Rebirth of a Nation: Reflections, Ruminations, and Reactions

What follows are points of praise and criticism of Jackson Lears' Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. I refuse to call this a review because that implies a smooth narrative of reflection. Creating that narrative requires more time than I have today. Plus, that kind of piece isn't needed. This book has been positively reviewed, in narrative form, in a multitude of prominent, top-notch newspapers and magazines. In addition the end pages of Lears' book are littered with quotes of praise from superstars in the history profession: Richard White, Andrew Bacevich, Michael Kazin, Todd Gitlin, and Edward L. Ayers. Finally, as noted on the cover of my paperback copy, Rebirth of a Nation was declared "Best Book of the Year" (2009) by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Although we have discussed Lears and his works at USIH on several occasions, none of us have prominently posted anything on Rebirth of a Nation (it did come up in the comments of one discussion).

So what's left to say? I don't know in an absolute sense. I haven't read all the reviews noted above, but only skimmed them (I loved the last line of Summers' write-up). All I know is what I feel compelled to pass along--to reflect upon. Here's what I have, in bullet point form:

- I love the synthetic nature of the book. Lears blends primary texts with the best analysis from secondary sources accumulated over the past forty to fifty years. Through the latter you see how the progressive building of medium-sized ideas about the era (e.g. force, heroism, manliness, rebirth) come together to, in Richard White's words, change the metaphor. If White is right, neither Wiebe's Search for Order nor Hofstadter's Age of Reform contain the dominant heuristic thought tools for the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It's now the capacious idea of rebirth (or regeneration), which has subsumed order and reform in it. Because of this I predict that Rebirth of a Nation will now be required reading in any upper-level undergraduate or graduate course dealing with the post-Reconstruction to World War I era. And if those students attend to to Lears' notes, the book is worth at least half of a graduate education in the fields of social, cultural, and intellectual history. You could add political history to that list if that subfield weren't so neglected. In any case, this book should be on the shelf of every single historian who proclaims to study or teach post-Civil War history. It will reward reference thumbing or close reading.

- If you're in a bad mood, the alliteration and belletristic nature of Lears' writing can become tiresome fairly quickly. I grew tired of it halfway through chapter one. In the second half of the book, however, the alliteration is either toned down or less noticeable. I confess that this is a bit of carping on my part. Perhaps I'm jealous. Then again, I received a lot of criticism for too much alliteration in my early writing, so maybe I'm over-sensitive to the issue. Anyway, when it's not tiring Lears' style makes the work easy to read. This is no small thing in relation to the fact that gender analysis---one of Lears' strengths---is not my primary analytical mode. [Aside: My title is, of course, a tongue-in-cheek tribute to Lears' alliteration.]

- In my pre-reading of Rebirth (wherein I thoroughly study the TOC, Notes, and Index), I had identified chapter five as the pivotal part of the book. I do not mean, in any way, that chapters one through four are less valuable. All four are absolutely necessary to the story. But chapter five met my expectation of importance. It stirs militarism, violence, market culture, white male supremacy, and urban-rural tensions into a hot cauldron of 1890s crises. In this cauldron, crises were dissolved into a new language of reform, order, and regeneration, manifest in market consumption, the idea of a cooperative commonwealth, and empire. Every major character of the age appears in the chapter: Addams, Adams, Beveridge, Bryan, Burnham, Coxey, Darwin, Debs, Gompers, Herron, James, Morgan, Pullman, Roosevelt, Strong, Twain, and Willard. Lears shows how misunderstandings about Darwin were put to both good and evil uses (p. 204). The introductory discussion of  empire in this chapter (pp. 200-221) is first rate, supplanted only by the contents of chapter seven, titled "Empire as a Way of Life." Lears' discussion of civil religion in the chapter compared favorably, in terms of themes, to the contents of Ray Haberski's God and War---though the later focuses on the post-World War II period and, to my knowledge, doesn't reference Lears.

- In the first 100 pages of the book I became annoyed with Lears' slight tendency to look for the erotic when its presence was questionable (pp. 61, 63, 64). At some point the search says more about the author than the material. Intemperance comes in forms other than sex--e.g. anger, verbal abuse, alcohol, etc.

- Although Lears does not seem highly sympathetic to pragmatism, based on his framing of Randolph Bourne's criticisms of John Dewey later in the book (pp. 237, 344-345), William James is a clear hero in the text. Even if Lears disapproved of James' experimentalist pragmatism (he didn't, p. 225), that disapproval would have been drowned in relation to praise for James' anti-imperialism (pp. 22, 217, 219-220), his capacious spiritualism (pp. 238-239), and his desire to subvert militarism to "more humane" ends (pp. 22, 49, 329-330). Lears' perspective on James corresponds with mine, but I think the reader should know that James is a hero in the text. Despite our agreement and Lears' praise of James, I still think that Lears offers a somewhat shallow reading of James' famous essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War" (1906). I'm not sure that James "idealized war's revitalizing force" as much as he sought to deeply subvert the language of his period (i.e. the discipline, order, and physical fitness inherent in militarism are not exclusive to it). But maybe I need to reread the essay.

This is probably enough for today. I'll gather up more reflections to pass along next week. In the meantime, have you read the book? Do any of your thoughts correspond with mine? - TL

California's Golden Jubilee

   
Today's guest blogger, Mark Robertson, received a MA in American History from San Jose State University in 2012. Currently he is working with Dr. Margo McBane and Dr. Anne Fountain (both of SJSU) on a project entitled, “From Cherries to Chips,” investigating early 20th century agricultural workers of Santa Clara County -- now the hub of Silicon Valley's tech industry. He also blogs and tweets at Gilded Empire and @Calhistorian, respectively.

California's Golden Jubilee
by Mark Robertson


About a year ago, I was working my way through some historical literature in order to gain a better understanding of the emergence of California's sense of itself as a political community – a uniquely Californian identity if you will. Upon stumbling upon a reference to California's “Semi-Centennial” discovery of gold, I was intrigued by the lack of historiographic coverage of the event. Little has been written beyond a few passing references, yet as I read through the newspapers it became quite apparent that this was not small event, but a very large civic celebration. Can this event offer a similar window into a San Franciscan identity similar to the Mid-Winter Fair (1894)? What do mass public commemorations teach us about how citizens think of themselves and their city? What differences and similarities exist in interpreting this event and the Mid-Winter Fair? As Barbara Berglund has suggested, do massive civic events organized by the few structure the reality of the many? What does the celebration say about the regional competition between San Francisco and Los Angeles for supremacy in California? These were only some of the questions which first came to mind.

California's Golden Jubilee and Mining Fair (CGJ) was held in San Francisco from January 24 to March 5, 1898. In the midst of the accelerating Yukon gold rush, a rebounding regional economy, and San Francisco's growing preeminence on the Pacific, a disparate coalition of associations representing San Francisco's “commercial-civic elite” transformed a private legacy of commemoration into a mass civic celebration.[1] The legacy of remembering James W. Marshall in San Francisco reveals that as the anniversary approached, conflicting imaginings of the city's past and future were made to be reconciled for the sake of shared civic gain. By looking at the ways in which the ideas of profit and promotion prompted the coalition of commercial-civic elite in 1897-98 (led by Mayor and politician James D. Phelan and flanked by the San Francisco Miners' Association, the Society of California Pioneers, and the San Francisco Merchants' Association) to transform this small, parochial private commemoration of James W. Marshall's discovery of gold into a mass civic celebration of San Francisco's economic growth, social development, and the city's position in an expanding American empire, we can better understand how massive celebrations like the CGJ reinforced and reoriented California's Pioneer Myth within the context of a new international mining frontier and the city's progressive insurgent leadership of the late 1890s.

Every January the Society of California Pioneers had privately observed the anniversary of that golden event which inspired the California gold rush. However in 1897, as San Francisco's elite were preparing for a new era in the city's future, three of the most prestigious associations began planning a cooperative commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of James W. Marshall's discovery of gold on the American River. The resulting celebration opened to a grand cavalcade of fraternal, civil and military strength, a procession of historical pageantry demonstrating San Francisco's progressive growth from its sleepy Latin past, and finally closed with an extravagant five week long exhibition of the natural, manufacturing, and industrial advantages of San Francisco. The grandest spectacle was the opening of the Golden Jubilee Mining Fair, Saturday, January 31.[2] With a procession gathering around San Francisco's famed Mechanics' Pavilion, the turning of a golden key in Washington D.C. by President William McKinley ignited the electric lights and drew the giant curtain aside revealing the entrance the Golden Jubilee Mining Fair where dozens of exhibits, demonstrations, and spectacles vied for the public's attention.[3]

In this way, the Golden Jubilee projected what Robert Rydell referred to as a symbolic universe - a symbolic representation of San Francisco's dominant culture's collective sense of itself. Fairs like the Golden Jubilee, “make the social world comprehensible[, where] the directors of the fairs attempted to organize the direction of society from a particular...perspective.” But as Rydell reminds us, exhibitions like the Golden Jubilee also “perform a hegemonic function precisely because they propagated the ideas and values” of the “political, financial, corporate, and intellectual leaders” offering their ideas as the “proper interpretation of the social...reality.” In so doing, the Golden Jubilee coalition structured a version of the present by providing visitors with a “galaxy of symbols that cohered as symbolic universes.”[4] In San Francisco, once a small merchant community along Yerba Buena cove, the California Gold Rush seeded a new American city, and also “a new urban society” on the edge of an expanding national empire. The rapid influx of a diverse population, the overwhelmingly male society, and the prospects of economic opportunity created a seemingly “disorderly city.”[5] But by the 1890s many Californians looked at San Francisco as the natural urban metropolis of the Pacific coast that had triumphed in a struggle for order in a land so long ignored by the competing empires. No one communicated this better in the Golden Jubilee coalition more directly than James D. Phelan, Mayor of San Francisco from 1897-1902.[6]  In his efforts to lead and fund the celebration and exhibition, Phelan did more than anyone else to structure the celebration's symbolic vision of the city's history, present, and future. In essence, California's Golden Jubilee presented a reflection of the dominant Pioneer Myth of late 19th century California, while orienting San Francisco's collective identity forward into futurity.[7]

However the celebration did not succeed without conflicts and compromises. The organizers of the Golden Jubilee each envisioned a different reading of San Francisco's past and present greatness, and thereby its future. The most significant conflict between the competing visions of the Golden Jubilee coalition, was in the overall structure of the commemoration. The Society of California Pioneers demonstrated a desire to extol the advantages left by the earliest pioneers, extend praise to those still living who had witnessed the discovery, and also to give respect to what they saw as a city built by California pioneers. The California State Miners' Association on the other hand saw little reverence or even respect of the earliest pioneers. Mainly farmers and merchants, the legacies of California's earliest pioneers were particularly troublesome to the mining men centered in San Francisco. The 1880s debris controversy demonstrated that little reverence was given to non-industrial processes and those whom disdained progress. To the mining men, San Francisco was a product of gold, labor, and capital, not community, art, or culture. In slight contrast but still in line with the CSMA, Mayor James D. Phelan saw the city as the agglomeration of all that had come before, pastoral and industrial. To Phelan, and as exhibited in hist leadership of the Golden Jubilee, San Francisco was the Pacific Metropolis of the American Empire, the apex of urbanity and civilization in the American West. In deciding to cooperatively celebrate their community's shared history however, organizers were confronted with reconciling these differing views on how best to commemorate the anniversary.

Significantly, the Golden Jubilee coalition reoriented the interpretation of the city's past, by presenting and displaying San Francisco's wealth as an entirely “new urban society” distinct from not only the region's Latin past, but also its more recent domestic struggles between labor and capital.[8] Through two months of political competition and compromise, the Golden Jubilee coalition cobbled together an entirely voluntary contingent of some 17-20,000 official participants, at the cost of some $40,000 (including floats, music, and entertainment) that declared their “Sunset City,” as the Pacific metropolis.[9] In celebrating California's shared past, the Golden Jubilee coalition saw it as another opportunity to distinguish the present from the city's mythic and fabled past and its often tumultuous struggle for order.[10] In so doing, the resulting celebration demonstrated the ways in which civic celebrations project a “distinctive collective identity for people of different classes, ethnic backgrounds, and lengths of residence who happen to live in the same locale.”[11]

Civic commemorative activity like California's Golden Jubilee, presents a rich lens to discern the character of a dominant urban identity. By investigating how the Golden Jubilee displayed the city's past, we can get a sense of how the Golden Jubilee coalition of commercial-civic elite reconciled their own views in 1898. It is in this temporal orientation of the past, the collective memorial path linking the past with the present, that also outlines the perceived path to the future. It was in this vein that Barbara Berglund characterized the California Mid-Winter International Exposition (1894) as “imagining the city.”[12] The Mid-Winter Fair in aggregate, with its orientalist symbolism and Roman imagery, displayed a symbolic universe communicating the city's orientation towards its future in linking the West with the East; slighting the past for an emphasis on what was perceived as the probable future. The same theme of progress presented in the Golden Jubilee paralleled that of the Mid-Winter Fair, but emphasized a longer view which stretched much farther into the past into a progressive future. What would become California's Golden Jubilee and Mining Fair provided yet another opportunity for San Francisco's elite to present and project an image of the city drawn from what they saw as its honorable beginnings, traced into the future. But as the Mid-Winter Fair was national and international in scope, California's Golden Jubilee was local and regional, enveloping the domain dominated by San Francisco's economic tentacles.[13] Can we not look at this as a reflection of a regional California identity, a sort of broad, macro-collective understanding of the past and the present?

The Golden Jubilee was more than the commemoration of a shared history found in the anniversary of John W. Marshall's discovery of gold as the Society of California Pioneers had done since 1856, it was a structuring and declaration of a dominant culture's vision of San Francisco's pioneer identity, and its perceived progressive future.[14] Interestingly however, the closing of the Golden Jubilee Mining Fair on March 5 and any reporting of its impact were barely recorded in local newspapers. The local coverage was saturated with a topic of particular interest to San Francisco, but was quite another affair than celebration and civic pride. Some three weeks prior on February 16, 1898, as the Golden Jubilee entered its fourth week, San Franciscan's awoke to the morning's headlines, likely with some trepidation. “Maine Destroyed in Havana Harbor,” proclaimed the San Francisco Call. To many in the city, San Francisco represented the hub of American empire in the Pacific. With the escalating tensions within Cuba and the speculation over what actually happened to the USS Maine in Havana harbor, the Golden Jubilee's presentation of the region's military capabilities were quickly reified in that tragic event – as San Franciscan's themselves seemed to be involved in their own island revolution in the Pacific where one of their own, the Spreckels family, vied for control of the Hawaiian paradise. Little reference would be reported of the celebration in the newspapers, popular culture, or historiography of San Francisco or California. Does this indicate, as Glen Gendzel has suggested that the central inspiration of a Californian identity shifted from San Francisco to Los Angeles at the turn of the century?[15]

_______________
[1]   Ethington, Philip, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). The term “commercial-civic elite” refers to a common group of urban elite who are largely involved in commerce and politics, as opposed to cultural elite or business elite. This usage is borrowed from Patricia Hill, Dallas: The Making of a Modern City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).

[2]    Golden Jubilee Committee, Official Souvenir of California’s Golden Jubilee - Held at San Francisco, California - Beginning January 24, 1898 and Ending January 29, 1898. Containing the Programme of Each Day’s Events, With Much Reading Matter of Interest Pertaining to the Discovery of Gold, and Many Illustrations (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker Company, Printers, 1898).

[3]  “The Call’s Golden Jubilee Edition,” The San Francisco Call, 29 January 1898, 6.

[ 4]    Robert Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 2-3.

[ 5]    Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press Of Kansas, 2010), 1.

[6]    Ethington, 288.

[ 7]    Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 49.

[8]    Berglund, 1.

[ 9]    The number of official participants was calculated by multiplying the reported twenty divisions, which reportedly ranged from as low as 700, but as high as 3,000 per division. The above estimate is rather conservative compared with many of the newspaper's boastings. Additionally, the Golden Jubilee Week and the Golden Jubilee Fair reportedly cost $20,000 each with some odds and ends to be added up at a later date.

[10]    Gray A. Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (University of California Press, 2006).

[11]    David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 61.

[12]    Berglund, 171.

[13]    Here “tentacles” carries the connotation of the reach of the rail roads centered in the San Francisco Bay region,  critiqued in Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (Doubleday Books, 1901).

[14]  David M. Wrobel and Michael C. Steiner, eds, “Forging a Cosmopolitan Civic Culture: The Regional identity of San Francisco and Northern California,” Many Wests: Place, Culture, and Regional Identity (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997).

[15] Glen Gendzel, “Pioneers and Padres: Competing Mythologies in Northern and Southern California,” Western Historical Quarterly 32 (April 2001), 55-79.

Disembodied Voices in Intellectual History

In his recent post on Embodiment in Intellectual History, Ben raised the question of how intellectual historians might more effectively or fruitfully consider the "embodied aspects of the people about whom we write." He suggested that a consideration of "intellectuals' physical presences may grow more important as disembodied communication technologies become more and more ubiquitous." 
I began to wonder:  when was the last time that our communication technologies weren't in some way disembodied.  We probably have to go back to prehistory for that.  But I forbid my students from beginning their essays at the dawn of time, or writing an introductory paragraph about the course of human history, so I will spare you a similar sweeping gesture.  Besides, we do (mostly) U.S. history around here -- our wayback machine doesn't go very far back (though it might be salutary for us if it did). 

So as I thought about Ben's post, and I thought about how intellectual historians might "do embodiment" well, I was reminded of one of my favorite sections of A Godly Hero, Michael Kazin's brilliant biography of William Jennings Bryan.*

Kazin's extended meditation on the sonority of Bryan's voice provides an excellent example of how intellectual historians can explore what someone's physical presence meant for the articulation and reception of his or her ideas.  In the Great Commoner's case, this particular aspect of Bryan's (self-consciously performative) self-performance seems to have imbued his ideas with a liveliness and appeal that they lacked when presented in mere text, as printed words upon a page.

Kazin writes about the almost magical power of Bryan's speaking voice.

How did he do it? One born too late to hear Bryan on the stump or in a convention hall can only gather up reminiscences and marvel that, in an era satiated with oratory, he could lead so many people, foes as well as allies, to describe him as the most compelling speaker they'd ever heard (48).

Listeners commented on the extraordinary timbre of Bryan's voice:

Nearly every recollection begins by describing the quality of that voice. "Sonorous and melodious," "deep and powerfully musical," "soothing but penetrating," "free, bold, picturesque," "clear as a cathedral bell..." (48)

As Kazin points out, such praise sounds very much like the aesthetic judgment audiences might have pronounced upon a stage actor's talents.

Like them, the Nebraskan could project his voice a remarkable distance. Mary Bryan recalled one day in 1898 when, from inside a hotel room in Corpus Christi, she could hear her husband perfectly "three long blocks" away.  At national conventions, before the introduction of amplified sound in the early 1920s, Bryan's was often the only voice that could reach every seat in the house. And his diction -- clear, precise, and rendered with a slight prairie twang that passed for no accent at all -- ensured that listeners could understand every word (48).

I am intrigued by the gendered aspects of Bryan's appeal.  Apparently, he sounded like a man was supposed to sound.  And I can't help but wonder: what were women supposed to sound like when they spoke in public?  "They weren't," would be the easy laugh line here.  But there were women on the Chautauqua circuit, and I suspect that someone like Carrie Nation could hold a crowd's attention.  But I don't know that her appeal was aesthetic -- or acoustical -- in the way that Bryan's seemed to be.  Instead, part of the draw there (in addition to audience interest in the content of her speech) might have been the sheer spectacle of going to see a woman -- and such a woman! -- speak in public.

In terms of going to hear women, I suppose that famous female vocalists and melodramatic actresses could have drawn great crowds wherever they performed. But except for stage performers and professional entertainers, I wonder if there were many women who would have been able to draw a crowd simply to hear the sound of their speaking voices, as crowds wanted to do in Bryan's case.

In the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, what were the aesthetic expectations for public female -- and/or feminine -- speech?  (I mean besides "Ladies, please don't!")  What acoustical features, what kind of sonority, might have marked a pleasing, public female voice?  If you have some bibliographic suggestions, please add them to the comments below.  This is something I'll need to look at in relation to my work in the early 20th century, and I should probably base my understanding of the matter on something more authoritative than Singin' in the Rain.  ("I caiiiiiint staiiiind him.")

In any case, Bryan's heyday may have been the age of oratory, but it was not yet the age of radio. Kazin writes:

A...GOP partisan named Ira Smith first heard Bryan in 1896. Half a century later, he recalled: "I listened to his speech as if every word and every gesture were a revelation. It is not my nature to be awed by a famous name, but I felt that Bryan was the first politician I had ever heard speak the truth and nothing but the truth." The next day, Smith read the same speech in a newspaper and "disagreed with almost all of it." He was glad, in retrospect, that "the most remarkable orator of the century" had passed his prime before the onset of radio. Otherwise, Smith, who ran the White House mailroom for five decades, believed the Nebraskan would certainly have been elected president (49).

To me, this is perhaps the most striking insight of all -- one of those "for want of a nail" arguments that sets history swinging on the hinge of a single slim contingency.

Heck, maybe old Ira Smith was right.

Or was he making the kind of appeal to technology's magic -- or to charisma's power? -- that often serves as a sop to our most simplistic explanatory urges?  For example, we've probably all heard some version of "Kennedy beat Nixon because of television."  That's a little too easy.  And I think it would be really bad history to say, "If Bryan had been broadcast coast to coast on the radio, he surely would have won the White House."  But Kazin, who doesn't tend to write bad history, doesn't say that.

Furthermore, as Kazin points out, it was not merely his voice alone that made Bryan so appealing; it was his deep sincerity. "Listeners enjoyed being in his presence and often felt inspired by a guileless orator who seemed an authentic representative of the producing classes. A politics of character thus blended into a politics of celebrity as Bryan's voice became known throughout the land" (49). That part about "being in his presence" suggests a whole performative rhetoric of look and gesture, physicality, sturdy manliness, that went along with that big sonorous voice.  So radio might not have helped Bryan much anyhow.

In their introduction to an audio clip of Bryan's "Cross of Gold" speech, recorded in a studio twenty-five years after it was first delivered, the editors at GMU's History Matters site note that the recording "does not capture the power and drama of the original address."  Perhaps only listeners who had heard Bryan speaking live and also heard that recording could judge whether or not the recording "gets" Bryan.  Listening to his disembodied voice today, we have the challenge of wading through almost one hundred years of technologically mediated cultural history -- or culturally mediated technological history -- that have worked to shape what we think a (man's) voice ought to sound like.

But if audio recordings didn't seem to do justice to Bryan's oratorical gifts, that may have had less to do with the disembodiment of Bryan's voice than with the disembodiment of Bryan's audience.  Maybe it wasn't enough for Bryan to stretch himself out upon a Cross of Gold in a recording studio; maybe he needed a stadium full of people to bring power to his performance.

Along with Ben, I too would be interested to hear (!) our readers' thoughts on the more general question of how attention to embodiment can work in intellectual history.  I would suggest that exploring the (dis)connection between voice and presence, ideas and embodiment, matters not only in history, but for history -- for how we study it, for how we write it, and for how we perform it (and ourselves) here in the silent cacophony of the intellectual history blogosphere.

What say you?

---------
*If my discussion of this book seems vaguely familiar to you, it might be because I swiped a few paragraphs for this post from my old blog.  But I had, like, Seven Faithful Readers.  So I'm guessing it's new to you.

Book Review: Amy Wood on Szefel's *The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era*

Review of Lisa Szefel’s The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). ISBN: 978-0-230-11284-1. 280 pages.

Reviewed by Amy Wood
Illinois State University

In a 1991 essay titled “Can Poetry Matter?” poet Dana Gioia lamented the withering relevance of poetry in contemporary America. (The essay, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, became the basis for a 1992 book by the same name). Despite the fact that poetry was the object of unprecedented support, through published anthologies and literary magazines, fellowships and prizes, and professorships and creative writing programs, poets nevertheless constituted an isolated subculture in American arts. Poetry in the late twentieth century, he bemoaned, had become inaccessible and esoteric, as poets increasingly secluded themselves within clubby academic circles and wrote their verse no longer for a larger educated readership, but, really, only for each other. Gioia looked nostalgically back to a mid-century poetic heyday when figures like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, and John Berryman, to name a few, were prominent voices in American intellectual life. In addition to poetry, they wrote essays and criticism that broadened their intellectual reach. I don’t think the situation is much different twenty years later. Intellectuals and educated readers tend to be familiar with the leading historians, philosophers, critics, and novelists of the day, but would be hard pressed to name more than one or two contemporary poets.

This is a shame because, as Gioia contends, good poetry can offer particular aesthetic pleasures, pleasures that can, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, contribute to our happiness. Children, of course, intuitively recognize the enjoyment to be found in verse, as anyone who has read and re-read the same nursery rhyme or Dr. Seuss story to a child knows. But Gioia also glimpses significant political consequences to the declining importance of poetry in contemporary life. Poetry, he says, “is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.” A healthy society depends upon a literate citizenry who can appreciate and grasp the power of language, if only to guard against its manipulations and distortions from their political leaders. As George Orwell warned, the deterioration of language walks hand in hand with political turmoil. Gioia’s call for a renewed awareness of the craft of poetic language has even more salience now, when there is so much intellectual lamentation that our Twitter and texting culture has flattened language and reduced it to cloying abbreviations and emoticons. Gioia ends his essay by calling for poets to come out of their self-inflicted seclusion, form much-needed alliances with other artists and intellectuals, and use their talent to speak to humanity’s greatest concerns. As it had in the past, a reinvigorated and socially relevant poetic culture could provide a small bulwark against the technocratic and materialist mindsets that dominate our society.

In The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era, Lisa Szefel illuminates a time when American poets became committed to the notion that poetry should matter, that it should speak to the greatest concerns of the day. In this original and elegantly written account, Szefel traces the rise of a progressive-minded poetry movement that, between 1910 and 1920, developed alongside the social reform efforts of the era. These poets sought to break away from the genteel elitism of Victorian poetry and produce works that reflected the experiences of ordinary Americans and addressed the woes and sorrows that unmanaged capitalism had wrought. They believed that socially relevant poetry could strike readers’ moral imaginations and spur social action. With the help of sympathetic editors and readers, they created a flourishing literary community, which built the “cultural infrastructure” (p. 2) that later allowed the famous mid-century poets that Gioia celebrates to thrive.

Well-known poets such as Amy Lowell, Carl Sandberg, and Robert Frost enter her story, but Szefel gives us an appreciated introduction to more obscure figures like Edwin Markham, Harriet Monroe, and William Stanley Braithwaite. In doing so, she welcomes us into a circle of poets largely neglected in American cultural histories of the period. After all, when we think of literary output in the Progressive era, we think of the social realism of Upton Sinclair or the literary naturalism of Theodore Dreiser and others who wrote with vivid and shocking clarity about social injustice and human suffering in modern America. And when we think of a twentieth-century renaissance in American poetry, the great poets of the Harlem Renaissance or the high modernists like T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams come to mind. In drawing attention to the poets who preceded and even anticipated these movements, Szefel has filled an enormous gap in literary and intellectual histories of the Progressive era.

One reason why historians have tended to overlook these poets is that amidst the reformist ethos of the era, poetry could appear indulgent and twee. The spirit of the time seemed more suited to the gritty realism that other artistic media like fiction or photography could more readily provide. Progressive poets struggled with this very problem of form. They sought to portray the ugly realities of urban industrial life through verse, while at the same time they embraced a “gospel of beauty” rooted in Victorian sensibilities. Szefel presents them as transitional figures, awkwardly straddling the chasm between the Victorian and the modern. Disturbed by the disruption and corruption of modern life, they remained deeply wedded to the Platonic idealism of nineteenth-century romanticism and transcendentalism, believing that poetry, as the pure expression of beauty, could serve as an antidote to the rationalization and materialism of the day by allowing for subjective expression and self-revelation. Poetry thus provided spiritual nourishment, representing a space in the human soul where true freedom resides, apart from social constraints. That ennobling element could in turn cultivate moral goodness in readers by sparking their empathetic imaginations and attuning them to the sufferings of others. Their gospel of beauty, in this way, Szefel argues, shared much in common with the Social Gospel movement. (It is telling marker of these poets’ transitional status that Gioia does not mention the expression of beauty as a purpose of poetry, but instead focuses on personal happiness.)

Yet these poets chafed against the rigid conventions of the Victorian poetry that dominated the pages of both literary journals and middlebrow magazines at the turn of the century. They considered the genteel idealism of that poetry, with its focus on pastoral themes, to be both stale and effete. This new generation poets saw themselves as part of an avant-garde who would reinvigorate poetry – i.e. inject it with manly vigor – to articulate the “messiness” of modern life and animate the “mundane and mechanical” about it (p. 45). Though still committed to poetry’s aesthetic purpose, they wanted to shift the meaning of beauty to find it in common places, on city streets, in dockyards and skyscrapers, and in the haggard bodies of laborers.

By emphasizing their social purposefulness, Szefel sets the sensibilities of these poets apart from the anti-modernism of other artists and intellectuals of the period, as characterized by T. Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace. Lears argued that figures like Charles Eliot Norton, Frank Norris and Henry Adams retreated to the arts or to spirituality as a repudiation of the modern industrial order and as a counterweight to the sense of meaninglessness that they felt in it. But ultimately their bourgeois rejection of capitalism was toothless. It offered them personal rejuvenation and therapeutic release, but it did not disrupt their class hegemony or challenge the existing order in any meaningful way; in fact, their retreat constituted an accommodation to the very values that repelled them, and the onslaught of modernity continued uninterrupted. Szefel, however, wants to see her poets in a more favorable light, as sincere in their desire to change the world. Art for them could create bonds of solidarity that were crucial to the “discernment of meaning, value, and individual freedom” in modern life (p 45).

Yet, although Szefel demonstrates the commitment that progressive poets had to infuse poetry with a social conscience, it is less evident how exactly their poems operated as political or social commentary. Part of the reason for this is that Szefel is more attentive to the motivations of her figures and the complex relationships between them than she is with the poetry itself. To be fair, the book is one of literary history, not literary analysis. But to make the claim, as she does, that poetry can help to cultivate human sympathy for others and motivate social action requires attention to the form and content of the verse itself. Szefel references the work of Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty, who have emphasized the importance of “aesthetic sensibilities” and “narrative imagination” to the development of empathetic understanding (p. 11). I found myself longing for her to apply that theoretical work more directly to the poems under study.

What’s more, throughout her richly detailed account of their careers, Szefel reveals that her poets were much more ambivalent about reform than her larger argument suggests. It is never made clear how exactly their poetry linked up to progressive politics or reform efforts; the connections between them appear nebulous, a matter of vague aspiration rather than specific intent. And ultimately, the movement’s adherence to the gospel of beauty led poets and editors to recoil against works that focused on human suffering and social turmoil for fear that they would only lead to hopelessness. For example, Edwin Markham’s 1898 poem, “Man with a Hoe,” with its unsentimental depiction of an overburdened laborer, was a breakthrough piece that shocked readers and reflected the belief that the “moral power of art could temper avarice and induce charity” (p. 60). At the same time, as Szefel concedes, the poem refrains from any direct critique of capitalism and maintains a spiritual, optimistic sensibility, so that his portrait of the farmer appears more romantic than reformist. Szefel devotes a wonderful chapter to Amy Lowell, an extraordinarily fascinating figure, but Lowell’s imagiste poetry, with its focus on vivid imagery and direct language, was more concerned with breaking down Victorian ornamentation and reconfiguring conventions of poetic expression and form than with politics. In fact, she believed that poetry should remain a “serf to beauty” and not act as a “voice of protest” (p. 184). Similarly, although poet and editor Harriet Monroe promoted poets like Carl Sandberg and Edgar Lee Masters, who dealt with startling realities in their verse, she eschewed poetry that would appear propagandistic. Even the editor of the socialist magazine, The Masses, Max Eastman, comes off as tepid in his conception of poetry’s political role. (Szefel surprisingly pays only scant attention to socialist poets like Clement Wood and Mike Gold).

Compared to the work of people like Upton Sinclair or Lewis Hine, the reformist ethos of these poets appears weak and hesitant. Indeed, with their abiding faith in aesthetics as a means to self-fulfillment and moral truth, they appear closer to Lears’ bourgeois anti-modernists than the zealous social reformers that Szefel claims them to be. Their ambivalence is, of course, also part of Szefel’s point that these poets were part of a complex transition in the poetic arts from Victorian romanticism to modernism. And there is no doubt, after reading Szefel’s book, that these poets, through their experimentation with free verse and commonplace themes, played a critical role in developing modern poetry. Still, one is left wondering how much poetry did in fact matter to Progressive-era politics. If it did matter, it seemed to do so much in the way Gioia hopes it would today – as snapshots of everyday moments and expressions of real feeling in an otherwise harried and soulless age.

Book Review: Amy Wood on Szefel's *The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era*

Review of Lisa Szefel’s The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era: Reforming American Verse and Values (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2011). ISBN: 978-0-230-11284-1. 280 pages.

Reviewed by Amy Wood
Illinois State University

In a 1991 essay titled “Can Poetry Matter?” poet Dana Gioia lamented the withering relevance of poetry in contemporary America. (The essay, originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, became the basis for a 1992 book by the same name). Despite the fact that poetry was the object of unprecedented support, through published anthologies and literary magazines, fellowships and prizes, and professorships and creative writing programs, poets nevertheless constituted an isolated subculture in American arts. Poetry in the late twentieth century, he bemoaned, had become inaccessible and esoteric, as poets increasingly secluded themselves within clubby academic circles and wrote their verse no longer for a larger educated readership, but, really, only for each other. Gioia looked nostalgically back to a mid-century poetic heyday when figures like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, and John Berryman, to name a few, were prominent voices in American intellectual life. In addition to poetry, they wrote essays and criticism that broadened their intellectual reach. I don’t think the situation is much different twenty years later. Intellectuals and educated readers tend to be familiar with the leading historians, philosophers, critics, and novelists of the day, but would be hard pressed to name more than one or two contemporary poets.

This is a shame because, as Gioia contends, good poetry can offer particular aesthetic pleasures, pleasures that can, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, contribute to our happiness. Children, of course, intuitively recognize the enjoyment to be found in verse, as anyone who has read and re-read the same nursery rhyme or Dr. Seuss story to a child knows. But Gioia also glimpses significant political consequences to the declining importance of poetry in contemporary life. Poetry, he says, “is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.” A healthy society depends upon a literate citizenry who can appreciate and grasp the power of language, if only to guard against its manipulations and distortions from their political leaders. As George Orwell warned, the deterioration of language walks hand in hand with political turmoil. Gioia’s call for a renewed awareness of the craft of poetic language has even more salience now, when there is so much intellectual lamentation that our Twitter and texting culture has flattened language and reduced it to cloying abbreviations and emoticons. Gioia ends his essay by calling for poets to come out of their self-inflicted seclusion, form much-needed alliances with other artists and intellectuals, and use their talent to speak to humanity’s greatest concerns. As it had in the past, a reinvigorated and socially relevant poetic culture could provide a small bulwark against the technocratic and materialist mindsets that dominate our society.

In The Gospel of Beauty in the Progressive Era, Lisa Szefel illuminates a time when American poets became committed to the notion that poetry should matter, that it should speak to the greatest concerns of the day. In this original and elegantly written account, Szefel traces the rise of a progressive-minded poetry movement that, between 1910 and 1920, developed alongside the social reform efforts of the era. These poets sought to break away from the genteel elitism of Victorian poetry and produce works that reflected the experiences of ordinary Americans and addressed the woes and sorrows that unmanaged capitalism had wrought. They believed that socially relevant poetry could strike readers’ moral imaginations and spur social action. With the help of sympathetic editors and readers, they created a flourishing literary community, which built the “cultural infrastructure” (p. 2) that later allowed the famous mid-century poets that Gioia celebrates to thrive.

Well-known poets such as Amy Lowell, Carl Sandberg, and Robert Frost enter her story, but Szefel gives us an appreciated introduction to more obscure figures like Edwin Markham, Harriet Monroe, and William Stanley Braithwaite. In doing so, she welcomes us into a circle of poets largely neglected in American cultural histories of the period. After all, when we think of literary output in the Progressive era, we think of the social realism of Upton Sinclair or the literary naturalism of Theodore Dreiser and others who wrote with vivid and shocking clarity about social injustice and human suffering in modern America. And when we think of a twentieth-century renaissance in American poetry, the great poets of the Harlem Renaissance or the high modernists like T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams come to mind. In drawing attention to the poets who preceded and even anticipated these movements, Szefel has filled an enormous gap in literary and intellectual histories of the Progressive era.

One reason why historians have tended to overlook these poets is that amidst the reformist ethos of the era, poetry could appear indulgent and twee. The spirit of the time seemed more suited to the gritty realism that other artistic media like fiction or photography could more readily provide. Progressive poets struggled with this very problem of form. They sought to portray the ugly realities of urban industrial life through verse, while at the same time they embraced a “gospel of beauty” rooted in Victorian sensibilities. Szefel presents them as transitional figures, awkwardly straddling the chasm between the Victorian and the modern. Disturbed by the disruption and corruption of modern life, they remained deeply wedded to the Platonic idealism of nineteenth-century romanticism and transcendentalism, believing that poetry, as the pure expression of beauty, could serve as an antidote to the rationalization and materialism of the day by allowing for subjective expression and self-revelation. Poetry thus provided spiritual nourishment, representing a space in the human soul where true freedom resides, apart from social constraints. That ennobling element could in turn cultivate moral goodness in readers by sparking their empathetic imaginations and attuning them to the sufferings of others. Their gospel of beauty, in this way, Szefel argues, shared much in common with the Social Gospel movement. (It is telling marker of these poets’ transitional status that Gioia does not mention the expression of beauty as a purpose of poetry, but instead focuses on personal happiness.)

Yet these poets chafed against the rigid conventions of the Victorian poetry that dominated the pages of both literary journals and middlebrow magazines at the turn of the century. They considered the genteel idealism of that poetry, with its focus on pastoral themes, to be both stale and effete. This new generation poets saw themselves as part of an avant-garde who would reinvigorate poetry – i.e. inject it with manly vigor – to articulate the “messiness” of modern life and animate the “mundane and mechanical” about it (p. 45). Though still committed to poetry’s aesthetic purpose, they wanted to shift the meaning of beauty to find it in common places, on city streets, in dockyards and skyscrapers, and in the haggard bodies of laborers.

By emphasizing their social purposefulness, Szefel sets the sensibilities of these poets apart from the anti-modernism of other artists and intellectuals of the period, as characterized by T. Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace. Lears argued that figures like Charles Eliot Norton, Frank Norris and Henry Adams retreated to the arts or to spirituality as a repudiation of the modern industrial order and as a counterweight to the sense of meaninglessness that they felt in it. But ultimately their bourgeois rejection of capitalism was toothless. It offered them personal rejuvenation and therapeutic release, but it did not disrupt their class hegemony or challenge the existing order in any meaningful way; in fact, their retreat constituted an accommodation to the very values that repelled them, and the onslaught of modernity continued uninterrupted. Szefel, however, wants to see her poets in a more favorable light, as sincere in their desire to change the world. Art for them could create bonds of solidarity that were crucial to the “discernment of meaning, value, and individual freedom” in modern life (p 45).

Yet, although Szefel demonstrates the commitment that progressive poets had to infuse poetry with a social conscience, it is less evident how exactly their poems operated as political or social commentary. Part of the reason for this is that Szefel is more attentive to the motivations of her figures and the complex relationships between them than she is with the poetry itself. To be fair, the book is one of literary history, not literary analysis. But to make the claim, as she does, that poetry can help to cultivate human sympathy for others and motivate social action requires attention to the form and content of the verse itself. Szefel references the work of Elaine Scarry, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Rorty, who have emphasized the importance of “aesthetic sensibilities” and “narrative imagination” to the development of empathetic understanding (p. 11). I found myself longing for her to apply that theoretical work more directly to the poems under study.

What’s more, throughout her richly detailed account of their careers, Szefel reveals that her poets were much more ambivalent about reform than her larger argument suggests. It is never made clear how exactly their poetry linked up to progressive politics or reform efforts; the connections between them appear nebulous, a matter of vague aspiration rather than specific intent. And ultimately, the movement’s adherence to the gospel of beauty led poets and editors to recoil against works that focused on human suffering and social turmoil for fear that they would only lead to hopelessness. For example, Edwin Markham’s 1898 poem, “Man with a Hoe,” with its unsentimental depiction of an overburdened laborer, was a breakthrough piece that shocked readers and reflected the belief that the “moral power of art could temper avarice and induce charity” (p. 60). At the same time, as Szefel concedes, the poem refrains from any direct critique of capitalism and maintains a spiritual, optimistic sensibility, so that his portrait of the farmer appears more romantic than reformist. Szefel devotes a wonderful chapter to Amy Lowell, an extraordinarily fascinating figure, but Lowell’s imagiste poetry, with its focus on vivid imagery and direct language, was more concerned with breaking down Victorian ornamentation and reconfiguring conventions of poetic expression and form than with politics. In fact, she believed that poetry should remain a “serf to beauty” and not act as a “voice of protest” (p. 184). Similarly, although poet and editor Harriet Monroe promoted poets like Carl Sandberg and Edgar Lee Masters, who dealt with startling realities in their verse, she eschewed poetry that would appear propagandistic. Even the editor of the socialist magazine, The Masses, Max Eastman, comes off as tepid in his conception of poetry’s political role. (Szefel surprisingly pays only scant attention to socialist poets like Clement Wood and Mike Gold).

Compared to the work of people like Upton Sinclair or Lewis Hine, the reformist ethos of these poets appears weak and hesitant. Indeed, with their abiding faith in aesthetics as a means to self-fulfillment and moral truth, they appear closer to Lears’ bourgeois anti-modernists than the zealous social reformers that Szefel claims them to be. Their ambivalence is, of course, also part of Szefel’s point that these poets were part of a complex transition in the poetic arts from Victorian romanticism to modernism. And there is no doubt, after reading Szefel’s book, that these poets, through their experimentation with free verse and commonplace themes, played a critical role in developing modern poetry. Still, one is left wondering how much poetry did in fact matter to Progressive-era politics. If it did matter, it seemed to do so much in the way Gioia hopes it would today – as snapshots of everyday moments and expressions of real feeling in an otherwise harried and soulless age.

Tim's Light Reading (11/18/2010)

1 (of 7). The Fish Man Cometh: Recent History, Problems, and Hopes in Higher Education

Stanley Fish recently dissected several "woe-is-us books" (his phrase) on the state of higher education today. I suspect that historians of higher education will, in the years ahead, be mining at least a few of the dozen books he covered. Indeed, Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas and Nussbaum's Not For Profit are on my reading list. Hacker and Dreifus's Higher Education? and Nelson's No University is an Island might get on there too. However, in a move to lighten the tone of the subject of his article, Fish says that we should all should pay attention to a start-up liberal arts institution to be located in Georgia, Ralston College. As an aside, if it creates new jobs for intellectual historians, well, that would be a great thing.

On Ralston, I noted this highly idealistic---but worthy---statement from the school's "About Us" page: Ralston College intends to remain without political, ideological, or religious affiliations. I guess Stephen Blackwood is trying to avoid this kind of start-up. Here's what Fish says about Ralston---incorporating statements from the college about itself (bolds mine):

“We believe,” declares the college’s Web brochure, “that the goal of general education is to produce a person who can draw on different fields of knowledge and at the same time grasp the whole of which each field is a part.” This means that “Ralston is fundamentally about reading books, thinking about them, and talking about them.” No on-line instruction, no departmental structure, no professorial ranks, no athletic programs, no teacher evaluations (student-centered education but not on the customer model) and no tenure.

And here is Fish's reaction (bolds mine):

The very fact of Ralston College, if it gets off the ground, might stand as a reminder of what the enterprise has always been about and might serve as a beacon, however dimly perceived, to those who value the liberal arts enterprise for what it is rather than for what it might contribute to the bottom line, to the strengthening of democracy, to the fashioning of citizens, to the advancement of social justice or any other worthy but academically irrelevant aim.

My question for Professor Fish is as follows: Do you really mean to say that those of us concerned with the liberal arts should have no concern with what our institutions "might contribute"---I repeat, ~might~ contribute---to any of those causes? Don't you really mean that our institutions should not be centered on contributing to one or more of those causes? You don't mean to say that those concerns are really just pipe dreams, do you? What a soul-crushing thought, worthy of Theodore "Hickey" Hickman.


2. Addams the Intellectual

Much like Louis Knight does in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, this Slate article by Ruth Graham approaches Jane Addams as something more than a mere social reformer, hero of liberalism, or "American saint". Graham calls us to see Addams as "an independent thinker and doer who was neither universally adored nor chained to liberal orthodoxy." The occasion for Graham reminding us of Addams's intellectual contributions is that this month is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Twenty Years at Hull House. In the context of Addams's pacificism and contemporary reactions to her position, Graham forwards the following (bolds mine):

Meanwhile, Addams' pacifist period must be squared with her past as something of moderate. "My temperament and habit had always kept me in rather the middle of the road," Addams wrote, looking back in 1922. "In politics and social reform I had been for the 'best possible.' " It's that pragmatist attitude that has contributed to her recent rediscovery as a philosopher on par with her friends John Dewey and William James. Her moderation also means there's plenty about her that merits respect from contemporary conservatives.

In contrast with that last sentence, however, Graham relays this: Despite this, after her death, Addams' name would be sullied by conservative critics like World magazine editor Marvin Olasky, whose influential 1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion fingered Hull House as a model for the supposedly bloated New Deal and Great Society programs that superseded it in the 1930s and 1960s. In fact, Addams didn't agitate for the overthrow of capitalism. She asked for the meaningful deployment of state resources.

No matter the views of conservatives, I think that Graham, Knight, and Jean Bethke-Elshtain have it right: intellectual historians ~must~ reckon with Addams in accounts of the Progressive Era.


3. Have you ever wondered what Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau read while at Harvard?

If so, this database/website hosted by the Harvard University Library will tell you. Here is an excerpt from the site's introductory page:

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History is an online exploration of the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard Libraries. For Internet users worldwide, Reading provides unparalleled digital access to a significant selection of unique source materials:

* personally annotated books owned by John Keats, Herman Melville, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and others
* William Wordsworth's private library catalog
* commonplace books used by Joseph Conrad, Washington Irving, Victor Hugo, and more
* records of the Harvard College Library that reveal the reading activities of Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau ...


4. Lilla on the Tea Party

Columbia University professor and intellectual historian Mark Lilla identifies an issue where Obama could have found common ground with Tea Partiers: fairness. Had Obama played the role of an economic populist, Lilla believes that Obama could have defused a significant portion of Tea Party rhetoric and brought some (small) portion of them, and independents, into the Democrat's fold. But is Lilla underestimating Tea Party anti-intellectualism and racism, the issue unemployment, the effective obstinacy of a determined political minority, the importance of states' rights/subsidiarity, and the support given by one major media outlet for Tea Party issues? Perhaps.


5. Clinton Rossiter's (Now Dated) Shout-out to American Intellectual History

I feel like an idiot for not having encountered, prior to this long piece by Bill Moyers, Clinton Rossiter's pithy assessment of the intellectual corruption of the Gilded Age. The quote, which serves as a subheading for chapter five of his 1982 book, Conservatism in America, is introduced as follows: "American Conservatism, 1865-1945: Or, The Great Train Robbery of American Intellectual History."

Rossiter argues that Gilded Age Robber Barons hijacked the language of progress, individualism, opportunity, and the whole Jeffersonian liberal tradition in general, to funnel wealth toward the "deserving." Clinton Lawrence Rossiter, III, was a historian and political scientist at Cornell University from 1946-1970, when Rossiter committed suicide. The Wikipedia article on Rossiter is the best I can do for background at this point.


6. Diagramming Western Philosophy

Assistant Professor Kevin Sharp, an analytic philosopher at The Ohio State University, likes to draw diagrams---or flow charts---of philosophical thought. Here are two covering the Western philosophical tradition from 600 BCE to 600 CE, and another from 700 to about 1960. Others are available. This kind of effort correlates well with those outlined by Patricia Cohen in a NYT article from this past Tuesday titled, "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches." Good stuff.


7. Fer or Agin?

Continuing somewhat the discussion of the Tea Party that David Sehat started on Tuesday, some journalists have asserted that Marco Rubio is a---perhaps THE--- darling of Tea Partiers. But is this story an argument for or against religion mattering to Tea Partiers? I can't tell.

Finally, I offer the following on the Tea Party from Noam Chomsky (bolds mine):

Ridiculing Tea Party shenanigans is a serious error, however. It is far more appropriate to understand what lies behind the movement’s popular appeal, and to ask ourselves why justly angry people are being mobilized by the extreme right and not by the kind of constructive activism that rose during the Depression, like the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

Words to ponder. - TL

Tim's Light Reading (11/18/2010)

1 (of 7). The Fish Man Cometh: Recent History, Problems, and Hopes in Higher Education

Stanley Fish recently dissected several "woe-is-us books" (his phrase) on the state of higher education today. I suspect that historians of higher education will, in the years ahead, be mining at least a few of the dozen books he covered. Indeed, Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas and Nussbaum's Not For Profit are on my reading list. Hacker and Dreifus's Higher Education? and Nelson's No University is an Island might get on there too. However, in a move to lighten the tone of the subject of his article, Fish says that we should all should pay attention to a start-up liberal arts institution to be located in Georgia, Ralston College. As an aside, if it creates new jobs for intellectual historians, well, that would be a great thing.

On Ralston, I noted this highly idealistic---but worthy---statement from the school's "About Us" page: Ralston College intends to remain without political, ideological, or religious affiliations. I guess Stephen Blackwood is trying to avoid this kind of start-up. Here's what Fish says about Ralston---incorporating statements from the college about itself (bolds mine):

“We believe,” declares the college’s Web brochure, “that the goal of general education is to produce a person who can draw on different fields of knowledge and at the same time grasp the whole of which each field is a part.” This means that “Ralston is fundamentally about reading books, thinking about them, and talking about them.” No on-line instruction, no departmental structure, no professorial ranks, no athletic programs, no teacher evaluations (student-centered education but not on the customer model) and no tenure.

And here is Fish's reaction (bolds mine):

The very fact of Ralston College, if it gets off the ground, might stand as a reminder of what the enterprise has always been about and might serve as a beacon, however dimly perceived, to those who value the liberal arts enterprise for what it is rather than for what it might contribute to the bottom line, to the strengthening of democracy, to the fashioning of citizens, to the advancement of social justice or any other worthy but academically irrelevant aim.

My question for Professor Fish is as follows: Do you really mean to say that those of us concerned with the liberal arts should have no concern with what our institutions "might contribute"---I repeat, ~might~ contribute---to any of those causes? Don't you really mean that our institutions should not be centered on contributing to one or more of those causes? You don't mean to say that those concerns are really just pipe dreams, do you? What a soul-crushing thought, worthy of Theodore "Hickey" Hickman.


2. Addams the Intellectual

Much like Louis Knight does in Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy, this Slate article by Ruth Graham approaches Jane Addams as something more than a mere social reformer, hero of liberalism, or "American saint". Graham calls us to see Addams as "an independent thinker and doer who was neither universally adored nor chained to liberal orthodoxy." The occasion for Graham reminding us of Addams's intellectual contributions is that this month is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Twenty Years at Hull House. In the context of Addams's pacificism and contemporary reactions to her position, Graham forwards the following (bolds mine):

Meanwhile, Addams' pacifist period must be squared with her past as something of moderate. "My temperament and habit had always kept me in rather the middle of the road," Addams wrote, looking back in 1922. "In politics and social reform I had been for the 'best possible.' " It's that pragmatist attitude that has contributed to her recent rediscovery as a philosopher on par with her friends John Dewey and William James. Her moderation also means there's plenty about her that merits respect from contemporary conservatives.

In contrast with that last sentence, however, Graham relays this: Despite this, after her death, Addams' name would be sullied by conservative critics like World magazine editor Marvin Olasky, whose influential 1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion fingered Hull House as a model for the supposedly bloated New Deal and Great Society programs that superseded it in the 1930s and 1960s. In fact, Addams didn't agitate for the overthrow of capitalism. She asked for the meaningful deployment of state resources.

No matter the views of conservatives, I think that Graham, Knight, and Jean Bethke-Elshtain have it right: intellectual historians ~must~ reckon with Addams in accounts of the Progressive Era.


3. Have you ever wondered what Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau read while at Harvard?

If so, this database/website hosted by the Harvard University Library will tell you. Here is an excerpt from the site's introductory page:

Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History is an online exploration of the intellectual, cultural, and political history of reading as reflected in the historical holdings of the Harvard Libraries. For Internet users worldwide, Reading provides unparalleled digital access to a significant selection of unique source materials:

* personally annotated books owned by John Keats, Herman Melville, Hester Lynch Piozzi, and others
* William Wordsworth's private library catalog
* commonplace books used by Joseph Conrad, Washington Irving, Victor Hugo, and more
* records of the Harvard College Library that reveal the reading activities of Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau ...


4. Lilla on the Tea Party

Columbia University professor and intellectual historian Mark Lilla identifies an issue where Obama could have found common ground with Tea Partiers: fairness. Had Obama played the role of an economic populist, Lilla believes that Obama could have defused a significant portion of Tea Party rhetoric and brought some (small) portion of them, and independents, into the Democrat's fold. But is Lilla underestimating Tea Party anti-intellectualism and racism, the issue unemployment, the effective obstinacy of a determined political minority, the importance of states' rights/subsidiarity, and the support given by one major media outlet for Tea Party issues? Perhaps.


5. Clinton Rossiter's (Now Dated) Shout-out to American Intellectual History

I feel like an idiot for not having encountered, prior to this long piece by Bill Moyers, Clinton Rossiter's pithy assessment of the intellectual corruption of the Gilded Age. The quote, which serves as a subheading for chapter five of his 1982 book, Conservatism in America, is introduced as follows: "American Conservatism, 1865-1945: Or, The Great Train Robbery of American Intellectual History."

Rossiter argues that Gilded Age Robber Barons hijacked the language of progress, individualism, opportunity, and the whole Jeffersonian liberal tradition in general, to funnel wealth toward the "deserving." Clinton Lawrence Rossiter, III, was a historian and political scientist at Cornell University from 1946-1970, when Rossiter committed suicide. The Wikipedia article on Rossiter is the best I can do for background at this point.


6. Diagramming Western Philosophy

Assistant Professor Kevin Sharp, an analytic philosopher at The Ohio State University, likes to draw diagrams---or flow charts---of philosophical thought. Here are two covering the Western philosophical tradition from 600 BCE to 600 CE, and another from 700 to about 1960. Others are available. This kind of effort correlates well with those outlined by Patricia Cohen in a NYT article from this past Tuesday titled, "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches." Good stuff.


7. Fer or Agin?

Continuing somewhat the discussion of the Tea Party that David Sehat started on Tuesday, some journalists have asserted that Marco Rubio is a---perhaps THE--- darling of Tea Partiers. But is this story an argument for or against religion mattering to Tea Partiers? I can't tell.

Finally, I offer the following on the Tea Party from Noam Chomsky (bolds mine):

Ridiculing Tea Party shenanigans is a serious error, however. It is far more appropriate to understand what lies behind the movement’s popular appeal, and to ask ourselves why justly angry people are being mobilized by the extreme right and not by the kind of constructive activism that rose during the Depression, like the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations).

Words to ponder. - TL

Hughes on Mizruchi's The Rise of Multicultural America

Review of Susan L. Mizruchi's The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). ISBN: 978-0-8078-3250-9, $65 (cloth); ISBN: 978-0-8078-5912-4, $ 24.95 (paper). 368 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 21 illus., notes, index.

Guest Review by Richard L. Hughes
Illinois State University

Historians often argue that the fifty years between 1865 and 1915 contained the most dramatic period of change in American history. By the First World War, individuals born in antebellum America found themselves living in a modern nation that often bore little resemblance to the nation they grew up in. The rise of industrialization, corporate economic growth, and urbanization, coupled with dramatic changes in race and ethnicity due to emancipation and unprecedented immigration, forged what Susan L. Mizruchi identifies as "the first multicultural modern capitalist society." Not surprisingly, such developments also revolutionized the American publishing industry and The Rise of Multicultural America explores the relationship between economic changes and an increasingly pluralistic print culture that ranged from classic American literature to the burgeoning field of modern advertising. The result is a "literary-cultural study" that suggests that American capitalism promoted both a multicultural society and resistance to such changes in such a way as to create a broader yet continually contested modern American identity.

A professor of English with an interest in American literature, Mizruchi examines published materials associated with the aftermath of the Civil War, race and Reconstruction, Native Americans, immigrants, marketing and corporate America, labor, and utopian visions of American society. ...Continue reading the review here.

Hughes on Mizruchi's The Rise of Multicultural America

Review of Susan L. Mizruchi's The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915 (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). ISBN: 978-0-8078-3250-9, $65 (cloth); ISBN: 978-0-8078-5912-4, $ 24.95 (paper). 368 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 21 illus., notes, index.

Guest Review by Richard L. Hughes
Illinois State University

Historians often argue that the fifty years between 1865 and 1915 contained the most dramatic period of change in American history. By the First World War, individuals born in antebellum America found themselves living in a modern nation that often bore little resemblance to the nation they grew up in. The rise of industrialization, corporate economic growth, and urbanization, coupled with dramatic changes in race and ethnicity due to emancipation and unprecedented immigration, forged what Susan L. Mizruchi identifies as "the first multicultural modern capitalist society." Not surprisingly, such developments also revolutionized the American publishing industry and The Rise of Multicultural America explores the relationship between economic changes and an increasingly pluralistic print culture that ranged from classic American literature to the burgeoning field of modern advertising. The result is a "literary-cultural study" that suggests that American capitalism promoted both a multicultural society and resistance to such changes in such a way as to create a broader yet continually contested modern American identity.

A professor of English with an interest in American literature, Mizruchi examines published materials associated with the aftermath of the Civil War, race and Reconstruction, Native Americans, immigrants, marketing and corporate America, labor, and utopian visions of American society. ...Continue reading the review here.

Crosspost: A Two-For-One Review On The Attractions Of Eugenics

After teaching a semester of the history of medicine in the U.S., I keep my ear to the ground for news in that field that intersects with intellectual history (including the history of ideas). With that, this H-Law review---which I received courtesy of H-SCI-MED-TECH, will be of interest to those who think, occasionally or otherwise, about eugenics, legal history, and aspects of social control.

Lynne Curry ably recounts the new work of two scholars, Paul A. Lombardo and Victoria F. Nourse, and shapes their topics into a commentary on the relevance of eugenics history to current legal and social debates about our genetic inheritance. The title of Curry's review, "Intellectual Seduction: The Promise and Perils of Eugenics," draws from a line in Nourse's book. I doubt the history of the emotional attachment to eugenics is a focus, but appreciate the nod to that aspect of the history of ideas.

One could write a powerful history of fear in the United States as it relates to loss, both individual and social, of status, power, beauty, the other, random violence, degradation by disease, etc. One might also link that fear to both conservative and liberal impulses.

It's amazing how even succinct reviews of books will open your mind to new areas of thought.

Crosspost: A Two-For-One Review On The Attractions Of Eugenics

After teaching a semester of the history of medicine in the U.S., I keep my ear to the ground for news in that field that intersects with intellectual history (including the history of ideas). With that, this H-Law review---which I received courtesy of H-SCI-MED-TECH, will be of interest to those who think, occasionally or otherwise, about eugenics, legal history, and aspects of social control.

Lynne Curry ably recounts the new work of two scholars, Paul A. Lombardo and Victoria F. Nourse, and shapes their topics into a commentary on the relevance of eugenics history to current legal and social debates about our genetic inheritance. The title of Curry's review, "Intellectual Seduction: The Promise and Perils of Eugenics," draws from a line in Nourse's book. I doubt the history of the emotional attachment to eugenics is a focus, but appreciate the nod to that aspect of the history of ideas.

One could write a powerful history of fear in the United States as it relates to loss, both individual and social, of status, power, beauty, the other, random violence, degradation by disease, etc. One might also link that fear to both conservative and liberal impulses.

It's amazing how even succinct reviews of books will open your mind to new areas of thought.