Embattled Home Fronts: Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I

Embattled Home Fronts Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I Costerus New Series 179 Series Edito...

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Embattled Home Fronts

Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I

Costerus New Series 179 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper


Domestic Politics and the American Novel of World War I

Karsten H. Piep

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2009

Cover photo: “Silent Protest” parade on Fifth Avenue, New York City, July 28, 1917, in response to the East St. Louis race riot. In front row are James Weldon Johnson (far right), W. E. B. DuBois (2nd from right), Rev. Hutchens Chew Bishop, and realtor John E. Nail. By Permission of the New York Public Library. Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-2520-2 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

vii

Preface

ix

Modern Memory Revisited: An Introduction

1

I

WORLD WAR I AS LIBERAL PROTEST NOVEL

1 Randolph Bourne, Progressivism, and the Protest Novel 2 John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, and Humble Protest 3 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, and Personal War II

35 63 83

WORLD WAR I AS PROLETARIAN BILDUNGSROMAN

4 Specters of Revolution and the Proletarian Bildungsroman 5 Upton Sinclair, Jimmie Higgins, and Equivocal Commitments 6 William Cunningham, The Green Corn Rebellion, and Revolutionary Memory

109 123 145

III WORLD WAR I AS FEMINIST UTOPIA 7 Pacifism, Resistance, and Feminist Utopias 8 Dorothy Canfield, Home Fires in France, and Female-Centered Communities 9 Gertrude Atherton, The White Morning, and the War between the Sexes

171 187 199

IV WORLD WAR I AS RACE ROMANCE 10 Race Consciousness and the Romantic Quest 11 Sarah Lee Brown Fleming, Hope’s Highway, and the End of Racial Strife 12 Walter F. White, The Fire in the Flint, and Persistent Struggle

219

Bibliography

285

Index

301

243 263

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Several people have been instrumental in allowing me to complete this book. I wish to thank especially Rodrigo Lazo and Timothy Melley, whose incisive comments on my early drafts prompted me to dig deeper, think harder, and write clearer. And I also want to thank Cedric Barfoot, under whose steady editorial hand the book project took its present shape. Lastly, my most heartfelt thanks goes out to my parents as well as my wife, Diana, without whose gracious aid and assistance I could have never even attempted this work. Parts of section II appeared originally in War Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities and an earlier version of section III was published in Women’s Studies: An Inter-Disciplinary Journal.

PREFACE Over there, over there, Send the word, send the word over there – That the Yanks are coming, The Yanks are coming, The drums rum-tumming Ev’rywhere. So prepare, say a pray’r, Send the word, send the word to beware. We’ll be over, we’re coming over, And we won’t come back till it’s over Over there.1

From the US perspective the Great War at first appeared to be a distant affair that took place somewhere “over there” in an “old Europe”, ruled by feuding monarchs and petty aristocrats. Yet, the very rhetoric with which President Wilson gradually led the United States into war as the promoter of democracy, champion of equality, advocate of selfdetermination, and bringer of social peace made it soon apparent that some of the fiercest battles in the war “over there” would be fought right “over here”. Another popular war song, Ed Morton and Alfred Bryan’s “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”, portended as much in early 1915. When it became clear that the United States would “rush to the rescue” of a Europe that was drowning itself in muck and blood, the seemingly immutable concepts of American democracy and culture were suddenly thrown into question at home. In light of impending war, long simmering contradictions broke forth into the open: How could conscription be reconciled with an American tradition of volunteerism? How could the tenets of rugged individualism be 1

George M. Cohan, “Over There” (1917), in David Ewen, American Popular Songs from the Revolutionary War to the Present (New York: Random House, 1966), 234.

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brought in line with the need for Prussian-like discipline? How could official war propaganda coexist with the right of freedom of speech? How could dissent be silenced democratically? How could the dissimilar interests of capital and labor be reconciled so as to facilitate the mass mobilization of people and material? How could a war be fought in the name of democracy when women and minorities remained disenfranchised? How could America rush to the defense of maltreated Belgians when at home lynchings occurred almost on a daily basis? How could a war be fought against Prussian Junkerdom by a society that is itself marked by rigid social hierarchies? Even more unsettling was a host of related concerns that threatened to upset America’s social organization forever: what role would women play in the war and how would their involvement affect the already strained gender relations? Would female employment during wartime topple established family structures? What effect would the war have on class relations? Would restrictive wartime policies heighten revolutionary sentiments among the working classes, most of which had been opposed to war in the first place? And what implications would the war have on the status of African Americans in society? Would and could African Americans demand social equality in exchange for services rendered? Obviously, these and other questions related to the American war effort not only concerned government officials, politicians, pundits, and historians, but nearly every individual and nearly every group of people who lived through these tumultuous times, producers of literature emphatically included. And more often than not, the very way in which these and other questions would be framed by members of different social groups revealed American society to be the site of festering class, gender, and race conflicts. Hence, while many laborites sensed that the national war effort would lead to more or less fundamental shifts in the relationship between capital and labor, not a few women’s rights activists perceived that America’s involvement in the armed conflict abroad would eventually endow females with greater political sway and economic independence. Similarly, many African Americans adopted the view that Wilson’s “War for Democracy” had to be fought first and foremost on the American home front. The following study, then, is a historically contextualized inquiry into the highly conflicted and often remarkably contradictory

Preface

xi

American experience of World War I as it plays itself out in the diverse body of literary works to which it has given rise and by which it has been, in turn, shaped and commemorated. As such, this study, like most of its predecessors, naturally concerns itself with the formal aspects of literary representations of World War I. But rather than merely endeavoring to discern how American writers from various social backgrounds chose to depict World War I, the present study undertakes to shed light on the particular ideologies and political practices that inform these often very group-specific representational choices. In short, the study endeavors to do nothing more and nothing less than to retrace the American literary history of World War I by keeping a firm eye on American political history. It is my central premise that American literary works of World War I were inextricably embroiled in contemporaneous debates about shifting class, gender, and race relations. Hence, I argue that even the most sophisticated among them do not represent and commemorate the war as it really was. Rather, American literary works of World War I draw upon both the official and the unofficial rhetoric surrounding the war so as to redefine, reassert, and/or heighten particular group identities. To emphasize this point, I depart from most preceding investigations by scrutinizing canonized American World War I texts – written almost exclusively from a white male middle-class perspective – alongside marginalized works by proletarian, feminist, and/or African American authors. Moreover, to facilitate the close reading of First World War novels written from diverse class, gender, and race positions, I am painstakingly resituating individual texts within the larger socio-political contexts and debates that surround them. In this way, I hope to contribute to a richer understanding of a fascinating body of literature that for the most part still leads a shadowy existence in the annals of American literary history.

MODERN MEMORY REVISITED An Introduction We have had no desire to attain an authentic history; but have rather aimed to record our impressions and facts in a simple way.1 For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.2

Notwithstanding William Dean Howells’ edict in 1914 that “war stops literature” and W. B. Yeats’ lasting distaste for trench poetry, the First World War was undeniably a literary event on the grand scale, even if only in number of publications. From the very first day of hostilities, the 1914-18 war inspired enormous quantities of poetry and fiction. In England alone, Catherine W. Reilly has counted 2,225 poets of the First World War, of whom 1,808 were civilians.3 The listing of French wartime poets in Jean Vic’s La Litterature de la Guerre runs to eighteen pages. Claims that more than three million war poems were written in Germany are difficult to substantiate, but the catalogues of the Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt list 355 German-language novels of World War I. Under the subject heading “World War, 1914-1918”, the New York Public Library records 1420 pieces of fiction, 1111 volumes of poetry, 622 personal narratives, and 149 biographical 1

Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (New York: AMS Press, 1971), 6. 2 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255. 3 A. D. Harvey, “First World War Literature”, History Today, XLIII (November 1993), 11.

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accounts. In The Novels of World War I: An Annotated Bibliography (1981), Philip E. Hager and Desmond Taylor catalog nearly 1,400 titles, published between 1914 and 1978. If one adds to these the tens of thousands of war memoirs, short stories, autobiographies, letters, journals, and diaries that were written by nurses, combatants, relief workers, journalists, home front activists, and civilians from all walks of life, it is easy to see why some commentators have claimed that the First World War generated “as much writing as fighting”. But whilst the Great War continues to inspire literary responses such as Pat Barker’s acclaimed novel Regeneration (1991), a mere twenty or so World War I novels have received sustained critical attention and achieved canonical status.4 Perhaps another forty works are frequently discussed within the specialized field of war literature studies, but the vast bulk of literary responses to the First World War have been for the most part forgotten. The reasons cited for such forgetfulness are manifold. Chief among them is the alleged inferiority of much World War I literature in general and of works by US American authors in particular, whose vicarious or at best limited exposure to the horrific realities of modern trench warfare is said to have delayed a radical break with the conventions of nineteenthcentury war narratives. “To Americans”, Paul Fussell observes in his seminal study, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), “the Great War in France was as remote, as, let’s say, the Second War in the Solomon Islands: ‘Over There’ (meaning way Over There) is characteristically an American, not a British, war song”. According to Fussell, this in part accounts for the fact that, unlike the British “intercourse with literature”, which was “instinctive and unapologetic”, the American “way with literature” remained “less 4

Philip E. Hager and Desmond Taylor come up with the following list “of the twenty most significant novels of the Great War”: Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1917), Vicente Blasco Ibanez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1918), Herman Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1932), Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night (1934), Humphrey Cobb’s Paths of Glory (1935), John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921), Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy – Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), Last Post (1928) – , Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929), William March’s Company K (1933), Stratis Myrivilia’s Life in the Tomb (1927/1977), Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quite on the Western Front (1929), Jules Romains’ Verdun (1940), Michail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), Fritz Unruh’s The Way of Sacrifice (1928), and Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grisha (1929).


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assured, likely to be apologetic and self-conscious”.5 Comparing American novels of World War I with those that thematize World War II, Malcolm Cowley sounded a similar note in 1954, asserting that more of the latter “reach a certain level of competence and that, as a group, they compose a sounder body of work”.6 Studies ranging from Stanley Cooperman’s World War 1 and the American Novel (1967) to Peter Aichinger’s The American Soldier in Fiction, 1880-1963 (1975) and Peter G. Jones’ War and the Novelist (1976) have since seconded Cowley’s assessment and sketched out the gradual development of American war writings into a “distinguishable genre” that adequately represents the realities of modern warfare.7 The “formal objectivity perfected by Hemingway and Dos Passos”, Cooperman explains, was “carried on by World War II writers … who … could concentrate on total realism not only of event, but of dialogue, politics, and sexual or social motivation”.8 Though put forth time after time, such value judgments concerning the “competence”, “soundness”, and “formal objectivity” of war literature appear to be far from self-evident, so that one must ask on what grounds and for what purpose certain forms of expressions are upheld, while others are deemed inadequate. As Jane Tompkins has demonstrated in Sensational Designs (1985), critical postulations of standards of artistic merit and representational fidelity not only serve to mask prevailing ideological stances but also to obscure both the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural work literary pieces perform in direct confrontation with each other as well as society at large. The soundness of World War I literature and hence its literary value has habitually been ascertained on the basis of how accurately a particular novel projects postwar sentiments of disillusionment and expresses sharp disgust with the war as well as its attendant rhetoric. Partially in reaction to the hyper-patriotic war propaganda, so effectively disseminated in the United States by the Creel Committee, many critics exhibit an understandable penchant for World War I 5 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford UP, 1975), 221, 160-61. 6 Malcolm, Cowley, The Literary Situation (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 34. 7 Peter G. Jones, War and the Novelist: Appraising the American War Novel (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1976), 3. 8 Stanley Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967), 241.

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protest novels, which debunk the language of the Great Crusade that purported, in Woodrow Wilson’s memorable phrase, “to make the world safe for democracy”. Not surprisingly, then, most critical assessments of World War I literature that seek to map out the development of American war literature into a distinguishable genre suggest that the unsound fiction written during the 1914-1918 period was pro-war, while the more objective novels of the later phase were characterized by disillusionment and finally outrage. As Philip E. Hager and Desmond Taylor have shown, however, this literaryhistorical division of World War I literature into early pro-war and later anti-war works is scarcely tenable. “It is now apparent”, Hager and Taylor write, “that the themes of the novels did not change from fervent patriotism or even jingoism to revulsion and outrage as the human casualties were recognized back home”.9 Comparing wartime with postwar novels, Hager and Taylor conclude that mundane themes such as “life in war”, “day-to-day activities”, “conversations”, and “thoughts of draft-aged youths in love with village girls” predominate the written response to World War I. Even though critics have become more aware of the difficulties involved in circumscribing the thematic and ideological thrust of antiwar novels, relatively few studies of American First World War literature pause to consider the political uses to which images of shellshocked and victimized soldiers are put within particularly praiseworthy works of anti-war fiction.10 Hence, Evelyn Cobley notes that the “self-image of the soldier as sacrificial victim” constitutes a form of ironic “ennoblement”, but stops short of asking what day-today practices and attitudes such re-ennoblement of the war veteran serves to legitimize.11 Similarly, whereas much attention has been paid to the uncompromising manner in which “exemplary” novels expose the “deceptive rhetoric of progress within a cultural system that no longer permits the authentic individual experience of values”, comparatively little notice has been taken of the ways in which American World War I texts by authors of both genders and of 9

Philip Hager and Desmond Taylor, The Novels of World War I: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1981), 4. 10 Walter Hölbling, Fiktionen vom Krieg im neueren amerikanischen Roman (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1987), 52. 11 Evelyn Cobley, “Violence and Sacrifice in Modern War Narratives”, SubStance, XXIII/3 (1994), 77.


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different racial backgrounds buttress, subvert, or rework cultural assumptions concerning the status of women, minorities, immigrants, and the working classes.12 Dorothy Goldman’s remark that “in terms of literary history and the canon of war writing, the Great War was a man’s war” attests to this, as does David Lundberg’s observation that “even though some [black soldiers] were poets and novelists who left accounts of their war experience … none of [the recent scholarship] deals explicitly with the black literary response to the war”.13 When Walt Whitman wrote after the Civil War that “the real war will never get in the books”, he might have been closer to the truth than many a literary critic who berates “the failure of American writers to grasp the reality of the war”.14 No matter how sophisticated its representational techniques and no matter how up-to-date its vocabulary, every war narrative that emerges from the pages of history books or works of fiction creates the very realities its represents. And what Amy Kaplan has observed with regard to nineteenth-century Realist narratives is also applicable to early twentieth-century war narratives (Modernist or otherwise): they “actively construct the coherent social world they represent; and they do this not in a vacuum of fictionality but in direct confrontation with the elusive process of social change”.15 At the heart of Kaplan’s social constructivist approach to literature stands the central supposition that history – “the elusive process of social change” – is never directly reflected in the form and content of a given text, but instead appears always already mediated by personal and cultural ideologies. Yet, since “the subject matter of war literature is still widely believed to be historically verifiable”, as Evelyn Cobley notes, many literary critics have focused primarily on the selfprofessed truthfulness of war narratives rather than on the ways in which fictions of war at once generate and suppress historical

12

Hölbling, Fiktionen vom Krieg im neueren amerikanischen Roman, 56. Dorothy Goldman, Women Writers and the Great War (New York: Twayne, 1995) ix-x; David Lundberg, “The American Literature of War: The Civil War, World War I, and World War II, American Quarterly, XXXVI/3 (Fall 1984), 381. 14 Jeffrey Walsh, American War Literature, 1914 to Vietnam (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982), 17. 15 Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988), 9. 13

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possibilities for social change.16 Akin to those young white male authors, who, after “the show” was over, set out to tell the truth about the horrors of modern warfare, critics have labored hard to explain the appearance of new modes of understanding and representation as the anticipated and seemingly inevitable outcome of history. Gertrude Stein’s literary-political edict that Modernism made World War I decipherable for it “created the completed recognition of the contemporary composition”, appears to have been accepted by a majority of critics without a great deal of modification.17 Paying henceforth scant attention to the ways in which Stein and her fellow writers “actively construct the coherent world they represent”, critical studies ranging from John W. Aldridge’s After the Lost Generation (1951) to Bernhard Bergonzi’s Heroes’ Twilight (1965) to Holger Klein’s The First World War in Fiction (1976) have persisted in judging the significance of war novels on the basis of their artistic capacity to give appropriate forms to the new historical realities (or signs of the times) that are supposed to be accessible as the Kantian “thing-in-itself”. In his Preface to The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell describes what he perceives to be the “reciprocal process by which life feeds materials to literature while literature returns the favor by conforming forms upon life”.18 Taking note of Bernhard Bergonzi’s retrospective insight that “The problems of relating texts of literature and the texts of history now loom larger and more dauntingly”, the present study aims to complicate Fussell’s reciprocal process insofar as it assumes that life itself (for instance, war, social change, history) cannot come into view independently of the very texts that give form to it.19 I am thus proceeding from Fredric Jameson’s understanding that “history … as an absent cause … is inaccessible to us except in textual form [so] that our approach to it and to the Real necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the

16

Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993), 14. 17 Gertrude Stein, “Composition and Explanation”, in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures, 1909-45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (New York: Penguin, 1984), 28. 18 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, i. 19 Bernhard Bergonzi, Heroes Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War (2nd ed, London: Macmillan, 1980), 10.


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political unconscious”.20 Literature, as Jameson has argued convincingly, is not an artistic reflection of historical realities, but a “socially symbolic act” – “a way of doing something to the world”.21 Hence, instead of attempting to measure literary depictions of the war against dominant historical master narratives concerning the Real War or against standards of what William E. Matsen calls the evolving “writer’s craft”, Embattled Home Fronts sets out to discern the types of cultural work in which American World War I literature participates.22 The self-reflective amateur historian in Richard Powers’ World War I novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985) concludes: … each life both theorizes on and works out the spirit of its epoch. Each discrete life examines and explains everything it touches in a constant exchange of mutual defining and reshaping …. They create each other, as making and understanding create each other.23

Embattled Home Fronts takes a similar epistemological turn. Heeding Jameson’s call to reconstruct the historical subtexts that surround and underlie individual literary texts, including what are called “timeless classics”, I am, first of all, endeavoring to restore some of the marginalized or lost literary voices of the First World War, most notably those of women, African Americans, and writers concerned with a working-class perspective. “Such reconstruction”, as Jameson points out, “is of a piece with the reaffirmation of the existence of marginalized or oppositional cultures in our own time, and the reaudition of the oppositional voices of black or ethnic cultures, women’s and gay literature, ‘naïve’ or marginalized folk art, and the like”.24

20

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981), 35. 21 Ibid., 12. 22 William E. Matsen, The Great War and the American Novel: Versions of Reality and the Writer’s Craft in Select Fiction of the First World War (New York: Peter Lang, 1993). 23 Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (New York: Morrow, 1985), 206-207. 24 Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 85.

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Now, since “the reaffirmation of the existence of marginalized or oppositional groups” has lately come under sharp attack, a few words of clarification seem to be in order here. Leading the assault against what he perceives to be self-defeating trends within current political literary criticism, Walter Benn Michaels has charged that late twentieth-century versions of identity politics fall into the early twentieth-century trap of “pluralist racism”.25 Michaels certainly does well to remind us of the inherent structural limitations of identity political concepts that are based upon difference. What Michaels tends to overlook, however, is that pluralist formulations of difference are usually in flux and often foster strategic coalitions across race, gender, and class lines (perhaps the latest example of this is the white rapper Eminem). Moreover, as Raymond Williams reminds us, even after new or emergent cultural practices have been incorporated into the structure of a dominant culture, they are never singular, fixed, or stable. They “have continually to be renewed, recreated, and defended and by the same token … can be continually challenged and in certain respects modified”.26 Eager to expose “the conceptual apparatus of pluralist racism”, Michaels, it appears, falls into the trap of structural determinism when he not only equates white supremacy with black nationalist positions, but also fails to consider the social conditions under which literary constructions of a cultural race consciousness function as weapons in the political fight against oppression. “Conceptual similarities often underlie antagonistic positions”, Eric Lott observes, “but this hardly means that the positions are

25

Reading a wide variety of early twentieth-century texts, ranging from the Immigration Act of 1924 to Nella Larsen’s Passing to William Faulkner’s The Sound of the Fury, Michaels notes a conceptual shift from Progressive-era notions of racial, ethnic, and cultural hierarchies toward modern ideas of pluralism based upon “Difference not Inferiority”. According to Michaels, however, this new conceptual emphasis on racial, ethnic, and cultural differences is hardly designed to promote greater tolerance. On the contrary, in Michaels’ view it merely constitutes a more sophisticated form of racism because “the commitment to difference itself represent a theoretical intensification that has nothing do to with feelings of tolerance or intolerance toward other races and everything to do with the conceptual apparatus of pluralist racism” (Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism [Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995], 65). 26 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory”, in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: NLB, 1980), 35.


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indistinguishable or that we should care more about conceptual underpinnings than political conflicts”.27 Without close attention to specific political conflicts, I maintain, the study of American World War I literature yields little more than formalistic dichotomies, which demarcate genteel against Modernist fiction, but – by and in themselves – reveal hardly anything about the social practices of war novels and their relations to society. Thus, in shifting the focus from artistic responses to modern warfare “over there” to literary interventions in the political battles “over here”, I am departing from most previous studies by starting from the assumption that American World War I novels were actively engaged in the class, gender, and race conflicts that threatened to explode the nation’s social fabric. For as historian David M. Kennedy reminds us, “Americans went to war in 1917 not only against Germans in the fields of France but against each other at home. They entered on a deadly serious contest to determine the consequences of the crisis for the character of American economic, social, and political life.”28 Based upon these suppositions, I contend that literary representations of the Great War are shaped less by sudden and universal insights into modern society’s futility and self-destructive horror than by concerted and often conflicting efforts to fashion the realities of (class, gender, race) warfare in ways that create, stabilize, or heighten particular group identities. And these efforts to create, stabilize, or heighten particular group identities are characterized both by a harking back to residual cultural experiences, meanings, and values (for example, the African American experience of slavery) and by a fostering of emergent cultural experiences, meanings, and values (for instance, the growing experience of women in the business world). Before the backdrop of mounting labor conflicts, an unprecedented influx of women into the workforce, and the spread of bloody race riots, marginalized World War I novels such as Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins, Gertrude Atherton’s The White Morning, and Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway actively participate in the creation of a heightened class, race, and gender consciousness that 27 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 28. 28 David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1980), 41.

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eventually gave rise to the identity-political concepts of the “New Proletariat”, the “New Woman”, and the “New Negro”. Striving to sketch out specific communal responses to World War I, these works do not, as has been charged, stubbornly cling to the outdated representational mode of the historical romance. Instead, they adapt and modify existing conventions of the Bildungsroman, the feminist Utopia, and the historical romance so as to chart out the course of future political action based upon the collective memory of past struggles and past abuses. And in doing so, the forgotten war novels discussed in this study provide some of the missing links that connect, for example, early twentieth-century muckraking novels such as Frank Norris’ The Octopus (1901) with 1930s social novels such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), late nineteenth-century women’s novels such as Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Fires (1896) with 1930s communitarian novels such as Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl (1936), and post-Reconstruction novels such as Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) with black protest novels such as Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). Of course, American World War I novels written from proletarian, feminist, and black perspectives were not the only ones concerned with redefining class, gender, and race positions. Far from representing the realities of war in a detached and objective manner, self-consciously Modernist war novels such as John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms labored equally hard to redraw the contours of a white male middle-class identity whose cultural authority seemed to be eroding. But in contrast to the collective or communal war novels mentioned above, these Modernist works persist in depicting the Great War as the great isolating experience that renders meaningful political discourses well nigh impossible. Angrily discarding hopes for an exalted collective destiny that progressive reformers continued to voice, they turn public struggles into private ones, until the self becomes the sole arbiter on questions of morality, politics, and – not incidentally – relations between the classes, sexes, and the nature of man- and womanhood. Given the longstanding valorization of individualism and selfreliance within Western literature generally and American literature particularly, it is easy to see why the Modernist privatization of political conflicts continues to appeal to critics of World War I


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literature. Erich Kahler’s assessment of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is emblematic. Noting the “clarity” with which Hemingway conveys “the bitter experience and disillusionment of the generation”, Kahler finds special praise for the book’s omission of “detail, social commentary, and explicit psychology”.29 It remains puzzling, to say the least, how the deliberate avoidance of “detail, social commentary, and explicit psychology” may elucidate the roots of disillusionment not just among young male war veterans, but an entire generation. Apparently, critics such as Kahler and Peter G. Jones are less interested in the precise sources of the protagonist’s “existentialist anxiety” than in his ability to revalidate traditional tenets of (white male) individualism through “calculated detachment” or other such strategies.30 And indeed, Frederic Henry’s separate peace in A Farewell to Arms as well as John Andrews’ private gesture towards human freedom in Three Soldiers forcefully reassert authentic man’s ability to define himself through his inner strengths and to create his own vision of existence independently of friends, foes, family, society, and tradition. First World War novels written from proletarian, feminist, and/or African American perspectives by and large tend to resist such politics of (re)individualization. In these novels, loners almost invariably turn out to be losers. Hence, rather than providing an ominous picture of the potentially devastating effects of modern mass warfare, mass slaughter, and mass demagoguery on the individual, they depict and explore various collective responses to the sweltering social conflicts that had been aggravated by the war. Moreover, written, for the most part, from a perspective of the already-oppressed, proletarian, feminist, and black World War I novels do not just depict what some called the “rich man’s” or the “white man’s war” with a certain amount of malicious glee, but as a historical signpost that portends radical shifts in the nation’s cultural, social, and political power structures. Ultimately, my focus on the ways in which American authors struggled to represent the impact of World War I on different segments of the populace aims to illuminate where and how venues for emancipatory social action were opened up, blocked, or both. The present study aspires to do more than to discern some of the ways in 29 30

Erich Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss (New York: Braziller, 1967), 98-99. Jones, War and the Novelist, 8.

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which American World War I literature – unwittingly or not – buttresses hegemonic power structures. It also, and perhaps more importantly, seeks to recover certain Utopian impulses that underlie these works. For if, as Walter Benjamin famously stated, “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”, the inverse conclusion appears to be equally permissible; namely, that there is no cultural artifact which – in documenting barbarism – does not also project Utopian longings for emancipatory social action.31 Benjamin’s own approach in his fragmentary Passagen-Werk, wherein he seeks “to recover the revolutionary potential of the archaic images of the collective wish for social utopia”, points the way to such an interpretative double move that aims to illuminate how literary appropriations of cultural myth at once bolster and undercut existing power structures.32 The circulation of hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses within American World War I literature is much too complex to be understood as the clash between genteel and Modernist war representations. Both more traditionalistic war representations – which typically hold on to Progessivist tenets of social reform – and more Modernistic war representations – which tend to reject notions of social amelioration – at times challenge, at times replicate elements of a hegemonic order that, is subject to constant rifts, shifts, and transformations. And it is precisely in light of these incessant changes within the hegemonic order that the rereading of canonical alongside marginalized World War I novels assumes significance. Because once alternative or oppositional practices, meanings, and experiences have been thoroughly incorporated into a dominant culture (as happened, for example, with the Modernist trope of disillusionment), they tend to become part of a new cultural system of domination. Viewed in this light, it might be more than coincidence that the rise of American literary Modernism went hand-in-hand with the spread of the neoconservative politics of normalcy and the rapid demise of social critical fiction (until the latter was again revived in the early 1930s under the impact of the Great Depression). This, then, brings me to a final point already alluded to above; namely, that the oppositional or alternative tendencies within 31

Benjamin, Illuminations, 256. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 116.

32


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marginalized World War I novels written from a feminist, black, and proletarian perspective were obviously muted but never fully incorporated into the dominant cultures of ensuing decades. As a result, these war representations maintained potentially transformative qualities or images (such as depictions of war-worn women who topple a militaristic government, black war heroes who become communal leaders, or multiracial coalitions among rebellious workers) that bespeak the unrealized hopes and aspirations of the “lost generations” of war brides, black servicemen and ammunition workers. To be sure, many of these war and postwar hopes have subsequently been articulated through different channels. Yet the specific and often highly conflicted cultural practices, meanings, and experiences that millions of women, blacks, and members of the working classes shared during the First World War have long since been lost. Literally overwritten by a palimpsestic modern memory of the Great War that “derives primarily from images of the trenches in France and Belgium”, they have been rendered nearly invisible.33 In the final chapter of Willa Cather’s Pulitzer-prize-winning World War I novel, One of Ours (1922), Mrs Wheeler finds solace in the thought that her fallen son had been spared the inevitable disillusionment that was to follow the war: He died believing his own country better than it is, and France better than any country can ever be. And those were beautiful beliefs to die with. Perhaps it was well to see that vision, and then to see no more. She would have dreaded the awakening—she sometimes even doubts whether he could have borne at all that last, desolating disappointment.34

Having painstakingly traced Claude Wheeler’s transformation from a dull, frustrated Nebraska farm boy into an invigorated and overly idealistic war hero, Cather disposes of her protagonist at the height of his masculine powers. Unlike John Dos Passos, who in Three Soldiers sends John Andrews “out on the Crusade in order to achieve meaning through sacrifice” only to throw him into self-doubt and deep personal anguish, Cather charts Claude’s growing obsession with power and 33 34

Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, i. Willa Cather, One of Ours (New York: Knopf, 1922), 458.

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violence to its climactic end.35 Primarily interested in the psychological links between idolized notions of women, repressive sexual mores, and violence, Cather deliberately preempts Claude’s postwar disillusionment, which, Mrs Wheeler surmises, might have prompted him to commit suicide. That last, desolating disappointment, which Cather both evokes and, to the chagrin of many of her critics, suppresses, has undoubtedly become the most enduring legacy of America’s Great War experience, not least because a postwar generation of self-consciously modern writers made it their signature theme. “All hopes were reduced to ashes in the savage absurdity of war”, Stanley Cooperman writes in his pioneering study World War I and the American Novel. Initially “seized upon” as a “means for escaping materialism, for achieving personal nobility” and “for carrying the banner of disinterested justice”, the “war was discovered to be an excrescence of hypocritical values and a tragically flawed society. This was the final—and unforgivable—disillusion.” Out of this unforgivable disillusionment, Cooperman notes, “a movement of counter-rhetoric developed during the twenties and early thirties, bringing into articulate focus the general cynicism represented by the work of Eliot Paul, the anesthetized ‘I’ of Hemingway’s heroes, and the broad, objective, scientific noninvolvement of Dos Passos’ collectivist novels”.36 In short, the Great War not only gave America’s budding literary Modernism its frightfully exhilarating baptism of fire, but also its defining gestures of angry protest and disenchantment. In Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, published two years after the war, Ezra Pound forcefully articulates the new self-image of a maimed and shellshocked yet wised up and defiant “lost generation”: These fought in any case, … believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy; usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places. 35 36

Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel, 176. Ibid., 44-45.


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Daring as never before, wastage as never before. Young blood and high blood, fair cheeks, and fine bodies; fortitude as never before frankness as never before, disillusion as never told in the old days, hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies.37

Having witnessed “wastage as never before” and suffered bouts of hitherto unmanly hysteria in the trenches, the new vanguard of American culture – that is, well-educated, privileged, white young males such as Ernest Hemingway, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, and William Faulkner – are called upon to expose “old lies and new infamy” and to speak frankly of “disillusion as never told in the old days”. For those who “fought in any case”, wearing their hard-won disillusionment as a red badge of courage, Pound suggests, stand poised to serve a death-knell to “an old bitch gone in the teeth /… a botched civilization”.38 Given Pound’s prominent account of the genesis of modern man in opposition to a feminized Victorian culture, it is hardly surprising that literary critics have tended to gauge the impact of World War I on the production of literature in terms of its catalytic effects on the innovative writings by British soldier-poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves or American medical corps literati such as John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. In order to expose old lies and new infamy, the well-worn argument goes, new literary forms were required that had to be derived from the direct experience of industrialized mass warfare. And in line with the revisionist histories of the Great War that began appearing as early as 1920, the gist of this experience was to be “horror, dehumanization, numbness, absurdity, and education into political, cultural, and sexual realities”.39 Hence, 37

Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”, in Personae: The Collected Poems of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1926), 187-88. 38 Ibid., 188. 39 Cooperman, World War 1 and the American Novel, 125. On revisionist histories of the 1920s, see John Lukas, “Revising the Twentieth Century”, American Heritage, XVV/5 (1994), 83-89.

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stressing the unbridgeable difference between home front and trench experience and, by extension, between pre- and postwar aesthetics, Paul Fussell categorically asserts that “Even if those at home had wanted to know the realities of the war, they couldn’t have without experiencing them: its conditions were too novel, its industrialized ghastliness was too unprecedented. The war would have been simply unbelievable”.40 Following Pound’s poetic analysis, Fussell not merely perceives the Great War as a ritual of initiation for young innocent men, but as the entrance rite into the modern world so that a select body of British and American World War I writings becomes the source of all truly modern – because historically circumscribed and necessarily ironic – war literature. “I am saying”, Fussell writes, “that there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding; that it is essentially ironic; and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War”.41 As numerous feminist scholars were quick to point out, Fussell’s emphasis on ironic representations of trench warfare by a disillusioned generation of young war poets has resulted in an epistemological privileging of a particular white male perspective over that of women, blacks, home front activists, and civilians.42 In effect, Fussell as well as many other critics of the war poet school assert that war writings by women and civilians are somehow less real and less modern than those of combatants. The shortcomings of such a narrow focus on war literature produced largely from a white male perspective are at least twofold. First, as Susan Schweik has argued, it serves to conceal various social struggles that took place at the remote American home front, for example, conflicts within the working class, within the progressive movement, among women’s rights advocates, and among the black populace.43 Secondly, in their insistence that “the war itself becomes a genuine dividing line between the literary generations”, critics such as Charles A. Fenton endow with genuineness only the particular, trench-born protest of the “lost generation”, thereby casting 40

Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 87. Ibid., 35. 42 See, for instance, Arms and the Women: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, eds Helen Cooper et al (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989). 43 See Susan Schweik, A Gulf Cut So Deeply: American Women Poets and the Second World War (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991), 293-94. 41


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aside other literary attempts to remember, represent, and reconstruct World War I.44 “The myth of a lost generation”, Walsh observes, “is one of the most potent imaginative impulses and orientations in the traditions of American war writing”. The political potency of this myth, however, lies not simply in its “aura of betrayal” and disillusionment, but most of all in its experiential claim of being the sole depository of truly modern memory.45 For as self-consciously modern writers such as Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner “began to capitalize upon their self-image of separateness, of being initiated”, not only the Modernist aesthetics of these writers –most notably “a suspension of time” and “a modification of customary space” (that is, what Gertrude Stein called a “cubist change of perspective”) – achieved “exemplary status”, but so did their particular kind of “radical cultural critique”.46 Swift to denounce war novels “by lady authors” who “were themselves products of older, more sentimental concepts of war”, few critics of American World War I literature have paused to consider why the “radical cultural critique” of A Farewell to Arms, Three Soldiers, and Soldiers’ Pay achieved such credence among intellectual circles during the late 1920s and early 1930s.47 Only of late have cultural critics begun to reevaluate the politics of Modernist representation vis-à-vis persistent national anxieties concerning the status of women, minorities, and immigrants. Citing Malcolm Cowley’s observation that “the admired writers of the generation were 44

Charles A. Fenton, “A Literary Fracture of World War I”, American Quarterly, XII/2 (1960), 119-32. 45 Walsh, American War Literature, 5. 46 F. J. Hoffman, The Twenties (New York: Harcourt, 1965), 87; Walsh, American War Literature, 80-81. For instance, in Fiktionen vom Krieg im neueren amerikanischen Roman Walter Hölbling argues that although “both the aesthetic innovations and the radical cultural critique of authors such as Cummings, Dos Passos, Hemingway and Faulkner … [initially] affected only a relatively small circle of contemporary intellectuals, especially the novels by Dos Passos and Hemingway set new paradigms for the fictional representation of war, which, meanwhile conventionalized, have maintained their exemplary status into the present” (55). Similarly, Peter G. Jones argues in War and the Novelist: “Three earlier works constitute prototypes for contemporary war novels. In terms of structure, characterization, and exploitation of the genre’s potential as a means of more general expression, they established precedents that still exert a strong influence. These books are: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms” (5). 47 Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel, 21, 33.

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men in the great majority” who were also “white, middle-class, mostly Protestant by upbringing, and mostly English and Scottish by descent”, David Minter argues that the appeal of the lost-generation brand of cultural critique was not so much rooted in its radicalism as in its exclusiveness: “Rather than reach out to recent immigrants, women, or African-Americans, they [Fitzgerald and his contemporaries] remained almost as jealous of their status and control as Tom Buchanan is of his.”48 While Cowley’s admired writers “bemoaned the Senate’s acts in the aftermath of the war; denounced the KKK, the Red Scare … and condemned the vulgar materialism and ruthless profiteering of businessmen”, Minter points out that many of them “harbored and even expressed versions of the ambitions and prejudices they thought of themselves as rebelling against”. This, Minter concludes, may help to explain why society rewarded white male literati such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Dos Passos “in ways that it never rewarded black writers of Harlem, Jewish writers of New York’s East Side and women writers anywhere … many of whom it pushed into the marginalized tasks of running bookstores, editing small journals, and writing diaries. 49 Willa Cather and Edith Wharton, to be sure, were well-established novelists long before World War I, and remained so long afterwards. It seems undeniable, though, that the authorial and critical insistence on Modernist aesthetics and its attendant variety of radical cultural critique has led to a devaluation of the home front writings by women, whose depictions of World War I are said to be tainted by an adherence to conventions of the historical romance.50 And although the Harlem Renaissance is said to have been greatly impacted by the Great War, African-American literary responses to the war such as Victor Daly’s Not Only War (1932) have received little to no critical attention, which seems especially disconcerting since over 367,000 African-American soldiers served in the conflict. Obviously, this is as much an aesthetic as a political move, because in assigning sole representational authority to works by white male Modernists, critics such as Bernard Bergonzi, Stanley Cooperman, and Paul Fussell have created a cultural history of World War I that excludes black voices 48

David Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel, Henry James to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994), 113. 49 Ibid., 118. 50 Hölbling, Fiktionen vom Krieg im neueren amerikanischen Roman, 50-51.


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(much like an US Army that relegated black soldiers to Service of Supply units) and undermines the validity of everything female writers such as Cather may have contributed to a more polymorphous view of modern understanding. Ernest Hemingway’s blunt rejection of One of Ours in a 1923 letter to Edmund Wilson offers a case in point: Look at One of Ours [Hemingway wrote], Prize, big sale, people taking it seriously …. Wasn’t that last scene in the lines wonderful? Do you know where it came from? The battle scene in Birth of a Nation. I identified episode after episode, Catherized. Poor woman she has to get her war experience somewhere.51

Hemingway might be correct in detecting a strain of Nativism in Cather’s One of Ours, but his insistence on combat experience as the requisite for both narrative and historical validity, however, tends to suppress the multiplicity of ways in which authors from different backgrounds and perspectives sought to understand and shape the socio-political implications of World War I. Put differently, critical presuppositions that only certain texts, using certain experiences in a particular fashion, provide an adequately modern understanding of American postwar culture, at best limits, at worst forestalls any analysis of the ways in which American World War I writings strive to intervene in ongoing public discourses on gender, race, and class relations. “War, like writing, shapes perception”, Trudi Tate points out.52 Modernism, according to Gertrude Stein, made World War I decipherable. Yet, Modernist fiction is certainly neither the most authentic nor the most objective form of writing that makes war readable. After all, as Margot Norris has shown, “modernism’s suppression of the war dead” tends to not only erase historical referents, but also to veil the “aesthetics and ideological agendas” of luminaries such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, whose war poems indirectly and in highly stylized fashion associate mass carnage with unruly urban masses, anarchy, and filth.53 Thus, to 51

Quoted in Edmund Wilson, The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952), 118. 52 Trudi Tate, Modernism, History, and the First World War (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998), 4. 53 Margot Norris, Writing War in the Twentieth Century (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2000), 35-36.

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gain, as it were, a fuller perception of the ways in which various representational approaches compete with each other in the construction of a modern understanding of the World War I experience, it becomes necessary to read avowedly Modernist war writings by young, privileged white males in conjunction with habitually dismissed war texts by authors of different gender, class affiliation, and/or color. For as Cary Nelson has demonstrated in Repression and Recovery, the cultural work of Modernist literature remains obscured until “other vital poetries and other engaged audiences for poetry [that] were also at work” are taken into consideration.54 Feminist scholarship on war writings by women, especially within the British context, has already laid some groundwork for a more inclusive study of World War I literature that complicates Fussell’s notion of modern memory as the loss of innocence and the ascent of ironic representation. Since the early 1980s, feminist critics have been excavating long-forgotten novels, poems, and diaries that not only depict real suffering on the home front and testify to female complicity in war making, but also illustrate how the Great War, with all its “scene[s] of bondage, frustration, or absurdity”, held the Utopian promise of emancipatory social change.55 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s survey of World War I literature in No Man’s Land (1988) has served notice that the Great War, far from inevitably culminating in disillusionment, angry protest, and Modernist irony, “functioned in so many ways to liberate women—offering a revolution in economic expectations, a release of passionate energies, a reunion of previously fragmented sisters, and a revision of social and aesthetic dreams”. 56 The war, in short, sparked a radical reversal of gender roles so: … that as young men became increasingly alienated from their prewar selves, increasingly immured in the muck and blood of no man’s land, increasingly abandoned by the civilization of which they had ostensibly been heirs, women seemed to become, as if by an uncanny 54

Cary Nelson, Recovery and Repression: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910-1945 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1989), 22. 55 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 312. 56 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988), II, 348.


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swing of the pendulum, ever more powerful. As nurses, as mistresses, as munitions workers, bus drivers, or soldiers in the “land army”, even as wives and mothers, these formerly subservient creatures began to loom malevolently larger.57

Not surprisingly, then, this real or perceived “apotheosis of femaleness” culminated in a fierce backlash shortly after the war. Barraged by a flood of anti-home front poems, trench novels, and revisionist histories that blamed an overly feminized culture for the war, women writers became increasingly tormented by feelings of survivor’s guilt, began to internalize “the postwar misogyny that was so ‘strikingly in fashion’”, and eventually buried their dreams of a “utopia arisen from the ashes of apocalypse and founded on the revelation of a new social order”.58 Drawing upon Gilbert and Gubar’s study, James Longbach also stresses the interconnection between the battles “of modernism, sexism, and the Somme”.59 According to Longbach, however, the literary war between the sexes neither originated at the Somme nor ended with the passage of female suffrage laws. For although male authors were quick to portray the war as the apocalypse that had shattered old-fashioned sexual mores and beget more progressive gender relations, in the war writings of women authors such as Rebecca West “there is no sense that one age has ended and a new age begun. And if the men of 1914 wanted to believe that the battle of the sexes had been won with the Great War”, Longbach writes, “the women of 1914 suspected that more battles would be fought”.60 Writing primarily about A Son at the Front but making wider claims concerning the legacy of World War I novels by women, Judith Sensibar has argued that Edith Wharton “anticipated feminist critics of the late twentieth century by asking how the social disruptions of the Great War reveal and affect socially constructed notions of masculinity and femininity”.61 Accordingly, Sensibar emphasizes that 57

Ibid., 263. Ibid., 321, 303. 59 James Longbach, “The Men and Women of 1914”, in Arms and the Women: War, Gender, and Literary Representation, 98. 60 Ibid., 118. 61 Judith Sensibar, “‘Behind the Lines’ in Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front: Rewriting the Masculinist Tradition”, Journal of American Studies, XXIV/2 (August 1990), 118. 58

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women “write a different war, a war behind the lines and within that … will continue as long as masculine homophobic gender classifications are in place”.62 “The war”, Dorothy Goldman concurs, “made women more alert to contemporary gender systems, and their views on them and their inherent inequality were widely, if not always explicitly, expressed”. This heightened attentiveness to contemporary gender systems, however, is not restricted to World War I writings by women, Goldman underscores. During and after the war, she points out, “both men and women were struggling to understand the social and gender roles that had been imposed on them”. But rather than tracing a mounting gender antagonism back to divergent wartime experiences of men and women, Goldman stresses that “it was the construction of the reality of war that came between men and women”. Hence, formal and thematic differences in the ways in which male and female authors represent World War I must be understood as part and parcel of an ongoing “reconceptualization of gender roles”. 63 As Trudi Tate has pointed out, the reconceptualization of gender roles during and after the war provides but one of several subtexts that have affected the form and content of Great War novels. Another significant subtext, especially in the American framework, is undoubtedly the ongoing reconceptualization of race relations that received new impetus during World War I. But although most scholars seem to agree that the war was crucial to the emergence of the New Negro as well as the Harlem Renaissance, few studies have dealt explicitly with black literary responses to World War I. This might explain why literary critics often reduce the African American war experience to the familiar tropes of victimization, hopelessness, and alienation. Observes Wendy Steiner: Black soldiers, doubly victimized by the European enemy and by white American soldiers, suffered discrimination and brutality abroad and upon their return home. For them, the war dimmed any real hope of assimilation. Their alienation from the land they had fought to preserve was confirmed by the bloody riots of the summer of 1919.64 62

Ibid., 198. Goldman, Women Writers and the Great War, 33, 39, 47. 64 Wendy Steiner, “The Diversity of American Fiction, 1910-1945”, in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 850.

63


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Given such literary historical insistence on Modernist disillusionment, it is no wonder that the browbeaten veterans at the Golden Day in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947) and the ravaged Shadrack, who celebrates an annual “National Suicide Day” in Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), should have become the most enduring images of black World War I soldiers in American literature. “Blasted and permanently astonished by the events of 1917”, these black veterans, much like Dos Passos’ John Andrews and Faulkner’s Donald Mahon, come to represent the paralyzing aphasia of modern man. 65 While there is no doubt that many black veterans felt victimized and disillusioned, earlier Great War writings by black men and women especially do more than just bear witness to dehumanization: they also reaffirm a black potential for heroic action and begin to chart out a new race consciousness that holds the promise of self-emancipation. As Claire Tylee writes, “African American women’s writing of the Great War period articulated the pride and dramatized the Black Energy which helped fire the cultural revolution of the Harlem Renaissance … [they] intervene in national politics, both by publicizing the dilemmas of African American men and by demonstrating that their people were worthy of respectful attention”.66 Moreover, as Lee J. Greene notes, the “double victimization” of black soldiers is often rendered as a form of empowerment in African American war novels, because “as a consequence of their travels abroad, these soldiers discover a metaphorical New Eden. The standard situation is that as a result of white Europeans’ humane treatment of them, the soldiers more readily affirm their rightful place as members of the human family and refute white America’s claim that they are naturally depraved and subhuman”.67 In his “Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War” (1919), W. E. B. Du Bois makes a similar point, claiming that “this double experience of deliberate and devilish persecution from their own countrymen, coupled with a taste of real democracy and world-old culture, was revolutionizing. They began to hate prejudice and 65

Tony Morrison, Sula (New York: Bantam, 1977), 28. Claire Tylee, “Womanist Propaganda, African-American Great War Experience, and Cultural Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance: Plays by Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mary P. Burrill”, Women’s Studies International Forum, XX/1 (January-February 1997), 161. 67 Lee J. Greene, Blacks in Eden, 131. 66

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discrimination as they had never hated it before” so that a “new, radical Negro spirit has been born in France”.68 Attempts to gauge African American literary responses to World War I, both Tylee and Greene underscore, cannot rely on constructions of the realities of war that draw upon the literary representations of white male authors in order to describe the purported nature of black postwar disillusionment. As will be argued throughout, what these constructions fail to consider is that black characters in novels such as Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and Walter White’s Fire in the Flint assess their war experiences before the backdrop of a long history of racial victimization and disillusionment. Unlike the privileged white male characters in canonized war novels, for whom the Great War and its aftermath comes to signify the first encounter with a botched civilization, black characters perceive the war as merely one in a long series of much more humiliating encounters with an inherently flawed society. Derived from a renewed alertness to the long history of victimization and passive suffering, the affirmations of romantic notions such as valor, heroism, and sacrifice that permeate many African American accounts of World War I become rhetorical tools in the daily struggles against racism. Aside from growing cultural concerns about the war’s impact on gender and race relations, an equally notable – albeit even less frequently observed – subtext of American World War I literature revolves around the specter of social revolution. Dismayed by Woodrow Wilson’s turnabout, Dos Passos remembers that he “began listening seriously to the Socialists. Their song was that all that was needed was to abolish capitalism. Turn the industrial plant over to the people who did the work and man’s aggressive instincts would be channeled into constructive efforts.”69 But even though it has been often remarked that the protest novels of the postwar period tend to indict the war as a nefarious scheme to enrich unscrupulous capitalists, mock quasi-aristocratic military hierarchies, and depict how the trench experience forges close bonds among men across social classes, studies about the treatment of class in American World War I literature remain exceedingly rare. Rarer still are serious analyses of 68

W. E. B. Du Bois, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Holt, 1995), 699. 69 John Dos Passos, Foreword, in One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (Ithaca, NY: 1969), 2.


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partisan novels that depict working-class struggles to come to terms with the First World War. Several factors may account for this. First of all, since the First World War is said to have “pretty much finished the Socialist Party as an effective political force in the United States”, considerations of working-class resistance to hegemonic war and post-war ideologies are deemed more or less superfluous.70 Moreover, it was evidently not the Great War but the Great Depression that became the signature theme of the Great American proletarian novel, which enjoyed its golden age during the 1930s. Lastly and perhaps most ominously, New Critical paradigms have cultivated a longstanding critical distaste for tendentious or overtly partisan fiction, as Barbara Foley has shown. Propelled by waves of anti-Marxism, repeated declarations by Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and other right-wing literati, according to which the intermingling of art and politics results in heresy, underwrote an exclusionary neoconservative aesthetic that privileges literary qualities such as opacity, paradox, ambiguity, and non-commitment. As I have already outlined, critics of World War I literature have therefore been less interested in discussing, for example, Ernest Hemingway’s portrayal of mutinous working-class characters in A Farewell to Arms than in extolling the book’s omission of “social commentary”, its “atmosphere of existential anxiety”, and its “calculated detachment”.71 In a similar vein, World War I novels that assume an openly Socialist stance and/or probe the emergence or suppression of class consciousness such as Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins (1919) and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion (1932) have either been dismissed as stylistically awkward window dressing for ideological positions or simply been ignored altogether.72 Within the past decade, however, a few scholarly works have begun to retrieve literary engagements with the working-class perspective on World War I from the modern dumping ground of cultural forgetfulness. In his excellent Partisan and Poets (1997), Mark Van Wienen analyzes a vast array of popular war verse and broadsides that were published in newspapers as well as in the partisan 70

Peter Buitenhaus, “Upton Sinclair and the Socialist Response to World War I”, Canadian Review of American Studies, XIV/2 (1983), 121. 71 Jones, War and the Novelist, 8. 72 Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel, 95.

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organs of the IWW, the Women’s Peace Party, and the NAACP. Arguing “that all American poetries … were always already political”, Van Wienen demonstrates that popular Great War poetry, though nowadays dismissed as ephemeral, proved itself capable not only of shaping the domestic debates over the status of workers, women, and African Americans but also of fulfilling “a self-consciously political, politically transformative, role”. More specifically, in his discussion of popular working-class verse, Van Wienen shows how “the IWW’s production and practice of poetry and songs” confronted “Americans with the nation’s class diversity and social inequality”, while conceptualizing “class division” both “as an opportunity to be exploited” and a “problem to be solved”. Similar to numerous home front writings by blacks and women, Van Wienen underscores, working-class literature of the Great War uses the subject matter of war not only to highlight past and present grievances, but to redefine subject positions and to envision social change, for instance, the “coming of a great ‘class war’”.73 And even though the latter did not occur, postwar reflections on lost home front battles and missed opportunities such as Henry George Weiss’ 1935 poem, Remember, bid workers to recall and to remain steadfast in their conviction: that when they demonstrated against starvation they were Reds that when they talked of rights they had no rights … that Communism is bread Communism plenty Communism workers’ rule.74

Just as the modern memory of African Americans seemed to have been shaped less by passive suffering in the trenches than by increasingly violent racial discrimination at home, the modern memory of working-class men and women appears to have been

73

Mark W. Van Wienen, Partisan and Poets: The Political Work of American Poetry in the Great War (New York: Cambridge UP: 1997), 16, 75, 1. 74 Quoted in Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets, 236.


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marked for the most part by wartime bread politics and political repression. Despite several promising efforts to present a more diverse picture of the literary imaginings of the Great War, Neil A. Wynn’s observation in From Progressivism to Prosperity (1986) that First World War histories “relegate the home front in America to a secondary place in the narrative” still holds also largely true for critical surveys of American World War I literature.75 Hence, building upon the revisionist studies surveyed above as well as recent historiographical undertakings to rewrite America’s Great War as a domestic struggle, I have selected primary texts that reflect a broad range of literary engagements in the war and postwar constructions of class, gender, and race. Individual works, then, have neither been chosen on the basis of their current status as war literature, nor necessarily in light of their “influence in mainstream ideology”, but with an eye toward their placement within the ideologies and political practices of particular groups.76 Accordingly, the present study commences with an investigation of the ideological underpinnings of the quest for masculine autonomy and individualism in John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers (1921) and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929), before paying close attention to literary preservation of revolutionary memory in two overtly proletarian novels of (re)education: Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins (1919) and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion (1935). Thence, it explores the communitarian and Utopian thrusts of two feminist novels – Dorothy Canfield’s Home Fires in France (1918) and Gertrude Atherton’s war Utopia, The White Morning (1918) – and subsequently examines African American strategies of resistance and accommodation in Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s racial uplift novel, Hope’s Highway (1918) and Walter White’s bleak postWorld War I reconstruction work, The Fire in the Flint (1924). The emphasis on literary representations not only of the war experiences on the home front, but also of life during the immediate pre- and postwar periods seems further justified by the fact that even 75

Neil A. Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society (New York: Holms and Meier, 1986), xiv. 76 Jennifer Haytock, At Home, At War: Domesticity and World War I in American Literature (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003), 123.

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American soldier-poets, unlike numerous of their European counterparts, have rarely produced sheer combat novels or Frontromane such as Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (1917) and Ernst Jünger’s Stahlgewitter (1920). The principal setting of E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room (1922), for example, is a squalid French prison, which, ironically, becomes a sanctuary of spiritual salvation. Likewise, two hospitals, tranquil Lake Como, and the peaceful Swiss countryside furnish three of the four main settings in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929). At the heart of these and similar American war novels by combatants, Stanley Cooperman and Peter G. Jones have shown, lies not the front experience as such, but the retreat from war and the attempt at individual reconciliation with a flawed society. And it is precisely this purportedly apolitical or transhistorical attempt at individual reconciliation that concerns me as I seek, in Jameson’s words, “to restore the specificity of the political content of everyday life and of individual fantasy-experience”. 77 The endeavor to rewrite a still small but fairly diverse body of American World War I literature would be remiss, unless it not also reconsiders the question of how individual texts (or groups thereof) adopt and adapt available generic forms of literary representation. For as Evelyn Cobley has shown, “formal choices are never ideologically innocent” in that they “determine, at least to some extent, what kind of events can be included and how they are to be treated”.78 The following thematic analyses are therefore framed by interrelated considerations of four genre types or subtypes. Two of these, namely the protest novel and the Bildungsroman with its leitmotif of the romantic quest, have already received some considerable formal scrutiny within critical studies of war literature. The two other genres, namely the feminist Utopia and the historical romance, have so far rarely been discussed within the context of World War I literature. The significance of the present study, however, rests less on the identification of various genre adaptations within a varied body of American World War I fictions than on the recognition of the conflicted ideologies about gender, class, and race that underlie literary representations of the Great War. The story to be told here 77

Jones, War and the Novelist, 4-9; Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel, 22. 78 Evelyn Cobley, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World War Narratives (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1993), 16.


29

therefore focuses less on literary history as such than on literary interventions within political history. It traces stylistic innovations or trends only insofar as they illuminate changes in cultural formations and political stances. And while it closely scrutinizes individual authors and their texts, it remains primarily concerned with the larger processes of group formations and reformations. In the first three chapters that comprise section I, “World War I War as Individualist Protest Novel”, it will be argued that works by young American soldier-poets strive to fashion the war experiences in ways that revalidate core tenets of white male liberalism – autonomy, singularity, self-expression – which seemed to be fast diminishing amid heightened wartime demands for cooperation, collaboration, and unity of sentiments. Based upon a close consideration of Randolph Bourne’s wartime writing, chapter 1 retraces how a younger generation of American literati grew increasingly disillusioned with the tenets of progressivism and embraced a form of liberalism that once again stressed the values of individualism. Chapters 2 and 3, thenceforth take a historically contextualized look at John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms respectively so as to demonstrate that these protest novels of World War I are concerned less with exposing “the realities of the Versailles, the role of financial interests, the nature of ideological suppression” than with retrieving (neo-) romantic ideas of heroic individuality in light of the apparent failures of the progressive reform movement.79 The war, it will be argued, provided young protest novelists with an opportunity to remake and to redefine themselves not only in opposition to Dos Passos’ bankers and their “bediamoned” old ladies, but also vis-à-vis the various social reform groups, working-class organizations, and women’s rights movements, whose continued faith in strategies of mass mobilization, political agitation, and communal activism came to be seen as dangerously anachronistic. In highlighting their own novel experience of victimization at the hands of a jingoistic, profit-driven, and thoroughly materialistic consumer culture, white male protest novelists of World War I were able to join the ranks of the traditionally oppressed, selectively co-opt some of

79

Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel, 99.

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their positions, and thus reclaim intellectual leadership as the most radical and sophisticated critics of culture. Drawing upon contemporaneous debates concerning the role of labor during the war as well as on Barbara Foley’s observations concerning the forms and functions of working-class fiction, section II, “World War I as Proletarian Bildungsroman”, investigates radical adaptations of the bourgeois Bildungsroman genre vis-à-vis the emergent Modernist novel. Chapter 4 situates the emergence of the Proletarian Bildungsroman within its historical context and delineates its generic adaptations in comparison with the Modernist novel of education. Thereafter, chapters 5 and 6 investigate how Upton Sinclair’s propagandistic Jimmie Higgins and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion respectively adapt conventions of the Bildungsroman to create stories of ideological conversion and reconversion before the backdrop of war. Both novels evoke Marx’s specter of impending social revolution so as to sketch out appropriate working-class responses to the First World War. Using mostly local settings, namely the factories of fictional Leesville and the sharecropping farms of rural Oklahoma, the war in these Proletarian Bildungsromans functions as a catalyst for the protagonists’ political radicalization. Under mounting pressures from within and without, however, the heroes of these Bildungsromans not only struggle to sustain their revolutionary consciousness, but ultimately succumb to a more or less conformist stance. Following the ill-prepared and abortive attempt to march against Washington, Jim Tetley in William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion betrays the revolutionary cause by joining the US army. And Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins finds himself condemned to die a martyr’s death at the hand of his own government, after realizing that his heroics on the battlefield had only served the interests of rich capitalists at home. But rather than succumbing to a fatalistic sense of defeatism, I will argue, both novels ground their heroes’ struggles into a historical context so as to warn and inspire future revolutionaries. Applying Jane Donawerth’s and Carole A. Kolmerten’s pioneering work on Utopian novels by women, the opening chapter of section III, “World War I War as Feminist Utopia”, situates the wartime writings of American female authors within the context of the early twentiethcentury Women’s Rights Movement as well as the increasingly passionate preparedness debates. Before this historical background,


31

then, chapter 8 probes the ideological underpinnings of the femalecentered communities depicted in Dorothy Canfield’s Home Fires in France, while chapter 9 scrutinizes the social politics that inform the war between sexes, which lies at the heart of Gertrude Atherton’s The White Morning. Both novels, it will be argued, heighten and exploit war-induced notions of an “apotheosis of femaleness” by combining older motifs of female-centered communities with images of the emergent New Woman. Despite a reliance on essentialized gender categories as well as strong tendencies to uphold political and economic hierarchies, the novels’ varied adaptations of Utopian forms challenge and subvert traditional gender roles, especially within the public domain. Expanding upon what Lee J. Greene has identified as the black quest for Eden, section IV, “World War I as Race Romance”, commences with an analysis of the ways in which black writers adapted and modified generic conventions of the sentimental novel, racial uplift narratives, and the post-Civil War reconstruction novel to fashion a distinctly African American response to World War I. Subsequent readings of Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway in chapter 11 and Walter F. White’s The Fire in the Flint in chapter 12 will show how earlier tropes of passive racial uplift are turned into calls for direct communal action and impassionate demands for social justice. Unlike World War I novels by white writers, who by and large omit overt references to race, Fleming’s as well as White’s (post)war romances insist that, in W. E. B. Du Bois words, “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line”.80 Hence, both novels focus on local struggles against racism before the backdrop of an awakening race consciousness that spurs African Americans into action and puts the nation on notice. Though hampered by notions of millennialism and determinism respectively, Hope’s Highway and The Fire in the Flint succeed in highlighting the contradictions inherent in America’s war efforts while concomitantly establishing a counterhistory of the World War I experience that speaks directly to the modern memory of African Americans. Throughout, the study focuses on particular war novels and their constitutive practices or social uses, thereby turning literature into the 80

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (New York: Vintage, 1990), 14.

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principal vehicle for analyzing American culture during and after World War I. Individual chapters proceed more or less chronologically in order to reveal both subtle shifts and obvious continuities within literary representations of the Great War by authors writing from specific class, gender, and race perspectives. The study as a whole, however, is arranged in dialectic fashion so as to highlight the tensions both between and within alternately dominant and nondominant groups.

SECTION I WORLD WAR I AS LIBERAL PROTEST NOVEL

CHAPTER 1 Randolph Bourne, Progressivism, and the Protest Novel Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the big-city crowd aroused …. James Ensor tirelessly confronted its discipline with its wildness; he liked to put military groups in his carnival mobs, and both got along splendidly – as the prototype of totalitarian states, in which the police make common cause with the looters.1

Sometime in the late summer of 1918, as General Pershing was preparing to send half a million doughboys into the slaughter of the battle at Saint-Mihiel, Randolph Silliman Bourne finished one of his last fictional character sketches, “The Artist in Wartime” (1918). In it, Bourne, always a step ahead of his time, augured the return of an old social type: the disengaged flâneur who regards the masses with a mixture of personal terror and aloof reproach.2 His name is Sebert and like many sensitive young intellectuals who would follow him in both literature and real life, the wartime experience of mass hysteria, mass mobilization, and mounting public intolerance has thoroughly disabused him of any faith in the advancement of American society.

1

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 174. According to Walter Benjamin in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, the figure of the flâneur, which first appeared in early nineteenth-century literature, is at bottom a “traumatophile type”. The flâneur’s repeated “contact with the metropolitan masses” amounts to a series of “shock experiences”, Benjamin explains, in that these close encounters challenge bourgeois concepts of autonomy and individualism. Perceived not as “classes or any sort of collective”, the masses appear to the flâneur as an unreasoning, threatening, and repulsively “amorphous crowed” (Illuminations, 16465).

2

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In his earlier years, though, Sebert had been an uncompromising idealist, imbued with a pronounced social consciousness and the desire to contribute to the amelioration of a flawed yet, at bottom, worthwhile society.3 “I saw my future to be that of riding at the head of crusades and revolutions, on a white horse”, the fledgling writer recalls. “I felt keenly my duty towards society to remove its terrible evils and enlighten its terrible stupidities” (410). So firm was his social commitment that initially, even the war could not sway him off course, for he considered it merely “a momentary aberration”. But, like many self-consciously Modernist writers of the postwar era, Sebert quickly comes to regard the Great War as the ultimate manifestation of the modern condition rather than a temporary deviation thereof. “Society”, he assesses, “turns out to be not a slowly repenting sinner, but a hysterical mob” (411). What offends Sebert’s cultured bourgeois sensibility most, however, is that this new era of mass organization and mass mobilization threatens to wipe out his deeply internalized notions of personal autonomy and heroic individuality. “I look around”, Sebert says, “and find almost every institution, every group, every social engine, enthusiastic for this multiplication of pain. I see individuals cooperating, either delightedly or under coercion, in the myriad branches of this enterprise. And my heart turns sour within me.” In short, the national war effort has revealed to him that, pushed to their logical conclusion, the tenets of progressivism – such as cooperation, collectivism, organization, institutionalization – are antithetical to the principles of bourgeois individualism. The upshot of this disillusioning apprehension is that Sebert’s “social conscience no longer operates to make [him] feel part of this society” (412). Feeling not only betrayed, but victimized by a society that “insists on engaging itself in what is either destructive or futile”, he withdraws himself in protest, turning his back toward all institutions, groups, social engines, and parties that had heretofore beckoned with the promise of universal progress:

3

Randolph Bourne, “The Artist in Wartime”, in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1910-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (Berkeley: California UP, 1992), 410-11. Hereafter this and others essays in the volume are cited parenthetically.

Bourne, Progressivism, and the Protest Novel

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I am not leading revolutionists against barricades. I am not agitating for the oppressed proletariat. I am not even exciting the liberals of the world with a plan to end the war. Instead … I remain in a hibernating state, waiting for the world to stop its raging, and become interested again, if it ever was such, in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (410)

Although Sebert is obviously an overdrawn character – intended to convey an emergent mood or temper rather than a set of settled convictions – his move from naïve social activist to detached individualist is paradigmatic of the ways in which young American soldier-poets fashioned their purportedly “realistic examination of war and postwar experiences” so as to redefine a white male liberalism, whose moral, cultural, and political authority appeared to be eroding amidst the socio-political upheavals of World War I.4 As a close look at John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms will demonstrate, in making the white male middleclass protagonist’s experience of victimization at the hands of authoritarian governments, misguided reform movements, “unreasoning women”, and “hysterical mobs” the centerpiece of their “realistic examination”, World War I protest novels not only level sharp attacks against big business, corrupt politicians, and hardnosed bureaucrats.5 They lay at least partial blame for the dehumanizing war on the doorsteps of the traditional victims of oppression and their hapless organizations. Consequently, “the representative anti-hero of World War I protest novels” finds himself both disillusioned and isolated.6 Yet, as Sebert’s example underscores, the totalizing assessment that “every institution, every group, every social engine” participates in “this multiplication of pain” also has a “strangely” liberating effect since the educated anti-hero’s close encounters with apathetic proletarian crowds as well as mobs of self-obsessed females enable him to shed both class guilt and idealized notions about women. His disillusionment with and isolation from members of the lower classes 4

Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel, 3. David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford UP, 1980), 222; Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel, 99. 6 Cooperman, World War I and the American Novel, 165.

5

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and the opposite sex thus morally legitimize and politically authorize the protagonist’s individualist protest against “every institution, every group, every social engine” that threatens to wipe out white male middle-class concepts of autonomy and singularity.7 And having grown appalled by what Emerson denounced as the “feminine rage” of hypocritical social reformers with their “thousand-fold Relief Societies” as well as the helpless “indignation” of the “ignorant and the poor”, the disenchanted white middle-class protagonist reaches the Emersonian resolve to live “no longer to the expectation of these deceiving and deceived people”.8 In grounding their anti-war protests in the protagonist’s growing awareness of the inherent dangers of organization, collectivization, and institutionalization, works such as Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms turn public struggles into private ones, until the embattled white male middle-class self reemerges as the sole arbiter on questions of morality, politics, and the relationship between the classes and sexes. Similar to the fictional Sebert, budding American literati such as John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, Lawrence Stallings, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway came of age in the early 1900s, visualizing themselves “riding at the head of crusades and revolutions”. Imbued with a vague sense of “revolt from middleclass standards” and dismayed by an American society that worshipped “the popular gods of materialism”, they longed to overcome “the stodgy complacency of the nineteenth century”.9 Moreover, akin to Sebert, they had long suffered from a white middle-class “guilt of littering the world with poverty, disease and ugliness” that made them feel more “keenly [their] duty toward society to remove its terrible evils and enlighten its terrible stupidities” (410-11). “Millions of men perform labor narrowing and stultifying … without ever a chance of selfexpression”, Dos Passos wrote while still at Harvard: “This is the time of all others for casting up the balance sheet of Industrialism, of our scientific civilization.”10 Under the ether cone of college life, however, 7

Iain Colley, Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair (London: Macmillan, 1978), 38. Emerson, The Portable Emerson, 142, 145, 154, 155. 9 Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: Viking Press, 1951), 35; John Dos Passos, “A Humble Protest”, in The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1988), 32. 10 Dos Passos, The Major Nonfictional Prose, 34.

8


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prospective reformers and incipient anti-establishment rebels such as Dos Passos had found little opportunity to act upon their social designs. Therefore, when the “world fell into a cataclysm”, restless young men of the educated classes sensed a chance for self-defining action (410). “In conflict … would arise a reason for this now unreasonable existence”, many of them thought in line with Thomas Boyd’s William Hicks of Through the Wheat.11 “I go to the front tomorrow”, a nineteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway reported back to the Kansas City Star: “Oh Boy!!! I am glad I am in it.”12 “I am dying to get to Belgium & exhaust surplus energy”, a likewise anticipant Dos Passos confided to Arthur McComb.13 Early on in One Man’s Initiation, Martin Howe thinks of war as “the flame that would consume to ashes all the lies in the world”.14 War, young idealist such as Martin Howe believed, would provide not only “an escape from everything implicit in the notion of modern industrial society”, but a “transformative experience of community” that would affect “fundamental social changes”, revolutionary or otherwise.15 “Form that point of view I approve heartily of military service”, Dos Passos declared, “because it would make young men rub shoulders more, get to know people outside of their class – be actually instead of theoretically democratic”.16 Needless to say, few among the idealistic college-men who volunteered for military service discovered what they had set out to find. To begin with, the impersonality of modern trench warfare rendered heroics on the battlefields pretty much impossible. “It [shellfire] makes one feel so helpless, there is no chance of reprisal for the individual man”, William Langer recalls: “The advantage is all

11

Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat (New York: Scribner’s, 1923), 4. Quoted in Charles A. Fenton, The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway: The Early Years (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 58. 13 John Dos Passos, John Dos Passos’ Correspondence with Arthur K. McComb, or, “Learn to Sing the Carmagnole”, ed. Melvin Landsberg (Niwot: Colorado UP, 1991), 24. 14 John Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1969), 60. 15 Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (New York: Cambridge UP, 1979), 42. 16 John Dos Passos, The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, ed. Townsend Ludington (Boston: Gambit, 1973), 45. 12

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with the shell, and you have no comeback.”17 Langer’s anguished feeling of helplessness in the face of a modern war of attrition was shared by many doughboys and undoubtedly contributed to their rapid disenchantment with what they had anticipated to be “a great show”. Nevertheless, since American troops saw relatively little combat in World War I, the mentally and physically debilitating effects of modern warfare seem to belong more properly to the disillusionment experience of the European soldier, whose protracted agony has found memorable literary manifestation in sadly broken characters such as Siegfried Sassoon’s George Sherston or D. H. Lawrence’s Clifford Chatterley.18 More than either the physical violation of the male body or the mental abuse of the male psyche during actual battle, it appeared to have been the sudden confrontation with a high-handed government authority that disabused American “gentlemen volunteers” of their erstwhile hope in the democratization of society. “Military hierarchy and subordination chafed against ingrained American values of equality and individualism”, Kennedy notes.19 It was not so much the slaughter on the battlefields as the impersonality of a cold and calculating bureaucratic machine that incurred some of the angriest protest by American soldier-poets. Tellingly, both Dos Passos’ John Andrews and Hemingway’s Frederic Henry resolve to go AWOL not as a consequence of their wounding, but as a result of their abuse at the hands of the US military police and the Italian carabinieri respectively. In protest novel after protest novel, then, a recognizable pattern emerges, whereby the war provides an extended metaphor for the corruption of an American culture that had apparently sold its birthright, its sense of democracy, and, most devastatingly, its concern for the individual. Not war per se, but the mobilization, organization, and maintenance of a vast military machine comes to signify man’s descent into the abyss of an industrial

17

Quoted in Kennedy, Over Here, 211. To be sure, both Faulkner’s Donald Mahon in Soldiers’ Pay and Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises give gruesome testimony of the emasculating affects of mechanized warfare. But for the most part, protagonists of American World War I novels return physically unscathed and mentally relatively healthy from the battlefield. David M. Kennedy makes a very similar point with respect to American war narratives of World War I in Over Here, 205-18. 19 Kennedy, Over Here, 210.

18


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age that breeds docile conformity through mass demagoguery, mass production, and mass consumption. In due course, the transformative experience of community that was supposed to inaugurate sweeping social changes came to be seen as a self-deluding chimera. For example, rather than bringing the sexes closer together, the war appeared to have further estranged them. Consequently, the maimed war veterans in William Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay feel utterly misunderstood and rejected by society. Relegated to the far corner of the dancehall, the soldiers talk loudly among themselves, “drowning the imitation of dancers they could not emulate, of girls who once waited upon their favors and now ignored them—the hang-over of warfare in a society tired of warfare. Puzzled and lost, poor devils”.20 The victimization of young war heroes, Faulkner emphasizes in this passage, is twofold. First, a jingoistic society promised its young men honor and glory on the battlefields, but only delivered senseless bloodshed. Brett Ashley’s enthusiasm for violence in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises further highlights the gendered dimension of the soldiers’ sense of victimization. Secondly, the very women who had cheered them into the slaughterhouse of war now refuse to have anything to do with the returning veterans. “If you touch me, I’ll vomit”, says Effie by way of welcoming her disfigured fiancée in William March’s Company K.21 Even in the trenches “there was no true comradeship” to be found, recollects John Campbell: It was simply a case of members of the working classes held down by brutal and iron discipline. Different rations, different pay, and different risk. The class line was as clear in France as it is at home; there was no comradeship in the trenches to perpetuate.22

20

Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985), 115. William March, Company K (New York: Smith and Hass, 1933), 156. 22 Quoted in Eric Leed, “Class and Disillusionment”, The Journal of Modern History L/4 (December 1978), 681. At this point it might be worthwhile to remember that most of the “gentlemen volunteers” who flocked from Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other prestigious institutions of higher learning to the muddy battlefields of Europe served in rather privileged capacities as ambulance drivers, translators, aviators, signal corps engineers, etc. 21

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“You are a foreigner”, the priest tells Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms: “But you are nearer to the officers than you are to the men.” Several chapters later, the Tenente, like Nick Adams of “In Another Country”, is bewildered to be confronted by the common soldiers’ angry shouts of “A basso gli ufficiali!”.23 Still more disillusioning, upon closer contact, the lower classes, who in One Man’s Initiation are still seen as harbingers of a new world order, appeared to be nothing but an apathetic mass, incapable of true revolutionary thought and action.24 “Politically, I have given up hope entirely …. There are too many who go singing to the sacrifice—who throw themselves gladly, abjectly beneath the Juggernaut”, Dos Passos voiced from France.25 Not surprisingly, although their untypical and fictionalized experience of victimization by an authoritative state renders them more conscious of “all the old sorrows of the race, black or yellow or white”, the wised-up sons of the educated bourgeoisie tend to assume a rather condescending attitude toward incorrigible idealists, who still seek to better the lot of the traditionally oppressed through channels of political organizations, parties, and institutions.26 Hemingway’s shortshort story “The Revolutionist” from In Our Time (1925) offers a case in pointlessness. Here, as later in A Farewell to Arms, the narrator chances upon a young idealist, who stubbornly “believed altogether in the world revolution” and the Communist Party. Predictably, his naïve hope to organize the Italian peasantry comes to naught and the last, the shrewd veteran-narrator hears of him, is that “the Swiss had him in jail near Sion”.27 The lesson is obvious and no doubt reflects the author’s own disillusionment with the many aborted revolutions he had witnessed.28 Hemingway’s sad précis of the course of revolutions in Green Hills of Africa (1935) speaks volumes: “They are beautiful. Really. For quite a while. Then they go bad.” 29 23

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 70 and 219; “In Another Country”, in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), 268. 24 Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation, 163. 25 Dos Passos, Correspondence, 52-53. 26 Faulkner, Soldiers’ Pay, 306. 27 Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Collier, 1986), 81-82. 28 Robert O. Stephens, Hemingway’s Nonfiction: The Public Voice (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1968), 183-89. 29 Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (New York: Scribner’s, 1996), 192.


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Like Bourne’s hibernating Sebert, Dos Passos’ John Andrews and Hemingway’s Frederic Henry at last strive to reaffirm their inundated middle-class concepts of heroic individuality by disassociating themselves not only from a debased state that demands uncritical patriotic devotion and co-operation of services, but from all forms of social relations that appear to challenge, upset, restrict, stifle, or abuse the educated white male middle-class self. Just as in Sebert’s account, a heightened, war-induced awareness that progressive ideals of cooperation, organization, self-submission and disinterested service bear the seeds of totalitarianism leads these young protagonists of World War I protest novels to reject or dismiss them wholesale. “It was inevitable that the crowds should sink deeper and deeper into slavery”, John Andrews concludes near the end of Three Soldiers: “Whichever won, tyranny from above or spontaneous organization from below, there could be no individuals.”30 “Put him [the peasant] in power and see how wise he is”, Frederic Henry says by way of deflating the priest’s incipient Socialism in A Farewell to Arms.31 Only by abandoning outdated dreams of a collectivist world, then, can enlightened liberals such as Sebert, John Andrews, and Frederic Henry reassert white male middle-class concepts of individuality visà-vis progressive reform movements, working-class organizations, and women’s rights groups, whose naïve pursuit of collectivization, organization, and communal activism was seen to have contributed to the fateful demise of “the swaggering independence of our pioneers” and “hardheaded individuality of our old Yankee skippers”.32 Debates over American preparedness and intervention proved to be no less taxing and no less haunting for the white liberal establishment than for Socialists, laborites, feminists, women’s rights organizations, and nascent black civil rights groups. As Christopher Lash has shown, inflated expectations that a concerted national war effort would put an end to “gross materialism”, self-centeredness, and exploitive social relations led to “disillusionment with popular government” and

30

Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 373. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 179. 32 Dos Passos, The Major Nonfictional Prose, 56. 31

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triggered a sweeping “postwar reaction against progressivism”.33 Nativism, Red Scare, and “the capitalist domination of the state” came to be viewed as direct outgrowths of the war effort so that previous dominant political concepts of progress, collectivism, organization, institutional reform, and social evolution appeared to have been thoroughly discredited.34 “We must learn the stern truth now that there is no such thing as automatic progress”, Randolph Bourne concluded in a 1917 pamphlet, prophetically entitled “The Disillusionment” (404). On virtually all fronts, President Wilson’s much invoked wartime spirit of co-operation seemed to collapse under the weight of dismal postwar realities, giving way not only to labor unrest and racial violence, but also to unprecedented levels of public intolerance and government repression. The war, progressive social commentators such as Walter Lippmann and Ray Stannard Baker acknowledged, had not erased the nation’s festering problems. Consequently, “by late 1918, the reformer banners that many progressives, trade unionists, blacks, and women had carried faithfully through the fighting and into the Armistice were shredded by the storm of reaction”.35 “Our prophecies were false, our remedies in vain”, a dejected Baker conceded.36 At every corner, the veneer of progressive reform seemed to be peeling off, laying bare the gray brick and cold steel of a social edifice that was ruled by shameless war profiteers, corrupt politicians, and unscrupulous demagogues. “It was suddenly clear for a second in the thundering glare what war was about, what peace was about”, Dos Passos wrote in 1919: 33

Christopher Lash, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), 360-63. 34 Ibid., 320. Frederic Lewis Allen explains, “From the coercion of alien enemies and supposed pro-Germans it was a short step, as we have seen, to the coercion of racial minorities and supposed Bolsheviks. From war-time censorship it was a short step to peace-time censorship of newspapers and books and public speech. And from legislating sobriety in war-time it was a short step to imbedding prohibition permanently in the Constitution and trying to write the moral code of the majority into the statute-books (Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s [New York: Wiley, 1997], 172). 35 Kennedy, Over Here, 287. 36 Quoted in John A. Thompson, Reformers and War: Progressive Publicists and the First World War (New York: Cambridge UP, 1987), 271.


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In America, in Europe, the old men won. The bankers in their offices took a deep breath, the bediamonded old ladies of the leisure class went back to clipping their coupons in the refined quiet of their safedeposit vaults, the last puffs of the ozone of revolt went stale in the whisper of speakeasy arguments.37

Amidst this postwar storm of reaction, left-leaning middle-class intellectuals commenced to perceive themselves as a beleaguered or, in H. L. Mencken’s words, a “civilized minority”. Once again labeling themselves “liberals” rather than “progressives”, they now started propagating a detached “New Liberalism” that identified itself with “hatred of compulsion”, “tolerance”, and, most importantly, “respect for the individual”.38 In a postwar America filled with the discordant clamor of “political idealists, diplomats, labor leaders, prohibitionists, feminists, reformers, revolutionaries”, Harold Stearns declared in Liberalism in America (1919), the liberal mind must remain “au-desus de la mêlée” and apply its faculties to “creating a certain tolerant temper in society at large”.39 Of course, just a few years earlier most liberal minds had found themselves very much au centre de la mêlée. Though initially united in their assessment that America should steer clear of “Europe’s relapse into barbarism”, a growing number of progressives soon came to view America’s potential involvement in the war as an opportunity to affect radical social reforms at home.40 As early as November 1915, John A. Thompson notes, the editors of the New Republic had tacitly 37 Quoted in Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980), 191. 38 Harold Stearns, Liberalism in America: Its Origin, Its Temporary Collapse, Its Future (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1919), 10. Turn-of-century social reformers, Christopher Lash explains, described themselves as “progressives” rather than “liberals” in order to disassociate themselves from the liberal program of laissez-faire economics: “Only in the closing phase of World War I did the term come back into favor, partly because advocates of peaceful change now found it necessary to distinguish themselves from the Bolsheviks and their partisans, but also because wartime repression gave new importance to the defense of civil liberties” (The True and Only Heaven, 412). 39 Stearns, Liberalism in America, 18. 40 John Haynes quoted in John A. Thompson, Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (New York: Cambridge UP, 1987), 87.

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“suggested that preparedness might serve as ‘a Trojan Horse’ for the infiltration of radical reforms”.41 One of the first progressives to openly break ranks was the eminent social philosopher and educator John Dewey. In a string of essays for the New Republic, written between 1916 and 1918, Dewey counseled fellow-progressives to abandon their “pacifist absolutism” and recognize “the immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war”. The war, in Dewey’s eyes, constituted a “plastic juncture” in history that was charged with “social possibilities”. He therefore urged progressive reformers not to shun but to exploit the “current crisis” as a means to foster “the more conscious and extensive use of science for communal purposes”, to devise “instrumentalities for enforcing the public interest in all the agencies of production and exchange”, and to temper “the individualistic tradition” by highlighting “the supremacy of public need over private possession”.42 To social engineers such as Dewey, the war was not so much a Great Crusade for moral purity as a great socializing experience. Progressive publicists such as Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann began voicing equally sanguine hopes that participation in the war would purge the country of its gross materialism and trigger a new wave of social reforms. “I do not wish to underestimate the forces of reaction in our country”, Lippmann wrote in 1917. But he added: We shall know how to deal with them. Forces have been let loose which they can no longer control, and out of this immense horror ideas have arisen to possess men’s souls …. We shall stand committed as never before to the realization of democracy in America …. We shall turn with fresh interest to our own tyrannies—to our Colorado mines, our autocratic steel industries, our sweatshops and our slums. We shall call that man un-American and no patriot who prates of liberty in Europe and resists it at home. A force is loose in America as well. Our own reactionaries will not assuage it with their Billy Sundays or control through lawyers and politicians of the Old Guard.43 41

Thompson, Reformers and War, 141. John Dewey, “The Social Possibilities of War”, in Characters and Events: Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy by John Dewey, ed. Joseph Ratner (New York: Holt, 1929), II, 551-61. 43 Walter Lippmann, “The World Conflict in Relation to American Democracy”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, LXXII (1917), 3.

42


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Others, though, remained skeptical that the economic forces unleashed by a national war effort could be so easily harnessed for the realization of democracy in America. “The shouters for exorbitant armament are using preparedness as an argument with which to intrench more firmly the doctrine of the sacredness of monopoly and extortion”, Amos Pinchot warned President Wilson.44 Using recent history as his guide, Frederic C. Howe made a similar point by arguing that during “the Civil War banking interests, financial interests, tariff interests, railroad interests, land-grabbing interests, made their way into government”. “Imperialism, a great budget, a great navy, and the possible wars which may come from imperialism mean that financial interests will continue to be powerful”, Howe cautioned, adding that in “case of great emergency they will be called in to rule, much as they have been in Europe”.45 Still others were troubled less by the sovereignty of financial interests than by the organization, system, routine, and discipline a war would necessitate. “A new sense of the obligations of citizenship will transform the spirit of the nation”, the columnist Frederick Lewis Allen conceded. “But it is also inevitable that the drill sergeant will receive authority”, he warned. He foresaw that “Socialism will take tremendous strides forward”, yet at the same time: We shall be delivered into the hands of officers and executives who put victory first and justice second. We shall have to lay by our goodnatured individualism and march in step and command. The only way to fight Prussianism is with Prussian tools. The danger is lest we forget the lesson of Prussia: that the bad brother of discipline is tyranny … it would be an evil day for America if we threw overboard liberty to make room for efficiency.46

As Kennedy has noted, Allen’s hopes and apprehensions in “The American Tradition and the War” went to the heart of “a problem that had preoccupied thoughtful Americans for at least a generation”: the 44

Quoted in Thompson, Reformers and War, 137. Frederic C. Howe, “Democracy or Imperialism – The Alternative that Confronts Us”, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, LVI (1916), 252. 46 Frederick Lewis Allen, “The American Tradition and the War”, Nation, April 1917, 484-85.

45

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proper balance between individual freedom and social responsibility.47 Once the patriotic appeals to civic duty had been muted in the aftermath of World War I, it was precisely this precarious relation between personal liberty and social obligation that would again be of central concern to young war novelists of the middle classes such as John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. At the time America formally abandoned neutrality in April 1917, however, demands of the bourgeois self against the public realm seemed to go up with the smoke of battle. John Andrews, in Three Soldiers, muses to be of “one organism … was what he had sought when he had enlisted …. He was sick of revolt, of thought, of carrying his individuality like a banner over the turmoil.”48 “Once the decision had been made”, Thompson observes, “most of those who had opposed intervention abandoned, or at least suspended, overt criticism of it”.49 And for the time being, the majority of progressive intellectuals followed Dewey’s instrumentalist lead in welcoming “war as the forge in whose fires they might shape a new ethos of social duty and civic responsibility”.50 By May 1917, a jubilant Lippmann reassured labor leaders that “we stand at the threshold of a collectivism that is greater than any as yet planned by a socialist party”.51 “The world wherein the right of the individual to profits was paramount to the right of society to fair prices was blown up with the Austrian grand duke”, William Allen White chimed in a year later.52 Of course, while they hailed the establishment of new regulatory agencies, progressives also grew worried about the government’s rapid curtailment of civil liberties. Conscription and censorship especially became contentious issues. Even so, for the most part progressive pundits defended inconvenient or temporary limitations of personal freedoms as unavoidable in wartime. Others, like White, even went so far as to welcome the draft as “a perfect plan … to sink the individual into a social unit”.53 The chief objection to 47

Kennedy, Over Here, 43. Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 26. 49 Thompson, Reformers and War, 177. 50 Kennedy, Over Here, 44. 51 Quoted in Thompson, Reformers and War, 212. 52 William Allen White, “Regulation of Food”, Survey, June 1917, 217. 53 Quoted in Thompson, Reformers and War, 222. 48


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the suppression of dissent was not that it violated fundamental rights; but rather that it would further polarize society, engenders public intolerance, and “subsequently make the task of realizing the constructive purposes which lie behind American fighting excessively and unnecessarily difficult”.54 Among the small and increasingly isolated group of white liberals who discerned no “constructive purposes … behind American fighting” was Randolph Bourne. In “The War and the Intellectuals” (1917) – the first in a series of anti-war essays that would end the short life of Seven Arts – Bourne sternly denounced “the unanimity with which the American intellectuals have thrown their support to the use of war-technique in the crisis in which America found herself. Socialists, college professors, publicists, new-republicans, practitioners of literature”, he charged, “have vied with each other in confirming with their intellectual faith the collapse of neutrality and the riveting of the war-mind on a hundred million more of the world’s people” (307). In Bourne’s eyes, the rapid spread of war “sentiment” was “a class-phenomenon” and so he largely exempted “the great masses” from direct blame (308, 310). Yet, his insight into the opportunism of what he liked to call the “significant classes” is matched by his pessimism about the political abilities of the “apathetic” and “inarticulate” “farmers” and “workingmen” (310). “Many men will not like being sucked into the actual fighting mechanism”, Bourne surmises in “A War Diary” (1917), but it “is unlikely that enough men will be taken from the potentially revolting classes seriously to embitter their spirit” (319). Like most World War I protest novelists, Bourne thus finds himself without a suitable revolutionary force on which to hang his political hopes. This had not always been the case. In 1913, Bourne had made a name for himself as the spokesperson of a “Young America” with the publication of Youth and Life, a collection of mildly rebellious essays that feature polemics against the “old rigid morality” and call upon young middle-class Americans to embrace “all the adventurous quality that makes [life] worth living” (98). “Our times”, he wrote elatedly in Youth and Life, “gives no check to the radical tendencies of youth. On the contrary, they give the directest stimulation …. There is 54

Herbert Croly quoted in Thompson, Reformers and War, 227.

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a radical philosophy [Dewey’s instrumentalism] that illuminates our environment, gives us terms in which to express what we see, and coordinates our otherwise aimless reactions” (104). Issued four years before America plunged headlong into the carnage of World War I, Bourne’s spirited admonition to challenge the strictures of “family, business, church, society, state” with youthful “heroism” anticipates much of the initial excitement and subsequent disillusionment with which young, educated males of the upper and middle classes came to regard the Great War (96). To be sure, Bourne himself, unlike young Dos Passos, Faulkner, or Hemingway, never betrayed even so much as a fleeting fascination with war. In contrast to many of his slightly younger contemporaries, Bourne clung to intellectualized notions of adventure and heroism that were incompatible with war. Yet, this did not shield him from experiencing a sense of overwhelming loss and disillusionment, usually associated with the succeeding, the lost generation.55 Since disillusionment must figure prominently in any discussion of World War I protest novels, and since, as David Minter has shown, “survivors of the Great War turned to writers like Bourne as their guides”, it is crucial at this juncture to probe deeper into the sources and consequences of Bourne’s disillusionment.56 According to Bruce Clayton, Bourne’s disillusionment stemmed from an overly romantic view of politics that proved unsustainable during the war. “In Youth and Life”, Clayton writes: Bourne had espoused a politics based on the romantic conviction that America needed to be revitalized by radical personalities. Viewed in light of the war, his earlier nonpragmatic prescriptions for youth seemed dreamy, paper thin, of a piece with a romantic era, too fragile for the world.57

Bourne, no doubt, would have resisted Clayton’s characterization of his prewar politics as “nonpragmatic” and “romantic”. After all, in “John Dewey’s Philosophy” (1915) he had declared himself an ardent 55

Bruce Clayton, Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1984), 226. 56 David Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994), 71. 57 Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 226.


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practitioner of Dewey’s “ultra-democratic” instrumentalism (332). More to the point, in “A Moral Equivalent to Universal Military Service” (1915), Bourne, recognizing “a very genuine sentiment for unity of sentiment, for service”, envisioned an idealistic “army of youth”, “swarming over the land, spreading the health knowledge, the knowledge of domestic science, of gardening, of tastefulness, that they have learned in school” (49-50). This advocacy of voluntary civilian service in place of compulsory military service explains his claim in “The War and the Intellectuals”, that the “war caused in America a recrudescence of nebulous ideals which a younger generation was fast outgrowing because it had passed the wistful stage and was discovering concrete ways of getting them incarnated in actual institutions. The shock of war threw us back from this pragmatic work into an emotional bath of these old ideals” (313-14). As one reads on, however, the shock of war turns out to be much more than a simple throwback, for it seems to have effectively terminated the pragmatic work of clarifying and incarnating radical ideas in actual institutions. “The real casualty of the war was Bourne’s faith in pragmatism”, observes Casey Nelson Blake.58 “One has a sense”, Bourne confessed in “Twilight of Idols” (1917), “of having come to a sudden, short stop at the end of an intellectual era” (342). In Youth and Life, Bourne had warned young intellectuals against becoming “all or nothing radicals” and advised them to infiltrate social institutions so as to gradually transform them from the inside out (300-304). Along similar lines, in “Law and Order” (1912), he had argued that “the State … should become progressively Socialistic and devote all its efforts to the abolition of the class-war” (354). A mere four years later, though, he decried America’s move toward “semimilitaristic State-socialism” and saw the upright intellectual’s role as that of perpetual “dissenter”, “irreconcilable radical”, or “spiritual vagabond”, whose “declassed mind” “will continue to roam widely and ceaselessly” (320, 317). Bourne’s politics, it seems, became more rather than less romantic in light of the war. Tellingly, in the “Twilight of Idols”, Bourne locates “the root of our dissatisfaction with much of the current 58

Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumsford (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 1990), 157.

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political and social realism” in “a real shortage of spiritual values” and “the lack of poetic vision in our pragmatist ‘awakeners’” (342-45). Dewey’s embrace of war as an instrument for social reform, he argues, has revealed the fundamental shortcoming of American pragmatism: “an exaggerated emphasis on the mechanics of life at the expense of the quality of living” (345). Modern warfare, with its reliance on the mobilization, organization, and maintenance of a vast military machinery, Bourne stresses in his later writings, brings to the fore the latent totalitarianism of a scrupulously rationalized and seemingly enlightened bourgeoisie society. “Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden”, Bourne explains in “The State”: “The more terrifying the occasion of defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd” until the “State” emerges as “the inexorable arbiter and determinant of man’s business and attitudes and opinions” (359). “Loyalty—or mystic devotion to the State—becomes the major imagined human value” (361). Bourne concedes in “Twilight of Idols” that the progressive “philosophy of ‘adaptation’ or ‘adjustment’ … worked when we were trying to get that material foundation for American life in which more impassioned living could flourish”. But “when we are faced with inexorable disaster and the hysterias of the mob”, he insists, the “old philosophy, the old radicalism” shows its inherently reactionary tendencies (345). For in their technocratic zeal to first conjure up and then harness the primeval forces of public belligerence to the wheel of progress, “pragmatist ‘awakeners’” have aligned themselves with “the least liberal and least democratic elements” so that ultimately “they become mere agents and expositors of forces as they are” (342, 330). And instead of overcoming the “tyrannical herd instinct”, the progressive philosophy of old merely disguises it behind “the technical organization of war by an earnest group of young liberals, who direct their course by an opportunist programme of Statesocialism at home and a league of benevolent imperialistic nation abroad” (308, 345). This is “technically admirable”, scoffs Bourne, “only there is nothing in the outlook that touches in any way the happiness of the individual, the vivifying of the personality, the


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comprehension of social forces, the flair of art—in other words, the quality of life” (345). Abandoned by his fellow-liberals turned realists and unable or unwilling to find support among the proletariat (or, for that matter, in the small bands of staunch anti-war feminists and dissenting civil rights leaders), the only hope Bourne holds for the “malcontent” intellectual is that his “apathy towards war should take the form of a heightened energy and enthusiasm for education, the arts, the interpretation that make for life in the midst of death” (316-17). But even this retreat into education, art, and interpretation – a gesture empathically repeated by E. E. Cummings’ unnamed narrator in The Enormous Room as well as by Dos Passos’ John Andrews in Three Soldiers – hardly seems to provide a satisfactory solution to the terrible dilemma faced by the upright intellectual. As Bourne saw it, the intellectual could “either support what is going on, in which case you count for nothing because you are swallowed in the mass and great incalculable forces bear on you; or remain aloof, passively resistant, in case you count for nothing because you are outside the machine of reality” (14). Almost without fail, Bourne’s anti-war essays end in what Evelyn Cobley has identified as the characteristic posture of the Modernist war novel: “romantic despair”.59 Both Bourne’s mounting concern for the individual and his proportionally waning faith in organizational or institutional politics, it becomes clear, are rooted at least partially in his personal confrontations with a state authority that not only seemed to grow allpowerful, but also sanctioned “a white terrorism ... against pacifists, socialists, enemy aliens, and … all persons or movements that can be imagined as connected with the enemy” (367). Dissenters such as himself, Bourne complains have become unprotected game in the public’s “pursuit of enemies within”, which “outweighs in psychic attractiveness the assault on the enemy without” (316, 367). “War becomes almost a sport between the hunters and hunted”, he concludes (367). The personal shock that, in Bourne’s account, leads a younger generation to recoil from pragmatic work within institutions and organizations is thus not very different form those mind-altering 59

Cobley, Representing War, 12.

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shocks experienced by Cummings’ narrator in The Enormous Room, who is arrested for writing seditious letters or, more dramatically, by Hemingway’s Frederic Henry, who finds himself ordered to be shot by henchmen of the Italian government. It is not so much the knowledge or experience of carnage on the battlefield, then, as the sudden and unexpected confrontation with an unreasoning state authority that instills sensitive sons of the bourgeoisie with their deepest and longest-lasting sense of injury and resentment. Revealingly, Bourne – an avid reader of both Freud and Jung – couches his investigation of state authority in psycho-analytical terms, when he speaks of the general public’s “adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of your definite action and ideas” (365). Likewise Bourne himself had once regarded John Dewey with a similar filial look. But as the distinguished professor bore the force of his public authority upon him and sought to conscript him into the army of pro-war pragmatists, Bourne’s angry denunciation of Dewey’s progressivism seemed to acquire the same tone of filial betrayal and indignation that animates Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. Faced with a nation that demanded unquestioning obedience and selfless sacrifice, young liberals came to revile what Bourne described as “the consciousness of collectivity” that devours all “individuality” and endows “the masses” with “a feeling of strength, which in turn arouses pugnacity” (362). As Eric J. Leed has pointed out in his brilliant study of British and German World War I writings, to young intellectuals of the middle classes “it was much more painful to be denuded of those positive and wholly internalized values of bourgeois culture – the values of equality, freedom from mechanical necessities, the vision of heroic individuality – than it was to leave behind those negative images formulated in the bourgeois critique of itself – ‘materialism,’ ‘egotism,’ purely ‘contractual’ or ‘exploitive’ social relationships, the ‘machine age’”.60 In their war-induced fervor to complete the latter, the old wardens of progressivism had seriously imperiled the former, young liberals such as Bourne judged.

60

Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I, 94.


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Henceforth, painfully aware that the war had eroded “values of equality, freedom from mechanical necessities, the vision of heroic individuality”, young white male writers were only too eager to denounce progressive remedies for societal ills and to replace them with transcendentalist notions of self-reliance that were grounded in what Ralph Waldo Emerson famously called “the infinitude of the private man”.61 The resurgence of such romantic sentiments, though understandable in light of the glaring failures of progressive politics, obviously rendered these rebellious liberals rather shaky allies of those groups that, while much more adversely affected by the misguided politics of the progressive establishment, had fewer stakes in notions of self-reliance, none the least because a long history of repression had taught them to rely on principles of collectivism, organization, institutional reform, judicial protection, et cetera. After all, it was one thing for comparatively well-situated men like Bourne’s Sebert or Dos Passos’ John Andrews to dwell on their own infinitude and quite another for Walter White’s black sharecroppers in rural Georgia or William Cunningham’s impoverished white farmers on the Oklahoma plains. This is not to imply that the vehement anti-war protest by Bourne and those younger war-poets who would follow his lead lacks profundity or that it is not informed by sincere humanitarian concerns. On the contrary, these middle-class writers’ shocking, because new, experience of victimization – however small in comparison to the oppression endured by workers, women, African Americans, and other minorities on a daily basis – often coalesce into new forms of social knowledge that foster a keener understanding of the societal mechanisms of subjugation.62 In “The State”, for example, Bourne notes that life under quasi-totalitarian control, in its manifest forms an exception for the middle classes, approximates the working classes’ quotidian experience of powerlessness:

61

Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. William H. Gilman (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1960-1982), VII, 342. 62 “The shock experience which the passer-by has in a crowd corresponds to what the worker ‘experiences’ at his machine”, Walter Benjamin notes in a slightly different context (Illuminations, 176).

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Embattled Home Fronts The members of the working [classes] … live habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which, though nominally free, they are in practice as a class bound to a system of machine-production the implements of which they do not own, and in the distribution of whose product they have not the slightest voice, except what they can occasionally exert by a veiled intimidation which draws slightly more of the product in their direction. From such serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. (365)

Frederic Henry’s statement in A Farewell to Arms that “the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start”, reveals the same insight, as does, of course, John Andrews’ more explicit observation in Three Soldiers that “this [army life] is the world as it has appeared to the majority of men, this is just the lower half of the pyramid”63 The experience of war, not as the advertised heroic adventure, but as tedious, monotonous, mechanical work further compounds the uniformed middle-class author’s understanding of the economic underpinnings of industrial society. The long column of dust-stirring, gun-carrying soldiers that disturbs the late summer idyll in the opening pages of A Farewell to Arms not only announces modern man’s violation of nature, but also evokes images of the daily processions of industrial workers, marching into the hell fires of Chicago steel mills. “From the point of view of the worker”, Bourne writes in “A War Diary”, it will make little difference whether his work contributes to annihilation overseas or to construction at home” (319). But to the college-trained John Andrews in Three Soldiers the new experience of war-work quickly becomes excruciatingly painful. Like his creator, he nearly goes mad when ordered to clean endless rows of windows at camp: “‘How long do we have to do this?’ he asked the man who was working with him … I’ll go crazy if I stay here three months …. I’ve been here a week’ muttered Andrews between his teeth as he climbed down and moved his ladder to the next window.”64 Becoming intimately acquainted with the dehumanizing implications of industrial labor, Andrews undergoes what Eric Leed has described as the process of “militarized

63 64

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 179; Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 32. Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 21.


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proletarianization” as he keeps “remarking to himself how strange it was that he was not thinking of anything”.65 “The dislocation brought on by World War I”, Wendy Steiner comments, “provoked a profound analysis of the phenomenon of victimization”.66 Yet, this profound analysis of the phenomenon of victimization in World War I protest novels rarely seems to lead to more than very uneasy identifications with the traditional victims of oppression. For example, at the very instant John Andrews begins to feel an enforced kinship with members of the lower classes, he must also recognize that “they seemed to be at home in this army life. They did not seem appalled by the loss of their liberty.”67 “Where was the connection?”, the malcontent intellectual Andrews wonders, as his idealized notions of “declassing” himself begin to unravel. Similarly, while Bourne notices that the proletariat is “notoriously less affected by the symbolism of the State” and “shows more resistance”, he observes that, “still into the military they go, not with the hurrahs of the significant classes whose instincts war so powerfully feeds, but with the same apathy with which they enter and continue in the industrial enterprise” (365). And Frederic Henry, though on exceptionally good terms with his men, can never help but to mock their expressions of revolutionary zeal as naïve regurgitations of stale doctrines. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novelette, “May Day” (1920) offers yet another dramatization of the common soldiers’ fuzzy sense of resentment and rebellion. Fitzgerald describes the dislocated war veterans in stark naturalistic terms: They were ugly, ill-nourished, devoid of all except the very lowest form of intelligence … they were lately vermin-ridden, cold, and hungry in a dirty town of a strange land; they were poor, friendless …. They were dressed in the uniform of the United States Army, and on the shoulder of each was the insignia of a drafted division from New Jersey, landed three days before.68

65

Leed, No Man’s Land, 694. Steiner, “The Diversity of American Fiction,” 850. 67 Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 32. 68 F. Scott Fitzgerald, “May Day”, in The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (New York: Scribner’s, 1989), 106. 66

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Uncertain, resentful, and somewhat ill at ease, these discharged soldiers instinctively knew that they had been taken advantage off. “What have you got outa the war?” one of them asks. “Look arounja, look arounja! Are you rich? – no, you’re lucky if you’re alive and got both your legs.” But when they chance upon the May Day parade, their accumulate anger is directed against the “God damn” Bolsheviks. “The human race has come a long way”, Fitzgerald has Henry, one of the story’s malcontent intellectuals explain, “but most of us are throwbacks; the soldiers don’t know what they want, or what they hate, or what they like. They’re used to acting in large bodies, and they seem to have to make demonstrations.”69 The lower classes, dulled out of their senses by industrial serfdom, simply cannot comprehend the larger implications of their situation. And it is precisely this realization that, as Eric Leed has pointed out, eventually precipitates a “diminution both of the guilt and the idealization with which morally uncomfortable sons of the bourgeoisie regarded the working classes”.70 By parading their newly acquired share of victimization like a badge of courage, educated white male authors tend to both morally legitimize and culturally elevate their own brand of anti-war protest, casting it as the most original, most incisive, and most definitive forms of social critique available. Alienated workers, disenfranchised women, and quasi-enslaved blacks suffer too, but theirs are regarded as ordinary, unreflective forms of suffering that do not generate “new values” and “a new orientation of the spirit that shall be modern”. A new “feeling given fiber and outline by intelligence”, Bourne insists, “can come … only from those who are thorough malcontents … men who could not stomach the war, or that reactionary idealism that has followed in its train” (345-46). Malcolm Cowley, having noted elsewhere that “the admired writers of the generation were men in the great majority” who were also “white, middle-class, mostly Protestant in upbringing, and mostly English or Scottish by decent”, made this lore of the malcontent war novelist’s superior or elevated suffering part of modern literary history:71

69

Ibid., 107, 108, 128. Leed, No Man’s Land, 694. 71 Quoted in Minter, A Cultural History of the American Novel, 117. 70


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War novelists are not sociologists or historians, but neither are they average soldiers. The special training and talent of novelists lead them to express special moods. They are usually critical in temper and often are self-critical to the point of being burdened with feelings of guilt. They are sensitive—about themselves in the beginning; but if they have any imagination (and they need it) they learn to be sensitive for others …. In military service, many future writers were men of whom their comrades said that they were “always goofing off by themselves”. They suffered more than others from the enforced promiscuity of army and shipboard life. Most of them were rebels against discipline when they thought it was illogical—which they usually did—and rebels against the system .… When we find them in substantial agreement on a number of topics, we should listen attentively to what they say.72

Again, it appears impossible to deny that the experience of trench warfare rendered many future writers in uniform more aware of the restrictive living conditions of others. As numerous studies have pointed out, circumstances such as the hierarchical organization of army life, enforced passivity in the trenches, economic dependency, censorship, restriction of social contacts, exclusion from political decisions, and so on, represented grave curtailments of personal liberties that men, unlike women, had traditionally taken for granted. Moreover, under the pressures of war, soldiers adopted any number of behavioral and emotional traits – ranging from the execution of domestic chores to caring for the sick to outbursts of uncontrollable hysteria – that had usually been associated with women. Nevertheless, as Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, Alex Vernon and others have also shown, this very experience of what might be called the militarized feminization of men frequently gave rise to intense anxieties about masculinity as well as the loss of social privileges. These, in turn, beget “anger directed specially against the female because women did not fight”; because “they loosened conventional gender restrictions on their behavior; and because they remained ignorant of the facts of front while enthusiastically supporting the 72

Malcolm Cowley, The Literary Situation (New York: Scribner’s, 1947), 25-26. According to Stanley Cooperman, this passage represents “perhaps the most reasonable defense of the artist-in-the-army” (World War I and the American Novel, 198).

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war”.73 Thus, while by and large sympathetic toward female demands for the franchise and greater social freedoms, World War I protest novels tend to chastise the excessive behaviors of devouring females or radical new feminists, who seem to further victimize the already maimed male protagonist. Bourne’s expansive writings once more help to shed light on the gender-political aspects that inform the anti-war protests of white male middle-class authors. Like most educated liberals of his time, Bourne had been an ardent supporter of women’s rights. In a 1915 character sketch for the New Republic, he lauded the achievements of the “New Woman”, supported calls for birth control and, following Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s contention, denounced women’s economic servitude to men. By 1916, however, his views on feminism had dimmed considerably. Organized feminists especially, Bourne perceived, had grown too preoccupied with being females rather than individuals. Thus, in “Making One’s Contribution”, Bourne depicts a young man baffled by women who can think of nothing but making a contribution “as women”.74 Likewise, in “Karen”, he portrays a young emancipated college girl gone awry, who makes herself “hideous in mannish skirts and waists” and becomes “intimate with feminists whose feminism had done little more for their emotional life than to make them acutely conscious of the cloven hoof of the male” (446). And in his review of Clemence Dane’s English boarding school novel, Regiment of Women (1917), Bourne uses words like “neurotic”, “diabolical”, and “wanton” to describe the book’s lesbian school director, who, he assesses, is a “type of woman which must inevitably become rather common in the manless world which women are trying to make for themselves”.75 Aside from revealing deep-rooted male anxieties about lesbianism, Bourne’s critique of feminism is notable in that it blames the “excesses” of female behavior at least in part on “the times [of war] that produce the type of fair and serious and life-denying women, who in the name of career and her pride … destroys not only you but 73

Alex Vernon, “War, Gender, and Ernest Hemingway”, The Hemingway Review XXII/2 (Fall 2002), 43; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980 (New York: Penguin, 1987), 172. 74 Randolph Bourne, “Making One’s Contribution”, New Republic, 26 August 1916, 91-92. 75 Quoted in Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 178.


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herself”.76 War, Bourne recognizes uneasily, has provided women with greater opportunities to pursue careers and lead economically independent lives. Yet, instead of approaching sympathetic men such as himself in a spirit of growing gender equality, these newest new women only seemed to intensify their vilifications of men, seemed to band together even closer, and, in the manner of scrupulous warprofiteers, appeared to openly relish the prospect of a manless world. In light of Gertrude Atherton’s radically feministic and betimes outright murderous wartime fantasies in Mrs Belfame and The White Morning, Bourne’s fears might not appear too far-fetched. But what is important to note is that sensitive young male literati began to feel that feminists and their organizations deliberately used the war to further undermine the diminishing status of man “as a self-willed being”.77 Moreover, since women – like the proletariat – had long been equated with the “inferior reasoning of crowds” and since the hysteria surrounding World War I came to be perceived as “a quintessential crowd phenomenon”, it is hardly astonishing that male war novelists often connect feelings of enochlophobia with outgoing female characters such as Bret Ashley in the Sun Also Rises, Geneviéve Rod in Three Soldiers, or Margaret Powers in Soldiers’ Pay, whose promiscuous sociability threatens to overwhelm the protagonists’ beleaguered sense of self.78 “The fear of the masses”, notes Andreas Huyssen, “is also always a fear of nature out of control, a fear of the unconscious, of sexuality, of loss of identity and stable ego boundaries in the mass”.79 In the end, then, it is not sufficient for the enlightened protagonist of World War I protest novels to simply renounce misguided progressivist doctrines of mass organization, mass agitation, and mass collectivization. To attain some sort of transcendent personal liberty within a modern world determined by outside forces that seek to enslave, tame, and/or domesticate the besieged male middle-class self, heroically resisting characters such as Frederic Henry and John 76

Quoted in Clayton, Forgotten Prophet, 176. Iain Colley, Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair, 38. 78 Janet Galligani Casey, Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), 27. 79 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986), 52. 77

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Andrews must purge their private lives of all sentimental attachments to others, who, though themselves subjugated by powers beyond their control and understanding, have become in their turn oppressors.

CHAPTER 2 John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, and Humble Protest War is the health of the State. Only when the State is at war does the modern society function with that unity of sentiment, simple uncritical patriotic devotion, co-operation of services, which have always been the ideal of the State lover.1

One Man’s Initiation: 1917, Dos Passos’ first attempt to formulate a literary response to the Great War, depicts a young American ambulance driver’s reaction to the slaughter in France. Throughout the early chapters of the novel, Martin Howe remains very much the detached gentleman volunteer, who marvels at the sights in Paris, enjoys the conviviality of French officers, and waxes abstractly about war: “the flood of scarlet poppies seemed the blood of fighting men slaughtered through all time.”2 But as Howe is “initiated in all the circles of hell”, he grows increasingly aware of the concrete suffering around him.3 Observing a group of men playing cards in the dugout, suddenly “he thinks of all the lives that must, in these three years have ended”.4 And while listlessly watching a German prisoner, Howe wonders: “Did he accept all this stench an filth and degradation of slavery as part of the divine order of things. Or did he burn with loathing and revolt?”5

1

Randolph Bourne, “The State” (1919), in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 19101918, 360. 2 Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, 52. 3 Ibid., 69. 4 Ibid., 85. 5 Ibid., 146.

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To be sure, Howe can never quite shed his tendency to scrutinize common soldiers – both friends and foes – as others, “noting intelligent faces, beautiful faces, faces brutally gay, miserable faces like those of sobbing drunkards”.6 Eventually, however, the random violence of war allows Howe to identify with the plight of the common men, who for “generations” had “worn away their lives in mines and factories and forges, in fields and work-shops”.7 In a cathartic scene that momentarily transcends differences of class and nationality, Howe springs into action when the very German prisoner, whose progress down the road he had watched languidly, is all of a sudden hit by shrapnel: … he clutched the wounded man tightly to him in the effort of carrying him towards the dugout. The effort gave Martin a strange contentment. It was as if his body was taking part in the agony of this man’s body. At last they washed out all the hatreds, all the lies, in blood and sweat. Nothing was left but the quiet friendliness of beings alike in every part, eternally alike.8

As Robert C. Rosen has argued, One Man’s Initiation not only “serves as an indictment of war”, but, in tracing Howe’s “incipient political awareness”, also provides a glimpse of young Dos Passos own incipient hope for revolutionary action.9 During a long political discussion toward the end of the novel, Howe falls under the sway of the “carefully articulated systems of thought” by four young French radicals.10 Under Socratic questioning, Howe comes to denounce “American Idealism” as mere “camouflage” and assesses that “America is ruled by the press”, which in turn is ruled by “dark forces” that have succeeded in turning young intellectuals into “slaves of bought intellect, willing slaves”.11 Howe, not unlike Dos Passos in “A Humble Protest”, perceives that the classes are equally enslaved to “industry, to money, to the mammon of business, the great God of our 6

Ibid., 64-65. Ibid., 147. 8 Ibid., 148. 9 Robert C. Rosen, John Dos Passos: Politics and the Writer (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1981), 10. 10 Dos Passos, “Preface 1945”, in One Man’s Initiation, 38. 11 Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, 158-59. 7

Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, and Humble Protest

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times”.12 It is the French Socialist André Du Bois, who instills in him a vision of a war-induced revolution from below. “We are merely intellectuals. We cling to the mummified world. But they have the power and the nerve”, Du Bois explains in good Marxist fashion: What we want is organization from the bottom, organization by the ungreedy, by the humane, by the uncunning, socialism of the masses that shall spring from the natural need of men to help one another; not socialism from the top to the ends of the governors, that they may clamp us tighter in their fetters … the unspeakable misery of this war is driving men closer into fraternity, co-operation. It is the lower classes, therefore, that the new world must be founded one …. We only can combat the lies.13

Howe drinks with his new comrades somewhat confusedly to “Revolution, to Anarchy, to the Socialist state”.14 And when he walks back to the dugout, he elatedly informs Tom Randolph: “With people like these we needn’t despair of civilization.”15 The novel sustains Howe’s optimism even though the final chapter brings death to Du Bois, Merrier, Lully, and Norman. “It’s not for long”, a dying Norman ensures Howe: “To-morrow, the next day.”16 “In my disillusionment [with Western Civilization]”, Dos Passos recalled nearly fifty years later: I began listening seriously to the Socialist …. Why shouldn’t the working people, who had everything to lose and nothing to gain from war and aggression, knit the fabric up again? We were young hotheads. We took to shouting all the warcries of the Socialist dogma.17

But even as a much younger, still politically radicalized man, Dos Passos was apparently unable to sustain One Man’s Initiation’s faith in the “ungreedy” and “uncunning” Socialism of the masses for long. 12

Dos Passos, The Major Nonfictional Prose, 32. Dos Passos, One Man’s Initiation: 1917, 163-69. 14 Ibid., 168. 15 Ibid., 169. 16 Ibid., 174. 17 Dos Passos, “Introduction 1968”, in One Man’s Initiation, 3-4. 13

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The succession of misfired revolutions in France, Portugal, Austria, and Germany as well as Lenin’s embrace of totalitarian methods in post-revolutionary Russia gradually made him doubt “the power and the nerve” of the working classes.18 More immediately, though, it seemed to have been his second initiation – this time into the “hell” of “industrial serfdom” – that shattered his idealized view of the lower classes, further compounded his longstanding fears of falling victim to the “very pathetic … ways” of “the mob”, and subsequently turned him into an ardent champion of “the supreme individual”, who denounces “organization” both “from the top” and “from the bottom”.19 Despite the fact that Dos Passos, like his friend E. E. Cummings, had been dishonorably discharged from the ambulance service for mailing treasonable letters, he was eager to get back into the army while the war still lasted. With the help of influential relatives, Dos Passos succeeded. In September of 1918, he reported to Camp Crane in Allentown, Pennsylvania. As one of the gentlemen volunteers at Section 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service, Dos Passos had cultivated an abstract taste for revolution; among the common soldiers at Camp Crane he hoped to get closer to its sources. “I have always wanted to divest myself of class and the monied background—the army seemed to be the best way—From the bottom—thought I, one can see clear”, Dos Passos reported back to Arthur McComb in early October.20 Yet the letters and diary entries Dos Passos wrote at Camp Crane reveal that the mechanics of declassing oneself turned out to be much more difficult and disillusioning than he had expected. Unaccustomed to obeying orders, army discipline quickly became unbearable to Dos Passos and he began counting his days in captivity. Long hours of “enforced labor” rendered him “most miserable” as he fell “into a state of sullen rage so that one can’t even talk to new found people”. Often, Dos Passos confided, the dull routine of work made him feel “so stupidly unintelligent—so emptyheaded” that he would not even take

18

On Dos Passos’ disillusionment with the Bolshevik Revolution, see his essays collected in Orient Express (New York: Harper, 1927). 19 Dos Passos, The Major Nonfictional Prose, 30-31. 20 Dos Passos, Correspondence, 109-10.


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the trouble to “get into conversation with” common soldiers.21 “Organization is death, organization is death”, he chanted in a letter to McComb. During the early days of “captivity”, Dos Passos could still praise “the simply and sublime amiability of the average American soldier” and note expectantly: “Here is clay for the molding. Who is to be potter? That is the great question.”22 But a mere week later, the immediate answer seemed to confirm his worst fears. In attendance during the screening of a particularly atrocious propaganda movie, he “could feel a wave of hatred go through the men … the men were furious with war—kill kill kill”.23 Army life as an extension of industrial serfdom, he discovered, was neither conducive to genuine comradeship nor to an awakening of revolutionary sentiments among the common men. To the contrary, “put in charge of the mess hall”, Dos Passos noticed “the sheeplike look army life gives [his men]—a dumb submissive look about the eyes. They usually submit cowardly to my shoutings to move on with the look of hurt dogs that have been illtreated.”24 In line with Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu (1916) – a book he greatly admired – Dos Passos nevertheless concluded that the war had to be fought to its bitter end in order to generate sufficient revolutionary discontent among the masses. Finding himself in Paris after the armistice, he excitedly awaited the general strike, set for 1 May 1919 by the General Labor Federation. “Loafing around in little old bars full of the teasing fragrances of history”, he “eagerly collected intimations of the urge towards the common good”.25 But to his great disappointment, no second French Revolution occurred. The gendarmerie brutally interfered with the May Day demonstration and the general strike was aborted. Agitated crowds of workers and discharged soldiers clashed with each other and turned to smashing windows and looting shops – a scene that replayed itself in a number of European and American cities. Dos Passos once again returned to his beloved Spain, where lack of “modern centralization” and the 21

Dos Passos, Fourteenth Chronicle, 212. Ibid., 252, 212; Dos Passos, Correspondence, 109, 107. 23 Dos Passos, Fourteenth Chronicle, 219. 24 Ibid., 218 and 230. 25 Dos Passos, “Grosz Comes to America”, quoted in Melvin Landsberg, Dos Passos Path: A Political Biography, 1912-1936 (Boulder: Colorado UP, 1972), 65. 22

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“intense individualism” of its inhabitants afforded refuge from “this immense machine, the Industrial system”. Writing from Madrid, he expressed his mounting ambivalence toward the very masses he had hoped revolution would liberate: Overpopulation combined with a breakdown of food has wrecked the checks and balances of the industrialized world. In ten years we may be cavemen snatching the last bit of food from each others mouths amid the stinking ruins of our cities, or we may be slaving—antlike— in some utterly systematized world where the individual will be crushed so that the mob (or the princes) may live.26

It was in this mood of apocalyptic despair that Dos Passos finished writing his second World War I novel, Three Soldiers. Though initially conceived as a “collectivist novel”, which relates shared war experiences of three American soldiers from different regional and socio-economic backgrounds, it is the perspective of the educated, upper-class character John Andrews that comes to dominate the latter half of the book. Taken as a whole, many critics have remarked, the novel dramatizes how the “army turns men into automatons, turns individuals into faceless cogs of an inhuman mechanism”.27 But if one takes a more discriminating look at the novel’s depictions of its three ostensibly representative protagonists – Dan Fuselli as the representative of an opportunistic petite bourgeoisie, Joe Chrisfield as the representative of a brutalized proletariat, and John Andrews as the representative of a world-weary Bildungsbürgertum – it becomes apparent that only Andrews possesses the intellectual facilities to grasp the inherent inhumanities of the modern condition. The three characters might be on some level doubles of each other, as Michael Clark suggests, but Fuselli and Chrisfield, in marked contrast to Andrews, remain oblivious to the nature of their oppression.28 Moreover, through their unreflective actions, Fuselli and 26

Dos Passos, The Major Nonfictional Prose, 41, 34; Fourteenth Chronicle, 281. Rosen, John Dos Passos: Politics and the Writer, 15. 28 Michael Clark, Dos Passos Early Fiction (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna UP, 1987) 80. As Casey notes in Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), “Andrews is more conscious of the precise nature of the oppressive effects of the military regime that for Fuselli and Chrisfield seems only a nebulous, unnamable, and all-powerful controlling force” (82). 27


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Chrisfield tend to unwittingly compound their own miseries as well as those of others. Hence, even though Andrews, too, comes “under the wheels” of a “life-denying system”, his personal “gesture, feeble as it is, towards human freedom” receives moral as well as political sanctioning by the text as the only sensible response to the dehumanizing war experience. And in the process, any prospect of revolutionary action, though not completely cancelled out, is being redefined in largely individualistic terms. Three Soldiers commences the exposure of the dehumanizing character of army life by depicting the inevitable degradation of its least comprehending victim with ironic distance. Dan Fuselli, a second-generation Italian-American store clerk from San Francisco, is thoroughly imbued with the narrow outlooks, deep-rooted prejudices and turgid aspirations of American mass culture, as Dos Passos saw them. Upon entering the army, Fuselli harbors several movie-inspired notions of heroic action on the battlefield.29 But his true aim is to get ahead in the army. War, he senses opportunistically, will give him the chance to solidify his claim to middle-class respectability: “Gee,” he says to himself, “this war’s a lucky thing for me. I might have been in the R. C. Vicker Company’s store for five years without a raise. An’ here in the army I got a chance to do almost anything” … Sure he’d get private first-class as soon as they got overseas. Then in a couple of months he might be corporal.” (43, 48)

His eyes fixed firmly on the corporalship, Fuselli strives hard to please his superior, whose self-assured, “business-like” demeanor reminds him of the “president of the Company that owned the optical goods store” (35, 64). Trying to “get in on the good side” with the “topsergeant”, Fuselli denounces Socialism, regurgitates patriotic slogans, and cracks anti-Semitic jokes (58, 92). Still, rewards for his vulgar professions of patriotism and loyalty are slow to come. Ordered “to straighten out Lieutenant Stanford’s room at eight sharp in Officers’ Barracks, Number Four”, Fuselli is stung by the sudden realization that he has lost even his petit bourgeoisie status as a store clerk. “This was the first time he’d had to do servants’ work”, Fuselli reflects crossly. “He hadn’t joined the army to be a slave to any damned first 29

Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 40 (hereafter cited parenthetically).

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loot” (63). Nonetheless, his incipient anger is immediately contained by his ingrained fear of and respect for authority. Forever hoping to advance while kicking those still below him, Fuselli is a prime example of the petit bourgeoisie, who obediently executes every order from above. At last, though, Fuselli’s “dog-like” servility seems to pay off when he is appointed “1st-class private, acting corporal” (99). Of course, this promotion merely sets Fuselli up for his certain downfall. In exchange for the promise of securing him the permanent corporalship, Fuselli, flush “with a delicious feeling of leadership”, panders his girl, Yvonne, to the lusty old top-sergeant (68). But despite his trafficking in women, the papers never materialize and, to add insult to injury, Fuselli is transferred to a menial clerk job at Headquarters Company. For a fleeting moment, Fuselli senses the bleakness of his condition as he is overwhelmed by “hopeless anger against this vast treadmill to which he was bound” (113). In characteristic fashion, however, Fuselli swiftly restores his unshakable faith in the system, consoling himself with the thought that “at last … he had a job where he could show what he was good for. He walked up and down whistling shrilly” (119). One-hundred-eighty-one pages later, the reader catches a final glimpse of Fuselli, which completes the picture of his demise. Following his demotion to “a labor battalion” for contracting a venereal disease, a disheveled Fuselli finds himself “on the permanent K.P.”, “emptying ash cans and shoveling coal”. “Not a bad job”, Fuselli ensures Chrisfield and Andrews who stare at him in utter consternation, “off two days a week; no drill, good eats” (303). Fuselli’s capacity for mindless suffering seems infinite. Hoosier farm boy Joe Chrisfield is rendered much more sympathetically, not least because he “personifies the anger and hatred Fuselli has repressed”.30 His virility and naïve forthrightness almost make him a character out of the 1930s Proletkult, which colors William Cunningham’s portrayal of Jim Tetley in The Green Corn Rebellion. But his association with the organic “flow of agrarian life” also make him part of the old Jeffersonian tradition that, just as in Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins, appears to be sadly but irretrievably lost in Three Soldiers.31 Both of which explains why Andrews at first views the unspoiled “wild man” Chrisfield with a mixture of 30 31

Rosen, John Dos Passos: Politics and the Writer, 17. Colley, Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair, 43.


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revolutionary expectation and romantic admiration (167). When Chrisfield expresses his desire to be “like you, Andy”, Andrews replies self-depreciatively: “Chris, I belong to a crowd that just fakes learning. I guess the best thing that can happen to us is to get killed in this butchery. We are a tame generation …. It’s you that it matters to kill.” (168)

In due course, however, close contact with the corrupted modern world – represented by army discipline and industrialized warfare – brings out a number of highly undesirable traits in Chrisfield, which cast dark shadows over the “ungreedy” and “uncunning” Socialism of the masses. For it turns out that Chrisfield in his righteous anger comes to actually enjoy killing. Not, as Andrews might have hoped, in a conscious act of rebellion against authority, but in the form of personal vengeance and arbitrary rage. In the chaos that follows a botched assault against German positions, for instance, Chrisfield not only murders his personal nemesis, Sergeant Anderson, but also engages in the gross abuse of a ragged German soldier, who attempts to surrender: Chrisfield kicked him. The man shambled on without turning round. Chrisfield kicked him again, feeling the point of the man’s spine and the soft flesh of his thighs against his toes with each kick, laughing so hard all the while that he could hardly see where he was going.

Chrisfield keeps on laughing as he accepts his buddies’ offer “to take keer o’ him [the prisoner]”, because there “ain’t no use sendin’ him back” (189). War has turned Chrisfield into a brutalized brutalizer – a well-functioning cog within the military machinery: “His feet beat the ground in time with the other feet. He would not have to think whether to go to the right or to the left. He would do as others did” (190). “It’s part of the system. You’ve got to turn men into beasts before ye can get ’em to act that way”, the Socialist Eisenstein had cautioned earlier (46). And sure enough, having succeeded in turning Chrisfield into a “beast”, who wants “to strip himself naked, to squeeze the wrist of a girl until she screams”, the army promptly promotes him to corporal (160). Even more dramatically than in Fuselli’s case, the promotion finalizes Chrisfield’s moral descent from rebellious wild

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man to opportunistic member of the herd. Two subsequent encounters with John Andrews draw attention to Chrisfield’s regression into a cowardly man of the mob. Dispatched to the German city of Coblenz as part of the army of occupation, Chrisfield boasts about how easy killing has become to him, rebukes Andrews for wanting to “end … soldiering”, and finally seeks to entice his old friend into joining him with the prospect of living “like kings up there” in Germany (265). Andrews is first shocked, then noticeably angered by this proposition. “The trouble is, Chris, that I don’t want to live like a king, or a sergeant or a major general”, Andrews tries to explain before abruptly “jumping to his feet” and taking leave unceremoniously (265-67). Any hope that the Chrisfields of the world may yet rise up in righteous revolt against the brutalizing system comes to naught during a final meeting between the two protagonists in Paris. Having both gone AWOL – Andrews “by pure accident” and Chrisfield for fear of having publicly bragged about killing Anderson – they find themselves holed up in the basement of warehouse among a bunch of fellow-deserters and petty criminals (423). While the men contemplate various courses of action, the May Day demonstrations on the streets of Paris turn violent. To the middle-class rebel Andrews, the unrest seems to signal the much anticipated overthrow of the government and he instantly seeks to rouse revolutionary sentiment among the ordinary men around him, “who are tired of being ordered around” (400). In line with Aubrey, who had earlier read the Russian Revolution as a sign that “the new era is opening up”, Andrews’ argues, “this will be the first great gesture towards a newer and better world” (297). His browbeaten lower-class associates, however, have long abandoned hope for a better world. “Fellers like us ain’t got it in ’em to buck the system, Andy”, Chrisfield explains. What war and army-life has taught “fellers” such a Chrisfield is not how to buck the system, but how to play along in order to improve their personal lot. “D’you know what I’ll do when the revolution comes?” one of the men in the hideout asks Andrews provocatively: “I’ll go straight to one of those jewelry stores, Rue Royal, and fill my pockets and come home with my hands full of diamonds.” “What good’ll that do you?”, Andrews responds perplexed, “they won’t be worth anything. It’ll only be work that is worth anything.” “I’ll need them in the end”, the man insists, adding prophetically:


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“D’you know what it’ll mean, your revolution? Another system! When there’s a system there are always men to be bought with diamonds. That’s what the world is like.” (400)

To confirm the men’s defeatist attitude, the chapter ends on an appropriately low note. Word comes that the incipient revolt had been crushed and that the police is on the hunt for straggling would-be revolutionaries who have turned to smashing windows and looting stores. “Beat it”, a dejected Andrews advises a terrified Chrisfield: “There may be no time to waste” (407). In the near-deterministic world of Three Soldiers, both the servile petit bourgeois Fuselli and the brutalized proletarian Chrisfield have proved incapable of bucking the system. Three Soldiers “shows”, remarks Casey, “that the machinery of warfare deadens men and that the men are unable collectively to transcend the limitations that allow that deadening”.32 But this deadening is not necessarily a dead end, as Casey suggests, since the operative term here is “collectively”. In marked contrast to Fuselli and Chrisfield, John Andrews, with his deep intellectual roots in pre-progressive notions of bourgeois individualism, does manage at least partially to “transcend the limitations that allow that deadening” and thereby to reassert man’s capacity for rebellious action, albeit in strictly individualist terms. This is not an easy undertaking, the novel makes clear, for it requires Andrews to become intimately acquainted with the physical world as it appears “to the majority of men” while guarding himself against “sinking too deeply into the helpless mentality of the soldier” (32, 31). Nor is arriving at his final “gesture, feeble as it is, toward human freedom” an intellectually painless charge, Three Soldiers underscores, because it entails, among other things, the sobering realization that the experience of “common slavery” is far from edifying and that members of the lower classes and/or the opposite sex are not unspoiled, romantic beings, who somehow hold the keys to a better world (443, 26). At the outset, Andrews, much like his creator, views his decision to join the army as a forceful renunciation of his own cultivated bourgeois background. Ashamed of his sheltered upbringing on a Virginia plantation, bored with “the stale air” of his intellectual life, 32

Casey, Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine, 84.

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and displeased about his inability to create musical compositions, Andrews sees war as an opportunity to remake himself by getting in touch with the masses, their “actual” work, their “real” suffering, their “unadulterated” vitality, and their “genuine” solidarity. Sick of personal “revolt, of independent thought, of carrying his individuality like a banner above the turmoil”, Andrews hopes to find a collective sense of direction among the “unspoiled” masses that “seemed at moments to be but one organism” (26). “Ever since his first year at college he seemed to have done nothing but to think about himself, talk about himself”, Andrews reflects self-critically: “At least at the bottom, in the utterest degradation of slavery, he could find forgetfulness and start rebuilding the fabric of his life, out of real things this time, out of work and comradeship and scorn” (31). What follows, however, is Andrews’ slow and painful recognition that modern industrial society has all but negated the socially beneficial and/or potentially liberating aspects of work, comradeship, and scorn. Andrews is made to discover that work has become mindnumbing industrial labor (Andrews “washing windows”, Fuselli’s “endless sweeping”, Chrisfield’s cleaning of latrines, the “interminable monotony of drills and lineups”), that comradeship has deteriorated into enforced cooperation (“marching in ranks”, “running with the pack” “the crowds dutifully cheering”), and that scorn has been redeployed to deepen divisions and to fuel intolerance (Fuselli’s hatred of “kikes”, “frogs”, and “socialists”, “the ‘Y’ man” spreading “atrocity stories”, Chrisfield kicking a German prisoner).33 “So was civilization nothing but a vast edifice of shame, and the war, instead of its crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression”, Andrews concludes disappointedly (210). In lieu of any prospect for an exalted collective destiny, regaining “dominion over himself” and “asserting [his] right of individual liberty” become Andrews’ new chief objectives (207, 394). To be sure, in retrospect Andrews views his desertion, like his initial decision to enlist, as a political act – “a gesture, however feeble, however forlorn, for other people’s freedom” – but his final rebellion remains fundamentally directed against what he perceives to be his

33

Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 20, 120, 168, 113, 190, 211, 207, 157, 210, 198.


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own enslavement (431). “I was not willing to submit any longer to the treadmill”, he explains his decision to desert: I could not submit any longer to the discipline …. Oh, those long Roman words, what millstones are around men’s necks! That was silly, too; I was quite willing to help in the killings of Germans, I had no quarrel with that, out of curiosity or cowardice …. You see, it has taken me so long to find out how the world is. There was no one to show me the way. (421)

Both wised up and purified by his first-hand experience of victimization in the army, Dos Passos’ Andrews, analogous to Bourne’s Sebert, has freed himself from the social guilt of thinking and talking about himself, since the masses’ unwitting complicity in its own subjugation has demonstrated the inherent pitfalls of a naïve faith in collective thought and organizational action. “It seems to me”, Andrews expounds his neo-Emersonian philosophy still somewhat hesitantly, “that human society has been always that, and perhaps will be always that: organizations growing and stifling individuals, and individuals revolting hopelessly against them, and at last forming new societies to crush old societies and becoming slaves again in their turn” (412).34 “Carrying his individuality like a banner above the turmoil” has thus been revalidated as the sole authentic stance of defiance available to thinking modern man. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world” – this Emersonian dictum comes to inform the final chapters of Three Soldiers.35 For like the modern middle-class rebels in Pío Baroja’s novels, with whom Dos Passos identifies himself in Rosinante on the Road Again (1922), Andrews realizes that his “slavery has been an isolated slavery which has unfitted him forever from becoming truly part of a community”. 36 And because his 34

“Society never advances”, Emerson expounds in similar terms: “It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes; it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1844), in The Portable Emerson, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1986), 161. 35 Ibid., 141. 36 John Dos Passos, Rosinante on the Road Again (New York: Doran, 1922), 93.

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isolation remains at least partially self-willed, it is not merely a mechanical one, but a spiritual one, that is an “elevation” in that it allows him to “use the vast powers of knowledge which training has given him to put the acid test to existing institutions, and to strip the veils off them”.37 “Andrews is the most pure and extreme form of the early Dos Passos hero”, notes Ian Colley, “the man who fails but in his failure creates his own identity and gives existential meaning to the act of revolt for which he is condemned”.38 To be certain, it is not just military authority and army-life that threaten to drag Andrews “into the mud of” an undignified “common slavery” from which individualistic escape would indeed be impossible (26). In Part 5, “The World Outside” and Part 6, “Under the Wheels”, Andrews’ postwar struggles against the oppressive system are principally depicted through his disillusioning relationships with three selfish women, all of whom, in one way or another, seek to “tame”, domesticate, and imprison him (416). Female characters in Three Soldiers, Cobley points out, “are Oedipally encoded as a threat to male identity”.39 Hence, just as Andrews is made to see that his idealized notions about the common workmen had been misplaced, he must learn that his romantic fantasies about women are untenable. For rather than providing a counterpoint to the blind conformity, random violence, and systematic oppression around him, Jeanne, Rosaline, and Geneviève appear to be in cahoots with a system that denies men all expressions of heroic individuality. Tellingly, it is a fourth woman, Andrews’ “fat” landlady, who affects his final arrest by the military police (409). While on the frontlines, Andrews, treading in the footsteps of his idealistic predecessor Martin Howe, repeatedly indulges in romantic visions of imaginary women that afford him temporary relief from the sordidness of his wartime surroundings. Once the sobering realities of war-work have led him to abandon plans for an ode to characterbuilding labor, tentatively entitled “Arbeit und Rhythmus”, Andrews seeks artistic refuge from the world by composing a sensual orchestra piece based on Flaubert’s La Tentatione Saint Antoine. The sight of a

37

Emerson, “Self-Reliance”, 154; Dos Passos, Rosinante on the Road Again, 94. Colley, Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair, 34. 39 Cobley, Representing War, 162. 38


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nurse in the hospital ward is sufficient to trigger Orientalist fantasies about the seductive Queen of Sheba: Standing in the dark in the desert of his despair, he would hear the sound of a caravan in the distance …. Then the music would burst in a sudden hot whirlwind about him …. Naked slaves would bend their gleaming backs before him as they laid out a carpet at his feet; and, through the flare of torchlight, the Queen of Sheba would advance towards him, covered with emeralds and dull-gold ornaments …. She would put her hand with its slim fantastic nails on his shoulders; and, in looking into her eyes, he would suddenly feel within reach all the fiery imaginings of his desire. (204)

As Casey has pointed out, “Andrews’ idealized visions of the Queen of Sheba … have much to do with his inability to see woman as anything more than projections of his own ideas and desires”.40 This, then, might also explain why none of his brief relationships with the aspiring Jeanne, the suffocating Rosaline, and the fiercely materialistic Geneviève work out. It is noteworthy, however, that Andrews’ musical “projections of his own ideas are desires” are considerably complicated by the fact that Christian tradition has made King Solomon the conqueror of the Queen of Sheba and so inspired and validated many other apparent victories of the West over the Orient, of men over women, of “truth” over error. Andrews strives hard to fulfill Solomon’s Judeo-Christian legacy, but always falls short of capturing her through his art. After many trials and errors, he abandons his composition and instead resumes work on another unfeasible project, “The Soul and Body of John Brown”, a “madman who wanted to free people” (423). Corrupted by profiteering and embroiled in senseless a war, modern Western civilization has apparently lost its moral authority over the “savage” world. Since modern Western man has forfeited his Solomonic virtues, the African Queen is no longer conquerable and thus seems to stand, “quiet and inscrutable”, for the uncanny ascendancy of both her gender and her race (289). Lest Andrews becomes too ensnared by the “imaginings of his desires”, Dos Passos has him run into several real women, who one 40

Casey, Dos Passos and the Ideology of the Feminine, 83.

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after another cure him of his quixotic ideas about the liberating powers of love (289). Fittingly, Andrews’ exuberant shouts, “C’est la armistice” and “Libertad, Libertad, allons, ma femme”, do not culminate in his forgetting of “himself and the army and everything in crazy, romantic love”, but land him as somewhat as an anticlimax in prison (279, 343). Andrews’ initial “imaginings of his desire” come to an abrupt end, when the woman in his presence sternly rebukes the “boys” in the hospital ward for their unpatriotic talk and admonishes them to “remember what the Huns did in Belgium … poor Miss Cavell, a nurse just like me” (204). Encounters with ultra-patriotic characters such the unnamed nurse or the nameless women Martin Howe meets aboard ship to France clearly serve to associate females with wartime propaganda and postwar advertisement, both as objects and consumers thereof. To varying degrees, all women characters in Three Soldiers reinforce notions about both the shallowness and the callousness of a postwar consumer culture that during the anticonsumerist protest of the early 1920s was conventionally gendered as female. In the wake of the armistices, Andrews plays up to the sense of middle-class solidarity among his officers and succeeds in engineering his transfer to Paris, where he, though still under army auspices, is allowed to enroll at the Sorbonne’s Schola Cantorum. At first, “the world outside” seems to afford everything he has longed for: “the Paris of Diderot and Voltaire and Jean-Jacques … he felt very languid and happy” (285-86). I like it”, Andrews explains to Henslowe, who wants him to join a Red Cross detachment in Poland. “I’m getting a better course in orchestration than I imagined existed, and I met a girl the other day, and I’m crazy over Paris” (309). The thought of Jeanne, a lowly dressmaker with an affable smile, fills Andrews’ love-starved “mind and body with a reverberation of all the rhythms of men and women moving in the frieze of life before his eyes; no more like wooden automatons knowing only the motions of the drill manual, but supple and varied, full of force and tragedy” (289). As the infatuated Andrews becomes better acquainted with the reserved Jeanne, however, he is quickly forced to realize that she belongs very much to the mundane world of “wooden automatons”, who are merely struggling to advance socially. In one of his more effusive moods, Andrews proclaims:


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“It’s funny, Jeanne, I threw myself into the army. I was so sick of being free and not getting anywhere. Now I have learnt that live is to be used, not just held in the hand like a box of bonbons that nobody eats.” (322)

In response, Jeanne stares “at him blankly”. Incapable of following his existentialist notions of freedom, she thinks of life in purely materialistic terms, hoping “to be rich some day, like princes and princesses in fairy tales” (320). And the comparatively well-to-do Andrews, who buys her food and drink and boxes of bonbons, appears to be a means by which to attain her goal. “I suppose one must pay for one’s dinner”, Jeanne says “maliciously” when Andrews invites her upstairs (330). That Jeanne views their relationship largely through utilitarian spectacles becomes clear during a preceding exchange. “You are so well educated”, Jeanne muses while contemplating the prospect of a future together: “How is it you are only an ordinary soldier?” “Good God!”, Andrews exclaims noticeably irritated, “I wouldn’t be an officer”. “Why, it must be rather nice to be an officer”, the upwardly mobile Jeanne replies uncomprehendingly (323). The upshot of this awkward conversation is that Andrews senses an unbridgeable difference between them. He begins to feel choked by the stale air of domestic tedium that clouds their joyous outing in the countryside: They sat looking at each other silently. Andrews felt weary and melancholy. He could think of nothing to say. Jeanne was playing with some tiny white daisies with pink tips to their petals, arranging them in circles and crosses on the table. (324)

The brief affair ends on a note of “passionate disgust”, which is further amplified by Andrews’ sudden annoyance with the bustling city life that initially had seemed so vigorous and full of “insane hope of the future” (340, 285). “Today everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like”, Andrews observes “mournfully” (343). A chance encounter with Rosaline, the alluring daughter of a selfprofessed anarchist who shelters him on his river barge from the military police, seems to afford Andrews yet another opportunity to “forget himself and the army and everything”. Unlike the conventional

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working-class girl Jeanne, Rosaline shares Andrews’ desire to “live very much” (302). “We could have good times together …. You must amuse yourself when you can in this life”, she suggests invitingly (382-83). Andrews is obviously tempted to accept her offer. “Oh, it must be a wonderful life”, he croons romantically. “This barge seems like heaven after the army” (381). On second thoughts, however, Andrews realizes that Rosaline’s sexual forthrightness springs largely from her own “boredom” with “all these barges” and is nothing but a desperate attempt to ensnare him (382). “All the boys go away to the cities”, she sighs at one point, before craftily reminding him of his precarious status as “a deserter”, who is liable to be shot at “any time” (383). Rosaline’s offer that he “can help the old man to run the boat” sounds innocent enough, but the “trembling eagerness” in her “eyes” gives her away (379). Andrews makes a hasty exit. Twice disappointed by the possessiveness of selfish women, Andrews pins his last hope for romantic redemption on the cultivated Geneviève Rod, whom he had met earlier in Paris. As it turns out, however, Geneviève is even less inclined than either Jeanne or Rosaline to help him “piece together the future” (412). Geneviève is too caught up in her shallow social life to shower Andrews with the considerate attention he craves: Whenever he looked at her, some well-dressed person stepped in front of her with a gesture of politeness. He felt caught in a ring of welldressed conventions that dance about him with grotesque politeness. (418)

When they are alone, Geneviève professes her sympathy for Andrews, allows him to kiss her, and even concedes that he was “treated with horrible injustice” (423). But to Andrews growing irritation, she steadfastly refuses to see his desertion as an act of courage. “What induced you to do such a thing?”, Geneviève asks as uncomprehendingly as Jeanne (421): “Why couldn’t you have talked it over with me first, before cutting off every chance of going back … the shame of it, the danger of being found out all the time” (427-28). Emancipated yet thoroughly imbued with outdated beliefs in middleclass respectability and bourgeois pragmatism, she is unable to share Andrews’ hard-won “notions of individual liberty”: “I am ashamed of


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many things in my life, Geneviève. I am rather proud of this”, Andrews replies laconically (428). In the closing chapter, Andrews gradually reverses Heloise’s prayer in Gertrude Atherton’s The White Morning – “O God … deliver us from war and deliver us from men” – by projecting his accumulated hatred for the dehumanizing “military machine” squarely onto Geneviève. Exasperated by her flirtations with other men and her long motor-excursions through the French countryside, Andrews snaps at Geneviève: “I’m under the wheels of your system. If your system doesn’t succeed in killing me, it will be that much weaker, it will have less strength to kill others.” (419)

Geneviève, a young upper-class woman no less hedonistic than Andrews himself, comes to personify the exploitive nature of a capitalistic system that thrives on war for profit. Unable to contain her, Andrews’ anxiety over his loss of male self-control grows steadily. At one point, holding “Geneviève’s revolver”, he even contemplates suicide. Similar to the dejected veterans in Soldier’s Pay, Andrews casts himself in the role of a hapless victim of female selfishness: “a slave to stand cap in hand for someone of stronger will to tell him to act” (208). Thus, after Geneviève has stood him up repeatedly, it dawns on him that she merely wants “a tame pianist as an ornament to a clever young woman’s drawing room” (416). The charge that women enjoyed easy lives in drawing rooms during the war is a familiar trope in male World War I writings; Dos Passos invokes it in Three Soldiers to prompt Andrews’ final “gesture, feeble as it is, towards human freedom”. Convinced that Geneviève seeks to stifle his male individuality in the stuffy atmosphere of her drawing room, Andrews leaves her and stoically awaits his impending arrest while listlessly resuming work on the “first movement of the ‘Soul and Body of John Brown’” (430). “Yet people were always alone, really”, Andrews consoles himself; “however much they love each other, there could be no real union. Those who rode in the great car could never feel as others felt; the toads hoping across the road” (425). In the end, then, Andrews’ gesture of defiance appears to be directed less against military “organizations growing and stifling individuals” than against

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the perceived threat posed by the type of self-indulgent “New Woman” whom Geneviève represents (421).

CHAPTER 3 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, and Personal War Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members … the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.1

Ever since Phillip Young’s influential reconsideration of the Hemingway oeuvre in 1966, much attention has been ladled on the writer’s literary struggles to overcome his traumatic wounding on the Italian front. And indeed, especially in Hemingway’s earlier works such as In Our Time, Men Without Women, and The Sun Also Rises wounded, traumatized, and otherwise maimed war veterans occupy central roles. As Stephen Cooper has pointed out, however, “for Hemingway himself in summer and fall 1918, political disillusionment had yet to set in, and his trauma was well disguised”.2 In contrast to Dos Passos, who was three years his senior and intellectually mature beyond his age, Hemingway did not write of disillusionment with “Mr. Wilson’s war to end all wars” in his letters to friends and family. Instead, he dispatched usually upbeat reports about life in the trenches, which were often interspersed with expressions of his unbroken commitment to spreading the gospel of American democracy: “I will always go where I can do the most good you know and that’s what we are here for.”3 And despite his leg injury, which entitled him to medical leave, he intrepidly avowed, “I will stay here just as long as I

1

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1844), in The Portable Emerson, 143. Stephen Cooper, The Politics of Ernest Hemingway (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1987), 3. 3 Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner, 1981), 18. 2

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can hobble and there is a war to hobble to”.4 Unlike Frederic Henry, young Ernest Hemingway seemed in no way “embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice, and the expression in vain” (184). Back in Oak Park after the war in 1919, Hemingway relished his role of local war hero, showing off war mementos and providing impressionable high school students with thrilling accounts of his exploits on the Italian front. In an interview with Roselle Dean for The Oak Parker, he struck the patriotic chord that was expected by the good denizens of his affluent Chicago suburb. “I went because I wanted to go”, Hemingway declared: “I was big and strong, my country needed me, and I went and did whatever I was told – and anything I did outside of that was simply my duty.”5 Even as late as March 1920, Hemingway would dash off a mocking article for the Toronto Star about slackers pretending to be war veterans. Though private doubts about the war might have already been fomenting by 1920, Hemingway had obviously not arrived at the kind of “separate peace” and uncompromising individualism that cap the development of Nick Adams in In Our Times and Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms. Above and beyond the experience of modern warfare, for disillusioned, self-searching characters such as Nick Adams and Frederic Henry to emerge it took Hemingway’s exposure to the convoluted politics of the postwar era – chief among which were, firstly, his brief involvement in the co-operative movement, which cured him of any lingering trust in progressive reforms; secondly, his coverage of the wrangling for political power in Europe, which not only filled with him with contempt for “politicians, profiteers, generals, staff officers and whores”, but also confirmed his skepticism about leftist mass movements; and, thirdly, his acquaintance with the raucous gender debates of the 1920s, which fueled his suspicions about feminism and stirred him toward the theories of liberal-minded sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Benjamin Lindsey.6 4

Ibid., 19. Quoted in Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner, 1969), 18. 6 Ernest Hemingway, “Wings Always Over Africa”, in By-Line Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (New York: Scribner, 1967), 234. 5

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, and Personal War

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One direct result of food rationing and unscrupulous wartime profiteering was a brief resurgence of the American co-operative movement in the early 1920s. In most major cities, nonprofit consumer organizations sprung up, whose aim it was to reduce commodity prices by pooling the purchasing power of its members. This involved taking charge of distribution through wholesale facilities and local co-op stores, whose activities were coordinated by an umbrella organization, the National Co-operative Society. The onetime farmhand Hemingway, believing that “a co-operative thing was straight”, became involved in the movement partly out of idealism and partly because he needed a job. In response to an advertisement by the Chicago-based Co-operative Society of America, he was offered and accepted a position as copy editor for the society’s “slicked-up” monthly, Cooperative Commonwealth. “Have what’s really a pretty darned good job now”, Hemingway announced in his letters, qualifying a tad hesitantly that if “almost any part of what they say about this movement is true it is quelque movement”.7 Surrounded “by idealistic young students” who “conceived of themselves as partners in an evangelical crusade”, Hemingway spent winter 1920 and spring 1921 churning out glowing articles about the society’s activities.8 As Hemingway was soon to find out, however, Harrison Parker’s Co-operative Society, unlike the legitimate and highly respected Cooperative League, was a giant fraud. Unbeknown to its thousands of small-time investors, Parker had shifted the co-operative’s trust funds into shady private ventures. When Parker was adjudged bankrupt on 6 October 1922, it was disclosed that the Co-operative Society of America had accumulated $15,000,000 in debts. As the US District Court began its investigation of Parker’s shady co-operative in early 1921, Hemingway quickly convinced himself that “it was crooked” yet resolved to stay “on a little while,” thinking he “could write and expose it”. Nothing came of this exposé, however, and so he just racked “it up as experience and the hell with it”.9 Hemingway’s disappointing association with Parker apparently contributed to his lasting aversion to self-professed do-gooders and idealistic reform movements of all sorts. Notes Charles A. Fenton: “Hemingway could 7

Hemingway, Selected Letters, 52, 42. Fenton, The Apprenticeship, 98, 107. 9 Quoted in Fenton, The Apprenticeship, 108. 8

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not have been placed in an atmosphere better calculated to increase his distaste for certain American values and his determination to avoid permanent bondage to any such employment.”10 An assignment to cover European politics for The Toronto Star seemed to offer Hemingway escape from “permanent bondage”, sanctimonious meliorists, and the sordidness of modern American commercial life. But the postwar Europe he found, embroiled as it was in bitter economic and political strife, hardly provided reasons for hope in a better future. Everywhere, it appeared to him, opportunities to affect fundamental social changes had been gambled away, brutally suppressed, or both. “If Lenin is the Napoleon that made a dictatorship out of the Russian revolution, [Soviet foreign minister] Tchitcherin is his Talleyrand”, Hemingway mused.11 Meanwhile, he observed, German interests are represented by Hugo Stinnes, “the industrial dictator”, Italy is on the verge of bending to the will of “Benito Mussolini, the renegade Socialist”, and France’s Premier Raymond Ponicaré meekly “submits to the dictatorship of Léon Daudet, the Royalist”.12 Hemingway’s reports on the 1922 World Economic Conference at Genoa, the Lausanne Conference to end the Greco-Turkish War, and the French occupation of the Ruhr reveal his mounting disgust with politics. The war, Hemingway came to see, was far from over. It had merely shifted from the battlefields to the conference tables, whence it spilled back into the volatile streets where reactionary mobs such as the Italian Fascisti, French Camelots du Roi, and German Braunhemden seized the initiative. Perhaps no piece of writing from that time highlights Hemingway’s level of frustration better than his sarcastic poem, “They All Made Peace – What Is Peace?” (1923), which aims blunt ad hominem attacks against much of the world’s political leadership: Lord Curzon likes young boys. So does Chicherin. So does Mustapha Kemal. He is good looking too. 10

Fenton, The Apprenticeship, 107. Hemingway, Dateline Toronto, 153. 12 Ibid., 155, 175, 266. 11


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His eyes are to close together but he makes war. That is the way he is. … Monsieur Barrèré gets telegrams. So does Marquis Garroni. His telegrams come on motorcycles from MUSSOLINI. MUSSOLINI has nigger eyes and a bodyguard and has his picture taken reading a book upside down. MUSSOLINI is wonderful. Read the Daily Mail. … M. Stambuliski walks up the hill and down the hill. Don’t talk About M. Venizelos. He is wicked. You can see it. His beard shows it. Mr. Child is not wicked. Mrs. Child has flat breasts and Mr. Child is an idealist and Wrote Harding’s campaign speeches and calls Senator Beveridge Al. You know me Al. Lincoln Steffens is with Child. The big C. makes the joke easy.13

Six years later, these depraved politicians and misguided idealists would form part of the ominously amorphous “they” in A Farewell to Arms, who perpetuate the war and unfailingly “killed you in the end. You can count on that. Stay around and they would kill you” (327). The solution, obviously, is not to stay around but to withdraw as far as possible from politics. Politicians were not the only ones in whom Hemingway had lost faith by 1923. Even more devastatingly was his concomitant disillusionment with the failure of leftist mass movements to carry out the looming postwar revolution. “The world was much closer to revolution in the years after the war than it is now”, the “Old Newsman” counseled young American radicals in 1934:

13

Ernest Hemingway, Complete Poems, ed. Nicholas Gerogiannis (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979), 63-64.

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Embattled Home Fronts In those days we who believed in it looked for it at any time, expected it, hoped for it – for it was the logical thing. But everywhere it came it was aborted. For a long time I could not understand it, but finally I figured it out. If you study history you will see that there can never be a Communist revolution without, first, a complete military debacle … that is the necessary catharsis before revolution. No country was ever riper for revolution than Italy after the war but the revolution was doomed to fail because her defeat was not complete; because after Caporetto she fought and won in June and July of 1918 on the Piave. From the Piave, by way of the Banca Commerciale, the Credito Italiano, the merchants of Milan who wanted the prosperous socialist co-operative societies and the socialist municipal government of that city smashed, came fascism.14

The same fate befell an only half-beaten France, Hemingway further argues in “Old Newsman Writes”, when Clemenceau mobilized the reactionary Garde Republicaine to disperse the Parisian May Day crowds. “Nobody who saw that”, he concludes with reference to the 1932 veterans march on Washington, “could be expected to think something new was happening when Hoover had the troops disperse the bonus army”.15 Ten years earlier, while attending the Genoa Conference, Hemingway had reported that “sections of Italy, principally Tuscany and the north, have seen bloody fighting, murders, reprisals and pitched battles in the last few months over communism”. Yet the real threat “to the peace of Italy”, he is quick to stress in his articles, are not the tame Italian communists, but the Fascisti – units of “young exveterans” who, under “the tacit protection of the government”, served the “very definite purpose” of crushing “what looked like a coming revolution”. For once the Fascisti had acquired a “taste of killing under police protection”, they showed no sign of letting up, Hemingway writes. What’s more, having succeeded in recruiting “several hundreds of thousands of workers disgusted with communism”, the “Fascisti leaders, seeing their well-organized gang, have developed political ambitions and want to make a solid political party of their followers”.16 14

Hemingway, By-Line Ernest Hemingway, 180-81. Ibid., 182. 16 Hemingway, Dateline Toronto, 131, 173, 175. 15


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Hemingway clearly blames the government for molding a righteous groundswell of popular postwar discontent into an uncontrollable and exceedingly dangerous reactionary force. Yet his mocking depictions of “malicious Reds”, though in part designed to assuage his readerships’ fears of Communism, also hint a good deal of disillusionment with the lack of genuine revolutionary spirit among the working classes. Although the “Reds of Genoa” frequently engage in revolutionary talk, accompanied by “toasts to Lenin and shouts for Trotsky”, Hemingway reports, closing “the cafés usually stops them. Uninspired by the vinous products of their native land, the Italian Communist cannot keep his enthusiasm up to the demonstration point for long.” The “Italian Red”, Hemingway explains: … is father of a family and a good workman six days out of seven; on the seventh he talks politics. His leaders have formally rejected Russian communism and he is as Red as some Canadians are Liberal. He does not want to fight for it, or convert the world to it, he merely wants to talk about it, as he has from time immemorial.

No wonder, then, that Mussolini’s “shock troops” had such an easy time quelling the revolution before it could take spread. Like Bourne and Dos Passos before him, Hemingway is left without an apposite revolutionary force upon which to hang his barely sprouting political hopes. What he is left with, though, is a sad picture of the impotence of the Communist Party and a keen understanding of the ways in which “counterrevolutionary” powers are capable of using principles of political propaganda and mass organization to erect totalitarian or quasi-totalitarian states that deny man all forms of individual expression. Hemingway’s political writings throughout the 1920s centered chiefly on the impending threats Fascist and totalitarian movements posed to middle-class concepts of autonomy. Some of his humaninterest pieces and many of his fictions, though, also register a rising male unease about the position of women within a postwar society that was rapidly loosening its sexual mores. Flappers, dance crazes, dating, and petting had already been hot topics prior to World War I. With the popularization of serious sex studies by Havelock Ellis, Sigmund Freud, and Ellen Key in the early 1920s, however, unsettling notions of a sexual revolution and a new morality took firm hold in the public

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consciousness. The sex instinct came to be regarded as central to life, its repression as damaging to health and psyche. Clearly, such changing views affected women’s roles more fundamentally than those of men, since the latter had long been assumed to possess aggressively sexual natures. Ellis’ authoritative pronouncement that the “sexual impulse in women” exists apart from a “reproductive instinct” suddenly seemed to bring an equality of desire. “The myth of the pure woman is almost at an end”, announced V. F. Calverton in 1928: “Women’s demands for equal rights have extended to the sexual sphere as well as the social.”17 Naturally, even liberal observers such as Calverton quickly noticed that the sexual emancipation of women had a flipside. For a start, it was feared that the separation of the sexual impulse from the reproductive instinct might encourage and excuse female promiscuity. A man-eating Hemingway heroine like Bret Ashley comes to mind, who aggressively pursues her sexual desires at the expense of the already sadly emasculated war veteran Jake Barnes. Moreover, as the “myth of the pure woman” lost scientific credibility, assertive female sexuality often came to be associated with blood lust and a general fascination with violence – two attributes that had hitherto been regarded as masculine prerogatives. It is easy to see how such associations took on a decidedly sinister hue after the bloodshed of World War I. Revealingly, in a 1920 Star article on the first Toronto prizefights held with women in attendance, Hemingway describes the female audience’s unrestrained enthusiasm for bloody fistfights as a resurgence of long repressed destructive drives: Is it the magic name Arena that brings back to the alleged gentler sex their old Roman attributes? Lecky, the historian, says that the majority of the old gladiatorial crowds were women.18

Sensible women, he implies in closing, should stay home and wait for their husbands. After all, as “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Maycomber” (1936) would later suggest, once women’s “old Roman 17 Quoted in Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), II, 397. 18 Hemingway, Dateline Toronto, 30-32.


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attributes” have been reawakened, even the home may no longer be safe for men.19 Another threat with which the sexual liberation of women confronted men was lesbianism – a threat fueled, no doubt, by the publication of a slew of openly lesbian plays and novels ranging from Clemence Dane’s controversial Regiment of Women to Radclyffe Hall’s scandalous The Well of Loneliness (1928). Prior to the sexual revolution of the 1920s, same-sex relationships between women, “Boston marriages”, had been silently tolerated. But “once love between women was seen as sexual”, Nancy Woloch points out, “such relationships no longer seemed harmless, but rather a hazard – a barrier to sexual happiness”.20 Sexologists struggled to contain this new hazard by devising novel theories of abnormality. As early as 1905, Havelock Ellis, whose writings Hemingway knew very well, had come up with an elaborate scheme that distinguished between “congenital inverts”, who are hereditarily unable to change their inclinations, and mere “homosexuals”, whose same-sex inclinations are “acquired characteristics – preventable and curable”.21 Ellis’ model, which became widely accepted, had the obvious advantage that it reduced male fears of lesbianism by isolating “girl ravishing” congenital inverts as the true social threat. In addition, experts such as Judge Benjamin Lindsey commenced to propagate a new type of “companionate marriage” that focused on the romantic-sexual union between husband and wife (rather than on the family unit) and stressed values such as compatibility, reciprocity, and mutuality.22 Contraceptives as well as easier divorces were also part of this proposed package deal, which in essence represented an extension of established dating practices. However, no reform of marriage laws occurred during the 1920s. Yet, the concept of “companionate marriage represented an influential attempt of mainstream marriage ideology to adapt to 19

This short story, much discussed, depicts a wife who first cuckolds and then “accidentally” shoots her husband. 20 Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 403. 21 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 276. 22 Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, The Companionate Marriage (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 27.

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women’s perceived new social and sexual powers …. It directed female sexual energies toward men and heterosexual partnerships.”23 Small wonder, then, that Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms adapts contemporaneous ideas of companionate marriage so as to dispel the triple threats of female promiscuity, blood lust, and lesbianism by redirecting Catherine’s sexual energies toward Frederic. As several critics have noted, Frederic Henry’s development from naïve idealist to seasoned war veteran, who considers the war a “rotten game”, is basically concluded when A Farewell to Arms commences. By 1929, Hemingway could evidently rest assured that his readership would take a generally unfavorable view of the war, which, incidentally, might also explain Frederic’s somewhat incongruent claim that he has always been embarrassed by expressions of patriotism and traditional notions of heroism. In any case, Frederic’s Bildung involves less the recognition of “the realities of modern warfare” than the realization or achievement of a stable, selfsufficient, white male middle-class persona. This realization is dramatized through a number of interpersonal relationships and encounters, most conspicuously with Catherine and the priest, but no less significantly with his Socialist mechanics (Passini, Manera, Bonello, Piani, Aymo), the proto-Fascist. Ettore, two unnamed sergeants, the Italian carabinieri, and last but not least Catherine’s ever-present shadow, Helen Ferguson. In fact, Frederic’s interactions with these often overlooked minor characters shed perhaps the clearest light on the novel’s underlying ideological trajectories. For as in John Andrews’ case, Frederic’s self-realization involves a series of painful renunciation of social ties (what Emerson might call “an absolving of the self”). Sooner or later, all of Frederic’s acquaintances come to embody various social impositions and/or threats, from which Frederic must absolve himself in his quest for a “separate peace”. Although Frederic expresses his disgust with the war early on in the book, he, nevertheless, retains a strong sense of duty, until his fateful confrontation with the “battle police”. The fact that Frederic tolerates his drivers’ “seditious” talk and freely socializes with them cannot mask some fundamental differences in attitudes and outlooks 23

Christina Simmons, “Companionate Marriage and Lesbian Threat”, Frontiers, IV/3 (Winter 1979), 55-56.


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between officers and enlisted men. A brief exchange with Passini and Manera sums up Frederic’s ambiguous attitude toward his men: “You should not let us talk this way, Tenente. Evviva l’esercito,” Passini said sarcastically. “I know how you talk,” I said, “but as long as you drive the cars and behave – ” “ – and don’t talk so other officers can hear,” Manera finished. (49)

Like his creator in 1942, Frederic avows that he “hates war and hates all politicians”, but insists that “once we have a war there is only one thing to do. It must be won”.24 This view separates him form his men, a group of self-declared Socialists, who subscribe to a doctrine of passive resistance. “War is not won by victory”, Passini, the most level-headed among Frederic’s men, declares: “One side must stop fighting. Why don’t we stop fighting? If they come down into Italy they will get tired and go away. They have their own country. But no, instead there is war …. There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war.” (50-51)

According to Passini’s analysis, the war is largely a manifestation of ongoing internal oppression and coercion. Frederic, by contrast, still perceives the war along official lines as a fight against forces from without. “I think you do not know anything about being conquered and so you think it is not bad”, he counters rather weakly (50). It is not until his run-in with the “battle police” that Frederic senses some of the wisdom in Passini’s argument that the real enemies are the protoFascistic carabinieri, who suppress dissent, enforce order with “a bayonet”, and strip whole populations of their “civil rights” (49). Passini’s attempt to convert Frederic is cut short by a sudden “trench mortar” attack that sends the former to his death and the latter to the hospital (51-52). Yet, during a conversation with the priest at the field lazaretto, Frederic is again made aware of his class status and 24

Ernest Hemingway, Introduction, in Men At War: The Best War Stories of All Time (New York: Crown, 1942), xi.

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for the first time begins to question his own role in the war. Baffled by the priest’s statement that he, even though a foreigner is “nearer the officers … than to the men”, Frederic asks: “What is the difference?” “I cannot say it easily”, the priest responds: “There are people who would make war. In this country there are many like that. There are other people who would not make war.” “But the first ones make them do it.” “Yes.” “And I help them.” (70-71)

Frederic’s realization that he is aiding a system that coerces people to “make war” is obviously unsettling, prompting him to further inquire: “And the ones who would not make war? Can they stop it? Have they ever been able to stop it?” The priest’s dejected answer – which echoes much of Hemingway’s own disillusionment with leftist mass movements and their dishonest leadership – leaves little hope for political change through collective action: “They are not organized to stop things and when they get organized their leaders sell them out” (71). Accordingly, the speculative conversation turns toward the redemptive power of interpersonal love; and as the priest leaves, Frederic finds solace in fantasizing about an untainted, bucolic life in the Abruzzi, where “Don” and peasants coexist in perfect harmony (72-73). Soon thereafter, while convalescing in Milan, Frederic experiences the redemptive powers of interpersonal love, through the self-effacing Catherine. Before he can plot his final escape to neutral Switzerland, however, Frederic must undergo one last disillusioning trial under fire. Upon his return to the frontlines, the situation has markedly changed. Rain, “bare” trees, and “muddy “roads” are a foreboding of trouble. In the wake of several Pyrrhic victories – “the Italians had lost one hundred and fifty thousand men on the Bainsizza plateau and on San Gabriel” – morale is at a nadir. Frederic gets word of “bad rioting in Turin” and other municipalities (133). Again in conversation with the priest, Frederic now concedes that he, too, no longer believes in victory. But defeat, “though it may be better”, is still no option for him (179). In the early 1930s, at a time when revolutionary sentiments again carried high currency among American intellectuals, Hemingway


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would argue that a “purging away of all existing standards, faiths and loyalties” in the aftermath of a “great military debacle” begets the necessary preconditions for the successful revolution.25 Interestingly enough, in his novelistic account of the defeat at Caporetto, the “purging away of all existing standards, faiths and loyalties” betrays no hint of revolutionary possibilities. On the contrary, all that the chaotic retreat conjures up are the imminent dangers of both mob rule and its first cousin, the Fascist reign of terror. In parting, Frederic prophetically warns the priest that the peasants, if in power, would behave no different than their oppressors. Subsequent scenes corroborate those fears. While Frederic grows “very angry” at the sight of the ill-organized retreat – “why isn’t there somebody here to stop them?” – the men under his command become progressively more elated (211). In the face of a sudden collapse of the entire command structure, Bonello, Piani, and Aymo not only speak glowingly of the prospects of a swift peace, but also begin to exhibit their pent-up class hatred for officers, rich borgehse, and everyone else with money or authority. Helping themselves to the wine reserves of an abandoned villa, while deliberately soiling the former occupants’ beds with their “muddy boots”, the men boisterously proclaim the onset of the revolution: “To-morrow we’ll be in Udine. We’ll drink champagne. That’s were the slackers live …. To-morrow we’ll sleep in the king’s bed.”

Frederic, at first mildly amused, eventually becomes annoyed and, when Bonello adds distasteful remarks about sleeping “with the queen”, puts an end to the celebration: “‘Shut up,” I said. ‘You get too funny with a little wine’” (192). On the following day, Frederic’s determination to execute his orders amidst the mounting disarray is again tested when his ambulances get “stuck in a muddy road about … ten kilometers from Udine” (203). His nerves already strained, Frederic snaps, when two sergeants, whom they had picked up along the road, openly disobey his orders “to cut brush” and instead make off toward the forest (204). Having shot and wounded one of the deserters, Frederic watches on as Bonello cold-bloodedly finishes him off. Frederic clearly overreacts in 25

Hemingway, By-Line Ernest Hemingway, 181.

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bringing down the sergeant, but his knee-jerk decision derives at least partial justification from the emergency situation at hand, the novel appears to suggest. Margot Norris notes that “Hemingway contrives it [the shooting] to resemble as much as possible a civilian traffic jam … in which the sergeant is an ungrateful hitchhiker who refuses, in a stressful road emergency, to help the people who gave him a ride”.26 However, Bonello’s killing of the sergeant seems to afford a much more unsettling glimpse into the abyss of blind class hatred. For Bonello, in this respect similar to the brutalized Chrisfield, takes a perverted pride in having killed the wounded sergeant: “I never killed anybody in this war, and all my life I’ve wanted to kill a sergeant …. That’s one thing I can always remember. I killed that – of a sergeant.” (207)

Bonello’s statement, which elicits laughter and cheers from Paini and Aymo, not only conjures up images of bloody mob rule, but also raises serious doubts about the men’s professed commitment to Socialist ideals. Asked by Frederic how they did “get to be socialists”, they uncomprehendingly reply in unison: “We’re all socialists. Everybody is a Socialist. We’ve always been socialists” (208). Even Mussolini, Hemingway informs us elsewhere, had once been a Socialist so that nomenclature appears to be the only difference between Socialists such as Bonello and Fascists such as Ettore. It is characteristic of Frederic that he inquires no further into Bonello’s motives until the latter, in an act of cowardice, betrays his friends by crossing enemy lines. Forced to abandon their vehicles, Frederic and Piani join the main column of the retreating army, where they are greeted by shouts of “Brigata di Pace! and “a basso gli ufficiali!”. Before Frederic can fully grasp the situation, he is suddenly confronted by mobs of revolting foot soldiers, threatening to shoot all officers, and by exasperated carabineri, summarily executing field officers separated from their units. Neither sniper fire nor his wounding by a mortar shell could instill Frederic with any greater sense of personal violation than suddenly finding himself the target of lethal animosity left and right – 26

Margot Norris, “The Novel as War: Lies and Truth in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms”, Modern Fiction Studies, XL/4 (Winter 1994), 704.


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in the literal as well as the political sense. His self-image of an enlightened officer who hates war, tyranny, and injustice, but nonetheless believes that war can only be ended by fighting the war through and winning it, has landed him in a precarious situation. The “working people” bear him “hatred”, because they see him merely as a representative of the very government that, in turn, is set on making him into a scapegoat for its own failures (233). Therefore, rather than taking any chances with either the rioters or the government’s henchmen (two sides of the same coin), he throws himself headlong into the river. At last, the river washes Frederic clean of the entire sordid mess that is wartime politics. Like Bourne’s Sebert, his “social conscience no longer operates to make [him] feel part of this society”. Or, as Frederic himself puts it by way of a civilian analogy: You were out of it now. You had no more obligation. If they shot floorwalkers after a fire in the department store because they spoke with an accent they always had, then certainly the floorwalkers would not be expected to return when store opened again for business …. I was through. (232)

In casting himself as an innocent foreigner, who had somehow got caught in a deadly mess that was none of his own doing, Frederic manages to exonerate himself. At the same time, though, Margot Norris observes, “his bitter judgment of the carabinieri … delivers— without irony or recognition—a perfect if inadvertent self-indictment of his own comportment in shooting the sergeant”.27 What Frederic refuses to acknowledge (and the narrative refuses to fully explore) is that he has been all along complicit in the very “efficiency” and “coldness” that characterizes modern warfare (223). Not surprisingly, after declaring himself free of all responsibilities, Frederic sets out “to forget the war” in his blossoming love relationship with the pliant Catherine (243). Yet, even here, on the most private level, the wartime seeds of personal disintegration and societal bondage have already been sown. Catherine’s unplanned pregnancy – first announced in the same chapter that mentions the outbreak of riots – threatens to tear apart the young lovers’ intimate attachment, only to replace it with the new social obligations of 27

Ibid., 706.

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marriage, parenthood, and childcare. When Catherine seeks Frederic’s reassurance that she “won’t come between us, will she? The little brat”, she is merely preparing him for the inevitable (304). For even though Frederic has unknown to himself weaned Catherine away from the incipient danger of lesbianism – represented through Helen Ferguson – her impending motherhood is still bound to divert her sexual energies away from him. Again, it is Catherine who most clearly foresees that their sexual-romantic notions of oneness and absolute compatibility are destined to unravel under the strain of social pressures and obligations. “People”, she cautions hesitantly, “love each other and they misunderstand on purpose and they fight and suddenly they aren’t the same anymore” (139). Even so, for the time being, Catherine appears to embody the perfect antidote to the self-seeking, violence-loving, men-devouring female figures that populate so many male-imagined World War I books. To begin with, when Frederic first meets Catherine, she has already outgrown silly female ideas that her fiancé “might come to the hospital where I was. With a sabre cut …. Something picturesque” (20). Moreover, she exhibits not only an acute awareness of the suffering endured by men in war (“They blew him all to bits”), but also a heightened desire to heal the war-wounded male ego. Conceding a measure of naiveté, she informs Frederic: “I wanted to do something for him. You see I didn’t care about the other thing [marriage] and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known.” (19)

Catherine’s qualifications as devoted lover and faithful companion seem fabulous indeed. What slightly complicates Frederic’s romantic conquest of Catherine, however, is her close association with Helen Ferguson, which seems to bear traces of homosocial, if not homoerotic desire. From the start, Helen is Catherine’s constant companion. The two women enter the novel together, they work side-by-side at the hospital in Gorizia, both effect their transfer to Milan, and when Catherine goes to Stresa to meet Frederic, Helen tags along. Moreover, as Miriam Mandel has pointed out, Frederic repeatedly encounters the two women in “conventionally romantic settings”; for example, the


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garden behind the British hospital and the dining room at the plush hotel in Stresa.28 To be sure, as soon as Catherine shows a sexual interest in Frederic, Helen quickly takes a backseat. Yet she still manages constantly to irritate Frederic. In Milan, for instance, Helen not just admonishes Frederic to “let her [Catherine] stay off nights a little while”, but furthermore predicts that their relationship will end in fighting and finally even offers to “kill” him, should he “get her in trouble” (108-109). And in a key scene at Stresa, where Frederic and Catherine make preparations to “sneak off”, a tearful Helen goes on a jealous tirade, comparing Frederic to a “snake” and accusing him of having “ruined” Catherine with “his sneaking Italian tricks” (246). Frederic, “sick of Fergy”, voluntarily withdraws himself to the bar. But when Catherine’s final meeting with Helen takes longer than he had expected, it is Frederic’s turn to grow fidgety. In the tense exchange that ensues upon her return, Catherine reassures Frederic of her love by asking him to consider “how much we have and she hasn’t anything”. Frederic’s retort, “I don’t think she wants what we have”, shows him to be still largely unaware of any sexual competition, prompting Catherine to rejoin, “You don’t know much, darling, for such a wise guy” (257). Largely because Catherine is willing to become “whatever” he wants, then, Henry manages to momentarily restore his war-shattered sense of manhood (105). Not simply because she offers easy access to sex, but because she grants him total control over herself, fully aware, though, that this “is a rotten game we play” (31). What Henry needs to become “whole again” is not a wife, nor simply a lover and companion, but a woman who ceases to be a woman, that is, a being who is not different from he himself. Traditional marriage, with its bureaucratic formalities, legal responsibilities, and static gender roles, Catherine senses, would merely reproduce the social constraints

28

Miriam Mandel, “Ferguson and Lesbian Love: Unspoken Subplots in A Farewell to Arms”, The Hemingway Review, XIV/1 (Spring 1994), 2. It is Rinaldi who provides the first two clues as to Helen’s sexual orientation. Confused by the Scotswoman’s distaste for the English, he asks, “Not like Miss Barkley?”, whereupon Helen’s immediately clarifies, “Oh, that’s different. You mustn’t take everything so literal” (21). Shortly after the double date, Rinaldi states that he does not like Helen.

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Frederic seeks to overcome. Thus, on the subject of marriage Catherine flatly declares: “What good would it do to marry now? We’re really married. I couldn’t be any more married …. There isn’t any me. I’m you. Don’t make up a separate me.” (115)

Only through Catherine becoming like him, can Frederic restore his sense of himself as a freely acting agent. In a conversation before his injury, Frederic Henry stubbornly rejects Passini’s claim that there “is no finish to war” (51). During his convalescence, however, Henry begins to doubt his position, wondering, perhaps “wars weren’t won any more. Maybe they went on forever” (119). Childbirth under such conditions would be less a sign of change or renewal than a confirmation of Nietzsche’s dictum of the “always the same”. “For three years I looked forward very childishly to the war ending at Christmas”, Catherine states sardonically: “But now I look forward till when our son will be a lieutenant commander” (141). Within a world of perpetual warfare, Catherine’s pregnancy recalls the novel’s opening image of soldiers, “carrying long 6.5 mm cartridges” under their capes “as though they were six months pregnant” (4). “The soldiers will give birth not to a living being”, Jennifer Haytock notes, “but to violence and death – foreshadowing the bloody and fatal end of Catherine’s pregnancy … for both the soldiers and for Catherine, ‘pregnancy’ signifies not hope for the future but entrapment and danger”.29 In the end, then, Catherine’s stillbirth and her subsequent death in childbed might represent nothing more and nothing less than two more tragic war causalities. But since A Farewell to Arms largely revolves around Frederic’s encounters with various dangers of social “entrapment”, Catherine’s destruction, just as Passini’s death and the revolution’s demise, ultimately have a liberating effect on the novel’s protagonist. For as heartrending the deaths of Catherine and her child may be, these two final causalities of the book also signify Frederic’s final release from the dangers of “entrapment”. His heart might be broken, his ideals might be shattered, but at last he is free to bid his farewell to 29

Jennifer Haytock, “Hemingway’s Soldiers and Their Pregnant Women: Domestic Rituals in World War I”, The Hemingway Review, XIX/2 (Fall 2000), 70.


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every kind of arms, appendages, attachments that imperil his hard-won independence. The extent to which novels such as Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms have impacted on American literature of World War II has long been the subject of heated debate. One of the few consensuses that seems to have emerged is that World War II novels such as John Horne Burns’ The Gallery (1947), Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948), and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1955) remain principally concerned with the ironic demise of the individual. As in the World War I novels just discussed, the experience of war and army life are rendered as expressions of a Leviathan-like totalitarian system, which induces the individual to conform to a pattern of values that destroy his identity – only more so and often to the point of absurdity. Brutalized brutalizers such as Dos Passos’ Chrisfield and Hemingway’s Bonello are the norm in The Naked and the Dead. Even the gentle Martinez puts the boot in the genitals of a dead Japanese soldier. None of the characters in Mailer’s book seems capable of undertaking the kind of self-redemptive action implied in Frederic Henry’s separate peace or John Andrews’ “gesture, feeble as it is, toward human freedom”. Mailer’s Robert Hearn, a left-leaning intellectual who imagines himself a political assassin, comes closest, but he, too, eventually loses both his moral and social bearings in “the isolation of the army”. Similar to John Andrews and Fredric Henry, Hearn fails to establish a meaningful rapport with his platoon. Any impulse toward collective revolts against dehumanizing oppression, still tangible in Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms, is precluded from the start. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the dropping of two atomic bombs, it had been replaced by General Cummings’ Fascist postulate that “the only morality of the future is power morality”.30 “In the 1944 war”, concludes Burns’ narrator, “everyone’s hand ended by being against everyone else’s. Civilization was already dead, but nobody bothered to admit this to himself.”31 To be sure, Joseph Heller’s Yossarian does manage to break free from the catch-22 that is the military-industrial complex when he resolves to 30 31

Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Rinehart, 1948), 277. John Horne Burns, The Gallery (New York: Avon Books, 1977), 157.

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desert to Sweden. But the motives for his long-delayed act of defiance, like those of Frederic Henry and John Andrews, remain highly individualistic (“there is nothing negative about running away to save my life”) and do not signal a fundamental reorganization of society.32 If there was a war that endowed white American middle-class writers with renewed faith in revolutionary action and again lent credence to notions of a collective identity, it was clearly the Spanish Civil War (1936-1937). Galvanized by the seemingly unstoppable spread of Fascism and totalitarianism – Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Hitler’s ascendance to power in 1933, and Italy’s assault on Ethiopia in 1934 – 2,800 American volunteers joined the International Brigades in an effort to aid the Spanish Socialist and Marxists in their fight against General Franco’s troops.33 Countless war correspondents, among them John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, followed in their wake, supplying the American readership with a steady stream of reports on the Republican cause in Spain. Perhaps the two most widely discussed American literary works to come out of the Spanish Civil War were Alvah Bessie’s Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (1939) and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Bessie’s and Hemingway’s public quarrels over their respective representations of the Republican cause have been discussed at length elsewhere and do not concern us here.34 What is of interest in light of the foregoing analysis of Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms is the way in which Men in Battle and For Whom the Bell Tolls render the middle-class individual’s war experience not as an education in passive suffering and heroic isolation, but as an education in collective action and communalism. 32

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Dell, 1963), 461. Interestingly enough, Heller’s Catch-22 owes much of its enduring popularity to the readers of the Vietnam War generation, who literally picked up where Yossarian had left off by expanding his individualist anti-war protest into a broad-based counterculture movement that was to change the face, if not the core, of America’s political and social life. 33 On American volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, see Robert Rosenstone, Crusade of the Left: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Pegasus, 1969). 34 See, for example, Michael J. B. Allen, “The Unspanish War in For Whom the Bell Tolls, Contemporary Literature XIII/2 (Spring, 1972), 204-212 and Ernest Hemingway: A Literary Reference, ed. Robert W. Trogdon (New York: Carrol & Graf, 2002), 220-30.


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For instance, in marked contrast to depictions of the coercive and dehumanizing nature of American military life in many World War I novels by young soldier-poets, Bessie describes the internal organization of the Abraham International Brigades as a model of social democracy in action, wherein individual and collective needs achieve proper balance: It was understood that soldiers would obey their officers’ commands in action: question them later. And therein lies the distinction that made this army unique in military history. For while certain manifestations of individualism had to be restrained in the interest of unified action, every soldier retained the right to question his command, his officers and commissars, and to bring his grievances to the attention of his fellow soldiers and his superiors. This was done in an organized and democratic fashion through the medium of the political meeting, for this was a political army first to last.35

Robert Jordan, the hero of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, is much less sanguine about the democratic commitment of his commissars. But he, too, accepts that “individualism had to be restrained in the interest of unified action”: Here in Spain the Communists offered the best discipline and the soundest and sanest for the prosecution of the war. He accepted their discipline for the duration of the war because, in the conduct of the war, they were the only party whose programme and whose discipline he could respect.36

Bessie’s motives for volunteering in the Spanish Civil War are very similar to those of John Andrews in Three Soldiers: he seeks escape from the stifling atmosphere of American middle-class life. But where Andrews (and his creator) fails in his attempt to declass himself, Bessie succeeds in creating a new, other-directed identity for himself:

35

Alvah Bessie, Men in Battle: A Story of Americans in Spain (New York: Scribner’s, 1939), 54. 36 Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls (New York: Scribner’s, 1940), 167.

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Embattled Home Fronts It was necessary for me, at that stage of my development as a man, to work (for the first time) in a large body of men; to submerge myself in the mass, seeking neither distinction nor preferment (the reverse of my activities for the past several years) and in this way achieve selfdiscipline, patience, and unselfishness – the opposite of a long middleclass training – and the construction of a life that would be geared to other men and the world events that subscribe them.37

To Robert Jordan, as Jeffery Walsh has pointed out, the major educative force is less the close contact with the socially and economic other (although he certainly develops a strong solidarity with the novel’s gypsies) than the transformative power of love. In many ways a more mature version of Frederic Henry, Robert Jordan’s relationship with Maria transcends the purely personal in that it encompasses a much more elemental love of mankind. He loves Maria, Jordan says, as he loves “liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry”.38 Like Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms, Men in War, Men in Battle and For Whom the Bell Tolls are postwar books – a fact that somewhat dampens their enthusiasm. By 1939, Franco, with the aid of Hitler and Mussolini, had prevailed in the Spanish Civil War. The various Socialist, Marxist, and Anarchist hopes for revolution that the war had spawned did not come to pass, none the least because of quarrels and conflicts within the Popular Front. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls provides detailed descriptions of the in fighting among the Republicans (a major reason why Bessie denounced For Whom the Bell Tolls). Yet, Robert Jordan’s last heroic stand against the Fascists still conveys an aura of hope (even though it also signifies a return to individualism). Predictably, Bessie commemorates the legacy of the war more broadly in world-historical terms. Like Upton Sinclair in Jimmie Higgins and William Cunningham in The Green Corn Rebellion, he refuses to regard the deaths and defeats of his fellow-strugglers in vain. Their memory must live on, he insists: [because] the very existence of this army … was the guarantee of international working class brotherhood; the final proof that those who

37 38

Bessie, Men in Battle, 81. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 343.


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perform the work of the world possess a common interest and an identical obligation. It was the living embodiment of the unity that exists between all men of good will, whatever their nationality, their political or religious conviction, or their way of making a living on this earth. 39

Obviously, World War I and the Spanish Civil War were two very different wars, not just on ideological grounds, but also because the former involved government-directed mass mobilization and conscription, whereas the latter merely saw the participation of a few thousands committed volunteers. Even so, as the next chapter shall show, with respect to a literary insistence on both the possibility and the need for emancipatory collective action, proletarian World War I novels such as William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion and Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins are much closer to novels such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and especially Men in Battle than to individualist protest novels such as Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms. For all their cultural weight, Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms were clearly neither the first nor the last words on World War I.

39

Bessie, Men in Battle, 111.

SECTION II WORLD WAR I AS PROLETARIAN BILDUNGSROMAN

CHAPTER 4 Specters of Revolution and the Proletarian Bildungsroman The man of letters who systematically stands aside from the major social and political issues wastes and dishonors his vocation as a writer and as a man, since the horrors which exist throughout the world can be changed by political means only.1

As the First World War wore on, collective acts of insubordination such as draft evasions, mass surrenders, desertions, strikes, and outright mutinies became increasingly common in all of the belligerent countries. On the side of the Allies, the French Army Mutiny of 1917 is probably the best-known example of how the war experience imbued common soldiers with a growing political awareness.2 Following yet another disastrous attack on the Aisne in April 1917, some 40,000 troops refused to be used up as cannon fodder. Word spread and soon fifty-four divisions, or nearly half the French army, disobeyed orders. Untold thousands deserted. The demands of the soldiers were diverse, ranging from an end to the offensive war, to immediate peace negotiations, to bread for wives and children, to a general improvement of living conditions. Initially, the French High Command attempted to crush the widening insurrection 1

Henri Barbusse, quoted in Nicole Racine, “The Clarét Movement in France, 19191921”, Journal of Contemporary History, II/2 (April 1967), 200. 2 In Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994), Leonard V. Smith highlights the French soldiers role in setting the war’s moral limits by politicizing them. “By definition, the citizensoldier will not entirely relinquish the rights of the citizen”, Smith writes, “Authority and obedience will be thus constantly subject to questioning and negotiation from below” (11).

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through court-martials and summary executions. But as public support for the rebellious soldiers mounted and civilian protestors took to the streets of Paris, General Neville was hurriedly replaced by General Pétain, who managed to appease the troops by negotiating concessions. Although the French Mutiny of 1917, unlike the Petrograd Uprising of the same year or the Kiel Naval Rebellion of 1918, did not escalate into a full-scale revolution, it demonstrated that Western democracies too had become exceedingly vulnerable in the face of a rising wartime discontent among the masses. Accordingly, leftist writers such as Henri Barbusse were quick to capitalize on the signs of impending social revolt. In Clarét (1919; translated as Light, 1919), his second and, in America, largely unknown Great War novel, Barbusse seeks to preserve the potentially explosive memory of the mutiny by using it as a backdrop for the politicization of his protagonist, Paul Simon. Plotted as a novel of education, Clarét traces Simon’s move from passivity and self-indulgent individualism to an awareness of the exploitation of the laboring classes and eventually to radical social action. Near the end of war, an enlightened Simon, much like his creator, vows to devote his life to the propagation of humanitarian and Socialist ideals.3 Outraged after visiting the new “musée de guerre”, designed to venerate “la grande nation” as “le preserver l’ordre est de la liberté”, Simon composes his first political pamphlet, “proclaim[ing] the inevitable advent of the universal republic”: O you people of the world, you the unwearying vanquished of History, I appeal to your justice and I appeal to your anger. Over the vague quarrels which drench the strands with blood, over the plunderers of 3

In October of 1919, Henri Barbusse, Raymond, Lefebvre, Paul Vaillant, and other French intellectucals founded “Clarét: The Intelectual’s International”, an organization dedicated to putting the arts into the service of pacficism, internationalism, and socialism. The group’s first international steering committee included such luminaries as Charles Gide, Thomas Hardy, Upton Sinclair, H.G. Wells, and Stefan Zweig. Closley associated with the Third International, the group split in 1921 when its left-wing under Barbusse endorsed violent revolutionary tactics. Plagued by financial problems, Clarét was officially disbanded in 1923. See Nicole Racine, “The Clarét Movement in France, 1919-1921”, Journal of Contemporary History, II/2 (April 1967), 195-208.

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shipwrecks, over the jetsam and the reefs, and the palaces and monuments built upon sand, I see the high tide coming. Truth is only revolutionary by reason of error’s disorder. Revolution is Order.4

As the two previous chapters have shown, dissent, acts of insubordination, and desertions among the troops also figure prominently in the few American World War I novels that have been traditionally deemed worthy of critical attention. Two of the main characters in John Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers, Joe Chrisfield and John Andrews, desert the army and go underground. Having been thrown into prison for allegedly writing subversive letters, the unnamed protagonist in E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room bitterly denounces government oppression in parodistic fashion. And in Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the desertion of 400,000 Italian troops, following the bloody defeat at Caporetto, triggers Frederic Henry’s sudden recognition that he “was through” with war and that “it was not [his] show any more”.5 But unlike a number of European romans de guerre such as Barbusse’s Clarét or Fritz Unruh’s Opfergang (1919; translated as Way of Sacrifice, 1928), wherein the veteran emerges politically radicalized from the trenches, in these American war novels, acts of rebelliousness remain highly individualistic and subsequently dilute rather than distill possibilities for collective political action.6 Denied the sort of self-affirming heroism that reconstitutes Henry Fleming in the final chapters of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, for this generation of adventurous doughboys the “great show” proves to be one, protracted letdown. As a pattern, potentially explosive anger gives way to paralyzing disillusionment – l’état moderne quientessciel. Perhaps understandably, then, one finds ample critical discussions of how young American soldier poets grew increasingly despondent, became alienated from a botched civilization, and

4

Henri Barbusse, Light, trans. Fitzwater Wray (New York: Dutton, 1919), 273-74, 295. 5 Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 232. 6 One exception is Humphrey’s Cobb’s novel Path of Glory (1935), which, in dramatizing the French army mutiny, represents military disobedience not as an individual revolt, but a collective awakening of political consciousness.

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eventually fashioned what Ann Douglas views as “the new literary tools the modern experience demanded”.7 What has got lost amidst these efforts to establish the literariness of American World War I writings, though, are ostensibly pedestrian literary representations of the more mundane but no less onerous, tumultuous, and conflicting working-class experience on the home front. “Alone among the combatants in World War I, Americans located the Great War’s significance, not in the trenches of France, but on the home front”, historian Jeanette Keith writes.8 Yet one rarely, if ever, comes across critical considerations of literary works that depict the fierce labor unrests which rattled wartime America, represent strategies of labor opposition to the war “over there”, or portray homegrown revolts such as the ill-fated Green Corn Rebellion, instigated by a multiracial alliance of impoverished white, black, and Indian draft resisters in rural Oklahoma. In an effort to call attention to alternative constructions of the modern memory of World War I, this section scrutinize the ways in which two Proletarian war novels – Upton Sinclair’s serialized Jimmie Higgins (1918-19) and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion (1935) – attempt to re-present, shape, and memorialize the material as well as the ideological battles fought by and within the American laboring classes. Following a comparison of adaptations of the Bildungsroman format in war novels by self-consciously Modernist and self-consciously Proletarian writers, this section offer two contextualized readings of Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion. As will be seen, both novels register post-war disillusionment and project a sense of Modernist irony. But similar to Barbusse’s Clarét and Unruh’s Opfergang, these Proletarian Bildungsromans go beyond a concern for the individual by striving to create a collective working-class memory of specific wartime conflicts and of abuses that reasserts the need for concerted political action and social change. Moreover, challenging simplistic assessments according to which a hitherto innocent nation allowed itself to be 7 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongol Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995), 199. 8 Jeanette Keith, “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917-1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South”, The Journal of American History, LXXXVII/4 (March 2001), 1336.


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cajoled into the Great American Crusade, Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion not only bear witness to persistent war resentment from below, but also testify to the possibility of counterhegemonic activism during periods of severe government repression.9 Prefiguring John Steinbeck’s literary call for communal social activism in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion seeks to overcome a sense of postwar defeatism by evoking the spirit of rebelliousness and interracial cooperation during the brief Oklahoma uprising. Begun in 1918 and originally conceived as a pro-war propaganda tool, Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins aims to deflect wartime labor dissatisfaction and to counter a radical rhetoric that equated the world war abroad with the class war at home. But despite its patriotic overtones, in representing the drawn-out conversion of the titular hero from labor activist to war hero to defender of the Bolshevik Revolution, Jimmie Higgins provides a forum for radical leftist positions that otherwise could not have been voiced and that by the end of the novel appear to be in some measure confirmed. Critics have described the war novel as Bildungsroman in terms of the young hero’s accelerated quest for wisdom. Almost invariably, the hero is said to enter the story in a state of romantic innocence until the experience of warfare initiates him into the realties of modern life. “The process of education, irrevocable acts or irreversible decisions, instances of initiation and maturation, and moments of revelation”, Peter G. Jones writes, mark the American war novel from “Crane’s classic tale” to Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers to Joseph Heller’s Catch22.10 In most paradigmatic novels of the First World War, the outcome of this process of wartime education is the individual’s realization that he is pitted against a cruel, debased, and, at bottom, absurd society. 9

Meirion and Susie Harries, The Last Days of Innocence: America at War (New York: Random House, 1997), 7-8. For a somewhat dated but concise overview of antiWorld War I activism in the United States, see James Weinstein, “Anti-War Sentiment and the Socialist Party, 1917-1918”, Political Science Quarterly, LXXIV/2 (June 1959), 215-39. 10 Jones, War and the Novelist, 21.

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His direct confrontations with trench life, mechanized warfare, mass slaughter, and severe bodily as well as mental injury teach him not only that romantic notions of heroism are no longer tenable, but also that adversity, subjugation, and isolation are part of the universal human condition.11 Obviously, such Modernist adaptations of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman form fly into the face of traditional definitions that “consider an accommodation between the individual and society an essential characteristic of the genre”.12 In his reading of what is widely considered the quintessential modern Bildungsroman – Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924; translated as The Magic Mountain, 1924) – Martin Swales recognizes a distinctive loss of all teleological underpinnings, noting that at the end of the novel there is not harmony but chaos and violence.13 Written “under the impact of the 1914-1918 war”, The Magic Mountain portrays Hans Castrop’s seven-year-long “journey into selfknowledge”, only to dismantle his dreamlike “vision of the wholeness of man” as he “finds himself plunged into the holocaust of the First World War”.14 Ultimately, Mann’s Hans Castrop, akin to Dos Passos’ John Andrews and Hemingway’s Frederic Henry, is trapped inside a static world of the always-the-same, which reflects the stalemate on the Western Front and underscores the basic irony of his existence. As the Hungarian critic, Georg Lukács, has argued in his not infrequently acrimonious critique of literary Modernism, “the only ‘development’ in this literature is the gradual revelation of the human condition. Man is now what he has always been and always will be.”15 11

In World War 1 and the American Novel, Cooperman describes the learning curve in this way: “the antihero enlists for a Cause; becomes bitterly conscious of the futility of the Cause; carries on the job as job until by its own absurdity the Cause rejects the antihero and forces his physical no less than emotional withdrawal” (189). 12 James Hardin, Introduction, in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, ed. James Hardin. (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1991), xxi. 13 Martin Swales, “Irony and the Novel: Reflections on the German Bildungsroman”, in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 46-68. 14 Ibid., 58. 15 Georg Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, trans. John and Necke Mander (London: Merlin Press, 1963), 21. According to Lukács, the development of character in much Modernist literature is restricted in two ways. “First, the hero is strictly confined within the limits of his own experience” (21). Secondly, he is depicted “as a solitary being, incapable of meaningful relationships” (24). Applied to Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms this seems to hold true indeed.


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The novel of education, at least in its Modernist application to the war novel, becomes what Swales terms a “parodistic” Bildungsroman that mocks society’s false hopes in boundless progress, democratization, and applied science.16 In doing so, however, the war novel as modern Bildungsroman tends to register changing social formations only insofar as they stifle or enslave the individual and reconfirm an always already limited human potential for concrete political action. Hence, in Mann’s The Magic Mountain, as in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, the Great War is stripped of all its specificities, of all its historical causes and consequences. Turned into a universal metaphor of man’s struggle, the war appears to have always been there. No one is more aware of this elementary stasis than the peasant, whose inborn wisdom, according to Frederic Henry, lies in the fact that “he is defeated from the start”.17 Passive endurance is the peasant’s and, by extension, humanity’s unalterable fate, A Farewell to Arms posits, because no matter how “much courage” people bring “to this world the world has to kill them to break them”.18 Moreover, generically, the modern or “parodistic” Bildungsroman implies “a restriction to the private sphere, to the inner life of the individual, his psyche, where the epoch and society play only the role of background and foil”.19 Consequently, in Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms the impact of war and its outcomes remain confined within the limits of the protagonist’s personal experience. “For Andrews war becomes a crime against the individual”, Stanley Cooperman notes, whereas for Frederic Henry “war becomes a threat to existence, virility, and love”.20 And although these antiheroes of the modern Bildungsroman attempt to devise alternatives beyond withdrawal, their individualistic actions, gestures, and rituals only call 16

Swales elucidates, “I have in mind the self-consciousness of the Bildungsroman, its discursiveness and self-reflectivity, its narrative obliqueness, its concern for the elusiveness of selfhood, its dialectical critique of the role of plot in the novel” (“Irony and the Novel”, 63). 17 Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 179. 18 Ibid., 249. 19 Hartmut Steinecke, “The Novel and the Individual: The Significance of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister in the Debate about the Bildungsroman”, in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 94. 20 Cooperman, World War 1 and the American Novel, 175.

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renewed attention to the futility of man’s solitary struggle against the powers that be. That the (anti)hero’s quasi-existentialist isolation, which Lukács with reference to Heidegger describes as a Modernist sense of “thrownness-into-being” is not so much a passive reflection as an active creation of modern postwar realities becomes clear when one looks at Upton Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins and William Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion.21 To varying degrees, the adaptations of the Bildungsroman genre in these two war novels work against the seemingly inevitable isolation of the representative hero or antihero. For even though the protagonists in both of these novels also ultimately retreat into themselves, the narratives entangle them and make them part of an ongoing historical movement toward liberation from servitude. In Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion, as in most Proletarian Bildungsromans, the protagonists’ “espousal of—or at least growth toward—evolutionary class consciousness embodies in microcosm the change that is occurring and must continue to occur on a larger scale, in the working class”.22 Before the backdrop of World War I and its attendant surge of reactionary nationalism, however, the exemplary protagonists find themselves particularly hard pressed to sustain and act upon their revolutionary class consciousness in a consistent manner. Thus, cajoled into believing that the fight against German Junkerdom will erase all class distinctions and miraculously democratize American society, Jimmie Higgins temporarily loses his identity-giving working-class consciousness and becomes a soulless henchman for the reactionary forces. When history finally catches up with him on the icy planes of Siberia, forlorn Jimmie comes to the woeful realization that he has nearly betrayed himself, his comrades and the revolution. The final image of his self-punitive martyrdom serves future generations both as a warning and an inspiration to carry on the inescapable class struggle. Jim Tetley’s story in The Green Corn Rebellion too bespeaks the disuniting confusion that had gripped the working class during World War I, but concomitantly spotlights moments of interracial solidarity and acts of desperate courage that point toward social change. Overly 21 22

Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 20. Foley, Radical Representations, 327.


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sanguine that “this here war … for profits” would prompt farmers and workers everywhere to rise up in arms against “the damned capitalists in Washington”, Jim and his fellow-sharecroppers stage a local rebellion.23 The uprising is crushed, sure enough, and a dejected Jim, fearful that his marital infidelities might be exposed, joins the army. His self-punishing decision to turn traitor, however, is purely personal, for his erstwhile comrades quietly regroup and vow passive resistance. Jim’s loss of faith notwithstanding, the memory of the possibility of interracial cooperation and revolutionary action is preserved and passed on to the next generation. In the inexorable course of history, the memory of past defeats (and personal failures) only heightens the prospect of future victories, both Cunningham’s and Sinclair’s war novels stress in best working-class fiction tradition. What looms large in the background of both Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion is, of course, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, either as an anticipated or as an unfolding event. “The workers of Russia having shown the way, nevermore would the workers of any nation bow to the yoke of slavery”, Sinclair has his titular hero Jimmie Higgins augur.24 “Yes, even in the so-called republics, such as France, which was ruled by bankers, and America, which was ruled by Wall Street—even here, the workers would read the real lessons of revolt!”25 Similarly, Jim Tetley’s personal capitulation is offset by the inclusion of a newspaper headline, announcing: “Lenin and Trotsky Seize Power in Russia.” And what the bourgeois press denounces as a “bloody reign in Russia” provides fresh impetus to Mack McGee’s revolutionary hope that the young generation “will maybe help finish up this job that we made such as mess of”.26 Though its full significance for the struggles of the American workers remains sketchy, the Bolshevik Revolution comes to signify what Amy Kaplan dubs “the elusive process of social change”, against the backdrop of which the protagonists’ growth and development (or failure thereof) is represented.27 Put another way, unlike in the 23

William Cunningham, The Green Corn Rebellion (New York: Vanguard, 1935), 47. Upton Sinclair, Jimmie Higgins: A Story (Racine, Wis.: Western Printing, 1919), 118. 25 Ibid., 118-19. 26 Cunningham, The Green Corn Rebellion, 302. 27 Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism, 9. 24

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deliberately un- or anti-historical works by Modernist writers, the hero’s personal education (both positive and negative) in these two Proletarian war novels is depicted vis-à-vis liberating social formations that seem to be hovering on history’s horizon. Grounded in a Marxist view of history, Sinclair’s as well as Cunningham’s adaptations of the traditional Bildungsroman format in Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion clearly go beyond the concern for the individual and his tragic or ironic fate. For it is not the protagonist’s personal failures and disappointments but the struggle “to correlate his/her particularity with the destiny of his/her class” that provides the central focus of these two stories.28 According to John M. Reilly, “the subject matter of the [Proletarian] novel is not only individuals, but specific groups, represented by individuals acting in opposition to other groups, and, within the conflict, constituting history”.29 Applied to the Proletarian World War I novel – at least as represented by Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion – Reilly’s observation must be expanded to include the ideological battles that took place within the working class and its leadership. Perhaps more than any other event, the Great War brought into ever-sharper focus the ideological split within the aging labor movement. Under the stewardship of Samuel Gompers, the powerful American Federation of Labor (AFL), pledged its unwavering support for the war in exchange for governmental concessions such as the establishment of shop committees, arbitration boards, the eight-hour workday, and draft exemptions for skilled workers. In late 1917, with Gompers as a newly appointed member of the Council of National Defense by his side, Wilson became the first US president to address a labor convention, promising delegates to the AFL’s gathering in Buffalo, “ I am with you if you are with me”. Meanwhile, the left wing of the labor movement, represented by the Socialist Party of America (SPA) under Eugene V. Debs and the International Workers of the World (IWW) staunchly opposed Gomper’s blanket support for Wilson. To them, the war was an “inherently illiberal” enterprise, “promoted by profit-seeking capitalist

28

Foley, Radical Representations, 359. John M. Reilly, “Images in Gastonia: A Revolutionary Chapter in American Social Fiction”, Georgia Review, XXVIII/3 (Fall 1974), 512. 29


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but fought and paid for by oppressed workers”.30 This inherent clash of interests, the majority of Socialists believed, should be vigorously exploited, not least since the Bolshevik Revolution had already highlighted the internal vulnerability of belligerent governments, including that of the United States. Hence, fearful that Gompers’ accommodationist course would forestall any fundamental reorganization of capital and labor in America, most Socialists sought to further strengthen the worker’s bargaining powers through concerted anti-war agitation, appeals to international solidarity, aggressive organization, and the threat of general strikes. As patriotic sentiments swept the nation and the Wilson government implemented a carrot-and-stick approach toward labor, not only the strategic aims of unionists and Socialists, but the very future of the entire movement appeared to be at stake. To Cunningham, writing during the heydays of the Popular Front movement in the 1930s, these conflicts seemed largely settled and so The Green Corn Rebellion touches only briefly on the split – for the most part in order to extol the virtues of Leninism. To Sinclair, however, these internal battles between right- and left-wingers provided the central point of reference, as he wrestled, amid the fog of war, to map out an appropriate working-class response to the Great War. As he told his readership when the first installment of Jimmie Higgins appeared in his self-published journal, Upton Sinclair’s, on October 1918: “You cannot understand what is now happening in the world unless you understand what Socialism is and what sort of people Socialists are.”31 Sinclair’s ambitious aim, then, was not merely to chart out Jimmie Higgins gradual conversion from misguided labor propagandist to staunch patriot, but to provide – from his own rather isolated standpoint of a pro-war Socialist – a detailed account of the conflicts within the labor movement concerning questions of internationalism versus nationalism, strike versus negotiation, and revolution versus reform. And it is precisely this ambition to reproduce the multitude of conflicting positions within the Socialist movement that not only lays 30

Robert H. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 118 (where President Wilson’s promise is also to be found). 31 Upton Sinclair’s, I (October 1918), 2.

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bare contradictions within Sinclair’s own position, but along the way also undermines some of the conservative tendencies inherent in the classic Bildungsroman genre by stressing social conflict over social accommodation. Foregoing, moreover, the traditional Bildungsroman’s drive towards closure, neither Jimmie Higgins nor The Green Corn Rebellion allow their respective protagonists to ride off into the sunset. Jimmie Higgins realizes too late that his embrace of jingoistic patriotism has seriously undermined the working-class struggle for emancipation. Desperately seeking redemption, Jimmie assumes the role of isolated martyr. Similarly, it is only after he has joined the army, betrayed his comrades and abandoned his family in a fit of selfish fatalism that Jim Tetley senses that he has given up hope for the revolution too soon. But in sharp contrast to Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms, the personal defeats and shortcomings of the protagonists in Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion do not signify “a universal condition humaine”. Nor do they provide a rationale for the abandonment of collectivist ideals and organizational strategies. Instead, both novels emphasize that, in Lukács words, “the fate of … individuals is characteristic of certain human types in specific social or historical circumstance”, because “beside and beyond their solitariness, the common life, the strife and togetherness of other human beings, goes on as before”.32 The time might not have been ripe, but the conflicts over and struggles for emancipation will continue, Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion maintain, since individual experiences of abuse and defeat seep into the collective consciousness or memory of the working class, thereby heightening the urge for social change. Proclaims the omniscient narrator in Jimmie Higgins: Poor, mad Jimmie Higgins will never again trouble his country; but Jimmie’s friends and partisan, who know the story of his experience, cannot be thus lightly dismissed by society. In the industrial troubles, which are threatening the great democracy of the West, there will appear men and women animated by a fierce and blazing bitterness.33

32 33

Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 20. Sinclair, Jimmie Higgins, 282.


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Notably, the tactics employed by the thus animated working men and women in the industrial troubles to come, will be derived directly from the late war experience. Drawing conspicuous parallels between world war and class war, the narrator observes with respect to Jimmie’s last and lonely stand against his own “American troops … made ready to join in … warfare upon organized” workingmen: Just as once Jimmie Higgins had found himself in a strategic position where he had held up the whole Hun army and won the battle of Château-Thierry, so now he found himself in a position of equal strategic importance—on the line of communication of the Allied armies attacking Russia, and threatening to cut the line and force the armies into retreat!34

Looking farther ahead, Mack, Jim Tetley’s father-in-law and political mentor in The Green Corn Rebellion, also projects confidence that future revolutionaries will absorb the lessons of the failed uprising when he predicts that “in twenty years, or maybe fifty years, there’ll be thousands of fellers who are real leaders and revolutionists, and million of farmers and working men like us ready to follow these leaders”.35 In both texts, then, the protagonist’s espousal of a rebellious course of action – fleeting, haphazard, incomplete, conflicted, and incongruous as it may be – forebodes a growing commitment and sophistication among the working class as a whole to bring about social change, as the memory of both past failures and gross abuses is preserved.

34 35

Ibid., 280. Cunningham, The Green Corn Rebellion, 253.

CHAPTER 5 Upton Sinclair, Jimmie Higgins, and Equivocal Commitments You workers in Ohio, enlisted in the greatest cause ever organized in the interest of your class, are making history today in the face of threatening opposition of all kinds – history that is going to be read with profound interest by coming generations.1

In July 1917, the radical International Socialist Review carried an article by one Jack Phillips that reported on strikes and anti-war protest inside the German Empire and discussed the possibility of a worldwide labor revolt. The article ended with a somber reflection on how an adventure-hungry working stiff is duped into war by official propaganda: “See the World,”said the recruiting sign. And the hungry young workman eager for adventure walked in, passed the exam, and became an enlisted man in the United States army. Now he is with Pershing’s corps on the western battlefront. They will be shot off the horizon and form a pyramid of skulls. They will never understand just what the recruiting sign meant by “See the World.”2

1 Eugene V. Debs, “The Canton Ohio Anti-war Speech” (1918), reprinted in Socialist Viewpoint, III/3 (March 2003), 172. 2 Quoted in Philip Yannella, The Other Carl Sandburg (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996), 94.

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One month later, the mainstream Chicago Evening Post printed a staunch pro-war poem, entitled “The Four Brothers”, in which a Whitmanesque narrator sings the gathering workmen-troops off into battle with the German Empire by glorifying the national memory of the Civil War: Cowpunchers, cornhuskers, shopmen, ready in khaki; Ballplayers, lumberjacks, ironworkers, ready in khaki; A million, ten million, singing, “I am ready”. This the sun looks on between two seaboards, In the land of Lincoln, in the Land of Grant and Lee. I heard one say, “I am ready to be killed”. I heard another say, “I am ready to be killed”. O sunburned clear-eyed boys! I stand on sidewalks and you go by with drums and guns and bugles, You – and the flag! And my heart tightens; a fist of something feels my throat When you go by, You on the kaiser hunt, you and your faces saying, “I am ready to be killed”.3

Both pieces had sprung from the pen of Carl Sandburg. Like Upton Sinclair and Jack London, Sandburg was a one-time Socialist and public supporter of President Woodrow Wilson, whose commitments were manifestly split during the war. Convinced that the autocratic Hohenzollern regime represented a dangerous anachronism, Sandburg did not hesitate to crank out jingoistic pieces for the conservative Alliance for Labor and Democracy. Yet unwilling to abandon faith in more direct and radical action on the homefront, Sandburg continued writing for the anti-war International Socialist Review. Under the pseudonym Jack Phillips, he supplied scathing critiques of the government’s persecution of the International Workers of the World (IWW), arguing, “that the war should be supported not for patriotic or any other conventional reasons but because it promised to lead to a worldwide working-class revolution, and saw the overthrow of the Czar by Russian workers in the spring of 1917 and then the 3

Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers, 1918 (New York: Dover, 2000), 67.

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Bolshevik revolution of October as portents of the wondrous world to come”.4 Though Sandburg’s personality split may have been an extreme case, what Philip Yannella has called the poet’s “zigzags in wartime” are quite characteristic of the political and ideological turmoil that had gripped many American intellectuals on the left. For example, in a 1915 letter to the Committee of the Anti-Enlistment League, Upton Sinclair insisted that he “hates militarism and all the trappings and symbols of militarism”, while pledging his unwavering support for the allies “until the last German soldier has been driven back from the soil of France, Belgium, and Russia”.5 Three years later, Sinclair advertised his novel-in-progress, Jimmie Higgins, to Wilson’s chief propagandist, George Creel, as a literary means “to win and hold the radical part of labor”, but at the same time issued an angry open letter to the President, highlighting the absurdity of “helping to win democracy abroad, [while] we are losing it at home”. 6 Similarly, in a letter to John Malmsbury Wright, an aging Jack London expressed his belief that “War is a silly nonintellectual function performed by men who are themselves only partly civilized”, while elsewhere proclaiming the purifying effects of war. “The world war”, London wrote on 16 June 1916 in a commentary for Pathé Exchange, “has redeemed [humanity] from the fat and gross materialism of generations of peace, and caught mankind up in a blaze of the spirit”.7 As Eric Homberger has shown, during the early decades of the twentieth century, radical American literature was marked by an equivocal commitment to the tenets of international Socialism and 4

Yannella, The Other Carl Sandburg, 92. Quoted in John Laslett and Symour M. Lipsett, Failure or Dream?: Essays in the History of American Socialism (Berkley: U of California P, 1984), 304-305. 6 Leon A. Harris, Upton Sinclair: American Rebel (New York: Crowell, 1975), 22426. As it happens, George Creel politely rejected Sinclair’s propaganda novel, ostensibly because the “whole proposition … would be to expensive for [him] to handle” (quoted in Buitenhaus, “Upton Sinclair and the Socialist Response to World War I”, 124). 7 Jack London, The Letters of Jack London, eds Earle Labor and Robert C. Leitz (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988), 1323; Jack London, The Book of Jack London (New York: Century, 1921), II, 346-47. 5

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world revolution.8 Such equivocal commitments on the radical literary front undoubtedly replicated many of the conflicts and contradictions within the Socialist movement as a whole. “While the socialist movement contained any number of tendencies and a variety of factions”, writes Francis Robert Shor, “it was riddled throughout with tensions over ethnicity and class and plagued by debates over evolution versus revolution, organizational alignments, and political versus direct action strategies and tactics”.9 Hence, although both Upton Sinclair and Jack London had greeted the initial promise of the Russian Revolution of 1905 with enthusiasm, they grew increasingly fearful about the prospect of unbridled mob rule.10 Large-scale labor uprisings and revolts might furnish the historically mandated solution within backward countries such as Russia and Germany, they came to believe, but could prove disastrous within “advanced democracies” such as the United States. Alarmed, moreover, by the steady influx of foreign-born radicals, who, not assuaged by the experience of American democracy, might push labor down a violent path, many native-born intellectuals on the left advocated an “evolutionary socialism”, which was firmly rooted in the ideals of Franklin, Jefferson, and Lincoln and would mold the heterogeneous laboring masses into a distinctly American working class. Even younger American left-wing radicals such as John Reed, Eric Homberger argues, clung to the idea of American exceptionalism, according to which “the specific and exceptional features of American economic and political life largely exempted America from the Comintern theses on the imminent collapse of capitalism in the West”.11 As a result, Socialist rhetoric of impending class warfare, tempered by the notion of American exceptionalism and kept in check through a strong dose of Nativist imagery, permeates a number of literary 8

Eric Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900-39 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1986). 9 Francis Robert Shor, Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997), 85. 10 These anxieties are evident in Jack London’s novel The Iron Heel (1907), when the Chicago Commune mistakes the converted heroine for an agent of the enemy, suddenly turns into a “fiendish” mob, and temporarily loses its moral superiority to the reactionary caste of Oligarchs. 11 Homberger, American Writers and Radical Politics, 117.


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responses to the Great War from the American left. Sandburg’s successive invocations of “fighters gaunt with the red band of labor’s sorrow” and “the pen of Tom Jefferson, the ashes of Abraham Lincoln” in The Four Brothers, exemplify attempts by left-leaning practitioners of literature to bolster the patriotism of the working classes so as to redirect its growing wartime discontent against a common enemy on the outside.12 Karl Marx’s “specter of communism”, it seemed, had been temporarily subdued by the ghost of nationalism. The apparent incongruities of many such statements by American left-wing literati did not go unnoticed, of course. The maverick commentator Randolph Bourne – yet another one-time Socialist – remarked in June 1917: And when they declared for the war they showed how thin was the intellectual veneer of their socialism. For they called us in terms that might have emanated from any bourgeois journal to defend democracy and capitalist civilizations that socialists had been fighting for 13 decades.

Bourne’s sour remarks, to be sure, were directed for the most part against a relatively small intellectual circle within the Socialist Party of America (SPA), not the party as a whole. Unlike its faltering counterparts in Germany, France, England, and Russia, the SPA maintained its anti-war stance even more vigorously after Wilson had urged Congress to endorse his declaration of war against Germany, thereby exposing the hollowness of his popular reelection campaign slogan, “he has kept us out of the war”. During the hastily convened emergency meeting at St Louis on 7 April 1917, the 193 SPA delegates overwhelming adopted the party’s majority report, declaring: “The Socialist Party of the United States in the present grave crisis reaffirms its allegiance to the principle of internationalism and working class solidarity the world over, and proclaims its unalterable opposition to the war juts declared by the government of the United States ….”

12

Sandburg, Cornhuskers, 67. Randolph Bourne, “The War and the Intellectuals”, in The Seven Arts (June 1917), 133-46.

13

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Although the “majority report” stopped short of calling for a general strike, it promised “an even more vigorous prosecution of the class struggle during wartime” and pledged “continuous active and public opposition to the war”, including “unyielding opposition to all proposed legislation for military and industrial conscription … vigorous resistance to all reactionary measures, such as censorship of the press and mails, restriction of the right of free speech, assemblage and organization, or compulsory arbitration and limitation of the right to strike.” In addition, the delegates endorsed an “extension of the campaign of education among the workers to organize them into strong, class-conscious and closely unified political and industrial organization”.14 More than anything else, it was this call for a massive education campaign among the workers that prompted Upton Sinclair to write a Proletarian Bildungsroman of reeducation that would – “in the most easily assimilable form” – showcase the representative protagonist’s gradual conversion from labor activist to radical anti-war agitator to steadfast patriot.15 Jimmie Higgins’ conversion to a patriotic pro-war stance was to undermine calls by the “Candidate” (Sinclair’s tag for Eugene V. Debs) to “let them organize and establish their own machinery of information and propaganda”.16 Even before America’s official war entry, dissenting pro-Ally Socialists such as Upton Sinclair, John Spargo, Phelps Stokes, Charles Edward Russell, and Jack London had started a counter-education campaign of their own. Publishing in the Socialist Party Bulletin and the New York Call, they contended “that the proper aim of Socialist world-politics at the present time is an alliance of the politically advanced nations for the defense of the democratic principle thruout the world” and urged all Socialists to abandon the fight against military preparedness.17 When the majority report was ratified during the emergency convention in St Louis, numerous dissidents – among them Sinclair – left the party, arguing that the SPA had become “unAmerican” and could therefore no longer represent the best interest of 14

Quoted in Phillip S. Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, Vol. VII (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 33. 15 Upton Sinclair, “Jimmie Higgins”, Upton Sinclair’s, 1 (October 1918), 2. 16 Sinclair, Jimmie Higgins, 22 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 17 Quoted in Foner, History of the Labor Movement in the United States, 29.


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the working class. The predicted mass exodus of rank-and-file members did not occur, however. Peter Buitenhaus has chalked up growing pro-war sentiments among American left-wing intellectuals and writers “as a yet another victory for British propaganda in the United States”, concluding that “in supporting the war and himself disseminating Allied propaganda, Sinclair indirectly contributed to the destruction of the Socialist Party in the United States and to the delaying of many of the social reforms for which he had fought all his life”.18 In 1926 Sinclair seemed to have admitted as much himself when he declared “that if at the beginning of 1917 I had known what I know today, I would have opposed the war and gone to jail with the pacifist radicals”.19 Sinclair’s belated pacifism aside, it remains noteworthy that Jimmie Higgins, though conceived as a pro-war propaganda novel, not only ends with an embittered denunciation of American military interventionism, but also provides a detailed record of the political struggles within the Socialist Party that constantly challenges and undercuts the work’s dominant ideological thrust.20 In the process of representing the titular hero’s slow conversion to patriotic war doctrines, the novel provides an extensive platform for the arguments of the very “radical part of labor” Sinclair hoped to “win and hold”. As I will go on to show in greater detail, while the narrator’s interventions seek to mold the represented proletarian discourses into one great master narrative, the oppositional discourses resists such authoritative assimilation attempts and persistently slip away from it. The result is a heteroglot text full of contradictions.21 Eventually, the 18

Buitenhaus, “Upton Sinclair and the Socialist Response to World War I”, 129. Quoted in Floyd Dell, Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1930), 150. 20 “Unfortunately”, William Bloodworth assesses in Upton Sinclair (Boston: Twayne, 1977), “the story shifts too often with the shifting attitudes of its author and too often suggests his intrusive presence between reader and experience” (96). 21 The term “heteroglot” here is used in the Bakhtinan sense as signifying the contradictory coexistence of different social discourse within a single text. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981), Michael Bakhtin explains, “at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles 19

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novel’s ideological edifice collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, when Sinclair, outraged about American military intervention in Siberia, has Jimmie die the martyr’s death at the hand of a reactionary United States Army. Jimmie, to be certain, ends up as an ironic hero, but one whose death inextricably links the promise of American democracy with the defense of the Bolshevik revolution. In line with Sinclair’s intention to provide a snapshot of the divided labor movement as a whole, Jimmie Higgins’ education proceeds along several intertwined pathways, leading him to associate with a chapter of divided “bona-fide Socialists” from various ethnic backgrounds, to spend an enlightening afternoon with the charismatic “Candidate”, and to join a band of radical “wobblie” organizers. Moreover, naïve Jimmie Higgins becomes tangled up in the nefarious schemes of German spies, makes friends with a patriotic Civil War veteran (who tries to teach him what it means to be a “true American”) and, while recuperating in a British “war-hospital”, even lectures the British Monarch, “Mr. King”, on how to “get rid o’ the profit-system” (209). Jimmie’s chance encounter with the contrite and meanwhile thoroughly reformed heir to Leesville’s “Empire Machine Shop” in the trenches was to finalize his education, affording him a glimpse into “the other side of the problem of riches and poverty” (243). Counter to the author’s original plans, however, Jimmie Higgins’ last mentor becomes “a little Jew” from New York, who once again radicalizes him in defense of the young Soviet Union. Jimmie’s proSoviet stance eventually brings him face to face with Colonel Nye, an infamous Colorado “coal-strike” crusher who “had occupied himself in turning loose machine-guns on tent-colonies filled with women and children” (252, 274). The short “democracy of pain” turns out to be a chimera, as Jimmie must realize that the techniques of oppression employed in the war abroad closely mirror those perfected in the class-war at home (240). In 1909, Upton Sinclair had defended his position that future wars could be prevented by sticking to the core principles of Socialism; namely, “international solidarity and universal brotherhood”. “We cannot depart from it in any detail, nor under any circumstance”, and so forth, all given bodily form. These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other in a variety of ways, forming new socially typifying ‘languages’” (347).


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Sinclair stated unequivocally, “without ceasing to be Socialists and abandoning our cause”. 22 A mere nine years later, writing Jimmie Higgins, he apparently tried to achieve what, by his own account, was impossible. As Sinclair was at pains to explain in a letter to John Reed, this abrupt turnabout had sprung from his newfound insight that the “German menace” had to be subdued before “a free political democracy anywhere else in the world” could arise. At the same time, though, he harbored no illusions as to the “predatory” character of “American capitalism” and the corruption of “American politics”. Sinclair’s challenge in writing Jimmie Higgins, then, consisted of maintaining the fundamental justness of America’s “war to make the world save to democracy” without ceasing to denounce what he considered the exploitive nature of US free market capitalism. Obviously, this proved to be increasingly problematic, as US American involvement in the war abroad not only curtailed democratic freedoms at home, but also highlighted ethnic divisions, aggravated domestic labor disputes, and, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, even raised the fearsome specter of a violent social revolution. The reader first meets Jimmie Higgins right around the outbreak of the European War in fictional “Leesville, U.S.A.”, where he puts in twelve-hour workdays at old man Granitch’s “Empire Machine Shops”. A rank-and-file member of the local chapter of the Socialist Party, Jimmie quickly finds himself embroiled in the divisive debates concerning the impact and consequences the war “over there” has on workers “over here”. Although according to official party line “the fountain-head of the war was world-capitalism, clamouring for markets, seeking to get rid of its surplus products”, it becomes apparent that the local chapter is split on the issue along ethnic lines (21): “on the one side the Germans and the Austrians, the Russian Jews, the Irish, and the religious pacifists; on the other side two English glass-blowers, a French waiter, and several Americans, who, because of college education or other snobbish weakness, were suspected of tenderness for John Bull” (51).

22

Upton Sinclair, “War: A Manifesto Against It. An Appeal to the Socialist Movement”, Wilshire’s Magazine (September, 1909), 7.

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The narrator’s sympathies lie with the latter faction, ably represented by the patriotic parlor Socialists Dr Service and Lawyer Norwood. Cast as the voices of reason and moderation, in party meeting after party meeting Comrades Service and Norwood seek to instill the workers with faith in the American democratic system, arguing that it is necessary “to forgo revolutionary agitation, until the Kaiser had been put out of business” (146). Recalcitrant Jimmie Higgins, however, still imbued with his creator’s erstwhile faith in “international solidarity and universal brotherhood”, firmly sides with the former faction of self-declared “anti-nationalists” (47). To him, the experience of continued repression and wartime profiteering outweighs the President’s lofty “appeals for justice and democracy” that are shrouded in “the beautiful language of idealism” (119). Contradicting Wilson’s vision of America as an essentially classless society, the class consciousness of Jimmie and his fellow workers actually increases as the war abroad exacerbates the economic conflicts at home. Initially, the switch from peacetime to wartime production mollifies rank-and-file opposition to the war as employment opportunities abound. “Wages went up, almost for the asking; never did the unskilled man have so much money in his pocket, while the man who could pretend to any skill at all found himself in the plutocratic class” (39). But soon, it becomes apparent that only the factory owners and “speculators” profit from the “boom conditions” (96). Inflation shoots through the roof: [and] men discovered the worm in this luscious war-fruit; prices were going up almost as fast as wages – in some places even faster. The sums you had to pay to the landlord surpassed belief …. Food was scarce and of poor quality; before long you found yourself begin asked to pay six cents for a hunk of pie or a cup of coffee – and then seven cents, and then ten. (39)

Before long, “the shops were seething with discontent” and Jimmie finds himself at the forefront of those who call for “strike!, strike!” (57-58). In subsequent chapters, Sinclair shows how the government’s increasingly ruthless interventions on behalf of the “shop owners” play into the hand of Socialist anti-war agitators, who denounce the


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war as a scheme to further enrich the capitalists and to “[rivet] forever on the people of America” a “system of militarism and suppression” (147). Predictably, the strike at the Empire Machine Shop is crushed before it can gather momentum. The National Guard moves in, Jimmie and his comrades are viciously beaten and thrown into jail. Upon release, Jimmie and his fellow strike leaders find themselves “blacklisted” not just in Leesville, but in nearby Hubbardstown and all the surrounding communities as well. Struggling to eek out a living by performing odd jobs, Jimmie loses the last shred of hope in the promise of American democracy. Having become too familiar with “the ways of American wage-slavery, euphemistically referred to as ‘industrial serfdom,’” Jimmie Higgins’ “sense of loyalty’ is no longer “to his country, but to his class which had been exploited, hounded, driven from pillar to post” (91, 119). Society’s failure to care for those who produce its wealth, Sinclair underscores, has turned Jimmie and his fellow “wage-slaves” into vaterlandslose Gesellen – lads without a fatherland – whose shared experience of exploitation under international capitalism render notions of citizenship nominal. Meanwhile, the seeds of armed rebellion begin to sprout. Under the influence of “Wild Bill”, a radical Socialist of Irish extraction, Jimmie contemplates renouncing his pacifist stance in favor of taking up arms in the class-war: “There were several things you could say. War gave the workers guns, and taught them to use them; how would it be if some day they turned these guns about and fought their own battles?” (48). In the wake of the worker’s uprising in Petrograd as well as Wilson’s post-election efforts to “sweep the country into war”, Sinclair shows, such radical thoughts begin to take a wider hold among the laboring class (117). During a “great mass-meeting in celebration of the Russian Revolution”, Comrade Smith, “editor of the ‘Worker,’” draws a “clamour of applause from the audience” when he announces: I am not a pacifist, I am not opposed to war—it is merely that I purpose to choose the war in which I fight. If they try to put a gun into my hands, I shall not refuse to take it—not much, for I and my fellow wage-slaves have long wished for guns! But I shall use my own judgment as to where I aim that gun—whether at enemies in front of me, or at enemies behind me—whether at my brothers, the

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Embattled Home Fronts workingmen of Germany, or at my oppressors, the exploiters of Wall Street, their newspaper lackeys and military martinets. (121)

Apparently, the danger Sinclair perceives here – that America’s engagement in the world war might trigger an uncontrollable classwar on the homefront – was indeed quite tangible. For in the years leading up to America’s war entry, Smith’s militant rhetoric resounded in the popular verse and prose of many IWW propagandists. Seeking to demonstrate the folly of allowing class loyalties to be supplanted by national loyalties, the IWW journal Solidarity, for example, ran a poem that admonished its readers in no uncertain terms to: Unite! unite! for your own fight, You slaves of shop and mills, How much better far such battles are Than all the streaming ways of war Where slaves fight slaves to kill.23

To Sinclair, it seems, such talk of impending class warfare posed a challenge to his notion of an evolutionary Socialism that would grow out of the American radical tradition and draw on images of Jeffersonian agrarianism, Jacksonian leveling, John Brown-style abolitionism, and Lincolnesque Republicanism. Thus Sinclair attempts to refashion Jimmie into a homegrown revolutionary by sending him “back to the bosom of his ancient Mother” Nature. Working as a farmhand, “six miles out in the country”, the “little Socialist” Jimmie regains some of his old cheerfulness as “all summer long he ploughed and harrowed and hoed, he tended horses and cows and pigs and chickens, and drove to town with farm-truck to be sold” (92). Most importantly, though, it is during his stint at the farm that he meets “old Peter Drew”, a jovial farmer who “had been in the first battle of Bull Run, and had fought with the Army of Northern Virginia all the way to Richmond” (93). The setting for Jimmie’s incipient Americanization is appropriately picturesque: resting “under the shade of an elm tree by the kitchendoor”, Peter Drew tells Jimmie of bygone days and lectures him on the 23

Ralph Chaplin, “Slaves, to the Slaughter!”, Solidarity (August 1914), 2.


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historical achievements of his country. Impressed by the “kind, gentle, generous” manner of the Civil War veteran, “little by little” Jimmie senses “that there might be such a thing as the soul of America” and begins to wonder if perhaps “there was really more to the country than Wall Street speculators and grafting politicians, policemen with clubs and militiamen with bayonets to stick into the bodies of workingmen who tried to improve their lot in life” (95). Eventually, however, the halcyon days of summer, which afford Jimmie a nostalgic glimpse of a rural past that is fundamentally at odds with the twentieth-century working-class experience, are bound to end. Once again confronted with the grim realities of a twelve-hour workday in the ammunition factory, Jimmie averts his eyes from the residual promise of agrarian liberation, represented by old Peter Drew, and looks hopefully toward the emergence of a “newer and broader kind of democracy”, represented by the “workers of Russia” (118). Though still sentimentally attached to the ways of old Peter Drew, who “had made his impression not so much by his arguments, which [he] considered sixty years out of date, as by his personality”, Jimmie cannot sustain his budding Nativist faith in the self-redemptory “American soul”. Reflecting Sinclair’s own sporadic doubts as to the feasibility of reforming the capitalist system from within, Jimmie and Wild Bill decide to “take the road” after the police had shut down yet another Socialist convention and carted off its keynote speakers to prison. Using language reminiscent of his letter to Wilson mentioned earlier, an obviously indignant Sinclair writes: “The two of them had to stand there and see the fundamental constitutional rights of American citizens set at naught, to see liberty trampled in the dust beneath the boots of a brutal soldiery, to see justice strangled and raped in the innermost shrine of her temple” (131). Sinclair, it becomes apparent, is not blind to the arguments of the majority of anti-war Socialists, who, pointing to the “suppression of their papers”, wondered aloud about “the use of fighting for Democracy abroad, if you had to sacrifice every particle of Democracy at home in order to win the fight?” (147). Nor does he flinch from explaining how “a social system based upon oppression and knavery” induces the “radical part of labor” to promulgate acts of sabotage and violence (138). Thus, following his retreat into America’s rural past, Jimmie finds himself “in the front-line trenches

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of the class war” when he joins a band of Wobblies. Just as old Peter Drew had impressed upon him the lessons of the American Revolution and the Civil War, “here around the campfires … the guerillas of the class struggle” instill Jimmie with the communal memory “of their sufferings and their exploits”. Although Jimmie, unlike Wild Bill, never fully espouses Wobblie strategies, he comes to apprehend the suffering and pain that compels the “blanket stiffs” to militant resistance: These men wandered about from one job to another, at the mercy of the seasons and the fluctuations of industry. They were deprived of votes, and therefore their status of citizens; they were deprived of a chance to organize, and therefore of their status as human begins. (139)

Always susceptible to his surroundings, Jimmie not only perceives the elemental “justness of their cause” and learns “the all-precious lesson of Solidarity”, but also begins to identify himself with these outlaws, who at bottom “had kept their gentleness, their sweetness of soul” (140-141). Upon leaving the Wobblies, Jimmie fancies himself “no longer a blind and helpless victim of a false economic system, but a revolutionist, fully class-conscious, trained in a grim school” (138). As expected, Jimmie’s new life as a radical labor agitator in wartime America is fraught with dangers. Labeled a “traitor” and a “criminal” by the “capitalistic press”, Jimmie on several occasions only narrowly escapes the patriotic wrath of vigilante groups, threatening to lynch him on the spot. His wobblie associates fare even worse. Shortly after Jimmie’s departure, local militiamen surround the camp, shoot one of the Wobblies, and load the rest of them “into half a dozen automobiles” (141). But these and other incidents of government oppression – such as the increasingly “fashionable” arrest of Socialists and the jailing of “conscientious objectors” – merely reinforce Jimmie’s resolve to wage “war on the country” (138). Feeling “more than ever a part of society”, Jimmie grows “fairly happy again—happier than he had thought he could ever be” for “he had the greatest thing in the world to live for, the vision of a just and sane society” (144). “The second revolution, the uprising of the Bolsheviki” in November of 1917 further strengthens Jimmie’s conviction that an


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international revolution is afoot and that the hour of the American workmen has struck. (153). Having joined a “Socialist local in Irontown, still active and determined, in spite of the fact that its office had been raided by the police”, a jubilant Jimmie celebrates “the first proletarian government in history” with his comrades (151, 153). Anticipating that the “German proletariat” would follow the lead of the “Russian proletariat”, Jimmie and his comrades call for another strike, denouncing “the capitalists, making fervid speeches about patriotism, but refusing to give up the whip-hand over their wageslaves” (158). Sinclair might have harbored similar hopes that the Russian Revolution signaled the internal collapse of the European War. But when the German government first crushed a series of solidarity strikes within its own country and then sent its troops deep into the territory of Bolshevik Russia, he seemed more convinced than ever that the “German menace” had to be overcome before “a free political democracy anywhere else in the world” could come to pass. Moreover, Wilson’s overtures toward labor appeared to validate John Spargo’s plan to “seize upon [the war’s] opportunities to extend our collectivist program, and demand the representation of labor upon all boards and governing bodies formed during the war”.24 So Jimmie’s conversion from an anti- to pro-war stance occurs at the height of both his class consciousness and his commitment to the international revolution. Stunned by the willingness of the German workers to force the punitive Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk upon their brethrens, Jimmie’s mind is: … literally torn in half; he found himself, every twenty-four hours of his life, of two absolutely contradictory and diametrically opposite points of view. He would vow destruction to the hated German armies; and then he would turn about and vow destruction to the men at home who were managing the job of destroying the German armies. (157)

Cast as a simplistic either-or proposition, Jimmie’s decision to “take the plunge” and to join the army as a machinist is a foregone 24

Quoted in David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 97.

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conclusion, especially since the national war effort appears to miraculously erase all class distinctions and antagonisms at home (176). Returning to Leesville, Jimmie first encounters a platoon of marching recruits, among whom he spots “a son of Ashton Chalmers, president of the First National Bank of Leesville, being ordered about and hauled over the coals by an ex-blacksmith’s helper” (162). Next, he learns from his old friends and comrades that “the government sent an arbitration commission” that “broke old Granitch down—made him recognise the union and grant the basic eight hour days” (167). And finally, Comrade Emil, who had already been converted, hands Jimmie a speech by Ashton Chalmers in which he admonishes his fellow bankers: We face a new era, when labour is coming into its own. If we do not want to be left behind as derelicts, we shall have to get busy and do our part to bring in this new era, which otherwise will come with bloodshed and destruction. (167)

Jimmie’s last impulse to resist “unthinking militarism” is broken when even Comrade Stankewitz, a self-declared “anti-nationalist”, flatly states that “the revolution kin vait” and announces his plans to enlist (159, 177). Predictably enough, Sinclair’s subsequent descriptions of Jimmie’s heroic feats in the fight against the “Huns” read like a condensed version of Arthur Guy Emprey’s best-selling potboiler Over the Top (1917). Having witnessed all sorts of German atrocities, including submarine and gas attacks as well as the crucifixion of an English sergeant, Jimmie, volunteering as a motorcycle dispatcher, singlehandedly staves off the German advance at Château-Thierry. Swept away by patriotic frenzy, Jimmie, at least for the moment, forgets both the lessons of the class-war he had learned among the Wobblies and his earlier fears that “the system of militarism and suppression” might be “riveted forever on the people of America” (147). To him, as well as to Sinclair, the war appears to be a purifying, redemptory event that “would lead to vast changes in the world”. Having crushed the Prussian Junkerdom, Jimmie foresees, “the people would nevermore let themselves be hoodwinked and exploited as they had” (187). Brought together in a “Great Crusade” to purge the world


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of the last autocratic monarchy on the continent, old class distinctions will diminish so that the American people can finish their historical task of building Lincoln’s egalitarian republic. To underscore this point, Sinclair has Jimmie run into his former nemesis, Lacey Granitch, “young lord of Leesville” (240). What follows is a sentimental scene of class reconciliation in the trenches. War, due to its close association with death, the great equalizer, has meanwhile taught this once “proud, free, rich, and young aristocrat” the meaning of suffering and imparted him with “respect for his fellowmen” (240). Thus, when Jimmie tells him “about starvation and neglect, about overwork and unemployment, about strikes and jails, and manifold oppressions”, Lacey is first “moved” and then begins to recognize the inherent flaws within the capitalistic system (241). Gaining insights into each other’s “side of the problems of riches and poverty”, the two men “from opposite poles of social life” become fast friends (243, 239). In parting, Lacey, apparently en route to becoming a moderate Socialist himself, promises his new friend “to read” all of the recommended “books”, leaving Jimmie with “a vision of the Empire Machine Shops turned over to the control of the workers” (246). But Jimmie’s wartime education does not end with these sanguine images of peaceful collectivization and amicable class reconciliation. In yet another reversal, the final three chapters of Jimmie Higgins seem to bear out Marx’s prediction that “the growth of the of the international character of the capitalistic regime” will worsen “the mass of misery, slavery, degradation”.25 Shipped off to Archangel in Siberian Russia, the “little Socialist machinist from Leesville, U.S.A. who just a few months ago had changed the “whole course of the world’s history”, must suddenly discover that he has been made part of a reactionary coup d’état to turn back the clock of history, when he learns that the goal of “this expedition” was not “to fight the Germans … but to fight the Bolsheviki!” (234). Recognizing that Wilsonian internationalism had turned into a ruse to bolster the capitalist system of “wage-slavery” worldwide, Jimmie’s subdued hatred for “corrupt politicians” who are in cahoots with

25

Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), I, 929.

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“greedy capitalists” re-emerges ever more vehemently, revealing not a little of Sinclair’s own sense of betrayal: He had swallowed their propaganda, he had filled himself up with their patriotism, he had dropped everything to come and fight for Democracy …. And now they had broken their bargain with him, they had brought him here and ordered him to fight working men—just as 26 if he had been a militiaman at home! Democracy indeed! (251)

The bitter irony of Jimmie’s situation, fittingly revealed in the “wilderness of ice and desolation” under the “Arctic Circle”, could not be any clearer (252).27 Having shut out his class consciousness, ignored his experience, and disregarded the advice of his “irreconcilable” comrades, Jimmie sees his greatest fears come true as “bound and gagged, lashed to the chariot of Militarism” he “was to take part in destroying the first proletarian government in history!” (250). Before Sinclair has his self-ensnared protagonist escape into sheer madness, however, Jimmie makes one last and desperate attempt to reaffirm his dedication to “international working-class solidarity” (281, 256). Painfully aware that the fight for democracy had further curtailed his rights as a citizen, Jimmie recalls the pain of suffering inflicted upon his class. Stirred by mental recollections of police beatings and unscrupulous shop owners, he reassumes his role as a soldier in the “class-war that had been going on for ages”, vowing to put up “a struggle” (140, 248). When he meets a radical “little Jew” from New York in Siberia, Jimmie therefore eagerly seizes the offered opportunity to distribute leaflets among the American troops, calling 26

On 20 August 1918, in an open “Letter to American Workers”, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin made a similar point, writing that “the American people, who set the world an example in waging a revolutionary war against feudal slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of ‘liberating’ them, and are throttling the Russian Socialist Republic in 1918 on the pretext of ‘protecting’ it from the Germans” (V.I. Lenin, “Letter to American Workers”, in Collected Works, ed. George Hanna [Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966], XXVIII, 62-75). 27 In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye describes the “ironic mode” at length as “the mythos of winter” (239).


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on them to cross the lines and to join the Russian Revolutionary Army’s “march to the victory of freedom” (256). Jimmie’s revolutionary propaganda falls on fertile ground, but before long his activities raise suspicion and he is thrown into jail. There he comes face-to-face with Colonel Nye, an infamous Colorado coal strike crusher, who subjects Jimmie to the “water cure” and other such tortures regularly employed by American “police-authorities in small town and villages” (270). In spite of horrendous pain, Jimmie does not break and stalwartly refuses to divulge the names of his coconspirators. Hung up by his thumbs in a damp prison cell, Jimmie’s private suffering takes on a larger, symbolic meaning when he hears a “feeble whisper” shortly before his mind cracks: You are the revolution. You are social justice, struggling for life in this world. You are humanity, setting its face to the light, striving to reach a new goal, to put behind it an old horror. (269)

Jimmie, in short, is turned into a Christlike figure for the Socialist movement. But even though Jimmie Higgins might lose his lonely struggle, his personal suffering, endured on behalf of untold thousands of revolutionaries, becomes an indelible part of the collective workingclass memory of World War I, Sinclair insists in these final pages. “Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge”, which “appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden”, Walter Benjamin would later write in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”.28 Sinclair’s view of the transmission of “historical knowledge” toward the end of Jimmie Higgins is strikingly similar. The story of Jimmie’s experiences will not be forgotten, the narrator promises. For in due course, the shared memory of his representative plight will eventually spark revolutionary action: “‘There will appear men and women animated by a fierce and blazing bitterness’, ready to seize ‘all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil’ and to repay ‘every drop of blood drawn with the lash’” (282). Ending Jimmie Higgins with a quote by Lincoln, 28

Benjamin, Illuminations, 260.

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Sinclair, not unlike Lenin in his three letters to the “American Workers”, hitches the stalled wagon of American self-emancipation onto the steam-gathering locomotive of the Bolshevik Revolution, which is “leading the way for mankind to a newer and broader kind of democracy” (240). To be sure, Jimmie Higgins might show Upton Sinclair to be one of Lenin’s “craven, half-hearted ‘socialists’ who are thoroughly imbued with the prejudices of bourgeois democracy, who yesterday defended ‘their’ imperialist governments and today limit themselves to platonic ‘protests’ against military intervention in Russia”.29 Still, all told, Sinclair’s misguided foray into jingoistic nationalism might have actually brought him closer to Lenin’s view that “bourgeois parliamentarism” can no longer serve the workers’ interests in the wake of the Bolshevist Revolution.30 Assessing the success of Bolshevist strategies to establish a Russian “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the January 1919 edition of his journal, Sinclair suggested that even within “advanced democracies” such as the USA violent revolutions might become necessary, unless the government sees to the “speedy and ungrudging concession of the workers’ demands for the full product of their labor and full control of the conditions of their labor”.31 “Those Socialists who had been trapped into supporting the President’s war programme would wake up some morning with a fearful dark-brown taste in their mouths”, Jimmie had augured in 29

Lenin, “Letter to the Workers of Europe and America”, in Collected Works, XXVIII, 453-77. 30 On 21 January 1919, in the “Letter to the Workers of Europe and America” just cited, Lenin also proclaimed then end of parliamentary co-operation: “The socialists, the fighters for the emancipation of the working people from exploitation, had to utilise the bourgeois parliaments as a platform, as a base, for propaganda, agitation and organisation as long as our struggle was confined to the framework of the bourgeois system. Now that world history has brought up the question of destroying the whole of that system, of overthrowing and suppressing the exploiters, of passing from capitalism to socialism, it would be a shameful betrayal of the proletariat, deserting to its class enemy, the bourgeoisie, and being a traitor and a renegade to confine oneself to bourgeois parliamentarism, to bourgeois democracy, to present it as ‘democracy’ in general, to obscure its bourgeois character, to forget that as long as capitalist property exists universal suffrage is an instrument of the bourgeois state” (458). 31 “What About Bolshevism?”, Upton Sinclair’s, 9 (January 1919), 4.


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Chapter XIV (148). In the wake of the Palmer Raids and the ensuing Red Scare of 1919, the “dark-brown taste” in Sinclair’s own mouth must have seemed almost unbearable. “Retrospectively”, Mari Jo Buhle judges, 1919 marked “the close of a distinct era in the history of American radicalism”.32 And indeed, by most accounts, the worker’s movement lay dormant throughout the 1920s as Harding’s administration returned to a politics of normalcy and negated many of the gains labor had achieved during wartime. Moreover, amidst the hedonistic and self-absorbed flapper culture of the Roaring Twenties, youthful rebelliousness was directed inward and the “story of [Jimmie’s] experiences” quickly fell into oblivion. “Look”, Dos Passos’ John Andrews explains his decision to go AWOL, “it’s a purely personal matter … I just want to get away”.33 It took another decade before “men and women animated by a fierce and blazing bitterness” would again rally around the battle flag of Socialism that had held such promise yet was so battered during the First World War. Not quite unexpectedly, it was Upton Sinclair himself who had a hand in rallying the next generation of radical political activists. In 1934, the old muckraker turned politician swept the Democratic primary for governor of California, frightening a comfortably entrenched establishment with the prospect of a Socialist governor at the helm of the nation’s most volatile state. Noting how quickly Sinclair’s grass-roots campaign had gathered momentum, The New York Times called it “the first serious movement against the profitsystem in the United States”. And even though Sinclair, like the erstwhile Presidential Candidate Debs before him, was defeated at the ballot box, his bid, as Greg Mitchell points out, both “energized” and “radicalized a whole generation of activists, many of them artists, performers, intellectuals, and writers”.34

32 Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Socialism, 1870-1920 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1981), 318. 33 Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 393. 34 Greg Mitchell, The Campaign of a Century: Upton Sinclair’s Race for Governor of California and the Birth of Media Politics (New York: Random House, 1992), 54.

CHAPTER 6 William Cunningham, The Green Corn Rebellion, and Revolutionary Memory Memory, then, is not only a backward retrival of a vanished event, but also a posting forward, at the remembered instant, to all future moments of corresponding circumstance.1

One of the most poignant episodes of the Great War on the American home front occurred on 2 August 1917 in southeastern Oklahoma. Indignant about the wartime profiteering of wealthy landlords and incensed by new federal conscription laws, a motley group of radical tenant farmers staged what has become known as the “Green Corn Rebellion”. Believing rumors that a nationwide workers’ uprising was imminent, the would-be revolutionaries, organized under the banner of the Syndicalist Working Class Union (WCU), ambushed the Seminole County sheriff, cut down telegraph lines, and burned several railroad bridges. On the following morning, the band of armed rebels gathered on a farmstead in Pontotoc County, raising the red flag and awaiting marching orders. They anticipated shortly joining thousands of other farmers from all over the state in a march on Washington that would topple the government. The coalition of white, black, and Native American farmers waited in vain. Unbeknown to the rebels, the SPA had worked behind the scenes to discourage other WCU chapters from participating, because it was feared that an armed rebellion might give the government yet another pretext to jail leftists indiscriminately. A hastily assembled posse of “patriots” made short shrift of the revolt that was left without reinforcements. When the smoke had cleared, three men lay slain and 1

Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, 209.

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450 others were rounded up for taking part in the insurgence. A hundred-and-fifty rebels were eventually convicted, many of whom served out long sentences in the infamous Leavenworth penitentiary. Eighteen years later, Pontotoc County native William Cunningham fictionalized these events in his first novel, The Green Corn Rebellion.2 Thirty-three-year-old Cunningham, a journalist, teacher, and aspiring writer from the Dust Bowl, was among those who had followed Sinclair’s election campaign in California with growing enthusiasm. Raised in a household of staunch Eugene V. Debs supporters, Cunningham and his younger sister, Agnes “Sis” Cunningham – the folk protest singer and co-publisher of the small but influential 1960s’ magazine Broadside – had developed a deep commitment to the labor cause early on in life. Upton Sinclair’s run for governor, “Sis” Cunningham recollects in her autobiography, inspired them to place their art fully into the service of politics.3 The Green Corn Rebellion was a direct outgrowth of this commitment to political art as well as William Cunningham’s involvement with the Oklahoma’s Writer’s Project, which he headed from 1935 to 1938 and under whose auspices he had previously collected Indian folktales and researched local labor history. Viewed within the political and cultural contexts of the mid-1930s, Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion furthermore betrays its origins in the Popular Front movement that sought, among many other things, to recover or reinvent a distinctly American tradition of political radicalism. Following the rise of Mussolini in Italy, Franco in 2

Published in 1935 by Vanguard in New York, the novel was at best a moderate success. Nevertheless it proved him to be enough of a literary man to receive the appointment as director of the Oklahoma Writer’s Project in the same year. His appointment lasted only until 1938. Due to his radical leftist leanings a controversial figure from the start, Cunningham was replaced by Jim Thompson. Cunningham moved to Washington, where he worked for two years with the Federal Writers Project. Throughout the 1940s, Cunningham gathered stories for the Soviet news agency TASS in New York City. Aside from two nonfiction works, How to Work Your Way Through College (1927) and The Real Book About Daniel Boone (1952), he wrote numerous short stories that appeared in Harper’s and Collier’s. In addition, Cunningham published altogether three novels, The Green Corn Rebellion (1935), Pretty Boy (1936), and Danny (1953), co-authored with his wife, Sarah Brown. William Cunningham died in 1967. 3 Agnes Cunningham and Gordon Friesen, Red Dust and Broadside: A Joint Autobiography (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999), 162.

Cunningham, The Green Corn Rebellion, and Memory

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Spain, and Hitler in Germany, the Popular Front was initially conceived by the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern as an anti-Fascist coalition of Communists, Socialists, and Liberals. In retrospect, the Popular Front movement has often been described as nothing more than a Communist ploy – financed and directed by Moscow – to harness leftist sentiments during the depression years. Particularly in France and the United Sates, however, the Popular Front promptly evolved into a populist culture movement, uniting leftleaning writers, musicians, painters, sculptors, literary critics, and moviemakers with divergent political agendas in a common fight for civil liberties and sweeping social reforms. Moving away from scathing critiques of American middle-class life such as Sinclair Lewis’ Babitt (1922), Popular Front artists and intellectuals began to represent the experiences of another, invisible America – one peopled with factory workers, immigrants, and dispossessed farmers – in order to promote solidarity across class lines. Documentaries such as Lewis Hine’s Men at Work (1932), Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor’s An American Exodus (1935), novels such as Jack Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), poetical works such as Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes (1936), and innovative musical pieces such as Marc Blitzstein’s opera The Cradle Will Rock (1937), sought not simply to depict the daily hardships endured by immigrant coal miners, urban textile workers, black sharecroppers, and displaced farmers, but to highlight the determination and ingenuity with which the disposed masses struggle for a better life in a better America. The result of this convergence of working-class insurgency, Marxist ideology, Social Democratic politics, and artistic commitment was a new, if incomplete, cultural enfranchisement of working people as well as the saturation of popular culture with class-based images and themes. “Under the sign of the ‘people’”, Michael Denning writes, “this Popular Front public culture sought to forge ethnic and racial alliances, mediating between Anglo-American culture, the culture of ethnic workers, and African American culture, in part by reclaiming the figure of ‘America’ itself, imagining an Americanism that would provide a usable past”.4 4

Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 9.

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In seeking to provide “a usable past” that points toward the possibilities of social transformation in the present, William Cunningham, like many other young Midwestern, Southwestern, and Western writers of the 1930s, contributed to the rise of what Benjamin Botkin has termed “Proletarian Regionalism”. Scorned by orthodox Marxist critics such as Granville Hicks, Regionalism had been viewed throughout the 1920s and early 1930s as an irredeemably reactionary genre that glorified past ways of life and forestalled social changes. The white supremacist nostalgia evoked in many Regionalist works by the southern Agrarians certainly reinforced such views.5 In its Popular Front reincarnation as Proletarian Regionalism or Sectional Realism, however, the representation of folk expression gradually came to be seen as a literary “means of understanding (for purposes of revolution) our apparently standardized but deeply divided and enigmatic native life”.6 Following B.A. Botkin’s influential redefinition of the study of folklore, rural America was no longer regarded nostalgically as an insular space wherein old traditions and values had somehow weathered the storms of urbanization, industrialization, mechanization, and population shifts. Rather, in highlighting the inherent diversity of American regions, their inhabitants, and their customs, Botkin and others formulated a dynamic view of American culture “in which cosmopolitanism and provincialism were complementary, not hostile, approaches”. Where Modernists such as T. S. Eliot “saw fragmentation and the threat of cultural decay”, notes Jerrold Hirsch, “Botkin saw pluralism and the opportunity for creating a new revitalized culture and democratic community based on knowledge of diverse folk traditions”.7 Therefore to “discount the spirit of a region, its customs, folklore and native speech”, Constance Rourke argued in 1933, would mean to overlook “the humble influences of place and kinship and common emotion that accumulate 5

See, for example, Stark Young’s Regionalist novels Heaven Trees (1926) and So Red the Rose (1934), which romanticize antebellum plantation life and mourn the loss of old-fashioned Southern values. 6 Constance Rourke, “The Significance of Sections”, New Republic (September 20, 1933), 148-51. 7 Jerrold Hirsch, “Folklore in the Making: B.A. Botkin”, The Journal of American Folklore, C/395 (January-March 1987), 11-12.


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through generations to shape and condition a distinctive native consciousness”. Not mere “intellectual synthesis”, but folk expression provides “the basis from which … a revolutionary literature can develop”, Rourke maintained.8 Praised by novelist Jack Conroy as “an excellent specimen of sectional realism … of a variety too long neglected by our contemporary proletarian novelist”, The Green Corn Rebellion illustrates literary attempts in the 1930s to salvage revolutionary images preserved in regional folk expression that bespeak a long overlooked tradition of American radicalism.9 Hence, rather than once again summoning up the great figures of the American Revolution and the Civil War, Depression era works of Proletarian Regionalism such as Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion and Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl (1939) seek to capture the localized emergence of protorevolutionary sentiments among Oklahoma’s impecunious farmers and St Paul’s browbeaten working girls respectively. According to Le Sueur, the role of “the so-called writer” in this endeavor was that of a sympathetic ethnographer, who records the quotidian trials, failures, and triumphs of the hitherto voiceless segments of society. Writing of “the great and heroic women of the depression”, who had provided her with the raw material for The Girl, Le Sueur recalls, “they looked upon me as a woman who wrote (like the old letter writers) and who strangely and wonderfully insisted that their lives were not defeated, trashed, defenseless”.10 Equally insistent on giving import to the struggles of the ostensibly vanquished, Cunningham set out to mine local “word-of-mouth legend”, turning his “bare-footed, dust- and sandstorm-covered” narrative into a novelized rendition of a folkloristically persevered counter-history that both breaks official silence about and challenges official accounts of the 1917 Oklahoma uprising.11 At the time of the novel’s inception, little had been written about the Green Corn Rebellion. “The war-time censorship saw to it that such events were ignored in the daily papers”, Conroy explains in his 8

Rourke, “The Significance of Sections”, 149 and 151. Jack Conroy, “The Green Corn Rebellion”, Windsor Quarterly, III/1 (Spring 1935), 76-77. 10 Meridel Le Sueur, The Girl (Los Angeles: West End Pres, 1978), 150. 11 Conroy, “The Green Corn Rebellion”, 77. 9

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review of The Green Corn Rebellion. The few newspaper and government reports that did deal with the Green Corn Rebellion without fail ignored the festering tensions that had led up to it.12 Neither the preceding land allotment revolts of the Seminoles and Creeks, nor the longstanding protests of white farmers against “predatory lending practices”, nor the growing public opposition to the Great War and its resultant conscription laws were given as motives for the uprising.13 Instead, contemporary accounts as well as official histories cast the rebellion as a spontaneous insurrection by a shiftless lumpenproletariat that had brought economic despair onto itself and hardly knew why it had taken up arms. “In many respects”, Charles D. Beard assesses in a 1932 monograph, … these men were little more than serfs or peons, slaves to the ‘cash crop’ demanded by their landlords. Yet they did but little to help themselves. When they did have money, they spent it freely and often foolishly. The practice of saving was generally neglected and they lived from crop to crop, year to year, vaguely dissatisfied, always dreaming of a new country somewhere.14

In a similar vein, the role played by Native and African Americans in the rebellion was habitually belittled and disparaged.15 Charles D. Bush remarks: “A few Negroes, usually coerced into joining the disaffected party, and a very small number of irreconcilable Snake Indians made up a minority racial group, but the vast majority of the people were white.”16 The very idea that hitherto seemingly docile blacks and notoriously obstinate Indians had not only become conscious of a common enemy, but, moreover, proved capable of 12

Two brief surveys of government reports on the Green Corn Rebellion can be found in Garin Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red: The Gospel of Socialism in the Oklahoma Countryside, 1910-1924 (Westport, Conn., 1976) and James R Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (Baton Rouge, 1978). 13 Burbank, When Farmers Voted Red, 126. 14 Charles D. Bush, “The Green Corn Rebellion”, Thesis (University of Oklahoma, 1932), 25. 15 See Erik M. Zissu, “Conscription, Sovereignty, and Land: American Indian Resistance During World War I, Pacific Historical Review, CXIV/4 (Winter 1995), 537-67. 16 Bush, “The Green Corn Rebellion”, 24.


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forming an interracial alliance, was apparently too frightening to be acknowledged. The most pointed critique of the Green Corn Rebellion came not from the right – which reveled in its apparent defeat – but from within the anti-war left, which struggled to remain operative amidst the tempest of war-induced patriotism. Oscar Ameringer’s view of the rebellion in his political memoir, If You Don’t Weaken (1940), exemplifies the official SPA position. Ameringer, who had been dispatched to Oklahoma by the party leadership with instructions to quell the simmering revolt before it could erupt, deemed the “illadvised” Green Corn Rebellion as one of the “worst” things that could have happened during the war.17 Blaming the Oklahoma rebels for the subsequent arrest of “thousands of our members”, Ameringer concluded that the “regrettable” rebellion resulted from a lack of party discipline among the isolated farmers, who, “naturally given to direct action or self-help”, were too ignorant to understand the “policy and tactics of the Socialists”.18 The Party therefore opted to quickly forget this “most unfortunate” episode. Yet, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz relates in her autobiography, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, the memory of the Green Corn Rebellion continued to live on in the oral traditions of Oklahoma’s impoverished black, white, and Indian tenant farmers. Among the rural poor, Dunbar-Ortiz recalls, the Green Corn Rebellion was not viewed as a defeat but as “a great moment of heroism, and a moment of unity, betrayed by the ‘electric-light city’ Socialists, who scorned it”.19 By the mid-1930s, as long treks of dispossessed Oklahoma farmers made their arduous journey to California, a politically energized Cunningham set out to recall and re-evaluate the lessons of the Green Corn Rebellion. In his resulting novel, Cunningham seeks to recuperate those moments of heroism and unity preserved in folklore, posting them forward as early harbingers of the Popular Front Movement. Premature as it turns out to be, the celebratory gathering of the united “farmer’s army” upon “the hill”, where “whites … danced with the 17

Oscar Ameringer, If You Don’t Weaken (New York: Holt, 1940), 184. Ibid., 186. 19 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie (New York: Verso, 1997), 15. 18

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Indians” and “Negroes were treated just like whites”, provides the novel’s guiding image of things to come.20 Moreover, contesting official accounts according to which the rebellion was a non-political riot by transient “hillbillies” from “Arkansas, Tennessee, and other Southern States”,21 The Green Corn Rebellion maps out the emergence of a revolutionary alliance between Oklahoma’s white “dirt farmers”, black sharecroppers, and dispossessed Indians, who apprehend that their life-stifling economic misery is the result of a repressive political system, tailored to suit the exploitive aims of “the bankers … the landowners … the big railroad … and … Standard Oil” (165). Drawing upon a well-established pattern in Regionalist literature, the novel privileges the unforgiving yet authentic rural experience as the native seedbed of revolutionary sentiments, while disparaging the deceitfully comfortable urban life as a bulwark of reactionary conformism. “When you thought about the cities you wondered how anything could happen that would change things”, Jim Tetley reflects in one of his many pensive moments: “So damned many people, and you felt like most of them never even heard of socialism. Patriotic, and ready to go to war and fight for the capitalists. How could you ever knock anything into their heads?” (203-204)

Once the emergence of a unifying working-class consciousness has been firmly anchored within the farmers’ shared experience of economic and political oppression, though, Cunningham’s novel, siding in part with the official SPA assessment, depicts the rebellion as having been triggered by a rash impulse to hasten “the big shake up” (99). “The American people ain’t ready”, the defeated rebel leader Mack McGee judges retrospectively and acknowledges, “Us fellers went off half-cocked. We wasn’t ready to overthrow the government. You can’t get ready overnight or in a month, or even in a year” (252). Faced with the deadly prospect of becoming cannon fodder in “a rich man’s war”, Cunningham stresses, the already desperate farmers 20 William Cunningham, The Green Corn Rebellion (New York: Vanguard, 1935), 227, 218, and 230. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 21 Bush, “The Green Corn Rebellion”, 26.


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jumped at the promise of revolution, even though they had been utterly unprepared for it (119). But in an obvious slight against dithering SPA officers such as Oscar Ameringer (who makes two brief appearances as Fred Niek in the novel), Cunningham also lays blame for the rebels’ rashness at the doorsteps of “these damn big Socialists in Oklahoma City”, whose “big talk” had excited “farmer’s into raisn’ hell” without properly preparing and organizing them for the task (247, 253). The failure of the Green Corn Rebellion, Cunningham has his characters suggest, is not so much a reflection of the farmer’s ignorance as of inconsistencies within the SPA’s perpetually shifting “policy and tactics”. “The Socialist party ain’t got enough good leaders”, Mack McGee observes, concluding in Leninist fashion that the success of the proletariat’s emancipation will rest in the hands of a young vanguard of professional revolutionaries: “You know how it is with farmin’, a feller ought to be born and raised on the farm to know very much about it, and I guess it’s like that with revolution: we got to wait till we got thousands of youngsters who don’t think or talk about anything but revolution, before we can do a damn thing.” (253)

As Mack’s comments highlight, Bildung lies at the heart of Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion in two ways: First, in the sense of the Herausbildung or formation of a class consciousness that is grounded in shared everyday experiences and constitutive of an emergent society. Second, in the sense of the Ausbildung or practical training that enables the class-conscious to bring about desired social change. The initial formation of class consciousness, although grounded in the recognition of shared experiences, is represented as a more or less organic process, tied to essentialized concepts of virility, naturalness, and place. Thus, manly and unaffected farmhands such as Jim Tetley seem to have an intuitive grasp of the socio-economic forces that stifle their existence, whereas effeminate city-dwellers such as his crippled brother Ted are bound to a “false consciousness” that makes them rejoice in their state of servitude. Similarly, uncorrupted Native Americans such as John Medicine and Dick Cottontail, who have managed to maintain their connection with the land, seem to apprehend their part in the collective struggle almost instinctively,

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whereas “the rest of the tribe”, enfeebled by its forced reliance on government handouts, has become too “damned lazy” to “turn over a finger to win back the whole state” (217). The subsequent practical training of those who have attained class consciousness is sketched out as a slow learning process, requiring iron self-discipline, persistence, forethought, and unwavering commitment. And it is precisely at this latter hurdle, Cunningham underscores, that the natural rebels stumble over their intuitive yet crude perception of the revolution to come. Largely ignorant of the political conditions outside their immediate purview, life-hungry Jim Tetley and his fellow rebels gorge themselves on the unfermented notion that “the revolution … was going to start in a few weeks, right here and now” (153) and subsequently come to resemble the heifer, which they encounter during their first raid: She was badly bloated from eating too many roasting ears. One of the boys whetted his pocket knife on his gun barrel, measured off a span from the left hip bone, and plunged the knife into her belly. Gas hissed out of the wound. “She’ll git all right,’ the boy said, ‘but maybe it’ll learn her a lesson.” (226)

Jim Tetley, like Jack Conroy’s Larry Donovan in The Disinherited (1933) a “true proletarian” of “crude vigor”, comes to personify both the promises and the shortcomings of the “green” rebellion. Jim’s native wit, keen sense of justice, and readiness to take direct action make him a natural revolutionary in the vein of Josh Green in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition or Bob Harper in Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint. Moreover, Jim’s awareness that poor whites like himself, dispossessed Indians like Dick Cottontail, and maltreated blacks like the Spanish-American War veteran Bill Johnson share a common interest in disposing of “this damned competitive system that made people liars and thieves”, shows him to be a prototypical Popular Front warrior (155). However, uneducated Jim, much like Josh and Bob, lacks both sufficient retrospection and adequate prescience to sustain an effective fight against the powers that be. Cunningham emphasizes that living almost exclusively in and for the moment, Jim’s admirable propensity for direct action remains hampered by his inability to think and act with an eye toward his long-


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term obligations in the ongoing revolutionary struggle. Thus, rather than fastidiously preparing the ground for “the big shake-up” by “gittin’” the “fellers … organized”, acquiring “some trainin’” in revolutionary tactics, and nurturing the next generation of revolutionaries by way of raising his son, Jim seeks instantaneous deliverance from all constricting harnesses (233, 133). In the wake of the botched insurgence, Jim is therefore all too easily overcome by a sense of postwar defeatism and, despite reassurances that he “ain’t changed” his “mind none about things”, abandons the revolutionary cause in a misdirected attempt at self-punishment for personal indiscretions (293). Resorting to the stark realism of late nineteenth-century Regionalist works such as Hamlin Garlands’ Main Traveled Roads (1891), Cunningham depicts Jim Tetley’s rural existence in Oklahoma as marked by hardships and limitations. After the family farm had been “mortgaged up” to send his older brother, Ted, “through high school and then to linotype school”, both parents suddenly die, leaving him to grow up as an uneducated sharecropper (39). “Married too damned soon” to the frugal neighbor’s daughter Jennie McGee, hardtoiling Jim barely manages to eke out a living for himself and his pregnant wife (37, 84). Harassed by the banks over outstanding loan payments, Jim teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. And in-between long working hours, rural life offers little diversions for twenty-fiveyear-old Jim. “He was just at the age to enjoy life and really have a little fun”, the narrator explains Jim’s pent-up frustration, “but there wasn’t a damned thing that he could do that he wanted to do. He was like a stallion hitched up to the plow …” (41). Too obsessed with his own plight, it takes young Tetley a while to fathom that his personal predicaments are part and parcel of the larger class conflicts that have been shaping up all around him. Talk of America’s impending war entry and the prospect of conscription first rouses Jim’s political curiosity. Invited by Mack McGee, his father-inlaw, and Uncle Billy Turner, Jim attends a Socialist anti-war rally, featuring Fred Niek (Oscar Ameringer) as keynote speaker. Although much of the speech is lost on Jim, he develops a sense of solidarity with the “farmers and poor people from town” and begins to share their anger directed at “damned capitalists and politicians”, seeking to “send boys to Europe to be killed” (49). Moreover, in the middle of

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debates concerning the veracity of German war atrocity stories, the “sudden” memory of having witnessed “a crowd of fellers cut a Negro once”, leads Jim to doubt “American faith and loyalty to the great fundamental doctrine of the Declaration of Independence” (47, 122). Following “the big Socialist meeting”, Jim becomes more receptive to the suffering around him. Listening to accounts of how “Old Filmore” and “a dozen other fellows” conspired with the local “Indian agent” to “relieve” Indian farmers of their land, Jim begins to understand his own inability “to get ahead” not as a personal fault, but as symptomatic of “this damned competitive system that made people liars and thieves” (58, 59, 155). At home, Jim’s subtle transformation from malcontent yet acquiescent sharecropper to class-conscious labor activist brings him into conflict with “good-hearted” but “old-fashioned” Jeannie. Increasingly irritated by his wife’s persistent demands for “a decent house and some decent clothes”, Jim challenges her confidence in the capitalist gospel of Protestant work ethics, arguing that “the whole damned system is rotten and people that work themselves to death ain’t got time to find out, and they don’t do a damned thing about it” (94, 93). But Jeannie, who “ke[eps] alive and me[ets] all her troubles” by “always … doing something”, remains undeterred (210). Dismissing Jim’s Socialist notions of “justice in the world” as unrealistic (“that won’t come in our time”), “commonsensical” Jeannie pleads with Jim to accept his lot and to keep on “workin’ like a nigger dog” (93). Outwardly, Jim acquiesces, makes a show of working twice as hard as before, and even stops reading articles in the Socialist Appeal To Reason.22 Inwardly, however, Jim grows more and more convinced 22

Founded in 1897 by Julius Wayland, Appeal to Reason published a mix of articles and book excerpts by radical thinkers such as Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, John Ruskin, and Edward Bellamy. Voicing positions from the far-left, the journal was frequently attacked and found itself under tight government scrutiny throughout its existence. Nevertheless, the journal proved to be very popular among union members and Socialists and at the height of its popularity in 1913 sold 700,000 copies weekly. With the outbreak of World War I, Appeal to Reason staunchly opposed American participation in the conflict. Following Wilson’s declaration of war, however, the journal came under government pressure and reversed its anti-war policy rather than ceasing publication. Circulation declined dramatically and the journal eventually folded in 1922. See Elliott Shore, “Selling Socialism: The Appeal


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that Jeannie’s trust in the redemptive powers of hard labor is ultimately self-destructive. A few days later, fixing up the barn while awaiting his son’s birth, Jim concludes for himself, “You can’t blame a capitalist for making money. Anybody would do the same thing. But if there is going to be any happiness in the world you’ve got to destroy the capitalists, just like rattlesnakes, and change the rules so there can’t be any more capitalists” (106). America’s official war entry accelerates Jim’s conversion from malcontent sharecropper to conscious working-class radical. Reading of efforts to pass national conscription laws, Jim no longer accepts war as something that somehow occurs naturally (103). Noting, furthermore, a steep increase in prices for farm supplies, Jim senses that “this war here is fought for profits” and becomes repulsed by the thought that “now the lives of millions of peaceful and innocent people had to be sacrificed because of property” (123). Thus, when Mack, who had become his political mentor, furtively hints that soon “hell’s gonna break loose over this war business”, Jim readily agrees to attend a coordinating meeting of the Working Class Union in Oklahoma City (124). Left to his own devices for a few hours prior to the meeting, impressionable Jim quickly forgets “about this socialist business” (148). Bedazzled by the big city lights, the bustle on the streets, the vaudeville shows, the motion picture theaters, and the expensive hotels, Jim daydreams of being wealthy and dating showgirls. But before long, the natural working-class hero begins feeling thoroughly out of place amidst the artificial glare of the city. Confronted with his own image in a mirror, Jim wonders, “why it was that when he got dressed up he didn’t look like much, but when he had on his old greasy overall he looked pretty good” (139). Based on this self-reflection, Jim intuits that it might not be so “swell to live in the city” after all, and resolves, “a man who had an education and lived in the city and made money might … not be a damned bit happier than a country jake in the long run” (140, 142). And in marked contrast to his degenerate brother, Ted, who seeks the anonymity of the big city in order to get drunk and amuse himself with prostitutes, Jim begins to detest the unthinking crowds of men who to Reason and The Radical Press in Turn-of-the-Century America”, Media, Culture & Society, VII/2 (April 1985), 147-68.

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lure after “girls with almost nothing on” and take in war pictures, “with smoke and airplanes”, for sheer “excitement” (142, 141, 204). Jim’s decision “to risk his life to help change the damned system” is premised less on what he hears during the WCU meeting than on his random perceptions of grave social ills around him (155). Not given to contemplating the particulars of how the local rebellion is supposed to trigger a full-scale revolution, Jim pays scant attention to the warnings of the yellow Socialist, Fred Niek, who advises the gathering: “Eferything you’re saying here tonight will pe on file in Washington tomorrow morning …. Now you poys forgit all about stoppin’ this war and scatter out very thin. You better hide your guns and ammunitions where you can’t never find ’em.” (149-51)

Caught up in the general excitement “about the rebellion that would start that July”, Jim jumps at the chance to make “things happen right away” and joins the revolutionary army without a moment’s hesitation (157). Under the local command of Comrade McGee, Comrade Tetley’s first assignment is to scout out and recruit potential revolutionaries among the “poorest farmers in the neighborhood” (156). This assignment not only brings Jim in closer contact with other “tenant farmers who could not borrow money from the banks because they had voted the socialist ticket”, but also acquaints him with the grievances of the county’s “Negro” and “Indian” populations (155). Although not always related directly through Jim’s consciousness, the novel’s interspersed accounts of the maltreatment of poor whites, defrauded Indians, and disenfranchised blacks suggest a rising awareness among the county’s farmers that social hierarchies based on either class or race serve the same exploitive ends. Chapter 2, for example, recounts apparently well-known stories of how local authorities conspire with wealthy landowners to defraud Indians of their properties. Following a particularly unscrupulous land allocation scheme, “some of the bucks got drunk in a saloon and told the saloon-keeper that the Indians were going to kill every white in the country” (13). This led to a “bad Indian scare” and Sheriff Gladson, hoping to ensure his re-election by quelling the rumored uprising, “rode into the Indian camp in the middle of the night”, randomly killing three members of the tribe (13-14). Chapter 8 relates how Bud


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Filmore acquired the “high-class mission furniture” owned by “a couple of nigger servants” for “little or nothing” (58-60). Chapter 23 describes Ned Wellhoff’s unsuccessful endeavors to procure a loan from the bank in order to pay for his wife’s medical treatment. Rebuffed by the banker, Ned tries to save every penny, but in the end must watch helplessly as his wife dies in childbirth. Chapter 25 provides a gruesome account of how Glen Rhelin, a rich landowner, first forces Bill Johnson, “Negro farmer and veteran of the SpanishAmerican War”, to eat a “raw mouse”, then brutally beats him, and finally has him thrown into jail for “tryin’ to steal … wheat” (194, 191, 198). And at the height of the rebellion in Chapter 29, the memory of a lynching Jim had observed as a boy leads him to identify with the victim of white racism: “He couldn’t help but put himself in the Negroes’ place and imagine a dozen hands gripping him while fists crushed against his mouth” (231). Given these shared experiences of violent expropriation, Jim’s recruitment efforts fall on fertile ground and the rebellion gathers momentum. Reassured by Comrade Carson, “the leader of the Oklahoma army”, that over a “hundred thousand” WCU members nationwide are preparing to “kick the capitalists out of power forever”, the motley band of local tenant farmers “order guns and ammunition right away from a mail order house” (157-58). “Hell” finally breaks “loose” on “the night of August 2” (211). Cutting fences and telegraph poles under the cover of night, Mack, Jim and “about a dozen” other rebels march toward their appointed meeting point, “adding a few new men to the group” along the way (218). But from the start, the novel leaves little doubt that the entire undertaking had been organized rather badly. Approaching several deserted houses, the rebels are stunned to find that a number of farmers have reneged on their promise to join the uprising. More bad news awaits them at the “Indian Camp”. There, only “John Medicine, Dick Cottontail and some others” stand ready to join the fight” (217). “The rest of the tribe lives off the government, and they’re so damned lazy that they won’t turn over a finger to win back the whole state”, a disappointed Mack explains, apparently forgetting previous Indian revolts that had been violently put down by Sheriff Gladson. News from adjoining counties are equally unsettling. “There’s been eight or nine of our boys arrested in Pottawatomie County”,

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Comrade Daniels, the sectional leader, reports: “The waterworks at Dewar was blown to hell and they got nine of our men in jail” (219). Despite these setbacks, however, the rebels proceed determinedly, showing themselves to be quite adept in the tactics of guerilla warfare. Jim and his multiracial commando burn a strategically important bridge, while another group carries out a successful raid against the police outpost. At dawn the rebels set up camp upon a pastured hill and for a brief moment experience the thrill of having established a truly egalitarian Socialist community. As the “big pole … with a red flag” goes up, Jim revels in the notion that “this was the first flag of the new worker’s and farmer’s republic” (227). Gathering around their hoisted banner, the exhausted men adopt the Indian custom of roasting green corn on an open fire, swap stories, share food, and feel a strong sense of racetranscending “solidarity”. “Up here on the hill Negroes were treated just like whites”, Jim contemplates. And in line with 1930s Popular Front sentiments, according to which “economic oppression and common cause were supposed automatically to erase white supremacy”, Cunningham has Jim explain: “it was always like this among socialist farmers because socialists knew that all working men white or black, were in the same boat” (230).23 Thus, when the time for “speechmaking” has come, Jim urges Bill Johnson, the black Spanish-American war veteran, to say “a little bit about how to march and fight” (238). Picking up on the men’s general feeling of solidarity, Johnson reminds his comrades: “… all of us boys has got to stick togetheh, no matteh if wea’h balck owa white owa red. And if we do that and get the otheh wukin’ people with us on owa mawch they ain’t nothin’ can stop us, even if we ain’t trained soljaws, all of us.” (238)

Politically potent and portended as these images of interracial working-class unity may be, Cunningham quickly refocuses the reader’s attention on the practical obstacles faced by the “green” rebels. Anxiously on the lookout for promised reinforcements, the inexperienced revolutionaries are beset by doubts as a full day passes 23

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “One or Two Things I Know About Us: Rethinking the Image and Role of the ‘Okies’”, Monthly Review, LIV/3 (July-August 2002), 3-14.


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and no orders arrive. “There was something wrong with Carson and the socialists in Oklahoma City”, Jim surmises on the second day, “or they would have got word through before this” (241). And sure enough, after two days of waiting in vain, it is not Comrade Carson and his troops, but a well-armed local posse lead by Sheriff Gladson that converges on the rebel’s hill. Spotting neighbors, acquaintances, and relatives among the vigilantes, one insurgent after another start[s] running (246). Even Mack and Jim eventually drop their guns and run off without having fired a single shot. Only stalwart Johnson and “about ten men, black and white” make a last stand, but are quickly overpowered. Watching his “scattered” comrades being “picked up one at a time” and awaiting his own turn, Jim is overwhelmed by a sense of defeatism (274). Afraid that he might be trapped “forever” in “the old work-house way of living”, Jim’s personal tragedy lies in the apprehension that “a change would have to come some time, but not soon enough to do [him] any good” (170, 291). Moreover, Jim’s private troubles are compounded by feelings of shame and guilt about a brief affair with Agnes McGee, his wife’s coy sister. So, when his brother threatens to expose the tryst, lest he sets a patriotic example by joining the army, Jim capitulates on all fronts: too cowardly to admit his marital indiscretion to Jennie, who had already become suspicious and signaled forgiveness, Jim selfishly agrees to the bargain, betraying not only his old friends and associates, but also abandoning his own wife and son. Turning a deaf ear to Jennie’s pleadings, Jim fatalistically resolves that it is “better” to “be dead and buried … than be dead and still ploddin’ away on top of the ground” (273, 290). At least for the moment, Jim shares Frederic Henry’s despairing assessment that the peasantry “is defeated from the start”.24 “But [the situation in Oklahoma] was really no different from anywhere else”, Jim contemplates: … the poor went around in a daze all their lives doing what they were told. And if they develop any wills of their own the banker got a bunch of town loafers and the sheriff to shoot hell out of them and arrest them. (291)

24

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 179.

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As Cunningham makes apparent, however, Jim’s paralyzing despair is only “characteristic of certain human types in specific social or historical circumstance”, because “beside and beyond” his selfassumed “solitariness, the common life, the strife and togetherness of other human beings, goes on as before”.25 Trying to rally his beaten troops for the battles still ahead, Mack concedes, “When we talked about overthrowin’ the capitalist system we was like a bunch of roosters in the henhouse crowin’ at midnight”, but “at the same time” avers unfalteringly, “you can be sure they’ll start crowin’ again in a few hours, and that time they’ll be right” (254). Hence, carted off to prison, Jim’s beaten yet still defiant fellow rebels find consolation in the fact that “at least” they “won’t be raisin’ wheat for the soldiers to eat while they’re killin’ Dutchmen” (283). Far from signaling surrender, the rebels’ choice of imprisonment over forced enlistment becomes a final public gesture of resistance, leading one of their guards to reflect that “he didn’t want to go to war either” (282). That “none” of “those farmers who had been released on good behavior” can be cajoled into joining the army is a further indication of the rebels’ determination to continue their “struggle and strife” by different means (287). Rather than resigning in despair, some of the farmers “grab their guns and take to the sticks and hide out, like the members of the ‘Jones Family’”, while others such as McSlarrow and Uncle Bill quietly regroup and organize “secret get-togethers” (204, 292).26 Told in no uncertain terms by his former comrades “that considerin’” his “goin’ off to the army” he “ought” not “to come back any more to this here community”, the ostracized protagonist appears destined to become “one of these God-damned dead heroes” (292-93). Yet, Cunningham ends the novel on a hopeful note. Waving his son goodbye as he boards the train bound for the boot camp, “Jim remember[s] all at once something that Mack had said: That kid of yours will maybe help finish up this job that we made such a mess of” (301-302). If nothing else, Cunningham reiterates in this final scene, 25

Lukács, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 20. “The Jones Family”, Cunningham explains in his novel, “was an organization of fellows who didn’t want to go to war, and they were hiding out in the timber and in caves in the hills, and they came at night to houses of people they knew to get grub” (205). 26


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Jim has planted the seed of the coming revolution both literally and figuratively. For even though his cowardly bargain might have prevented him from raising his own son, his very example will serve future generations of revolutionaries both as a warning and an inspiration. At last, spotting a newspaper headline announcing, “Lenin and Trotsky Seize Power in Russia”, Jim realizes that he had abandoned hope too hastily. Personal time, Jim must learn, is seldom in sync with historical time. His closing resolve to “read all about the bloody reign in Russia” as soon as the “boy in the seat ahead” would discard the paper seems to suggest that Jim will “watch his chance” to join the working-class struggle once more (302). Following the Armistices of 1918, America’s intelligentsia – at first shocked, then morbidly delighted by the irate poetry and indignant prose of young soldier-literati – came to perceive the Great War as a pivotal traumatic event that had altered human relations forever. Most average Americans, however, quickly came to regard the Great War as nothing more than a botched prelude to a time of unprecedented wealth, prosperity, and personal freedom. Throughout the 1920s, consumerism reached record heights as unemployment figures dropped and an increasing number of young men and women filled white-collar jobs. But with the onset of Depression in the early 1930s, old class conflicts again intensified and the wartime experiences of profiteering capitalists, calling in local militia and federal troops to violently subdue strikes in New England, Arizona, and Seattle, assumed a new presence in the public mind.27 Thus, during the labor disputes of the 1930s, union flyers would frequently condemn patterns of governmental interference on behalf of big business by recalling the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1917.28

27

From 1914 to 1920, the IWW alone led over 150 strikes, including America’s first general strike in Seattle (1919). Many of these strikes were brutally put down by state and federal troops. The 1917 silver mine strike in Arizona led to the infamous Bisbee Deportation of 1,100 union members to Columbus, New Mexico. See The Tree of Liberty: A Documentary History of Rebellion and Political Crime in America, eds Nicholas N. Kittrie and Eldon D. Wedlock (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998). 28 Kittrie and Wedlock, The Tree of Liberty, 312.

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Similarly, in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), arguably the most influential work of Social-Critical Realism in the twentieth-century, John Steinbeck demonstrates how lingering images of mustard gas attacks on the Western Front could be transhistorically mobilized to denounce present mechanisms of working-class oppression: The land fell into fewer hands, the number of disposed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent on arms, for gas to protect the great holdings … more and more families scampered on the highways, looking for crumbs from the great holdings, lusting after the land beside the roads. The great owners formed associations for protection, and they met to discuss ways to intimidate, to kill, to gas.29

Moreover, the memory of pervious conflicts serve as frequent reminders in The Grapes of Wrath that war (or the use of war-like methods) has toppled more than one regime in the past: And always they were in fear of a principle—three hundred thousand—if they ever move under a leader—the end. Three hundred thousand, hungry and miserable; if they ever know themselves, the land will be theirs, and all the gas, all the rifles in the world won’t stop them.30

While it would be stretching it to read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a sequel to Cunningham’s and Sinclair’s Proletarian war novels, certain parallels and continuities are obvious: increasingly violent class conflicts, strikes, localized government repression, communal resistance, and the specter of social revolution provide the background in all three works. The plea for a leader in the passage above recall Mack’s vision of “thousands of fellers who are real leaders and revolutionists” (253). Jim Casy’s Christ-like sacrifice in the labor struggle is reminiscent of Jimmie Higgins’ martyr’s death. And Tom Joad’s development from displaced farmhand to determined labor activist resembles the learning curve of the protagonists in The Green Corn Rebellion and Jimmie Higgins. These are, of course, patterns one finds in any number of Proletarian novels. But in light of the narrator’s references to wartime 29 30

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 1992), 324-25. Ibid., 325.


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profiteering above (“Get enough wars and cotton’ll hit the ceiling”) and tractors rolling over the fields like tanks in Chapter 5, Tom Joad appears as the inheritor of Jim Tetley’s and Jimmie Higgins’ lost struggles, who picks up the fight for working-class liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.31 Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion clearly resist authoritative literary assessments, according to which the disillusioned and anxiety-ridden protest novels by young male war veterans are the sole depositories of the “reality of modern warfare”. Written explicitly to re-present and re-shape the working-class memory of World War I, Sinclair’s and Cunningham’s war novels not only seek to preserve, but to historicize the war-related conflicts on the home front. Put another way, they represent the Great War not as an isolated (and isolating) event, but within the larger context of past and future working-class struggles toward liberation. Hence, unlike middle-class observers of American culture such as the Review of Reviews, which in January of 1914 confidentially claimed that “a period of peace, industry and world-wide friendship is dawning”, the protagonists in The Green Corn Rebellion and Jimmie Higgins come of age within an American prewar society torn by violent class conflicts, industrial upheavals, and racial hatred.32 In these Proletarian Bildungsromans, the recognition that ruthless capitalists conspire with corrupt politicians to exploit the masses, impoverished farmers nearly starve to death, strikes are crushed, Indians are forcibly removed, and blacks are routinely lynched precedes and in many ways supersedes the first-hand experience of mass-slaughter in Europe’s trenches. The Great War abroad is thus presented as much less inconceivable, shocking, and ideal shattering than in liberal protest novels by “lost generation” authors, for it ultimately confirms what experience had taught Jim and Jimmie all along about the inherent flaws of the capitalist system and the shortcomings of American democracy. Based upon this pre-knowledge, then, the Great War – far from inducing paralyzing trauma – offers a tangible opportunity to mobilize the working classes since it amplifies inherent conflicts of interest and 31

Ibid., 48. Quoted in Walter Millis, Road to War – America, 1914-1917 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), 15.

32

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throws the government into a crisis of legitimization, which, in turn, results in the deployment of nationalistic sentiment and governmental force against dissenters. Images of growing labor unrest, anti-war rallies, strikes, acts of subversion, and outright rebellions henceforth highlight the possibility of coordinated resistance during periods of severe government repression and forcefully reiterate the need for working-class solidarity, which, most explicitly in Cunningham’s version, must transcend racial and ethnic boundaries based upon the recognition of a common cause. In the end, though, Sinclair’s and Cunningham’s literary attempts to provide a usable past of the internal and external conflicts that had gripped the American working classes during the Great War remain fraught with a mechanistic optimism that not just veils, but indeed reinforces essentialist notions about race and gender behind the smokescreen of the coming, all-redeeming revolution. In both texts, it is the emergence of (or struggle for) an unaffected, native-born, white male working-class consciousness that becomes the primary carrier of America’s revolutionary promise. Foreign-born immigrants, blacks, and Indians may join this historical movement toward general liberation, The Green Corn Rebellion and Jimmie Higgins point out, but only provided they learn to align their own interests and strategies of opposition with those of the class conscious white proletariat. The black war veteran Bill Johnson and the Indian farmer Dick Cottontail in The Green Corn Rebellion as well as Stankewitz, “the little Roumanian Jew”, and “the little Jew” from New York, whom Jimmie meets in Jimmie Higgins provide glowing examples of how minority concerns and grievances are to be subsumed within the larger common cause. But most racially and ethnically marked characters in Sinclair’s and Cunningham’s Proletarian Bildungsromans fail to understand this and are hence depicted as docile victims of the capitalist system. The “lazy” Indians, living “off the government”, in The Green Corn Rebellion and the happy-go-lucky “plantation niggers from Louisiana and Alabama” in Jimmie Higgins clearly fall into the latter category.33 In a similar vein, the majority of female characters are portrayed as natural conservatives, who are so engrossed in their household duties 33

Sinclair, Jimmie Higgins, 214.


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that they are incapable of developing any revolutionary consciousness of their own. Upwardly mobile, both Jimmie’s and Jim’s wives vigorously object to their husbands’ involvement in radical politics, but eventually acquiesce, comprehending that their “first duty was to [their] men folks” (156). And the few politically active women that do appear in Jimmie Higgins are also quickly relegated to a supporting role in their husbands’ political endeavors. Hence, once safely married off to Comrade Gerrity, the self-proclaimed “advanced feminist” Evelyn puts aside “her handbag” full of “leaflets on Birth Control”, and instead agitates on behalf of her husband’s conscientious objector campaign.34 Barbara Foley’s general conclusion in Radical Representation that “many proletarian novels, despite their projection of what Gold called ‘revolutionary élan,’ uncritically reproduced a range of received assumptions about selfhood … ‘the Negro question,’ and ‘the woman question,’” to some extent holds also for Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins and Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion. Moreover, by clinging rather rigidly to a Marxist teleology of the orthodox strand, Sinclair and Cunningham’s Proletarian war novels further testify to what Foley identifies as “the left’s shortcomings in breaking with inherited ways of thinking and doing”.35 And yet, especially when considered within the narrower context of the political, social, and cultural significance of the Great War, what makes both Jimmie Higgins and The Green Corn Rebellion noteworthy is their effort to preserve and retell the wartime struggles of the working classes in such a manner that their “revolutionary élan” and Utopian desires become inheritable and thus form a potentially transformative link with the past.

34 35

Ibid., 71. Foley, Radical Representation, 444.

SECTION III WORLD WAR I AS FEMINIST UTOPIA

CHAPTER 7 Pacifism, Resistance, and Feminist Utopias Never a voice from a woman to say how she would like the world. Now is the time for practical Utopias.1

In 1915, as Europe’s war toll was mounting and hopes for a quick peace settlement were fading, Charlotte Perkins Gilman presented readers of her magazine Forerunner with a very different world: a world without “wars”, “kings”, “priest”, and “aristocracies;” a rural world of fecund pastures and lush peach groves, where disease and poverty are unknown; a world in which the upbringing and education of children is the highest societal duty; a world dedicated to the pursuit of beauty, health, intellect, and strength of character; a world populated by “the best kind of people”, who are bound “together—not by competition, but by united action”.2 Ominously, Herland is a world devoid of men. For Gilman, whose Women and Economics (1898) had established her as one of America’s preeminent feminists and Fabian-style Socialists, masculinity, warfare, and domination were inextricably linked. Gilman, like most of her contemporaries, subscribed to the theory of innate gender differences. Men, according to this generally accepted notion, possessed certain sex traits that predisposed them to a combative, competitive, and highly individualistic (“self-expressive”) behavior, which found full expression within patriarchic or, in her words, “androcentric” societies. Women, by contrast, were born with a

1

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “A Woman’s Utopia”, 1907, in Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women before 1950, ed. Carol Farley Kessler (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1995), 135. 2 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (New York: Dover, 1998), 51.

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strong mothering instinct that made them peaceable, nurturing, and cooperative. Therefore war was seen as an essentially masculine activity (“unbridled masculinity” at its “absurdest extreme”, Gilman called it), whereas peace was understood to be the natural domain of female action.3 “Maleness means war”, Gilman asserts unequivocally in The Man-Made World (1911), thereby offering a seemingly unimpeachable biological rationale for the necessity of broader female involvement in the arena of public politics, where women could put their inherent propensities for peacemaking and peacekeeping into the service of universal “betterment”.4 Given the right circumstances, then, women could forge a model society devoid of the aggression, competitiveness, and domination that had hitherto characterized “our man-made world”. Like the majority of fin-de-siècle feminists, Gilman considered herself a “pacifist, of settled convictions”, arguing that “peace is a primary essential to human growth”. At the same time, however, Gilman made it clear that her brand of pacifism did not entail a commitment to passive non-resistance. “One may be an extremely peaceful citizen, quite gunless and knifeless, yet fight valiantly when it becomes necessary”, she explained in “Peace in Three Pieces” (1916).5 As Gilman saw it, the biblical command to “love and serve” one’s enemy was a call to direct action that might sometimes even demand the use of violent resistance. Recounting the genesis of her Utopian female society in Herland, Gilman outlines such a condition under which violent action becomes indispensable. After a combination of natural disasters and prolonged warfare had annihilated most men of the ur-society, a band of male slaves “rose in revolt”, killing everyone except the young girls, whom they intended to enslave. But instead of submitting themselves passively, the “infuriated virgins” without delay instigated a second rebellion and “in sheer desperation slew their brutal conquerors”.6 Interestingly enough, 3

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Man-Made World, or, Our Androcentric Culture (New York: Charlton, 1911), 211. 4 Ibid., 292. 5 Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “Peace in Three Pieces”, Forerunner, VII (July 1916), 270. 6 Gilman, Herland, 47.

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it is this second, the gender revolt rather than the first, the class revolt that is sanctioned by the text. In an obvious attempt to revise Marxist notions of history as a series of class struggles, Gilman predicates her visions for a better world on a successful woman’s revolution. And the Great War, she seems to hint, might just infuriate the “new mothers of a new world” enough to rise up in “sheer desperation” and to once and for all put an end to “men’s wars”, “men’s quarrels”, and “men’s competition”.7 Needless to say, Gilman’s radical feminist Utopia did not come to fruition. Still, as more and more women writers formulated their responses to the man-made slaughter abroad, they not only grew progressively more conscious of the war’s potential to alter established gender relations, but also began to spawn competing visions of a Herland that might fill the fast expanding void of No Man’s Land. When war erupted in Europe, women as well as men were taken by surprise. The two decades preceding the Great War had been a time of unrelenting optimism in the perfectibility of human society. Under liberal-minded President Wilson, the progressive movement flourished and “there was reform after reform”.8 Young idealists, Malcolm Cowley recalls, were convinced that “the world was going in their direction, the new standards were winning out, and America in ten or fifteen years would not only be a fatherland of the arts, but also a socialist commonwealth”.9 War among the “civilized nations” seemed unfeasible. “It is difficult now”, literary critic Amy Loveman wrote during the Second World War, “to realize how sincerely the men and women of the first decade of the twentieth century believed that humanity was on the march to happiness”.10 Once this “march to happiness” had come to a screeching halt, though, some women seemed to remember Gilman’s dour verdict of 1911, according to which “unbridled masculinity means the kind of 7

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The New Mothers of a New World”, Forerunner, IV (June 1913), 148. 8 Cooperman, World War 1 and the American Novel, 7. 9 Quoted in Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942), 172. 10 Amy Loveman, “Then and Now”, Saturday Review of Literature, 5 August 1944, 45

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civilization … that bursts forth, over and over, in the riot of open war”.11 “After this war, there will be many other wars”, American field nurse Ellen La Motte augurs in her Introduction to The Backwash of War (1915).12 The narrator in Dorothy Canfield’s Home Fires in France reminds herself “and man had made it”, while contrasting the “man-wrought” beauty of a church nave with the “scarred, mutilated, sightless faces of young men in their prime”.13 Increasingly dissatisfied with the “masculine management of the existing Peace Societies”, which, as Jane Addams put it, had “lulled” the “women of this country into inattention to the great military question of the war”, female activists involved in suffrage (such as Carrie Chapman Catt), social work (such as Lillian Wald), and labor reform (such Mary Dier) quickly formed a new peace alliance, determined to take matters into their own hands.14 On 29 August 1914, more than 1,500 women, clad in white gowns and beating muffled drums, gathered in the streets of New York City to stage one of the first anti-war rallies in the United States. Several months later, the Women’s Peace Party (WPP) was founded with Jane Addams at its head. By mid-1915, the fast-growing WPP could already boast over 40,000 active members in all forty-eight states. In line with the accepted idea that women are natural peacemakers, the platform of the WPP called for the enlistment of “all American women in arousing the nations … to abolish war”. But the peace agenda was also understood as a means to push for women’s rights in general. Among other things, the party called for “the extension of the franchise to women” and demanded that women be given their equal “share in deciding between war and peace in all the courts of high debate: within the home, the school, the church, the industrial order, and the state”.15 Perceiving that upholding the moral high ground in homes, schools, and churches had proved insufficient, the WPP sought 11

Gilman, The Man-Made World, 211. Ellen N. La Motte, The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse (New York: Putnam’s, 1915), vi. 13 Dorothy Canfield, Home Fires in France (New York: Holt, 1918), 83. 14 Jane Addams in a letter to Carrie Chapman Catt, dated 21 December 1914, quoted in Erika Kuhlman, Petticoats and White Feathers: Gender Conformity, Race, the Progressive Peace Movement, and the Debate over War, 1895-1919 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1997), 38. 15 Quoted in Kuhlman, Petticoats and White Feathers, 39. 12


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direct involvement of women in business and government. The terrible man-made war abroad, it seems, provided American women with the rhetorical armaments to demand an equal say in matters of state affairs. Numerous WWP poems, broadsides, and songs illustrate how female peace activists sought to exploit their supposed moral authority within the domestic sphere so as to gain greater influence on the political stage. Mina Packard’s poem “Woman’s Armaments” (1915) graphically highlights the dehumanizing impact of warfare on the nation’s children: It makes the baby faces, So pale; and scared; and white! It makes the boys, so young and fair, We taught should never fight, Go out to kill! and scatter blood And brains upon the dirt! Till those fair lithesome bodies Lie still! and cold! inert!

Based on these horrific images of young male “brains” scattered “upon the dirt”, the poem concludes with a provocative challenge to place state affairs into caring female hands: Just give a women power and see How she will heed the calls, To hand out earthly comforts Instead of cannon balls!16

With the shadow of war hanging over the nation, Packard and her sisters in the peace movement are able to envision a women’s republic that resembles Gilman’s Herland insofar as it legitimizes female demands for political power both on moral and on practical grounds (women “hand out earthly comforts” rather than “cannon balls” and prevent the decimation of youth). Before long, however, the WWP’s sway over the public war debate started to wane. Following the German torpedo attack on the RMS 16

Quoted in Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets, 50.

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Lusitania, ideological rifts between radicals, moderates, and conservatives within the various women’s peace and relief organizations widened. “How terrible is this Lusitania sinking—the loathsome brutes”, Gertrude Atherton recorded privately, before publicly breaking with Jane Addams in a 1916 New York Times piece, wherein she declared that the pacifistic doctrine of nonresistance now seemed “the one thing more abominable than war”.17 All the while, the anglophile “preparedness” movement was gathering steam, employing some of the same arguments and tactics that the WPP had used so effectively. In posters, pamphlets, and songs, the German state was represented as the epitome of male aggressiveness and cruel domination. Racialized images of brutishlooking, dark-skinned, broad-shouldered, and hairy “Huns” raping a feminized Belgium were circulated widely through the press. Pointedly expressing the racist Zeitgeist, one of Edith Wharton’s characters in A Son at the Front (1923) pronounces, “Germans not fit to live with white people”.18 The highly publicized execution of the English nurse Edith Cavell in 1915 furnished additional proof of the Teutonic male’s barbarian misogyny. One after another, female peace activists broke ranks and openly sided with the cause of the Allies. Gilman distanced herself from the WPP’s internationalist peace platform in 1916. Never shy to expound and expand her racist notions, she declared Germany a “Frankenstein among the nations”, “an ultra-masculine culture, in a male world, finding natural associates among the Mohamedans [sic], with their theory of glorified war and subject womanhood”.19 Wharton’s and Gilman’s inclination to cast the war in racist terms as “a culture war” is indicative of a strong Nativist strain in turn-of-the-century feminism. Writing chiefly about Gilman’s work, but making wider claims about the ideology of American fin-de-siècle feminism, Susan S. Lanser notes that “despite her socialist values” and “her active participation in movements for reform … Gilman … [frequently] 17

Quoted in Emily Wortis Leider, California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), 265 and 268. 18 Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front (New York: Scribner, 1923), 132. 19 “Studies in Social Pathology” and “Growth and Combat”, Forerunner, VII (May 1916), 297 and 307.


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inscribed racism, nationalism, and classism into her proposals for social change”.20 Of course, as Lanser also points out, white middleclass feminists were not the only one’s plagued by anxieties about race and ethnicity. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writes Lanser, “white, Christian, American-born intellectuals—novelists, political scientists, economists, sociologists, crusaders for social reform—not only shared this racial anxiety, but, as John Higham puts it, ‘blazed the way for ordinary nativists’ by giving popular racism an ‘intellectual respectability’”.21 It therefore seems scarcely astounding that, especially following Wilson’s proclamation of war in April 1917, Creel’s propaganda machine was so successful in unleashing a wave of “100 percent Americanism” that engulfed most white, native-born middle-class women. As pacifism became a treasonous concept, American women felt compelled to demonstrate their patriotism by actively supporting the war effort as “war mothers”, nurses, relief workers, shell makers, streetcar conductors, registration officers, propagandists, and informants. Even stalwart Jane Addams worked for Hoover’s Food Administration, allowed Hull House to become a registration center for draft-aged men, and in 1918 spoke at several Liberty Loan rallies.22 This move from pacifism to preparedness to all-out support of American military invention can also be traced through best-selling war novels by female authors such as Temple Bailey’s The Tin Soldier (1918) and Edith Wharton’s The Marne (1918), where initially pacifistic young women are made to realize that it is their womanly duty to aid and cheer their fighting men. “I must go out to them”, Bailey’s Drusilla resolves, joins the corps of war nurses, and subsequently intones Christian hymns for the “tired and spent” soldiers, who see “in her … America coming fresh and unworn to fight a winning battle to the end”.23

20

Susan S. Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America”, Feminist Studies, XV/3 (Fall 1989), 432. 21 Lanser, “Feminist Criticism, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’ and the Politics of Color in America”, 430. 22 Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience, 141. 23 Temple Bailey, The Tin Soldier (Philadelphia: Grossett and Dunlap, 1918), 456.

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Marice Rutledge Gibson Hale’s Children of Fate (1917) is one of the very few novels written during the war that contests such patriotically prescribed female role of vacuous cheerleader. Perhaps anticipating the harsh backlash against perceived female jingoism by disillusioned male veterans, Natalie, the novel’s American heroine, comes to regret having idealized warfare. Word that Pierre, her French fiancé, is eager to return to the front after sustaining a wound at Verdun, prompts Natalie to accuse herself and her sex of abetting senseless slaughter: What had they done? …. For such a war, made by men and upheld by women, menaced generations …. These men sent to kill, for one reason or another, killed in the name of women. Such women as she, Natalie, were responsible for their deeds; in the intricate workings of their minds, they themselves labeled their killing with fair names.24

But for the most part, both female and male writers agitated with increasing vigor on behalf of America’s official mission “to make the world safe for democracy”. Under the auspices of the Vigilantes, Gertrude Atherton, for instance, edited several numbers of a propaganda organ called The American Woman’s Magazine, whose motto stressed “Service-Loyalty-Responsibility”.25 Correspondingly, Dorothy Canfield portrays “a little Kansas leaven” in Home Fires in France whose display of democratic duty and loyalty toward the “poor Belgian mothers” shames the young men of her midwestern village into volunteering for war. Nationalistic frenzy provides one explanation for the women’s embrace of war. But there were other, much more practical considerations that drew women toward supporting the war effort. Similar to African American leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois, many suffragists reasoned that their work in the service and supply lines 24

Marice Rutledge Gibson Hale, Children of Fate (New York: Stokes, 1917), 72. Emily Wortis Leider, California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), 279-80. The Vigilantes, co-founded in 1916 by the German-American poet Herman Hagedorn, was a military-style organization of intellectuals and writers dedicated to propagate American interventionism abroad. Among its recruits were prominent literary figures such as Edith Thomas, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, George Washington Cable, and Hamlin Garland.

25


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would accelerate their ascent to full citizenship. As Alice Hay Wadsworth noted in a 1917 New York Times editorial: “Women’s essential contribution to the country’s war needs apparently has emphasized their claim to political recognition, and the year 1917 has recorded the greatest actual gains in the history of the American suffrage movement.”26 At least with regard to female suffrage, ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 bore out Wadsworth’s assessment. On a more immediate level, the war offered women unprecedented economic independence and social freedoms. As young men were sent overseas, middle-class women, who had previously been confined to domestic and charity work, suddenly found it to be their patriotic duty to seek gainful employment outside the home in a wide variety of occupations, ranging from industrial jobs to higher salaried clerical and managerial positions. “All told”, Neil A. Wynn calculates, “one million additional women entered wage labor during the war, and within the female work force there was a considerable shift as women already in employment moved into better-paying occupations”.27 Growing economic independence translated into greater personal freedom as well. Observed the British Daily Mail: The wartime business girl is to be seen any night dining out alone or with a friend in the moderate-price restaurants in London. Formerly she would never have had her evening meal in town unless in the company of a man friend. But now with money and without men she is more and more beginning to dine out.28

As Henry Sydnor Harrison’s portrayal of emancipated female characters in his 1922 novel Saint Teresa suggests, quite a few women in wartime New York took similar liberties.29 In the eyes of quite a few women, then, war not merely freed them from the constraints of traditional gender roles, but made “the blood course through the[ir] veins” by sending them “up the scaling-ladder, 26

Quoted in Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity, 149. Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity, 139. 28 Quoted in Dorothy Goldman, Women Writers and the Great War (New York: Twayne, 1995), 14. 29 See Henry Sydnor Harrison, Saint Teresa: A Novel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922). 27

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and out into ‘All Man’s Land’”.30 In the absence of men, women recognized a historical chance to escape from the confines of the home for good. “I think we may write it down in history that on August 14, 1914, the door of the Doll’s House opened”, muses American journalist Mable Potter Daggett in Woman Wanted (1918): She who stood at the threshold where the tides of the ages surged, waved a brave farewell to lines of gleaming bayonets going down the street. Then the clock on her mantel ticked off the wonderful moment of the centuries that only God himself had planned. The force primeval that had held her in bondage, this is what should set her free.31

In The White Morning, Gertrude Atherton’s Mariette captures the same exhilarating sense of escaping the “Doll’s House” more succinctly: “Think of the freedom of being a Red Cross nurse, and all the men at the front.”32 “It is a marvelous life”, the unnamed nurse “with the Rank of Lieutenant” in Mademoiselle Miss (1916) concurs, “and strangely enough, despite all the tragedy, I call it a healthy one … for the first time in my life I begin to feel as a normal being should”.33 Similarly, the war widows Marguerite and Madeleine in Canfield’s Home Fires in France quickly regain their health and feel “as strong as ever” once they put themselves in charge of running a “tenement-house for children” and a pharmacy respectively.34 And for all her inflated patriotism, Temple Bailey’s Drusilla seems very cognizant of the war’s potential to turn customary gender relations upside-down, when as a female ambulance driver in France she encounters “men as tender as women, and women as brave as men”.35

30

Harriet Stanton Blatch, Mobilizing Woman-Power (New York: The Womans Press, 1918), 86. 31 Mabel Potter Daggett, Woman Wanted: The Story Written in Blood Red Letters on the Horizon of the Great World War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1918), 91-92. 32 Gertrude Atherton, The White Morning: A Novel of the Power of the German Women in Wartime (New York: Stokes, 1918), 8. 33 Anonymous, Mademoiselle Miss: Letters from an American Girl Serving with the Rank of a Lieutenant in a French Army Hospital at the Front (Boston: Butterfield, 1916), 4. 34 Canfield, Home Fires in France, 289 and 257. 35 Bailey, The Tin Soldier, 360.


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“Women writers”, Dorothy Goldman points out, “almost without exception, do not … describe warfare”.36 Instead, many of them represent a home front vacated by man that affords woman longsought opportunities to reach and create “A State of Her Own”.37 As Daggett saw it, the “star of opportunity has taken its course directly from the battlefields of Europe”.38 Suddenly, amid the upheaval of war, Utopia – the mythical nowhere – appeared to be localizable on the women-dominated home front. To be sure, in foregrounding the war’s liberating impact on white middle-class women, war writings by “American lady authors” might, as Cooperman asserts, appear to be “utterly unrealistic”.39 But then again, not a few commentators have argued persuasively that it was the decidedly unreal experiences of working in ammunition plants, organizing war relief funds, performing clerical duties, associating with men professionally, and dinning out alone that contributed to making the “single, highly educated, economically independent New Woman” of the 1920s a reality.40 “The growth of women’s political consciousness went hand in hand with their [novel] experience of war work”, Goldman assesses.41 And while it might be true that “American lady authors” by and large tended to romanticize warfare, their home front novels certainly complicate the picture of women’s complicity in the slaughter of millions. For even as most female writers were abandoning the peace plank in 1917, they continued to challenge and subvert patriarchal structures of domination, including what they understood to be a universally masculine proclivity for destruction and bloodshed. “Sick or well, German, English, French, I loathe them all alike”, the politically radicalized feminist Heloise declares in The White Morning and prays, “‘O God! … Deliver us! Deliver us from war and deliver us from men’.”42 Above and beyond more or less radical indictments against male aggression, war writings by American women such as Mildred 36

Goldman, Women Writers and the Great War, 195. Jean Pfaelzer, The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form (Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1984), 141. 38 Daggett, Woman Wanted, 63. 39 Cooperman, World War 1 and the American Novel, 21. 40 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 245. 41 Goldman, Women Writers and the Great War, 15. 42 Atherton, The White Morning, 65. 37

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Aldrich, Mable Potter Daggett, Temple Baily, Willa Cather, Dorothy Canfield Canfield, and Gertrude Atherton sketch out the contours of a new, female-centered society that is to emerge from the ruins of an androcentric society. Stressing, in Aldrich’s words, “that it is the women who are changing”, they depict independent women neglecting their household duties, laboring in factories, running businesses, forming collectives, rejecting motherhood, interrogating heterosexual relationships, instigating revolutions, and attending to state affairs, thereby replacing traditional concepts of “True Womanhood” with distinctly modern images of the “New Woman”.43 In the eyes of radical middle-class feminists such as Gertrude Atherton, it was precisely through her involvement in the war effort that early twentieth-century woman came into her own as both a homo economicus and a homo politicus. As Atherton observed in 1917: Never prior to the Great War, was such an enormous body of women awake after the lethargic submission of centuries, and clamoring for their rights. Never before have millions of women been supporting themselves; never before had they even contemplated organization and the direct political attack.44

Atherton’s anticipation of “the direct political attack” notwithstanding, literary representations of self-supporting and politically active women in home front novels remain in conflict and often revert to valorizations of matrimony, motherhood, and domesticity. The very title of Dorothy Canfield’s Home Fires in France suggests a fundamental separation of spheres. Among other things, Enid’s failure to provide Claude with a good home in Willa Cather’s One of Ours seems to be presented as one reason for why he marches into battle. Marriage – although liberalized – and childbearing, it turns out, remain the liberated heroine’s ultimate raison d’être in Gilman’s Herland. And even Atherton’s own The White Morning ends with a picture of the triumphant revolutionary,

43

Mildred Aldrich, The Peak of the Land: The Waiting Months on the Hilltop from the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes to the Second Victory on the Marne (Boston: Small and Maynard, 1918), 196. 44 Gertrude Atherton, The Living Present (New York: Stokes, 1917), 207.


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Gisela, mourning her dead lover, “who had been her other part and whose heart and hers she had slain”.45 These novels centered on the female war experiences, utterly unrealistic as they may be, clearly perform notable cultural work in that they contribute to a general broadening of “the horizons of expectations for women”, which, according to Francis Shor, helped to push socio-political concepts of womanhood beyond the ideology of separate spheres.46 More specifically, in projecting feminist Utopian desires onto the home front experiences of female characters, women writers were able to harness conventions of the Utopian genre in ostensibly realistic – because at once experientially verifiable – fashion so as to criticize and revise existing gender relations.47 Carol A. Kolmerten has shown that throughout late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers effectively employed Utopian forms in a three-pronged assault against structures of patriarchal society. Wartime perceptions of women seemed to further substantiate the grounds of such efforts.48 First, Kolmerten points out, Utopian writings facilitated a sustained critique of what many women perceived to be “destructive male values”. With the outbreak of hostilities in Europe, many women saw war-making as the utmost expression of inherent patriarchal desires to dominate through brute force. Thus popular depictions of the hyper-masculine Hun provided women writers with easy, politically acceptable targets. Secondly, following in the footsteps of earlier feminist social novels such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), the adaptation of Utopian forms allowed for the creation of “a supportive female45

Atherton, The White Morning, 174. Shor, Utopianism and Radicalism in a Reforming America, 28. See also Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982). 47 Hence, at the request of her publisher, Atherton appended her fictional account of a “Woman’s Revolution” in Germany with “An Argument for My ‘The White Morning’”. 48 It is interesting to note that the Great War occurred at a time when Utopian fictions were in vogue. As Darby Lewes writes in Dream Revisonaries: Gender and Genre in Women’s Utopian Fiction, 1870-1920 (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1995: “Between 1869 and 1920, amid a general increase in women’s writing, there was a sudden efflorescence of utopian narratives. More than a hundred texts of astonishing diversity appeared: profeminist and antifeminist, socialist and capitalist; placed in Kentucky or London, or on Mars; set in the past, present, future, or outside time altogether” (1). 46

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centered community”, which, if not exclusively female, is at least guided by feminine values.49 Given the real or imagined absence of men during war, such creations of female-centered communities not only appeared to be quite plausible but indeed indispensable and hence found their way quite naturally into many war novels by women. Thirdly, the Utopian form permitted the depiction of female characters who find fulfillment in a variety of roles, activities, trades, and professions that in real life were occupied by males. By 1917, this too seemed less Utopian than ever, for the enormous national war effort required women to take over scores of jobs that had been vacated by draft-aged males. Home front novels by women abound with female characters who not only work as nurses or social workers, but also as farmers, bakers, doctors, pharmacists, shopkeepers, and business executives. As the following discussion of Dorothy Canfield’s Home Fires in France and Gertrude Atherton’s The White Morning will show in greater detail, home front novels written from a feminist perspective tend to heighten Utopian expectations released by war in order to revise and to realign existing gender relations. And in doing so, women writers of the Great War became intimately involved in the often loud and impassioned gender debates of the war and postwar periods. Through their sometimes hesitant sometimes provocatively brazen representations of the war’s liberating potential for women, they rattled the very foundations of a patriarchal society that struggled to come to grips with the ripple effects of industrial warfare. Depictions of women, who seemed to somehow miraculously grow independent and self-assertive amidst the turmoil of war, sent an unmistakable signal that male supremacy was volatile. The general sense of disillusionment that was to follow the war only enhanced these signals, and consequentially triggered a fierce antifeminist backlash. Still, both Atherton’s radical Utopian dream in The White Morning and Canfield’s somewhat nostalgic vision of a gentler, kinder, feminized society already seem to carry their own seeds of 49

Carol A. Kolmerten, “Texts and Contexts: American Women Envision Utopia, 1890-1920”, in Utopian and Science Fiction by Women: Worlds of Difference, eds Jane L. Donawerth and Carol A. Kolmerten (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1994), 108.


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destruction. For as liberating as these dreams and visions might be, they are undercut by efforts to revalidate and reinforce traditional notions of essential gender differences. Deeply ingrained notions that women are by nature less aggressive, less competitive, less selfinterested, and less domineering than men not only limit the range of representable female activities, but also give rise to valorized depictions of female-centered communities that obscure, among other things, class- and race-based mechanisms of social domination. Perhaps nobody was more aware of these tendencies within much of the feminist literature of the early twentieth century than Emma Goldman, who in characteristic brashness declared the “American suffrage movement … altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people” and repudiated both the deification and the demonization of woman as complementary means to turn her into an otherworldly, inhuman, and essentially unnatural creature. Woman’s “greatest misfortune has been that she was looked upon as either angel or devil”, Goldman avers in “Woman Suffrage” (1910), since it prevented her from “being considered human, and therefore subject to all human follies and mistakes”.50

50

Emma Goldman, “Woman’s Suffrage”, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 207 and 199.

CHAPTER 8 Dorothy Canfield, Home Fires in France, and FemaleCentered Communities They themselves were a unit, a conscious group; they thought in terms of the community. As such, their time-sense was not limited to the hopes and ambitions of an individual life. Therefore, they habitually considered and carried out plans for improvement, which might cover centuries.1

Like Edith Wharton, Mildred Aldrich, Gertrude Atherton, and several other American literary women of her time, Dorothy Canfield Fisher experienced the war firsthand behind the French lines. Unable “to put up with” the “inactivity” of the distant observer, Dorothy Canfield and her husband, John Fisher, had decided early on in the war “to do something”.2 On 22 April 1916, John Fisher sailed to France where he would serve with the American Ambulance Service of the American Ambulance Hospital in Neuilly. At home in Vermont, Dorothy Canfield’s restlessness increased. Three months later, against the strong urgings of family and friends, she took her children and followed her husband to Paris. There, Canfield got involved in volunteer work at a rehabilitation center for the war blind and later spearheaded efforts to print and disseminate Braille books. Canfield and her husband stayed overseas for the duration of World War I. During her two-and-a-half years in France, Canfield managed to write incessantly, supplying her publishers with a steady stream of war 1

Gilman, Herland, 67. Quoted in Margaret L. Clark, “Above the Battle and Above the Noise: Tiers of Propaganda in Great War Literature” (Unpublished Dissertation: Louisiana State U., 2003), 69. 2

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sketches and short stories that appeared in Collier’s Weekly and Harper’s. Perceiving that the people back home remained largely oblivious to the tremendous changes precipitated by the European conflict, Canfield was determined to shake the American public out of its isolationist complacency. As she explained afterwards: “My object … was to try to get something to the American public which would sound real to them, would sound like what might happen to any of us, in comfortable homes in suburbs.”3 Canfield, who never considered herself a pacifist, clearly sought to heighten pro-war sentiments in America through some of her melodramatic stories such as “A Little Kansas Leaven”. But on a more subtle level, Canfield also wanted to make the war politically relevant by highlighting its far-reaching effects on a domestic sphere that had hitherto appeared to be comfortably secure, stable, unchanging. Writing about her short story, “La Pharmacienne”, Canfield elucidates her growing interest in what she saw as the evolutionary transformation processes women undergo during wartime: It is a study of a Frenchwomen, typical nice, housekeeper, goodmother-variety, who is hard hit by the war, living in the war-zone, and is little by little transformed out of being a house-cat into being one of the stern, unconsciously heroic obscure heroines of France. To my mind, the study has value because nobody has said a word as yet about the processes by which all this unexpected heroism has been evolved out of the French people.4

About half of her sociological character studies that were to be collected in Home Fires in France (1918) and Days of Glory (1919) revolve around the wartime experiences of stern Frenchwomen, who, in the face of extreme danger and adversity, develop their innate potential for heroic action. Partially grounded in older notions of “true womanhood”, Homes Fires in France extols the simple virtues of close-knit, child-rearing female communities like those depicted in Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Furs (1896). Amid the death and destruction wrought by war, women are time and again 3

Ibid., 72. Quoted in Ida H. Washington, Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography (Shelburne, VT: The New England Press, 1982), 160.

4

Canfield, Home Fires, and Female-Centered Communities 189 depicted as the true standard bearers of civilization who heroically resist extreme male aggression at the hand of barbaric German soldiers, while commencing the deliberate civilizatory task of creating a gentler, more peaceable society guided by feminine values. Neither depicted as the harbinger of a coming social revolution (as in proletarian war novels), nor rendered as the shocking revelation of man’s absurd existence in a fully industrialized world (as in Modernist protest novels), in Canfield’s home front sketches the Great War is represented as the bloodstained birth bed of modern gender relations, which, after the violent throes have subsided, promise a new and improved normalcy. Significantly, in “Vignettes from Life at the Rear”, it is a French soldier who explicitly links the birth of new ideas to the experience of labor pain: “When a mother gives birth to a child, she suffers, suffers horribly. Perhaps all the world is now trying to give birth to a new idea, which we have talked of, but never felt before.”5 And as if on cue, when the recently widowed Madeleine in “La Pharmacienne” awakes from her deathlike slumber, she feels that “some tremendous change had come over the world”, cleans up her late husband’s store, and dutifully assumes her new communal role as the village pharmacist (289). Canfield’s literary attempts to make the war real for her readership, then, do not end at producing sympathetic identification, but persist in generating exemplary female figures whose bold ventures into the public realm put America’s contentedly stagnant housewives to shame. “There has been a great deal of exclaiming and admiring”, Canfield notes, adding “but I have a notion that most Americans don’t realize by what hard and bitter and horrible phases the Frenchwomen had to pass before they emerged from being just nice home-keepers into being guardians of the public weal, as they are to so great an extent in the deserted villages and towns”.6 In their new public roles, Frenchwomen, Canfield suggests, show their American sisters how “the organizations created to achieve suffrage” might in due course “become powerful weapons with which to wrest from men significant portions of real power”.7

5

Canfield, Home Fires in France, 75. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Quoted in Washington, Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography, 60. 7 Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience, 151. 6

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One of these “horrible phases”, with which American women are familiar but to which their heroic French sisters are subjected in its “absurdest extreme”, is living under the yoke of “unbridled masculinity”. In Canfield’s Home Fires in France the critique of “destructive male values”, so characteristic of late ninetieth- and early twentieth-century feminist writings, surfaces time and again in depictions of marauding German troops, upsetting the well-ordered life of female villagers in French border towns. Drawing upon easily recognizable propaganda images, Canfield represents German soldiers as atavistic creatures – barely human – who snatch food from the lips of emaciated children, mistreat prisoners, hold drunken revelries, and beat and rape women at will. In two typical scenes from “La Pharmacienne”, German troops invade Madeleine’s household, demanding their spoils of war: Madeleine went into the kitchen and brought back on a big tray everything ready-cooked which was there …. The men drinking at the sideboard cried aloud hoarsely and fell upon the contents of the tray, clutching, cramming food in their mouths … still tearing off huge mouthfuls from the cheese, the bread, the meat they held, masticating them with wild animal noises, turned and clattered down the stairs again, having paid no more attention to Madeleine than if she had been a piece of the furniture. (276)

Following this first violent disruption of domestic tranquility, Madeleine is left in a state of shock: “Everywhere she looked, she [still] saw yellow teeth, gnawing and tearing at food; bulging jawmuscles straining; dirty foreheads streaked with perspiration, wrinkled like those of eating dogs; bloodshot eyes glaring in physical greed.” But she soon recovers and vows unyielding resistance against future onslaughts by “the dirty beasts”: “Her fear left her, never to come back, swept away by a bitter contempt” (277). Yet, an officer’s request to prepare food and lodging, uttered in the “casual tone of a man giving an order to a servant”, further humiliates Madeleine, as she must recognize “her absolute defenselessness in the face of physical force” (278). Reduced to the status of servant when “four Herr-Lieutenants and one Herr-Captain” take up quarter in her house, Madeleine nonetheless musters the strength to fend off a desperately drunk soldier, trying to rape Simone, her household help:

Canfield, Home Fires, and Female-Centered Communities 191 Simone struggled and screamed, shriek after shriek, horribly. Madeleine screamed too, and snatching up the poker flung herself on the man. He released his hold, too uncertain on his feet to resist. Both women threw themselves against him, pushing him to the door and shoving him out on the narrow landing, where he lost his balance and fell heavily, rolling over and over, down the stairs. (280-81)

Aside from their time-specific propaganda value, these two scenes certainly bespeak widely shared female apprehensions within a maledominated world. Though desires to exploit and to violate women are projected squarely onto the “yellow-toothed”, German über-male here, few among Canfield’s female readers would have missed the pointed critique of patriarchic domination in general. “To feel it [the sense of her defenselessness] again, is to be bitterly shamed”, the narrator states, serving a somber reminder that even in peacetime women enjoy few legal protections (278). And in the face of this inherent vulnerability, Madeleine and Simone’s concerted action seems to suggest that women of all stations must learn to work together so as to organize their collective defense. Of course, unlike more radical feminists such as Atherton and Gilman, Canfield appears to have never even toyed with the idea of a women’s revolution. Yet, similar to Atherton and Gilman, Canfield grew more convinced throughout the war that passive non-resistance ultimately strengthens the oppressive powers that be. Having sympathized with pacifist organizations before the war, Canfield did not reach this conviction easily, especially since she was confronted daily with the consequence of industrial warfare. Surrounded by maimed and mutilated soldiers in France, Canfield at times nearly lost faith in the “war to end all wars”, as a letter to Sarah Cleghorn reveals: I wonder if you realize how faint-hearted and sick I am most of the time, even with the feeling not wavering that there was nothing for the French and Belgians to do but to defend their country? …. I have the feeling that our generation is pretty well done for, stunned and stupefied with the bludgeon of the war, and that it is only for the children that the future will draw enough vitality to stagger along …. What do you suppose I am writing? I am setting down for my own

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Embattled Home Fronts benefit the reasons why I am not a thorough-going non-resistant pacifist.8

Proclivities toward becoming a “thorough-going non-resistant pacifist” would eventually resurface in her third Great War book, The Deepening Stream (1930). In 1917, however, Canfield could reassure herself that force requires counterforce. Detecting socio-pathological parallels between sudden outbursts of uncontrollable male aggression and Prussian designs to conquer the world, Canfield insists on the necessity of active resistance with reference to one of her earlier short stories. “I know you won’t remember a sketch I wrote years ago”, Canfield begins another letter to Cleghorn: … about a young wife who found that her new husband had fits of inexplicable bad temper—when no matter how gentle and ingenious tender she was, everything she did only irritated him the more. After a conversation with his old nurse who described him as a child, she takes another course, flies into a pretended rage herself, scolds and threatens and cries. He is astonished and a little bit daunted, finally … quite changed in humor, pets her … and ends by carrying her off to the theatre and supper afterwards …. I couldn’t let it go like that and made an unexpected turn at the ending, where the young wife has a tragic gaze into the future as she sees what manner of man she has united her life to …. I have observed, or think I have that there are certain natures, whom non-resistance acts upon like a sort of irresistible excitant, like a poison, like a powerful drug which they can’t resist. It excites them to deeds of brutality …. Now it has been my feeling that the Prussian military party is, among nations what that sort of man is among people …. I don’t think moral suasion can work with such people nor appeals to their honor.9

Unlike the founding mothers of Gilman’s Herland, the women in Canfield’s Home Fires in France do not slay their brutal male oppressors. But in accordance with Canfield’s rejection of passive non-resistance, they do learn to engage in acts of open defiance and

8

Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher, ed. Mark J. Madigan (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1993), 90. 9 Ibid., 91.

Canfield, Home Fires, and Female-Centered Communities 193 covert subversion – a reflection, perhaps, of the increasingly militant methods employed by American suffragists at home. In “The Refugee”, an unnamed heroine, described as “the very type and symbol of the intelligent, modern woman”, recounts her village’s struggles during German occupation (111). At first, the townspeople, consisting “only of old men and defenseless women” (125), submit themselves passively to the oppressors, breaking none “of ‘their’ rules” and hoping “constantly for deliverance” (119, 114). Abiding by “‘their’ rules”, however, merely leads to greater oppression. The “Boches” begin to publicly flog prisoners, ban Frenchwomen from hospital work, “at any hour of the day or night … search house[s] from top to bottom”, seal off the town and attempt to shut down its schools. Resentment grows until the unnamed heroine realizes “how deeply even a modern woman can be forced to hate” (119). Invigorated by their righteous hatred, the townswomen keep open the schools and in brash defiance of the authorities publicly intone la Marseillaise, while “a regiment of German guards” stands by idly. Moreover, the women begin to secretly obtain French newspapers and smuggle letters across the lines. “That rule, like all their rules, is broken as often as we can”, the heroine proudly informs her readership (125). As a result of their subversive activities, many townswomen are strip-searched, imprisoned, or deported. Yet, “we did not weep”, the resolute heroine recalls, “we have never shown them how they can torture us. Not a tear was shed” (131). Though weary and exhausted, the women in Home Fires in France grow stronger and ever more self-confident in the face of brutal adversity. Men, meanwhile, appear to become proportionally weaker, reverting back into a feeble, child-like state that requires motherly oversight and protection. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have pointed out, perceptions of World War I and its social consequences were oftentimes very gender-specific: “as young men became increasingly alienated from their prewar selves, women seemed to become, as if by some uncanny swing of history’s pendulum, ever more powerful.”10 The “war that has traditionally been defined as an

10

Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, II, 425.

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apocalypse of masculinism”, Gilbert and Gubar conclude, “seems to have led to an apotheosis of femaleness”.11 Although Gilbert and Gubar’s claim may be a bit sweeping, Canfield’s short story, “Eyes for the Blind”, seems to indicate just such “an apotheosis of femaleness”, for it not only registers the war’s potential to dramatically alter gender relations, but actively creates a world stripped of all vestiges of masculine authority. Before the war a passive woman whose husband afforded her a life of luxury, the unnamed heroine of Canfield’s story rises to the occasion when called upon to lead a rehabilitation center for the “war-blind”. Aside from training the blind veterans to become “professional knitters” and shouldering full responsibility for the day-to-day operations of the institute, the “Directrice” assumes the role of mother and confessor. Surrounded by broken, disoriented men who nod, salute, and disperse “like obedient children”, she acts as their sole pillar of strength and support (176). Even the “great-shouldered, massively muscular fellow clutched at her like a scared child, and began in rapid, hysteric whisper to tell her of the awful things he saw in his eternity of blackness” (177). The transfer of power from men to women is absolute in this story. Rendered blind and hysterical by yellow gas, the men are thankful to perform feminine tasks, while the Victorian matriarch orders the world around them. And even though the Directrice does not actually “wear the black and penitential garb of the Mother Superior”, she exhibits “all of a Mother Superior’s firm, penetrating authority and calm manner” (179). Canfield’s vision of the new, feminized order that is to emerge from the ruins of a war-ravaged world takes most conspicuous shape in the two stories that frame Home Fires in France: “Notes from a French Village in the War Zone” and “La Pharmacienne”. In both of these sketches Canfield depicts a proto-capitalistic society that is constructed around the needs of women and therefore deeply invested in ostensibly feminine values such as tutoring, communalism and noncompetitiveness. The two framing texts envision a society that defies a modern industrial order guided by supposedly masculine ideals such as strenuous exercise, individualism, profiteering, and personal dominance. Ultimately, then, this communitarian society, founded not 11

Ibid., 424-25.

Canfield, Home Fires, and Female-Centered Communities 195 so much on Socialist principles as on the nurturing feminine values mentioned earlier, resolves simmering class conflicts by tempering Capitalism’s masculine emphasis on competition as well as its masculine proclivity for exploitation. Set up through light banter between an “American boy” and a maternal tour-guide narrator, the opening story, “Notes from a French Village in the War Zone”, provides a yearning glimpse of an idyllic yet industrious rural world that still affords a “really sociable community life” (5). In sharp contrast to contemporary American “country life”, which has become marked by “the isolation and loneliness of the women and children”, there “is no isolation possible here”: when, to shake hands with the woman of the next farm, you have only to lean out of your front window and have her lean out of hers, when your children go to get water from the fountain along with all the other children of the region, when you are less than five minutes’ walk from church and the grocery-store, when your children can wait till the school-bell is ringing before snatching up their books to go to school. (4-5)

The town’s “close-knit communal organization”, the narrator extols, extends far beyond mere sociability. Among other things, it is conducive to specialization and a pooling of resources so that “labors … are better done in centralized activity” (13). As part of this preindustrial arrangement, the “village bakeress” supplies the entire community with “well-baked loaves”, while Madame Beaugard, “the village fruit-seller … adds greatly to the variety and tastefulness of the diet of the village”. And on wash days, too, the “community puts its resources together instead of scattering them” (14). But communal work is more than an efficient pooling of resources; it is also a time for friendly sociability: Here during the communal lavoir … our housewife finds an assortment of her friends and neighbors … gets whatever news from the outer world is going around, jokes and scolds, sympathizes and laughs … gets, in short the same refreshing and entire change from the inevitable monotony of the home routine which an American housewife of a more prosperous class gets in her club meeting, and

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Embattled Home Fronts which the American housewife of the same class gets, alas! almost never. (15)

Similarly, “the younger girls of the town are brought together” in a school, where they “learn how to sew and cook and keep their household accounts” (18). Further, in keeping with the villagers’ mercantilist spirit, “older girls, instead of being forced to go away from home, as in most American villages, to work in factories or shops, may earn an excellent living” at the communal “embroidery” enterprise that sells “direct[ly] to consumers” (19). At a time when wartime strikes and labor unrest ridiculed middle-class notions of social peace in America, Canfield’s decidedly archaic Utopia, which harks back to pre-industrial ideas of Capitalism, is not only alive and well in these whimsical portraits of classless female industriousness, but also ostensibly free from the ugly blemishes of poverty, overproduction, unemployment, competitiveness, profiteering, and exploitation.12 Run – in the noticeable absence of men – exclusively by and for the women of Crouy, this insular, self-sufficient settlement comes very close indeed to resembling Gilman’s Herland. So does, not coincidentally, Canfield’s final portrayal of postoccupation life in “La Pharmacienne”. Having withstood utter degradation at the hand of beastly German mercenaries, Madeleine and her fellow-townswomen sense that “some tremendous change had come over the world” (289) and “without knowing it” take “a first step forward into a new life” (292). When Sœus Ste Lucie breaks the spell by observing, “We haven’t any mayor and the priest is dead, and we haven’t any pharmacy and the baker is mobilized, and there isn’t one strong, well man left in town”, the brave women of this new world transform themselves “from being just nice home-keepers into being guardians of the public weal” (295). Henceforth, the women literally act as executors of the patriarchal estate and for the first time seem to feel a strong sense of purpose and self-ownership: The “wife of the baker” gets “up at two o’clock in the morning” to “heat the oven”, the “white-haired wife of the old mayor” takes over his place at the town hall, and Madeleine, stepping “forward into a new and awful and

12

See Richard Grassby, The Idea of Capitalism before the Industrial Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 1-19.

Canfield, Home Fires, and Female-Centered Communities 197 wonderful world”, announces: “Yes, oh yes, I shall keep the pharmacy open” (304-306). It remains unclear what the “new and awful and wonderful world” will hold for Canfield’s grief-stricken yet expectant and visible empowered female characters. The closing image of Madeleine, putting “down her head” and walking “forward strongly, as though breasting and conquering a great wind”, seems to suggest that she will never again be a “house-cat” of the “typical nice, housekeeper, goodmother-variety” (309). In the end, Canfield’s Home Fires in France appears to second Gertrude Atherton’s defiant conclusion in The Living Present that the new women of World War I are here to stay: Thousands have, under the spur, developed unsuspected capacities, energies, endurance, and above all genuine executive abilities. That these women should be swept back into private life by the selfishness of men when the killing business is over is simply unthinkable.13

Of course, the very vehemence of Atherton’s pronouncement betrays her (and Canfield’s) awareness that the “unthinkable” was already happening at home. As early as 1917, in a rare show of unanimity, labor leaders, industrialists, and government officials began citing prevailing medical opinion, according to which sustained labor was detrimental to women’s delicate organs. The implied message was that women should resume their domestic roles as soon as the fighting ends. Moreover, even though a number of “women activists” and “social feminists” had managed to secure executive positions within new regulatory agencies such as the National War Labor Board (NWLB), a predominantly male bureaucracy strenuously resisted implementing ordinances that would grant women equal pay, work-place security, and the opportunity for job advancement. The NWLB, historian Valerie Connor concludes, “was unable to accept women as responsible partners in the formation and administration of policy because fundamentally, it rejected the basic equality of women in industrial matters”.14 And sure enough, as the end of war seemed imminent, NWLB Secretary W. Jett Lauck brushed off demands to 13

Atherton, The Living Present, 207. Valerie Jean Connor, The National War Labor Board: Stability, Social Justice, and the Voluntary State in World War I (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1983), 234. 14

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afford women the same kind of workplace protection that men enjoyed by flatly declaring, “Women are the mothers of the race … and cannot be dealt with on the same terms as men workers”.15

15

Quoted in Connor, The National War Labor Board, 215.

CHAPTER 9 Gertrude Atherton, The White Morning, and the War between the Sexes See the message in the sky written in letters of blood above the battlefields of Europe! There it is, the promise of freedom for women!1

While Dorothy Canfield penned her observations in northern France, which would furnish the raw material for her female-centered communitarian vision in Home Fires in France, back in the United States the distant war gave rise to some outright murderous fantasies. Inspired by the highly publicized murder trial of one Florence Carman, Gertrude Atherton concocted her topical novel Mrs. Belfame in 1916. Set among the upwardly mobile smart set of provincial Elsinore, the novel traces Enid Belfame’s dubious rise to fame as the prime suspect in her husband’s murder. Modestly wealthy and wellconnected, Enid’s homicidal designs spring less from any particular disgust with her boorish husband than from a general longing “for a room, a separate personal existence, of her own”.2 “Divorce being out of the question”, the thought of deposing “David Belfame, superfluous husband”, takes definite form in Enid’s mind during a lecture at the “Friday Club” on the topic “The European War vs. Women”.3 Spurred by the speaker’s lurid accounts of German war atrocities, Enid’s scruples about taking a life diminish, as she reasons: “Why not?” Over there men were being torn and shot to pieces by wholesale, joking across the trenches in their intervals of rest, to kill 1

Mabel Potter Daggett, Woman Wanted: The Story Written in Blood Red Letters on the Horizon of the Great World War (New York: Doran, 1918), 14. 2 Gertrude Atherton, Mrs. Belfame: A Novel (New York: Stokes, 1916), 2. 3 Ibid., 11 and 8.

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Embattled Home Fronts again when the signal was given with as little compunction as she herself had often aimed at a target, or wrung a chicken that had fed from her hand. And these were men, the makers of law, the selfelected rulers of the world.4

Equating her personal misery with the worldwide “human sufferings” caused by the man-made war, Enid turns the planned removal of her husband into an indictment against the entire male sex. In her mind, the mayhem abroad furnishes sufficient evidence “that not civilization but man was a failure” so that the elimination of one more of these failed creatures might actually be a blessing. 5 Three-hundred-odd pages later, the reader learns that Enid never got to act upon her murderous inclinations. A surprise confession read in court revels that “dear friend” Anna Steuer had, unbeknown to Enid, acted on her behalf out of sisterly love.6 Unrepentant to the end, Anna justifies the killing of Enid’s husband in her ante-mortem statement as a revolutionary challenge to the glaringly obvious lawlessness of a male-dominated world at war: Millions of men in the greatest civilizations of earth are killing one another daily for no reason whatever save that man, who seeks to direct the destinies of the world, is a complete and pitiful failure. Why, pray, should a woman repent having broken one of his laws and removed one of the most worthless and abominable of his sex, who had made the life of a beloved friend past enduring. Moreover, I have saved hundreds of lives at the risk of my own.7

Set free not only from the prison of legal law, but from the jail of gender relations as well, Enid honors the “martyrdom” of her friend by bidding farewell to her current admirer and sailing off to the battlefields of Europe, where “in some small measure” she intends to take Anna’s place as a nurse.8 Having committed to print her nascent ideas that it might take some form of violent rebellion to deliver women from a bellicose 4

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 14. 6 Ibid., 317. 7 Ibid., 329. 8 Ibid., 334. 5

Atherton, The White Morning, and War between the Sexes 201 patriarchy, Atherton soon followed her character Enid to Europe. In France, aside from making her usual rounds of Parisian high society circles, Atherton toured numerous field hospitals in the war zone, observed wartime life on the streets, and conducted several interviews with French girls of different classes and backgrounds. These interviews and observations formed the basis of her essays in The Living Present, wherein she repeatedly augured a fundamental and lasting revolution in gender relations. But it was through her second war novel that she could finally enact her vision of an Amazonian revolution to end all wars and to deliver women from the patriarchal yoke. Deemed “grotesque”, a “screaming extravaganza”, and “a thesis more … than a novel” by some reviewers, The White Morning, in the words of a more complimentary New York Times critic, “seeks to express a great possibility, to reveal that there is perhaps on the edge of history a revolution unlike any other the world has yet seen”. 9 Covering roughly a fifteen-year time span from 1903 to 1918, the novel depicts the steady upsurge of rebellious sentiments among German women, until they are so disgusted by their domineering and warmongering fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers in field gray that they stage a violent “woman’s revolution”, which puts an immediate end to war and leads to the establishment of a republic, “acknowledged by the great powers of the world”.10 Revealing something of Atherton’s contempt for the lower classes, the uprising is very much a revolution from above. “I made Gisela a junker at birth”, Atherton explains in her appended “Argument for My The White Morning”, “because a rebel from the top, with qualities of leadership, would make a deeper impression in Germany than one of the many avowed extremists of humbler origins” (193). Thus, the novel’s heroine and eventual leader of the revolution is a Countess von Niebuhr, who assumes the common surname Döring when mingling with the Bohemian crowd in Munich, studying English as a governess in the United States, trying to declass pesky wooers of lower station, or making contact with the “extremists of humbler 9

Reviews of The White Morning by Gertrude Atherton in Bellman, 6 April 1918, 385 (by C. K. Mitchner); in Dial, 28 February 1918, 205; and New York Times, 27 June 1918, 55 (“The War in England and Germany”). 10 Atherton, The White Morning, 169. Hereafter cited parenthetically.

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origins” already referred to. Portrayed as a palpable goddess of wrath, Gisela, is, to use Emily Wortis Leider’s apt description, “Atherton’s Siegfried-slaying answer to Richard Wagner’s ‘Brunhilde on the rock’ who awakens “not at the kiss of man, but at the summons of Germany in her darkest hour”.11 In line with Atherton’s belief that it requires an “educated and systematically trained” mind of “leisure” to conceive radical feminist ideas, the novel begins with a prewar portrayal of Gisela’s growth and development into a champion of women’s rights (189). Raised under the riding boot of a despotic Prussian patriarch, Gisela and her sisters had early on in their lives “solemnly pledged one another never to marry” (2). But it is not until her four-year stint as a governess in New York that Gisela comes into close contact with emancipated AngloSaxon upper-class girls and develops a truly feminist consciousness. Returning from the States with a “developing sense of revolt against the attitude of the German male” (32), talented Gisela fashions herself into a successful author, publishing works that appeal “subtly but clearly to the growing rebellion of the German women” (45). In one of the novel’s frequent lecture sections, the intrusive narrator describes the fomenting sub-current of female discontent, which the heroine manages to gather and distill within her plays: Those who have not lived in Germany have not even an inkling of the deep slow secret revolt against the insolent and inconsiderate attitude of the German male that had been growing among its women for some fifteen years before the outbreak of the war. They ventured no public meetings or militant acts of any sort, for men were far too strong for them yet, and the German woman is by nature retiring, however individualistic her ego. Their only outward manifestation was the hideous reformkleid,12 a typical manifestation in even the women of a nation whose art is as ugly as it is often interesting. But thousands of them were muttering to one another and reading with envy the literature of woman’s revolt in other lands. When one of their own sex rose, a women of highest intellect and an impeccable style … their 11 Emily Wortis Leider, California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1991), 273. 12 At the turn of the century, German women’s right activists and physicians propagated the “Reformkleid”, a simple, loose-hanging dress that was to free middleclass women from the constraints of the corset.

Atherton, The White Morning, and War between the Sexes 203 own vague protest slowly crystallized and they grew to look upon her as a leader, who one day would show them the path out of bondage. (47-48)

The White Morning obviously contains much propagandistic value in its stereotypical renditions of the subservient, disciplined, pedantic and always a bit oafish German national character. Yet, not unlike Canfield’s Home Fires in France, the novel’s exaggerated depictions of an inherently misogynist streak within “German Kultur” also provide convenient window dressing for its piercing criticism of patriarchal designs to keep women in a passive state of subservience (46).13 In the patriotic guise of its avowedly anti-German stance, The White Morning presents a radical feminist response to the Great War through which Atherton seeks to realize her hopes that “if this war lasts long enough women for the first time in the history of civilization will have it in them to seize one at least of the world’s reins”.14 For the roots of the Great War, Atherton emphasizes in The White Morning, are to be found in the very structure of patriarchal societies, whose characteristically aggressive capitalism had set them on an unbending course toward mutual destruction. Discussing the causes of the war, Mimi, one of Gisela’s close associates, keenly assesses: It was also more than possible that [Germany’s] aggressive prosperity might one of these days excite the apprehension of Great Britain, who would then show more than her teeth. Gradually the idea must have permeated, taken possession of the minds of men who had vast fortunes to increase or lose, that sooner or later they must fight for what they had and that it were better perhaps to strike first, at a moment they might choose themselves—however little they might sympathize with the ambitions of the Pan-German Party for supreme power in Europe—. (86)

Given the avaricious mindset of men, striving to increase and protect their “vast fortunes” by whatever means possible, the war was 13

Incidentally, American suffragettes often employed similar strategies, unfurling, for example, banners in front of the White House, reminding “Kaiser Wilson”: “20,000,000 American women are not self-governed”. 14 Atherton, The Living Present, 213.

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all but inevitable and, the novel intimates rather subversively, Germany’s opening salvo constituted nothing more and nothing less than an ill-advised pre-emptive strike. But at any rate, once men have begun to slaughter each other over their “vast fortunes”, The White Morning contends, the war releases so much internal friction that it finally ignites the long fuse of the “deep slow secret revolt … that had been growing among … women”. Accordingly, as the war drags on and news reaches the home front that “more than half a million young Germans had fallen before Verdun”, budding thoughts of a revolution take concrete shape in the minds of Gisela and her associates (69). As the narrator explains: They feared for their daughters at homes even as they feared for their young sons in the trenches …. Barring a revolution, the war might last for years … years …. War and misery and starving children, the loss of men and boys they loved, and a profound distrust of their rulers … [fill] them with a cold and bitter hatred of an autocracy convicted of lying and aggressive purpose out of its own mouth. (108, 140)

“God! How they hate the war—every women I know”, Gisela’s sister Mariette exclaims, lending credence to the narrator’s assessment (104). “O God!”, Heloise joins the chorus of exasperated women and, like Enid and Anna in Mrs. Belfame, projects her hatred of war squarely onto the entire male half of the world’s population: “Sick or well, German, English, French, I loathe them all alike …. Deliver us! Deliver us from war and deliver us from men!” (65). United by a shared determination to stamp out or at least to curtail masculine propensities for domination through brute force, the vengeance-filled women in The White Morning not only display “genuine executive abilities” when they begin to secretly plan the revolution, but also develop deep bonds of friendship among themselves that challenge and transcend traditional heterosexual relationships.15 What starts as a political revolution becomes a sexual revolution that portends an uncanny erasure of masculinity, which William Faulkner’s sexless Donald Mahon in Soldier’s Pay seems to complete.

15

Ibid., 217.

Atherton, The White Morning, and War between the Sexes 205 Similar to Anna in Mrs. Belfame, Gisela feels “a sudden inclusive love of her sex, an overpowering desire to deliver it form the sadness and horror of war; a profounder emotion than anything it had inspired in those far off days of peace” (67). Consequently, “the friends of her inner circle [are] all women” and even though Gisela once in awhile craves the society of some men, she gives “her real sympathies and affections to her women friends” (68). The long-term satisfaction Gisela finds in homosocial relationships with her women friends supersede the short-lived pleasure of heterosexual love, especially since the latter threatens to confine her within the patriarchal institution of marriage. Organized with Prussian precision and in strict hierarchical fashion – Gisela has dispatched her “lieutenants” into all four corners of the empire – the revolutionary women’s army, “dressed uniformly in gray”, awaits their leader’s signal to advance. Before Gisela can give the go-ahead for the violent uprising, though, she has to prove herself in a crisis of consciousness. Having unexpectedly met her old beau, Franz, a Prussian autocrat of the gentler sort, Gisela allows herself to be seduced into a night of ecstatic lovemaking on the very eve of the planned revolution. The surrounding air of violence excites stern Gisela to such a degree that she cannot help but turn into a sexually passionate and pliant lover – so much so that she even dreams of eloping and forsaking the revolution altogether: “Spain! Franz! For a moment her imagination rioted” (130). But by the dawn of the white morning that “would change the face of the world” (136), Gisela quickly regains her composure, realizing that she would be “utterly in his power if he awakened and chose to exert it” (125). Reasoning moreover that “even if she won Franz over, her power would be sapped” (131), Gisela comes to the sobering conclusion that “he was the one deadly menace to the future of his country”. Whereupon she quickly reaches for her dagger, drives “it into his heart to the guard”, and accords him the “honor” of being “the first man” sacrificed “on the altar of the Woman’s Revolution” (134). At last, having unceremoniously “dropped” his corpse “into the swiftly flowing Isar” river, Gisela gives order to let the “inferno” break loose (135-38). “Bayonets fixed” to their rifles, the women make short shrift of what little resistance they encounter from the awe-stricken soldiers,

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guarding palaces, ministries, post offices, railway and telegraph stations (137). “There was sniping, of course, from the windows, but the women made a concerted rush and disposed of the terrified offender” (148). At the end of day – the emperor detained and peace secured – the women unfurl the republic’s new flag, showing “a hen in successive stages of evolution”, the “final phase” being “an eagle” with the “grim, leering, vengeful, pitiless” countenance of a “woman” (146). “The hens are eagles—all over Germany”, Gisela “announces in her full carrying voice”, officially proclaiming victory (147). Curiously enough, even though Atherton provides her Amazonian warriors with a suitable banner, the novel stops short of envisioning a state of matriarchy as in Gilman’s Herland. At the inquest of her friends and supporters as to whether she intends to establish a “Woman’s Republic” with herself “as President”, Gisela exclaims, “certainly not!”, and then explains rather inconsistently: It is not in the German women—not yet—to crave the grinding cares of public life. We shall make the men do the work, and we will live for the first time. Delivered from Cæsarism and junkerism and with the advanced men of Germany at the head of a Republic, I should feel too secure of Germany’s future to demand any of the ugly duties of government—although the women will speak through the men. Their day of silence and submission is forever passed—. (99-100)

Possibly in order to broaden the public appeal of The White Morning, here, in one short paragraph, Atherton turns Gisela from a radical feminist visionary into a reactionary guardian of the nineteenth-century separate spheres ideology, which rejected female suffrage on the grounds that women should exert their influence vicariously by putting their husbands, brothers, sons onto the path of morality. More incongruously still, just moments before Gisela thrusts her dagger deep into Franz’s heart – a highly symbolic act that not only seems to denote an end to male potency, but perhaps the beginning of woman’s sexual liberation as well – Atherton has her heroine disavow all “political ambitions” in favor of passively shining as the moral “beacon-light of the new Republic … until some one man (she knew of none) or some group of men became strong enough to control its destinies” (130-31).

Atherton, The White Morning, and War between the Sexes 207 Thus, in accordance with the character’s resolve – but in clear contradiction of its author’s claims elsewhere that it “is simply unthinkable” that “women should be swept back into private life by the selfishness of men when the killing business is over” – the novel ends with Gisela mourning over her lover’s coffin and retiring into a private sanctuary of lettered solitude. What Wortis Leider perceives as Atherton’s “new willingness to countenance revolution” appears to come to a sudden stop on the closing pages of The White Morning.16 Even so, the novel earned Atherton cautious praise from an old nemesis. “It appears that her views have radically changed”, Upton Sinclair noted in his self-published bi-monthly: “She seems willing to contemplate revolution as a not wholly undesirable thing.” Of course, although Sinclair considered this change in “our premiere exponent of the aristocratic tradition” a step into the right direction, he still rebuked Atherton for making the novel’s heroine “hochwohlgeboren” (born into high station) and advised her: “When the revolt in Germany comes … you will not see rich German women killing rich German men; you will see rich German women killing poor German women— and calling on rich German men to help.” 17 A mere three months later, the short November Revolution of 1918 seemed to confirm Sinclair’s suspicion, throwing into further doubt Atherton’s premise that the shared experience of patriarchal oppression outweighs all other conflicts of interest between rich and poor female revolutionaries. Sinclair’s hopes for a proletarian revolution and Atherton’s vision of a woman’s revolution are obviously poles apart. For Atherton, in marked contrast to Sinclair, social progress is not tied to the eradication of class distinctions, but to the removal of existing gender barriers, which had prevented women from bringing to bear their superior “humanitarian instincts” upon the body politics of world affairs. Because woman is by nature less power hungry and less avaricious than man, Atherton insists, the apparent injustices of this world would be greatly diminished, once women “seize one at least of the world’s reins”. As she expounds confidently in The Living Present:

16

Leider, California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times, 275. Upton Sinclair, Review of The White Morning by Gertrude Atherton, Upton Sinclair’s, III (July 1918), 7.

17

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Embattled Home Fronts Assuredly if we grasp and hold the reins of the world there will never be another war. We are not, in the first place, as greedy as men; we will divide the world up in strict accordance with race, and let every nation have its own place in the sun. Commercial greed has no place in our make-up, and with the hideous examples of history it will never obtain 18 entrance.

Unencumbered by “the sort of blood that goes to the head”, women, in Atherton’s view, would thenceforth devote their “abilities, uninterrupted by war, to solving the problem of poverty (the acutest evidence of man’s failure), and to fostering the talents of millions of men and women that to-day constitute part of the wastage of Earth”.19 In short, gender is not seen as a social construct, but a behavioral determinant that, in Emma Goldman’s words, “predestines woman to accomplish that wherein man has failed”. To Goldman, of course, this was a preposterous notion, none the least because it would “credit woman with supernatural powers”.20 Yet Atherton, it becomes clear, seeks to safely transport essentialist notions of the moral superiority of woman into a postwar era that beckons her with the promise of greater social, economical, and political influence. At least for the immediate future, though, this attempt to safeguard feminine claims of moral superiority seems to prevent women from claiming their equal share of “the grinding cares of public life”. For in order to shine as the righteous “beacon-light of the new Republic”, Gisela must decline “the ugly duties of government” – a reference, perhaps, to President Wilson’s growing irritation with the territorial claims of his allies – in favor of affecting public policies circuitously through her plays and short stories. In due course, then, such depictions of Gisela as at once of and above the fray of daily politics, 18

Atherton, The Living Present, 221. Atherton’s use of the term “race” here seems to imply ethnicity or nationality and thus refers to President Wilson’s plan of redrawing European borders along ethnic and national rather than political lines. As Wilson declared in a speech on 12 February 1918: “National aspirations must be respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by their own consent. ‘Selfdetermination’ is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril” (quoted in Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience, 129). 19 Ibid., 221-22. 20 Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 198.

Atherton, The White Morning, and War between the Sexes 209 cast an ever-brighter “beacon-light” on the text’s struggles of proclaiming the advent of gender equality on the basis of woman’s inborn moral ascendancy over man. Apparent incongruities notwithstanding, Atherton’s The White Morning no doubt succeeds in stirring up old gender debates by representing the war as a climatic episode in the ongoing battle of the sexes, from which women emerge if not fully victorious, at least visibly empowered, politically energized, and closely united. What’s more, in presenting her heroine as the avenger of her gender, who, swooping over the battlefield in an aeroplane, “discharge[s] her revolver into the shoulder of a big officer”, Atherton puts the world on notice that nothing will be sacrosanct in the fight for selfdetermination (147-48). Enraged by the horrors of warfare, Atherton suggests most explicitly in The Living Present, women will be “flinging off … tradition and displaying a shining armor of indifference toward man as man”, refusing “to settle down and keep house for tiresome creatures”, and “making a bold bid for political equality”.21 In the end, “even the much depended upon maternal instinct may subside”, Atherton surmises, as women everywhere exclaim in unison: “No! For a generation at least the world shall be ours, and then it may limp on with a depleted population or go to the dogs.”22 In light of Atherton’s subversive portrayal of a radicalized generation of New Women, who refuse marriage, forego motherhood, share real sympathies and affections only with women friends, and, like praying mantises, kill male lovers after the sex act, it is hardly surprising that progressive thinkers felt compelled to blunt the blow of radical feminist sentiments that had been heightened by the war experience. Subversive re-invocations of earlier metaphors of social disorder such as “The-Woman-on-Top” or “The-World-Upside-Down” seemed to suggest that the feminist crusade had literally gone over the top.23 Aware, though, that a return to the prewar order was neither likely nor wholly desirable, progressive reformers began to search for ways to realign gender relations with the new realities of postwar life. Modern 21

Atherton, The Living Present, 214-19. Ibid., 219-20. 23 Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, II, 262-64. 22

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theories of sexual repression, propagated since the late nineteenth century by Sigmund Freud and Havelock Ellis, combined with novel business approaches, emphasizing the benefits of cooperation, partnership, and efficiency, seemed to proffer scientific explanations and solutions to the “battle of the sexes” that would lead to normalized gender relations. The fast-growing discipline of sexology seemed to furnish scientific proof that feminists who demanded absolute equality and New Women who single-mindedly followed a career path ran the risk of becoming selfish deviants. In the scholarly works of influential sexologists such as Havelock Ellis, over assertive women emerged as neurotic female inverts who harm themselves as well as society at large by aping masculine behavior. Equating feminism and demands for women’s rights with the socially acknowledged perils of lesbianism, Ellis asserts: The modern movement of emancipation—the movement to obtain the same rights and duties, the same freedom and responsibility, the same education and the same work, must be regarded as on the whole a wholesome and inevitable movement. But it carries with it certain disadvantages. It has involved an increase in feminine criminality and feminine insanity, which are being elevated towards the masculine standard …. Having been taught independence of men and disdain for the old theory which placed women in the moated grange of the home … a tendency develops for women to carry this independence still further and to find love where they find work. I do not say that these unquestionable influences of modern movements can directly cause sexual inversion … but they develop the germs of it, and they probably cause a spurious imitation. This spurious imitation is due to the fact that the congenital anomaly occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence who, voluntarily or involuntarily, influence others.24

Given Ellis’ authoritative scientific account of the latent dangers of “sexual inversion” or its “spurious imitation”, popular images of the headstrong, independent, and political active women took on a decidedly sinister hue. “Having ‘unnaturally’ denied her own sexual 24

Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Inversion in Women”, quoted in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 279.

Atherton, The White Morning, and War between the Sexes 211 impulses”, she was depicted as seeking “emotional release through man-hating and bellicose and outdated feminist rhetoric”.25 The mannish pugnaciousness with which she continues to clamor for women’s rights and a female-centered world came to be seen as no more than a protective façade behind which her deeply discontented, sexually perverted, unfulfilled inner self hides. As William Lee Howard vociferated in the New York Medical Journal: The female possessed of masculine ideas of independence, the virago who would sit in the public highways and lift up her pseudo-virile voice, proclaiming her sole right to decide questions of war or religion … and that disgusting antisocial being, the female sexual pervert, are simply degrees of the same class—degenerates.26

Before long, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg points out, “the New Woman had become a repressed, at time ludicrous, figure”, whose radical political aspiration had been safely contained within a normalizing discourse of sexual deviance.27 But the New Woman’s public makeover did not stop there. For out of the shadows of her “ludicrous figure” stepped the character of the “new New Woman”, who considers her mother’s struggle for emancipation a fait accompli and henceforth seeks personal liberation within the confines of a modern heterosexual relationship. Writing in the October 1927 issue of Harper’s, Dorothy Bromley draws a sharp distinction between “‘Feminist New-Style’ and the feminist old-style” in interrelated terms of appearance and attitude: “The latter wore flat heels, disliked men, and, accepting that women could not have both a career and marriage, opted for the career. The new-style feminist was a ‘good dresser’ and a ‘pal’ to men, and fully expected to have marriage, children, and a career, too.”28 Gone are Utopian notions that politicized woman will fundamentally transform the world. Content with and secure in her visibly more public role, the liberated woman can allow herself to put on her flashiest dress so as to attract a suitable new man who treats her like a companion or a partner rather than 25

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 282. Ibid., 280. 27 Ibid., 282. 28 Dorothy M. Brown, Setting a Course: American Women in the 1920s (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 33. 26

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servant or a saint. Freely yielding to her innermost desires, the New Woman realizes that true fulfillment can only be found through a companionate marriage based upon the new business ideals of cooperation, mutual satisfaction, and an efficient division of labor.29 Within the corporate framework of the companionate marriage as an enterprise between equals, then, the liberated woman could return home without loosing face, conducting her appointed work of raising children and increasing consumption in a self-respecting and scientific manner.30 “Only the ‘unnatural’ women continued to struggle with men for economic independence and political power”, notes SmithRosenberg. 31 In the decade following World War I, women hardly lacked their share of new role models who vigorously defied old stereotypes of the meek and passive violet. In 1924, Hazel Wightman captured the nation’s attention as she became the first American woman to win the tennis championship at Wimbledon. Some years later, Helen Wills surpassed Wightman’s achievement, winning an unprecedented eight times at Wimbledon and dominating the world’s tennis courts well into the 1930s. In 1926, at the age of nineteen, the German American butcher’s daughter, Gertrude Ederle, was declared a national heroine after she had swum across the English Channel. The first woman ever to accomplish this feat, she even set a new record by doing it in fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes. Media excitement over Ederle’s triumph was eventually eclipsed in 1928, when Amelia Earhart, quickly dubbed “our Lady Lindy”, became the first woman to fly an airplane across the Atlantic Ocean. 29

Ibid., 9. Brown summarizes the new business credo of postwar America with a quote by the vice president of the Chemical National Bank of New York: “We know that real success in business is not attained at the expense of others. Business can succeed only in the long run by acquiring and holding the goodwill o people” (9). 30 For a discussion of depictions of companionate marriage in early twentieth-century American literature, see Karsten Piep, “Love’s Labor’s Regained: The Making of Companionate Marriages in Frank Norris’s The Pit”, Papers on Language and Literature, XL/1 (2004), 28-56. 31 Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 289. Citing Rayna Rapp and Ellen Ross, Smith-Rosenberg further links the idea of “companionate-marriage” to a “carefully orchestrated … campaign” by “big business”, seeking “to return women to the home and transform the redomesticated woman into the bulwark of America’s new consumer economy” (282).

Atherton, The White Morning, and War between the Sexes 213 Throughout the 1920s, these were the athletic, cheerful, hale and hearty New Women that postwar American society loved to celebrate. “A woman could not possibly have accomplished this same feat thirty years ago”, the Washington Star judged in an article on Gertrude Ederle: for corsets and other ridiculously unnecessary clothing hampered her physical condition …. Physical education has brought about an evolution of common sense that has wrought a complete turnover, not only in woman’s physical condition but in her mental attitude.32

Amidst this “complete turnover” in “physical condition” and “mental attitude”, however, radical feminist claims to economical independence and political leadership seemed to erode rapidly. Hand in hand with the rise of what some historians have described as “lifestyle feminism” went endeavors to co-opt “many feminist issues by linking personal identity and fulfillment with companionate marriage, heterosexual pleasure, motherhood as a career, and consumerism”.33 A number of literary products of the early 1920s testify to these endeavors. Preceding Henry Sydnor Harrison’s sanguine portrayal of the happily redomesticated heroine in Saint Teresa (1922), the rebellious Carol Kennicott in Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920) is made to find her true vocation in modern wife- and motherhood. In light of “the great war” and the “coming of woman suffrage”, Carol, like “many other women”, initially makes good on her threat “to chuck it [housework] … and [to] come out and play with you men in the offices and clubs and politics you’ve cleverly kept for yourselves”. 34 But after only one year of “real work” with the “Bureau of War Risk Insurance” in Washington, Carol grows “tired of the office” as “her association with women who had organized suffrage associations in hostile cities” leads her to detest the “impersonal attitude” of political activism.35 By and by, the increasingly irritable Carol gives up her 32

Quoted in Brown, Setting a Course, 43. Barbara Laslett and Johanna Brenner, “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives”, Annual Review of Sociology, XV (August 1989), 395. 34 Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, in Lewis at Zenith: A Three-Novel Omnibus (New York: Harcourt, 1961), 244 and 313. 35 Ibid., 316 and 320. 33

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“perfectly selfish” dream of “building up real political power for women”, realizes that she has “one thing … a baby to hug”, and once “again s[ees] Gopher Prairie as her home”.36 Finally, on the train back to her husband’s rural Midwestern town, Carol’s newfound domestic “devotion” reaches such heights that she is “willing to give up her own room, to try to share all of her life with Kennicott”.37 Emancipation, in short, is no longer defined in terms of Utopian desires for a Herland, but by way of woman’s renewed and expanded engagement in Hisland. To be sure, similar to Canfield’s Home Fires in France and Atherton’s The White Morning, Lewis’ Main Street depicts a strong, independent-minded female character, who repudiates conventional gender distinctions and thereby destabilizes some of the core tenets of patriarchical authority. Stripped of its larger and potentially explosive political significance, however, the battle of the sexes in Main Street becomes merely a question of reorganizing marital relations within the requisite confines of which woman can exercise her new freedoms in a healthy, mutually beneficent, publicly accepted, and socially responsible manner. What is evidently eradicated in this process are longstanding feminist attempts to promote alternative societies based upon such feminine values as communalism, education, and noncompetitiveness. Unlike the women in Canfield’s Home Fires in France and Atherton’s The White Morning, Sinclair Lewis’ Carol does not forge close bonds with her sisters and fails to find emotional, intellectual, and material support within female-centered communities. So her return to the fold seems inevitable. Gone, too, are the sharp denouncements of innate male aggressiveness and the subsequent efforts to actively resist patriarchal oppression that characterize Canfield’s and Atherton’s wartime writings. New Men such as Lewis’ Kennicott may at times be inconsiderate, but their growing willingness to perceive women as competent partners and genial pals rather than meek housemaids make blanket assaults against “unbridled masculinity” appear ridiculously outdated. After the war, it seems, heightened expectations for a gentler, kinder, feminized society had run their course as not only pseudoscientific normalizing discourses began to circulate, but also 36 37

Ibid., 327-29. Ibid., 330.

Atherton, The White Morning, and War between the Sexes 215 rifts within the aging women’s movement became more and more pronounced. Strains between anti- and pro-war feminists resurfaced, when the former began to hold the latter responsible for the bloodshed. Younger middle-class women, bent on furthering their personal careers, no longer identified with the lofty aspirations of an older generation of feminists; nor did black and working-class women who felt that the patronizing touch of white middle-class reformers had held them back for too long. And behind the postwar façade of Coolidge prosperity, simmering class antagonism and racial tensions flared up anew, making it patently clear that neither Canfield’s nostalgic vision of a close-knit, female-centered community nor Atherton’s essentialist faith in the curative powers of universal sisterhood were sufficient to stamp out persistent conflicts of interests. By the mid-1920s it became moreover apparent that the women’s vote had failed to materialize. As Democratic Congresswoman Emily Newell Blair admitted: I know of no woman today who has any influence or political power because she is a woman. I know of no woman who has a following of other women. I know of no politician who is afraid of the woman vote on any question under the sun.38

Crushed under the weight of sobering postwar realties, hopes for a feminist Utopia appeared to have been lost irretrievably. And yet, even though by all accounts the feminist movement waned during the interwar years, the flame of feminist Utopian desires was kept alive in American women’s literature. Interestingly enough, as Elaine Showalter points out in “Women Writers Between the Wars”, feminist themes were no longer voiced most prominently in the writings of well-connected white middle-class women, but in the long overlooked works by African American authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Jewish American novelists such as Tess Slesinger, and working-class writers such as Meridel Le Sueur.39 Whereas prominent Anglo-Saxon female writers were plagued by “survivor’s guilt” and, 38

Quoted in Elaine Showalter, “Women Writers Between the Wars”, Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia UP, 1988), 823. 39 Ibid., 822-41.

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according to Gilbert and Gubar, became “infected by the postwar misogyny that was so ‘strikingly the correct fashion’”, minority authors as well as writers on the Left began exploring feminist demands within the context of their racial, ethnic, and/or class identities.40 In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), for example, Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie, not unlike Atherton’s Gisela or Enid, is forced to shoot her lover, Vergible “Tea Cake” Woods, after a highly symbolic infection of rabies had turned him into a personification of male violence, raving with jealousy and beating her. Acquitted by an allwhite jury and unencumbered by domestic burdens of any kind, Janie returns to her small community, weary but satisfied, to tell her story. Similarly, in her short story “Sweat”, Hurston traces how her black working-class heroine, Delia, disposes of her sadistic husband, after the leading men of her all-black community had failed to intervene on her behalf. And in The Girl (1939), Meridel Le Sueur conjures up earlier Utopian images of close-knit female communities that provide her downtrodden and abused female characters with the strength to “fight for” their rights in the name of “the Great Mothers” that had preceded them”.41 These and other appropriations of feminist Utopian ideas indicate the enduring legacy of shared experiences of female subjugation and, at the same time, the added burdens of class- and race-based oppression.

40 41

Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, II, 322. Meridel Le Sueur, The Girl (Los Angeles: West End Press, 1978), 125 and 146.

SECTION IV WORLD WAR I AS RACE ROMANCE

CHAPTER 10 Race Consciousness and the Romantic Quest If we have fought to make safe democracy for the white races, we will soon fight to make it safe for ourselves and our posterity.1

Dorothy Canfield’s vignette, “The Refugee”, describes the plight of French women and children living in a sector occupied by German troops. “One day”, “little Marguerite” comes across Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After reading the book with growing excitement, she exclaims: Why, auntie, this might have been written about us, mightn’t it? It tells about things that happen to us all the time—that we have seen. The men who are flogged and starved and killed, the mothers trying in vain to follow their daughters into captivity, the young girls dragged out of their father’s arms—it’s all just like what the Germans do to us, isn’t it?2

Canfield obviously wrote these lines under the impression of US and British war propaganda. Her comparison between the oppression of blacks in the antebellum South and civilians in wartime France is nevertheless instructive, for it reveals the ignorance shared by most whites concerning the experience of African Americans before, during, and after World War I. Dos Passos’ Three Soldiers exhibits similar instances of ignorance, not least because John Andrews fancies himself an abolitionist, though he at last admits: “No; he had not lived up to the name of James Brown.”3 Yet, Fredric Henry’s angry retort in 1

“Views of a Negro During 'the Red Summer' of 1919 – A Document”, ed. William Tuttle, Jr., Journal of Negro History, LI (July 1966), 210. 2 Canfield, Home Fires in France, 129. 3 Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 431.

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A Farewell to Arms that he is no Othello because “Othello was a nigger”, Joe Chrisfield’s complaints in Three Soldiers that this “ain’t no sort o’ life for a man to be treated lahk he was a nigger” as well as Andrews constant references to “slavery” and “enslavement” articulate more than the racist attitudes “so prevalent at the time of the Great Crusade”.4 Collectively, they also hint at growing anxieties that on account of the war white privileges were being eroded. Forced to toil alongside “evil-odored blacks”, Thomas Boyd’s William Hicks in Through the Wheat (1923) pointedly expresses white soldiers’ fears of having been relegated to second-class citizenship: “Soldiering with a shovel. A hell of a way to treat a white man.”5 Though visible merely as ominous shadows in the standard narratives of World War I, black Americans nonetheless began to emerge from the margins of official history during the war and postwar years. No longer content to “wear the mask that grins and lies”, an increasingly self-assertive and politically active African American populace began to demand full citizenship in exchange for unrecognized wartime sacrifices.6 Tellingly, in his first Yoknapatawpha County novel, Sartoris (1929), William Faulkner depicts a black veteran whose defiant attitude portends racial strife as a direct result of World War I. Caspey, although a minor character, comes to represent the defiant attitude of the New Negro: I don’t take nothn’ fum no white folks no mo’. War done changed all that. If us cullud folks is good enough ter save France from de Germans, den us is good enough ter have de same rights de Germans is. French folks thinks so, anyhow, and ef America don’t, dey’s ways of learnin’ ‘um.7

Works by black authors such as Addie W. Hunton and Katheryn M. Johnson’s Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920) seek to exploit white anxieties about black discontent. And by highlighting the contradictions inherent in America’s war 4

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 257; Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, 139; Cooperman, World War 1 and the American Novel, 87. 5 Thomas Boyd, Through the Wheat (New York: Scribner’s, 1923), 1-2. 6 Paul Lawrence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask”, in African-American Poetry: An Anthology: 1773-1927, ed. Joan R. Sherman (New York: Dover, 1997), 64. 7 William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York: Random House, 1956), 45.

Race Consciousness and Romantic Quest

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effort, they concomitantly seek to establish a counter-history of the World War I experience that speaks directly to the modern memory of African Americans. Keenly aware that history is a construct rather than a reflection of reality, Hunton and Johnson state from the outset that they have “no desire to attain to an authentic history”, but instead aim “to record [their] impressions and facts in a simple way”.8 Similar to Walter Benjamin, who in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” posits that to “articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’”, Hunton and Johnson seek to capture those fleeting images of the past that disrupt “the continuum of history” and point toward “redemption”.9 Appropriately, Hunton and Johnson, perhaps following the early example of William Wells Brown’s pastiche-like novel Clotel (1853), intersperse their memoir with poems, newspaper accounts, official memoranda, pictures, letters, statistics, and the like. This technique creates a flow-disrupting, impressionistic account of World War I that achieves multiple ends. “Dedicated to the women of our race”, the memoir, akin to Canfield’s and Cather’s World War I writings, aligns the war sacrifices of women with those of “the young manhood” who suffered” and died “for the cause of freedom”. The tone of the work is patriotic and clearly designed to impress the heroic contributions of black soldiers onto national consciousness in a way palpable to white taste. Its political goals, however, are quite evident (albeit in hindsight somewhat idealistic), serving not only as a reminder that America’s promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” remains unfulfilled, but also sounding a stern warning that “real peace” cannot be achieved until “hate and its train of social and civil injustices” has been blotted out.10 In contributing to what Benjamin calls the larger “tradition of the oppressed”, Hunton and Johnson probably did not aim “to bring about a real state of emergency” (that is, the revolution). Even so, similar to Benjamin’s emancipatory method of historiographical investigation, their counter-history seeks to remind

8

Addie W. Hunton and Katheryn M. Johnson, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (New York: AMS Press, 1971), iii. 9 Benjamin, Illuminations, 255 and 261. 10 Ibid., 239.

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readers that the “‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule”.11 In “First Day in France”, Hunton and Johnson recall an incident that both accentuates the contradiction inherent in the fact that black soldiers, suffering physical and political repression at home, were sent out to “make the world safe for democracy”, and plays to white fears that armed African American troops might turn the tables. Arriving in Bordeaux, the women are not surprised “to be greeted first of all by our own men”: But it did seem passing strange that we should see them guarding German prisoners! Somehow we felt that colored soldiers found it rather refreshing—even enjoyable for a change—having come from a country where it seemed everybody’s business to guard them.12

Yet, this “refreshing” image, alluding to the possibility of an armed rebellion like those that had occurred in the French army, is immediately supplanted by a sobering picture of exclusion: “We remember, too, the Paris of late summer of 1919, when after her great victory parade—in which all the victors participated except our own colored soldiers—she began to realize her real condition.”13 Black “modern memory”, Hunton and Johnson stress, attests to both the (revolutionary) potential for self-liberation and the recognition that, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate”.14 If blacks were not the victors in this struggle, they might emerge victorious from the next. Quoting a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Hunton and Johnson reiterate the importance of the African-American contribution to the war effort:

11

Benjamin, Illuminations, 257. On Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history, see Karsten Piep, “‘A Tiger’s Leap Into the Past’: On the ‘Historical’, ‘Unhistorical’, and ‘Suprahistorical’ in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’”, New German Review, XX/1 (2005), 41-59. 12 Hunton and Johnson, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, 15. 13 Ibid., 17. 14 Benjamin, Illuminations, 256.


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We are the army stevedores and work as we must and may. The cross of honor will never be ours to proudly wear away. But the men at the Front could not be there, And the battles could not be won If the stevedores stopped in their dull routine, And left their work undone. Somebody has to do this work, be glad that it isn’t you, We are the army stevedores—give us our due.15

In addressing the disparity between the black and the white war experience (“be glad that it isn’t you”), the poem illustrates how the degrading labor battalion experience can nevertheless lead to a growing awareness of political strength among African Americans. For if the “stevedores” would suddenly decide to stop their “dull routine”, or, like Claude McKay’s Jake Brown in Home to Harlem (1928), would one after another simply go AWOL, not just “the men at the Front” but American industrial capital would suffer immensely. Equally empowering can be the experience of friendly relations with white French civilians, Hunton and Johnson underscore. Contrasting life under segregation at home with life over there in France, Hunton and Johnson recall, it “was rather an unusual as well as a most welcome experience to be able to go into places of public accommodation without having any hesitation or misgivings; to be at liberty to take a seat in a common carrier”.16 And despite concerted efforts by the US war information office to warn civilians “that their dark-skinned allies … were so brutal and vicious as to be absolutely dangerous”, Hunton and Johnson recall, the “French people … gradually discovered that the colored American was not the wild and vicious character” so that social contacts were established.17 Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, to be sure, does not present a sweeping history of transnational exploitation and heroic black resistance in the vein of Martin R. Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1861-62). No references, for example, are made to black colonial troops serving in the French and British armies. Prior to America’s war entry, the Crisis, edited by the 15

Hunton and Johnson, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, 101-102. 16 Ibid., 182. 17 Ibid., 184.

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very W. E. B. Du Bois who would later issue his controversial call to “Close Ranks”, managed to expose the global contradictions of World War I much more pointedly, when it reprinted the picture of a black colonial soldier holding a German spike-helmet in his hand with the gloss: “A Black ‘Heathen’ of the Congo, fighting to protect the wives and daughters of the white Belgians, who have murdered and robbed his people, against ‘Christian’ Culture represented by the German trophy in his hand!”18 Moreover, just as in Pauline E. Hopkins’ Contending Forces (1900), the reader finds numerous anecdotes of racial uplift and much advice on gradual amelioration in Two Colored Women with the A.E.F. Still, the memoir contains abundant passages and images that call attention to the ways in which World War I fostered a mounting consciousness of both political power and racial identity among African Americans. As Hunton and Johnson conclude, we “learned to know that there was being developed in France a racial consciousness and racial strength that could not have been gained in a half century of normal living in America”.19 Hunton and Johnson’s euphemistic reference to the “half century of normal living in America” cannot conceal the fact that the years leading up to World War I were marked by “lynching, disenfranchisement, inferior schools, confinement to menial and lower-paid employment”.20 What Benjamin calls the “state of emergency”, in other words, was endemic to the quotidian black experience in post-Reconstruction America. As Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, Sutton Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio (1899), and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition cogently illustrate, any progress that was achieved during Reconstruction had been made naught by “Southern Redemption”.21 Concentrated principally in the former Confederate states, blacks, freed de jure but not de facto, had 18

Quoted in Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets, 112. Hunton and Johnson, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, 157. 20 Walter F. White, A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White (New York: Viking, 1948), 72. 21 See Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 3-36.

19


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fallen under the renewed economic control and political domination of their former masters. The exploitive system of tenant farming and sharecropping ensured that landless African Americans remained caught up in a vicious cycle of poverty. Poll taxes, literacy tests, property ownership stipulations, and the notorious grandfather clause had been instituted to disenfranchise all but a few blacks in urban areas such as Atlanta. “Jim Crow” laws, upheld by the Supreme Court in Plessy v Ferguson (1892), had made segregation a way of life, relegating blacks to inferior public accommodations in streetcars, trains, theaters, restaurants, hospitals, schools, and universities. Legal discrimination against blacks was reinforced through public intimidation and bloody outbursts of violence. Lynchings – involving shooting, burning, maiming, and ritualized subordination – became regular phenomena. Throughout the 1890s, approximately a hundredand-fifty black Americans were murdered annually and between 1900 and 1914, over a thousand fell victim to deadly mob violence.22 Abandoned by the federal government, geographically scattered, politically disunited, and without the aid of strong national organizations, a steady stream of African-American sharecroppers began protesting with their feet, following once again the “Northern Star” in search of humane living conditions. As Jon-Christian Suggs explains, the “fact that 90 percent of black Americans lived in rural settings hamstrung their abilities to organize in any numbers to resist statewide actions against them, and the resultant oppression in turn stimulated emigration to urban centers”.23 The outbreak of war in Europe further accelerated the mass exodus that has since become known as the Great Migration. As European immigration was practically halted while demand for war-related products skyrocketed, the prospect of decent-paying factory jobs lured African American into the industrial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Word-ofmouth as well as op-ed pieces in influential black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender urged people to escape from the “deepfreeze” of modern-day slavery: “IF YOU CAN FREEZE TO DEATH in the North

22

Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity, 175. Jon-Christian Suggs, Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in American Life (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000), 151. 23

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and be free, why FREEZE in the South and be a slave …. The Defender Says Come.”24 And come they did. Between 1914 and 1920, an estimated fivehundred-thousand Americans of African lineage found their way to big manufacturing cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh as well as a host of smaller communities, thereby making the long ignored question of race relations an issue of national concern.25 Few black Americans actually found the anticipated economic prosperity and social acceptance in the North. Still, most believed that they had at least attained “more freedom and less fear than in the South”.26 Like millions of Irish and Eastern European immigrants before them, black migrants received substandard wages for backbreaking labor. Housing was both poor and scarce and brought them in fierce competition with white blue-collar workers. With the exception of the IWW, most trade unions rejected black membership and collaborated with employers and city officials to confine African Americans to menial jobs and ghettoized housing. Racial hostilities turned violent almost immediately, as a series of anti-black riots in East St Louis, Detroit, and Chicago attest. Unacceptable living conditions and increased racial violence notwithstanding, the mass movement North wrought tremendous changes within the heretofore splintered African American community and stimulated an unprecedented wave of political activism. In the fast-growing urban ghettos, radical anti-integrationist organizations such as the Universal Negro Improvement Association, led by the flamboyant Marcus Garvey, and Marxist groups such as the African Blood Brotherhood took root. Mainstream civil rights organizations that had been fledgling before World War I, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the New York-based Urban League, increased their membership tenfold. Having spearheaded a publicity campaign against D. W. Griffith’s virulently racist movie Birth of a Nation (1915), the NAACP’s membership grew rapidly, from roughly 9,000 in 1917 to

24

Chicago Defender, 24 February 1917, 1. Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience, 128. 26 Arthus Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1974), 10. 25


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approximately 90,000 in 1919. By 1920, the NAACP could boast of more than three-hundred local branches nationwide. Initially, most African Americans were indifferent to the slaughter in distant Europe. “The Germans ain’t done nothin’ to me, and if they have, I forgive ’em”, was the irony-tinged response of many.27 Soon, however, writers, intellectuals, and civil rights activists grasped that the moralizing rhetoric surrounding World War I could be advantageously exploited to highlight black grievances at home. “As ghastly as are the horrors of the European war, man’s inhumanity to man is not confined to our brethren across the sea”, the Chicago Defender editorialized in February 1916.28 Between 1914 and 1916, a hundred-and-twenty-six African Americans fell victim to lynchings, prompting a writer for the Baltimore Afro-American to point up the duplicity of a Wilson administration that denounces German “ruthlessness on the high sea” while turning a blind eye on the “ruthlessness in my home town”.29 The much lamented death of American civilians aboard the torpedoed Lusitania provided black writers with an additional opportunity to expose the double standards upheld by the overwhelming bulk of the white public. In a New York Age article, entitled “Concerns Not Even the Sheriff”, a bitter James Weldon Johnson noted on 5 August 1915: It does seem like a hollow hypocrisy that this nation is … ready to raise armies and navies to uphold the principle of international law which guarantees protection to non-combatants aboard merchant ships; even when those vessels belong to belligerents; and yet, the fact that within its own borders one of its own citizens is taken from the custody of the lawfully constituted courts and burned at the stake by a mob will not call for the raising even of a sheriff’s posse.30

But more than any other home front atrocity perpetrated during the war years, it was the four-day “Negro-hunt” of East St Louis in May 1917 – charring an entire neighborhood and leaving over a hundred 27

Quoted in James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 1930), 232-33. 28 Quoted in William G. Jordan, Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy, 1914-1920 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 2001), 41. 29 Ibid., 42. 30 Ibid., 42-43.

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blacks and eight whites dead – that galvanized the African American community into action.31 While most white papers predictably blamed “Negro residential invasion” for the bloodbath, the black press unanimously denounced the riot in the sharpest terms.32 On July 28, 5,000 shocked and incensed African Americans staged a protest march down New York’s Fifth Avenue, “with 20,000 more standing in silence along the route”.33 Banners were unfurled – and quickly confiscated – asking, “Mr. President, why not make America safe for America?” Other posters, conjuring up images of abolitionist times, “showed kneeling women pleading with President Wilson”.34 Wilson steadfastly refused to receive a black delegation that sought to address the East St Louis riot. In response, Kelly Miller, prominent head of the sociology department at Howard University, penned a widely distributed (and subsequently banned) open letter that tempers expressions of outrage with reaffirmations of black loyalty in times of war: It is a hollow mockery of the Negro when he is beaten and bruised in all parts of the nation and flees to the national government for asylum, to be denied relief on the basis of doubtful jurisdiction. The black man asks for protection and is given a theory of government …. The Negro, Mr. President, in this emergency, will stand by you and the nation. Will you and the nation stand by the Negro?”35

Miller’s strategy to demand federal recognition of basic citizenship rights on the basis of a black display of patriotism is characteristic of African American responses to the Great War after US intervention had become imminent. Before the backdrop of impending warfare, black essayists and editors – similar to pro-war Socialist writers such as Upton Sinclair and hawkish feminist authors such as Gertrude Atherton – doggedly persisted in pointing out the increasingly blatant defects within American democracy while simultaneously playing up 31

Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 24. Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity, 185. 33 Ibid., 186; Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 26. 34 Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 26. 35 Kelly Miller, “The Disgrace of Democracy: An Open Letter to President Woodrow Wilson, 4 August 1917”, in Anthology of American Negro Literature, ed. V. F. Calverton (New York: Modern Library, 1929), 365-66. 32


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the deep-rooted patriotism and unwavering loyalty of their constituency. In the eyes of many individuals, newspaper boards, and civil rights organizations alike, the war seemed to hold the key to full participatory membership in the national family. Grounded in the romantic rather than the legalistic assumption that service to the nation not just incurs gratitude, but also already denotes an unspoken de facto recognition of citizenship, black organs of public opinion admonished their readers to seize the day. “The opportunity we have longed for is here”, the Chicago Defender proclaimed, “it is ours now to grasp it. The war has given us a place upon which to stand.”36 “Evasism”, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Young, the highest ranking black officer in the US armed services and hero of the 1915 military expedition into Mexico, concurred, “has done us no good as a race, nor has it done the country at large any in this time of need of preparation for its defense”.37 Across the country, community leaders began addressing young blacks of draft-age as “sons of freedom”, promising, “when we have proved ourselves men, worthy to work and die for our country, a grateful nation may gladly give us the recognition of real men, and the rights and privileges of true and loyal citizens of these United States”.38 In May 1917, the NAACP called on “colored fellow citizens to join heartily in this fight for eventual world liberty”.39 And even W.E.B. Du Bois, who had sternly denounced both European imperialism in general and the US American invasion of the Dominican Republic in particular, threw his support behind the war. “Let us not hesitate”, Du Bois urged readers of the Crisis in July, 1918: “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens …. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly with our eyes lifted to the hills.”40 A month earlier, playwright Alice 36

Chicago Defender, 29 December 1917, 4. Quoted in Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets, 129. 38 Quoted in Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 7. 39 Quoted in Zieger, America’s Great War: World War I and the American Experience, 130. 40 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Close Ranks”, Crisis, 16 (July 1918), 111. This editorial dismayed many militant black leaders such as William Monroe Trotter, a co-founder of the NAACP, who left the organization over objections to white financing and leadership. Contemporary historians such as Mark Ellis have suggested that Du Bois 37

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Dunbar-Nelson had organized a flag parade in Delaware, during which 6,000 participants pledged “the loyalty of the Race to the American Flag”.41 Patriotic affirmations of loyalty to the flag, it was believed, would turn a segregated nation into one of “fellow citizens”. As the narrator in Walter F. White’s The Fire in the Flint explains: “many of them entered the army, not so much because they were fired with desire to fight for an abstract thing like world democracy, but, because they were of a race oppressed, they entertained very definite beliefs that service in France would mean a more decent regime in America.”42 In hindsight, such hopes were no doubt “delirious”, as Barbeau and Henri duly note.43 Yet they were certainly not new. At the onset of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass had expressed similar notions that military services would cement black citizenship rights: “Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his buttons and a musket on his shoulders, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned his right to citizenship.”44 At first, the double-barreled tactic of pledging black support for the war effort while concurrently protesting injustices seemed to pay off as the government reluctantly embraced the idea of black military service, not least because internal reports had concluded that the “cooperation of this large element of our population in all civilian and military activities is of vital importance” and “the alienation, or worse, of eleven million people would be a serious menace to the successful prosecution of the war”.45 Stephen J. Maher’s melodramatic The Sister of a Certain Soldier (1918) reflects the official change in attitude “struck a deal” with the army to write “Close Ranks” in exchange for the captaincy. William Jordan refutes this claim, arguing that “American racism forced black leaders to shift between tactics of accommodation and of protest”. See Mark Ellis, “‘Closing Ranks’ and ‘Seeking Honor’: W. E. B. Du Bois in World War I”, Journal of American History, 79 (June 1992), 96-124. For the rejoinder, see William Jordan, “‘The Damnable Dilemma’: African American Accommodation and Protest during World War I”, Journal of American History, 81 (March 1995), 1562-83. 41 Quoted in Gloria Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Woman Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987), 67. 42 Walter F. White, The Fire in the Flint (New York: Knopf, 1924), 43. 43 Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 7. 44 Quoted in Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, xii. 45 Quoted in Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity, 176.


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toward the enlistment of black troops. One of the few World War I fictions by a white author that features a black main character, the novella depicts the “heroic” efforts of a black Joan d’Arc to dispel African American notions of the “hypocrisy and cruelty … of the American white man’s heart” and “to organize a new company of colored troops” that will revel in “the glory of the actual giving of themselves to their country”.46 At the time Maher’s novella appeared, the metaphor of the national household (albeit a strictly patriarchal and segregated one) was also deployed in recruitment posters that portrayed young black males of draft-age as “the sons of freedom”, who bravely fight German soldiers before the superimposed image of a fatherly Abraham Lincoln. It soon became apparent, however, that the government had no intentions of acknowledging African Americans as equal citizens through service in the armed forces. By and large relegated to “Services and Supply” units, most black soldiers were only allowed to perform menial (albeit essential) tasks behind the lines. As Barbeau and Henri put it, “almost all the black draftees would serve in the military equivalent of chain gangs”.47 Racism in the army was rampant. Because white troops could not be expected to serve alongside black soldiers, the armed forces were strictly segregated along both horizontal and vertical lines. This meant that an all-white corps of officers typically commanded all-black companies.48 Under pressure to mollify the African American community, the government did eventually establish a segregated training camp for black officers in Des Moines, Iowa, but relatively few African Americans actually received commissions.49 Almost invariably, African American 46

Stephen E. Maher, The Sister of a Certain Soldier (New Haven, CT: Morehouse and Taylor, 1918), 8, 25, and 42. 47 Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 90. 48 Significantly, Maher’s black Joan d’Arc in The Sister of a Certain Soldier convinces “white officers … to instruct the new [colored] company” (25). 49 According to Barbeau and Henri in The Unknown Soldiers, “the military reconciled itself to the decision [of training black officers] with certain reservations: (1) that no more than 2 percent of officer candidates should be black men (although 13 percent of draftees were black), (2) that few colored officers would ever be utilized …, (3) that these few should be washed out as quickly as they could be charged with incompetence, and (4) that there should be no black officers of field rank (major and up)” (58).

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brigades received low-grade equipment, mediocre training, secondrate accommodation, and some of the worst assignments imaginable. Meanwhile, large segments of the white public loathed seeing blacks in uniform. On the streets of Houston, black soldiers who defied segregation laws by refusing to yield to white pedestrians were physically assaulted. The ensuing riot of 23 August 1917 resulted in seventeen white casualties (including five policemen) and the summary execution of thirteen black soldiers.50 Incidents such as these were water on the mills of a white mainstream press that unremittingly ran long articles, stressing the innate unruliness and race-typical ineptness of African Americans in uniform. But undoubtedly the greatest fear harbored by the white public was that black soldiers would “freely associate” with white women in France. As soon as the first black troops had disembarked in Le Havre, army directives were dispatched, stipulating under punishment of martial law that black “enlisted men … will not talk to or be in company with any white woman”.51 In addition, the US Army pleaded with the French High Command to prevent any contact between African American soldiers and female civilians, “because white Americans become greatly incensed at any public expression of intimacy between white women and black men”.52 And sure enough, across the Atlantic, even the mere thought of possible “intimacy between white women and black men” sufficed to trigger violent reactions. Already incensed by omnipresent propaganda images of dark-skinned Huns raping fair Belgian maidens as well as the bigoted portrayal of black rapists in Birth of a Nation, white miscegenation phobia reached a fever pitch shortly after the war and, as in Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint, found release in the lynchings of black veterans, who were said to have been “ruined” in France.53 “I allus said these niggers who went to France an’ ran with 50

Wray R. Johnson, “Black American Radicalism and the First World War: The Secret Files of the Military Intelligence Division”, Armed Forces and Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal, XXVI/1 (Fall 1999), 30. 51 Quoted in Hunton and Johnson, Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, 186. 52 Quoted in Greene, Blacks in Eden, 144. 53 Among the “seventy-eight blacks” that were lynched in 1919, Wray R. Johnson notes in “Black American Radicalism and the First World War”, ten “were black veterans” (36).


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those damn Frenchwomen ’d try some of that same stuff when they came back! Ol’ Vardaman was right! Ought never ’t have let niggers in th’ army anyhow”, exclaims one member of the faceless mob that is about to lynch Kenneth Harper exclaims in The Fire in the Flint.54 Withering hopes of gaining recognition in return for their services were crushed when returning black veterans found themselves prime targets of the Nativist postwar hysteria that led to a resurgence of Ku Klux Klan violence not only in the “Old South”, but in Northeastern and Midwestern states as well. In 1919 alone, “over eighty blacks were lynched, and eleven were burned at the stakes”.55 “The blood lust which World War One was too short to satiate made the year 1919 one of almost unmitigated horror and tension”, remembers former NAACP secretary Walter White in his autobiography: “Violent and bloody race riots broke out in Washington, Chicago, Omaha, Philadelphia; Phillips County Arkansas, and other areas.”56 Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s sweeping historical poem, “Pictures”, in Clouds and Sunshine (1920), conveys the sour realization that black loyalty during World War I had not brought the expected rewards. Instead, both “Lynching” and “Discrimination” had spread to the North and become a national phenomenon: Not wanted here, not wanted there, Such signs go up all o’er the land. My God, then are my people free! No vote for you, no vote for me. Have we not borne the stripes enough, Our cry goes up,—“How long, how long!”57

But even though the general sense of postwar humiliation was great, it quickly became evident that African Americans as a whole would no longer passively submit to white repression. As philosopher and literary critic Alain Locke explains: “the anticipated rewards of the Negro’s patriotic response to the idealism of the ‘War to Save Democracy’ were not measurably realized and, spurred by the bitter 54

White, The Fire in the Flint, 286. Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity, 189. 56 White, A Man Called White, 44. 57 Sarah Lee Brown Fleming, Hope’s Highway/Clouds and Sunshine (New York: Hall, 1995), 216. 55

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disillusionment of postwar indifference, there came that desperate intensification of the Negro’s race consciousness and attempt to recover group morale.”58 Animated by a mounting feeling of racial pride that counteracted “bitter disillusionment”, African American writers, editors, and activists recalled the lessons of previous struggles, and recovered group morale by vowing that henceforth blacks will no longer “tamely and meekly submit to a program of lynching, burning, and social ostracism”.59 The once hawkish Du Bois admitted “a deep sense of disappointment, of poignant pain” and later, like Upton Sinclair, even conceded that he “did not realize the full horror of war and its wide impotence as a method of social reform”.60 But, again like Sinclair, Du Bois refused to give up. Perceiving that a “new, radical Negro spirit” had been born in France, he urged himself as well as his people to “marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn” and to uphold the hardwon fighting spirit: “We return, we return from fighting, we return fighting.”61 For white veterans returning from the battlefields of Europe, the war might have spelled bitter disillusionment, but at least the fighting and bloodshed seemed to be over. For a black populace subjected to white postwar resentment, by contrast, the war for social, economic, and political self-determination had just begun. Unlike “Hemingway’s hero” in A Farewell to Arms, Ralph Ellison notes, with reference to his initial plan of centering what was to become Invisible Man on the experiences of a black World War II veteran, “for my pilot there was neither escape nor a loved one waiting”.62 “The World War had ended”, Claude McKay remembers in A Long Way Home (1937). “But its end was a signal for the outbreak of little wars between labor and capital and, like a plague breaking out in sore places, between colored

58

Alain L. Locke, The Negro in America (Chicago: American Library Association, 1933), 12-13. 59 Editorial, Chicago Defender (22 February 1919), 1. 60 Quoted in Wynn, From Progressivism to Prosperity, 191. 61 W. E. B. Du Bois, “An Essay Toward the History of the Black Man in the Great War”, Crisis (June 1919), 72. 62 Ralph Waldo Ellison, Introduction, in Invisible Man, 30th Anniversary Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), xiii.


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folk and white”.63 Hence, there was neither time for self-pitying disillusionment, nor for the abandonment of black heroic idealism. Clad in near-mythic terminology, Claude McKay’s sonnet, “If We Must Die” (1919), forcefully speaks to the rise of a self-affirming “New Negro” consciousness while articulating the urgency of black fortitude and unity in the struggles that lie ahead: If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accurséd lot. If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe! Though far outnumbered let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back! 64

Viewed through the eyes of black writers such as McKay, then, the Great War did not trigger the sudden revulsion against “a botched civilization” that Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot articulate in their embittered postwar poetry.65 Acutely aware that the history of African 63

Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home (New York: Furman, 1937), 31. Claude McKay, “If We Must Die”, African-American Poetry: An Anthology: 17731927, ed. Joan R. Sherman (New York: Dover, 1997), 70. 65 As Henry Louis Gates and Nellie McKay contend in their Preface to The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: Norton, 1997): “With very few exceptions, none of the younger writers of the movement saw himself or herself as part of the radical modernist strain of literature set in motion in America mainly through the efforts of poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and Wallace Stevens or by ... James Joyce .... In part ... these writers were after a different business altogether. Most could not be completely taken, for example, by T.S. Eliot's epochal figuring of the entire modern world as a ‘Waste Land.’ For many of them, the 1920s was a decade of unrivalled optimism, and all through the generations of slavery and neo-slavery, black American culture had of necessity emphasized the power of endurance and survival, of love and laughter, as the only efficacious response to the painful circumstances surrounding their lives” (5). 64

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Americans has traditionally been circumscribed by Western civilization’s persistent betrayal of its own humanistic and democratic principles, World War I and its aftermath were seen only as the latest episode in a protracted series of broken promises and gross abuses. “Black history is rife with suffering, alienation, and terror”, Jane Campbell remarks succinctly.66 Consequently, unlike white avantgarde writers who strove to represent the dehumanizing particulars of warfare as a uniquely modern experience, black “novelists in general did not foreground black soldiers’ military experience or the war’s direct effects on African American civilian life. Rather”, Lee J. Greene notes, “they juxtaposed historical formations relevant to the black population that repeated themselves during the nation’s major wars of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries to emphasize the ongoing civil war between blacks and whites”.67 “Historically”, Ralph Ellison writes in his 1982 introduction to Invisible Man, “most of the nation’s conflicts of arms have been – at least for Afro-Americans – wars-within-wars. Such was true of the Civil War, the last Indian Wars, of the Spanish American Wars, and of World Wars I and II.”68 Accordingly, the battle lines drawn in black World War I fictions diverge noticeably from those in white Modernist war texts. Not the individual’s futile or ironic struggle against a faceless, unthinking war machine, but the hero’s representative fight against concrete evils such as segregation, racial prejudice, economic exploitation, and lynching becomes the narrative focal point. And as McKay’s use of the personal pronoun “we” in If We Must Die already suggests, this fight is typically represented as part and parcel of the historic communal struggle for social, economic, and political justice. The successes or failures of this ongoing communal struggle, in turn, speak directly to the successes or failures of American society at large. In this way, black Great War novels, following in the footsteps of the sanguine romances of racial uplift and the bleaker post-reconstruction novels of the late nineteenth century, emerge “as part of the national text … in 66 Jane Campbell, Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1986), xi. 67 Lee J. Greene, Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel’s First Century (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996), 135. 68 Ellison, Introduction, xiii.


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which African Americans create the record of their imagined American-ness, or of their resistance to it”.69 The preservation of heroic sentimentality in McKay’s If We Must Die further indicates that African American literary responses to World War One do more than just emphasize “the ongoing civil war between blacks and whites”.70 Above and beyond linking present experiences of maltreatment to the memory of past abuses, these writings “call upon earlier myths … of power, of hope, of delivery” in order to create messianic characters in the present, whose actions point toward a better future”.71 As a closer examination of Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and Walter F. White’s The Fire in the Flint will show, African American Great War writings transcend the confines of mere protest fiction by adapting conventions of the historical romance so as to represent exemplary black protagonists, whose renewed dedication to racial self-improvement, communal work, and heroic resistance mark them as the true standard bearers of the American democratic ideal. This harking back to “earlier myths … of power, of hope, of delivery”, as Bernard W. Bell has observed, was a strategy widely employed in early twentieth-century “Afro-American novels” that persist in “reaffirming the possibilities of the romantic vision of black American character” vis-à-vis “the stark reality and symbolism of ritual lynchings, obligatory Jim Crow episodes, and international intrigue”.72 Similar to the war historians Hunton and Johnson, then, war novelists such as Fleming and White not only record the continuance of racial oppression, but also counteract a “sense of blind defeat” by rekindling the desiring flame of romantic deliverance that

69

Suggs, Whispered Consolations, 93. “As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth century”, Campbell explains in Mythic Black Fiction, African American “heroes and heroines began to reject the delimiting values white culture attempted to impose. Instead, messianic figures began to point to and act out the real values at work, at times embracing the beauty of black speech, of violent revolt” (x). 70 Marcellus Blount, “Caged Birds: Race and Gender in the Sonnet”, Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, eds Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990), 228. 71 Campbell, Mythic Black Fiction, x. 72 Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987), 91.

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has marked both African American literature and historiography since the earliest slave narratives.73 According to Northrop Frye’s by now classic definition, the romance is a quest narrative that unfolds in three stages: (1) “the perilous quest and the preliminary minor adventures”, (2) “the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die”, and (3) “the recognition of the hero, who has clearly proven himself to be hero even if he does not survive the conflict”.74 This tripartite structure of the archetypal romantic quest, though modified to address time-specific concerns, continues to inform black World War I novels from Fleming’s expectant Hope’s Highway to White’s skeptical The Fire in the Flint. Of course, as Paul Fussell has shown, adaptations of the romantic quest motif in World War I literature are by no means limited to African American writings. For many British soldier-literati, Fussell points out, “the war experience came to resemble a medieval quest, whose shape was defined by the routine of the journey to the front and the rituals of “going up the line”.75 In black American Great War novels, however, the perilous journey “up the line” does not take place in the outlandish environment of no-man’s land, but in the familiar home front milieu of violence, wherein the protagonist must confront the barbed wires of race discrimination and the exploding shells of racial violence. The fighting abroad and its resulting interaction with less prejudiced Northerners and Europeans is therefore often portrayed as an intellectually stimulating reprieve, during which the African American soldier-hero revives his faith in the principles of participatory democracy.

73

White, The Fire in the Flint, 93. On the impact of the slave narrative on the development of African American literature, see, for example, Henry Louis Gates’ Introduction to The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Mentor, 1989), ix-xviii. The narrative’s characteristic “odyssey from slavery to freedom”, Gates writes, became “an emblem of every black person’s potential for higher education and the desire to be free” (x). 74 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957), 187. 75 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 135.


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Thus, in Hope’s Highway, Tom Brinley’s perilous quest is rendered as the movement from quasi-slavery in the Jim Crow South to the relative freedom of wartime Britain and France, where the former “no-man” has the “great opportunity” to “prove” his “manhood”, before returning as a visionary leader of his race.76 Similarly, picking up where Hope’s Highway leaves off, Kenneth Harper’s perilous quest in The Fire in the Flint does not commence when he arrives in France, but begins when the decorated black army physician decides to set up a medical practice in his native Georgia. Moreover, in marked distinction to much white Modernist war prose, where the crucial struggle between isolated individual and colossal war machine is deflated and turns from pathos into bathos, the battle between the representative hero and the representative foe in African American World War I novels retains its potentially uplifting and transformative meaning. This becomes most explicit in Hope’s Highway, where the falsely accused Tom Brinley not only escapes from the chain gang, but receives partial redress in court and, following his wartime education in Europe, returns home with a newly acquired dedication to prevail over unjust laws and to serve his people. Unlike most Modernist war novels by white authors that categorically deny the possibility of heroic recognition and hence depict the antihero’s withdrawal into himself, Hope’s Highway harnesses the nation- and community-building impulse of the historical romance in presenting the returning war hero as the empowered and self-confident leader of his “oppressed and forsaken people”.77 Tom Brinley, in short, emerges as a messianic and quintessentially romantic figure in the mold of Frederick Douglass’ Madison Washington. Written under the impression of escalating postwar discrimination and violence, The Fire in the Flint obviously conveys a great deal less faith in America’s future than Hope’s Highway. Nevertheless, White’s

76

Fleming, Hope’s Highway, 154. Fleming, Hope’s Highway, 154. On the nation-building impulse that underlies the classical form of the historical novel, see Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 24-30. 77

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postwar vision is not quite as bleak as critics commonly assert.78 For although Kenneth and Bob Harper are brutally slain by white mobs at the close of The Fire in the Flint, their courageous challenge of entrenched white power structures and their efforts to establish a black “co-operative society” signal nothing short of a sea change in postwar race relations.79 Too educated and too experienced “to do as [their] daddy did”, Kenneth – a social reformer and race leader in the vein of Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth” – and his militant brother Bob come to represent the “new Negro spirit” that had been (re)awakened by the phony war for democracy abroad.80 Like Sinclair’s Jimmie Higgins and Cunningham’s Jim Tetley, the Harper brothers are defeated in their fight on behalf of social justice and black self-determination. But their valiant resistance in the face of overwhelming adversity revives memories of past struggles and consequently spikes rebellious sentiments in the present. “At any rate”, Kenneth reflects shortly before his death, “killing or running me away wouldn’t kill the spirit of revolt these coloured people have—it might stir it even higher”.81 As the novel’s few perceptive (and increasingly nervous) whites are made to recognize, “there’ll be more like him coming on—and they got too much sense to stand for what nigras been made to suffer”.82 “African-American writers”, Barbara Christian observes: … use the sources of history to reimagine the terrain of the past in relation to the concerns of the present, concerns such as how communities were constituted, and what might be the very concept of freedom in a land which privileged the individual. Whether they wanted to or not, they had to become a functioning group if they were to survive.83 78

According to Suggs’ reading in Whispered Consolations, Harper’s defeat in White’s The Fire in the Flint “is even more complete than” that of Charles Chesnutt’s “black doctor” in The Marrow of Tradition (177). 79 White, The Fire in the Flint, 142. 80 Ibid., 53. 81 Ibid., 258. 82 Ibid., 165. 83 Barbara Christian, “‘The Past is Infinite: History and Myth in Toni Morrison’s Trilogy”, Social Identities, VI/4 (July/August 2000), 418. In Whispered Consolations, Suggs identifies these historical concerns as the recurring problem of “confederation” in African American fiction. This “superstructural problem”, Suggs explains, “is stated most simply as ‘How are we to come together as a people to survive the


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These overarching social, economical, and political concerns of how African Americans can “become a functioning group” also lie at the heart of Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and White’s The Fire in the Flint. For aside from the harrowing imprints of white barbarity and black suffering, they also always spot redemptive (and often romantic) images of individual heroism, collective activism, and a growing common consciousness that, according to Alain Locke, proclaimed African Americans a people. It is these images literary works such as Fleming’s Hope’s Highway and White’s The Fire in the Flint seek to preserve and nurture in the African American cultural memory of the First World War.

presence of white people in the world and the laws they have written to sustain themselves’” (119).

CHAPTER 11 Sarah Lee Brown Fleming, Hope’s Highway, and the End of Racial Strife They tell you this is the “white man’s war”; and you will be “no better off after than before the war …. Believe them not; cowards themselves, they do not wish to have their cowardice shamed by your brave example.1

Sarah Lee Brown Fleming was born on 10 January 1875 in Charleston, South Carolina. When the First World War broke out, Fleming was nearly forty years old and lived with her husband, the dentist Robert Stedman Fleming, in New Haven, Connecticut. Like Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and Gertrude Atherton, she belonged to an older generation of writers, who by and large threw their support behind America’s “War for Democracy”. Hope’s Highway shows Fleming to fit the mold of American pro-war literati. Having said this, though, it is important to note that her “political project”, like those of African American playwrights Alice DunbarNelson and Mary P. Burrill, “was at a tangent to patriotism and pacifism”.2 To her, as to most of her African American contemporaries, the embrace of patriotism was tied less to “an abstract thing like world democracy” than to “very definite beliefs that service in France would mean a more decent regime in America”.3 Tom Brinely’s initial eagerness “for a chance to serve his own country by 1

Frederick Douglass, “Men of Color, To Arms!”, Douglass Monthly, 21 March 1863, 1. 2 Tylee, “Womanist Propaganda”, 154. 3 White, The Fire in the Flint, 43. Besides, “neither patriotism nor public objection as conventionally conceived by white Americans was an option available to Black Americans”, Claire M. Tylee notes in “Womanist Propaganda” (154).

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entering the service at home”, underscores Fleming’s conviction that black displays of heroism abroad would result in greater social and political recognition at home.4 And so it seems hardly surprising that Fleming’s Hope’s Highway, in line with Du Bois’ editorial praise of black soldiery, seeks to dispel white prejudices concerning racial ineptness of black soldiers by extolling the heroism of colored colonial troops in Europe.5 In a letter from Paris, Frederic Towers, husband-to-be of the novel’s white heroine, not only remarks that the “French army has enlisted many of these black men in the ranks”, but furthermore relates how his encounter with one “herculean black [who] was given a medal of honor” changed his attitude toward the enlistment of black soldiers: His physique was magnificent,—tall, erect of stature, and well proportioned. He impressed one as he stood to receive his degree. The French people could not do enough for him. Imagine my attending a banquet in his honor! The French seemed to have forgotten his color, and spoke only of his valor and bravery …. I feel that we Americans are too narrow in our feelings. What difference does it make whether bravery is garbed in black or white? It is deeper than the skin. (58)

In its appeal to shared romantic notions of the beauty of strength, valor, bravery, and sacrifice, this scene is evidently designed to accentuate the war’s potential of uniting the races and of overcoming the divisive narrowness of prejudice. As Van Wienen has observed: “the values of martyrdom and heroism embodied in the soldier-poet were by no means simply immanent in the white, English soldier poet, but were uniquely developed in black American culture as well.”6 Unlike white soldierpoets such as Allan Seeger, however, black soldier-poets (real or 4

Fleming, Hope’s Highway, 151. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Du Bois managed to exalt in the unrequited heroism of African American “Buffalo Soldiers” even as he sternly rebuked his own country’s punitive expedition into Mexico. Writing of the battle of Carizzal, during which eighty black troops stood the ground against 120 Mexicans, Du Bois ends his editorial by assessing that the fight represented “a glory for the Mexicans who dared to defend their country and for Negro troopers who went singing to their death. And the greater glory for the black men, for Mexicans died for a land they love, while Negroes sang for a country that despises, cheats, and lynches them” (Crisis, April 1916, 165). 6 Van Wienen, Partisans and Poets, 105. 5

Fleming, Hope’s Highway, and the End of Racial Strife

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imagined) could never escape the fact that they were battling on two fronts. As soldiers both in their country’s official fight against Prussian expansionism and in their community’s unauthorized fight against institutionalized racism, they were “interpellated” into two subjection positions that at once reinforced and contested each other.7 Ripples of the complex and perforce contradictory interaction between these two subject positions – which may also be described by way of Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness” – are clearly noticeable in Hope’s Highway. For Fleming’s hero does not volunteer to serve his own country. Instead, Tom joins the French armed forces, after a visit to France had “opened his eyes to the fact that all men were equal in the French army, and his joy at this discovery knew no bounds” (151). Like most educated African Americas who had access to black dailies such as The Chicago Defender or the Baltimore AfroAmerican, Fleming was no doubt aware of the mistreatment of African American troops. Tom’s conscious decision to serve under the Tricolore rather than under “Old Glory” therefore appears to be a veiled indictment against the US Army’s strict segregation policies – all the more so, because in the French army Tom is rapidly promoted to Commander Brinley and showered with medals “of honor … to an enviable degree” (152). Hardly any black officers in the US Army reached the rank-equivalent of Lieutenant Colonel and none held field command.8 Apart from her novel, alas, nothing is known about Fleming’s struggles to come to grips with American wartime politics and, for 7

“Interpellation” is a term coined by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser that describes the process by which an individual becomes an ideologically subject. As Althusser explains in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”: “ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” (Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster [New York: Monthly Review Press 1971], 174). 8 When Colonel Charles Young was in line for promotion to brigadier general, he was swiftly and unceremoniously retired on specious medical grounds. Predictably, this caused uproar in the black press. Fleming, no doubt, was aware of this controversy. On the treatment of black officers in the AEF, see Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 56-69.

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that matter, preciously little is known about her life generally.9 What can be gleaned from her novel, though, suggests that she concerned herself only selectively or – perhaps better – eclectically with the political roots and social effects of war in distant Europe. According to the narrator in Hope’s Highway, for instance, World War I had been precipitated by “a disagreement over some African land” between Germany and France (151). Now, this over simplistic (if not outright mistaken) explanation may be read as an allusion to the Morocco Crisis of 1905, in which case it might entail a sly critique of European imperialism. The narrator’s subsequent elucidation that Tom’s military leadership was instrumental to the “settlement of the question at issue” strongly suggests, however, that Fleming’s grasp of European geopolitics was simply limited (152). Likewise, although Tom Brinley notes while traveling through England and France that “the war had left its mark on devastation to a greater or lesser degree on the different countries”, he makes the rather astonishing observation that the “war’s killing off of millions does not seem to have produced a scarcity here, at least” (144, 141).10 But given the daily experience of scarcity among poor urban blacks and disenfranchised Southern sharecroppers alike, Tom’s impression is perhaps less astounding than it may appear at first. As is the case with most African American World War I writings, whether fictional or non-fictional, representations of European affairs are of significance only insofar as they shed contrasting light on the living conditions within the United States. Accordingly, literary accounts of the black American wartime experience abroad tend to idealize the 9

The most extensive biographical entry on Fleming to date can be found in Ann Allen Shockley, Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (Boston: Hall, 1988). Additional information as well as a brief reading of Hope’s Highway can be found in Lorraine Elena Roses and Ruth Elizabeth Randolph, Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers, 1900-1945 (Boston: Hall, 1990), 115-17. 10 The novel’s chronology of events in Europe is also rather confusing, so that Tom Brinley arrives in London after the “war’s killing off of millions … had been over some little time”, but then, following his studies at Oxford University, he inexplicably decides to “resign from his paper temporarily, and enter the French army” (141, 151). The “recent triumphant end to the fight” might refer to the end of the Boer War (18991902), yet the “killing off of millions” in the same paragraph clearly refers to the slaughter of World War I (141).


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progressiveness of European democracy and race-relations.11 On a narrative level, Europe, even while being torn apart by internal strife, is frequently rendered as the literalization of the ancient Eden trope within contemporaneous African American discourses on World War I, against the background in which the failings of American society obtrude evermore starkly in black and white. While in England, for instance, Fleming’s Tom Brinley is puzzled to be invited to all sorts of “social functions … for he thought that socially his color would be a barrier as long as he lived, so far as mingling with white man was concerned” (143). And in striking contrast to the segregated institutions of higher learning in the United States, Oxford University is rendered as a paradigm of multiracial and multinational education, even in the inherently divisive times of war: “Every instructor was keen, earnest, and sincere. Every student had an equal chance. The great war affected this institution very little, for within its walls all races and nations were represented” (142). So, when a Europeanized Tom after some hesitation resolves to heed “the call of his people”, his return to America acquires the nimbus of a truly messianic mission: Duty calls me across the seas to my oppressed and forsaken people … I shall go to my people, taking those European ideals, which I trust shall even be a part of me …. I come back to you, my country, which I love and revere. You have unjust laws, you are unfair to my people; but I believe in your future. I have faith in you, though you mete out partial justice to me and mine …. I and my people hope for a greater freedom. (154-55)

One immediate effect of World War I on European society that did command Fleming’s critical attention was a perceptible shift in gender relations. A suffragist as well as a “race person”, Fleming makes it a point to note in her novel that the war had endowed European women with wider economic opportunities as well as greater social responsibilities so that a denial of suffrage based on the old separate sphere ideology seemed no longer tenable: “It was interesting to Tom 11

Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (London: The X Press, 2000) offers a notable exception in that it describes the racial unrest in postwar London that prompts Jake Brown to leave his white girlfriend and return to the “deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness” of Harlem (10).

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to watch the women in the different avenues of work, which before [the war] had been filled by men …. Everywhere he went Tom was forced to the conclusion that she could never be denied the ballot for which she had fought so ardently.” Everywhere, that is, except in the “motherland”, which, just as her American offspring, is “still orthodox in this particular” and where the “Pankhursts” are “still knocking at the door of Parliament … without success” (144). Analogous to Fisher and Atherton, Fleming portends in Hope’s Highway that these last barriers to female suffrage in England and, by extension, in America will soon crumble, as a prolonged warfare necessarily makes “the countries, to a greater degree, dependent upon their women”. It is worth noting, here, that Fleming, unlike Canfield and Atherton, does not justify female suffrage by claiming the supposedly innate moral superiority of women. Rather, she portrays female suffrage as dictated by sheer economic necessity and as the logical extension of established egalitarian principles. This allows Fleming, over the brief span of two pages, to link patriarchal objections to female suffrage with paternalistic arguments against race equality so as to expose them both as interconnected strategies to maintain white male dominance. Asked why the British government persists in denying women the vote, Felton, an influential Englishmen, puts it bluntly to Tom: We English do not comply with the request of our women, without forethought. We do not believe that it is good for women to have what we have decided is not good for them. Our attitude towards our women is the same as the Southern attitude is towards your people. We believe that women should always be subservient to men, and to place the ballot in their hands would surely make them the equal of men; and that we Englishmen do not wish. (145)

Tom, despite having been indirectly put into his place, does not demur. But the implications of Felton’s statement are unambiguous and the reader may safely surmise that Tom, a disenfranchised black male, opts not to internalize this particular “European ideal”. While the novel tends to be quite piercing in its exposure of the mechanisms of white male domination, Tom’s silence in the above scene makes clear that Fleming’s Hope’s Highway is reluctant to propose radical solutions to the “race question”. Seemingly


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unperturbed by the political currents of black nationalism that were gaining momentum in Harlem and elsewhere, Hope’s Highway appears to guide the reader down the accommodationist path of gradual uplift and racial conciliation that had been prepared, most prominently, by Booker T. Washington, who is mentioned on the novel’s dedication page. All of the mere handful of literary critics who have discussed Fleming’s literary work comment on its accommodationist tendency, usually in dismissive terms. “Hope’s Highway piously resolved the race problem in religion”, Carl Milton Hughes remarks curtly.12 “Written for the purpose of extolling Negro leaders and their sympathizers”, Hugh M. Gloster concludes in a similar vein, “Hope’s Highway has the usual overstatements of novels of its kind”.13 And indeed, following young Tom Brinley’s ascent from chain gang prisoner in Santa Maria, a fictional Southern plantation settlement, to decorated war hero, Oxford scholar, and champion of his race, Fleming’s Hope’s Highway fuses elements of slave narratives such as Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) with features of late nineteenth-century uplift novels such as Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces to create what Jane Campbell has called a “positive concept of history”.14 Before the veteran of many battles can turn his “people’s steps away from the rough road of ignorance into the highway of hope”, however, he must rely on the support of his white, maternal benefactor, Grace Ennery (156). Even though the novel underscores the black potential for self-advancement, it becomes apparent that this potential can only be realized through the help of angelic white characters such as Grace. As in Lydia Maria Child’s A Romance of the Republic (1867) – and, for that matter, most nineteenth-century US American novels written in the sentimental tradition – interracial cooperation neither originates from utilitarian considerations nor results from a series of conflicts, but bursts forth suddenly from the inborn sensibilities of exceptional individuals. Fleming’s vision of the future is clearly romantic and stands in stark contrast to the grim realism of the “pictures of the past, / And pictures 12

Carl Milton Hughes, The Negro Novelist (New York: Citadel Press, 1953), 36. Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), 96. 14 Campbell, Mythic Black Fiction, 33.

13

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of the present time” (216). Characteristically, Fleming closes her episodic poem “Pictures” – which traces black history from slavery through Civil War and Reconstruction to post-World War I discrimination – with a final picture of racial conciliation: ’Tis not with master, whip in hand But it is Black and White, alike , Holding aloft the stars and stripes. They’ve buried far beneath the sod Grim prejudice and all lynch laws, And all in one united band, Proclaim the freedom of the land. (217)

Yet, for all the novel’s romantic sensibilities and fantastic resolutions, it also includes flow-disrupting scenes such as a brutal lynching, a black farmer’s conference, the creation of the “Federation for Negro Protection”, and debates concerning the “admittance of the Negro in the State Militia” that bring to light growing national anxieties concerning the “race question” and testify to a growing racial self-awareness among blacks (63, 69). Programmatic statements by old Nana, the novel’s matriarch, that her people “must scatter themselves in all avenues of work” and that “some day them ‘white trash’ down there will get all they are lookin’ for”, further indicate a heightened awareness of the necessity for self-reliance in the ongoing struggle against racial discrimination and physical oppression (64,101). In line with its narrative intention to memorialize the heroic deeds of extraordinary black men past and present, Hope’s Highway commences by tracing the rise of Enoch Vance from a mere slave to “a true leader of his people”, who then emerges on the stage of African American history as “the first Negro qualified to teach the Blacks in the South after Emancipation” (18). Set in idyllic Santa Maria, where the old masters “were more or less kind to their slaves”, the novel pays nostalgic reverence to the benevolence of enlightened white aristocrats. Realizing “the freedom that the bondmen craved” was around the corner, John Vance, a slaveholder of a “very sympathetic nature”, decides to manumit the young Enoch and send him to a “great Western university” so that he might guide his people out of ignorance and poverty. Following “the announcement of


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Freedom”, Enoch Vance, now a distinguished scholar, returns to Santa Maria and establishes a college for freedmen (17, 14). Under the favorable conditions of the Reconstruction period, the “Institute prospers and the Leader” is “heralded far and wide for his great achievements”. Obviously modeled on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, the Vance Institute initially emphasizes “those things that his people most needed,—agriculture and manual training”. “As time advanced, however”, the school quickly evolves into an institution of “Higher education for the Black man” (19). Evidently mindful of Du Bois’ critique that the Tuskegee Institute’s strong vocational orientation keeps black people trapped in lower social and economic strata, Fleming modernizes the Vance Institute’s curriculum in Hope’s Highway – which explains why “this system of enlightenment” subsequently incurs the wrath of ruthless Southern Redemptionists such as Joe Vardam, who proclaims: “We don’t want any Niggers reading Latin and Greek”, and fight “with tooth and nail to have the whole educational curriculum changed, so far as higher education for Blacks [is] concerned” (20).15 Soon the forces of reaction prove too powerful for Enoch Vance. Throughout the South, the narrator informs her readers, “state after state disfranchised the Blacks and decreed against higher education for them. Thus, because of legislative interference, the great ambition of the Leader’s life was blighted” and he dies “of a broken heart” (20, 21). But the beaten leader’s struggles were not in vain, the novel insists, for in “leaving to the world the memory of a life well-spent” he has shown succeeding generations the pathway to freedom. Henceforth, the task of overcoming the obstacle of postReconstruction tyranny and of completing black liberation in the name of their brave forbearer falls onto the shoulders of young and gifted men such as Tom Brinley. The pattern outlined in the novel’s first two chapters provides the blueprint for the plot structure of subsequent chapters. Chapters III, VI, VII, and VIII, trace the awakening of Grace Ennery’s sympathies toward the “Negro” and her decision “to act upon [her] convictions” by financing Tom Brinely’s education (58). A descendent of Southern 15

The name of the villain Joe Vardam appears to refer to James K. Vardaman – governor of Mississippi from 1904-1905 and later US Senator – who was a notorious racist.

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aristocrats, Grace had grown up free from prejudice in Boston, where she lives a sheltered but unfulfilled life as a “Poor Little Rich Girl” (25). During a trip to her ancestral home in Santa Maria, Grace witnesses the appalling treatment of blacks in the South and to her astonishment learns that white legislators conspire with the Ku Klux Klan to keep blacks in a state of permanent servitude. These tidings turn her into a modern-day abolitionist and, with the help of her converted fiancée, she resolves to clear her conscience by providing for Tom, whom she had met in Santa Maria. Meanwhile, though, Joe Vardam and his ilk have falsely accused Tom of thievery and vagabondism and condemned him to hard labor in the chain gain.16 Adopting many conventions of the slave narrative, Chapters XII-XVI detail Tom’s escape from the chain gang, his perilous quest North to Washington and New York – which he masters due to the aid of an underground railroad-like network of sympathizers – as well as his efforts to avoid the long reach of the corrupted Southern legal system. In a final nod to the conventions of the slave narrative, Hope’s Highway even includes a runaway slave advertisement in a New York paper, offering “one thousand dollars reward for the return of a black boy who is an escaped convict” (95). Several mix-ups and a budding love affair with a poor but noble black washer girl in New York complicate the plot considerably, before Tom once again chances upon his white maternal benefactor while rescuing her from a burning house. Northern courts drop the false charges against Tom while he is already “spirited away” to Europe, where in rapid succession he takes a degree from Oxford, proves his mettle in the French army, and subsequently receives the offer of “an important consulate” (154). Tom, well aware that most “positions are closed to him” in the United States, contemplates the offer (149). In the end, however, Tom, following the example of the “great Leader”, returns to Santa Maria, where he, “without one thought of reward”, rebuilds the “Vance Institute to its former glory” (155, 156). Hints of Tom’s impending marriage as well as a newspaper headline, announcing – “GREAT DEMOCRATIC OF SANTA MARIA BROKEN—VARDAM’S AND TILTON’S 16

Tom’s sentence to chain gang labor might be an oblique reference to “the fight or work” laws that were enacted in mid-1918 to keep draft-age black males in the South.

Fleming, Hope’s Highway, and the End of Racial Strife POWER KILLED—REPUBLICAN RULE THE RESULT ELECTION” – complete the improbable happy ending.

OF

253 RECENT

Hope’s Highway can be – and has been – classified as a “race fantasy”, for its romantic storyline bears all the earmarks of what Sterling A. Brown has called the “race-glorification of Negro apologists”.17 “All of the significant black characters”, Jacquelyn McLendon observes along similar lines, are “essentially moral” and display an “innate goodness”.18 True enough, but while Fleming’s race-glorification, just as Cunningham’s class- or Atherton’s femaleglorification, might offend the artistic sensibilities of some readers, one should not overlook the political import of such idealized selfrepresentations. Obviously propagandistic and frequently lacking psychological depth, advocacy literature has long relied on group idealization as a powerful representational tool in countering negative stereotypes and fostering positive self-images. In a letter to Edgar Webster, Walter White rejected similar charges of race-glorification in The Fire in the Flint, but nevertheless insisted on the necessity of portraying essentially good and moral black characters. “If by doing so I am to bear the label of ‘propagandist’”, he concluded unapologetically, “I shall do so cheerfully and with a light heart”.19 Putting aside questions concerning the identity political import of idealized self-representations, though, the apologist tendencies of Hope’s Highway with regard to the socio-economic organization of early twentieth-century American society are all too obvious. One illustration of this can be found in the novel’s predilection of uncritically contrasting the magnanimity of white aristocrats with the vileness of poor whites. Like White’s The Fire in the Flint, Hope’s Highway largely blames the resurgence of racial violence on “an element that crowded in after slavery from the mountainous districts to the west of Santa Maria, or that came in by immigration” (20). Even though the novel frequently registers that “Blacks have so little protection in a country so unique in its Republican form of 17

Sterling A. Brown, The Negro in American Fiction (New York: Kennikat Press, 1968), 113. 18 Jacquelyn Y. McLendon, Introduction, in Hope’s Highway by Sarah Lee Brown Fleming (Boston: Hall, 1995), xviii. 19 Quoted in Edward E. Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1978), 37.

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government” because of the racism encoded in its “unjust laws”, Miss Ennery has it made patently clear to her that “the worst enemy of the Blacks are not the descendants of their former owners, but a class of poor whites who have pushed in from the mountains”(43, 155, 48). The novel does bring up poverty as a cause of “intense prejudice”, yet no mention is made of who ultimately profits from perpetuating a system that pits poor whites against poor blacks (48). Nor does the novel explore the underlying reasons for why the “idle class of Negroes” cares “little or nothing about leaders or rights” (31) Equally shortsighted is Fleming’s embrace of anti-immigrant sentiments in Hope’s Highway, which had probably been stoked by wartime fears that “hyphenated Americans” represent the “enemy within”, who propagates dangerous ideas and sabotages the nation’s war effort.20 Thus, in line with President Wilson’s finding that foreignborn citizens “have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life” and that such “creatures of passion, disloyalty, and anarchy must be crushed”, Fleming’s narrator unequivocally endorses legislative efforts to restrict immigration:21 Emigration seemed to have reached a serious stage …. To this land came various classes of foreigners to avoid the responsibility that would devolve upon them of building new homes in Europe. Upon this country’s investigation of a number of plots to blow up various buildings, it was found that anarchists had come over in large numbers. So, in order to avoid danger that might arise by permitting more of these anarchistic spirits to infest the country, a ban was place upon emigration.

Fleming’s adoption of the “100 Percent American” trope here obviously serves the immediate purpose of highlighting that black citizens claim no homeland other than the United States – a 20

Incidentally, as Hunton and Johnson relate, German war propaganda did aim to incite black citizens against their government, but such efforts were apparently of little avail. 21 Quoted in Arthur S. Link, Wilson: Confusions and Crises, 1915-1916 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1964), 37. Wartime fears of disloyalty lingered on and fueled postwar efforts to curb immigration. On 5 May 1921, Congress passed the first restrictive immigration quota in US history. The quota was designed to maintain the “character” of the United States and mainly targeted recent immigrants from non-European countries. The 1910 census data were used to apportion immigration certificates.


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supposition that not only casts African American desires to wear uniform in the most sincere light, but also shows blacks to be truer Americans than white bigots such as Mr Grant, who detest seeing “Niggers with firearms” and would sooner “trust these emigrants that are pouring in upon our shores” (53). In the long run, however, adopting a Nativist rhetoric that seeks to erase ethnic identities appears to be “antithetical to the interests of African Americans”, as William Jordan notes in his incisive study of the black Great War press.22 “Oppressed as a group, they needed to agitate for redress as a group. Set apart because of their racial identity by whites, they could not renounce their blackness because whites would ignore it”, Jordan explains.23 Overall, however, Fleming shows herself to be quite aware of the “need to agitate for redress as a group”; and despite its obviously apologist bent, her novel charts out the growing race consciousness among its leading black characters. For even though these characters remain to some extent reliant on “the efforts of aristocratic whites who … because of education and breeding are able overcome their prejudice”, they clearly display a growing propensity toward selfinitiative and self-organization.24 Tom Brinley’s escape to the North, for instance, is financed and organized by a certain Uncle Abbott, who bears scarce resemblance to Stowe’s passively enduring Uncle Tom. An underground resistance organizer, Uncle Abbott, similar to Reverend Wilson in White’s The Fire in the Flint, “poses as merely the preacher in front of whites” while “secretly” instructing his people “never to stand in fear of anyone” and “teaching them … their rights” (86). In addition, unbeknown to the Vardams and Tiltons, he has acquired the material means and managed to set up escape routes that enable him to shuttle out young chain gang prisoners (90, 91). An entire chapter dedicated to “The Farmer’s Conference” indicates Fleming’s awareness that the black struggle for freedom eventually hinges upon the achievement of at least partial economic independence from whites. Before the backdrop of Vardam’s ceaseless attempts to “break the spirit of the Blacks” through 22

William Jordan, Black Newspapers and America’s War for Democracy, 1914-1920 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001), 64. 23 Ibid., 61. 24 McLendon, Introduction, in Hope’s Highway, xviii.

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intimidation and violence, Fleming, similar to Dorothy Canfield Fisher in Home Fires in France, abruptly redirects her narrative focus to “a little town, about seventy miles from Richmond, called Hollis” (77). Contrasting the “rickety cabins” of Santa Maria with Hollis’ impeccable “settlement of cabins, behind which were richly cultivated tracts of land”, Fleming conveys an idyllic picture of a predominately black farming community in the heart of the South that thrives on cooperation and prospers on the free exchange of ideas (11, 77). Blacks and whites have learned to work amiably side-by-side in Hollis, which has made possible the “rise from poverty” for both. Tellingly, one of “the richest” farmers “for one hundred miles around” is a “Negro” and the novel leaves no doubt that the township’s prosperity is largely due to his “ingenious ways of doing things” (82). Without the benefit of formal training, the observant black farmer of Hollis has been so well “taught” by “Dame Nature” that “to-day” he ships more cotton of the finer grade than any other farmer in the South” (81, 83). Observes a white visitor admiringly: “This settlement … is one of the most progressive in the South. The Negroes are very energetic, and this section produces larger crops for its size than any other known settlement” (78). “Everything” looks “too good to be true”, the same visitor remarks in closing, thereby hinting that even this most Edenic of black agricultural communities cannot escape the omnipresent threat of racist violence (83). Though less graphic in her representation of white brutality than Walter White, Fleming does include a modern-day lynching scene in Hope’s Highway that shows how little progress has been achieved since slavery. Probably to heighten its effect on white readers, Fleming relates the ritualized murder through the eyes of innocent Grace. Prior to visiting Santa Maria: She had heard and read much of lynchings, but never thought she would witness such a barbarous scene, enacted by her own people. Yet, here was a poor fellow,—perhaps innocent of the crime with which he was charged,—being brutally killed, without being able to utter one single word in defense of himself. Quickly they strung him up to a tree and, daubing his body with pitch, struck a fired to him. (39)


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At first, the chief aim of this scene appears to rest on moving white readers towards the type of sympathetic identification that underlies sentimental abolitionist novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A few chapters later, however, Fleming makes it clear that the time of passive endurance has long since passed. Careful not to induce too much fear among her contemporary white readers, while concomitantly refreshing her black readership’s memory of heroic resistance in the past, Fleming transposes the confrontational response to the war-induced rise in lynchings back in time. Hushed but never entirely silenced, the black community’s collective memory of heroic resistance begins to be vocalized again: It was also whispered that Joe Vardam’s father, a very cruel slaveholder, was killed by one of his slaves, because he trashed a woman slave until she became unconscious. The slave in turn trashed him, and when Vardam’s father drew his pistol to shoot him, the slave wrested it from his hand and shot the master. (60)

This unnamed heroic slave – conjured up in the oral and written literatures of African Americans in various incarnations from the mythical Jaloff prince Bras-Coupé to Douglass’ Madison Washington to Chesnutt’s Josh Green – is as much part of Tom Brinley’s lineage as the peaceful educator, Vance Enoch. Tom, though destined to follow in the footsteps of the old, acquiescent leader, is prepared to fight violence with violence in his quest toward freedom. Born at a time of intensified racial oppression, Tom, unlike the old leader, learns early on that the present generation of African Americans must seek to manumit itself. Accordingly, when confronted by one of the prison wardens, Tom musters the “supernatural strength” of a Jaloff prince and does not flinch from striking the first blow: “To hesitate means death”, he thought. So before the guard had really recognized him, Tom made a dive, similar to a flying tackle in football, and threw him. The lad seemed for the moment to be endowed with supernatural strength. Before the guard could rise or get him fully in his grasps, Tom dealt him a blow across the head with the tool he had not yet disposed of, and fled. (91)

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As Tom is to learn when Vardam dispatches his henchmen to New York City, in the face of a well-organized antagonist, whose influence extends into all three branches of government, individual acts of resistance can lead to momentary success. Yet they are hardly means of scoring broad-based and long-lasting victories. Fleming’s book explores two approaches to the problem of devising effective strategies of resistance with which the black leadership saw itself confronted throughout the better half of the twentieth-century. The first one relies on gaining the help and assistance of sympathetic whites such as Grace Ennery and Frederic Tower. In the world of Fleming’s Hope’s Highway, this appears to be the preferable and most feasible solution. The second approach, which gained prominence during the Harlem Renaissance, relies on nurturing a common consciousness that forges African Americans into a cultural, social, and economic unit, which possesses the collective voice and power to affect its own liberation. Though less pronounced than the first approach, the contours of this second strategy also begin to emerge in Hope’s Highway, notably in Chapter IX, which complements the chapter on “The Farmer’s Conference” mentioned earlier. Entitled “The Proposal”, Chapter IX seems less concerned with Fred Tower’s marriage proposal to Grace than with providing a brief overview of various political proposals advanced “in behalf of the Negro” (64). In a clear reference to the NAACP, Fleming describes the goals of the “Federation for Negro Protection” – “a group of influential Whites and Blacks, formed for the protection of the rights of the black man in the North and the South” – and depicts a “FNP” conference that addresses the “absorbing themes” of the day: “The Negro in Office, The Negro in Politics, and The Negro in the Army.” Interestingly enough, instead of recapitulating “the great addresses” of the “numerous speakers, both white and black” Fleming’s novel focuses on a folksy speech by old Nanna, “who stood for the highest aims of the Blacks,—with which race she was identified”: “I’m a cook, an’ I’m not ashamed of my daily occupation, for a good cook must take pride in her work; yet I would not see all my people laboring in this field. They must scatter themselves in all avenues of work, in order to become a well-rounded, well-developed people. I am always anxious to know what all my people are doing.”


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In her deceptively simple speech, Nanna not only affirms a strong sense of racial pride that is rooted in the shared experiences of the common black folk, but also hints nascent black nationalist efforts to make African Americans conceive of themselves as “a well-rounded, well-developed people” in their own right. Further underscoring her role as a maternal wellspring of black self-appreciation, the narrator makes a point of explaining Nanna’s presence at the FNP conference by way of “her interest in the [conjoined] exhibit” of African American art, “which marked an anniversary of progress for her people” (63-64). To be sure, neither Uncle Abbott’s covert acts of subversion, nor Tom’s display of heroic resistance, nor Nanna’s affirmations of black pride make Hope’s Highway a radical political novel. In large measure, the collective fate of black characters appears to remain dependent upon influential whites, who are somehow moved to support African Americans claims to full citizenship. Moreover, the specific struggles (either in court or, more likely, on the streets) that lead up to the sudden overthrow of Santa Maria’s reactionary regime are conspicuously muted in Hope’s Highway. Except for old Nanna’s belligerent threat that “some day them ‘white trash’ down there will get all they are looking for”, the novel neither spells out how “Vardam’s and Tilton’s power” had been “killed” nor how Santa Maria’s blacks gained both the franchise and the right to higher education as a result of this (101, 153). Nothing short of a revolution must have taken place, yet Hope’s Highway wraps itself in silence on these vitally important matters and, like the historical novels of nineteenth-century bourgeois humanists, “interpret[s] future development in terms of a henceforth peaceful evolution on the basis of these achievements”.25 As the years went on, the narrator relates: Tom, with Mary his wife, kept up their zealous efforts in the interest of their people in Santa Maria. Did he raise Vance Institute to its former glory? Yes, nor was that glory all. He did more; for never again in the history of Santa Maria do we hear of the injustice of the Whites to the blacks—never did a Brinley, or an Abbott, or any other member of the Negro race, know the ignominy of working in the 25

Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, 29.

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Embattled Home Fronts chain-gang. For Tom Brinley had turned his people’s steps away from the rough road of ignorance into the happy highway of hope. (156)

No more struggles, no more lynchings, no more woes – this is an overly idealistic picture indeed, especially since Fleming’s own poem, “Pictures”, remarks critically on the rapid spread of “Discrimination” in the aftermath of World War I. Ultimately, however, Fleming’s buoyant vision of the future of African Americans in Hope’s Highway might perhaps be less starryeyed and much more in tune with the radical notions of black separatists than these conciliatory lines indicate. For on the very first page, the novel appears to shed light on its improbable claim that “never did a Brinley, or an Abbott, or any other member of the Negro race, know the ignominy of working in the chain-gang” by hinting the possibility that, at the story’s end, Santa Maria has become an allblack community evocative of Zora Neale Hurston’s hometown Eatonville. Stressing the propitious “seclusion” of “this heavenly spot”, the novel commences by recounting the settlement history of Santa Maria and its surrounding “Bay of Joan” area from a retreat for “wealthy Spaniards” in “the seventeenth-century” to a “thriving” Anglo-American plantation colony during antebellum times. No description of settlement patterns during Reconstruction and postReconstruction is given, but “to-day”, the narrator explains in directing the reader’s attention “across the bay” to “another ideal place”: … only the ruins of a once most extensive cotton plantation remain. Negro men and women may be seen working in the fields, which show a few patches of cultivation. Rickety cabins, scattered thickly here and there, tell the tale of the passing of the masters of this once thriving island and of the reign of the Blacks; for investigation will show that no white man lives there now. (11)

Compared with the other model township, Hollis, this all-black community that has sprung up on the ruins of the old plantation is still rather poor and underdeveloped. The fact that “no white man lives there now”, however, seems to afford the necessary preconditions to make this “heavenly spot” an “ideal place” for Tom’s “zealous efforts” to turn his “people’s steps away from the rough road of


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ignorance into the happy highway of hope” (11, 156). And given the narrator’s insistence that “never again in the history of Santa Maria do we hear of the injustice of the Whites to the blacks”, one may deduce that Tom’s doing “more” than raising the “Vance Institute to its former glory” refers to the establishment of an African American safe haven in the New World – the literalization of the mystical “land of the gods” – where, following the “passing of the masters” and the expulsion of their vile successors, “the reign of the Blacks” remains forever uncontested (156, 11).

CHAPTER 12 Walter F. White, The Fire in the Flint, and Persistent Struggle There have been many riots in the United States and England recently, and immediately following the war of democracy; there will be many more as coming from the white man. Therefore, the best thing the Negro of all countries can do is to prepare to match fire with hell fire.1

In the wake of what James Weldon Johnson called the “the bloody summer of 1919”, faith was fast diminishing that sanguine race romances such as Fleming’s Hope’s Highway represented a suitable response to the postwar epidemic of racial violence. Beliefs in moral suasion and millennialism suffered serious setbacks and were being supplanted by concerted literary efforts to expose the excesses of white racism unflinchingly so as to foreground the necessity of communal organization. The resultant literary portraits of the postwar era reflected, in the words of Howard Odum, “a new realism and a “new frankness and courage to face facts without fear, excitement, or apologies”.2 For while it was generally perceived that the war had set in motion an auspicious “quickening” of “racial consciousness”, it became also widely understood that the struggle for basic civil rights had just begun.3 Thus, it seems only befitting that Walter White’s first foray into the realm of literature resulted in a novel of political 1

Marcus Garvey, “Blackman All Over the World Should Prepare to Protect Themselves”, in Negro World, 11 October 1919, 1. 2 Quoted in Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance, 39. 3 Kenneth Robert Janken, White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP (New York: The New Press, 2003), 14.

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awakening that critically reevaluates the impact of World War I on “race relations, racial violence, and a nascent black consciousness in south Georgia”.4 As US war mobilization was gearing up in late 1917, twenty-fouryear-old Walter White found himself at a crucial juncture in his life. Young, well educated, and ambitious, White had just become a founding member of the Standard Loan and Realty Company and his professional career looked very promising indeed. A respected member of Atlanta’s prosperous black middle class, he had also made a name for himself by establishing the local NAACP branch and leading a vigorous publicity campaign to improve the city’s floundering black school system. This civic engagement had brought White to the attention of James Weldon Johnson, who was “impressed with the degree of mental and physical energy he [White] seemed to be able to bring into play and center on the job at hand”.5 Shortly after Johnson was appointed acting secretary of the NAACP, White received an unexpected offer to serve as one of the organization’s assistant secretaries. White, obviously flattered, expressed his appreciation, but hesitated to accept the offer. Financial considerations aside, the war abroad seemed to afford a better opportunity to prove himself a hero and to advance the race in the eyes of a skeptical nation. With the benefit of hindsight, White recalls in A Man Called White how he caught the fever of patriotism and was “induced” to apply for the segregated officer-training program: While I debated [Johnson’s] offer, a “flying squadron” of intensely patriotic young Negroes came to Atlanta during the course of a Southern tour to induce Negroes to volunteer for the Negro officers’ training camp which the War Department under pressure was planning to open at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. For the first time in history, the city of Atlanta permitted Negroes to use the city’s auditorium for a meeting to whip up patriotism. Some of us were invited to sit on the platform. When an eloquent appeal for volunteers was made, I found myself springing to my feet as one of the first to volunteer.6

4

Ibid., 104. Ibid., 27. 6 White, A Man Called White, 36. 5

White, The Fire in the Flint, and Persistent Struggle

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To his great consternation, he was rejected. In White’s own account, his dismissal was the result of “wild rumors” and “fantastic stories” that “German agents” were secretly inciting blacks to “rise up and massacre white people in their beds …. Obviously, light-skinned Negroes [such as himself] who could easily pass as white would be the kind the Kaiser would use!” These tales – “born”, as White writes, “of guilty conscience no doubt” – did circulate, but they probably reveal more about white mass psychoses than about the army’s actual recruitment practices.7 Given White’s prominent profile as a black community activist, it seems more likely that the local draft board simply feared him to be a troublemaker. In any event, having been denied the chance of becoming a soldier in his country’s war for democracy in Europe, White accepted the offered NAACP position and immediately channeled his considerable energies into becoming a warrior for social justice at home. Dispatched by Johnson to investigate lynchings throughout the South, White made good use of his fair skin, gathering valuable intelligence during various undercover operations, which brought him national prominence. In fact, so legendary were White’s exploits that they soon became the stuff of fiction.8 By 1920, excerpts of the reports White filed began appearing in mainstream papers such as the New York Evening Post, attracting the attention of no lesser arbiter of public opinion than H. L. Mencken. As White not only became an ardent champion of the “Negro Renaissance”, but also felt stirrings of literary aspiration in his own veins, it was Mencken who encouraged him to work his first-hand experience on the “frontlines” into a novel “about Negro life as it really exists”.9 Once he had decided to try his hand at fiction, White set to work with his customary single-mindedness: I wrote feverishly and incessantly for twelve days and parts of twelve nights, stopping only when complete fatigue made it physically and mentally impossible to write another word. On the twelfth day the

7

Ibid., 36. The light-skinned character of Vera Manning, who infiltrates the ranks of the KKK in Jessie Redmon Fauset’s novel, There Is Confusion (1924), is a female version of the young Walter White. As Claude McKay remarks in a Long Way Home: “Miss Fauset has written many novels about the people of her circle” (124). 9 Quoted in Janken, White: The Biography of Walter White, 95.

8

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Embattled Home Fronts novel was finished and I dropped on a near-by couch and slept for hours.10

It took many more month of revising and two years of haggling with publishing houses, before Alfred Knopf finally published The Fire in the Flint in 1924.11 The novel’s plot bears a conspicuous resemblance to T. S. Stribling’s Birthright (1922), which depicts the abortive attempts of a Harvard-trained educator to establish a second Tuskegee in his native Tennessee.12 But the work’s closest literary progenitor is undoubtedly Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. “In fact”, notes Lee J. Greene, “Fire can be read as a revision of Marrow that updates it to include the context of post-World War I race relations”.13 Centered on the experiences of two battle-proven protagonists – one a veteran of World War I, the other a veteran in the ongoing race war – The Fire in the Flint explores the feasibility of both ameliorating and militant actions blacks might adopt to achieve social reform in the postwar South. Kenneth Harper, a decorated war hero and Penn State Medical School graduate, who returns to his Georgia hometown in order to build a hospital that would serve the black community of Central City, represents the former approach.14 A “natural pacifist” and staunch admirer of Booker T. Washington, Kenneth Harper is at first unaffected by the spirit of “revolt among Negro ex-service men”.15 Reasoning that it is more prudent to attend “to his own individual problems” and to leave “the agitation for the betterment of things in general” to others, Kenneth Harper arranges himself with the town’s white leadership and establishes a flourishing medical practice (47). The militant approach is represented by Kenneth’s uneducated brother, Bob Harper, a “natural rebel” in the vein of Chesnutt’s Josh Green, for whom “revolt” is a “creed” (24). Unlike his older brother, 10

White, A Man Called White, 66. On the complicated publishing history of The Fire in the Flint, see Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance, 40-78. 12 White had reviewed Birthright for H. L. Mencken. 13 Greene, Blacks in Eden, 163. 14 According to White, the character of Kenneth Harper is based on one of his friends, a Harvard-trained physician, whose attempt to establish a practice in Georgia ended in failure: see Suggs, Whispered Consolations, 171. 15 White, The Fire in the Flint, 43. Hereafter cited parenthetically. 11


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who returned from France instilled with democratic idealism, Bob has experienced firsthand how the war, far from eliciting gratitude at home, had intensified white fears and racial hatred. To the quicktempered Bob, any compromise with a system designed to oppress and exploit blacks is impossible. Hence, when news of his sister’s brutal rape reaches him, Bob never thinks twice before gunning down her two white assailants. Pursued by an angry posse, Bob only avoids the lynching ritual by turning the gun on himself. Under the “howling and shouting” of the cheated white mob, Bob’s corpse is subsequently dismembered and burned on the “public square” (237). Yet, in the end it is not so much the brothers’ irreconcilable faith in the respective tenets of rebelliousness and gradual reform as Bob’s unbridled temperament and Kenneth’s good-natured naiveté that spell personal doom. For as the story unfolds it becomes clear that both Bob and Kenneth develop rather effective strategies in their fight for social change. Bob, for instance, attaches himself to a band of young men who protect black farmers against white vigilante groups, while Kenneth, under the influence of his energetic fiancée, Jane, spearheads efforts to organize a black sharecroppers’ union. In a sense, then, Bob’s and Kenneth’s community-oriented activities represent nothing more and nothing less than updated versions of Uncle Abbott’s endeavors to undermine the chain gang system and the efforts of the residents of Hollis to establish a co-operative farming community. In contrast to Hope’s Highway, however, The Fire in the Flint underscores that blacks cannot count on the goodwill and assistance of sympathetic whites. Nor can they hope to find redress in the whitedominated court of law. These, it appears, are two of the lessons of the specious “War for Democracy” that Kenneth Harper is too slow to learn. For even though Kenneth encounters enlightened characters such as Judge Stevenson, who recognize that Southern society “is brutal and tricky and deceitful … in trying to keep the nigras down”, he never quite understands that white Southern liberals are merely paying lip-service to the aim of “Negro advancement” (163). Not moral but economic reasons are behind the white elite’s unwillingness to change the system, the novel stresses. “It all goes back to the same root”, Judge Stevenson admits frankly, “—self-interest—how much is it going to cost me?” (160). Highlighting the degeneration of the old aristocratic South, which had allowed “the rise of poor whites”, Judge

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Stevenson has resigned himself to the fact that this “system of lynching and covering up their lynching with lying has grown so big that any man who tries to tackle it is beat befo’ he starts” (161). Hopes of enlisting “the support of every white man in the country who stands for something” are therefore at best premature and at worst selfdestructive, as Kenneth is to find out (158). His unsuccessful attempt to interest a group of white Atlanta businessmen in supporting the black sharecroppers’ cooperation may have served Kenneth as a warning to stir clear of whites. But humanitarian considerations subsequently compel Kenneth to make an ill-advised house call that puts him in the precarious position of being alone with two white women. As might be expected, this very situation provides his growing number of white antagonists with a pretext to lynch him. Although Central City’s white liberal elite has been aware that Kenneth had become the target of KKK intimidation, no measures are taken to protect him. Instead, his colleague Dr Scott had merely counseled Kenneth to give up his “foolish fight” and admonished him: “Your race’s greatest asset … has been its wonderful gentleness under oppression. You must continue to be sweet-tempered and patient—” (255). Conjuring up the old stereotype of the black rapist, the final newspaper clipping quells all hopes for racial conciliation by construing “Doc Harpers” night time call as a “criminal assault on a white women, the wife of a prominent citizen of this city” (300). To write “about Negro life as it really exits” in White’s view meant to place “the racial and interracial conflict” at the heart of the narrative. “If one is going to write realistically about the Negro or Negro characters”, White argues “most passionately” in a letter to his old college mentor, Edgar Webster: … he cannot leave out this phase of the Negro’s life in America for no Negro, intelligent or non-intelligent, illiterate or educated, rich or poor, ever passes a day that, directly or indirectly, this thing called the race problem creeps into his life. Thus I feel sure that no writer who is honest with himself can ever ignore so important a factor as this and, if he is honest about it, he is going to present it exactly as his characters would see the situation.16 16

Quoted in Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance, 37.


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Accordingly, The Fire in the Flint is less focused on sketching out the precise methods by which social change may be achieved – White, it seems, sees some promise in both the militant and the reformist approach – than on depicting the inevitability with which the demonstratively uninvolved Kenneth Harper is drawn into “the racial and interracial conflict”. What Kenneth as the representative of the educated black middle class has to learn paradigmatically is that his very race position precludes him from clinging to the illusionary bourgeois ideal of conflict-free existence. Therefore the inescapable fact that he belongs to an oppressed group of people “predestines him for the particular … social-historical collision” that, according to Lukács, constitutes the “drama” within historical romances.17 Having had the privilege of receiving a Northern education at a white university, Kenneth’s initial naiveté concerning the state of racial affairs is largely the result of willful forgetfulness. As Bob is quick to point out when Kenneth suggests gullibly that the “coloured farmers” should seek redress in court: “That shows you’ve forgotten all about things in the South” (29). Wanting to believe that he, for one, has single-handedly surmounted the confines of race prejudice, Kenneth fails to see that “the civilization that [had] permitted war— even made it necessary” is still embroiled in a bitter race war at home (19). Characteristically, although every so often haunted by “fitful memories” of the battles at “the Meuse, the Argonne, then Metz”, Kenneth manages to relegate “that awful experience … to the background of his mind” (42, 19). Looking back, he instead remembers the relative freedoms and opportunities that the “advantageous” war years had afforded him (18). Similar to Fleming’s Tom Brinely, White’s Kenneth Harper revels in the “pleasant” memory of his medical training at Penn State, where he mingled freely with whites and made fast friends with Bill Van Fleet, whose “old Pennsylvania Dutch family” was “glad to welcome a Negro into their home” (16). “It wasn’t bad at all to think of the things he had gone through—now that they were over”, the narrator relates Kenneth thoughts. “Especially the army. Out of Bellevue one week when the 17 Lukács, The Historical Novel, 121. Lukács illuminates this point with reference to Friedrich Hebbel’s historical drama Judith (1848), wherein the tragic heroine, upon discovering her Jewishness, sacrifices herself in order to liberate her enslaved people.

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chance came to go to the Negro officer’s training-camp at Des Moines. First lieutenant’s bars in the medical corps.” Retrospectively, Kenneth idealizes the “exciting ride across” the ocean to Europe, his friendly relations with the French, and the “blessed six month at the Sorbonne” in Paris (18-19). Kenneth returns from Europe believing that race prejudice has to be lived down, not talked down and so he tries to set a living example by opening a medical practice in his native Central City, Georgia. To those “who were always howling about rights”, Kenneth responds in best Booker T. Washington fashion: Get a trade or profession. Get a home. Get some property. Get a bank account. Do something! Be somebody! And then, when enough Negroes had reached that stage, the ballot and all the other things now denied them would come. (17)

Bob, the home front veteran, already knows better than to cling to wartime hopes that “white folks” would come “to see that the Negro was deserving of those rights and privileges and would freely, gladly give them to him without his asking for them” (18). Far from having improved conditions, the war had actually worsened race relations in the South, Bob stresses. “But, Ken”, he protests: … the way things were … are a lot different from the way they are now. Just yesterday Old Man Mygatt down at the bank got mad and told me I was an “impudent young nigger that needed to be taught my place” because I called his hand on a note he claimed papa owed the bank. (26)

It does not take long before Kenneth, too, is inexorably sucked into the swirling vortex of racial conflict. Although he tries hard to keep a low profile, his Northern education, worldly demeanor, and professional skills make him an instant target of white resentment. “Hope you ain’t got none of them No’then ideas ‘bout social equality while you was up there”, his white colleague Dr Bennett warns Kenneth during a “courtesy” call: “These niggers who went over to France and ran around with them Frenchwomen been causin’ a lot of trouble ‘round here, kickin’ up a rumpus, and talkin’ ‘bout votin’ and ridin’ in the same car with white folks” (53). Kenneth dismisses


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Bennett’s talk, but cannot help reflecting, “many phases of his life that … before his larger experience in the North and France had passed by him unnoticed, he now had brought to his attention … his was going to be a difficult course to pursue”. Fathoming his own situation “more clearly”, Kenneth begins to draw upon his “larger experience in the North and France” in appraising the war-like conditions of African American existence (65). So far, Kenneth had successfully managed to privatize his war experience and to shut his eyes to the “larger” historical impact of World War I on black life in America. As he again immerses himself in the social realities of a racially stratified society, however, Kenneth is reawakened to the unifying “spirit and determination” of “a race oppressed”, who had embraced “the fight for democracy in France” so as to “get some of that same democracy” not just “for themselves”, but “all others who were classed as Negroes” (43-44). Professional visits to the “no-man’s land” of “Factoryville”, where lower-class blacks are made to live and toil under the most squalid conditions, raise his awareness of the mechanisms of socio-economic oppression and, more importantly, lead him to abandon his Enlightenment gospel of individualistic self-reliance (125). A communal hero against his will, Kenneth reluctantly learns to accept the demands imposed upon the individual by an oppressed people through conversations with the community activist Reverend Wilson and his highly race-conscious fiancé, Jane. An emancipated woman with a strong sense of social responsibility, Jane is not afraid to hurt Kenneth’s “masculine vanity” (141). Thus, she not only tells Kenneth to “be proud of [his] race”, but also demands that he abandons his aloofness from “the race problem” (139). “Why, Kenneth”, she rebukes her husband-to-be: “you’ve had it mighty soft—just think of the thousands of coloured boys all over the South who are too poor to get even a high-school training …. It’s men with your brains and education that have got to take the leadership.” Moreover, in reminding him that “co-operative societies” had been “the backbone of the movement to get rid of the Czar in Russia”, Jane shows Kenneth “the practical ways” to “help Tracy and Tucker and all the rest of the farmers who’re being robbed of all they earn every year” (140-41).

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With Jane’s able assistance, Kenneth begins to draw up a plan for the establishment of the “National Negro Farmers’ Co-operative and Protective League” (175). Setbacks such as Judge Stephenson’s refusal to support the project as well as the appearance of a threatening note, signed “KKK”, merely increase Kenneth’s newfound dedication to challenge the powers that be. Earlier, while lackadaisically attending a clandestine sharecroppers’ meeting, “Kenneth had listened in amazement to the story of exploitation, crudely told, yet with a simplicity that was convincing and eloquent” (116). Now, contemplating “practical ways” to overcome this deeply entrenched system of exploitation, Kenneth comes to realize that his erstwhile “hopes of peace through compromise” had been “illusionary” (169). As he works out a system to raise capital through “initiation fees” and “monthly dues”, Kenneth fully anticipates a clash with the white landholders. Undeterred, though, a fired-up Kenneth promotes his plan in a rousing speech before a gathering of sharecroppers at Reverend Wilson’s “little wooden church” (177). In closing, Kenneth first employs the familiar technique of call-and-response to remind his listeners that black wartime loyalty has remained unrequited: You husbands and sons and brothers, three years ago were called on to fight for liberty and justice and democracy! Are you getting it? He was answered by a rousing “No!”

And then, adapting the Socialist rhetoric of the day, he urges the assembly to unite in the historical struggle for freedom: Single-handed you can do nothing! Organized, you can strike a blow for freedom, not only for yourselves but for countless generations of coloured children yet unborn! No race in all history has ever had its liberties and rights handed to them—such rights can come only when men are willing to struggle and sacrifice and work and die, if need be, to obtain them! I call on you here to-night to join in this movement which shall in time strike from our hands and feet the shackles which bind them, that we may move on as a race together to that greater freedom which have so long desired and which so long has been denied us! (179)


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Walter White, to be sure, never considered himself a Marxist. In fact, later in life he became a staunch anti-Communist and publicly quarreled with leftist writers such as Richard Wright. Yet, his depiction of black life in The Fire in the Flint as a series of inescapable struggles that not only foster a politicizing race consciousness among the oppressed, but also raise the specter of revolt, reveal a historical-materialist point of view. Similar to Cunningham’s The Green Corn Rebellion, not abstract notions of liberty and freedom, but the shared experience of physical suffering compels blacks to unite and to embrace strategies of communal action. Kenneth’s scheme to overcome the system of credit sales through cooperative buying power also entails provisions for a legal defense fund. Still instilled with a basic trust in the law, he plans to battle the detractors of the farmers’ association in court, making Central City a judicial test case. Immediately following his triumphant speech at the co-operative’s inaugural meeting, however, Kenneth is rudely awakened to the realities of white lawlessness. Driving home through “the coloured section” of town, Kenneth stumbles over a dazed woman, who had just been tarred and feathered by the KKK, “because she ‘talked too much’ about the brutal, cold-blooded murder of her husband” (188). Outraged, Kenneth’s first impulse is to report the incident to the authorities. But when it turns out that “Sheriff Parker … and two or three other prominent white people” were among the lynch mob, he concedes to himself that “there was nothing to be done towards the punishment of the men who had so brutally beaten Nancy Ware” (19293). As much as he chafes “at his own impotence in this situation”, Kenneth advises his friends and associates to stay calm, “until the cooperative societies were well under way and actively functioning” (194). Beneath the surface, though, the beating incident not only brings the black community closer together, but also heightens the prospect of a violent uprising. “Within a few hours the old esprit cordial between white and black had been wiped out”, White’s narrator observes forebodingly. Feeling “that there was no help to be expected from the law”, the blacks of Central City procure “fire-arms” and, echoing the defiant words of McKay’s postwar poem, begin “to talk among themselves of ‘dying fighting’ if forced to the limit” (195).

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Among those who resolve to die “‘fighting’ if forced to the limit” is Kenneth’s brother Bob, whom the novel likens to “Garibaldi” and “Joan of Arc” – two fabled military leaders of national independence movements (193). Exhibiting somewhat conflicting beliefs in both legal and illegal means to attain justice, Bob’s decision to apply for law school at Harvard does not prevent him in the interim from joining a group of radical young men, who have pledged to meet KKK violence head-on. Meanwhile, Kenneth’s work on behalf of the “N. N. F. C. P. L.” bears fruit. “News of the new society that was going to end the unsatisfactory relations share-croppers had with their landlords spread rapidly throughout the surrounding counties” and so, after only a few months of campaigning, the “Co-operative and Protective League” has “a membership of more than twelve hundred” (195). All around the county, the “coloured farmers” begin to regard the “inspired” and indefatigable Kenneth “as a new Moses to lead them into the promised land of economic independence”. Kenneth, who had feared that “petty politics and selfishness” might endanger the project, is elated (196). And because his mind is “too full of other events that loomed on the horizon”, he fails to discern that his unsolicited role as the “new Moses” has not only made himself, but his whole family prime targets of the town’s reactionary forces (224). Before the horizon of social change, the storm that will eventually spell personal doom is gathering force. Driven by professional envy, Dr Williams, the town’s original black physician, becomes the novel’s Judas Iscariot figure, when he informs the KKK of Kenneth’s prominent part in organizing the black sharecroppers’ cooperation. Bent on preventing “the damn niggers” from organizing, the Klan gets “busy devising schemes” that would allow for the disposal of both Kenneth, the head, and Bob, the arm of the co-operative society (224). While Kenneth is away in Atlanta, where his endeavors to garner monetary and legal assistance from the white liberal establishment fall on sympathetic yet unwilling ears, one of the Harper sisters is brutally raped by two white village thugs. Aside from reversing white images of the brutish black rapist, this scene serves as the trigger that hurls the plot toward personal tragedy. Predictably, the impulsive Bob avenges his sister’s rape by killing her assailants, only to become the latest victim of white lynch justice. More significantly, though, Mamie’s


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rape and Bob’s death finally rouse in Kenneth the righteous indignation and “deep-rooted” spirit of “revolt” with which World War I had instilled his more perceptive fellow “Negro ex-servicemen” all along (43). Earlier, contemplating the prospect of racial conciliation, Kenneth could still muse that a disastrous event such as an external war might result in a colorblind society: Maybe in time the race problem would be solved just like that … when some great event would wipe away artificial lines … as in France …. He thought of the terrible days and nights in the Argonne …. He remembered the night he had seen a wounded black soldier and a wounded white Southern one, drink from the same canteen …. They didn’t think about colour in those times …. (226)

Now, however, having experienced the unmitigated viciousness of racial violence in postwar America first hand, Kenneth, like Du Bois, comes to the sobering conclusion that warfare against an external enemy merely tends to intensify and brutalize oppression at home.18 Kenneth, to adapt the old adage, realizes that he has escaped from the frying pan of World War I, only to fall into the blazing fire of America’s ongoing race war. Animated by a “fierce hatred” that stems from the excruciating pain of personal loss, Kenneth renounces his accommodating approach, declares that “Bob had been right” because he “fought and died like a man”, and vows to thenceforth engage in open warfare against the tormenters of his race. “I’m going to kill every damned ‘Cracker’ I find”, he announces, justifying his homicidal designs with a sweeping diatribe against the treachery of Western society in general and white America in particular: “Superior race!” “Preservers of civilization!” “Superior”, indeed! They called Africans inferior! They, with smirking hypocrisy, reviled 18

Echoing earlier warnings about the detrimental impact of slavery on American culture, White, in a letter to Eugene Saxton, an associate editor with Doran and Company, speculates on “the ultimate effect” that the prolonged victimization of “the Negro” has on “white America and civilization”: “it is relatively unimportant what happens to eleven million Negroes in America if there were not an inevitable reaction on those who either oppress them or acquiesce in that oppression by their silence. The brutalization of the dominant whites of the South has come about through their exploitation and inhumane treatment of the Negro” (quoted in Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance, 50).

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Embattled Home Fronts these Turks! They went to war against the ‘Huns’ because of Belgium! None of these had ever done a thing so bestial as these “preservers of civilization” in Georgia! Civilization! Hell! The damned hypocrites! The liars! The fiends! “White civilization”! Paugh! Black and brown and yellow hands had built it! The white fed like carrion on the rotting flesh of darker peoples! And called their toil their own! And burned those on whose bodies their vile civilization was built! (271)

In this moment of great personal anguish, Kenneth’s painful recognition of having been hoodwinked into fighting for a “vile civilization” that is bent on keeping him and his kind in a permanent state of bondage culminates in a sense of self-destructive fatalism. “To hell with everything!” he exclaims. “What was life worth anyway? Why not end it all in one glorious orgy of killing?” (271-72). As his rage slowly abates, however, feelings of disenchantment and resultant desires for blind revenge give way to a more reflective “spirit of rebelliousness”. In thinking of the pain and suffering experienced not only by his own family, but by countless black families past and present, Kenneth decides that it takes “more courage to live” and to brave the daily struggle than “to exact some kind of revenge”. “They did need him now! More than ever before”, he thinks, cheering himself on (273). Kenneth’s resolve to suppress the urge to exact vengeance so as to continue his work on behalf of the farmers’ co-operative signifies that he has matured into a true leader of his people. Ironically, though, it is the same humanitarian impulse to serve others, coupled with his inextinguishable naiveté of the idealist, that render Kenneth easy prey for the Klan. Called upon to perform a life-saving emergency operation on the daughter of a prominent white family, the still grieving Kenneth at first resists on principle, but like Dr Miller in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, eventually relents on moral grounds. The house call, despite the fact that its medical urgency is real enough, turns out to be a trap. At last alerted by a guilt-ridden Mrs Ewing that the Klan is after him, Kenneth dismisses her belated concerns for his safety as “tommyrot” (295). Predictably, as Dr Kenneth Harper leaves Mrs Ewing’s house, he is suddenly ambushed, brutally beaten, and – after putting up a valiant fight – shot to death by a gang of white-robed men.


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Most recent critics have read The Fire in the Flint as ending in utter defeat. “White’s novel ends with no solution for any of the black characters or the black community”, Jon-Christian Suggs assesses;19 while Lee J. Greene corroborates: “The novel’s closure suggests that in the South’s racial civil war blacks do not have any chance of winning major battles or the war.”20 Interestingly enough, not a few contemporaneous readers – among them the future Nobel Laureate Sinclair Lewis – have interpreted The Fire in the Flint in a much more hopeful light.21 James B. Morris of the Bystander, for example, concluded that the novel shows “the American people the necessity of going into this problem at the root” and predicted that it “is destined to wake up the slumbering Negroes in the north”.22 White himself insisted that while The Fire in the Flint “ends in personal tragedy and death for the hero, one senses that the spirit of revolt against bigotry which he symbolizes will be accelerated rather than diminished by his death”.23 White’s reading of Kenneth’s death as a personal tragedy as well as Morris’ emphasis on the dual themes of “conflict” and “racial awakening” point to the novel’s larger socio-historical ambitions, which present-day critics – accustomed to assessing World War I literature in terms of the white Modernist trope of disillusionment – tend to overlook. For viewed within the context of 1920s African American politics, The Fire in the Flint appears to be less concerned with proposing ready-made solutions to the race problem than with sketching out the broader historical conditions that result in a heightening of race consciousness and political awareness among the black populace at large. Kenneth perishes, yet – true to the injunction of McKay’s If We Must Die – he dies a heroic death so that his hard-won “New Negro” spirit of defiance as well as the legacy of his community activism survives intact. Unlike the war fought in distant Europe, the ongoing internal struggle against racism and bigotry constitutes a righteous 19

Suggs, Whispered Consolations, 180. Greene, Blacks in Eden, 165. 21 On the critical reception of The Fire in the Flint, see John Earl Bassett, Harlem in Review: Critical Reactions to Black American Writers, 1917-1939 (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1992), 50-52. 22 Quoted in Waldron, Walter White and the Harlem Renaissance, 70. 23 White, A Man Called White, 67-68. 20

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war, White stresses, wherein “words such as glory, honor, courage, and hallow” sound neither “abstract” nor “obscene”.24 Therefore, as it became patently obvious that America’s war for democracy had resulted in less, not more democracy at home, other courageous leaders are destined to pick up the honorable fight for black selfemancipation. It is Kenneth himself who predicts as much shortly before his death: But if something should happen—well, if I can feel I’ve perhaps pointed a way out for my people, I can die happy …. At any rate, killing or running me away wouldn’t kill the spirit of revolt these coloured people have—it might stir it even higher. (258)

Amidst the postwar climate of mounting racial antagonism, Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s romantic vision of “some great approaching dawn” that will bury “far beneath the sod / Grim prejudice and all lynch laws” seemed more distant than ever.25 Nevertheless, having proven that blacks were indispensable in the nation’s late war effort, the general mood within the African American community remained one of optimism. Attitudes, if not material conditions, were rapidly changing and for a while it looked as though the infectious “spirit of revolt” – which the heroic figure of the black veteran came to embody – might translate into more than what novelist George Washington Lee saw as “the spiritual emancipation of [the] race”. At least until the mid-1920s, literary images of decorated World War veterans turned community activists, who point “a way out for [their] people”, seemed to inspire direct political action.26 Between 1918 and 1923, invigorated social activists such as A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of the radical Messenger, “formed some half-dozen [all-black] labor organizations”, which, during their brief heyday, were instrumental in coordinating several boycotts of whiteowned businesses that refused to hire African Americans.27 And even in the South, where the odds were staked heavily against black self24

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 191. Fleming, Hope’s Highway, 217. 26 George Lee Washington, River George (New York: McCauley, 1937), 219. 27 Michael L. Levine, African Americans and Civil Rights: From 1619 to the Present (Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1996), 153. 25


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organization, a determined group of Arkansas sharecroppers established the short-lived “Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America”.28 Meanwhile, the NAACP flexed its muscles on both the legislative and the legal fronts. In 1919, seeking to awaken the national conscience, the Association published an exhaustive review of lynching records entitled Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States. This report paved the way for the introduction of the “Dyer Bill” in 1922, which proposed making lynching a federal crime. The bill sailed through the House, but was eventually filibustered by a minority of southern Democrats in the Senate. On a number of minor cases involving voting rights, jury selection, and free movement for blacks, the Supreme Court sided with the NAACP’s legal counselors, but here, too, no decisive victory was scored.29 Still, prior to the Great War even these small victories and partial advances would have been unthinkable. Of course, given the continuation of economic exploitation and legal oppression, which was to be further exacerbated with the onset of the Great Depression, much of the spirit of revolt that had sprung from the black experience of World War I was eventually redirected onto the cultural plane, where it found expression in an unprecedented flowering of the black artistic impulse. “Barred from most meaningful direct political activity”, Ann Douglas observes, the New Negro intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance devised a “strategy of selfempowerment through cultural ascendancy rather than direct economic or political protest”.30 By the mid-1920s, Alain Locke’s notions that black cultural achievement in the arts would uplift the race – redefining the meaning of blackness – and that the self-assertive focus on the New Negro was essential to the national project of creating an authentic American identity reverberated throughout the artistic and intellectual scene of Harlem. In the eyes of influential Harlem luminaries such as Locke and Johnson, the “central problem 28

Ibid., 147. Ibid., 155. In 1917, the Court declared as unconstitutional a Louisville ordinance that required blacks to live in certain sections of the city, thus challenging residential segregation through city ordinances. Court decision to follow, initiated through NAACP lawsuits, nullified the restrictive covenants – a clause in real estate deeds that pledged a white buyer never to sell the property to blacks. And in 1923, the court declared that the exclusion of blacks from a jury was inconsistent with the right to a fair trial. 30 Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 324 and 8.

29

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of race was” neither economical nor political, but “one of attitude and reputation”.31 As Johnson asserts in his Preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry (1921): The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity of the Negro through the production of literature and art.32

In light of this new cultural-political emphasis on the production of great literature and art that transcends the confines of mere race fiction and race journalism, it is not surprising that the literary engagement with World War I and its immediate aftermath began to change. Although what Alain Locke euphemistically called the “galvanizing shocks and reactions of the last few years” remained central to many African American novels of the Harlem era, outward manifestations of the ongoing race war such as lynchings, economic exploitation, and segregation were dealt with more indirectly and subtly:33 the specific shocks of the war and postwar periods began to be abstracted and generalized. Discarding both the uplifting impulse of Fleming’s sweeping historical romance and the overtly propagandistic strain of White’s analytical social history, black Modernist works such as McKay’s Home to Harlem tend to foreground the internal, mental rather than the external, physical quest for black self-determination. In Fleming’s and White’s novels, the inhospitable “No Man’s Land” of World War I is mapped squarely onto the geographic and social landscape of a racist South. It is here where the socially responsible protagonist must pick up the physical fight for survival. In Home to Harlem and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), by contrast, “No (Wo)Man’s Land” is virtually everywhere (London, Harlem, Chicago and Texas, Copenhagen, Alabama respectively) so that the struggle for survival becomes a psychological or existentialist quest. In McKay’s Home to Harlem the heroic war veteran of Fleming’s 31 Nathan Irvin Huggins, Revelations: American History, American Myths (New York: Oxford UP, 1995), 161. 32 Quoted in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins (New York: Oxford UP, 1976), 281. 33 Locke, The Negro in America, viii.


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Hope’s Highway and White’s The Fire in the Flint is no longer depicted as a chief agent of broad social change, but is transformed into a private person, fighting personal battles and preserving his personal integrity. Assaulted during a strike of the Longshoremen, Jake Brown, like Bob Harper, does not hesitate to hit back. But unlike Kenneth Harper or Tom Brinley, Jake is not destined to become a social activist, much less a leader of his race. When he realizes that even Harlem affords no refuge from external as well as internal racial strife, Jake simply moves onward to Chicago, where, no doubt, more of the same will await him.34 Victor Daly’s Not Only War (1932) further exemplifies this shift in black World War I representations from works of social uplift and protest to works of psychological realism.35 Drawing a fine distinction between physical and psychological torture, Daly insists in his foreword that white America’s aversion toward war is limited to its corporeal terror. “The Hell Sherman knew”, Daly writes, “was a physical one—of rapine, destruction and death”.36 What Not Only War seeks to illuminate through its depiction of the psychosexual struggle between a black and a white soldier is this “other” hell of internalized racism that “is a purgatory for the mind, for the spirit, for the soul of men”.37 Consequently, Daly’s novel shows how racism victimizes not only blacks, but whites as well and hints that the wartime shock of indiscriminate physical destruction may lead to racial conciliation. White’s Kenneth Harper, it might be remembered, harbors similar hopes that “some great event would wipe away artificial lines”, until his first-hand experience of unabated racial oppression in the South convinces him that “the race problem” is at bottom a material struggle (226).

34 It is certainly no accident that McKay plotted Home to Harlem so that Jake’s move to Chicago would place him right at the scene of one of the bloodiest riots of 1919. 35 Daly’s novel has meanwhile sunk into oblivion. When it first appeared, though, it received accolades from no lesser critic than Alain Locke. “It is certainly to be marvelled”, Locke wrote, “that with all of the fiction of the war, the paradoxical story of the American Negro fighting a spiritual battle within a physical battle has just now been attempted” (quoted in Hugh Morris Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction [New York: Russell and Russell, 1967], 218.) 36 Victor Daly, Not Only War (College Park, MD: McGrath, 1969), 1. 37 Ibid., 7.

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McKay’s and Daly’s increasingly sophisticated accounts of the war veteran’s personal quest toward “spiritual emancipation”, it seems, had been purchased at the expense of the social commitment and political activism that lie at the heart of Fleming’s and White’s more pedestrian World War I novels. Yet, as the self-centered spirit of the “Jazz Age” began to crack under the hardships of the Great Depression, the heroic figure of the black soldier who “returns fighting” on behalf of his people made a comeback. Horace Pippin’s most famous World War I painting, suggestively entitled End of the War: Starting Home (1930), portrays a frightened group of German soldiers surrendering to black infantrymen. George Washington Lee’s 1937 novel, River George, depicts a returning soldier, Lieutenant Aaron George, who is appalled by the self-indulgent hedonism of a Harlem that is utterly ignorant of leaders such as “Walter White and Du Bois” who are “doing something for the Negro race”.38 Disillusioned not so much by the betrayal of World War I as by the lack of social conscientiousness among Northern blacks, Aaron, like Kenneth Harper, resolves to put his college education into the service of the race, and embarks on a messianic mission to make his Southern home safe for democracy. He, too, becomes the victim of a vicious lynching before he can “free his people”, but Aaron’s heroic sacrifice helps to unite the hitherto divided and defenseless black community of Beaver Dam Plantation.39 Last but not least, while Richard Wright does not overtly thematize World War I in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), his compilation of interconnected stories traces both the racial and the political awakening of the black postwar subject in quite the same fashion as River George, The Fire in the Flint and, to a lesser degree, Hope’s Highway. In Wright’s “Down by the Riverside”, Mann, analogous to Aaron and Kenneth, is inadvertently and inescapably drawn into a number of confrontations with the white community. “Long Black Song” posits these inevitable conflicts as part and parcel of the longstanding history of racial exploitation, when an exasperated Silas declares:

38 39

Washington, River George, 213. Ibid , 235.


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“The white folks ain never gimme a chance! They ain never give no black man a chance! There ain nothin in yo whole life yuh kin keep from em! They take yo lan! They take yo freedom! They take yo women! N’ then they take yo life!”40

In “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star”, Wright, similarly to White and Lee, explores the economic underpinning of racism and stresses the need for both black self-organization and communal self-defense. In “Fire and Cloud”, Reverend Taylor, like Kenneth Harper, must realize that attempts to cooperate with the town’s white power brokers only preserve the status quo and so he encourages his black congregation to organize a strike. Having become a true leader of his people, Taylor exclaims: “Gawds wid the people! N’ the peoples gotta be real as Gawd t us! We cant hep ourselves er the people when wes erlone …. All the will, all the strength, all the power, all the numbahs is in the people!”41 Finally, in “Bright and Morning Star” Wright adapts the motif of personal sacrifice in the communal quest for liberty when Johnny-Boy’s mother, Sue, kills the informant Booker. This act of violence seals her personal fate. Yet, Sue’s heroic sacrifice not only saves Johnny-Boy’s life, but also protects the local chapter of the Communist Party, whose “meager beginnings” she has come to regard as “another resurrection”.42

40

Richard Wright, Uncle Tom’s Children (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 152. Ibid., 210. 42 Ibid., 225. 41

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INDEX aesthetics, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 25 Addams, Jane, 174, 176, 178 African American(s), x, 7, 26, 31, 32, 55, 150, 219, 221, 223-25, 227-28, 231-33, 237, 241, 255, 257-60, 278; community, 216, 226, 228, 231, 257, 260, 278, 277, 282; soldiers, 5, 13, 19, 2223, 221-22, 231-32, 238, 244, 275; share-croppers, 55, 147, 152, 225, 246, 267, 268, 272, 274; women, Aldrich, Mildred, 182, 187 Allen, Frederick Lewis, 44 n. 14, 47 alliance(s), 128; interracial, 151; multiracial, 112; racial, 147; revolutionary, 152; peace, 174 America, x, 14, 23, 31, 45-51, 64, 85, 102 n. 32, 110, 117, 119, 126, 131-36, 138, 14748, 155, 163, 166, 171, 173, 177-78, 188-89, 196, 212 n. 29, 220-21, 224, 228, 230, 235 n. 65, 239, 243, 24748, 268, 271, 275, 279, 281; and World War I, 14, 27, 45, 48, 50, 112, 128, 130-131, 134, 136, 157, 223, 244, 278; see also

United States American, US, culture, ix, 15, 32, 147, 165, 244; democracy, ix, 83, 126, 130, 133, 166, 228; military, 40, 103, 129, 130, 177; society, x, 36, 38, 116, 213, 236, 247, 253 American Federation of Labor (AFL), 120 American Revolution, 136, 149 Ameringer, Oscar, 151, 153, 155 Anarchist(s), 79, 104, 254 anarchy, 20, 65, 254 anti-war, protest(s), 38, 55, 58, 60, 102 n. 32; rallies, 174, 155 Atherton, Gertrude, 9, 27, 31, 61, 81, 176, 178, 180, 181 n. 42, 182, 183 n. 47, 184, 187, 191, 197, 199; Mrs. Belfame, 61, 199, 204-205; The White Morning, 9, 27, 31, 81, 180, 181-84, 201, 203-205, 207, 211, 214 Bailey, Temple, 177, 180, 182 Barbusse, Henri, 2 n. 4, 28, 67, 109 n. 1, 110-12; Clarét, 110-12 Belgian(s), x, 178, 191, 224,

302


233 Belgium, 13, 39, 78, 125, 176, 276 Benjamin, Walter, 1 n. 2, 12, 35 n. 1, 55 n. 62, 141, 22122, 224 Bessie, Alvah, 102-104, 105 n. 39 Bildungsroman(s), 10, 28, 30, 112-16, 118, 120; Proletarian, 30, 116, 128, 16566 Black(s), see African American(s) Bolshevik(s), 44 n. 34, 45 n. 38, 58, 136-37, 139 Bolshevik Revolution, see Russian Revolution Botkin, Benjamin, 148 bourgeoisie, 42, 52, 54, 56, 68, 142 n. 30, see also middle class(es). Bourne, Randolph, 29, 35, 36 n. 3, 43, 44, 49-58, 60-61, 63 n. 1, 75, 89, 97, 127 Boyd, Thomas, 39, 220 Canfield, Dorothy; 27, 31, 174, 178, 182, 184, 187-92, 194, 196-97, 199, 203, 21415, 219, 221, 243, 248, 256; Home Fires in France, 27, 31, 174, 178. 189, 182, 184, 188, 190, 192-94, 197, 199, 203, 214, 256 capitalism, 24, 126, 131, 133, 142 n. 30, 195-96, 203 capitalists, 25, 30, 117-18,

133, 137, 140, 152, 155, 157, 159, 163, 165 Cather, Willa, 13, 14, 18, 19, 182, 221; One of Ours, 13, 19, 182 Cavell, Edith, 78, 176 censorship, 44 n. 14, 48, 59, 128, 149 Chesnutt, Charles, 10, 154, 224, 257; The Marrow of Tradition, 10, 154, 224, 240 n. 78, 266, 276 citizenship, 47, 133, 179, 220, 228-30, 259 civil rights, 44, 93, 226-27, 229, 263 Civil War 5, 47, 124, 130, 135-36, 149, 230, 236, 250, 277; Spanish, 102-105 Clarét, see Barbusse, Henri class, antagonism, 138, 215; conflicts, x, 155, 163, 164, 165, 195; consciousness, 25, 116, 120, 132, 137, 140, 152-54, 166; distinctions, 116, 138-39, 207; division, 26; relations, x, 22; struggle(s), 25, 116, 120, 128, 136, 163, 173; war, 26, 113, 121, 126, 134, 136 coalition(s), 146; anti-Facist, 147; multiracial, 13; strategic, 8 Comintern, 126, 147 communal, action, 31, 273; activism, 29, 43, 113; resistance 164 communalism, 102, 194, 214

303

Index Communism, 26, 88-89, 127 Communist(s), 88-89, 103, 147, 283 comradeship, 41, 67, 79 Conroy, Jack, 147, 149, 154 conscription, ix, 4, 48, 56, 104-105, 112, 118, 128, 145, 150, 155, 157, 177, 184, 229, 231, 252 n. 16, 265 cooperation, 29, 36, 43, 74, 210, 212, 256, 268, 274; interracial, 113, 117, 249 co-operative movement, 84, 85 Co-operative Society of America, 85, 86 Cooperman, Stanley, 3, 14, 16 n. 39, 17 n. 47, 19, 25 n. 72, 28, 29 n. 79, 37 n. 4-6, 59 n. 72, 114 n. 11, 115, 173 n. 8, 181, 220 n. 4 Cowley, Malcolm, 3, 18, 38 n. 9, 58, 59 n. 72, 173 Creel, George, 3, 125, 177 crowd(s), 35, 37, 43, 55 n. 62, 61, 67, 71, 74, 79, 83, 88, 90, 156-57, 201; see also mob(s) Cummings, E. E., 15, 17 n. 46, 28, 38, 48, 53, 54, 66, 111 Cunningham, Agnes "Sis", 146 Cunningham, William, 55, 70, 117-19, 146, 148-49, 15155, 160, 162-67, 246, 253; The Green Corn Rebellion, 25, 27, 30, 105, 116-21, 146, 149-53, 165-67, 273

Daggett, Mable Potter, 180-82, 200 n. 1 Daly, Victor, 18, 281-82 Debs, Eugene V., 118, 123 n. 1, 128, 143, 146 Dewey, John, 46, 48, 50-52, 54 disillusionment, 3-4, 11-15, 17, 20, 24, 37, 40, 42-44, 50, 65, 66 n. 19, 83, 87, 89, 99, 111-12, 184, 234-35, 277 Dos Passos, John, 3, 13-15, 17-18, 23-24, 29, 38-40, 42-43, 48, 50, 64-69, 75-77, 81, 83, 89, 101-102, 114; One Man’s Initiation, 24 n. 69, 39, 42, 63-65; Three Soldiers, 10-11, 13, 17 n. 46, 27, 37-38, 43, 48, 56, 61, 68-70, 73, 75-76, 78, 81, 101-105, 111, 113, 114 n. 15, 115, 120, 143 n. 33, 219-20 Douglass, Frederick, 230, 239, 243 n. 1, 257 Du Bois, W. E. B., 24, 31, 65, 178, 224, 229, 230 n. 40, 234, 240, 244-45, 251, 275, 282 Dunbar-Nelson, Alice, 230, 243 Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, 151, 160 n. 23 draft, see conscription Eliot. T. S., 19, 148, 235

304


Ellis, Havelock, 84, 89, 91, 210 Ellison, Ralph, 23, 234, 236 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 38, 55, 75, 76 n. 1, 92 England, 1, 127, 201 n. 9, 24648, 263; see also Great Britain Europe, ix, 41 n. 22, 45-47, 84, 86, 142 n. 19, 155, 165, 172-73, 181, 183, 199 n. 1, 200-203, 225, 227, 234, 239, 244, 246-47, 252, 254, 265, 270, 277 A Farewell to Arms, see Hemingway, Ernest Faulkner, William, 8 n. 25, 15, 17, 18 n. 48, 23, 38, 40 n. 18, 41, 48, 50, 220; Soldiers’ Pay, 17, 40 n. 18, 41, 42 n. 26, 61, 81, 204 female-centered communities, 31, 182, 184-85, 199, 21415 feminist(s), xi, 10-11, 13, 16, 20-21, 27, 43, 45, 53, 6061, 167, 171, 181-85, 19091, 197, 202-203, 206, 20911, 213-16, 228; Utopia(s), 28, 31, 173, 183, 215-16 feminism, 60, 84, 176, 210, 213 The Fire in the Flint, see White, Walter F. First World War, see World War I Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 18, 57-58

Fleming, Sarah Lee Brown, 31, 233, 237-38, 243-51, 253-58, 260, 269, 278, 280, 282; Hope’s Highway, 9, 24, 28, 31, 233 n. 57, 23739, 241, 243-56, 258, 260, 263, 267, 281-82 folk, art, 7; -lore, 148, 151, expression, 148-49 For Whom the Bell Tolls, see Hemingway, Ernest France, 2, 9, 13, 24, 42, 64, 66, 78, 86, 88, 112, 117, 125, 147, 174, 186, 187-88, 200201, 219-20, 223-24, 230,232, 234, 239, 243, 245-46, 256, 267, 270-71, 275 Fussell, Paul, 2, 3 n. 5, 6, 13 n. 3, 16, 19, 20, 238 gender, 27, 28, 77, 208; conflicts, x, 9; gender difference(s), 172, 185; equality, 61, 209, 247; relations, x. xi, 19, 21, 24, 173, 180, 183-84, 189, 194, 200-201, 209, 210; roles, 20, 22, 31, 99, 179 Germans, 9, 44 n. 34, 75, 131, 139, 140 n. 26, 176, 204, 219-20, 227; see also Hun(s) Germany, 1, 66, 72, 126-27, 134, 147, 176, 183 n. 47, 201-204, 206-207, 246 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 60, 171-73, 174 n. 11, 175-76,

Index 182, 187 n. 1, 191-92, 196, 206 Goldman, Emma, 185, 208 Gompers, Samuel, 118-19 The Grapes of Wrath, see Steinbeck, John Great Britain, 203, 239; see also England Great Depression, 12, 25, 147, 149, 163, 279, 282 Great Migration, 225 Great War, see World War I Green Corn Rebellion, 112, 149-51, 153 The Green Corn Rebellion, see Cunningham, William Hale, Marice Rutledge Gibson, 178 Harlem Renaissance, 18, 2223, 258, 265, 279 Harrison, Henry Sydnor, 179, 213 Heller, Joseph, 101, 102 n. 32, 113 Hemingway, Ernest, 3, 11, 1415, 17-19, 25, 38-43, 48, 50, 54, 83-92, 94, 96, 101102, 114; A Farewell to Arms, 2 n. 4, 10, 17, 27-29, 38, 42-43, 56, 92, 100-101, 104, 111, 114 n. 15, 115 n. 17, 161 n. 24, 220, 234, 278 n. 24; For Whom the Bell Tolls, 102-105; In Our Time, 42, 83-84 heroic, action, 23, 69, 188; individuality, 29, 43, 54,

305 76; resistance, 237, 257, 259 heroism, 24, 50, 92, 111, 114, 151, 188, 241, 244 Howells, William Dean, 1 Home Fires in France, see Canfield, Dorothy Home to Harlem, see McKay, Claude Hope’s Highway, see Fleming, Sarah Lee Brown Howe, Frederic C., 47 Hun(s), 78, 121, 138, 176, 183, 232, 276; see also Germans Hunton, Addie W., 1 n.1, 22024, 237, 254 Hurston, Zora Neale, 215-16, 260 immigrants, 5, 18, 147, 166, 226, 254 immigration, 225, 253-54 In Our Time, see Hemingway, Ernest identity, 61, 76, 101, 103, 213, 279; politics, 8, 10, 253; racial, 224, 255 Indians, see Native Americans individualism, ix, 10-11, 27, 29, 35 n. 2, 36, 40, 47, 68, 73, 84, 103-104, 110, 194 International Workers of the World (IWW), 26, 118, 124, 130, 134, 136, 138, 163 n. 27, 226 internationalism, 110 n. 3, 119, 127, 139 Italy, 86, 88, 89, 93, 102, 146

306


Jameson, Fredric, 6, 7, 28 Jew(s), 18, 130, 140, 166, 215, 269 n. 17 Jim Crow, see segregation Jimmie Higgins, see Sinclair, Upton Johnson, James Weldon, 227, 263-65, 279-80 Johnson, Katheryn M., 1 n. 1, 220-24, 237, 254 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 18, 233, 252, 265 n. 8, 268, 272-74 La Motte, Ellen, 174 labor, see working class(es) Le Sueur, Meridel, 10, 149, 215-16 leader(s), 13, 53-54, 88-89, 94, 121, 133, 152-53, 159-60, 164, 178, 201, 205, 239-40, 249, 251-52, 254, 257, 274, 276, 278, 281-83; black, 229 n. 40, 230 n. 40; labor, 45, 48, 197; true, 250, 276, 283 leadership, 30, 70, 118, 151, 201, 246, 258, 266, 271; black, 229 n. 40, 258; political, 86, 213, dishonest, 94 Lee, George Washington, 278, 282-83 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 66, 86, 89, 117, 140 n. 26, 142, 163 lesbianism, 60, 91-92, 98, 210 Lewis, Sinclair, 147, 213-14, 277

liberalism, 29, 37, 45 liberals, 37, 43, 45, 49, 5255, 60, 147, 267 Lindsey, Benjamin, 84, 91 Lippmann, Walter, 44, 46, 48 Locke, Alain, 233, 234 n. 58, 241, 279-80, 281 n. 35 London, Jack, 124-26, 128 Lost Generation, 6, 14, 17, 165 lower class(es), 42, 57-58, 73, 201; see also working class(es) Lukács, Georg, 114, 116, 120, 162 n. 25, 239 n. 77, 259 n. 25, 269 Lusitania, 176, 227 lynching(s), 159, 224, 233-34, 236, 250, 256, 267-68, 279, 282 Maher, Stephen J., 230-31 Mann, Thomas, 114-15 marriage, 98, 100, 182, 205, 209, 211-13; companionate, 91-92, 212, 252, 258 The Marrow of Tradition, see Chesnutt, Charles March, William, 2 n. 4, 41 Marx, Karl, 30, 127, 139, 156 n. 22 Marxist(s), 65, 102, 104, 118, 147-48, 167, 173, 226, 245n. 7, 273 masculinity, 22, 59. 171-73, 190, 204, 214 materialism, 14, 18, 38, 43, 46, 54, 125 McComb, Arthur, 39, 66, 67

Index McKay, Claude, 223, 234-37, 265 n. 8, 273, 277, 280-81, 282; Home to Harlem, 223, 247 n. 11, 280, 281 Mencken, H. L., 45, 265, 266 n. 12 memory, 16, 104, 110, 117, 120-21, 145, 151, 156, 159, 164-65, 237, 241, 251-52, 269; collective, 10, 112, 257; modern, 13, 17, 20, 26, 32, 112, 141, 221-22 middle class(es) 48, 50, 54-55; black, 264, 269 middle-class, concepts, 38, 43, 89; self, 38, 43, 61; rebels, 72, 75; women, 177, 179, 181, 215 militarism, 125, 133, 138, 140 Miller, Kelly, 228 minorities, x, 5, 18, 44 n. 24, 55 mob(s), 35-37, 52, 66, 68, 72, 86, 96, 126 n. 10, 227, 233, 240, 267, 273; see also crowd(s) Modernism, 6, 12, 14, 19, 21, 114 Modernist(s), 5, 9-10, 12, 1720, 23, 30, 36, 53, 112, 114-16, 118, 148, 189, 23536, 239, 277, 280 Morrison, Toni, 23 motherhood, 98, 182, 209, 213 Mrs. Belfame, see Atherton, Gertrude National Association for the

307 Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 26, 22627, 229, 233, 258, 264-65, 279 nationalism, 116, 119, 127, 142, 177, 249 Native Americans, 146, 15152, 154, 156, 158, 165-66 Nativism, 19, 44 Nativist(s), 126, 135, 176-77, 233, 255 Negro Renaissance, see Harlem Renaissance New Negro, 10, 220, 235, 240, 277, 279 New Woman, 10, 31, 182, 197, 209-211, 213 One Man’s Initiation, see Dos Passos, John One of Ours, see Cather, Willa pacifism, 129, 172, 177, 243 pacifist(s), 46, 53, 129, 133, 172, 176-77, 188, 191-92 patriarchal, desires, 187; oppression, 207, 214; society, 183-84, 203 patriotism, 4, 69, 92, 120, 127, 137, 140, 151, 171, 180, 228-29, 243, 264 Popular Front, 104, 119, 14647, 151, 154 Pound, Ezra, 14-16, 19, 54, 235 Powers, Richard, 7, 145 n. 1 pragmatism, 51-52, 80 preparedness, 31, 43, 46-47,

308


128, 176-77 progressive reform(s), 10, 29, 43-44, 46, 84, 209 progressives, 44-46, 48 progressivism, 29, 36, 44, 54 proletariat, see working class(es) propaganda, x, 3, 67, 78, 89, 113, 123, 125, 128-29, 14041, 142 n. 30, 177-78, 19091, 219, 232, 254 n. 10 protest novels, 4, 10, 24, 2830, 37, 40, 43, 49-50, 57, 61, 105, 165, 189 Prussian(s), x, 47, 138, 192, 202, 205, 245; see also Germans race, 8 n. 25, 9, 27, 29, 31, 42, 77, 158, 166, 177, 208, 219, 221, 229-30, 239, 244, 247, 249, 258-59, 271-72, 275, 279, 280-82; conflicts, x, 9; consciousness, 8, 9, 23, 31, 234, 255, 271, 273, 277; positions, xi, 10, 264; prejudice, 301-102; problem, 249, 268, 271, 275, 277, 281; relations, xi, 19, 22, 24, 226, 247, 264, 266, 270; riots, 9, 233; romance, 31, 267; war, 257 266, 269, 280 racism, 8, 24, 31, 159, 177, 230 n. 40, 231, 245, 254, 263, 277, 281, 283 realism, 3, 52, 148-49, 155, 164, 249, 263, 281

Reconstruction, 28, 31, 224, 250-51, 260; post-, 10, 224, 236, 251, 260 Red Scare, 18, 44, 143 Reed, John, 126, 131 Regionalism, 148-49, 152, 159 Regionalist(s), 148, 152-53 153 romance(s), 31, 236, 238; historical, 10, 18, 28, 237, 239, 269, 280; race, 31, 267 Rourke, Constance, 148-49 Russia, 66, 117, 121, 125-27, 135, 137, 139, 142, 163, 271 Russian Revolution, 66 n. 18, 72, 86, 113, 117, 119, 12526, 130-31, 133, 142 Sandburg, Carl, 124-25, 127, 167 Sassoon, Siegfried, 15, 40 Second World War, see World War II segregation, 225, 232, 236-37, 239, 245, 279 n. 29, 280 self-reliance, 55, 250, 271 sexual, liberation, 91, 206; mores, 14, 21; revolution, 89, 91, 204 shell(s), 40, 96, 177, 238; -shocked, 4, 14 Sinclair, Upton, 110 n. 3, 11720, 124-26, 128-35, 137-43, 146, 164-67, 207, 228, 234, 240, 243; Jimmie Higgins, 9, 30, 70, 104-105, 112-13, 116-18, 120, 128 n, 18,

Index 129, 131, 139, 141-42, 16567 slave narrative(s), 238, 249, 252 slavery, 9, 43; 63, 73-76, 117, 220, 225; wage-, 133, 139, 140 n. 26 Socialism, 43, 47, 51-52, 65, 69, 71, 110 n. 3, 119, 12527, 130, 134, 142 n. 30, 143, 152 Socialist Party of America (SPA), 25, 118, 127-29, 145, 151-53 Socialists, 24, 43, 49, 53, 74, 93, 96, 119, 127-28, 13032, 135-36, 142, 147, 151, 153, 156 n. 22, 160-61, 172 Soldiers’ Pay, see Faulkner, William Spain, 67, 102-103, 147, 205 Spanish-American War(s), 154, 159, 160, 236 Spargo, John, 128, 137 Stearns, Harold, 45 Stein, Gertrude, 6, 17, 19 Steinbeck, John, 10, 113, 164; The Grapes of Wrath, 10 113, 164 suffrage, 21, 75, 142 n. 30, 174, 179, 185, 189, 206, 213, 247-48; see also women's rights suffragist(s), 178, 193, 247 Three Soldiers, see Dos Passos, John totalitarianism, 43, 52, 102

309 United States (US), ix, 3, 25, 119, 126-27, 129, 143, 174, 201, 246, 254, 279-80; Army, 19, 30, 57, 124, 130, 229, 232, 245; see also America Utopia(s), 12, 21, 27, 171, 181, 196; see also feminist Utopia(s) veteran(s), 4, 11, 41-42, 57, 81, 84, 88, 90, 92, 111, 130, 135, 160, 165-66, 178, 194, 249, 270; black, 23, 154, 159, 220, 232, 233-34, 266, 278, 280, 282 victimization, 22-24, 30, 37, 41-42, 55, 57-58, 75, 275 n. 18 warfare, 9, 41, 73, 100, 113, 121, 160, 171-72, 175, 178, 181, 209, 228, 236, 248, 275; industrial, 71, 184, 191; mass, 11, 15; mechanized, 40 n. 18, 114; modern, 3, 6, 9, 40, 52, 84, 92, 97, 165; trench, 2, 16, 39, 59 Wharton, Edith, 18, 21, 17677, 187 White, Walter F., 28, 31, 48, 55, 233, 237-39, 241, 253, 256, 264-65, 266 n. 12, 268-69, 273, 275 n. 18, 277-78, 280-83; The Fire in the Flint, 24, 28, 31, 154, 230, 232-33, 238-41, 243 n.

310


3, 253, 255, 266 n. 11, 267, 269, 273, 277, 281-82 The White Morning, see Atherton, Gertrude Whitman, Walt, 5 Williams, Raymond, 8 Wilson, Woodrow, ix, x, 4, 24, 44, 47, 83, 118-19, 124-25, 127, 132-33, 135, 137, 156 n. 22, 173, 177, 203 n. 13, 208, 227-28, 254 Wobblies, see International Workers of the World Women’s Peace Party (WPP), 26, 174, 176 women’s rights, x, 16, 29, 31, 43, 60; see also suffrage World War I, literature, 2-4, 7, 9, 11-12, 17, 20, 24-25, 2728; novel(s), 2, 9-13, 21, 25, 31, 37, 43, 50, 57, 61, 68, 101, 110-11, 118, 238-

39, 282; writings, 16, 19, 22-23, 54, 81, 112, 221, 246 World War II, 3, 5, 101, 173, 234, working class(es), x, 5, 10, 13, 16, 37, 41, 53, 55, 58, 61, 66, 68, 89, 116, 118, 120-21, 127, 129, 137, 142, 153, 166-167; consciousness, 116, 152, 166; organizations, 29, 43; resistance, 25, 44; solidarity, 140, 166; struggle(s), 25, 120, 16364; unrest(s), 112, 166, 196; see also lower class(es) Working Class Union (WCU), 145, 158-59 Wright, Richard, 10, 273, 28283

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