarah Orne Jewett, Thomas Nelson Page, Duncan Campbell Scott, Bret Harte, J. M. Barrie, Octave Thanet, and A. T. QuillerCouch, it also printed illustrated travel essays that appealed to readers’ desire for authenticity. For example, Edward Penfield’s “Holland from the Stern of a Boeier” (1903) and Ernest Thompson Seton’s four-part series “The Arctic Prairies” (1910–1911) were both illustrated by the authors, a feature that not only underscored the magazine’s expertise in printing high-quality illustrations but also gave these pieces a realistic, documentary look. Although late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century monthlies are not known for distinguished poetry, Scribner’s printed more than the typical sentimental poems found in other magazines of the period. Poems by Edwin Arlington Robinson were well represented in the magazine, as were the poems of Edith Wharton, Henry Van Dyke, David Morton, Arthur Davison Ficke, Andrew Lang, Archibald Lampman, Katharine Lee Bates, and Robinson Jeffers, among others. Drawing on A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
its strength in printing fine illustrations, Scribner’s frequently framed poems with attractive borders and sometimes even with full-color plates. This attention to design suggests that Scribner’s poetry, fiction, travel essays, and other illustrated pieces were connected to the larger visual world that the magazine brought to readers each month. Perhaps the greatest literary achievement of Scribner’s, however, may be found in its fiction. Serialized novels were plentiful, including the work of George Washington Cable, Robert Louis Stevenson, Edith Wharton, F. Hopkinson Smith, John Galsworthy, John Fox Jr., Harold Frederic, and Robert Grant. From a purely literary point of view, the most important serials in the first decade of the twentieth century were Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905), which included a striking frontispiece illustration by A. B. Wenzel, and her novella Ethan Frome (1911). Scribner’s was also strong in short stories, most notably Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” (1897), Octave Thanet’s “Stories of a Western Town” (1892), and Rudyard Kipling’s “.007” (1897). Other important contributors of short fiction included Henry James, Frank R. Stockton, Kate Douglas Wiggin, William Allen White, Robert Herrick, Richard Harding Davis, and Margaret Crosby. Finally, even though the magazine began its long decline in 1911, it continued to bring important literary works to the American reading public. Short works by Thomas Wolfe, Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, Conrad Aiken, Langston Hughes, William Saroyan, William Faulkner, and Josephine Herbst filled the pages of Scribner’s with fresh fictional offerings. As mentioned earlier, Burlingame set the tone for Scribner’s in its first three decades by carefully balancing the content. This same principle was applied to literary criticism, with a balance being sought between serious literary essays and lighter domestic commentary on writers. In 1889, for example, Andrew Lang’s essay “Alexander Dumas” stood in contrast to Oscar Browning’s more domestic literary commentary in his essay “Goethe’s House at Weimar.” Scribner’s secured contributions from many other leading literary critics of the day, including Bliss Perry, Brander Matthews, W. C. Brownell, Robert Grant, and Augustine Birrell. CULTURAL AND SOCIAL STUDIES
Although Scribner’s was not as strong as other monthlies in its discussion of social issues, it did print a number of important studies about different cultures and classes. W. C. Brownell’s extensive “French Traits” series (1887–1889) covered everything from “The Social Instinct” to “Intelligence” and “Manners.” There were many features on Japan and Japanese cul-
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1025
THE SEA-WOLF
ture, which reflected a broader interest in Asian art, culture, and politics than was found in the other monthlies of the period. At least in terms of its content, Scribner’s rooted itself firmly in the perspective of the middle- and upper-middle-class reader when it printed essays such as Jacob A. Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives” (1889) and Walter A. Wyckoff ’s series “The Workers” (1898). Just before and during World War I, Scribner’s printed many different perspectives on the war effort, including Price Collier’s “Germany and the Germans” (1913), John Galsworthy’s “Thoughts on War” (1914), and Edith Wharton’s “The Look of Paris” (1915). Regular contributions by the war correspondents Richard Harding Davis and E. Alexander Powell also provided more thorough descriptions of the war than in newspaper accounts. LEGACY
For a little over fifty years, Scribner’s Magazine printed beautiful illustrations, noteworthy art criticism, and important literature and literary criticism. The magazine made a lasting contribution to American life and letters, especially in its consistent attempts to maintain a cosmopolitan perspective rather than a strictly American one. In so doing, Scribner’s Magazine succeeded in creating a unique space in American magazine print culture that acquainted middle-class readers with an intelligent and aesthetically inclined viewpoint of the world, one that avoided the “genteel” label sometimes ascribed to other periodicals. See also Century Magazine; Periodicals BIBLIOGRAPHY Secondary Works
Benert, Annette Larson. “Reading the Walls: The Politics of Architecture in Scribner’s Magazine, 1887–1914.” Arizona Quarterly 47, no. 1 (spring 1991): 49–79. Burlingame, Roger. Of Making Many Books: A Hundred Years of Reading, Writing, and Publishing. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946. Doyle, James. “Duncan Campbell Scott and American Literature.” In Duncan Campbell Scott Symposium, edited by K. P. Stich, pp. 101–109. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980.
Magazine Journalists, 1850–1900, edited by Sam G. Riley, pp. 90–93. Detroit: Gale, 1989. Sait, James E. “Charles Scribner’s Sons and the Great War.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 48, no. 2 (1987): 152–180. James Arthur Bond
THE SEA-WOLF On 30 November 1901, an unusually foggy night even by San Francisco standards, the ferry Sausalito collided with the ferry San Rafael in San Francisco Bay in what was the worst ferryboat collision in the history of the bay. Navigating the fog in an era when ferry skippers relied on the sounds of foghorns, bells on buoys, sirens on piers, and echoes of whistles together with compasses and a heavy dose of instinct, the Sausalito never saw the San Rafael before hitting it amidships, the Sausalito’s prow slamming into the dining room of the smaller, older San Rafael. The elegant side-wheel steamer—which had a pair of gilt eagles atop decorative masts—sank in twenty minutes. Three people died as a result of the collision, and an old horse named Dick, who was used to move baggage carts around the ferry, refused to leave and went down with the ship. In the midst of the panic, the two captains managed to lash their vessels together long enough to get the San Rafael’s passengers onto the Sausalito, but the career of the captain of the Sausalito was ruined. Jack London (1876–1916) used this wreck as the basis of the sinking of the Martinez at the beginning of his 1904 adventure novel, The Sea-Wolf. Aboard the doomed Martinez is Humphrey van Weyden, an amateur literary critic, perusing his latest essay in the Atlantic and thinking of “how comfortable it was, this division of labor,” as the sailors toil on the decks of the Martinez so he can spend his time enjoying the repose of his intellectual life (p. 2). But when the collision occurs and the Martinez begins to sink, he is suddenly surrounded not by poetry but by a “screaming bedlam” of terror. The screaming of the women is the worst:
Nash, Andrew. “‘A Phenomenally Slow Producer’: J. M. Barrie, Scribner’s, and the Publication of Sentimental Tommy.” Yale University Library Gazette 74 (October 1999): 41–53.
I realized I was becoming hysterical myself; for these were women of my own kind, like my mother and sisters, . . . [but] the sounds they made reminded me of the squealing of pigs under the knife of the butcher, and I was struck with horror at the vividness of the analogy. These women, capable of the most sublime emotions, of the tenderest sympathies, were open-mouthed and screaming. They wanted to live, they were helpless, like rats in a trap, and they screamed. (P. 7)
Roberson, Patt Foster. “Edward Livermore Burlingame.” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 79, American
Van Weyden, half-drowned, finds himself picked up by the sealing schooner Ghost. He is hauled aboard
Mott, Frank Luther. A History of American Magazines. 5 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930– 1968. See 4: 717–732.
1026
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
THE SEA-WOLF
and revived, only to find that this rescue is the beginning of a long and deadly struggle for survival. A new central character emerges in the form of Wolf Larsen, a fierce and ruthless ship captain and, surprisingly, a philosopher. Van Weyden’s soft and weak muscles are put to the test as he is forced to join Larsen’s brutish crew, and his easy gentility is similarly challenged by Larsen’s deterministic materialism and nihilism. To Larsen the question of the meaning of life can be measured in one word, “Bosh!” Life, he says, is mere “piggishness” (p. 97), and no man’s achievements can outlast death. Van Weyden is threatened by the crude bully of a cook, and successfully defends himself. Over time, as he grows stronger, he finds himself admiring Larsen’s strength, both his piercing intellect and muscular body. After the Ghost rescues some refugees near Japan on its sealing expedition, Larsen and van Weyden come into conflict over the poet Maud Brewster, culminating in van Weyden’s successful defense of her when Larsen tries to rape her. Brewster and van Weyden manage to escape to a deserted island together. Yet the Ghost finds them, half-wrecked and without a sail, Larsen having begun to succumb to the pain and blindness of a brain tumor. Van Weyden and Brewster finally manage to repair the ship and sail it away, and Larsen dies the sad and lonely death he expected. They are rescued by a passing ship. In the end van Weyden and Brewster each demonstrate their true natures as moral—and capable—individuals who reject Larsen’s crass individualism for the higher ideals of society. The ending, in which the lovers playfully tease each other about sneaking a kiss—Oh!—before the rescue ship comes, is fraught with tensions between the very raw adventure in which they have been engaged, including the ways it has changed them, and their realization that they must now return to the sentimental parlors of San Francisco.
CORBIS
the Bay Area activist Anna Strunsky, The KemptonWace Letters (1903). In addition to its sea lore, adventure, and romance, the tempestuous pages of The Sea-Wolf are a-brim with important turn-of-the-century cultural and historical conflicts—naturalism versus romance, philosophical individualism versus socialism, conflicting explorations of gender roles, and the advent of modern psychology. TEXTUAL HISTORY
COMPOSITION
The Sea-Wolf, written in the spring, summer, and fall of 1903, was based on London’s experiences as a seventeen-year-old able seaman in the North Pacific aboard the Sophia Sutherland ten years earlier, in 1893. The Sea-Wolf was London’s third novel, written during a burst of creative production impelled by poverty, struggle, escape, and adventure that followed London’s finding of his naturalistic “perspective,” as he called it, in the Klondike gold rush of 1898. This period of productivity also resulted in two collections of stories, Children of the Frost (1902) and The Faith of Men (1904); the world classic The Call of the Wild (1903); London’s sociological exposé of the lives of the British poor, The People of the Abyss (1903); and the provocative study of modern love he coauthored with A M E R I C A N
Jack London. The author writing aboard ship. © BETTMANN/
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
In January 1904 London embarked for Korea, traveling via steamer, junk, and sailboat, to cover the RussoJapanese War for the San Francisco Examiner. Perhaps he was especially eager during this time to travel abroad, given his deteriorating marriage to Bess Maddern London. He left his new love interest and later second wife, Charmian Kittredge, and his close friend, the poet George Sterling, to see The Sea-Wolf through proofs and serialization in Century Magazine from January through November 1904. He returned from the war in time to supervise book publication by Macmillan in October. The novel’s textual history is complex. Among other issues, it seems that London, like Émile Zola, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser,
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1027
THE SEA-WOLF
encountered the fusty, outdated censorship of many magazine editors of the day, at just exactly the same time as all of them coped with the enormous rewards of mass-market publication. There are five different versions of The Sea-Wolf from which a modern editor might work to produce an edition, beginning with London’s manuscript. This, however, exists only as a charred hunk on deposit at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, burned in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake shortly after London gave it to Sterling as a thank-you gift. Perhaps in order to secure copyright before the novel was to be published in serial form in Century, Macmillan brought out a paper-cover edition based on the manuscript (a disbound copy of which is held in the Clifton Waller Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia Library). For the serial publication, Century enforced a number of changes upon an exasperated London, and when Macmillan brought out its edition (now burdened with three copyrights, a technicality that would come back to haunt London in later legal battles with New York and Hollywood), London heavily revised the page proofs and had to pay for the changes. In the 1964 Riverside edition of the Sea-Wolf, Matthew Bruccoli points out that there are “thousands of differences between the serial and book versions” (p. 1). It is impossible, he avers, to determine which of the changes between the serial and book were deletions ordered by the magazine and which were added by London in that summer of 1904. Using London’s corrected typescripts, galleys, and marked copy of the book, Bruccoli follows the Macmillan text but also restores sixteen changes London made on galleys before the book publication, largely to do with the profanity turned into dashes by Century editors as well as some philosophizing and a few passages of explicit brutality. He also restores London’s daring use of an experimental present-tense style in chapters 6 through 14, which was changed to the past tense by Century. As Bruccoli notes: “In its book form The Sea-Wolf begins as a memoir and becomes a diary, but in the serial it is narrated as a completed story in the past. This change in the design of the book is not the result of carelessness, but a deliberate effect introduced by the author to produce a sense of immediacy” (p. 2). The Sea-Wolf’s “immediacy” of grammatical tense reflects its ties to urgent concerns of its day. RECEPTION AND INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT
The Sea-Wolf remains one of the world’s most popular and critically acclaimed novels, having never gone out of print in multiple editions in over one hundred years, a close rival of The Call of the Wild (1903) and White
1028
A M E R I C A N
Fang (1906) in sales but outdoing them in motionpicture productions. (Hobart Bosworth’s 1913 The Sea-Wolf was one of the very first full-length films and has been remade dozens of times.) It is nearly impossible to walk into a medium-size book store and not find The Sea-Wolf on the shelf. While early reviewers complained of its “excess of brutality” and of London’s habit of portraying “pictures of cruelty and . . . studies of monsters” (“The Sea-Wolf,” New York Times Saturday Review, p. 768), they also praised its vitality, its characterization of Wolf Larsen, and its “irresistible” suspense (“Literary Notes,” San Francisco Argonaut, p. 311). A century after its publication, the novel’s dialectical opposition of “superman” individualism to philosophies of socialistic community and reform, its themes of heterosexual and homosexual desire, and its new notions of masculinity and femininity still attract the interest of scholars—a revival of interest reflected in essays published in American Literature, American Literary Realism, and other leading journals. In The Sea-Wolf, the cruel strength of Wolf Larsen, one of London’s most memorable characters—a herovillain with elements of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, John Milton’s Satan, Herman Melville’s Ahab, Friedrich Nietzsche’s übermensch, and Robert Browning’s Caliban—is pitted against the efforts of the young romantic duo who must mature enough to withstand Larsen’s brutality. It seems improbable, to say the least, that the characters, whom London describes as the “dean of American letters” and the “first lady of American poetry,” Humphrey van Weyden and Maud Brewster, are thrown together by chance. But their ideological status as representatives of contemporary social mores is important. The novel’s attacks upon the eroding values of the Victorians and its doubts about the values of the modern era make it one of London’s most cogent works, transmuting abstract philosophical and literary ideas into intensely physical survival, appealing to many classes of readers. The Sea-Wolf combines heroic vitality with themes of initiation and of death and rebirth through the symbolism of a ship-as-microcosm tossing on the archetypal sea. In trying to weave into the fabric of his adventure tale his multiple responses to late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century philosophers and scientists, especially Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Darwin, London also explores new definitions of sexuality, gender, and androgyny in a Freudian analysis of the modern male personality. Some critics have found the characters unsatisfying because they seem to stand woodenly for ideas, and lengthy portions of the early part of the novel are indeed taken up with long philosophical debates among van Weyden and Larsen
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
THE SEA-WOLF
and later Brewster. But the novel endures in part because of the magnitude of its conflicting ideas. NIETZSCHE, DARWIN, FREUD
London intended Wolf Larsen, like his later semiautobiographical hero Martin Eden, to be a warning against Nietzschean individualism, but neither was generally read that way. He wrote to Mary Austin: “In the very beginning of my writing career, I attacked Nietzsche and his super-man idea. This was in The Sea Wolf. Lots of people read The Sea Wolf, no one discovered that it was an attack upon the super-man idea” (Letters, p. 1513). The problem is that despite the virtues of van Weyden and Brewster, Larsen steals every scene he is in and seems to inhabit a reality larger than life. Larsen is a transitional figure, reflecting London’s divided mind when it came to socialism versus largerthan-life individualistic heroes. As his counterpart Captain Ahab reflects both the Byronic hero and the modern antihero, so Larsen crosses over genres. Like the suffering Romantic hero, Larsen is sensitive, intelligent, domineering, arrogant, uninhibited, actively rebellious against conventional social mores, and—above all— alone. An early version of the alienated twentiethcentury man, he lacks purpose and direction, except for his course of revenge against his brother, Captain Death Larsen. With no meaningful relationships to appease his tremendous vitality, he brutalizes his crew and revels in nihilism. The animalistic Larsen is a forecast of Eugene O’Neill’s brutish Yank Smith in The Hairy Ape (1922) and T. S. Eliot’s “apeneck Sweeney” in Sweeney among the Nightingales (1920), but psychologically he has more in common with Eliot’s Prufrock and Gerontion, similarly cursed with hyperrational sensibility. Larsen’s gradual deterioration—his headaches, blindness, paralysis, and death from a brain tumor—is symbolic of a modern type of antisocial superman psychopathically alienated. As Charmian London describes him: “The superman is anti-social in his tendencies, and in these days of our complex society and sociology he cannot be successful in his hostile aloofness” (2:57). Larsen has not learned, as Conway Zirkle observes, that “strength was increased by cooperation, by union” (p. 331). The atavistic individual, the lone wolf, is doomed to extinction. Larsen is also “transitional” in the sense that as modern technology had made steamships possible (like his brother Death’s sailing steamer, Macedonia), sailing captains like Wolf Larsen are soon to be obsolete (Papa, p. 2). In a Darwinian sense, the importance of “the group,” with its evolutionary imperatives of social virtues, altruism, cooperation, even self-sacrifice, is justified in The Sea-Wolf as providing the foundation of the real “strength of the strong.” The “sissy” Hump van Weyden does not seem destined for greatness, but A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
he turns out to be a hero in a very different sense than Larsen because of his latent adaptability, intelligence, optimism, and capacity to love. As Larsen is drawn toward Death, van Weyden is propelled into self-sustaining maturity; Larsen declines as van Weyden correspondingly becomes a man, the two courses converging when he saves Maud Brewster from Larsen when he attempts to rape her. From this point on Larsen’s power declines as the couple embark upon their survival on Endeavor Island. By the time van Weyden again encounters Wolf, they have reversed positions. Larsen has lost his crew and is blind and partially paralyzed; van Weyden has gained a mate. Van Weyden’s development also clearly reflects the ideas of Sigmund Freud. As Thomas R. Tietze has pointed out, the novel follows a full-grown man— who has been raised by women and supported by his father’s money—coming into conflict with a father figure, a “self-made individuality.” Van Weyden has never seen raw masculinity, but London delineates a classic Oedipal struggle, as described by Tietze: Here we have the infant drawn from a liquid environment (following screams of women on the sinking ferry) rubbed into life by an effeminate male, hurting himself when “a puff of wind” throws him down, learning to walk all over again, and defeating a bully by sitting opposite him and whetting the blade of his phallic knife until the other retreats in fear. (Is it too obvious a symbol that Hump has obtained his knife by trading some milk for it?)
Van Weyden certainly seems to experience his emergence onto the deck as his birth: I seemed swinging in a mighty rhythm. . . . My rhythm grew shorter and shorter. . . . I could scarcely catch my breath, so fiercely was I impelled through the heavens. The gong thundered more frequently and more furiously. I grew to await it with a nameless dread. Then it seemed as though I were being dragged over rasping sands, white and hot in the sun. . . . I gasped, caught my breath painfully, and opened my eyes. Two men were kneeling beside me, working over me. My mighty rhythm was the lift and forward plunge of a ship on the sea. The terrific gong was a frying-pan, hanging on the wall, that rattled and clattered with each leap of the ship. The rasping, scorching sands were a man’s hard hands chafing my naked chest. . . . “That’ll do, Yonson,” one of the men said. “Carn’t yer see you’ve bloomin’ well rubbed all the gent’s skin orf?” (P. 12)
Van Weyden’s adolescence is figured by his initial crush on Larsen, who shows himself naked to van Weyden and invites him to touch his muscles. “Now,” observes Tietze, “whether the intrusion is ‘believable’
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1029
THE SEA-WOLF
or not, Hump’s psychological development requires the miraculous introduction of Maud.” Significantly, she first appears dressed as a boy. GENDER AND ANDROGYNY
Defending Brewster from Larsen in the rape scene, van Weyden brandishes his knife and “slays” the “father.” As to the often-criticized Endeavor Island housekeeping scenes, which London had to censor heavily for Century, including the separate huts they build, Tietze argues for the serious purpose of these scenes: “Hump cannot become a full person until he forms a community—in this case, a man and a woman working together to survive.” Ironically, given his own initial effeminacy, van Weyden recognizes that it is unhealthy to be as far separated from the community of women as someone like Larsen is. There must be a sensible equipoise of both worlds. Until taken aboard the Ghost, van Weyden is only a half-man, lacking in virility because he has been reared in a woman’s world. Not until he has viewed woman from a man’s world is his perspective complete, for only then may he assume his role in society as a male—as mate and father. As Sam Baskett has stated, he expresses the need for psychic androgyny—and his need explains Brewster’s place in the novel. Interestingly, at the time of the composition of The Sea-Wolf, London was writing in letters to Charmian Kittredge and Anna Strunsky about his own need for an ideal mate of an androgynous nature who would help him express “the woman in me” (Baskett, p. 9). Despite the censor’s blue pencil, London smugly managed to insert erotic elements, as with the comedy in the erecting of the mast in chapter 37: I called to her, and the mast moved easily and accurately. Straight toward the square hole of the step the square butt descended; . . . Square fitted into square. The mast was stepped. I raised a shout, and she ran down to see. In the yellow lantern light we peered at what we had accomplished. We looked at each other, and our hands felt their way and clasped. The eyes of both us, I think, were moist with the joy of success. “It was done so easily after all,” I remarked. “All the work was in the preparation.” “And all the wonder in the completion,” Maud added. “I can scarcely bring myself to realize that that great mast is really up and in; that you have lifted it from the water, swung it through the air, and deposited it here where it belongs. It is a Titan’s task.” (Pp. 349–350)
Though one well-known early reader, Ambrose Bierce, rejected the love element altogether, “with its absurd suppressions and impossible proprieties” (Foner, p. 61), the Darwinian and Freudian contexts make clearer why Brewster must enter the story.
1030
A M E R I C A N
Much has been made of Maud Brewster as a “New Woman,” but it is also accurate to say that Humphrey van Weyden also stands for a “New Man.” When one meets van Weyden, his capacity as a man seems limited merely to reading his own reviews in the Atlantic Monthly—an activity that serves as a fitting image of the backward-looking qualities of the old century, which the lovers must abandon to live in the new. As he gains the abilities that the circumstances require of him, however, Van Weyden becomes a man of the new century, able to face all of its intellectual, moral, social, and technological changes. Van Weyden and Brewster embody a modern relativism that comprehends both the meanness and magnificence of human potentiality. See also Naturalism BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
London, Jack. The Letters of Jack London. 3 vols. Edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and I. Milo Shepard. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988. London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf. New York: Macmillan, 1904. All references cited in text refer to this edition. London, Jack. The Sea-Wolf. Edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Riverside editions. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Secondary Works
Baskett, Sam S. “Sea-Change in The Sea-Wolf.” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 24, no. 2 (1992): 5–22. Bender, Bert. “Jack London in the Tradition of American Sea Fiction.” American Neptune 46 (summer 1986): 188–199. Boone, Joseph. “Male Independence and the American Quest Genre: Hidden Sexual Politics in the All-Male Worlds of Melville, Twain, and London.” In Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism, edited by Judith Spector, pp. 187–217. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1986. Derrick, Scott. “Making a Heterosexual Man: Gender, Sexuality, and Narrative in the Fiction of Jack London.” In Rereading Jack London, edited by Leonard Cassuto and Jeanne Campbell Reesman, pp. 110–129. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. Dooley, Patrick K. “‘The Strenuous Mood’: William James’s ‘Energies in Men’ and Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf.” American Literary Realism, 1870–1910 34, no. 1 (2001): 18–28. Foner, Phillip S., ed. Jack London, American Rebel: A Collection of His Social Writings Together with an Extensive Study of the Man and His Times. New York: Citadel Press, 1947. Gair, Christopher. “Gender and Genre: Nature, Naturalism, and Authority in The Sea-Wolf.” Studies in American Fiction 22, no. 2 (1994): 131–147.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SELF-HELP MANUALS
Heckerl, David K. “‘Violent Movements of Business’: The Moral Nihilist as Economic Man in Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf.” In Twisted from the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism, edited by Mary E. Papke, pp. 202–216. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Kingman, Russ. A Pictorial Life of Jack London. New York: Crown, 1979. Labor, Earle, and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Jack London. Rev. ed. New York: Twayne, 1994. See pp. 58–63. “Literary Notes: Jack London’s Remarkable Book.” Review of The Sea-Wolf. San Francisco Argonaut 55 (14 November 1904): 311. London, Charmian Kittredge. The Book of Jack London. 2 vols. New York: Century, 1921. Mitchell, Lee Clark. “‘And Rescue Us from Ourselves’: Becoming Someone in Jack London’s The Sea-Wolf.” American Literature 70, no. 2 (1998): 317–335. Nolte, Carl. “Foggy Ferry Crash Remembered.” San Francisco Chronicle, 1 December 2001. Available at http://www.sfgate.com. Oliveri, Vinnie. “Sex, Gender, and Death in The Sea-Wolf.” Pacific Coast Philology 38 (2003): 99–115. Papa, James A., Jr. “Canvas and Steam: Historical Conflict in Jack London’s Sea-Wolf.” Midwest Quarterly 40, no. 3 (1999): 1–7. Qualtiere, Michael. “Nietzschean Psychology in London’s The Sea-Wolf.” Western American Literature 16, no. 4 (1982): 261–278. “The Sea-Wolf.” New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art, 12 November 1904, pp. 768–769. Tietze, Thomas. “A Reply to ‘Yuletide on Endeavor Island.’” Jack London Foundation Newsletter 6, no. 2 (April 1994): n.p. Watson, Charles N., Jr. “Lucifer on the Quarter-Deck: The Sea-Wolf.” In The Novels of Jack London: A Reappraisal, pp. 53–78. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Woodward, Robert H. “Jack London’s Code of Primitivism.” Folio 18 (May 1953): 39–44. Zirkle, Conway. Evolution, Marxian Biology, and the Social Scene. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1959. Jeanne Campbell Reesman
SELF-HELP MANUALS Books intended to provide instruction that would allow individuals to advance socially, financially, or educationally proliferated during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The popularity of this genre might best be explained by what the histoA M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
rian Thomas Schlereth has called a “cultural ethos . . . [of] striving” that characterized the period (p. 254). While Schlereth specifically identifies this attitude as the basis for self-improvement programs sponsored by groups like the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (p. 253), it was also the basis for the philosophy of success articulated by and about America’s selfmade men of the period. While the designation “selfhelp manual” is most typically used to denote handbooks on business success like the journalist Orison S. Marden’s The Young Man Entering Business (1907), manuals on topics as diverse as household maintenance, etiquette, physical education, proper dress, conduct, and choosing and reading books also fall within the parameters of this genre. The thousands of titles aimed at self-improvement appealed to nineteenth-century Americans, who generally believed quite strongly in the individual’s potential to advance through self-discipline and self-education. Illiteracy fell from 20 percent to 6 percent in the years between 1876 and 1915, and with rising literacy came a demand for a variety of texts on a variety of topics (Schlereth, p. 253). At the same time, traditional ways of obtaining skills—apprenticeship and home training— were breaking down as people moved from rural to urban areas, leaving artisanship, the farm, and small trades behind. “How-to” books became a practical way to gain knowledge. Self-help manuals, whether treatises on success or instruction in decorating the home, held out the promise of advancement in a social class structure believed to be open and fluid. As the historian John Kasson has pointed out, the proliferation of instructional literature during this period made knowledge once reserved for the gentry available to all: “With proper drive, knowledge, and success, an individual or family might climb the social ladder to new heights” (p. 43). Yet as Kasson and others have shown, the manuals served cultural functions beyond those that appear on the surface. During this period, members of the urban upper class were at the center of power, but a new class of managers, planners, clerks, engineers, financial experts, and other professionals was demanded by an expanding entrepreneurial capitalism. With this new whitecollar middle class ever aspiring upward, success manuals, as well as etiquette and dress manuals, helped point the way. Changes in the workplace in combination with other trends like consumption and the formation of middle-class neighborhoods came to provide this new class with a distinct social identity. Because these groups often had wealth but little or no land, their efforts to carve out a social identity entailed distinguishing themselves from the working class, a process often propelled by aspirants’ own working-class roots.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1031
SELF-HELP MANUALS
Conduct, manners, and dress became marks of distinction, helping to define the middle class, and readers of the period sought within self-help manuals both instructions for advancing and assurances that, while life was changing, traditional values still prevailed. APOSTLES OF SELF-HELP
Among the better-known self-help manuals of the nineteenth century were manuals for success, which instructed young men in the virtues and mind-set of the self-made businessman. Following in the tradition of Cotton Mather’s Two Brief Discourses, One Directing a Christian in His General Calling, Another Directing Him in His Personal Calling (1701), which argued that men should succeed at their vocations in order to secure salvation, these manuals viewed self-improvement as next to godliness. The historian Irvin Wyllie has noted the precursors of nineteenth-century self-help in his analysis of the genre, including both Mather and Benjamin Franklin, whose Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732–1757), Autobiography (1791), The Way to Wealth (1758), and Advice to Young Tradesmen (1748) publicized the maxims-to-prosper-by and philosophy of thrift, hard work, and rise that has made Franklin America’s quintessential self-made man. The 1850s saw the publication of titles like Freeman Hunt’s Worth and Wealth (1856), Edwin Troxell Freedley’s Practical Treatise on Business (1852), and Charles C. B. Seymour’s Self-Made Men (1858), documenting the lives and paths to success of American men of wealth. From the 1880s through the 1920s self-help advocates published hundreds of books and articles, all with the aim of explaining the tenets of success to a public eager to rise. Before the turn of the twentieth century, these “apostles of self-help,” as Wyllie calls them, forwarded a gospel of success and wealth that focused on character and the development of willpower, industry, perseverance, and frugality. According to these writers, self-improvement implies moral superiority, and the young man aimed toward success must display moral deportment, punctuality, reliability, indispensability, obedience, and thoroughness even as he begins working his way up from messenger boy to clerk to manager to owner. Among the most influential of the late-nineteenthcentury self-help writers were representative Protestant clergymen who proposed that success came from God, whose gifts to all included the opportunity to rise. These latter-day Cotton Mathers saw economic salvation as analogous to spiritual salvation, and they modeled their books on sermons, logically organizing their arguments and presenting in detail the virtues needed for success. Instruction always appeared on how to resist temptation, including weaknesses of the flesh and the propensity to speculate on the stock market, which
1032
A M E R I C A N
these moral leaders equated with gambling. Among the clergy who headed up the cult of self-help were Daniel Wise, who wrote Uncrowned Kings (1875); Francis E. Clark, who wrote Our Business Boys (1884) and Danger Signals: The Enemies of Youth from the Business Man’s Standpoint (1882); Lyman Abbott, who wrote How to Succeed (1882); and Wilber F. Crafts, who wrote Successful Men of Today and What They Say of Success (1883). All major Protestant denominations offered a clerical spokesperson who saw no schism between the pursuit of wealth and Christian virtues. While many of the self-help writers of the late nineteenth century abandoned the sermon form in favor of biography combined with advice, traditional values continued to prevail. Some, themselves selfmade businessmen, revealed the supposed secrets of success as they related their own experiences. Thomas Mellon, the founder of the Mellon banking fortune, for example, offered Thomas Mellon and His Times (1885), while John D. Rockefeller offered Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1907), a variation on the theme of wealth through virtue. The most often quoted of these texts, Andrew Carnegie’s “The Gospel of Wealth” (1889) and The Empire of Business (1902), outlined the traditional values of self-help. Carnegie likened an honest day’s work to prayer, and he advocated a philosophy whereby the wealthy would endow libraries and museums that would benefit the common good. Other writers offering advice alongside biographical sketches and anecdotes of the rich and successful were journalists turned self-help proponents. The most prominent of these were Edward W. Bok with The Keys to Success (1898) and Successward (1895) and Orison S. Marden, whose Pushing to the Front (1894) went through 250 editions. The historian John Cawelti explains all of the above nineteenth-century texts in terms of their underlying purpose, that of explaining to their readers “the dynamic changes of American life in terms of badly shaken traditional verities” (p. 47). During this period urban centers were growing at a staggering rate, and an economy of abundance made material objects increasingly important in the day-to-day lives of people in all social classes. Amid all this change, Cawelti contends, the proponents of self-help eased the public’s fears about the breaking up of the traditional social order, which brought new groups into power. They coupled economic success and traditional values, a rhetorical move that made change much less threatening. “Perhaps these works of popular ethics,” Cawelti writes, “constituted a literature of reassurance rather than of inspiration and guidance” (p. 55). At bottom, he argues, the gospel of self-help allayed fears as it preserved the traditional social hierarchy.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SELF-HELP MANUALS
Andrew Carnegie’s essay “The Gospel of Wealth” appeared in the journal North American Review in June 1889. Following in the tradition of Benjamin Franklin and other purveyors of advice on success, Carnegie linked wealth with superior character. Viewed as a classic, the essay advocated that the wealthy use their riches for the good of society.
The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized, within the past few hundred years. In former days there was little difference between the dwelling, dress, food, and environment of the chief and those of his retainers. The Indians are to-day where civilized man then was. When visiting the Sioux, I was led to the wigwam of the chief. It was just like the others in external appearance, and even within the difference was trifling between it and those of the poorest of his braves. The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us to-day measures the change which has come with civilization. Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review 148, no. 391 (June 1889), pp. 653–654.
While character and the development of moral superiority were the centerpieces of nineteenth-century self-help manuals, those of the early twentieth century had as a central theme the importance of personality. The historian Walter Susman summarizes his reading of manuals by Orison S. Marden written in 1899 and 1921. The 1899 text, he says, stresses “the basic values necessary in a producer-oriented society, including hard work and thrift” while the 1921 manual urges men to develop “the aura and power of personality that can ‘sway great masses’” (p. 279). Susman has gleaned the following list of characteristic words from his reading of manuals from the early twentieth century: the nouns efficiency and energy and the adjectives fascinating, stunning, attractive, magnetic, glowing, masterful, creative, dominant, and forceful (p. 277). According to Susman, “The social role demanded of all in the new culture of personality was that of a performer” (p. 280). Manuals on effective speech, grooming and beauty, clothing, and personal appearance supplemented the reading of men bent on success. Confirming Susman’s view, Cawelti shows that the idea of “personal magnetism” replaced the ideal of self-improvement, and energy, initiative, and confidence replaced the more traditional emphasis on industry and perseverance. Self-help titles that reflect these post-1900 attitudes include The Progressive Business Man (1913) by Orison S. Marden, The New Day (1904) by Russell Conwell, Personality: How to Build It (1915) by Henry Laurent, and Power of Personality (1920) by B. C. Bean. WOMEN AND SELF-HELP
PHILOSOPHERS OF SUCCESS
Sometime during the first decade of the twentieth century a subtle shift in advice and purpose occurred in these self-help manuals, making them less focused on traditional values and more focused on the pursuit of wealth. Identifying this shift, Cawelti argues that while writers before 1900 balanced religion and secular values, showing a direct relationship between individual effort and the resultant product, their philosophy was warranted by their view of a static society of farmers, artisans, and petty capitalists that in actuality no longer constituted the dominant culture. Cawelti argues that nineteenth-century philosophies of selfhelp gradually gave way to a philosophy of success, a stance that implies competition and the successful man as a dynamic competitor. Because the large corporation had prevailed over the small business—over fifteen thousand of the latter had failed in 1893 alone (Schlereth, p. 33)—and because corporation needs were quite different from those of the small business, new kinds of self-help literature emerged. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
The spirit of striving that infused self-help and success manuals for men likewise infused the manuals written for and consumed by women. Focusing on the particulars of housewifery and motherhood, many works bear titles illustrating the traditional roles fulfilled by the majority of women of the period: Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery (1873) by Marion Harland, Perfect Womanhood for MaidensWives-Mothers (1903) by Mary Ries Melendy, MD, and Household Elegancies: Suggestion in Household Art and Tasteful Home Decoration (1875) by Mrs. C. S. Jones and Henry T. Williams. This self-help literature for women represented the home as both haven from the public sphere and the carrier of morality and cultural values. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe addressed this function in The American Woman’s Home (1869) when they wrote that the “aesthetic element” of a home “holds a place of great significance among the influences which make home happy and attractive, . . . and contributes much to the education of the entire household in refinement, intellectual
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1033
S E X E D U C AT I O N
development, and moral sensibility” (p. 84). Other self-help manuals, however, suggest the changes besetting women’s lives as colleges for women opened their doors and as women began entering the professions. Titles like The Woman’s Book: Dealing Practically with the Modern Conditions of Home-Life, Self-Support, Education, Opportunities, and Every-Day Problems (1894) and Lida Rose McCade’s The American Girl at College (1893) appealed to the New Woman, the term used to suggest the self-assertiveness, independence, and energy of the new generation of women interested in education, athletics, social reform, or pursuing a professional life. Books like Know Thyself; or, Nature’s Secrets Revealed (1911) gave instruction in “self-development with right conduct toward others” (p. 3) as well as instruction on birth control or “limitation of offspring” (p. 177). Manuals for women cut both with and against the grain of traditional women’s roles, allowing modern-day readers a clearer understanding of the competing versions of womanhood during this period. Whether written for aspiring businessmen or for women assuming traditional or nontraditional societal roles, self-help manuals provide a lens for examining the lives and aspirations of late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century Americans. While the texts for success strike contemporary readers as repetitious and formulaic, they enable historians and literary scholars to understand the cultural mind-set that made these books among the most popular of their day. By reading these texts, twenty-first-century readers come closer to capturing that “ethos of striving” that might otherwise prove elusive. See also Success BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. 1791. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 1996. Franklin, Benjamin. Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1733. 1933. Bedford, Mass.: Applewood, 1969. Franklin, Benjamin. The Way to Wealth. 1758. Bedford, Mass.: Applewood, 1986. Hunt, Freeman. Worth and Wealth: A Collection of Maxims, Morals, and Miscellanies for Merchants and Men of Business. 1856. The Making of America project, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996. http://www.hti.umich.edu. Marden, Orison S. Pushing to the Front. Petersburg, N.Y.: Success Company, 1894. Marden, Orison S. The Young Man Entering Business. 1907. New York: Lightening Source, 2003.
1034
A M E R I C A N
Seymour, Charles C. B. “Self-Made Men.” The Making of America project, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996. http:// name.umdl.umich.edu/ABE2870. Secondary Works
Cawelti, John G. Apostles of the Self-Made Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Kasson, John. Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990. Schlereth, Thomas. Victorian America: Transformations in Everyday Life, 1875–1915. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Susman, Walter I. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Wyllie, Irvin G. The Self-Made Man in America: The Myth of Rags to Riches. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1954. Carolyn L. Mathews
SENTIMENTAL FICTION See Domestic and Sentimental Fiction
SEX EDUCATION In a society that compartmentalized everyday life into public and private “spheres,” sex in the nineteenth century was considered an extremely private matter. Sex education programs did not exist in schools. It was the role of parents or older siblings to impart sexual information to younger family members. Public discourse on the subject was welcome only if the message was consistent with culturally held ideas about gender roles and the purpose of sex. Challenges to these ideas were subject to suppression and even prosecution. SEX EDUCATION AND THE FAMILY
It must be said that, in general, American families failed in their role as sex educators. Inhibited by a strong sense of modesty, parents and siblings were often circumspect in telling children “the facts of life” if they broached the subject at all. Consequently many young people acquired their sex education on the sly from pornography or from furtive discussions with members of the working class, such as servants, who generally were more open about sex than the middle class. Those with no access to such resources often entered marriage knowing very little about reproduction and birth control. Some were in the dark about the sex act itself.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S E X E D U C AT I O N
True, the diaries and letters of some middle-class Americans reveal the details of richly satisfying erotic lives. Especially in large cities such as New York, couples often prided themselves on having a sophisticated attitude toward sex. But much more frequently, personal writings speak of sexual ignorance and anxiety. Middle-class women were expected to be virgins before marriage. Virginity in men too was valued, although a double standard existed which could excuse a man if, for example, he had visited a prostitute to gain “experience.” Many couples faced their future as sexual partners with fear and trepidation. The historian Peter Gay, in his monumental study of the nineteenth-century middle class, The Bourgeois Experience, cites the letter of one man, writing to his fiancée, who anticipates her “terror” at seeing him naked on their wedding night (p. 291). A memorable scene from Frank Norris’s (1870–1902) 1899 novel McTeague illustrates this “terror” that many young women felt upon being alone with their husbands for the first time. The wedding party is breaking up, and as the newlywed Trina McTeague watches her family leave, she begins to panic: “They were going, going. When would she ever see them again? She was to be left alone with this man to whom she had just been married. A sudden vague terror seized her; she left McTeague and ran down the hall and caught her mother around the neck” (p. 101). Many marriages went days, and often much longer, before being consummated. Often marriage resulted in a sexual mismatch, pairing a libidinous, demanding husband with a wife who had been taught little about sex except that (1) its sole purpose was procreative and that (2) women were supposed to be submissive and assumed to be passionless—that is, they found no pleasure in sex for its own sake. Such was the upbringing of Annie Besant, who would enjoy a distinguished career as a scholar of religion and philosophy. In her autobiography, published in 1893, she wrote of a marriage that ended in separation, a marriage that she had entered “with no more idea of the marriage relation than if I had been four years old instead of twenty” (p. 70). Victimized by a conspiracy of silence on the subject of sexual intimacy, and thus unprepared to understand her own sexuality, she speaks for many daughters of her generation in regarding her initiation into the mysteries of sex as a “rude awakening.” In the scene from McTeague, Trina’s mother, who speaks in the heavily inflected English of a German immigrant, calms her daughter with empty assurances (“Poor leetle scairt girl, don’ gry—soh-soh-soh, dere’s nuttun to pe ’fraid oaf ”), before essentially advising her to submit to her new husband (“Dere, go to your hoasban’,” p. 101). For many American women, this is where their sex education began and ended. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
In 1872 and 1873, Congress enacted laws against the publication and dissemination of obscene materials. Commonly known as “the Comstock laws,” these statutes in effect made sex education an illegal activity. The following postal statute was used to prosecute doctors who wrote about birth control:
No obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of an indecent character, or any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion, nor any article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use or nature, nor any written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind giving information directly or indirectly, where or how, or of whom, or by what means either of the things before mentioned may be obtained or made, nor any letter upon the envelope of which, or postal card upon which indecent or scurrilous epithets may be written or printed, shall be carried in the mail; and any person who shall knowingly deposit or cause to be deposited, for mailing or delivery, any of the herein before-mentioned articles or things, or any notice or paper containing any advertisement relating to the aforesaid articles or things, and any person who, in pursuance of any plan or scheme for disposing of any of the herein before-mentioned articles or things, shall take or cause to be taken, from the mail any such letter or package, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and shall, for every offense, be fined not less than one hundred dollars, nor more than five thousand dollars, or imprisoned at hard labor no less than one year nor more than ten years, or both. Comstock, Frauds Exposed; or, How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted, p. 401.
SEX EDUCATION FROM THE EXPERTS
Outside the family, certain experts enjoyed a cultural mandate to educate Americans about sex. Signaling a shift from an earlier time, when the clergy was the recognized public authority on all matters pertaining to sex, Americans in the latter part of the nineteenth century entrusted doctors with this role. The rise in popularity of sexual advice literature attests to a hunger among those who could afford to buy it—mainly middle-class Americans—for sexual information. By
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1035
S E X E D U C AT I O N
and large these sex manuals were written by male doctors. Appealing to a growing public faith in science, these medical professionals would cite scientific evidence to support basically the same arguments made by clergymen a generation or two earlier. The dangers of sex were cataloged in full: venereal diseases could kill, so young men were urged to be continent. Young women, reminded of their duty as future mothers, were cautioned to avoid any activity that could jeopardize their reproductive systems. The intensity of these familiar arguments rose as challenges to the social order presented themselves. For example, arguments asserting scientific “proof” of the delicacy of the female reproductive system became more strident as the woman’s rights movement grew in strength. The years after the Civil War saw a vocal minority of women call for the same rights and privileges that men enjoyed, including access to higher education, which was the gateway to careers in medicine, law, and business. In this context Dr. Edward Clarke’s alarmist treatise Sex in Education must be read. Published in 1873, Sex in Education was reprinted eleven times in its first year alone. The volume spawned a number of treatises by other authors, most of whom rushed to agree with Clarke. Citing half a dozen case studies of young women who had fallen ill or collapsed from stress while attending women’s schools such as Vassar College, Clarke asserted that the college regimen was “out of harmony with the rhythmical periodicity of the female organization” (p. 79). In other words, woman was a delicate organism, and she who subjected herself to the rigorous demands of a higher education ran the risk of throwing her menstrual cycle out of balance. According to Clarke, the consequence of prolonged stress to a woman’s reproductive system would be infertility. With credentials that included ties to Harvard, Clarke could not be dismissed as a quack. His conclusion—that America could see the day when it would have to import its mothers-to-be from foreign countries—frightened many people. Clarke was not alone in reaching faulty scientific conclusions in the name of educating the public about sexuality. A whole body of medical literature appeared contemporaneously with Sex in Education that treated such subjects as masturbation. Again, citing case studies, these reports linked masturbation—or “onanism,” “selfabuse,” or “self-pollution”—to any number of symptoms, from lethargy to much more dire effects such as epilepsy and insanity. Having studied the nineteenthcentury panic over masturbation, Peter Gay comments: “The vice of ‘self-abuse’ or ‘self-pollution’ propelled learned men, and some learned women, into postures
1036
A M E R I C A N
of perspiring alarm; they flooded the literatures of medical advice and moral uplift with macabre case histories and desperate, repetitive pleas for action before it was too late” (p. 295). “Action” included depriving young men of all enticements to masturbation, such as warm baths, tight clothing, French novels, and stimulating drinks like tea and coffee. Cures of strict exercise, bland diet, and medicine were prescribed. In extreme cases male masturbators were fitted with restraining devices such as straitjackets and penile rings. Although the medical experts were wrong about a good many topics they addressed, these doctors were probably not trying deliberately to mislead the public. If a doctor encountered a mentally ill person who masturbated frequently, he could draw the conclusion that masturbation had caused, or at least contributed, to the disease. Psychoses were not well understood in the nineteenth century. Moreover, although doctors believed that they were drawing their conclusions from science, they were often in reality moralists who saw masturbation and other expressions of sexual passion as vices or evils. In other words, they were not able to shed cultural values when studying their patients. At the top of the list of values in the nineteenth century was that of doing one’s duty: a man’s duty was to sire offspring while contributing productively to a thriving capitalistic economy. Masturbation, then, was regarded as evil because it threatened social order. It amounted to a draining of the vital energy that a man would need to father strong, healthy children and to become a good citizen. Female masturbation was disturbing on an even more profound level. A woman found engaged in “self-gratification” was acting contrarily to the virtually sacred idea that a woman was passionless. Among women, only prostitutes were thought to be unable to control their sexual desire. Clitoral amputation was one method of treatment for both young girls and adult women who were caught masturbating. ANTHONY COMSTOCK AND THE SUPPRESSION OF SEXUAL DISCOURSE
Absent from virtually all sexual advice literature of the nineteenth century were invitations to enjoy and explore one’s sexuality. Erotic pleasure was a private matter between married couples, a topic not open to public discussion. Reproduction was the only goal of sex to be acknowledged publicly. With the rise to prominence of Anthony Comstock and his New York– based Society for the Suppression of Vice, Americans were protected by sexual police that tenaciously pursued anyone who crossed the line between private and public. Progressive doctors who published educational information about contraceptives were fined under the
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S E X E D U C AT I O N
so-called Comstock laws, since the very mention of birth control implied a purpose for sex besides that of reproduction. Anthony Comstock began his career in the early 1870s, cracking down on sellers of obscene material such as pornography. Comstock held no elected office or official position within the law enforcement community. His campaign against obscenity was very much a private crusade that rapidly gained political endorsement and the public’s trust. Soon obscenity came to be defined as anything that Comstock believed threatened the public by speaking too frankly about sex. Although many of those arrested by Comstock’s agents were indeed involved in the thriving pornography industry, he also hounded people who could hardly be called pornographers. Many were jailed. Ira Craddock was one of Comstock’s many victims. Craddock was a member of the social purity movement, which, with its origins as an antiprostitution league, had a positive impact on society in the last decades of the nineteenth century. During its heyday in the 1880s and 1890s, the social purity movement achieved a number of victories: it reformed many prostitutes; it convinced many middle-class Americans to adopt a single standard that held men just as accountable for prostitution as women; it lobbied successfully for changing the legal age of sexual consent from as low as ten in some states to between fourteen and eighteen in twenty-nine states. Social purists like Craddock became figures of controversy when they went further, calling for sex education that did not avoid discussion of birth control and erotic fulfillment. Craddock’s marital advice tract Right Marital Living (1899) provoked Comstock with, for example, a passage celebrating “the sacred moment when husband and wife shall melt into one another’s genital embrace, so that the twain shall be one flesh, and then, as of old, God will walk with the twain in the garden of bliss” (Stoehr, p. 631). Even though Craddock expresses sexual ecstasy in religious terms, as an experience bringing married couples closer to God, Comstock considered Right Marital Living obscene. Imprisoned for violating the Comstock laws, Craddock would eventually commit suicide. The advocates of free love were another group who tried to extend the boundaries of sexual discourse. They too suffered the wrath of Comstock. Whereas conventional morality held that sex outside of marriage was sinful, free lovers believed that sex without love was the true immorality. Did not many marriages decline into loveless unions? asked the free lovers. Marriage became a form of prostitution or slavery when a husband would “use” a wife he no longer loved for sexual gratification. Several utopian commuA M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
In this excerpt from Anthony Comstock’s book Frauds Exposed (1880), the anti-vice crusader defends his campaign to rid society of those who traffic in “obscene publications”:
The effect of this cursed business on our youth and society, no pen can describe. It breeds lust. Lust defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, damns the soul. It unnerves the arm, and steals away the elastic step. It robs the soul of manly virtues, and imprints upon the mind of the youth, visions that throughout life curse the man or woman. Like a panorama, the imagination seems to keep this hated thing before the mind, until it wears its way deeper and deeper, plunging the victim into practices he loathes. This traffic has made rakes and libertines in society—skeletons in many a household. The family is polluted, home desecrated, and each generation born into the world is more and more cursed by the inherited weaknesses, the harvest of this seed-sowing of the Evil one. And these monsters—these devil-men, or men-devils—caught in this cursed traffic, and prosecuted legally, and legally placed where they cannot longer strike their deadly fangs into the vitals of the youth, are made martyrs of, and the so-called “liberals” of this land rally to their defence! and, at the beck and call of this band of ex-convicts and co-conspirators, a combined effort is made to repeal these laws! Comstock, Frauds Exposed; or, How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted, p. 416.
nities were founded in the mid-1800s where members were encouraged to form monogamous love relationships without falling into the “trap” of thinking that marriage must be the inevitable outcome. Free lovers occupied a radical fringe in nineteenthcentury society until Victoria Woodhull began, in the early 1870s, to lecture to middle-class audiences on women’s rights. Like other nineteenth-century women with progressive thoughts, Woodhull believed women should be allowed to vote; but her ideas on women’s
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1037
S E X E D U C AT I O N
rights, which she expressed not only in lecture halls but also in her own periodical, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly, went far beyond the issue of suffrage to include a woman’s right to enjoy and to refuse sex. Comstock arrested Woodhull for publishing obscenity and prosecuted her vigorously, jailing her a total of three times before she finally fled to England to rebuild her life. While radicals agitated for more openness in sexual matters, American writers of the 1880s maintained the status quo. Courtship and marriage were main subjects in the first important American novels of the decade, Henry James’s (1843–1916) The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and William Dean Howells’s (1837–1920) A Modern Instance (1881); however, James and Howells played by the rule of keeping private matters private. Modern literary critics find a rich abundance of sexual symbols and patterns in The Portrait of a Lady and A Modern Instance, but these are not on the surface. They must be uncovered and interpreted by critics schooled in applying Freudian psychology to literary texts. James and Howells were key figures in the movement known as American literary realism, but their sense of realism did not extend to writing frankly about their characters’ sex lives. Bedroom scenes were unheard of. Even when writing of something as common as pregnancy, these authors used circumspection and euphemism. It was not a matter of being held back by fear of prosecution. They were simply representatives of the American middle class writing to an audience whose expectations for serious literature did not include discussion of what went on between a wife and a husband in their bedroom. Although tame by early twenty-first century standards, a few novels of the 1890s did deal with sexual themes. In Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), Stephen Crane (1871–1900) offers a sympathetic portrait of a young prostitute. The heroine of Kate Chopin’s (1851–1904) The Awakening (1899) is prepared to break free of her conventional marriage and to act upon her passion for another man. The marriage in Norris’ McTeague (1899) deteriorates into a sadomasochistic relationship. But these were isolated examples of novels that took risks; they did not represent a concerted effort by American writers to bring sexual frankness to literature. Moreover, they were not well received but were in fact targets for disdainful reviews. SEX EDUCATION AFTER COMSTOCK
Comstock’s power to intimidate and prosecute those who would attempt to educate and enlighten the public on sexuality would continue until his death in 1915. However, he alone cannot be blamed for the
1038
A M E R I C A N
atmosphere of sexual repression that characterized nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century middle-class life. After all, Comstock went about his business with the blessings of his peers. Thus the lack of reliable sexual information was not only the result of wrong conclusions reached by the medical experts but also the product of a society that willfully allowed itself to remain sexually ignorant. Comstock’s last celebrated arrest was that of Margaret Sanger (1883–1966), whom Comstock detained for distributing her pamphlet on birth control called Family Limitation (1914). The issue of birth control and the name of Margaret Sanger are inexorably linked. She was able to unite the classes over the issue of birth control, arguing that birth control meant sexual freedom for those middle-class women who wished to enjoy sex without becoming pregnant. It also brought control over fertility to working-class women, who often bore child after child. The economic demands of providing for a large family doomed working-class couples to live in poverty. Birth control offered a way out. Comstock would already be dead by the time charges against Sanger were dropped in 1916. His death did not immediately put an end to the policing of sex education—Sanger was arrested again, later in 1916, for opening a birth control clinic in New York that distributed contraceptives to working-class women—but the tide was changing. Sanger’s arrest had prompted some public outcry. Members of the intellectual community even wrote in protest to President Woodrow Wilson. Moreover, enough people wanted to hear what Sanger had to say that her supporters were able to organize a lecture tour of more than a hundred cities. Change did not happen overnight. But as most social historians agree, by the 1920s America had rejected the conspiracy of silence against sex education. A new era marked by a more open attitude toward expressions and discussions of sexuality had begun. See also Adolescence; The Awakening; Feminism; Pornography; Prostitution BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Besant, Annie. An Autobiography. London: Fisher and Unwin, 1893. Clarke, Edward H. Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873. Comstock, Anthony. Frauds Exposed; or, How the People Are Deceived and Robbed, and Youth Corrupted. 1880. Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1969.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SHORT STORY
Comstock, Anthony. Traps for the Young. 1883. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1967. Ellis, Havelock. Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Vol. 2, The Evolution of Modesty, the Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity, Auto-Eroticism. 1900. New York: Random House, 1936. Maudsley, Henry. “Illustrations of a Variety of Insanity.” Journal of Mental Science 14 (July 1868): 155–161. Norris, Frank. McTeague. 1899. Edited by Donald Pizer. New York and London: Norton, 1977. Sanger, Margaret. My Fight for Birth Control. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1931. Secondary Works
Bates, Anna Louise. Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock’s Life and Career. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. Beisel, Nicola. Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Broun, Heywood, and Margaret Leech. Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord. New York: Literary Guild of America, 1927. D’Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Gay, Peter. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud. Vol. 1, Education of the Senses. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Kennedy, David M. Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970. Prioleau, Elizabeth Stevens. The Circle of Eros: Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1983. Stoehr, Taylor. Free Love in America: A Documentary History. New York: AMS Press, 1979. Walters, Ronald G., ed. Primers for Purity: Sexual Advice to Victorian America. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: PrenticeHall, 1974. Paul Hadella
SHORT STORY The latter half of the nineteenth century marked a period of maturity for the American short story. Its growth was due largely to the influence of the realist movement, which professionalized the literary arts, putting them to the service of aesthetic protocols designed A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
to elevate fiction to the cultural status of science, politics, and the law. Emphasizing representational accuracy, tonal objectivity, and the taxonomic organization of fictional modes and styles into distinct categories, realists approached the short story with the intent of formalizing what had to date been at best an amorphous classification. There were short stories before the term “short story” entered the critical vocabulary in the 1850s, of course, but they varied so widely in technique and effect that the consanguinity among them was difficult to specify (Marler, pp. 154–155). The lack of generic unity explains why short fiction was broadly dismissed as a minor form, one suitable for novices needing to “prepare themselves for future and nobler exertions . . . to be worked up in more enduring materials” (Pattee, p. 32). The imperatives of realism redeemed the short story from this animadversion, giving it a critical currency that, despite Edgar Allan Poe’s efforts on its (and his own) behalf in the 1840s, and despite the memorable work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and others, it had not previously enjoyed. By the mid-1880s it would come to be celebrated as a “uniquely” American art form, one whose “supremacy,” in Brander Matthews’s estimation, “any competent critic could not but acknowledge” (p. 49). SHORT STORY FORM AND THE “TRICK ENDING”
That legitimization process was neither uniform nor easy. Initially it involved issues of content and style. Only after 1870 would realists focus upon form to determine how short fiction differed from other literary modes. At the heart of these inquiries lay a basic question: Did the circumscribed space of the short story impinge upon the natural shape of a plot, effectively molding its drama to fit a predetermined structure? Poe had certainly thought so, claiming that “the tale . . . affords unquestionably the fairest field for the loftiest talent” because its abbreviated length expedites a “single effect” through a “preestablished design” that avails itself of “the immense force derivable from totality” (May, pp. 60–61). Yet for many realists, such a prescription smacked of prefabrication, implying that “form” was merely a synonym for “formula.” The fin de siècle marketplace seemingly confirmed this fear by proliferating a type of story whose structure turned on what would come to be known— derisively—as the “trick ending,” in which a concluding twist catches the reader by surprise. One such story to receive wide acclaim was Frank Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” (1882), but an English translation of Guy de Maupassant’s “La Parure” (“The Necklace,” 1884) proved the true prototype, inspiring a flood of imitations that reached their commercial
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1039
SHORT STORY
DEFINING THE SHORT STORY The more carefully we study the history of fiction the more clearly we perceive that the Novel and the Short-story are essentially different—that the difference between them is not one of mere length only, but fundamental. The Short-story seeks one set of effects in its own way, and the Novel seeks a wholly distinct set of effects in a wholly distinct way. We are also led to the conclusion that the Short-story—in spite of the fact that in our language it has no name of its own— is one of the few sharply defined literary forms. It is a genre, as M. Brunetière terms it, a species, as a naturalist might call it, as individual as the Lyric itself and as various. It is as distinct an entity as the Epic, as Tragedy, as Comedy. Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short-Story, pp. 73–74.
apotheosis with the popularity of tales by O. Henry. Not every story with a twist was, in the strictest sense, a “trick ending” story: the term typically denotes only those texts that locate the surprise in the final sentence (Gerlach, p. 55; Fusco, pp. 4–5). Yet the prevalence of ironic conclusions perpetuated the notion that the short story was “end-driven,” thereby challenging more literary-minded writers to develop methods for undermining what seemed its determining form. For many other writers, however, particularly those drawing from oral and folkloric traditions of storytelling, a dramatic conclusion was comparable to the punch line of joke and was thus a vital narrative element. Still other writers deployed twists to comment on racial and gender issues, using reversals to debunk cultural stereotypes and undermine social hierarchies. ATLANTIC MONTHLY
The aesthetics of the short story might not even have become a matter of debate had it not been for the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston-based periodical whose founding editor, James Russell Lowell (1819– 1891), discouraged contributors from the romanticized stories popularized by the leading mid-nineteenthcentury mass-market fiction outlet, the New York Ledger. According to Fred Lewis Pattee, Lowell “was attracted by the genuineness and truth of life in a tale, be it high life or low, and he rejected without hesitation the mechanically literary, the artificially romantic, and the
1040
A M E R I C A N
merely sentimental. With the advent of the Atlantic Monthly a healthy realism for the first time decisively entered American fiction” (p. 168). Under his tutelage, a range of writers, including Rose Terry Cooke, Rebecca Harding Davis, Fitz-James O’Brien, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Edward Everett Hale, explored previously taboo subject matter, flouted the obligation to moralize, drew denser psychological portraits, eschewed fantasy for familiar settings, and enjoyed greater stylistic leeway in reproducing the nuances of everyday speech (dialect). Two early Atlantic stories in particular, “Life in the Iron Mills” (1861) by Davis (1831–1910) and “The Man without a Country” (1863), by Hale (1822–1909) infused short fiction with social urgency by examining labor abuse and the responsibilities of patriotism, respectively. Lowell’s influence is perhaps most marked on Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811– 1996), who curbed the didacticism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852) to produce the tales gathered in Sam Lawson’s Oldtown Fireside Stories (1871), which, along with those in Cooke’s Somebody’s Neighbors (1881), exemplify the New England local color literary tradition. While these early realist stories introduced new possibilities of subject and style, they were not concerned with form. As Pattee writes, under Lowell and his immediate editorial successor, James T. Fields, the typical Atlantic story “might begin with pages of exposition and end in a leisurely sprawl with sermonic applications; it might be loosely told with digressions and it might drag; it might extend through two or even three magazine installments—these facts were not vital. . . . [They were] concerned with matter rather than manner” (p. 173). Manner became an aesthetic issue only with the emergence of Henry James, William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich, all of whom, whether as fiction writers or critics, advocated deliberate though not undue plotting. Of them Aldrich (1836–1907) was initially most influential. His epistolary short story “Marjorie Daw” (1873) was “one of the most admired pieces of short fiction of its day” (Voss, p. 115) because it artfully demonstrated how a trick ending could challenge audience expectations of plot development. Over the course of several letters, a young New York man grows increasingly obsessed with the titular heroine evocatively described by his correspondent. Only in the final scene does he discover that the woman is fictitious, invented by the friend to entertain the man during a long convalescence. Despite its popularity, “Marjorie Daw” exemplifies two pitfalls of the surprise ending: according to John Gerlach, the “device exposes the writer to ‘reader backlash,’ resentment at having been taken in” by the trick, while also discouraging a subsequent reading because the surprise is not reproducible
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SHORT STORY
a second time (p. 55). To detractors, “Marjorie Daw” and its innumerable imitators—including Aldrich’s own “Mademoiselle Olympe Zabriski”—suggested that the short story was too susceptible to plot contrivances and was therefore less aesthetically viable than the novel. HENRY JAMES AND MARK TWAIN
No major writer of the period struggled more than Henry James (1843–1916) to reconcile realist aesthetics with short-story form. To him the brevity of the genre meant that only two distinct “effects” were possible: “The one with which we are familiar is that of the detached incident, single and sharp, as clear as a pistolshot; the other, of rarer performance, is that of the impression, comparatively generalized—simplified, foreshortened, reduced to a particular perspective—of a complexity or a continuity” (“Story-Teller at Large,” p. 190). The distinction suggests the poles that James would travel between his 1864 Atlantic debut, “The Story of a Year,” and such later accomplishments as “The Altar of the Dead” (1895) and “The Great Good Place” (1900). During the first stage of his career, ending around the time of his most anthologized story, Daisy Miller (1878), he structured his tales around “pistol-shot” incidents—sometimes, literal pistol shots (“My Friend Bingham”). Other stories rely upon similar if less violent twists, including revelations of romantic deceit (“A Landscape Painter”), obscured parentage (“Master Eustace”), and ironic reversals of situation (“A Passionate Pilgrim”). But as James began to plumb his trademark themes—the cultural discrepancies separating Europe and America, the place of art in the everyday, the vagaries of consciousness and self-knowledge— he found incident-oriented stories increasingly artificial and preferred instead to allow his narration to linger upon moments of moral and perspectival growth, often so subtly delineated as to appear abstract and static. This is not to say that, despite his disdain for inorganic gimmickry, James veered toward indeterminate conclusions—far from it. As Gerlach notes, “Poe’s standard for the short story—his emphasis on natural termination, linear progression, and convergence— became more, not less, James’s own standard” (p. 82), an observation substantiated by the number of protagonists who, like George Stransom in “Altar,” either die in the end or, like John Marcher in “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), undergo a significant conversion experience. What James achieved was a correlation of plot and characterization by which the former did not appear a “detached” or extraordinary occurrence but was instead an inexorable consequence of the latter. James’s devotion to character-driven stories arose from his belief that the donnée of short fiction, its gerA M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
minal idea, should be allowed to assume its natural dimension without being forced to fit such external, market-driven criteria as word length. Significantly, his commitment to “process and duration” coincided with his inability to constrain his fiction within the limits of the periodical industry’s “one-number story,” a work that could be printed within a single magazine issue. In the prefaces to the New York edition of his collected works, James repeatedly complains of the “rude prescription of brevity at any cost” that American shortstory venues insisted upon, even claiming that Daisy Miller was initially rejected because it was a “nouvelle,” his preferred term for “two” and “threenumber” stories (Art of the Novel, pp. 219, 268). To define a short story by any “arbitrary limit of length” that might determine its shape was to oppose “its really becoming a story”: “In that dull view a ‘short story’ was a ‘short story’ . . . shades and differences, varieties and styles, the value above all else of the idea happily developed, languished under the hard-and-fast-rule of the ‘from six to eight thousand words’” (Art of the Novel, p. 220). Not surprisingly, those stories that remain James’s most celebrated—Daisy Miller, “The Lesson of the Master,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” The Turn of the Screw, and “The Jolly Corner”—measure somewhere between fifteen and thirty thousand words, thereby blurring conventional generic divisions between the short story and the novel. As James would also delight in noting, most of these stories first appeared in British periodicals like the Yellow Book, which allowed each to “absolutely assume” and even “shamelessly parade in, its own organic form” (Art of the Novel, p. 219). Unlike James, Mark Twain (1835–1910) expressed few concerns about the artistry achievable in a short story. Although he considered the genre a “novel in a cradle” (quoted in Messent, p. 3), its abbreviated form was the building block of his imagination, which is why the majority of his novels are episodic in construction, with some even subsuming many memorable accomplishments in short fiction—Roughing It (1872), for example, includes six previously published stories presented as autonomous chapters. Twain’s career as a journalist, coupled with his schooling in the western humor tradition, introduced him to a variety of shorter structures such as the hoax and the burlesque, which allowed him to expose moral hypocrisy and human depravity under the leavening guise of comedy. In “How to Tell a Story” (1895), the closest thing to a structural analysis of the short story he would write, he identifies the “nub, point, [or] snapper” as a tale’s pivotal plot point. Akin to the punch line of a joke, the “snapper” is the humorist’s version of Poe’s “culminating effect”—it is the point toward which the material is organized. Twain employed
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1041
SHORT STORY
the snapper to notable effect in his first widely read story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), whose ending reveals how a mysterious stranger dupes the inveterate gambler Jim Smiley in a frog race. For some critics, the dominance of the punch line smacked of formula and depreciated Twain’s narrative skills: Pattee, for example, dismisses the story as “a whimsical anecdote” (p. 297). Such judgments vastly underrate Twain’s management of other devices that amplify this whimsy. As “How to Tell a Story” argues, the artistry of a tale for Twain lay in the tension generated when the narration either anticipates, “slurs,” or delays the snapper: “The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories”—what Twain would call the simple joke—“must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, others burst” (Complete Essays, p. 156). As in “The Celebrated Jumping Frog,” Twain often effected this “wandering” through the use of storytelling frames that deepen and disperse the joke, so the object of the humor is not merely Smiley himself but Twain’s own narrator, who ironically proves oblivious to the tale’s artistry by complaining of his friend Simon Wheeler’s “garrulous” and unstructured recitation of the story. In a similar manner, many of Twain’s tales can be read as metacommentaries on story structure: by dramatizing the dissatisfaction of listeners who insist that stories conclude with a discernible point, he demonstrates how successful storytelling often depends upon impeding or even disappointing rather than gratifying audience expectations of form. Snappers, once delivered, also often complicate and sometimes contradict the point they supposedly make, meaning that, as Tom Quirk has noted, Twain’s “narratives tend to end by evasion, not resolution” (p. 32). “Cannibalism in the Cars” (1869) concludes with the revelation that the story of a snowbound group of legislators who must dine upon each other to survive constitutes the “harmless vagaries of a madman, instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal” (Complete Short Stories, p. 16). In another writer’s hands, this surprise would be staged at the expense of the narrator, whose willingness to suspend his incredulity and allow himself to be frightened by such a seemingly preposterous tale would mark his essential naïveté. Yet the relief the narrator expresses actually reveals his inability to acknowledge the implications of the supposed monomaniac’s conceit—namely that, despite the pretense of civilization by which humans govern their actions, they are really driven by animalistic survival instincts. The conclusion is thus ironic, with audiences
1042
A M E R I C A N
expected to recognize what the narrator cannot: that the legislators’ verbose efforts to rationalize their cannibalism gratify the same rapacious impulses as their reputed flesh eating. The ending of “A True Story” (1874) achieves a similar effect, though not so absurdly. In this avowedly nonhumorous piece, a former slave describes her reunion with the son who escaped slavery thirteen years earlier. She is prompted to tell her story when her employer, “Mr. C—,” demands to know “how it is that you’ve lived sixty years and never had any trouble.” As Aunt Rachel demonstrates, Mr. C— does not know the troubles she has seen, a point she ironically notes in the closing line: “Oh, no Mr. C—, I hain’t had no trouble. An’ no joy!” (Complete Short Stories, pp. 95, 98). The ending dramatizes, as Twain’s conclusions often do, that the real twist of a story may not reside in the climax or denouement but in the invitation to the reader to ponder the implications of what is narrated. WOMEN’S REALIST SHORT FICTION
Women realists, meanwhile, addressed the question of form in a variety of ways that defies their collective categorization as local color regionalists, whether of the New England school of Stowe, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman or of the southern school of Kate Chopin, Grace King, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. At one extreme is Jewett (1849– 1909), whose stories are comparatively plotless, preferring observation to action. Both in Deephaven (1877), her debut collection, and The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), her most celebrated, her stories first record her narrators’ perceptions of an isolated, eccentric character, usually an aging woman content in her spinsterhood, who then relates a tale of local lore back to the storyteller. Jewett’s aversion to plot is perhaps most dramatic in her best-known story, “A White Heron” (1886), in which the climactic moment—a country child’s decision not to reveal the nesting place of a rare bird to a handsome and flattering hunter—is entirely elided. Rather than reveal young Sylvia’s motives, Jewett ends the tale with an apostrophe that imbues the narration with the aura of a subverted fairy tale: “Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time, remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child!” (p. 679). Jewett’s work frequently keeps its secrets in this fashion. Deceptively nondramatic, her stories locate plot in the nuances of character—though not, as per James, in character development. Rather than force her protagonists to some moment of selfawareness, she prefers to linger upon their habits and customs, which for her are the true indices of identity (Curnutt, pp. 103–104).
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SHORT STORY
buried in a bureau, written by his mother: “I thank the good God for having so arranged our lives that our dear Armand will never know that his mother, who adores him, belongs to the race that is cursed with the brand of slavery” (p. 245). As Pattee writes, “The sentence closes the story, but not for the reader” (p. 327), who ideally revisits the story to discover clues foreshadowing the ending. Although shorter than “Désirée’s Baby,” “The Story of an Hour” (1894) is more structurally complicated. The plot involves two surprises: when Louise Mallard discovers that her husband has died in a train wreck, she is less mournful than relieved, for the accident frees her from a restrictive marriage. Yet the possibilities of new life she has the opportunity to enjoy are negated by the sudden entrance of Brentley Mallard, who, despite initial reports, survived the collision. The shock is so great that Mrs. Mallard instantly dies from what her oblivious doctors diagnose as “the joy that kills” (p. 354). Despite Chopin’s deft use of the trick ending, she was savvy enough, unlike O. Henry, not to overuse the technique. As Richard Fusco notes, “In her first volume of stories, Bayou Folk”—the collection that includes “Désirée’s Baby”—“only four of the twentythree texts end with an unexpected twist,” with the rest tending toward the “unadorned anecdote.” This ratio is indicative of Chopin’s belief that her stories “would have greater impact if readers did not associate the literary practice with her” (pp. 143, 153). AMBROSE BIERCE AND STEPHEN CRANE
Cover of the 1899 edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s short story collection The Queen’s Twin and Other Tales. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Jewett’s low-key conclusions stand in marked opposition to the surprise endings of Chopin (1851– 1904), the local colorist most identified (unfairly) with the trick ending. The last-sentence revelation of “Désirée’s Baby” (1892) achieves precisely the effect that this device at its best can accomplish. Throughout this story of its Creole heroine’s marriage to the planter Armand Aubigny, the presentation of narrative detail leads the reader to presume that Désirée is of mixed parentage, especially given that, unlike Armand, whose family name is unimpeachable, she is an orphan of ambiguous lineage. Only after she escapes with her “quadroon” child and Armand is burning her belongings does he learn the truth, thanks to a letter he finds A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Another writer known for trick endings is Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914), whose Civil War fictions collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891) employ the device, not unlike Chopin in “The Story of an Hour,” to dramatize the crushing obstacles that prevent a protagonist from determining his own fate. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (1890), Bierce’s most famous fiction, exemplifies a type of trick ending that would inspire much derision in less-talented hands. The plot purports to follow the slaveholder Peyton Farquhar’s escape from Union soldiers, whose noose breaks as they hang the secessionist from an Alabama bridge. On the verge of reuniting with his wife, Farquhar “feels a stunning blow upon the back of his neck” that turns out to be the rope snapping his neck and killing him, revealing that Farquhar in fact never eluded his captors and that his escape was all along a fantasy (p. 43). Such “dream” narratives would become the bête noire of twentieth-century critics, but in Bierce’s case the mode allowed for a skillful, proto-modernist dramatization of temporal perception as Farquhar imagines an alternate destiny at the instant of his death.
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1043
SHORT STORY
Emphasizing an inescapable sense of fate was also the aim of such 1890s naturalists as Stephen Crane (1871–1900), whose central themes of environmental malevolence and natural determinism encouraged if not an overt use of trick endings at least ironic conclusions that underscored the powerlessness of his characters. In “The Open Boat” (1897), a fictionalized version of a shipwreck that Crane had survived, four men struggle to survive adrift in the ocean, bitterly resenting the threat of death when, throughout most of their ordeal, land lies just out of reach on the horizon: “If I am going to be drowned,” each cries, “why in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate the sand and trees?” (p. 894). The question is never answered; as Crane implies, there is no explanation for the hostility of the natural world, only its reality, a lesson the men learn when, after their rescue, they discover that one of their party has drowned within swimming distance of shore. That one if not all of the men will die is apparent from the narrative’s beginning; the only mystery is who, and its revelation pales in comparison to the survivors’ subsequent awareness that land offers no securer respite from death, only a “different and sinister hospitality of the grave” (p. 909). REALISM AND RACE
Perhaps the least appreciated end-driven realist short stories are those dealing with race. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. has argued, much African American literature draws from folkloric traditions of verbal “signifyin’” in which “a received racist image” is debunked through the rhetorical device of chiasmus, “repeating and reversing . . . in one deft act” (p. 52). Many exemplars of “plantation fiction”—deceptively nostalgic tales about the antebellum era—employ this device not only narratologically but structurally. They use trick endings to effect what Gates calls “chiastic fantasies of reversal of power relationships” (p. 59) in which slaves undermine their masters’ authority by playing up to prejudicial notions of black docility and passivity. The folkloric roots of this genre are famously evident in the Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox tales collected by Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908) in Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880) and several subsequent volumes. Purportedly literal transcriptions of folk fables that the Caucasian Harris gathered during journalistic interviews with former slaves, stories like “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox” invariably climax with the former, a trickster figure, wilily escaping the clutches of the latter by flattering his assumptions of innate superiority. Critics have impugned the authenticity of the dialect in which Harris’s narrator, Uncle Remus, tells
1044
A M E R I C A N
these tales to his white interlocutor, suggesting that its uncomfortable echoes of the minstrel show (in which performers acted out racist stereotypes, often in blackface) betray the author’s essential foreignness to the folk language he claimed to preserve (Hoffman, p. 341). Interestingly enough, in other plantation fictions by actual African American authors, that same dialect is the tool by which protagonists of color reverse “received racist images.” “The Passing of Grandison,” by Charles Chesnutt (1858–1932), tricks the audience into presuming that the obsequious loyalty expressed by the slave Grandison is sincere: “Well, I sh’d jes’ reckon I is better off [in slavery], suh, dan dem low-down free niggers, suh! Ef anybody ax’em who dey b’long ter, dey has ter say nobody, er e’se lie erbout it. Anybody ax me who I b’longs ter, I ain’ got no ’casion ter be shame’ ter tell ’em, no, suh, ’deed I ain’, suh!” (p. 133). Such flattery intensifies each time the master’s son, Dick Owens, attempts to dupe Grandison into freedom to win the affections of an abolitionist inamorata. When the slave reappears in Kentucky after having been kidnapped to Canada, Dick begins to suspect a ruse, but, significantly, not a ruse concocted by Grandison himself but by outside “agitators.” His concern proves partially correct, for shortly after his return, Grandison again disappears—only this time with his entire family, whose escape he has all along been engineering through his crafty manipulation of the rhetoric of beneficent slavery. Not only is Grandison a trickster figure; more important, the ending defies black stereotyping to reveal him heroically devoted to his family. In such cases the ending forces readers—most of whom, even in the early twenty-first century, prove all too eager to presume Grandison is a one-dimensional comic figure—to recognize how dialect can encode racial biases. As Dean McWilliams notes, Chesnutt’s title is an ironic nod to the theme of “passing,” in which lightskinned people of color pretend to be white, thereby demonstrating “the artificiality” and “susceptibility to erasure and transformation” of reigning definitions of racial identity (p. 118). Curiously, in many short stories that do not feature trickster figures, chiastic reversals consign characters to stereotyping rather than liberate them from it. In Grace King’s “The Little Convent Girl” (1893), a fatherless child on a steamer traveling from Cincinnati to New Orleans exerts a civilizing influence on the passengers and crew. When the girl’s mother turns out to be “colored,” however, the charmed adults are shocked and immediately withdraw their affection. Unlike in Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby,” the revelation of race is not a trick ending; the actual conclusion is more shocking, for when the steamer makes a return trip to the South, the girl commits suicide after the ship’s captain snubs her for being one of
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SHORT STORY
“them” (p. 162). Not all racially deterministic stories end this dramatically. Not unlike Jewett’s “A White Heron,” Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s (1875–1935) “Sister Josepha” excises its central revelation, in which the heroine, an adolescent orphan planning to leave the convent where she has grown up, overhears two nuns debating her fate: “It would be hard for her in the world, with no name but Camille, no friends, and her beauty; and then—” (p. 38). Nothing in the story specifies Camille’s ethnicity, although an early description of her skin as “sallow” leads savvy readers to suspect that the nuns know she is a mulatto. (Significantly, King applies this same word to her heroine.) As in “The Little Convent Girl,” the discovery of one’s racial identity is an initiation experience that narrows Camille’s sense of self, leading her to decide to remain in the nunnery. If the ending of “The Passing of Grandison” tricks readers into admitting their superficial assessment of an African American figure, tales such as these ask why, if race is supposedly such a fixed indicator of identity, audiences did not guess the heroines’ ethnicity until it was revealed (or in the case of “Sister Josepha” implied) through a plot twist. EARLY MODERNISM
With the advent of modernism in the early twentieth century, the form of the short story bifurcated into two opposing literary tendencies. On the one hand, James’s insistence that character development was the most organic medium of plot structure led to “epiphany” stories. These are fictions that culminate in dramatic moments of self-insight that significantly alter a protagonist’s sense of self. Although the term “epiphany” is associated with the Irish writer James Joyce, its most notable American practitioner before 1920 was Willa Cather. Her “Paul’s Case” (from her first story collection, The Troll Garden, 1905) is considered a template of the form. An adolescent aesthete embezzles from his employer to finance a quick foray into the luxuriant artistic lifestyle he imagines his province. When his crime is found out, he cannot stomach a return to drudgery and throws himself in front of a train—only to realize at the last irrevocable moment “the folly of his haste” and the “vastness of what he had left undone” (p. 138). As the age of Cather’s deluded hero suggests, epiphany stories typically involve young, naive characters for whom these concluding revelations are melancholy but necessary initiations into adult wisdom. Unlike epiphany stories, what are varyingly called “elliptical” or “impressionistic” short fictions eschew plot in favor of seemingly unmediated bursts of subjectivity. Such stories might negate any trace of story development by foregrounding the experiential immeA M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
diacy associated with modernism through the medium of stream of consciousness. Even more radically, they might do so by the absolute dominance of stylistic devices that announce themselves as linguistic media rather than referents to any recognizably physical realm. Gertrude Stein’s (1874–1946) Three Lives (1909), a triptych about three working-class women, is built exclusively out of techniques such as rhythm and repetition, so that a story like “Melanctha” hypnotizes readers with its intricate rhetorical patterns: “Melanctha had needed Rose always to believe her, Melanctha needed Rose always to let her cling to her, Melanctha wanted badly to have somebody who could make her always feel a little safe inside her, and now Rose had sent her from her” (p. 139). Although Stein was an immense influence upon modernists, most admirers who emulated her experiments aimed for more conventionally symbolic effects. The stories collected in Sherwood Anderson’s (1876–1941) Winesburg, Ohio (1919), while again deferring expectations for resolution, nevertheless dramatize the major theme of modernism (alienation and guilt) through imagistic figurations. In “Hands,” for instance, a putative homosexual’s longing for human understanding is emblematized by his “slender expressive fingers,” which are the “piston rods of his machinery of expression,” allowing him to communicate taboo desires he is otherwise forced to repress (p. 10). Anderson so believed in the use of these metaphorical conceits that he not only employed them as motifs but also hinted at their rationale in a poetic, quasi-methodological preface titled “The Book of Grotesques,” in which he suggests that his characters’ emotional deformities are legible in their physical tics and quirks. Although many critics consider the modernist era the high point of the short story’s development, it is inarguable that realism contributed significantly to its maturation. Realists not only legitimated the genre by aesthetically redeeming the innate brevity of its form; through their individual struggles to resolve the demands of plot and character development with the seeming “end-drivenness” of its structure, they also developed a range of styles and techniques that remain influential. Even the much-loathed “trick ending,” which remained a feature of the commercial short-fiction market for years after O. Henry disappeared from the canon, is not without artistic merit. In building up to a concluding twist, a reversal, or an epiphany, story writers demonstrated how the device could be employed to question reader prejudices about race, gender, and social status. Although the accomplishments of James and Twain have tended to overshadow those of their contemporaries, so many lesser-appreciated talents excelled at short fiction that the genre would never again
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1045
SISTER CARRIE
suffer the ignominy of being considered a “beginner’s art.” Indeed, thanks to the realists, the currency of the short story rose to such an extent that Poe’s insistence that it is a superior art form to the novel no longer seemed a risible claim. See also Atlantic Monthly; The Conjure Woman; The Country of the Pointed Firs; Daisy Miller; Humor; Naturalism; Realism; Regionalism and Local Color Fiction; Tales of Soldiers and Civilians; Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings; Winesburg, Ohio
Fusco, Richard. Maupassant and the American Short Story: The Influence of Form at the Turn of the Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gerlach, John. Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985. Hoffman, Daniel G. Form and Fable in American Fiction. New York: Holt Rinehart, 1961. McWilliams, Dean. Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio. New York: Huebsch, 1919.
Marler, Robert F. “From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850s.” American Literature 44 (1974): 153–169.
Bierce, Ambrose. Shadows of Blue and Gray: The Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce. Edited by Brian M. Thomsen. New York: Doherty, 2002.
Matthews, Brander. The Philosophy of the Short-Story. New York: Longmans, Green, 1901.
Cather, Willa. The Troll Garden. New York: McClure, Phillips, 1905.
May, Charles E. The New Short Story Theories. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994.
Chesnutt, Charles W. The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color-Line. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1899.
Messent, Peter. The Short Works of Mark Twain: A Critical Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Chopin, Kate. The Complete Works of Kate Chopin. Edited by Per Seyersted. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. Crane, Stephen. “The Open Boat.” In Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry. New York: Library of America, 1984. Dunbar-Nelson, Alice. The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories. New York: Dodd-Mead, 1899. James, Henry. The Art of the Novel. Edited by Richard P. Blackmur. New York: Scribners, 1934. James, Henry. “The Story-Teller at Large: Mr. Henry Harland.” In The American Essays of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel, pp. 186–196. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1956. Jewett, Sarah Orne. Novels and Stories. New York: Library of America, 1994. King, Grace. Balcony Stories. 1893. New Orleans: Graham Press, 1914. Stein, Gertrude. Three Lives. 1909. New York: Dover, 1994. Twain, Mark. The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Edited by Charles Neider. Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover, 1956. Twain, Mark. The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. Edited by Charles Neider. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957. Secondary Works
Curnutt, Kirk. Wise Economies: Brevity and Storytelling in American Short Stories. Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1997.
1046
A M E R I C A N
Pattee, Fred Lewis. The Development of the American Short Story. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923. Quirk, Tom. Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne,1997. Sedgwick, Ellery. The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1994. Voss, Arthur. The American Short Story: A Critical Survey. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973. Kirk Curnutt
SISTER CARRIE Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) published Sister Carrie in 1900, at the meeting point of two centuries. The novel is, in the words of Dreiser biographer Richard Lingeman, “a mixture of the old and the new—a bridge between the nineteenth-century novel and the twentieth” (Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, p. 275). Appearing at a time of profound social and economic transformation in the United States, Sister Carrie looks forward to an urban, industrial future and backward to a rural, sentimental past. It stands as an American classic, a work utterly representative of its fraught and dynamic time.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SISTER CARRIE
His attraction starts him on a fatal downward slide that parallels Carrie’s rise. Hurstwood’s decline, which Dreiser chronicles in detail that is both excruciating and poignant, lands him literally in the gutter and culminates in his suicide. SOCIAL DARWINISM AND SENTIMENTALISM
Theodore Dreiser. The author in his late twenties, around the time Sister Carrie was published. COURTESY OF ANNENBERG RARE BOOK & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, MS. COLL. 30, 432.2
Sister Carrie spotlights two characters and holds them up as exemplars of their age. Carrie Meeber resembles a fallen woman of the sort who sparked much prurient interest among social commentators of Dreiser’s time. Her tale is at least partly archetypal: small-town girl comes to the big city and is targeted by predatory men who take advantage of her innocence. But the standard morality tale of this time called for the fallen woman to be severely punished for her sexual transgression. Carrie is not. Instead, she prospers, moving from one lover to another, discarding the second when he weighs her down. By the novel’s end, she has become a star of the New York stage and a sex symbol. Sister Carrie also focuses on George Hurstwood, Carrie’s second lover. When first introduced, Hurstwood is a successful manager of a tony bar in downtown Chicago. His home life is lackluster, but his position in the thriving urban economy is both secure and prestigious. When Hurstwood meets Carrie—who is at that point the mistress of the salesman Charles Drouet—he becomes smitten with her. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Both Carrie’s rise and Hurstwood’s fall exemplify the diminishing power of family ties in the United States at the turn of the century. The postbellum era was one of seismic change in economic and social organization in the United States. During this time, urbanization and industrialization changed the way that Americans lived—and the way that they looked at the world. Before this transformation began in the years following the Civil War, the United States had been a predominantly rural, agriculturally based society. American life before industrialization was predominantly familybased, with the family serving as a basic social unit. It was understood that families took responsibility for the care of their aged, for example, and if someone fell upon hard times, his extended family took care of him—and his children as well, if necessary. Simply put, the family served as American society’s safety net before the Civil War. The relation between individual and community changed as the United States began to modernize, and the family proved an insufficient social support. Extended families fractured as people migrated to the cities. Unattached singles made their own way, and when city dwellers married and had children, these nuclear families were on their own. For millions of immigrants who entered the United States between 1890 and 1920, extended families lay an ocean away, never to be seen again. Neither Carrie nor Hurstwood rely on their families for anything. In fact, they see their families as antagonistic. Carrie moves in with her married sister Minnie when she comes to Chicago, but Minnie shows scarce concern for Carrie’s happiness (and her husband is indifferent to everything but Carrie’s rent money and the effect of her behavior on his reputation). When Carrie abruptly leaves her relatives for an apartment bankrolled by Drouet, they disappear from her life entirely. Carrie recalls the family she left behind in Columbia City only once in the novel, when a memory intrudes upon her of her father “in his flour-dusted miller’s suit” (p. 108). The recollection stands as a symbol of all that she seeks to suppress and surpass. Hurstwood similarly seeks to escape his family, especially his controlling wife. He ultimately abandons his wife and children for Carrie, moving to New York with her and leaving his past life behind. The Hurstwoods
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1047
SISTER CARRIE
prosper in his absence, and Dreiser juxtaposes the scene of Hurstwood’s death with a scene of his now-married daughter and former wife on a European vacation. Dreiser thus stages the breakdown of sentimental ties in Sister Carrie. Sentimentalism had deep ideological roots in nineteenth-century American culture, and it flowered in literature and elsewhere. American women novelists created the genre of sentimentalism in scores of popular novels during the nineteenth century. The sentimental novel looks at society as a family of people joined by emotional solidarity, sharing a faith in others and in nondenominational Christian salvation. This formulation arises not only on plot and story elements but more crucially on the worldview of the genre, which is centered, as Joanne Dobson puts it, on “an emotional and philosophical ethos that celebrates human connection, both personal and communal” (p. 267). Sentimentalism, says Dobson, “envisions the self in-relation” (p. 266). Throughout his career, Dreiser tested this vision of family and community connection in the crucible of the profit-driven, urbanizing, industrial United States. At the time of Sister Carrie, a “semi–welfare state” had replaced the family’s embrace and intimate care of its own unfortunates. Government activity in fighting poverty was indecisive and inconsistent, so reformers offering food, shelter, and support were stepping into a vacuum that the family could not reach and the law would not reach. Reformers could be arch. The moralizing tone behind terms like “deserving poor” conveyed the typical belief that the poor were mastered by indolence, intemperance, and improvidence—and the goal of charity was, as the reformer Jacqueline Shaw Lowell said in 1884, to “elevate the moral nature” of the beneficiary (Katz, p. 74). Poverty was considered to be a moral flaw, even if it was brought on by environment (as progressives believed) rather than innate depravity. Well-intentioned though they were, many reformers treated the poor like moral degenerates even as they offered them food, shelter, and support. Such charity workers were mainly motivated bv didactic religious belief coupled with Victorian morals. Dreiser, whose impoverished background gave him a special insight into these matters, shows these samaritans performing their offices upon the pathetic and destitute Hurstwood at the end of Sister Carrie. Dreiser viewed America’s haves and have-nots through the lenses of Spencerian competition and sentimental sympathy at the same time. Herbert Spencer, the author of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” was the most prominent exemplar of what would later be called “Social Darwinism.” He cobbled together an
1048
A M E R I C A N
entire philosophical system around the idea of brutal and deterministic evolution that discarded the unfit. God was replaced in Spencer’s world by a “great unknowable” that was indifferent to human suffering. Spencer’s works were widely read in the United States, where he became the toast of the moneymaking class. He gained a cadre of followers among the powerful industrial plutocrats, who saw Spencer’s ideas as justifying their own rise. The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was among Spencer’s most fervent boosters. Dreiser’s reading of Spencer’s First Principles (1862) in 1894 destroyed any youthful idealism arising from his religious upbringing. Spencer is actually mentioned by name in Sister Carrie, and his ideas prominently inform the narrative asides in the novel, as in chapter 8, when Dreiser calls man “a wisp in the wind” (p. 56). The coincidences that transform Carrie’s life and lift her fortunes are likewise consistent with Spencerian evolution. Dreiser later said that his encounter with Spencer’s ideas “almost killed me” (Swanberg, p. 60). This discomfort goes to the heart of his artistic vision in Sister Carrie and throughout his career. Accepting Spencer’s fatalism pained Dreiser because of his own sympathy for the losers in the struggle for existence. This is nowhere clearer than in his rendering of Hurstwood’s slow descent to suicide in Sister Carrie. Hurstwood’s last words, “What’s the use?” (p. 367), cap Dreiser’s deeply felt portrayal of harsh social forces at work. Here and elsewhere, Dreiser combined an unflinching account of a cruel world with a strong identification with those whom it destroyed. If Dreiser could see truth in Spencer’s harsh and inexorable view of life, he also saw the suffering of the victims with what his contemporary Sherwood Anderson called “real tenderness” (Lingeman, Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, p. 343). The harshness and the tenderness come together in his art, and make Dreiser the most compassionate of America’s naturalist writers. Key to this commentary is Dreiser’s work with sympathy as both a device and an idea. To sympathize, one must literally imagine oneself as someone else, and this forms the basis of what the neoclassical philosopher and economist Adam Smith calls “fellow feeling.” One might say that the project of American sentimental fiction was to provide a sound communal basis for sympathy—and American sentimental writers did this by locating sympathy as a domestic family virtue whose benefits ramify outward to take in the larger community. Dreiser’s sentimental streak has been bemoaned by Leslie Fiedler and other critics over the years but has recently been reconsidered by a new generation of readers, including Amy Kaplan and Clare Virginia Eby, who have appreciated the importance of sentimentalism to
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SISTER CARRIE
Dreiser’s larger vision. Dreiser’s sympathy is everywhere in Sister Carrie (and elsewhere in his work), but he saw no possibility for it to gain purchase in a world governed by fatal indifference. The subtitle of the first chapter of Sister Carrie, “A Waif amid Forces,” illustrates the hopeless hope that defined Dreiser’s view of the new industrial world. DESIRE AND CONSUMERISM
Dreiser recognized that industrialization was shaping new human desires. With Sister Carrie, Dreiser emerged as as the foremost chronicler of the birth of consumerism in the United States. Dreiser’s authority on this subject comes not only from waves of careful description of physical objects—a signature aspect of his style—but also from his deep insight into people’s desire for these things. In chapter 7, aptly titled “The Lure of the Material,” Dreiser shows how Carrie, recently arrived in Chicago and holding money advanced by Drouet, becomes suffused with longing for the things she sees in the Fair department store: How would she look in this, how charming that would make her! She came upon the corset counter and paused in rich reverie as she noted the dainty concoctions of colour and lace there displayed. If she would only make up her mind, she could have one of those now. She lingered in the jewelry department. She saw the earrings, the bracelets, the pins, the chains. What would she not have given if she could have had them all! She would look fine too, if only she had some of these things. (P. 51)
Throughout Sister Carrie, Carrie is drawn by the finery of things. At one point, she even imagines clothing speaking to her. When Carrie meets Drouet for the first time, she notes his “highly polished” patent leather shoes (p. 3). When she later meets Hurstwood, she notices that his shoes are less shiny, but they look better to her. After a while, Hurstwood looks better to her too. For Dreiser’s characters, the material world plays a formative role in the life of the mind and the heart. Dreiser’s interest in things proceeds from a time when the United States began mass-producing them. He came of age as a novelist in an industrializing country that was growing and producing material goods in quantities and speeds never before seen. Efficient large-scale manufacturing—that is, mass production—became possible in America only after the Civil War. Continually operating machines and plants were introduced, through which raw materials proceeded, worked over in a number of well-choreographed stages to emerge as finished products. These innovations contributed to the production of standardized goods at lower costs and higher profits. The development of electricity in the 1880s provided a A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
more stable and flexible power source for factories, and the capstone on mass production during Dreiser’s lifetime was placed by Henry Ford, whose Highland Park plant introduced the moving assembly line beginning in 1913. These industrial shifts were part of wholesale socioeconomic changes taking place in the United States. Nationwide corporations and monopolistic trusts now loomed over the economic landscape. These great corporations, led by titanic industrialists like Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles Tyson Yerkes (the model for Dreiser’s financier Frank Cowperwood in The Trilogy of Desire [1912, 1914, 1947]) created great fortunes, widening the gap between the rich and the poor and creating a new bureaucratic hierarchy that gave business its recognizably modern form. Laborers joined unions to assert their claims to the country’s burgeoning riches, and Dreiser documents some of the resultant struggles between labor and management in Sister Carrie. A revolution in mass communication had also begun: new publishing technology made books more affordable; newspapers grew in size, circulation, and influence; and motion pictures became widely available. Paralleling the mass production of things was the construction of the desire for them. Department stores and mail-order catalogs appeared, two new mass retail methods offering an unprecedented array of goods. In Thorstein Veblen’s memorable phrase from The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), “conspicuous consumption” became a national pastime. To stoke consumer desire, advertising outlays increased tenfold to $500 million between 1867 and 1900. Dreiser ties the new consumerism to changing views of sexuality. Carrie Meeber represents a character type that became known in Dreiser’s time as the “New Woman.” The New Woman stood opposed to traditional roles and expectations and thus symbolized the new freedoms that women enjoyed in urban industrialized society. These freedoms were economic (women could now earn their own living and spend their own money) and social (they no longer had to remain under the watchful eyes of their families), but most controversially, they were sexual. The debate over the New Woman at the turn of the century was rooted in the widely held anxiety accompanying women’s increased sexual freedom. The many cautionary tales of “fallen women” that circulated during Dreiser’s time may be read as the traditionalists’ response to these new developments. Dreiser’s Carrie embodies many aspects of the New Woman, and Dreiser’s unconventionally sympathetic portrayal of her gives Sister Carrie a subversive edge. Carrie comes across in Sister Carrie as a social climber
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1049
SISTER CARRIE
THE COURAGE OF A GREAT BOOK It pleased me as well as any novel I have read in any form, published or otherwise. (Frank Norris to Dreiser, 28 May 1900) The story will make all its objectors look small when it gets to the public. (Arthur Henry to Dreiser, 19 July 1900) A great book will destroy conditions, unfavorable or indifferent. (Dreiser to Walter H. Page, 6 August 1900) The sum and substance of literary as well as social morality may be expressed in three words—tell the truth. It matters not how the tongues of critics may wag, or the voices of a partially developed and highly conventionalized society may complain, the business of the author as of other workers upon this earth, is to say what he knows to be true. (Dreiser, “True Art Speaks Plainly” [1903]) Dreiser more than any other man, marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated, has cleared the trail from Victorian and Howellsian timidity and gentility in American fiction to honesty and boldness and passion of life. Without his pioneering, I doubt if any of us could, unless we liked to be sent to jail, seek to express life and beauty and terror. (Sinclair Lewis, “The American Fear of Literature” [Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1930])
who, like her male counterparts, will get ahead in the world in such ways as she can. Her sexuality is tied to her desire for things, and for gain. Carrie’s willingness to take lovers—and leave them—is a cause (rather than a result) of her very American desire for upward mobility. For Hurstwood, sexual libertinism leads to crime. His deepening desire for Carrie leads him to steal $10,000 in cash from an open safe at his job and trick Carrie into running away with him to New York. The scene of the theft, where Dreiser renders Hurstwood’s conflicted indecision in meticulous psychological detail, is a masterpiece of equivocation that anticipates the arrival of Sigmund Freud’s ideas on American shores some years later (when Dreiser was among those who received them warmly).
1050
A M E R I C A N
The changing expressions and values governing sexual desire created an American mass culture of celebrity. Carrie succeeds on the stage because she has that certain something, a charisma that retails her sexuality on a wide scale to paying audiences. Her pay rises meteorically, and posh hotels compete to offer her free living quarters. Carrie starts out filled with sexualized desire for things in store windows. By the end of Sister Carrie, she has become a sexualized commodity herself. Dreiser approves of many of the changes that allow for Carrie’s rise, but his approbation is by no means total. Not only does Hurstwood’s decline provide ongoing counterpoint to Carrie’s increasing economic freedom; Dreiser also introduces commentary on what has been lost through the character of Robert Ames. Ames, whose name evokes the French word for “soul,” is an electrical engineer with a philosophical bent and an innocent idealism. Though Carrie only meets Ames for a short time, he greatly attracts her. Ames’s morally based aesthetics lead him to disapprove of the riches being flaunted in the New York streets, and his idealism renders him immune to the lure of material gain. He is also immune to Carrie’s charms: “there was nothing responsive between them” (p. 353). Ames’s indifference to Carrie suggests Dreiser’s ambivalence about the myriad changes taking place in the United States. If the new economic freedom enables Carrie’s advance in the world, her failure to connect with Ames suggests that the proliferation of things also gets in the way of emotional connection among people in the world. Consumerism stands then, as one aspect of the wider field of desire, and Carrie’s melancholia at the end of Sister Carrie, along with Hurstwood’s death, point to an enduring conclusion that Dreiser returned to again and again: human beings are eternally wanting creatures who can only temporarily be satisfied. THE RECEPTION OF SISTER CARRIE
Sister Carrie had a difficult gestation and was stillborn at its initial release. Dreiser then revived the novel seven years later, and it has lived a long literary life since. Dreiser began composing Sister Carrie during the fall of 1899. He was well aware of the scandalous nature of his subject matter and readily consented to heavy editing by his wife, Sara, and his friend Arthur Henry. Working separately, the two cut thousands of words from Dreiser’s manuscript before its completion in 1900. After an initial rejection by Harper & Brothers, Sister Carrie was accepted by Doubleday, Page & Company after the novelist Frank Norris, having read the manuscript on behalf of the firm, enthusiastically
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S L A N G , D I A L E C T, A N D O T H E R T Y P E S O F M A R K E D L A N G U A G E
recommended it. The novel caused a split in the partnership, however: Page wanted to publish it, but Doubleday feared it would not sell. (According to the legend perpetuated by Dreiser and assisted by early, sympathetic commentators such as Dorothy Dudley, Mrs. Doubleday was disgusted by the book and prevailed upon her husband to distance himself from it.) The firm tried to rescind its offer to Dreiser, but the author held firm and insisted that the company follow through and publish the book. It appeared in 1900, but in a drab, cheap binding and with no supporting publicity. The book sank quickly and quietly into obscurity. Dreiser felt betrayed and deeply disappointed, and the commercial failure of Sister Carrie contributed to a nervous breakdown (then called “neurasthenia”) that he suffered soon afterward. In 1907 Sister Carrie was reissued by B. W. Dodge & Company, with Dreiser as the major investor. This time the author’s belief in his novel was rewarded: Sister Carrie gained a second life. It was widely read and reviewed, and it sparked the revival of Dreiser’s literary activity, reputation, and career. Spurred by Dreiser’s extraordinary output during the decade following its reissue, Sister Carrie gained secure purchase in the national literary canon, where it has influenced generations of readers and writers. Recounting his roots as a writer in Black Boy (1945), for example, Richard Wright cited the example of Dreiser. And when Sinclair Lewis became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930 (an award that many felt Dreiser should have gotten), he spoke eloquently of Dreiser’s “pioneering” realism. Sister Carrie received another notable reissue in 1981, as the University of Pennsylvania Press assembled an edition of the novel based on Dreiser’s original manuscript, before it was cut by his wife and friend. The Pennsylvania Edition of Sister Carrie is longer and more frank, offering additional insight into Dreiser’s creative process. The differences between the two editions have inspired much debate and brought new attention to both the novel and an author whose observations of a country in the throes of modernization ring as true today as a century ago. See also City Dwellers; Mass Marketing; Naturalism; Reform; Social Darwinism; The Theory of the Leisure Class BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Edited by John C. Berkey, Alice M. Winters, James L. W. West III, and Neda M. Westlake. Pennsylvania Edition. New York: Penguin, 1981.
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie. Edited by Donald Pizer. Norton Critical Edition. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1991. Quotations in the text are from this edition. Secondary Works
Banta, Martha. Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Cassuto, Leonard, and Clare Virginia Eby, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Theodore Dreiser. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dobson, Joanne. “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature.” American Literature 69, no. 2 (1997): 263–288. Dudley, Dorothy. Forgotten Frontiers: Dreiser and the Land of the Free. New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1932. Eby, Clare Virginia. Dreiser and Veblen, Saboteurs of the Status Quo. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998. Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Rev. ed. New York: Stein and Day, 1966. Reprint, Normal, Ill.: Dalkney Archive Press, 1998. Kaplan, Amy. The Social Construction of American Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Katz, Michael. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Lingeman, Richard. Theodore Dreiser: An American Journey, 1908–1945. New York: Putnam, 1990. Lingeman, Richard. Theodore Dreiser: At the Gates of the City, 1871–1907. New York: Putnam, 1986. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Moers, Ellen. Two Dreisers. New York: Viking, 1969. Pizer, Donald. The Novels of Theodore Dreiser: A Critical Study. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976. Swanberg, W. A. Dreiser. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965. Leonard Cassuto
SLANG, DIALECT, AND OTHER TYPES OF MARKED LANGUAGE Imagine opening a revised edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and reading: “My antics will no doubt remain unknown to you unless perchance you have had occasion to peruse a certain volume entitled The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; nevertheless, it matters not.” The excruciatingly formal prose of this imagined revision sharply contrasts with the familiar language of the novel. Nevertheless, in early drafts Huck’s famous introduction of himself to the reader had been a good
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1051
S L A N G , D I A L E C T, A N D O T H E R T Y P E S O F M A R K E D L A N G U A G E
deal more proper; Mark Twain (1835–1910) wrote “You will not know about me,” and later emended this to “You do not know me,” before he settled on the familiar: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.” Twain’s language here (and throughout the novel) is distinguished by the use of “dialect” or “slang” as those terms are usually understood. Twain was certainly not the first author to write in this informal language. The tradition of incorporating dialect into literary writing in English goes back at least as far as Geoffrey Chaucer. Even the very dialects Twain was representing had been portrayed by earlier American authors. Nevertheless, the approach to dialect and slang taken by Twain and other authors at this time represented a new direction. Before Twain, Joel Chandler Harris (1848– 1908), and other writers of the period, dialect usually appeared only in dialogue and was typically used for comic effect to suggest a character’s backwardness, vulgarity, or buffoonery. After the Civil War, however, many authors began to treat dialect more generously and sought to incorporate representations of “authentic” speech as part of a broader interest in painting their works with local color. This reformed attitude toward dialect and slang opened new avenues of expression. The authors of this generation broke the molds that typecast dialect-speaking characters and, in the case of Twain in Huckleberry Finn, pushed dialect well beyond the confines of dialogue. This article presents a general framework for approaching dialect, slang, and similar phenomena in literature. The examples discussed come from the period 1870–1920, but the issues are meant to apply to literature of virtually any era. Two main questions are addressed: (1) Why do authors use dialect, slang, and other linguistic forms that stand out from the literary norm? (2) What forms do they use in constructing linguistically unusual writing? WHY USE DIALECT, SLANG, AND SIMILAR DEVICES?
The motivations for incorporating dialect, slang, or similar forms of language clearly vary by author and even by work. Still, most cases fall under the general heading of characterization: the form of a character’s speech is used to signal aspects of who that character is. Authors are keenly aware that language can serve as a powerful marker of identity. In subtle and not so subtle ways we indicate something about ourselves when we speak, not just in what we say but in how we say it. Thus, a character whose language usage differs from that of other characters, or from the narration, is read as socially or culturally different.
1052
A M E R I C A N
An author may use language to mark differences of various types. Perhaps the most familiar of these are regional differences. Characters are often written to signal their geographic origins through their use of a regional dialect. Regional speech patterns can contribute to a sense of place by adding a dimension of local color. Of course, within a given setting dialect usage may vary across characters because authors use dialect to mark social differences as well. These differences may be coded by using distinct features for different social types. Stories set in the South, for example, may include one set of dialect forms for white characters and another set for African American characters. Social difference may also be indicated by varying the relative frequency of dialect in different characters’ usage. Accordingly, the dialogue of a character of lower social status might be filled with dialect markers, while such markers will appear more rarely in the dialogue of a higher status character. Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) adopts this approach in “A Church Mouse” (1891), which is set in rural New England. The speech of the “rich and influential” deacon Caleb Gale certainly includes nonstandard features, but they are not as pervasive as they are in the speech of the penniless Hetty Fifield. Caleb Gale argues: “Don’t you see it ain’t no use talkin’ such nonsense, Hetty? You’d better go right along an’ make up your mind it ain’t to be thought of.” Hetty responds, “Where do you s’pose I’ve got any place? Them folks air movin’ into Mis’ Grout’s house, an’ they as good as told me to clear out. I ain’t got no folks to take me in. I dun’ know where I’m goin’; mebbe I can go to your house?”. Unusual linguistic features are also commonly used to mark a character’s status as a speaker of a language other than English. Given the tremendous flow of immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, it is not surprising to find nonnative speakers of English appearing in literature of the time. In “A Providential Match” (1898), Abraham Cahan (1860–1951) represents the speech of a Russian Jewish immigrant in phrases such as “feet him like a glove” and “bishness is bishness.” Nonnative speech is also found in works featuring Americans traveling or living outside the country. In Their Wedding Journey (1872), William Dean Howells (1837–1920) offers a sample of a French accent encountered in Quebec: “There isn’t another ’ole in the ’ouse to lay me ’ead” (p. 169). Dialects and nonnative speech represent linguistic differences across groups of people, but language also varies on the level of the individual user. All people adjust their usage according to context, employing different registers or styles. Compare, for example, the formal style of speech that might characterize a
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S L A N G , D I A L E C T, A N D O T H E R T Y P E S O F M A R K E D L A N G U A G E
professional meeting with the informal style found in a casual conversation among friends. One common way of indicating register differences is through word choice, particularly the use of slang words and phrases to signal informality. Slang is often used to comic effect, as in Roughing It (1872), where Twain describes an exchange between a local “rough” and a minister that opens with the former asking, “Are you the duck that runs the gospel mill next door?” This informality is contrasted with the extreme formality in the speech of the minister, who describes himself as “the spiritual adviser of the little company of believers whose sanctuary adjoins these premises” (p. 310). The humor of this passage stems from the fact that neither party is able to decipher what the other is saying. The distinction drawn here between dialect and register is often blurred in actual usage and in literary representations. A given linguistic form may be associated with particular registers as well as with particular dialects. Consider, for example, the pronunciation of words ending in “-ing,” which for most people is sometimes articulated with the back “ng” sound and sometimes with the front “n” sound. This distinction is often represented as “-ing” versus “-in’.” Studies of linguistic usage by a variety of people in a variety of situations indicate that the front pronunciation is used more frequently among certain groups of people (e.g., the working class) and in informal contexts (e.g., personal conversations). Thus, an author might have a character use forms like “nothin’” and “walkin’” as an indication of the casualness of the context or as a signal of his or her social origins. In fact, the latter intention seems to be more common.
MARKEDNESS
The common thread linking literary representations of dialect, nonnative usages, and registers is their markedness. In linguistics, “markedness” describes the difference between default categories and special cases. The latter are called “marked” because they often contain additional linguistic material. For example, the plural of a noun is considered the marked case because it is generally formed by adding a suffix to the “unmarked” singular form. Markedness reflects how one thinks about language at a fundamental level. For example, the singular of nouns is viewed as the basic form and the plural as a derived form; consider how odd it sounds to describe “child” as the singular of “children” instead of describing “children” as the plural of “child.” Extending this notion to literature, one can see that there is a kind of unmarked language used throughout most works, which might for A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
convenience be called Standard Written English. This language establishes a backdrop against which dialect features, slang terms, and so forth stand out. These marked usages draw attention to themselves as linguistic forms and lead readers to consider why the given form is used. The concept of markedness is especially useful in the examination of literary uses of dialect and slang because markedness relations are inherently relative. One speaks of a given form as marked only in relation to an unmarked counterpart. Moreover, a linguistic form may be marked in relation to one form but unmarked in relation to another. So an author can indicate social differences among dialect speakers by putting in the mouth of one character language that is more marked. A common example in literature of the period is seen in the variation between “goin’ to” or “gonna” and “gwine” or “gwyne to.” These forms are marked relative to the standard “going to,” but “gwine to” is arguably more marked as it deviates more radically from the standard spelling (although not necessarily from the usual pronunciation) and appears almost exclusively in the speech of African American characters. The relativity of markedness relations helps explain why even when the unmarked language of an entire work is a dialect, the author can still use linguistic means of distinguishing characters, as in Huckleberry Finn. HOW MARKED LANGUAGE IS CONSTRUCTED
While authors have various reasons for using dialect, slang, and other types of marked language, some common forms appear in literature of the period. Authors vary greatly in the extent to which they use marked linguistic forms, although they vary less in terms of the forms selected; that is, there seems to be a common pool of forms from which many authors routinely draw. It is important to remember that every author faces certain practical limitations in the use of marked language. One type of challenge is presented by the writing system, which makes it difficult to represent many interesting variations in pronunciation. The reader’s needs bring another set of challenges; authors must bear in mind the potential for frustrating readers with language that deviates from standard orthographic conventions and therefore needs deciphering. Nonstandard spellings are perhaps the most common technique employed in literary dialect. They are most often intended to convey a marked pronunciation. Among the more common forms are “dem” (also “dat,” “dis,” etc.); “fer”; “git”; “jest”; “kin” for “can”; “thar” (also “whar”); and “-in’” for “-ing” (as in
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1053
S L A N G , D I A L E C T, A N D O T H E R T Y P E S O F M A R K E D L A N G U A G E
“fishin’”). Each of these examples involves an alternation between two sounds; it is also common to find representations of deleted sounds, most often indicated with the apostrophe (e.g., “an’” or “’n’”; “’cause”; “’em”; “’round” or “’roun’”; “s’pose”). Although readers may interpret such forms as dialect, each of the pronunciations represented in these examples is heard in the ordinary speech of most people. A more restricted usage, the deletion of the “r” sound, is a recognizable feature of southern and northeastern accents and appears frequently in literary dialect, represented in various ways (e.g., “yo’” for “your,” “heah” for “here”). An unconventional spelling is not always indicative of a variant pronunciation. Forms such as “wuz,” “sez,” and “frum” reflect the usual pronunciations. Examples like these are called “eye dialect” because they are nonstandard only to the eye and not to the ear. It may be difficult for modern readers to determine whether a given form is meant to reflect a marked pronunciation or is simply eye dialect. For example, Joel Chandler Harris and others used spellings like “w’en” and “w’ite.” Many Americans (and most Britons) might interpret these forms as eye dialect because the standard “wh” spelling does not call for a distinct pronunciation in their speech. In the nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, however, many speakers in some regions (especially the South) discriminated between the pronunciations of pairs like “witch” and “which.” For them, a spelling like “w’en” certainly represented a marked pronunciation. Similarly, the pronunciation suggested by the spelling “bin” for “been” does not attract much attention in the early twenty-first century but appears to have been more marked in earlier periods. Nonstandard grammatical usages are another resource on which an author may draw to distinguish marked language. These grammatical variants may be used to represent regional dialects and appear frequently as markers of social status. The form “gwine” (sometimes “gwyne”) mentioned above may be seen as an example of a nonstandard verb form although it is perhaps better classified as a pronunciation variant. Regardless, the form seems to have become conventionalized in representations of African American speech in the nineteenth century. More clear-cut cases of nonstandard verbs include uses of “come” and “seen” as simple past tense as well as forms like “riz,” “cotch,” and “sot” as the pasts of “rise,” “catch,” and “set.” All of these forms had currency in some dialects at one time, and of course, “come” and “seen” remain widely used in the early twenty-first century as past tense forms. Patterns of subject-verb agreement are also known to vary across dialects, and nonstandard agreement types sometimes appear in literature.
1054
A M E R I C A N
Among the more common examples are “you was” and “I weren’t.” Perhaps the most frequently appearing markers of nonstandard grammar relate to negation. Included here are “ain’t” and the forms known as “double negatives” (e.g., “don’t do nothing,” “never go nowhere”). The vocabulary an author chooses may also contribute to a sense of linguistic marking. As do certain pronunciations and grammatical forms, some words convey social information about the people who use them. Compared with pronunciation and grammar, the boundaries between standard and nonstandard and between formal and informal in the area of vocabulary are often fuzzier. Judgments about linguistic registers vary greatly, especially regarding the very informal words and expressions recognized as slang. A word that one person considers slang may strike another as more widely acceptable. Moreover, slang is largely ephemeral; indeed, part of the allure of slang is its freshness. A slang usage may be fashionable for some time and then disappear altogether. Occasionally, an item once seen as slang sheds its informal connotations and passes into general usage. The nature of slang presents special challenges to students of literature. An author’s use of what was a slang term a century ago may baffle modern readers unfamiliar with the term. When a “drummer” appears in Stephen Crane’s (1871–1900) “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” (1898), readers in the early twenty-first century might visualize a musician rather than the salesman denoted by the term then. Similarly, readers might be shocked by the frequent references to “making love” in literature of the period if they are not aware that the phrase simply meant flirting or courting. In other cases, the author’s intention to convey informality may be missed because the former slang term has achieved wider currency. Consider, for example, Twain’s labeling of “You bet!” as Nevada slang in Roughing It. Closely connected to slang is jargon, the specialized vocabulary of a given profession. Medicine, the military, and the law are fields well known for terminology that can be impenetrable to outsiders. Twain provides several examples of mining jargon in Roughing It (e.g., “wildcat claim,” “foot,” “flume,” “salting a claim”). The boundary between slang and jargon is often unclear. Consider, for example, the vocabulary of professional baseball as seen in the work of Ring Lardner (1885–1933). Items such as “bunt” and “strike” are clearly jargon while a usage like “pill” for “ball” is perhaps better termed slang, but what of “fungoes” (flyballs hit for fielding practice)? Also in the borderland between slang and jargon lies the vocabulary of the underworld often called
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SOCIAL DARWINISM
cant. The cant of criminals is a particularly fruitful and fascinating lexical arena that remains, by design, largely opaque to outsiders. For example, Allan Pinkerton (1819–1884) in Thirty Years a Detective (1886) discusses the pickpocket’s technique of “reefing,” the process of gradually drawing up a pocketbook. Another cant term, “gat,” for “revolver,” is noted by A. H. Lewis, who offers the definition “Gatts is East Sidese for pistols” in Apaches of New York (1914). This word, a shortening from “Gatling gun,” may have inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald in naming his title character in The Great Gatsby (1896–1940). H. L. Mencken offers several other real-life examples of underworld vocabulary in The American Language (1919, 1936), and the numerous citations included there indicate the great interest this topic aroused in the general and scholarly press early in the twentieth century. In particular, the literature of 1870–1920 illustrates how marked language can serve as a powerful tool for bringing characters and settings to life. Authors like those exemplified here took seriously the use of this device and often displayed remarkable sensitivity to “nonliterary” language. Unraveling the way such marked language was constructed can add depth to our understanding of this literature as well as greater appreciation for its creation. See also Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Humor; A New England Nun and Other Stories; Oratory; Regionalism and Local Color Fiction; Short Story BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Freeman, Mary Wilkins. “A Church Mouse.” In her A New England Nun and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891. Howells, William Dean. Their Wedding Journey. 1872. Edited by John K. Reeves. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. Mencken, H. L. The American Language. 1919. 4th ed. New York: Knopf, 1936. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885. Secondary Works
Carkeet, David. “The Dialects in Huckleberry Finn.” American Literature 51 (1979): 315–332. Ives, Sumner. “A Theory of Literary Dialect.” Tulane Studies in English 2 (1950): 137–182. Reprinted in A Various Language: Perspectives on American Dialects, edited by Juanita V. Williamson and Virginia M. Burke, pp. 145– 177. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. American English: Dialects and Variation. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998. Matthew J. Gordon
SOCIAL DARWINISM Social Darwinism is the theory that individual human beings, social groups, and entire ethnic groups are subject in their societies to the same laws of natural selection that govern the survival and evolution of plants and animals in nature. Just as natural selection eliminates weak, sick, impaired, and maladapted individuals of plant and animal species, so it weeds out weak people and races. Social Darwinism is most closely associated with Herbert Spencer, a biologist, sociologist, and philosopher born in England on 27 April 1820, at the height of British industrialism. Although a sickly child and often a physically and mentally frail adult, Herbert Spencer was the only one of nine children to survive infancy. Schooled at home, Spencer would eventually spend ten years as a railroad engineer, during which time he began writing in his free hours. With a particular aptitude for science and math, Spencer’s intelligent and inquisitive nature would land him in the company of many nineteenthcentury intellectuals, and for some time he was engaged to the Victorian writer George Eliot (1819– 1880), author of The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch. Spencer’s intense interest in human behavior focused on elements that comprise any society, including family structure and reproduction, language, education, labor, economic success, political organization, morality, and artistic expression. Early in his career he attempted to explain the natural historic progression of social organization from the individual human being to the family unit, the clan affiliation, the tribal association, and the national identity. Spencer argued that in their natural progression from simple familial units to complex groups, social organizations, like all organisms, become increasingly complicated and therefore are forced to reform not simply by affiliation but by function. For Spencer it logically followed that as social structures become more complex and functionally organized, class hierarchies will form and reform over time, valuing some functions more highly than others. Spencer also saw one crucial difference between social organisms and biological ones: while parts of a biological organism form a unified and concrete whole, different social organisms are free and relatively dispersed. While parts of a biological organism exist to benefit the
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1055
SOCIAL DARWINISM
Herbert Spencer. A biologist, philosopher, and rival of Charles Darwin, Spencer developed a doctrine of social evolution. GETTY IMAGES
whole, Spencer argued that the whole social organism exists for the benefit of the individual. Because Spencer’s primary theoretical premise was that all things progress toward a synthetic and functional organization, the British philosopher’s ideas, which became far more popular and influential in the United States than in England, covered many scientific and sociological areas that he felt interacted dynamically. Moreover, his “Development Hypothesis” (1852) argues, as implied above, in favor of an evolutionary explanation for human development preceding Charles Darwin’s own evolutionary text (On the Origin of Species, 1859) by seven years. The “Development Hypothesis” was instrumental in presenting Spencer’s evolutionary explanation for human development, but its basis in the ideology of inheritance outlined by the early French evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), which holds that individuals change and adapt to their physical surroundings and that this adaptation passes to their offspring, makes it a dated and obsolete text. Spencer’s related essay, “A Theory of Population, Deduced from the General Law of Animal Fertility,” also published in 1852, would prove instru-
1056
A M E R I C A N
mental in the formation of new ideas regarding economic success and social expectations in Europe and even more sweepingly in America. This essay argues that people who invest less energy into reproduction and more into education ultimately prove more economically and socially successful than those who produce more offspring. Consequently those families with fewer and more educated and refined children become the “select” citizens of their generation while those families who produce more prodigiously land squarely at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. This application of the evolutionary process to social organization comprises the essence of Social Darwinism. Spencer was articulating the facts as he saw them, placing no blame on the poor and uneducated for failure to restrict reproduction and therefore become more economically and socially successful. However, a type of cultural primitivism and economic inferiority stigmatized the large poor family, particularly when Spencer’s ideas were embraced by an increasingly wealthy and capitalistic American audience. Effectively the misinterpretation and misapplication of Spencer’s evolutionary theories in the form of American Social Darwinism often resulted in the increased misery of the very individuals the sociologist wished to assist. Even as Spencer advocated the abolition of the poor laws in Britain, his theories of success and social selectivity (as in “survival of the fittest”) were being used in America to support the eugenics movement that wished to limit the rights of the poor, the immigrant, and the mentally and physically infirm in order for America to progress more rapidly into a civilized and economically successful society. CHARLES DAVENPORT AND AMERICAN EUGENICS
While many were involved in popularizing ideas about inherited genetic traits, human evolution and progress, and the close association of genetics and behavior, few were more important than the American zoologist Charles Davenport (1866–1944). Davenport was another curious intellect whose interests spanned the entirety of human society. His early biological focus was human evolution, and he spent the first years of his scientific career tracing human characteristics through genealogical surveys of virtually everyone he met. Although Davenport’s initial premise was that most physical and psychological traits could be attributed to inheritance, his notions of nationality complicated his theory. Like many of his scientific predecessors and peers, Davenport disfavored individuals whose bloodlines originated in eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. His basis for attributing negative behaviors and characteristics to these groups was a
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SOCIAL DARWINISM
quantitative survey of the populations of asylums, penitentiaries, and ghettos, as well as his own personal surveys. This data was compiled and analyzed by Davenport after he helped establish a eugenics laboratory, the Station for Experimental Evolution, at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, in 1904 with the funding of the Carnegie Institution. While Davenport had a keen mind, he seemingly did not recognize the shortcomings of his scientific processes and data. Although his accumulation of quantitative information proved helpful in calculating rates of genetic variation, his attribution of amorality and criminality to those of foreign birth or lower class origins was evidence of his failure to prevent philosophy and ethnocentricity from entering his laboratory. For instance, he “believed that the influx of people from southeastern Europe would make Americans darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, . . . more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality” (Caudill, p. 105). Unfortunately the scientific community and the public shared Davenport’s shortsightedness regarding his findings. Drawing upon the work of the Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel, Davenport used Experiments with Plant Hybrids (1866), with its insistence on environmental influences on plant behavior and their subsequent impact on plant offspring, as corroboration of his own findings regarding environmental impact on humans and their offspring. Davenport’s incorporation of Mendelian genetics and theories of inheritance in tandem with his misinterpretation of Spencerian Social Darwinism laid the groundwork for the American sociologist’s arguments against immigration and in favor of the sterilization of the physically and mentally infirm and the lobotomization of the criminally insane. His shallowly researched scientific arguments formed the foundation for the eugenics movement in America and went unchallenged for decades. The scientific association between “bad blood” and criminal behavior, mental inferiority, insanity, and amorality paved the way for legislation limiting the rights of minorities, immigrants, convicts, and the infirm and was likewise responsible for the government’s policies regarding adoption. It also inspired the imagination of a public increasingly interested in evolving into the most prosperous and civilized society on Earth. Inaccuracies, prejudices, and personal preferences would govern the eugenics movement and the beliefs, however faulty, of much of the American public about ethnicity, inherited genetic traits, and human behavior well into the twentieth century. A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
SOCIAL DARWINISM AND THE ECONOMICS OF HENRY GEORGE
While numerous ideas inspired by Spencer’s Social Darwinism resulted in negative experiences for American minorities, not everyone who read Spencer’s theories applied or interpreted them so pessimistically. Some social scientists, philosophers, and cultural critics viewed Spencer’s ideas as new ways to approach and ultimately eradicate old social problems, which was ostensibly Spencer’s purpose. One such optimistic cultural voice was the journalist and political economist Henry George (1839–1897), who asserted that social and economic evolution could be achieved through a restructured economy based on a single governing tax. George’s essay “That We Might All Be Rich,” published in 1883, argued that there was no need for poverty to persist. George outlined basic human needs and desires and explained how fair distribution of goods and services, accompanied by fair taxation, would instigate an economy that could provide for all. While many who read George’s ideas regarded the possible eradication of poverty as utopian, there were some who shared his desire for and belief in a more egalitarian social order in America. Among these economic progressivists was the American realist Hamlin Garland (1860–1940), whose story “Under the Lion’s Paw” from Main-Travelled Roads (1891) illustrates the struggle of small individual farms faced with ruthless land speculators and rural hardship. Garland’s fictional text undermines the pastoral myth of rural life and demonstrates the need for a more equitable social and economic order in which the enterprise of hardworking farmers would be rewarded. WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS AND AMERICAN REALISM
While Garland was inspired by a desire for social and economic change, other writers focused more on simply observing American life, and this observation was often done through a Social Darwinian lens. Perhaps the most important of these American realists was William Dean Howells (1837–1920), whose prolific works document late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century life in scrupulous detail. In 1865 Howells took a position as assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. While in this position and later as editor he began to exercise great influence on American taste in literature and culture by including works in the Atlantic by Mark Twain, Henry James, and other realists. As editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Howells also helped to introduce numerous European writers and thinkers to American readers, most prominently the French journalist, novelist, and critic Émile Zola (1840– 1902), whose naturalistic fiction often condemned
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1057
SOCIAL DARWINISM
Victorian cultural values. Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels (1871–1893) portrays the struggles of the Parisian poor, prostitution, and the depravity and injustice rife within the mining industry. Interestingly, while Howells asserted the importance of Zola’s absolute realism in his portrayal of Victorian life, the American critic avoided sordid and explicit scenes in his own works. In fact in his collection of articles on American fiction and culture Howells argued that the presence of detailed scenes of depravity and sexuality had no place in American realism as they would detract from more important thematic elements. Howells’s criticism of graphic depravity in works of fiction illustrates the conflicted nature of his relationship with Social Darwinism and other late-nineteenthcentury social theories. Even as Howells strove mightily to represent reality as he saw it and to advocate reality in the fiction of his contemporaries, his Victorian sensibilities insisted on propriety and etiquette. While he recognized and appreciated the vulgarity that often accompanied everyday life and its habits, he felt strongly that depravity, like purity, was not the norm of American life; far more commonplace were work, courtship, marriage, birth, and death. Howells also agreed that humans were evolving into a more civilized and socially cultured species that engaged less and less in “low living.” Realists should concern themselves therefore with observing more consistent elements of social behaviors, as Howells did, such as ritualized courtship and marriage (Their Wedding Journey, 1872; A Chance Acquaintance, 1873), the focus on and consequence of accumulating wealth (The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885; A Hazard of New Fortunes, 1889), and the increasing social problems related to divorce (A Modern Instance, 1882). Virtually all of Howells’s thirty-eight novels turned his keenly observant eye to the evolving social scene in America; these works, along with more than sixty other books in varying genres both chronicled and influenced American life. HAROLD FREDERIC AND THE DAMNATION OF THERON WARE
While less prolific and influential than Howells, the American journalist and fiction writer Harold Frederic (1856–1898) was certainly influenced by contemporary theories such as Social Darwinism as evidenced by the topical nature of many of his fictional plots. Although he wrote numerous novels and over 1,500 newspaper articles, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) was considered to be his masterpiece. Inspired initially by the conflict Frederic noted between Irish Catholics and Protestants, the novel ultimately questions the tenets of both organized religion and science
1058
A M E R I C A N
as its main character seeks solace in an idealized work that does not exist. Instead Theron Ware realizes too late that the world around him is often hostile, squalid, and tragic. SOCIAL DARWINISM AND THE ISSUE OF RACE
One issue tied inextricably to the Spencerian concepts at the heart of Social Darwinism is that of race equality, yet it is an issue too often absent from the texts of many American writers. Ironically, many realists, insistent as they were that fiction should reflect real life, omitted virtually any discussion of race except as a peripheral element of their plots. However, occupying a rather solitary position in late-nineteenth-century fiction, stood Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932), the educated, financially successful, and professionally developed African American author whose best-known work is the collection of short stories The Conjure Woman (1899). The stories reflect the influence of African American folktales, songs, and trickster stories and use dialect and other devices to depict a realistic vision. While Chesnutt’s short stories are still popular, less well known are his novels, which more clearly articulate his desire for racial equality and widespread opportunities for African Americans. At the heart of Chesnutt’s novels The House behind the Cedars (1900), a text addressing the need felt by many African Americans to “pass” as white, and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), inspired by the Wilmington, North Carolina, race riot of 1898, are the same Georgian economic principles extracted from Spencer’s evolutionary theories. Although nearly forgotten today, these novels of Chesnutt’s were the most dynamic works of fiction that had then been undertaken by an African American writer. SOCIAL DARWINISM AND THE ROLE OF MOTHER
When Henry George articulated his economic theory, based as it was on Spencerian evolution, many writers began to address the role of women and their contribution to economic prosperity in the form of home labor. No one presented this concept more vividly for an American audience than Mary Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930) in her superb short story “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” from A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). In the story Freeman’s long-suffering “Mother” finally takes a stand against her hardworking but selfabsorbed husband, “Father.” After forty years of being promised a new home, the neglected Sarah Penn moves her children and belongings into the beautiful new barn that her husband builds in the place that he so long assured her the new house would be.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SOCIAL DARWINISM
At once meek and devoted yet canny and selfassured, Sarah sees how women have been restricted, repressed, and impaired. While her husband daily leads a full, prosperous, and satisfying life, she is less valued than the horses. She tells her daughter, “You ain’t found out yet we’re women-folks. . . . You ain’t seen enough of men-folks yet.” Then she adds ironically,
young and naive American faced with the old and sophisticated European. This theme reflects James’s ideas of essential national characters. Europe was old, cynical, highly structured, and politically divided, whereas America was young, optimistic, progressive, and united. The cultural difference was vast and led to fascinating fictional possibilities.
One of these days you’ll find it out, an’ then you’ll know that we know only what men-folks think we do, so far as any use of it goes, an’ how we’d ought to reckon men-folks in with Providence, an’ not complain of what they do any more than we do of the weather. (Pp. 123–124)
The novel that perhaps most clearly addresses the cultural naïveté of the nouveau riche American in Europe is The Portrait of a Lady (1881), in which the main character, Isabel Archer, gains sudden wealth from an unexpected inheritance. As was common for marriageable women, the socially conscious Isabel travels to Europe where she is duped into marrying a middle-aged man by an older and much wiser woman, Madame Merle. Forsaking love for social gain, Isabel becomes the prototype for the class-conscious and upwardly mobile American woman. Like other works by James, such as Daisy Miller (1878), The Bostonians (1886), The Wings of the Dove (1902), and The Ambassadors (1903), The Portrait of a Lady presents a tangled web of social expectations, financial obligations, family ties, economic success, and personal happiness. Marriage, from James’s viewpoint, appears to be more a form of strategic positioning than a step toward personal fulfillment. Also worthy of note is the relative absence of children in the Jamesian novel; while numerous characters have one child, very few have more. This fact alone seems to support James’s incorporation of Spencer’s economic hypothesis regarding population and financial success; and the relative absence of children in the novels of numerous writers is a lasting reminder of Social Darwinism’s important influence on American fiction.
Perhaps because it is written with such wry good humor, Freeman’s story is often overlooked as an important portrayal of the oppressed and repressed condition of women alongside the economic value of their work. Unlike Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860– 1935) did not rely on Henry George’s economic schema; instead in 1898 she published her own, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, which demonstrates how the economic dominance of men and the restriction of women to domestic labors had impaired not only the social evolution of women but of society in general. Because men alone had been the thinkers, artists, inventors, scientists, politicians, and businesspeople, all of these realms had been deprived of the skills, ideas, and personalities of at least half the members of the species. Although primarily known for her story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), in which the main character is physically restrained and prevented from writing by her husband following the birth of their child, Gilman’s economic treatise is considered her masterwork; it informed all of her later writing and is still cited as an important contribution to the women’s movement. Gilman’s utopian novel Herland (1915) might be viewed as a kind of wish fulfillment that envisions a society devoid of men where the environment is pristine, the customs simple, and the people moral, peaceful, and productive. HENRY JAMES AND LIFE ABROAD
Like Howells and other American realists, Henry James (1843–1916) chronicled the behavior and values of nineteenth-century society; however, unlike his American contemporaries, James set many of his novels in Europe, where he lived for many years. With their detailed accounts of manners, courtship, intrigue, and social climbing, James’s novels are among the most popular and widely read works in the American canon. Often at the heart of his early stories is the A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
The fascinating rise of scientific theory, social science, philosophy, and progressivism known as Social Darwinism had great impact on all of the arts, but it is most obvious and easily recognizable in the literary works of American realism, saturated as they are with social and economic observation and commentary. The texts of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Hamlin Garland, Harold Frederic, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Mary Wilkins Freeman provide a few examples of literature’s response to this persistent trend in American thought and culture. It is safe to claim that most works of fiction created in America between 1870 and 1920 were influenced, to varying degrees, by the evolutionary principles articulated by Herbert Spencer and others who gave voice to the turbulent and dynamic culture of a rising world power. See also The Conjure Woman; Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce; Darwinism; Feminism; MainTravelled Roads; The Marrow of Tradition; A
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1059
SOCIALISM
New England Nun and Other Stories; The Portrait of a Lady; Realism; Reform; Scientific Materialism; Success; Wealth; “The Yellow Wall-Paper”
SOCIALIST COMMUNITIES Friendship Community, Mississippi, 1872–1877 Bennett Cooperative Colony, Mississippi, 1873–1877 Social Freedom Community, Virginia, 1874–1880 Hays City Danish Colony, Kansas, 1877 Mutual Aid Community, Mississippi, 1883–1887 Kaweah Cooperative Commonwealth, California, 1885–1922 Cooperative Brotherhood, California, 1893–1898 Hiawatha Village Association, Michigan 1893–1896 Altruria, California, 1894–1895 Ruskin Cooperative Association, Tennessee, 1894–1899 Home Employment Cooperative Colony, Mississippi, 1894–1906 Christian Corporation, Nebraska, 1896–1897 Freedom Colony, Vermont 1897–1905 Equality, Washington, 1897–1907 Cooperative Brotherhood, Washington, 1898–1908 Ruskin Commonwealth, Georgia, 1899–1901 Friedheim, Virginia, 1899–1906 Niksur Cooperative Association, Minnesota, 1899–1899 Kinder Lou, Georgia, 1900–1901 Freeland Association, Washington, 1900–1906 Southern Cooperative Association, Florida, 1900–1904 Helicon Hall, New Jersey, 1906–1907 Fruit Crest, Missouri, 1911–1912 Llano del Rio Company, California, 1914–1918 Army of Industry, California, 1914–1918 Llano del Rio Company, Nevada, 1916–1918 Newllano Cooperative Colony, Louisiana, 1917–1938
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1879. Reprint, London: Penguin Books, 2004. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. 1859. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins. A New England Nun and Other Stories. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891. First published under the name Mary E. Wilkins. Reprinted in A Mary Wilkins Freeman Reader, edited by Mary R. Reichardt, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Spencer, Herbert. “Developmental Hypothesis.” Essay Scientific, Political and Speculative. London: Williams and Norgate, 1891. Secondary Works
Caudill, Edward. “Social Darwinism: Adapting Evolution to Society.” In his Darwinian Myths: The Legends and Misuses of a Theory. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997. Fleming, Donald. “Social Darwinism.” In Paths of American Thought, edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Morton White. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Gowaty, Patricia, ed. Feminism and Evolutionary Biology: Boundaries, Intersections, and Frontiers. New York: Chapman and Hall, 1997. Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Rev. ed. New York: Braziller, 1959. Young, H. Peyton. Individual Strategy and Social Structure: An Evolutionary Theory of Institutions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Deirdre Ray
Brian J. Berry, America’s Utopian Experiments: Communal Havens from Long-Wave Crises, p. 165.
SOCIALISM Socialism had its roots in the social and economic changes wrought by the rapidly increasing industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. As factory owners became increasingly wealthy and workers grew impoverished, many workers sought a more-collective and less-competitive organization of the means of production and distribution of goods. Whether grounded in the theories of Robert Owen (1771–1858), Charles Fourier (1772– 1837), Karl Marx (1818–1883), or homegrown socialists, America in the period of 1870 to 1920 saw an increasing—and increasingly diverse—array of
1060
A M E R I C A N
socialist movements, which strongly affected American politics, economics, and culture. SOCIALIST ORGANIZATIONS
In October 1883 delegates from a number of American socialist groups, comprised mostly of recent immigrants, gathered in Pittsburgh to form the International Working People’s Association (IWPA).
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SOCIALISM
Their “manifesto” proclaimed opposition to capitalism and promotion of Marxist revolution. Page Smith gauges the effects of the International Working People’s Association, which he says did not result in a mass movement but did spread some of its ideas through the more radical elements of the labor movement (p. 234). In subsequent years the IWPA sponsored meetings and published journals. Less militant and radical was the International Workingmen’s Association, formed in San Francisco in 1881 and devoted to education and self-help; they called for a “scientific system of governmental co-operation of the working-people” (Smith, p. 235). In 1877 the Workingmen’s Party changed its name to the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), and by the end of 1879 it had a membership of ten thousand people. The party’s hopes quickly faded, however, as economic conditions improved; membership dipped to fifteen hundred in the early 1880s when the “Black International,” the anarchist wing of the SLP, split off. Events of 1886, though, occasioned gains for the SLP, which supported Henry George for mayor of New York. His loss led to yet another split in 1888. Daniel De Leon reinvigorated the SLP, which through his efforts nominated a candidate for president in 1892 who received twenty-one thousand votes. Yet De Leon’s leadership led to a split in 1899 when Morris Hillquit, Job Harriman, and Eugene V. Debs formed the Socialist Party. Debs, who had risen to prominence in the Pullman strike of 1894 and who helped form the Social Democratic Party in 1897, was the most popular of the Socialist Party leaders and its nominee for president most years from 1900 to 1920. He presided over what Daniel Bell in Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952) calls “the ‘golden age’ of American Socialism” (p. 55), 1902 through 1912. In Socialism and America (1977) Irving Howe says that Debs’s brand of socialism was very attractive to many workers in that it offered solidarity and tolerance to a wide variety of groups, from strikers to farmers to miners (pp. 18–19). Debs’s popularity as a presidential candidate is indicative of the Socialist Party’s success in the first decades of the century: he received 96,000 votes in 1900; 402,000 in 1904; 875,000 in 1912; and even 920,000 in 1920 while in prison for sedition. Having a more openly and concertedly socialist agenda than many other socialist organizations was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, the “Wobblies”), founded in Chicago in 1905. Its members included the Western Federation of Miners and the more revolutionary elements of the labor movement and were led by William D. (“Big Bill”) Haywood, Debs, Thomas J. Hagerty, and De Leon. The central purpose of the IWW was to unite all workers, skilled and unskilled; as A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Debs said at the founding convention, “Without solidarity nothing is possible . . . with it nothing is impossible.” By 1906, however, the IWW was split between a faction focusing on unionism and one calling for more radical practices. This feud was compounded by events of 1905 and 1906, when Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg was assassinated by a bomb and Haywood and others were dragged to Idaho and tried. The Western Federation withdrew from the IWW, and subsequent conferences of the organization saw a decline in socialist involvement. Bell indicates that the IWW eventually became an organization of unskilled workers, a transformation completed in 1908 with the ouster of De Leon (p. 68). De Leon formed the Detroit faction of the IWW, while Haywood and Vincent St. John formed the Chicago IWW, promoting sabotage and other direct action. SOCIALIST THEORIES
Robert V. Hine outlines the various communitarian experiments of the last half of the nineteenth century and shows the rise of the Social Gospel and Christian socialism (Berry, p. 139). Brian J. Berry discusses the former movement as focused on planning as a means of social justice; its most prominent minister was Rev. Washington Gladden (1836–1918). In The Working People and Their Employers (1876) he summarizes his view of history as follows: “The subjugation of labor by capital is the first stage in the progress of industry; the second stage is the warfare between capital and labor; the third is the identification of labor and capital by some application of the principle of cooperation” (Cort, p. 227). Boston, the center of much Christian socialism, was the site of the founding of the Christian Labor Union in 1872 by Rev. Jesse James, who edited the monthly Equity from 1874 to 1875 and the LaborBalance from 1877 to 1879. The Christian Labor Union advocated mutual benefit societies, support of unions by churches, and an economic system based on labor. Other Christian organizations included the Society of Christian Socialists, which was founded in 1889 and which published the journal the Dawn from 1889 to 1896, and the Christian Social Union, which was founded in 1890. Another advocate of Christian socialism was Richard T. Ely (1854–1943), one of the leading economists of the period. A professor at Wisconsin and Johns Hopkins, Ely based his socialism, which included public ownership of monopolies, on the New Testament’s emphasis on caring for the poor. The controversial (due to his views on sexuality) minister Edward Ellis edited the Christian Socialist from 1905 to 1922. He was, as John C. Cort says in Christian Socialism (1988), a major figure in Christian socialism, one whom the Socialist Party sponsored on
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1061
SOCIALISM
a number of lecture tours (p. 241). Flourishing particularly during the Third Great Awakening of the 1890s, Christian socialism spawned a number of utopian communities across the nation—twenty-four in the period from 1875 to 1920. Secular communes also flourished during this period, connecting socialism to such diverse beliefs as free love, vegetarianism, spiritualism, feminism, and celibacy. Utopian communities also arose out of the “Scientific Socialism” movement, particularly as responses to economic crises of the 1870s, 1890s, and 1907. For example, between 1893 and World War I twentyone socialist communities were established, the most significant of which was likely the Ruskin Colony, founded in 1894 in Tennessee by Julius A. Wayland (1854–1912). Berry traces the development of the Ruskin Cooperative Association, which gave some Americans hopes that a viable communal life could be an answer to the growing problems of urbanization and industrialization. However, with an increased population, the usual quarrels and splits set in, and Ruskin ended in 1899. Berry speculates about “An Epidemic of Socialism?” and concludes: “Having rejected politics, government, and other institutions of society, many reformers adopted some form of cooperative organization as their instrument of change, with the hope that by forming one successful cooperative community they could begin the conversion of a troubled world. Each community viewed itself as instruments of broader social and economic change” (p. 161). Henry George’s Progress and Poverty (1879) argued that rent was the major cause of poverty. Daniel Bell summarizes George’s proposal as based upon the concept that natural and social reasons were the basis of the value of land; therefore, no individual should profit from it. Instead, George favored a single tax as the land’s full rental value, which he thought would lead to more productive use. George’s single tax ideas, which can be traced back to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s Communist Manifesto (1848), were popular during the turbulent 1880s. In 1886 the Central Labor Union of New York nominated George for mayor. Incorporating the theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer into their mainly Marxist ideology, many evolutionary socialists of the period were faced with serious contradiction between progressive and revolutionary aims. Mark Pittenger says that “very few Gilded Age socialist evolutionists would join the Socialist Party after its founding” (p. 10). Into the twentieth century more vigorous debates over the possibility of reconciling socialism and evolutionism were held by A. M. Simons, Ernest Untermann, Arthur M. Lewis, and Robert Rives La Monte, whose scientific
1062
A M E R I C A N
socialist theories were highly sophisticated (Pittenger, p. 11). For example, Lewis, working-class and selfeducated, wrote several volumes—most notably Evolution Social and Organic (1908)—that popularized the idea that the sciences could be effectively used by socialists. Pittenger indicates that Lewis’s significance resulted from his effectiveness in conveying complex socialist theories to the working classes (p. 143). SOCIALIST LITERATURE
Much of the socialist theories were disseminated by the plethora of newspapers and magazines devoted to the cause. The Massachusetts Episcopalian minister W. D. P. Bliss became interested in the publications of the British Fabians and formed the Fabian Society of Boston and its magazine the American Fabian in 1895. In it Bliss called for a league of Fabian Societies, which, as Howard H. Quint says in The Forging of American Socialism (1953), aimed to bring together those socialists committed to gradualism, forming a genuinely American version of socialism (p. 121). The journal continued until 1900, directed mainly at the middle class. One of the most effective socialist propagandists was Julius Augustus Wayland, “the One Hoss Editor.” Through his weekly newspapers, the Coming Nation (Greensburg, Indiana, and Ruskin, Tennessee) and Appeal to Reason (Girard, Kansas), Wayland gained a national audience from the 1890s until his death in 1919. In them Wayland promoted what Quint calls “grass roots socialism,” which was generally unconcerned with theoretical consistency but was persuasive in spreading the doctrine of the cooperative commonwealth (p. 209). Also influential was the Masses, which, according to Christine Stansell in American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (2000), blended socialism with the ideas of the bohemian avant-garde of Greenwich Village (p. 166). Beginning in 1911 under the editor Piet Vlag, the journal was a conventional socialist outlet until Max Eastman took over in 1912, when it became more of a feminist and modernist magazine, though retaining its leftist politics, which led to its suppression by the postal authorities in 1917. Summing up these developments, Morris Hillquit’s History of Socialism in the United States (1903) aimed to provide a thorough and complete account of the rise of socialism in the nineteenth century and its place in turn-of-the-century America. The IWW published six newspapers, the most enduring of which were Solidarity (1909–1917) and the Industrial Worker (1909–1913). Wobbly songs, gathered in the Little Red Songbook: Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent (1909), also helped to popularize the organization. The songwriter Joe Hill (born
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SOCIALISM
Joseph Emmanuel Haaglund) was the most famous of the Wobbly singers from the time of his immigration in 1902 until his controversial execution in Utah in 1915. Called “the hobo’s poet laureate,” Hill promoted through his verse the IWW’s call for solidarity and direct action. One of the most visible of the IWW’s literary enterprises was the 7 June 1913 Paterson Strike Pageant, organized by Haywood along with Mabel Dodge, John Reed, Walter Lippman, and Joan Sloan. The pageant, held to support and help striking workers in the Paterson, New Jersey, textile mills, included poems, songs, essays, and dramatic performances. According to Martin Green in New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant, the participants “had cast a new truth and a strong demand in the teeth of Manhattan: a truth of class conflict and a demand for radical change, which contradicted the pleasant halftruths of the politicians, theaters, and newspapers of the establishment” (p. 203). Perhaps the most influential socialist work of the period is Edward Bellamy’s (1850–1898) utopian fantasy Looking Backward 2000–1887 (1888), which presents an essentially socialist—though Bellamy terms it “nationalist”—vision of the future. His narrator, Julian West, falls into a coma in 1887 and awakes in 2000. Guided by Dr. Leete, West learns that the trusts have been consolidated and nationalized and the “national organization of labor under one direction” (p. 57) has solved the labor problems of the nineteenth century. Every citizen has a period of “industrial service” from age twenty-one to forty-five. What the service is depends on “natural endowments,” but the administration constantly seeks to equalize the trades and insure that all work is equivalent. In addition to his portrayal of the utopia, Bellamy, through his narrator’s recollections, gives a thorough critique of the social ills of 1880s America. Other writers also promoted socialism through utopian novels. William Dean Howells’s (1837– 1920) A Traveler from Altruria (1894) is structured around conversations among the narrator and others with Mr. Homos, an Altrurian whose socialist utopia is sharply contrasted with conditions in America. Mr. Homos tells the others, “We have found that it is human nature to work cheerfully, willingly, eagerly, at the tasks which all share for the supply of common necessities. . . . It is nowise possible for the individual to separate his good from the common good” (pp. 196– 197). Howells’s more conventional novels Annie Kilburn (1889) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) also take up socialist themes. In the former the title character works to implement a Social Union for factory workers, whereas the latter portrays the socialist Lindau and the violence A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
In his chapter “The Philomaths” (a club), Jack London presents a sustained argument between the “Plutocrats,” primarily Colonel Van Gilbert and Mr. Wickson, and London’s hero, Ernest Everhard. The following is Everhard’s final response.
It is true that you have read history aright. It is true that labor has from the beginning of history been in the dirt. And it is equally true that so long as you and yours and those that come after you have power, that labor shall remain in the dirt. I agree with you. I agree with all that you have said. Power will be the arbiter, as it always has been the arbiter. It is a struggle of classes. Just as your class dragged down the old feudal nobility, so it shall be dragged down by my class, the working class. If you will read your biology and your sociology as clearly as you do your history, you will see that this end I have described is inevitable. It does not matter it is in one year, ten, or a thousand–your class shall be dragged down. And it shall be done by power. We of the labor hosts have conned that word over till our minds are all a-tingle with it. Power. London, The Iron Heel, p. 54.
of a strike by streetcar workers. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s (1860–1935) Herland (1915) depicts a feminist utopia, where children are raised and educated by experts in early childhood development, particular talents are channeled into occupations best suited for them, and they live together communally without private property. In her earlier Women and Economics (1898) Gilman insisted that “the economic progress of the race, its maintenance at any period, its continued advance, involve the collective activities of all trades, crafts, arts, manufactures, inventions, discoveries, and all the civil and military institutions that go to maintain them” (p. 8). Socialism is a prevalent theme in much of Jack London’s (1876–1915) writing but is perhaps most fully represented in The Iron Heel (1908), a futuristic projection of the conflicts between the socialists and the capitalists beginning in 1912. The novel’s hero is Ernest Everhard, a London-like philosopher and author of Working-Class Philosopher. Besides arguing against the Plutocracy (bankers and corporate heads) with textbook Marxist theory, Everhard leads two
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1063
“SOME THOUGHTS ON THE SCIENCE OF ONANISM”
revolts against the Oligarchy, whose Iron Heel mercilessly crushes the revolutionaries. A longtime member of the Socialist Labor Party, London nevertheless had a strained relationship with it. In his resignation letter of 1916, he complains that the party has lost its “fire and fight,” while London “believed that the working class, by fighting, by never . . . making terms with the enemy, could emancipate itself ” (Letters, p. 1538). Like The Iron Heel, Upton Sinclair’s (1878–1968) The Jungle (1906) ruthlessly exposes the abuses workers were subjected to under the capitalist system. Sinclair details the life of stockyard worker Jurgis Rudkus, who experiences all of the effects of poverty, degradation, and despair, finding in the end hope through socialism. See also Anarchism; The Jungle; Labor; Poverty
Howe, Irving. Socialism and America. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1977. Johnson, Oakley C. Marxism in United States History before the Russian Revolution (1876–1917). New York: Humanities Press, 1974. Jones, Howard Mumford. The Age of Energy: Varieties of American Experience, 1865–1915. New York: Viking, 1971. Painter, Nell. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919. New York: Norton, 1987. Pittenger, Mark. American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Quint, Howard H. The Forging of American Socialism: Origins of the Modern Movement. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1953. Smith, Page. The Rise of Industrial America: A People’s History of the Post-Reconstruction Era. 1984. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward 2000–1887. 1887. New York: New American Library, 1966.
Stansell, Christine. American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Herland and Selected Stories. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1992.
John Samson
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Women and Economics. 1898. New York: Harper and Row, 1966. Howells, William Dean. A Traveler from Altruria. 1894. New York: Hill and Wang, 1957.
“SOME THOUGHTS ON THE SCIENCE OF ONANISM”
London, Jack. The Iron Heel. 1904. Ware, Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth Editions, 1966.
Mark Twain’s speech, “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism,” delivered at a gathering of the Stomach Club in Paris in the spring of 1879, masterfully blends occasion with subject matter. Largely comprised of American writers and artists, including Charles Edward Dubois, Edwin Austin Abbey, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Stomach Club was dedicated, as Twain noted, to “good times.” Twain’s speech certainly accommodated the club’s disposition. Combining extravagant puns, outlandish double entendres, comic exaggerations, and absurd attributions to historical and imaginary figures, Twain took a satirical thrust at a widespread body of contemporary writings—tracts, pamphlets, and books—committed to the eradication of the scourge of masturbation, otherwise known as self-abuse or the “solitary vice.”
London, Jack. The Letters of Jack London. 3 vols. Edited by Earle Labor, Robert C. Leitz III, and Milo I. Shepard. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988. Secondary Works
Bell, Daniel. Marxian Socialism in the United States. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Berry, Brian J. America’s Utopian Experiments: Communal Havens from Long-Wave Crises. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1992. Chambers, John Whiteclay, II. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era. 1992. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Cort, John C. Christian Socialism. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1988. Ginger, Ray. Age of Excess: The United States from 1877 to 1914. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Green, Martin. New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant. New York: Scribners, 1988. Herreshoff, David. Origins of American Marxism. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967.
1064
A M E R I C A N
In a letter written to Joseph Twichell, included in Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, Twain noted that during his 1879 visit to Paris he had had to grit his “ineffectual teeth” over the “old Masters” that his companions Livy and Clara Spalding were “worshipping.” Twain also had to endure oppressively dingy hotels during an exceptionally raw and rainy spring. Given
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
“SOME THOUGHTS ON THE SCIENCE OF ONANISM”
these conditions, Twain must have found the club’s invitation welcome indeed; it promised him an evening of congeniality with an audience prepared to savor his brand of humor that often veered toward the outré. RIDICULING THE CRUSADERS
In less than 800 words, this speech held up to ridicule most of the familiar alarms that an army of physicians, physiological reformers, ministers, and self-appointed public guardians regularly sounded and the shibboleths they evoked in an effort to terrorize mainly boys and young men into moral and physical self-governance. The literature of this whole mad crusade, combining as it did elements of moral revivalism with hucksterism and lofty exhortation with naked venality, offered Twain a fertile field for satire. The offspring in this country of Sylvester Graham’s Lecture to Young Men (c. 1833), these admonitory works included dramatic narratives that, in strident tones, traced a young man’s inevitable decline from buoyant health, capacious intellect, and ambition to physical debility, mental impairment, heightened depravity, and indolence; from home to asylum and, finally, the grave. When moral suasion or appeals to the self-abuser’s conscience failed or reminders of God’s design for His creation went unheeded, others were prepared to take charge. Entrepreneurs offered remedies gathered, purportedly, from both the primitive and civilized worlds that could allegedly deter a young man from this noxious practice and restore his depleted system to health. R. F. Young offered “The Balm of Vitality” in The Magic Wand and Medical Guide (1866), a nostrum garnered from the so-called Digger Indians of California, while Frederick Hollick in The Male Generative Organs in Health and Disease, from Infancy to Old Age (c. 1849) reassured the stricken that his agents were scouring locales ranging from Arabia to the Andes for a cure. Judging from this literature, most nostrums benefited considerably from an added dose of chemicals from Germany. As John S. Haller Jr. and Robin Haller show in The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America, those entrepreneurs with a more mechanical turn of mind proffered grotesque restraining devices—rings, pressing blocks of wood, bands with spikes, pads, and galvanic battery-operated girdles. It is against such a background that Twain delivered “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism.” Not only did this crusade offer rich comic possibilities, but it offered him an opportunity to exercise what he felt was humor’s most valuable office, that of exposing, as Young Satan says in Twain’s novella The Chronicle of Young Satan (1922), “the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
at them destroy them. . . . [O]nly Laughter can blow it [‘a colossal humbug’] to rags and atoms at a blast” (Gibson, pp. 165–166). “Some Thoughts” can be viewed as Twain’s own modest detonation. The speech’s very title, calling the practice of masturbation a “science,” immediately signals Twain’s satiric intent; it stands in marked contrast to the more decorous titles that the reformers used: John H. Ruttley’s Nature’s Secrets and the Secrets of Woman Revealed (1875), A. E. Youman’s Dr. Youman’s Illustrated Marriage Guide and Confidential Medical Adviser (1876), and Samuel Bayard Woodward’s Hints for the Young, In Relation to the Health of Body and Mind (1838). Twain’s title, rather, is blunt and suggests that his speech is more the by-product of casual musings than a grave exposition of a practice that was said to threaten marriage, mental acuity, buoyant health, and the soul’s salvation. Similarly, his parodic intent is evident in the labels he assigns this vice: “that species of recreation,” “this majestic diversion,” “this gentle art,” “this art,” and “this renowned science.” Gone are the dramatic euphemisms that the moral physiologists normally employed: the American Remedy Co.’s Prescription Book (1874) described this vile practice as the “Queen of the Appetites” (p. 5) and Dr. Youman’s Illustrated Marriage Guide and Confidential Medical Adviser calls it the “King of Terrors” (p. 129). The American Remedy Co.’s Prescription Book enlisted Miltonic imagery to cast temptation as a “seductive angel, but spreads its dragon wings and flies, at the completion of the foul deed, like an imp of darkness” (p. 14). S. F. Salter in Nervous Vitality: A Book for the Male Sex (1874) would have found Twain’s “gentle art” wholly inadequate, comparing masturbation rather to the power of a natural catastrophe: “Tell the hurricane to suppress its wrath before its fury is appeased; say to the thunderbolt to cease while the cloud is yet filled with electricity” (p. 10). QUOTING THE EXPERTS
Twain also holds up for ridicule the familiar tactic that the reformers deployed—that of liberally sprinkling their texts with quotations attributed to a host of pitiless authorities—from ancient Greeks such as Galen, Hippocrates, and Pythagoras to modern authorities that usually included a rather severe national trinity composed of Germans, French, and English. For instance, we learn from Hippocrates, via Archibald Adams in Male Sexual Health (1898), that “the seed of the man arises from all the humours of his body, and is the most valuable part of them. . . . When a person loses his seed, he loses his vital spirit” (pp. 24–25). The American Remedy Co.’s Prescription Book cites a multicultural panoply of authorities. The English Reverend
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1065
“SOME THOUGHTS ON THE SCIENCE OF ONANISM”
Adam Clarke unequivocally declared masturbation several degrees worse than common whoredom. A French student of mental disease was said to have determined that “masturbation . . . [is] the cause of insanity” (p. 5) and that “cretins, idiots and individuals in a state of dementia abandon themselves to it with a sort of fury” (p. 26). A German, Dr. Van der Kolk, similarly concluded: “When we observe in a young man a peculiar shyness, a downcast look . . . to which stupidity, strange prejudice, and weakening of the thinking powers become annexed, then must we ever think of this deplorable vice” (p. 5). References to studies by the likes of Samuel A. Tissot, Sir William Ellis, Samuel B. Woodward, and Dr. William Bell, among others, appear repeatedly in these works. Pretending to no less respect for learning or deference to authority, Twain similarly (mis)quotes the purported findings of authorities, indiscriminately mixing the names of the high and mighty with the low and obscure, the historically famous—Solomon, Caesar, and Brigham Young—with the fictionally absurd— Robinson Crusoe. His tone is also scandalously bawdy. For instance, we are led to believe that Caesar philosophically asserted in his Commentaries that “to the lonely it [masturbation] is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and the impotent it is a benefactor” (“Some Thoughts,” p. 125). Solomon, however, was less enthusiastic about this practice, wisely observing that “there is nothing to recommend it but its cheapness” (p. 126). Brigham Young, an “incontestable authority” given his multiple wives, shared Solomon’s reservations: “As compared to the other thing, it is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning” (p. 126). Queen Elizabeth, however, found it useful as “the bulwark of virginity,” as did Benjamin Franklin who declared it “the mother of invention.” Galen, however, thoroughly disapproved: “It is shameful to degrade to such bestial use that grand limb, that formidable member, which we votaries of science dub the ‘Major Maxillary’. . . . It would be better to decapitate the Major than to use him so” (p. 126). “EXESSIVE INDULGENCE” AND THE ARTIST
Some purity crusaders would have made those with an aesthetic predisposition—the very audience Twain was addressing—particular targets of their scrutiny. In a passage quoted in Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America, Luther V. Bell avers that “the imagination runs riot; day dreams . . . involving especially the sensual, usurp the place of the practical and common sense views of things” (p. 104). Russell T. Trall, also quoted by Horowitz, resurrected the old chestnut about the dangers of novel reading; he
1066
A M E R I C A N
censured, particularly, “fictitious writings, specially addressed to the amative propensity, full of lewd images, impure conceptions, and lust-engendering” situations (p. 121). Victims of their own artistic bent were as easy to spot, so John H. Ruttley claims, as the striped pole outside a barber shop; shunning the company of others, they turn inward, gradually wearing a sneaking expression or a permanently stupid look. S. F. Salter observed that the hardened masturbator is notorious for talking to himself in his solitary retirement, laughing much and frequently. For Salter, the addicted masturbator was easy to spot: “He will feel meanly and act as though he had plundered a hen roost.” Twain’s own list of incriminating evidences stands in sharp contrast: “The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pasttime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories—and, mainly, a yearning to paint pictures,” the latter a friendly gibe, most likely at Edwin Austin Abbey. Given the nature of the audience and the evening’s program of entertainment, Twain here enjoyed a dispensation denied him a year and a half earlier when he tried a similar effect before a banquet of Boston’s literary Brahmins gathered to celebrate John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday. Included among the after-dinner speakers, Twain comically represented three reprobates who, passing themselves off as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (all in attendance at the banquet) invade the cabin of a lonely miner and spend the night drinking, card-sharking, and quarreling, all the while echoing passages from the works of these worthies. Margaret Fuller’s complaint that Emerson was seemingly always on stilts applied equally well to the audience that met Twain’s humor with frozen silence. No doubt, the physiological crusaders also had something much different in mind from the likes of the Stomach Club when they urged young men to join any number of clubs or organizations whose aim, as Haller and Haller point out, was to teach skills and, more importantly, provide moral uplift. They envisioned something along the order, say, of the Captains of Ten, which taught carving and weaving, or the Agassiz Association, which devoted itself to science. The Brotherhood of St. Andrew and the Orders of the Knights of King Arthur aimed at enhancing knightly values while the Loyal Temperance Legion, the Band of Hope, and the Juvenile Good Templars made temperance their special focus. The Epworth League and the YMCA aimed at training the “moral athlete.” To say the least, the goals of such organizations were a good bit loftier than the gustatory, imbibitional, and merely social functions of the Stomach Club.
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
By way of putting a exclamation point on this evening’s spoofing, Twain offered an admonition of his own: “I say, ‘If you must gamble away your lives sexually, don’t play a Lone Hand too much.’ When you feel a revolutionary uprising in your system, get your Vendome Column down some other way—don’t jerk it down” (p. 127). This conclusion conveys the structuring, or lack thereof, of the whole speech, which is largely a series of one-liners whose humor arises from a bawdy play on words. The speech itself reflects Twain’s lifelong penchant for parody. He made fun of Sunday school reform tracts in “The Story of Mamie Grant, the Child-Missionary” (1868) and lampooned sentimental poetry through the writings of the character Emmeline Grangerford in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer’s Comrade) (1885). He also skewered Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward’s The Gates Ajar (1868) in his story “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (1907). That he chose to parody this anti-masturbatory literature is also in character; from his lifelong contempt for politicians to his philippic “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), he assumed in one form or another the guise of social critic, reformer, satirist, and moralist. In the anti-masturbation crusaders, Twain recognized the same qualities for which he denounced Charles C. Duncan of the Quaker City in the New York World in 1877—“a canting hypocrite, filled to the chin with sham godliness, and forever oozing and dripping false piety and pharisaical prayers” (Kaplan, p. 204). He bridled at this crusade’s moral absolutism and the quackery it fostered that, in turn, gave rise to the torment and, ultimately, the kind of self-hatred that so unnecessarily bedevil mankind. The Stomach Club on that spring evening also provided Twain with an opportunity to pun at the expense of the Old Masters who had collectively subjected him to the agony over the past few months of attending museums and exhibitions. Playing off the term masturbator, Twain maintains that the term Old Masters is “clearly an abbreviation, a contraction” (p. 125). Furthermore, when citing the distinguished lineage of self-abusers, he names Michelangelo as the foremost among them. See also Satire, Burlesque and Parody; Sex Education BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts. Edited by William M. Gibson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals. Edited by Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
M. Sanderson. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Twain, Mark. “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism.” In Mark Twain Speaking, edited by Paul Fatout. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1976. Secondary Works
Haller, John S., Jr., and Robin M. Haller. The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in NineteenthCentury America. New York: Knopf, 2002. Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Laqueur, Thomas W. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Press, 2003. Paine, Albert Bigelow. Mark Twain: A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Bros., 1912. Arthur Wrobel
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK In 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) published his most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk. The book is a foundational text in defining the African American experience. Its continuing significance is demonstrated by the fact that, on the centennial of its publication, a number of scholarly volumes, academic conferences, and new editions were offered to the public. Its importance lies in the author’s articulation of several key concepts and themes, including double consciousness, the need for black civil rights, and the metaphor of the veil. It includes, in addition to historical and sociological pieces, personal essays, biography, short fiction, music criticism, polemic, and moral inquiry. THE ORIGIN OF SOULS
By the beginning of the twentieth century, Du Bois had established himself as an expert on matters of race in the United States. His dissertation, The Suppression of the Slave Trade (1896), had been the first volume of the Harvard Historical Studies Series; his second work, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), had been sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania and was the first truly sociological study of black life. He had done graduate work at the University of Berlin as well as Harvard and was a founding member of the American Negro Academy. He had used his contacts to establish
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1067
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
shortly after that book’s appearance in 1901. Other pieces had appeared in lesser-known periodicals. All of these articles were significantly revised for inclusion in Souls. Five of the pieces—“Of the Wings of Atalanta,” “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” “Of Alexander Crummell,” “The Sorrow Songs,” and the only work of fiction, “Of the Coming of John”—appeared for the first time. THE UNITY OF SOULS
W. E. B. Du Bois, photographed c. 1904. © CORBIS
himself in the historical profession. He had also published several pieces in major periodicals and was wellenough known that there were serious discussions about his being hired at Booker T. Washington’s (1856–1915) Tuskegee Institute. So it was not surprising that in 1900 A. C. McClurg, a small Chicago publisher, approached Du Bois about putting together a collection of essays from articles he had already published. Du Bois, apparently concerned that such a volume would draw little interest, delayed a commitment to the project. He eventually agreed and included not only pieces published over the previous six years but also unpublished and newly written material. The book, which appeared on 18 April 1903, contained fourteen chapters in various genres. Several of the chapters—“Of Our Spiritual Strivings” (August 1897), “Of the Dawn of Freedom” (March 1901), “Of the Meaning of Progress” (January 1899), “Of the Training of Black Men” (September 1902)—had originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” the most controversial essay in the collection, began as a review of Up from Slavery in The Dial
1068
A M E R I C A N
Despite the variety of sources, genres, subjects, and discursive modes and his concerns about his efforts, Du Bois managed to achieve considerable unity in the book. In “The Forethought,” he apologizes to the reader for having presented his material “in vague, uncertain outline.” Eighteen months after its publication, he wrote what amounted to his own review of Souls for the Independent (17 November 1904). He admitted that the diversity of material “leads to rather abrupt transitions of style, tone and viewpoint and, too, without doubt, to a distinct sense of incompleteness and sketchiness” (“The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 1152). In the same commentary, he noted one of the unifying elements of the work, what he calls “the distinctly subjective note”: “Through all the book runs a personal and intimate tone of self-revelation” (p. 1152). This tone can be seen in the changing of the title of the first essay from “Strivings of the Negro People” to “Of Our Spiritual Strivings.” This introduction of the firstperson voice carries through even the more academic pieces, which use a generic “we,” implying an identification with the reader. More important than this verbal sign is the introduction of personal anecdotes as a means of illustrating key concepts. Thus, also in the first chapter, he reframes conventional references at the time to “the Negro Problem” by briefly describing moments when he was being defined as “the problem”: They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? (P. 7)
He follows this immediately with a story of his New England childhood, during which he was socially snubbed strictly on the basis of his skin color. The personal in Souls is also evident in some of the new material he chose to add. “Of Alexander Crummell” takes the form of a reminiscence of and tribute to one of the important black intellectuals of the previous generation. “Of the Coming of John” is one of Du Bois’s early ventures into fiction, and the title character is rather clearly a version of his creator in the sense that
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
John, like Du Bois, has been educated and can no longer fully identify with what he considers the restraints of black life. Finally, in this category is “Of the Passing of the First-Born,” a remembrance of the short life and painful death of his infant son. In each of these pieces, part of what is personal is the racial element: Crummell’s strength of character is linked to his conflicts with white religious authorities, John desires to no longer be seen as simply another black man by racist whites, and Du Bois’s pain over his son’s death was intensified by the bigoted remarks of white observers. A related unifying element is evident in the title of both the first chapter and the book itself. Each selection, from “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” to “The Sorrow Songs” is concerned most fundamentally with the souls of a group of people. One of the things that Du Bois is referring to when he talks about the vagueness of his writing is the complexity of this language. He is not restricting “souls” to religion, though he includes chapters on African American religion and on the spirituals. He has in mind to some extent the views of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Johann Gottfried von Herder concerning the inner meaning of folk and racial identity, an essence that now might be labeled ethnicity or nationalism. From his interest in philosophy at Harvard and his training in Germany, Du Bois had learned of Hegel’s emphasis on spirit as the highest expression of the dialectic and of Herder’s argument that national and ethnic groups were distinguished by spiritual rather than physical differences. But by “the souls of black folk,” Du Bois also means a personal and group psychology that has been shaped by history and social conditions. Because he believes that whites in America are blinded by belief in their own superiority and in black inferiority as a result of slavery and segregation, he seeks to demonstrate not merely black humanity but also black culture and black suffering. Black “culture” here is not only institutions, such as churches, schools, and families, but also values, beliefs, and forms of expression, all of which are covered in his essays. Du Bois repeatedly refers to African Americans living behind “the veil” and considers it his purpose to lift that veil so that the truth of black experience can be seen. This image is rich in meaning because whites have refused to see the full humanity of African Americans and to understand the effects of white supremacy. The examination of the inner life of African Americans involves what Du Bois calls “doubleconsciousness,” a concept he adapts from a variety of sources, including the emergent field of psychology: It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (P. 11)
This sense of being in but not of the nation is a central concern of the book. It shapes his critique of Booker T. Washington; his discussions of work, education, and politics; and the experiences described in the personal essays. Thus, despite its range of topics and modes of expression, The Souls of Black Folk achieved significant unity as a text. DU BOIS VERSUS WASHINGTON
“Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” drew the most attention at the time of publication and has been the focus of much of the political and historical commentary on Du Bois. In it he argues that Washington, despite his success at attaining a leadership position, had failed to serve the race in three areas: education, civil rights, and voting rights. He insists that the “Atlanta Compromise” made in Washington’s 1895 speech at the Cotton Exposition surrendered virtually everything of importance to African Americans because it accepted continuing segregation, denial of voting rights, and training in manual skills rather than full education. CRITICAL RECEPTION
Du Bois was concerned with the reception of his work because of its inherent limitations; he prayed in the “After-Thought” that it not be “still-born.” He need not have worried. Though it was largely ignored by the Washington, D.C.–controlled black press and by southern white publications, primarily because of the third chapter’s call for political equality, Souls was elsewhere received with considerable enthusiasm. The philosopher William James, one of Du Bois’s mentors at Harvard, recommended it to his brother Henry James, who later noted in The American Scene (1907) that it was the only significant book to come out of the South in many years. Max Weber, the German social theorist, offered to arrange a translation. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the journalist and anti-lynching activist, and Jessie Fauset, who was to become Du Bois’s assistant at The Crisis magazine, both wrote the author to express their appreciation of his work. Formal reviews in the white press were more reserved, in large part because of Du Bois’s criticism of Booker T. Washington. Even later supporters, such as Oswald Garrison Villard, who eventually joined Du Bois as a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was tentative in his comments. In contrast to these somewhat
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1069
S PA N I S H - A M E R I C A N WA R
lukewarm reactions, John Daniels, in the black periodical Alexander’s Magazine, saw the book as a poem and insisted that it should be judged not for any specific argument but for its overall literary effect (15 September 1903). It was also a book that had lingering effects. Throughout his career, Du Bois would occasionally receive praise or criticism for what he said in 1903. In 1956, for example, after reading the fiftieth anniversary edition of the work, Langston Hughes wrote to tell Du Bois how much he continued to appreciate Souls. In addition to selling nearly ten thousand copies in the first five years, twenty-four editions of The Souls of Black Folk were published between 1903 and 1940. In 1949 Du Bois purchased the plates from McClurg and in 1953 arranged for a fiftieth anniversary edition by Blue Heron Press. For the one hundredth anniversary in 2003, several publishers brought out critical editions and commentaries on the book that has become a key text in both African American and American literary canons. See also Blacks; Civil Rights; Jim Crow; Racial Uplift; Reconstruction; Reform; Up from Slavery
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois. 3 vols. Edited by Herbert Aptheker. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973–1978. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terry Hume Oliver. New York: Norton, 1999. Du Bois, W. E. B. “The Souls of Black Folk.” The Independent 57 (17 November 1904): 1152. Reprinted in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, edited by Eric Sundquist, pp. 304–305. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Secondary Works
Byerman, Keith E. Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919. New York: Henry Holt, 1993. Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976. Sundquist, Eric J. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Zamir, Shamoon. Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR The Spanish-American War is widely misunderstood to be one conflict that began in 1898, lasted about four years, and was fought between the United States and Spain in two locations a world apart from each other, Cuba and the Philippines. While there is an element of truth in this, it is more accurate to think of two wars. The Philippine-American War, doubtless America’s least known war, was fought between the United States and the Filipinos. It was a guerrilla war carried out entirely in the Philippine archipelago. The fighting began in February 1899 and continued for many years. The precursor to this war was the much shorter Spanish-American War, fought with Spain during the spring and summer of 1898 and waged principally in Cuba but also in the Philippines, in a single but decisive naval battle in Manila Bay in May, and in Puerto Rico, when in July the United States Army under General Nelson Miles invaded and occupied that island. This war was declared by the United States in late April, and the two nations signed a peace protocol in mid-August. The short duration and decisive outcome of the engagement with Spain led many U.S. leaders to agree with John Hay, the ambassador to Great Britain, when he wrote to his friend Theodore Roosevelt that it had been a “splendid little war” (Gale, p. 31). The decision to enter the war did not come without significant resistance, however. What course to take in international affairs was not clear for a country just emerging from isolation. Officially, the American government sought to avoid war. But there were those who hankered for a fight as a way of showing that the nation had muscle, and in truth, most Americans did side with the Cubans against the Spanish colonialists. A sensationalist press fanning these hot attitudes helped decide the country’s course of action. The war was a coming-of-age rite for the nation. Its most famous soldier, Theodore Roosevelt, used it to define a national cult of manly patriotism and then rode his battlefield exploits into the White House. He was a thirty-nine-year-old asthmatic who had undertaken a rigorous bodybuilding program of hunting, horse riding, and boxing to overcome his physical limitations. For three years he had worked as a cowboy in the Badlands of the Dakotas. His memoir of the war, The Rough Riders (1899), bore an epigraph from the martial cadences of the 1863 patriotic Civil War poem “The Reveille” by Bret Harte (1836–1902) that captured the valorous and unquestioning rectitude Roosevelt wished to project:
Keith E. Byerman
1070
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
“But when won the coming battle, What of profit springs there from? What if conquest, subjugation,
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S PA N I S H - A M E R I C A N WA R
A R C T I C
O C E A N
ATLAN TI C O C EAN Battle of Manila Bay 1 May 1898 Manila captured 13 August 1898 Guam captured 21 June 1898
PHILIPPINES
SPAIN
UNITED STATES
PAC IFIC O C EAN
Puerto Rico invaded 25 July 1898
CUBA PUERTO RICO
U.S. troops land in Cuba 22 June 1898 Battle of San Juan Hill and El Caney 1 July 1898 Battle of Santiago Bay 3 July 1898
IN DIA N OCE A N
Santiago captured 17 July 1898
ATLAN TI C O C EAN N
The Spanish-American War
0 0
1000
Even greater ills become?” But the drum Answered, “Come! You must do the sum to prove it,” said the Yankee-answering drum.
renewed the custom of having American warships pay uninvited visits to the Spanish colony.
CUBAN INDEPENDENCE AND “REMEMBER THE MAINE”
Three decades before this war began, in the late 1860s, Cuban guerrilla fighters had fought for national autonomy from Spanish colonization. Unsuccessful then, they had renewed their efforts in the early 1890s. By that time, though, the United States had also become deeply interested in the island. American investments in the Cuban sugar business had grown to more than $50 million, and annual trade between the United States and Cuba was worth twice that amount. In addition, many Americans lived and worked on the island. These interests were jeopardized by the revolution, and by 1896 strong pressure had built for the United States to either purchase Cuba from Spain or, if Spain could not regain control, to intervene militarily. President Grover Cleveland had maintained a policy of neutrality, but President William McKinley, inaugurated in 1897, was predisposed, cautiously, to intervention. Almost as though to precipitate an incident, McKinley A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
2000 mi.
1000 2000 km
So it was that on 25 January 1898 one of the nation’s newest battleships, the U.S.S. Maine, a pride of the American fleet with its steam-power and its advanced steel construction, showed up in Havana harbor. The Spanish foreign minister, seeing the ship’s presence as an act of intimidation, criticized McKinley in a private letter for being “weak” about neutrality and referred to him as a “petty politician.” The letter was leaked to William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal, which promptly printed it under the inflammatory banner headline, “The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.” McKinley demanded an apology from the Spanish government and he received it, but the situation was tinder. The spark came only days later, on the night of 15 February, when the Maine exploded and sank to the bottom of the harbor. When Hearst heard this, he demanded that the story be spread all over the front page and proclaimed, “This means war!” (O’Toole, p. 34). A Naval Court of Inquiry determined that the cause was a submarine mine, although it took care not to name a guilty party. The jingoists in the United States Senate drew their own conclusion, however,
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1071
S PA N I S H - A M E R I C A N WA R
and rallying to the slogan “Remember the Maine,” blamed the Spanish government. A rebuttal by a Spanish court of inquiry was dismissed out of hand. McKinley ordered a blockade of Cuba, and four days later, on 25 April 1898, Congress declared war, though it promised to leave as soon as the war of “pacification” was over. A European naval authority, using nothing more than the published testimony in the Navy’s own report, later proved that the Naval Court had reached a false conclusion, starting with an incredible, fundamental error—mistaking the location of the explosion. After still more inquiries conducted in the decades following, the true culprits, according to a comprehensive review of a century of debate, were conservative Spanish fanatics loyal to the ruthless and charismatic General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, the colonial governor who had been sent to Cuba in 1895 to quell the nationalist rebellion. “They had the opportunity, the means, and the motivation, and they blew up the Maine with a small low-strength mine they made themselves” (Samuels, p. 310). The shooting war actually began on 11 June with the capture of Guantánamo Bay. The best known and most storied moment in the war occurred on 1 July in the San Juan hills near Santiago de Cuba, the island’s second largest city and a Spanish stronghold. Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt had gathered an assortment of Ivy League polo players and western dead shots who were eager to live a rough and hardy life again. At a crucial moment, Roosevelt took unauthorized command. He spurred his horse up the ridge, pistol in one hand and saber in the other. His Rough Riders, together with an African American regiment, captured the position. It was a turning point in the war. Soon thereafter, when the Spanish agreed to surrender 23,000 troops around the city, the end of the war was near. Four years later, the United States made good on its promise and Cuba received its independence. The war involved 190,000 Spanish troops, while 250,000 American soldiers, 200,000 of them volunteers, were allied with as many as 50,000 Cuban freedom fighters. It cost the United States $250 million and fewer than 3,000 lives—90 percent of whom died from disease and bad food. In the words of G. J. A. O’Toole in The Spanish War, “As wars go this was a cheap one” (O’Toole, p. 17).
feel ebullient and proud. The huge number of volunteer soldiers reflected that pride. The enthusiasm for this war that was mirrored in Harte’s “The Reveille” was also in the imagination of Richard Hovey (1864–1900), and with more righteousness. Hovey’s lineage included five Mayflower Puritan ancestors, and his many poems about this war revealed that moral fervor. Although he is unknown today, no poet more faithfully expressed the religious aspect of the nation’s mood at the time of the war. In “The Word of the Lord from Havana,” written two days after the sinking of the Maine in February 1898, the loss of the ship is viewed as a punishment as well as a message from God warning against America’s neglect of the world’s oppressed. Hovey’s sonnet “America” (October 1898) recalls that the nation was conceived in violence and would not shrink from war to accomplish its holy mission, and “Unmanifest Destiny” (July 1898) concludes with a sure affirmation of the hand of Providence: I do not know beneath what sky Nor on what seas shall be thy fate; I only know it shall be high, I only know it shall be great. (Hovey, p. 17)
Doubtless, such sentiments resonated with writer and publisher Elbert Hubbard (1856–1916), an ardent sympathizer with Roosevelt’s rugged individualism. When he heard about the bravery of Lieutenant Andrew Rowan’s secret mission to meet with Cuban general Calixto Garcia, Elbert wrote an inspirational essay, “A Message for Garcia,” praising duty and initiative. Hubbard published it in February 1899, and it immediately took on a life of its own, with millions of copies distributed to American railroad employees, and later to Russian and Japanese workers, and finally to members of the United States Navy at the brink of World War I. According to the historian Charles H. Brown in The Correspondents’ War: Journalists in the Spanish-American War, the words of the essay “could be recited by most Americans who had heard them come forth in organ tones from high school and college elocutionists for a quarter of a century” (Brown, p. 173). Though Rowan’s exploits received the most attention, equally daring deeds were conducted with much less notice by a dozen correspondents who also carried messages to Garcia and other Cuban leaders or “who engaged in a variety of other espionage” (Brown, p. 173).
STRONG SYMPATHY FOR A JUST WAR
It was a popular one, too. Most of its distinctive features were positive—coming to the aid of a people fighting for their freedom while at the same time defeating a former superpower, remembering the Maine, glorying in Roosevelt’s charge. The war made the nation
1072
A M E R I C A N
THE “CORRESPONDENTS’ WAR”
In this war as in no other, American newspapers and their correspondents were deeply engaged in arousing feelings of patriotism, heroism, and adventure. The press campaigned so forcibly that it “sometimes acted
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
S PA N I S H - A M E R I C A N WA R
The New York World reports the battleship Maine explosion, 17 February 1898. Drawn from a description by eye-witnesses on the steamship City of Washington who saw the explosion, followed by “a volcano of fire and showers of boats, bodies, iron and guns.” This image helped garner support for the war. THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK
as though it were the government” and that publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer “usurped the functions of the Department of State” (Brown, p. vi). Before the war began, Hearst’s Journal sent the novelist Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916) to Cuba to write stories about the freedom fighters and their Spanish oppressors. His dispatches coincided well with Hearst’s efforts to pressure McKinley to intervene, for horrified by what he saw, Davis reported on “mass sickness, starvation and death” (Brown, p. 80). Other novelists also transformed themselves into journalists to participate in the adventure. Frank Norris (1870–1902) put aside his nearly finished McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) to report A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
on the action for McClure’s Magazine. He could hardly contain his eagerness: “You want to see excitement, turmoil, activity,” Norris wrote, “the marching and countermarching of troops, the excited going and coming of couriers a-horseback, the glint of epaulets and brass at street corners” (Brown, p. 170). Once in Cuba, he changed. A dispatch describing a dead Spanish soldier ends in horrified silence: “his face the color of wax; one poor, dirty hand hooked like a buzzard’s claw; his arm was doubled under him, and—but the rest is not for words” (Brown, pp. 349–350). To Norris, Stephen Crane (1871–1900), whom he met in Key West, embodied his idea of a war correspondent: “tanned to the color of a well-worn saddle”
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1073
S PA N I S H - A M E R I C A N WA R
(Brown, p. 171). Crane was in Key West preparing to write a series on the Cuban revolution for the Bacheller publishing syndicate, which had serialized his novel The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895). His essay “War Memories” (1899) reflected on his experiences in Cuba, which included several battles as well as the action in Havana after the conflict ended. His 1897 writings about the sinking of the Commodore, a ship smuggling arms to the Cuban insurgents on which Crane was a crew member, drew acclaim first as a newspaper report, “Stephen Crane’s Own Story,” and then as a short story, “The Open Boat.” Crane was the first of many to draw upon the country’s enthusiasm for the war and its enchantment with Cuba and revolution. Novels like Kirk Munroe’s “Forward March”: A Tale of the Spanish-American War (1899) romanticized the war and America’s might, and The Rough Riders (1927) by Herman Hagedorn (1882–1964) mythologized Roosevelt’s unit. Hagedorn’s book was adapted as a movie the same year it was published, and a remake appeared in 1997. The Bright Shawl, a spy novel by Joseph Hergesheimer (1880–1954), featured a beautiful young dancer whose shawl represents the youthful dreams of Cuban freedom fighters in the decades before the war. It was published in 1922 and made into a film the following year. By far the best-known, mostsophisticated—and least-favorable—treatment of the war was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum (1856–1919). The novel was popular enough in its own time and it was given considerable additional cultural longevity by the 1939 movie adaptation. Embedded in its fairy-tale narrative is an elaborate criticism of the consequences of the Spanish-American War as well as a satire of contemporary politics and monetary policy.
the New York Journal in March 1899 concluded: “In other words, the Armour establishment was selling carrion” (“The Condemned-Meat Industry, 1906”). The fury over these revelations set the stage for Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), an enormously influential exposé of the filth and corruption of the nation’s beef industry that gained important credibility for muckraking journalism and virtually by itself led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), a benchmark in progressive legislation.
“EMBALMED BEEF” AND THE JUNGLE
O’Toole, G. J. A. The Spanish War: An American Epic— 1898. New York: Norton, 1984.
The war did have other dark features, but some of them led to positive outcomes. Alarmed by the high death rate among the soldiers due to sickness, General Miles accused the suppliers of meat for the troops, the powerful “beef trust” and especially Armour & Company, of sending meat that had become spoiled in the heat. (Since the meat had been “preserved” with chemicals, it was facetiously called “embalmed beef.”) This was the most famous scandal of the war. Miles’s charges, reinforced by Roosevelt’s own first-hand observations, embarrassed McKinley and the army and led to investigations by a specially appointed “beef court” in February 1899 and, in turn, to the forced resignation of the secretary of war, Russell A. Alger. As recorded later by Upton Sinclair (1878–1968), affidavits published in
1074
A M E R I C A N
See also Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism; PhilippineAmerican War; Weaponry BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
Hovey, Richard. Along the Trail: A Book of Lyrics. 1903. New York: AMS, 1969. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Rough Riders. New York: Scribners, 1899. Sinclair, Upton. “The Condemned-Meat Industry.” Everybody’s Magazine 14 (1906): 608–616. Available at http://www.wadsworth.com/history_d/templates/ student_resources/0030724791_ayers/sources/ch20/ 20.3.armour.html. Secondary Works
Berner, Brad K. The Spanish-American War: A Historical Dictionary. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1998. Brown, Charles H. The Correspondents’ War: Journalists in the Spanish-American War. New York: Scribners, 1967. Dighe, Ranjit S., ed. The Historian’s Wizard of Oz: Reading of L. Frank Baum’s Classic as a Political and Monetary Allegory. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. Gale, Robert L. John Hay. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Linneman, William R. Richard Hovey. Boston: Twayne, 1976. Mansfield, Harvey. “The Manliness of Theodore Roosevelt.” New Criterion 23, no. 7 (March 2005): 4–9.
Samuels, Peggy, and Harold Samuels. Remembering the Maine. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. “The Spanish-American War.” Small Planet Communications. Available at http://www.smplanet.com/ imperialism/splendid.html. “The United States Becomes a World Power: The Spanish American War.” Digital History. Available at http:// www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cf m?HHID=190. “The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War.” Hispanic Division, Library of Congress. Available at http:// www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/.
H I S T O R Y
Terry Oggel
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SPIRITUALISM
SPIRITUALISM Among the pseudoscientific fads of nineteenth-century America were several that had to do with ghosts or spirits. One of these fads, spiritualism, can be distinguished from a more general interest in ghosts (poltergeists) as well as from a more general sense of being religious or spiritual. The nineteenth-century fad called spiritualism, in its narrow sense, refers to the practice of “communicating with the dead,” often during a séance. The fad took hold in 1848 and thrived for a decade, lost some momentum, and then gathered steam in the decades following 1870, both in practice and in various literary recollections of what had occurred a generation earlier. Arguably some spiritualists genuinely believed in their powers to contact dead spirits, but those spiritualists who conducted séances most often were enterprising charlatans who, for a fee, invited gullible or curious sitters into a darkened room, where the spiritualist pretended to be in a trance and posed questions to a “dead spirit.” The spiritualist then claimed that it was the dead spirit guiding his or her hand over a Ouija board to spell out answers to questions, tipping tables, blowing trumpets, or rapping on a table, seemingly in code. Although most spiritualists conducted séances in private settings, a few made public appearances in lecture halls and drew large crowds. Spirit photographers such as William Mumler, Frederick Hudson, and W. H. Harrison claimed that their blurry photographs were pictures of dead spirits, and a spirit postmaster, James Vincent Mansfield, bragged that he had active mail service to heavenly ghosts. Specifically he claimed that in a 30year period he had delivered 100,000 sealed letters to spirits who permitted him to transcribe their replies. The beginnings of the spiritualism movement in 1848 can be traced to a bedroom in Hydesville, New York, where the twelve- and thirteen-year-old sisters Katherine Fox (1836–1892) and Margaret Fox (1833– 1893) discovered that they could make a loud rapping noise when they cracked their toe joints against the bedstead. The girls delighted in telling their superstitious mother that they had contacted the spirit of a murdered peddler, who, they claimed, responded with audible raps. Mrs. Fox flew next door and told neighbors, who told more neighbors and eventually newspaper editors. Having discovered that they were celebrities, Kate and Margaret continued to practice their “talent” in communicating with the dead. An older sister, Leah Fox (1811–1890), living in Rochester, soon got into the act, and the three became a national sensation. Other tricksters decided to capitalize on the Fox sisters’ success. Andrew Jackson Davis (1826–1910), a A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
shoemaker who had championed mesmerism and established a reputation as the “Poughkeepsie Seer,” soon reported that he too had heard rappings. Among other self-styled spiritualists of the next few decades were Katie King (aka Florence Cook, 1856–1904); Lenora Piper (1857–1950), a Boston housewife who met with some of the leading intellectuals of the day; “Dr.” Henry Slade (1840–1905), a con man who won the trust of a few prominent physicists; and Alexandre Aksakof (1832–1880), a Russian spiritualist and statesman who took Henry Slade to Russia to perform. One spiritualist, J. R. Newton, claimed that he could contact Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato. Another, Thomas Lake Harris, specialized in contacting “literary spirits,” including those of Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Lizzie Doten, another medium specializing in “literary spirits,” conceded that her awe of Shakespeare interfered with her ability to be a medium for his messages; however, her awe of Robert Burns was sufficiently mild so she could adequately represent his messages. Until roughly 1860 spiritualism thrived, partly because it appealed to a public hungry for some promise that religious faith could be reconciled with new scientific theories. Spiritualism seemed to offer physical proof of a metaphysical reality: the audible or visible “replies” of the “dead spirits” seemed to provide empirical proof of the existence of an afterlife. The public was also at least curious about a phenomenon that combined some of the most interesting aspects of mesmerism, another pseudoscientific fad of the early nineteenth century, with a new technological innovation, the telegraph, which involved tapping messages in code to send over a great distance. To one believer spiritualism also affirmed evolution, if earthly beings evolved to a higher, spiritual status. For some women spiritualism offered something else, an alternative means of having a voice and of making a living in a world that offered women few venues for either. Alex Owen argues in The Darkened Room (1989) that nineteenth-century spiritualism provided women on both sides of the Atlantic with a vehicle for subverting existing power relations between men and women. Indeed many of the early adherents of spiritualism were associated with reform movements of some kind, whether socialism, abolitionism, or women’s rights, though not all feminists were sanguine about spiritualism: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were chagrined that their fellow feminist Victoria Woodhull was a spiritualist who attributed her charismatic speaking skills to a spiritual mentor, Demosthenes. (In 1871 Woodhull was elected president of the American Association of Spiritualists.) Affirmations of the movement were documented in texts such as Emma Hardinge Britten’s
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1075
SPIRITUALISM
Spiritual Materializations: The Spirit Body. Engraving by W. P. Snyder, 1874. The purported appearance of Katie King, thought to be the spirit of the deceased daughter of the pirate Henry Morgan, was a common occurrence at séances during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Snyder’s engraving depicts one such occurrence in Philadelphia in 1874. © CORBIS
Modern American Spiritualism (1870) and Nineteenth Century Miracles (1884). However, from its beginnings, enthusiastic endorsements of spiritualism were mixed with religious denunciations, satirical literary responses, and skeptical calls for investigation, suggesting something about the ambivalence of the age. Rarely, though, did the exposés stifle interest in the movement. For example, in the Cambridge investigation of 1857, three Harvard professors, including Louis Agassiz, exposed the Fox sisters, although the investigation did little to quash the sisters’ popularity. Conjurers were vocal critics of the psychics, but the tattling of cheats on other
1076
A M E R I C A N
cheats did little to dampen public interest. In 1866 P. T. Barnum (1810–1892) called spiritualists the “humbugs of the world,” and in 1876 Washington Irving Bishop (1856–1889), a hawker of quack nostrums, exposed the spiritualist Anna Eva Fay (1851–1927) as a fraud, but neither killed the movement. When Margaret Fox was exposed again in 1888, she recanted her clairvoyant claims but then recanted her recanting and still drew crowds. Although the movement was declining in the closing decades of the century and the first decades of the next, some spiritualists thrived, including Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), who together with
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SPIRITUALISM
Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907) founded the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky’s powerful personality attracted many to her blend of occultism, counterfeit miracles, and Asian philosophies. Other adherents of theosophy were simply drawn to neo-Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation and a cycle of life and rebirth. Another clairvoyant and spiritualist, Edgar Cayce (1877–1945), claimed that in previous incarnations he had been a warrior in Troy, one of Christ’s disciples, and an angel predating Adam and Eve. Certainly spiritualism enjoyed a bit of a resurgence in the decades following the 1870s, but it is not spiritualism per se that best marks the period between 1870 and 1920. Rather, it is the boyhood recollections of spiritualism in the fiction of Mark Twain (1835–1910), William Dean Howells (1837–1920), and Henry James (1843–1916). If the heyday of spiritualism in the 1850s was its life, the literary recollections of spiritualism in the next half-century might be considered its afterlife. HOWELLS’S RECOLLECTIONS OF SPIRITUALISM
As William Dean Howells recalls in Years of My Youth (1916), “Spiritualism was rife in every second house in the village with manifestations of rappings, table tippings, and oral and written messages from another world through psychics of either sex but oftenest the young girls one met in dances and sleigh rides” (p. 106). While Howells dealt with spiritualism most directly in his autobiography, he continued to address it in such works as The Landlord at Lion’s Head (1897), Questionable Shapes (1903), and Between the Dark and the Daylight: Romances (1907). His most nuanced depiction of the rise and fall of spiritualism was captured in his 1880 novel The Undiscovered Country, a critical but compassionate portrait of Boynton, a character who eventually discovers that his faith in spiritualism is unfounded. As Howard Kerr persuasively argues in Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals, the fictional Boynton was most likely modeled on the historical Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877), a man who had written a pro-spiritualism article for the Atlantic Monthly, which Howells then edited. Owen, the son of the social reformer Robert Owen, had been skeptical about the claims of some of the most flamboyant spiritualists of the early 1850s. A few years later, when he was exposed to the less dramatic spiritualist techniques of Florence Cook and her “spiritual guide” Katie King (presumably the same person since they were never seen onstage together), Owen dropped his critical stance and developed a “spiritual hypothesis,” which he elaborated upon in A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (1860). This, together with his 1871 book The Debatable Land between This World and the Next, helped to rekindle nationwide interest in spiritualism, for Owen was considered a reputable scholar and statesman. He had served in both state and national politics, had advocated for the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution, and had served overseas as a diplomat. His cautious investigation of spiritualism had piqued the interest of scientists, including Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who, like Charles Darwin, developed a theory of evolution. In 1875 Owen wrote an article for the January issue of the Atlantic Monthly explaining why he believed that Florence Cook and Katie King were either outright frauds or supernatural beings, arguably the latter. Just as the magazine was going to press in December, Owen discovered that King was indeed a fraud, and he tried to retract his article. It was too late, however, and his well-established reputation was seriously blemished. Owen died two years later. Howells too had been caught by the unfortunate timing of Owen’s article, unable to halt its publication and unable to protect Owen from considerable embarrassment. Although Howells had always been skeptical of spiritualists’ claims, he had been moved by Owen’s sincere and thoughtful inquiry and his unsuccessful attempt to retract his argument. The Owen-like protagonist of The Undiscovered Country, Boynton, is treated at least as sympathetically as the other characters, especially Mrs. Le Roy, the spiritualist who conducts the séances. Like Owen, Boynton hoped to stave off scientific materialism and to preserve what he could of the ethical basis of organized religion. As Kerr points out, Owen had in The Debatable Land called for proof that “intercourse from beyond the bourn is not forbidden to man” but found out otherwise, as does Boynton, who, at the end of The Undiscovered Country, recognizes the impossible when he quotes Hamlet: “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.” As Kerr points out, Howells’s The Undiscovered Country has less in common with other anti-spiritualist satires than it does with earlier psychological studies of single-minded delusion, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) explores in the The Blithedale Romance. For Howells and others, spiritualism provided one vehicle for psychological realism. TWAIN’S WRITINGS CAPTURE THE AMBIVALENCE
From mid-century on, the spiritualism movement provided humorists and satirists with a steady supply
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1077
SPIRITUALISM
of material for their tales. Throughout the 1860s Twain burlesqued “true” ghost stories in his pieces for the Virginia City Enterprise. In one burlesque of the spiritualist Ada Hoyt Foye’s séances, Twain asks for a spirit named John Smith and is answered by the rapping of every John Smith who had ever perished and who is now confined with the others to an infernal Smithsonian Institution. Here and elsewhere the butt of Twain’s humor is usually the spirit and not the spiritualist. Twain, like many skeptics, may have hoped privately that it was indeed possible to contact dead spirits. Justin Kaplan suggests in his 1966 biography that some of Twain’s most vitriolic attacks on séance swindlers may have resulted from his having tried and failed to contact his dead brother Henry. After his daughter Susy’s death in 1896, Twain attended séances with his wife. However, before and after 1896, he burlesqued the fad in his fiction, where he created numerous ridiculous spiritualists, mesmerists, and phrenologists. In 1883 Twain and Howells penned the farce “Colonel Sellers as a Scientist,” in which a scientist attempts to reach a ghost with batteries. Twain developed the story in The American Claimant (1892), where Sellers concocts a cheap and easy way to revitalize the New York City police force: materializing legions of dead police spirits with his electric batteries. Twain’s notebooks identify the character later named Manchester in Life on the Mississippi (1883) as “Mansfield”: arguably both Manchester and the Dauphin in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) were modeled on the spirit postmaster J. V. Mansfield, whom Twain may have visited in real life. JAMES’S WRITINGS SUGGEST KINSHIP
Henry James’s interest in spiritualism is evident as early as 1874 in his story “Professor Fargo,” in which the professor pretends to be a spiritualist medium in order to gain control over a beautiful deaf mute. In this story James, like Howells in The Undiscovered Country, shows his debt to Hawthorne, who used trances in part to explore the tangle of sexual desire and control. A dozen years after writing “Professor Fargo,” James returned to spiritualism in The Bostonians (1886). In this novel a spiritualistic lecturer, Mrs. Ada T. P. Foat, seems to be modeled on the spiritualist Ada Hoyt Foye, who was prominent on the lecture circuit. Basil Ransom, a young skeptic, struggles with Olive Chancellor for control of Varena Tarrant, a woman who has visions but does not quite claim to possess the supernatural powers of mediums such as Miss Birdseye. Here Ransom gives voice to some of James’s literal anti-spiritualist and anti-reform
1078
A M E R I C A N
sentiments and thus provides a bridge between James’s earlier anti-reform satires and his later studies of consciousness. While James treated the spiritualists ironically, he used them to explore his interest in alternate personalities, of interest to him as they were to his brother William James, who wrote about mutations of the self in The Principles of Psychology in 1890. THE PROMISE OF CONSOLATION
Spiritualism, like other pseudoscientific fads of the era, was in part a response to tensions between scientific certainty and religious doubt. It seemed to turn empiricism on its head and use it to demonstrate, not to demolish, a physical basis for faith in an afterlife. Lest one be too smug about the gullibility of those taken in by spiritualists, it is important to acknowledge that one is often most curious about that which one cannot adequately explain. It is also important to remember how badly many Americans needed consolation—for loved ones lost in the Civil War, which had claimed more than a half million lives; for faith shaken after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859); and for faith in any sure thing. Even Newtonian physics was being called into question, especially in the areas of thermodynamics and electromagnetism, and some nineteenth-century physicists speculated that heat flow and energy had spiritual as well as physical significance. For example, both William Thomson, who coined the term “thermodynamics” in 1854, and Rudolf Clausius, who coined the term “entropy” in 1865, subscribed to the idea that physical laws had metaphysical implications. In such a climate it may not be so surprising that Sir William Crookes, inventor of techniques for studying the cathode ray, endorsed the Fox sisters in 1871 and within the next few years published several articles in the Quarterly Journal of Science defending spiritualism on “scientific” grounds. As Frank Podmore suggests in his 1902 analysis Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism, the evidence for spiritualists’ claims was insufficient and often outright fraudulent. Nonetheless, something in their quest to understand spirituality might shed light on the deepest recesses of human consciousness. Podmore cautions us not to forget that “even the extravagances of mysticism may contain a residuum of unacknowledged and serviceable fact” (p. 361). As evidence of Podmore’s point, the American Society for Psychical Research, established by William James, mistakenly endorsed a number of pseudoscientific charlatans, yet the society also pioneered investigations of the unconscious and of mental illnesses. See also Orientalism; Psychology; Scientific Materialism
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SPORTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Works
SPORTS
Howells, William Dean. Between the Dark and the Daylight: Romances. New York: Harper, 1907.
Between 1870 and 1920, sports in the United States were completely transformed, not as a consequence of but as one agent of the broader transformation of American life. Before 1870, sporting practices in the United States were largely informal, local, and classspecific. The decade that began in 1920 became known, before it even ended, as the Golden Age of Sports, as Americans flocked to huge stadiums; the mass media old and new—newspapers and magazines on the one hand, radio and film on the other—were saturated with accounts of big games and larger-than-life sporting personalities; and stars such as Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Red Grange, and Bill Tilden became national celebrities. The period from 1870 to 1920 thus saw the multifaceted development of the highly organized, commercialized, corporate and bureaucratically governed, national (or “popular” or “mass”) sporting culture familiar in the early twenty-first century. The definition of “sport” itself shifted in this period. The word once narrowly referred to traditional activities such as hunting and fishing, to innocent childhood play (the “sport” of sledding and snowball fights), and to such disreputable amusements as the cockfighting and prizefighting of a vaguely criminal underworld (and the men, “the sports,” who indulged in them). Now it began broadly to denote newly organized and widely popular athletic games, both amateur and professional, participatory and spectatorial, such as golf, tennis, baseball, football, and basketball.
Howells, William Dean. The Landlord at Lion’s Head. New York: Harper, 1897. Howells, William Dean. Questionable Shapes. New York: Harper, 1903. Howells, William Dean. The Undiscovered Country. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880. Howells, William Dean. Years of My Youth. New York: Harper, 1916. Howells, William Dean, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens. “Colonel Sellers as a Scientist.” In The Complete Plays of W. D. Howells, edited by Walter J. Meserve. New York, 1960. James, Henry. The Bostonians. London: Macmillan, 1886. James, Henry. “Professor Fargo.” Galaxy 18 (August 1874): 233–253. Owen, Robert Dale. The Debatable Land between This World and the Next. Philadelphia: G. W. Carleton, 1871. Owen, Robert Dale. Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1860. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1885. Twain, Mark. The American Claimant. New York: Charles L. Webster, 1892. Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883. Secondary Works
Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. Kerr, Howard. Mediums, and Spirit-Rappers, and Roaring Radicals: Spiritualism in American Literature, 1850–1900. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Nye, Mary Jo. Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Owen, Alex. The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Nineteenth Century England. London: Virago, 1989. Podmore, Frank. Modern Spiritualism: A History and a Criticism. 2 vols. New York: Scribners, 1902. Randi, James. An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995. Martha D. Patton
A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
THE RISE OF SPORTS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
European visitors to the United States in the 1830s and 1840s routinely noted how little time Americans gave to amusements. Americans’ unplayfulness was only relative—southern planters and backwoodsmen hunted and fished in their distinctive ways, northern merchants and factory workers amused themselves after the manner of their classes—but both religious and economic factors constrained Americans’ indulgence in sport. The Puritans’ Calvinist abhorrence of wasted time persisted in evangelical Protestantism and informed a powerful work ethic, while practical necessities—initially of economic survival, then of revolution, then of nation building—and an accompanying philosophy of civic responsibility continually reinforced the importance of work and duty over pleasure seeking. New forces emerged in the decades following the Civil War. The rise of organized sports can be viewed as a response to the pressures produced by burgeoning cities and the disappearance of meaningful work: both laborers and clerical workers sought release in
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1079
SPORTS
organized recreations and spectator sports from the grind of their now routine-driven daily lives. Those same conditions of urbanization and industrialization were also what made the national sporting culture possible, through developments in transportation, communication, and technology. The railroads, telegraph lines, and popular press that produced a truly national culture created a place for sport within that culture, while manufacturers of sporting goods provided uniform equipment for games to be played in the same way in every part of the country. In the early nineteenth century, sport had been embraced chiefly by the landed gentry on the one hand and by the unruly elements among the lower classes on the other, with the emerging middle class clinging most strongly to the traditional values of self-discipline, sobriety, and industry that were antagonistic to sport. The organization of elite and working-class sport over the final decades of the nineteenth century—in metropolitan athletic clubs and country clubs on the one hand, for example, and in the creation of professional baseball leagues and cycling associations on the other— created profitable industries out of long-standing sporting interests. It was the embrace of sport by the expanding middle class, the group most invested in the older work ethic and its Victorian moral trappings, that marked the greatest change. Here, new social and religious justifications were required. Antebellum health reformers first made the case for physical exercise as necessary to the whole man (and sometimes woman), with attendant ideas about the selfdiscipline and moral improvement that could derive from athletic conditioning. But it was the “muscular Christianity” promoted by Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes in mid-century Britain that provided the rationale for American reformers in the 1860s and 1870s to vanquish the powerful religious antagonism to sport in the United States. Muscular Christianity had little impact on the sports such as baseball, boxing, pedestrianism, and horse racing that emerged in the antebellum period. But its influence on the beginnings of intercollegiate athletics in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s was crucial. The first athletic competitions between colleges—between the crews of Harvard and Yale in 1852, the baseball teams of Amherst and Williams in 1859, the football teams of Princeton and Rutgers in 1869—would have led nowhere had not liberal ministers and public spokesmen such as Edward Everett Hale, Henry Ward Beecher, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and preeminently Thomas Wentworth Higginson championed the ideal of a vigorous, manly, athletic Christianity in religious and secular periodicals. Muscular Christianity effectively wed modern sport to the older Victorian spirit of self-discipline and self-
1080
A M E R I C A N
improvement. And it spoke powerfully not just to the emerging middle class but also to the traditional elites who were accustomed to leadership in American public life but were seeing their power and influence usurped by Gilded Age capitalists. Muscular Christianity undergirded the expansion of sport in religious organizations such as the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Muscular Christianity plus modern social science undergirded the playground movement, which sought to defuse urban pressures and Americanize new immigrants by providing recreational outlets and organized team sports in gymnasiums and public parks. And muscular Christianity plus Darwinian social philosophy plus Anglo-Saxon racialism plus upper-class anxieties undergirded the development of intercollegiate sports, chiefly football, the most manly of all the manly sports, over the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Psychologists such as G. Stanley Hall, social reformers such as Luther Gulick and Henry S. Curtis, and Brahmin educators and reformers such as Francis Walker, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt in different ways argued that rugged sports were good for individuals, for communities, for the nation, and for “the race.” Their ideas were regularly promoted in popular magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and the monthly Outing by champions of sport such as Caspar Whitney and Walter Camp. By the end of the century those unplayful Americans of the antebellum period now seemed to English visitors obsessed with sports. They participated in activities and on teams organized by civic, social, religious, ethnic, educational, fraternal, and occupational organizations, and they cheered on the performances of others in ballparks and gymnasiums in virtually every community. Much of the world of American sport was still fragmented along lines of age, class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, occupation, and geography; but there was also a single national sporting culture that registered chiefly in the periodical and daily press. Americans played with their own peers at country clubs or neighborhood parks, but they read the same accounts of major league baseball games, championship prizefights, and intercollegiate football games, of “national champions” and “All-Americans,” in their local newspapers. A powerful and complex sports ethic was part of this national sporting culture, a self-contradictory mix of muscular Christianity and Darwinian competition, of British elitism and American democracy. The values of sportsmanship and “fair play,” and of amateurism more generally, derived from the sporting codes of elite English public schools and ultimately from the
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SPORTS
Catcher of the Ulster Nine. Illustration by Daniel Carter Beard for the 1889 edition of Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. A medieval knight attempts to learn the sport of baseball in Twain’s novel. THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
aristocratic code of gentlemen who had “won” at life simply by their birth. The values of gamesmanship, on the other hand—gaining an advantage through trickery rather than superior ability—could seem unscrupulous but were profoundly democratic, making victory possible for weaker and stronger alike and rewarding only the winners in the contests. What could seem mere hypocrisy—paeans to sportsmanship but obsession with winning—was in fact a profound ambivalence that played out not just on athletic fields but in American life generally. SPORT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION
American fiction did not fully explore the world of sport during this period of transformation, but a nascent sport literature did emerge. Much antebellum fiction A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
had unobtrusively incorporated the sporting practices of its times into its fictional worlds. James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and his Littlepage novels, for example, had their distinctive sports: the pigeon-hunting and salmon-fishing episodes in The Pioneers, the sleigh riding and other winter sports in Satanstoe. Cooper, of course, cast the former scenes as mini-allegories in order to contrast his hero’s sporting code to the reckless and wasteful behavior of the settlers, but these episodes also contributed more simply to the portrait of life in a new community at the edge of the wilderness. In a similar manner, the sporting customs of particular regions or classes were part of the background in a broad range of fiction. Beginning with John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832), plantation romances invariably included scenes of foxhunting or horse racing. The tales of southwestern humorists were
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1081
SPORTS
rich with crude backwoods brawling and racing or shooting contests, while the more domesticated western fiction of writers such as Caroline Kirkland included the barn raisings and quilting bees of pioneer settlements. In a strikingly different vein, Rebecca Harding Davis’s “Life in the Iron-Mills” (1861) marked her characters by the sports of their social and economic classes. The deeper spiritual longings of the Welsh puddler Hugh Wolfe are evident in part by his abhorrence of the cockpit that draws his coworkers; the dilettante Mitchell, on the other hand, is an amateur gymnast and “patron, in a blasé way, of the prize-ring” (p. 437). The sporting practices in these novels and stories sometimes bore thematic weight, but they occupied the margins of the narrative, not the center. This sort of casual inclusion of local and classmarked sports continued throughout the period under discussion in novels ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s My Wife and I (1871), in which a croquet match serves as an elaborate metaphor for life as viewed by the different players in her novel; to Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), whose heroine frequents the horse races with her father and pleasure-loving Creole friends; to Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920), whose social milieu is defined in part by the sports (croquet, archery, lawn tennis, yachting, polo) of New York’s untitled aristocracy in the 1870s. The Age of Innocence looks backward to a social world predating the rise of modern sports. So too do those nostalgic evocations of boyhood that thrived in the Gilded Age—novels such as Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (1876), Charles Dudley Warner’s Being a Boy, and William Dean Howells’s A Boy’s Town (1890)—which invariably included, and sometimes centered on, the innocent sporting pastimes of premodern, rural America. The modern sports at the center of the new national sporting culture, in contrast, are not much evident in mainstream American literature before the 1920s. As sport became organized and institutionalized over the late nineteenth century and therefore less organically woven into everyday life, writers had to choose more consciously to deal with it or not. One might argue that the spirit of modern sport saturated American fiction from the 1890s to World War I in the ubiquitous metaphor of “the game.” The idea that business or politics or life itself was a grand and glorious, or crushing and demoralizing, “game” became a literary commonplace in the fiction of Stephen Crane (1871–1900), Frank Norris (1879– 1902), Jack London (1876–1969), Richard Harding Davis (1864–1916), Owen Wister (1869–1938), and the rest of the “strenuous” school of American fiction.
1082
A M E R I C A N
The implied game was often poker or some other form of gambling, as hero after hero played the hand he was dealt in life or risked all on the main chance; but at other times it was a contest of will and prowess, implicitly the athletic games now dominating the sports pages of the daily newspaper. Theodore Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood, in The Financier (1912), played baseball and football as a boy, before life taught him that fair play had no place in the world of business. Crane, Norris, and Davis had themselves been schoolboy or college athletes. Along with London, all of them also worked briefly as sports journalists for the daily press, and they translated sport, if only metaphorically, into their fiction. Crane claimed to have learned all he knew of war from football, and he used football (as well as boxing and racing) metaphors in the battle scenes of The Red Badge of Courage. Davis’s soldiers of fortune in the novel of that name (1897), and in The King’s Jackal (1898) and Captain Macklin (1902), live their adventurous lives according to a sporting code. In addition to London’s handful of stories and two novellas about boxing, much of his other fiction is laden with metaphors of sport and gambling. In a most highly self-conscious way, “the game” is the central metaphor in Wister’s The Virginian (1902), the ur-text of popular western fiction and Wister’s homage to the values of Theodore Roosevelt, the sportsman president. The relationship of the new popular sports to the emerging view of life as contest poses a chicken-andegg conundrum. What is clearer is that the sports themselves did not fully register in the fictional mainstream. Frank Norris and Richard Harding Davis wrote football stories among their tossed-off productions— Davis’s “Richard Carr’s Baby,” included in his Stories for Boys (1891); Norris’s “Travis Hallett’s Half-Back” (Overland Monthly, January 1894) and “Kirkland at Quarter” (Saturday Evening Post, 12 October 1901)— but neither attempted a full-blown novel centered on the new college game. These stories are significant only as part of an emerging genre of the school sports story, chiefly in popular magazines, which developed the character types and plot formulas within and against which later writers worked. While there are no masterpieces within this considerable body of popular fiction, Owen Johnson’s (1878–1952) Stover at Yale (1912) deserves recognition as the “classic” from this period. THE EMERGENCE OF SPORTS FICTION
Stover at Yale was initially serialized in McClure’s Magazine, where it would have been instantly recognized as a college sports story, familiar since the 1890s as part of the more broadly defined story of college life. Waldron Kintzing Post’s (1868–1955) Harvard Stories
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SPORTS
in 1893, followed by Jesse Lynch Williams’s (1871– 1929) Princeton Stories in 1895, seem to have established the form. With the former dedicated “To the Class of ’90,” the latter “To ’92,” Post and Williams offered their tales of college life to their own classmates, whose recognition of the real-life models for the characters and incidents would bring back pleasant memories, but also more generally to that first generation of young men for whom college became a prerequisite for professional careers. The emphasis in these stories is on camaraderie, youthful escapades, and lighthearted pranks, a view of college life through a romantic haze appealing enough to send Princeton Stories through nine editions by 1900 (and to warrant a couple of sequels from Williams, The Adventures of a Freshman in 1899 and The Girl and the Game and Other College Stories in 1908). Both formal and informal games play an important role in this world, the Frosh-Soph class battles on the one hand, the contests of the varsity crew or eleven on the other. What is distinctive about sports within the larger world of college life is their utter seriousness: school life might be largely constituted of mock-heroic battles and sentimental friendships, but athletics require sacrifice, build character, and create heroes. The fundamentally heroic nature of school sports remained its most distinctive trait in popular fiction into the 1920s. Its purest embodiment appeared fifty-two times a year from April 1896 into 1915 in the pages of Tip Top Weekly, which chronicled the exploits of Frank Merriwell, then his brother Dick, then his son Frank Jr., at Fardale Academy, Yale University, and the wide world beyond. Merriwell’s creator, Gilbert Patten (1866–1945, writing as Burt L. Standish) is rightly considered the father of American sports fiction, but in many ways the Merriwell character can be viewed as a corporate creation. Patten concocted Frank Merriwell out of the “plucky” school of dime novels and Horatio Alger books, settling on a formula that Tip Top’s publisher, Street & Smith, could reproduce endlessly. Success spawned several less successful imitations—Fred Fearnot, Dick Daresome, and Frank Manley for Street & Smith’s publishing rivals (along with its own Jack Lightfoot)—but also a series of long-running periodicals through which Street & Smith itself largely created modern sports fiction. Tip Top Weekly was a juvenile magazine, as was Top-Notch (1910–1937), which Street & Smith started with Patten as editor (and frequently as chief contributor of sports stories and serials). The firm’s Popular Magazine, on the other hand, began in 1903 as another juvenile offering but quickly evolved into a magazine of adventure fiction for young men. A typical issue of Popular in the 1900s and 1910s included a mix of westerns, mysteries, historical romances, political romances, romances of “gentleman adventurers” (out of the Richard Harding A M E R I C A N
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
Davis school), and sports stories—the full range of male adventure genres, with sport occupying a prominent place. In the 1920s, when specialized pulps replaced the general-fiction formats, Street & Smith pioneered here as well, with Sport Story in 1923, the first and for many years only pulp magazine devoted exclusively to sport. Out of Frank Merriwell came the countless heroes in school sports stories in juvenile magazines such as St. Nicholas, Youth’s Companion, American Boy, and Boys’ Life and in novels by Ralph Henry Barbour, William Heyliger, and dozens of other writers (some of them serialized in the juvenile magazines). Out of Harvard Stories, Princeton Stories, and the early efforts of such writers as Richard Harding Davis and Frank Norris came dozens of stories in the great middle-class general-interest magazines of the early twentieth century. Overwhelmingly this fiction concerned the sports of boys and young men. A couple of women’s contributions to the college-life genre—Grace Margaret Gallaher’s Vassar Stories (1899) and Julia Augusta Schwartz’s Vassar Studies (1899)—included a tale of young women at sport (basketball in the former, track and field in the latter), and among the early-twentieth-century series books for girls, two of Jessie Graham Flower’s Grace Harlowe novels, two of Gertrude Morrison’s novels about the Girls of Central High, and the first three of Edith Bancroft’s five Jane Allen novels recounted female athletic heroics. But for all the obvious reasons this body of fiction was dwarfed by the Patten-Williams-Barbour school. SPORTS FICTION IN POPULAR MAGAZINES
The school sports story did not completely dominate the adult magazines. The chief producer of stories about country club and professional sports before 1920 was Charles E. Van Loan (1876–1919), a sportswriter for several western newspapers before placing his first short story with a national magazine in 1909. By the time he died in 1919 at age forty-two, Van Loan’s sports stories from such magazines as Popular, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post—contrary to a common misperception, the pulps and “slicks” were parts of the same publishing world in this period—had been published in eight volumes, four on baseball, two on boxing, and one each on horse racing (Old Man Curry, 1917) and golf (Fore! 1918). Van Loan’s stories recall the humorous sentimental realism of Bret Harte’s western fiction, look ahead to Damon Runyon’s Broadway tales in the same vein, and were instrumental in establishing this as the dominant mode for nonschool sport stories in the popular magazines of the 1920s and 1930s. Ring Lardner’s wit was sharper, his ear for the vernacular more precise, his
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
1083
SPORTS
ironies more deeply cutting than Van Loan’s, but Lardner followed in Van Loan’s footsteps. Van Loan wrote no stories about college sport, and his humorous style is strikingly absent from the work of the writers who did. Virtually from the very beginning football in particular was imbued with powerful ideologies, and as the game became the premier intercollegiate sport and a great popular spectacle by the 1890s it was invariably treated in popular fiction with high seriousness. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (1896–1940) homage to Allenby, the football captain in This Side of Paradise based on Hobey Baker, as well as his acerbic portrait of the privileged and brutish Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, derived from an understanding gained as a Princeton undergraduate in the 1910s of the potent role football played in college life. Post’s Harvard Stories and Williams’s Princeton Stories are affectionately humorous when dealing with most aspects of undergraduate life but reverential when the subject is the mighty football captain or the strivings of an outsider to make the varsity team. Short fiction in the popular magazines, whether the “slick” Saturday Evening Post or the pulp Popular, fully established the formula for the college football story in this same spirit. The college football story overwhelmingly concerned tests or proof of manly character. The hero of Frank Norris’s “Travis Hallett’s Half-Back” uses the physical courage and mental acuity learned on the football field to save his fiancée from a burning theater. The hero of Norris’s “Kirkland at Quarter” puts honor in service of his alma mater ahead of personal interest. Manliness in this fiction was both physical and moral. Eventually the football romance—the hero winning both the girl and the game—became the dominant form, but in this early period football was more often an all-male world, a Darwinian arena incongruously governed by a gentleman’s code of sportsmanship and fair play while endorsing a kind of Anglo-Saxon primitivism. Hard-driving coaches push young men at elite colleges to prove that they have not been softened and overcivilized by the privileges of their class and the comforts of the modern world. The most prolific author of this oft-told tale was James Hopper (1876–1956), a former football player at the University of California who had been a grade-school classmate of Jack London and later became a member of London’s “Crowd.” In eight football stories and a three-part serial in McClure’s, Everybody’s, and the Saturday Evening Post between 1904 and 1918 (with more in the 1920s) Hopper consistently portrayed college football in Londonesque terms. The central football episode in Owen Johnson’s Stover at Yale came directly from Hopper’s 1904 story
1084
A M E R I C A N
in the Saturday Evening Post, “The Strength of the Weak,” a tableau in which the hero punts time after time despite the crushing assaults of an overwhelming opponent, his punts traveling shorter and shorter distances as the young man grows exhausted yet singlehandedly staves off sure defeat. In Johnson’s version, Dink Stover cannot prevent the superior Princeton team from winning, but his heroic self-sacrifice earns him the ultimate reward, the silent acknowledgment of the great men from past Yale teams in the locker room afterward. Johnson’s novel deserves its classic status not for these football scenes alone but also for the larger treatment of undergraduate life centered around the profoundly undemocratic society system. In a novel that grapples with serious class issues in elite higher education (ultimately resolving them too neatly, to be sure), football more simply receives the heroic treatment typical of the popular magazine fiction of the day. Dink Stover had appeared earlier in Johnson’s The Varmint (1910), one of his series of books about prep school life, and in these Lawrenceville stories Johnson dared on occasion to treat football with something less than high seriousness. In “The Run That Turned the Game,” from The Prodigious Hickey (1910), a soft fat boy, “Piggy” Moore, is terrified into playing on the house team, then loses the climactic contest against the rival house when he completes a long desperate run to the wrong goal. A year after this story’s initial appearance in Century Magazine, George Fitch (1877–1915) published the first of his Siwash stories in the Saturday Evening Post (“Ole Skjarsen’s First Touchdown: A Siwash College Story,” 6 November 1909), the humorous tale of a strapping but dimwitted Swede that inaugurated the dumb-jock school of football fiction. It is not at all coincidental that Ole Skjarsen represented a new kind of college football player who would soon be dominating the game: the son not of an Anglo-Saxon gentleman but of an immigrant Swedish farmer. Later he would be the son of an Italian or Polish mill worker. The unambiguously heroic era of the college football story ended with the emergence of a more heterogeneous, multiethnic, and democratic world of college football. This transformed college football world emerged in the 1920s, when the so-called Golden Age of Sports also saw the proliferation of sports fiction and sports films, thoroughly formulaic for the most part, although literary authors also responded more fully to what was becoming an increasingly conspicuous part of American social life and culture. A broader range of themes and narrative formulas emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. The period preceding this Golden Age
H I S T O R Y
T H R O U G H
L I T E R A T U R E ,
1 8 7 0 – 1 9 2 0
SPORTS
thus marks the beginnings of a sports fiction genre whose full development lay in the future.
Schwartz, Julia Augusta. Vassar Studies. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899.
See also Adolescence; Boxing
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. My Wife and I; or, Harry Henderson’s History. New York: J. B. Ford, 1871.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing, 1876.
Primary Works
Aldrich, Thomas Bailey. The Story of a Bad Boy. Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870.
Warner, Charles Dudley. Being a Boy. Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1878.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Chicago: H. S. Stone, 1899.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: D. Appleton, 1920.
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna: A Descriptive Tale. New York: Charles Wiley, 1823.
Williams, Jesse Lynch. The Adventures of a Freshman. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899.
Cooper, James Fenimore. Satanstoe; or, The Littlepage Manuscripts: A Tale of the Colony. New York: Burgess, Stringer, 1845. Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War. New York: D. Appleton, 1896. Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Life in the Iron-Mills; or, The Korl Woman.” Atlantic Monthly 7 (April 1861): 430–451. Davis, Richard Harding. Captain Macklin: His Memoirs. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902. Davis, Richard Harding. The King’s Jackal. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898. Davis, Richard Harding. Stories for B
