European journal of American studies

6-2 | 2011 Special Issue: Oslo Conference

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/8881 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.8881 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 6-2 | 2011, “Special Issue: Oslo Conference” [Online], Online since 04 April 2011, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/8881; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.8881

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

The Christian Nation Debate and the U.S. Supreme Court Mokhtar Ben Barka

From Crèvecoeur to Castorland: Translating the French-American Alliance in the Late Federalist Era John A. Gallucci

The Myth of Americanization or the Divided Heart: U.S. Immigration in Literature and Historical Data, 1890-2008 John F. Moe

I (Don’t) Hear America Singing: The List of Songs Americans Should Know and Sing Melinda Russell

Lincoln’s “Unfathomable Sorrow”: Vinnie Ream, Sculptural Realism, and the Cultural Work of Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century America Gregory Tomso

The Reinvention of Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex Aristi Trendel

Refusing to Write Like Henry James: Women Reforming Realism in Fin-de-Siècle America Sarah Wadsworth

Negotiating Primitivist Modernisms: Louis Armstrong, Robert Goffin, and the Transatlantic Jazz Debate Daniel Stein

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The Christian Nation Debate and the U.S. Supreme Court

Mokhtar Ben Barka

1 In the 1980s, born-again Christians burst into the political arena with stunning force. The founding of the Moral Majority in 1979 by Southern Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell placed Protestant evangelicals in the center of the American political stage.1 Together with conservative Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and members of various political- religious groups, Protestant evangelicals constitute the Religious Right, also known as the New Christian Right.2 Today, the most important Religious Right group is the Virginia Beach-based Christian Coalition, founded by Reverend Pat Robertson in September 1989. The Coalition’s announced mission is to provide “a means toward helping to give Christians a voice in their government again.”3

2 Against the respect for religious diversity and the constitutional separation of church and state, Religious Right leaders seek to impose their beliefs and practices on the entire society, as evidenced by the conservative domestic and international policies they ardently support. They use a stream of selective biblical quotes to buttress their political positions on a myriad of issues including abortion, homosexuality, marriage, capital punishment, private ownership of guns, public education and the legitimacy of preemptive wars initiated by the U. S. government. The 2004 election of George W. Bush to a second term as president confirmed the extraordinary power of conservative religious issues in determining the campaign’s outcome.

3 Religious Right adherents firmly believe that “the United States was established as a Christian nation by Christian people, with the Christian religion assigned as a central place in guiding the nation’s destiny.”4 Since the United States has lost its moral identity as shaped by its founders, they argue, re-creating a “Christian America” is the only solution to society’s acute problems. One of the Religious Right’s most visible spokesmen, the evangelist-psychologist James Dobson, distributes through his organization Focus on the Family a set of history lessons that seeks to show that “the Constitution was designed to perpetuate a Christian order.”5 Many of America’s disorders, Dobson says, stem from abandoning this unity of state and church. Another well-known Christian conservative leader, Beverly LaHaye, chair of Concerned Women

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of America, affirms that “America is a nation based on biblical principles… Christian values dominate our government. Politicians who do not use the bible to guide their public and private lives do not belong in government.”6 To be clear, Religious Right leaders seek to convert the United States into a theocracy, although in their campaign to gain control over all aspects of American life, they constantly reassure the public that they are simply supporting “mainstream values.”

4 As the title indicates, this article deals with the ongoing debate concerning the “Christian nation” concept. More specifically, it focuses on the 1892 Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States case for it is frequently cited by Religious Right activists to argue for greater government support of religion and for Bible-based legislation. First, I will look at the historical background of this case. I will then examine the case itself, with a particular emphasis on Justice Brewer's ruling in which he stated that America was “a Christian nation.” Finally, I will argue that the Holy Trinity ruling was something of a legal anomaly.

1. Historical Background

5 To begin with, we need to note that the United States is a secular nation. The First Amendment to the Constitution (1791) prohibits Congress from making any laws concerning an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thus, at the national, there is to be no religious establishment and individuals are to have religious freedom. The provisions of the First Amendment were eventually held to apply to the individual states as well as the Federal government as a result of the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868). The debates concerning the religious clauses of the First Amendment indicate that there was not just a single viewpoint about church-state relations.

6 More generally, the U.S. Constitution was denounced from the very beginning by its Anti-Federalist opponents as a “godless” document. “This underdocumented and underremembered controversy of 1787-88 over the godless Constitution,” Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore explain, “was one of the most important public debates ever held in America over the place of religion in politics.”7 The separation of church and state and the role of religion in political life became major issues on the national level in the 1860s and 1870s, a period during which nativist sentiments escalated in response to the growing immigrant populations.8 Several Protestant organizations pushed for a constitutional amendment that would add some type of endorsement of Christianity to the Constitution. A closer look at the church-state battle in the latter half of the century reveals three main approaches to such issues that were vying to capture the American mind during this time.

7 1.1 - The National Reform Association (NRA), a coalition formed in 1863 by representatives from eleven Protestant denominations, emphasized the Christian character of the nation and advocated an amendment to the Constitution in such a way that the United States would be permanently and officially aligned with Christianity. In order to rectify what it called the “religious defect” in the U.S. Constitution, the NRA petitioned Congress in 1864 to amend the preamble of the Constitution to read, “We, people of the United States, humbly acknowledging Almighty God as the source of all authority and power in civil government, the Lord Jesus Christ as the Ruler among the

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nations […], do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.”9 The NRA’s amendment had broad support from many prominent citizens, yet it languished in Congress for years, occasionally being reintroduced. Finally in 1874 the House Judiciary Committee voted against its adoption. It was introduced in Congress again in 1882, but this time it died in committee. Another “Christian America” amendment resurfaced nearly one hundred years later, when similar proposals were introduced in Congress in 1961.

8 Alongside the activities of the NRA, religiously conservative ministers attacked the Constitution from the pulpit, usually because it lacked reference to God. These attacks on the Constitution underscore how conservative religious forces have varied their rhetoric against the First Amendment over the years. While in the nineteenth century conservative religious leaders acknowledged the secular nature of the Constitution and called for amending it to include references to God or Christianity, “most Religious Right activists today have abandoned this strategy and in the face of all available evidence insist that the Constitution was somehow written to afford special protection to Christianity.”10

9 1.2- Members of the National Reform Association referred frequently to the persistent demands of the “enemies of our Christian institutions” to eradicate all vestiges of religion from public life. Such epithets referred to the National Liberal League (NLL) and its main spokesman Robert Green Ingersoll,11 who championed an absolute separation between church and state. The NLL existed to eradicate everything the NRA desired to maintain. To achieve its goals, the National Liberal League, like the National Reform Association, proposed an amendment to the Constitution called the “Religious Freedom Amendment.” It had a twofold purpose: to extend to the states the prohibitions of the national Constitution concerning the establishment and the free exercise of religion, and to impose a radical, absolute separation of church and state governments. But it did not gain enough support.

10 1.3 - While the National Reform Association and the National Liberal League were garnering public support for their opposite positions and vying for the attention of Congress, a third effort toward constitutional change emerged: in 1875, the Republicans proposed the Blaine Amendment which was meant to protect the Protestant domination of American culture and schools to the detriment of minority religions, especially Catholicism. In addition to the exacerbation of the nativist sentiments, the Reconstruction period after the Civil War under President Grant’s administration had created a legacy of bitterness in the South. The Republicans needed a platform for the 1876 election that would positively affect the greatest number of voters. One solution, proposed by President Grant in 1875, was to focus the attention of the nation on the issues of education and school funding.12 By uniting the entire nation in the common cause of improving education, the Republicans could redirect the focus of the country from the failures of Reconstruction to the hope of rebuilding the nation.

11 One of the 1876 presidential hopefuls, Congressman James G. Blaine, recognized the political promise of the school issue and proposed a constitutional amendment in 1875. The party’s school agenda, coupled with the Blaine Amendment, served as a vehicle for political gain. One of the main reasons this strategy worked was the anti-Catholic enmity underlying the public school issue during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Because Protestant doctrines and values were at the core of the common

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school system, many Catholics sent their children to parochial schools in order to educate their children according to their beliefs. The Blaine Amendment’s main purpose—to prohibit government funding of sectarian schools—directly hurt the Catholic community since most sectarian schools at the time were Catholic. The Blaine Amendment also rekindled anti-Catholic sentiments and suspicions among Protestants.

12 The Blaine Amendment, unlike those of the National Reform Association or the National Liberal League, was seriously considered in both houses of Congress, but it failed to gain the two-thirds needed for it to be passed to the states for ratification. The defeat of the Blaine Amendment did not stop leaders in the Republican Congress from attempting to influence the school funding issue in the states and territories. Washington, one of the several states that came into the Union in 1889, adopted a Blaine-inspired “establishment Clause” into its Constitution.

2. The Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States

13 Although none of these amendments met with successful passage, continuous public debates over the church-state relations permeated the thirty five years after the Civil War to the end of the century. The debates culminated in 1892, when the case of the Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States came before the Supreme Court of the United States.13 Far from being specifically about religion, the Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States was an immigration case: the issue was whether or not hiring a foreigner violated the federal Contract Labor Act of 1885, a law passed by Congress that was designed to limit legal immigration and place restrictions on the ability of American firms to hire laborers from overseas. More precisely, the Act made it illegal for a corporation, among others, “to prepay the transportation, or in any way encourage the importation or migration of any alien… into the United States… to perform labor or service of any kind.”

14 In 1887, the Church of Holy Trinity, a Protestant Episcopal Church in the city of New York, had employed Reverend E. Walpole Warren, an English minister to serve as a pastor and rector. The United States Attorney General challenged that employment. The Circuit Court ruled that the Contract Labor Act prohibited the church’s contract with Reverend Warren. As Holy Trinity appealed against the Circuit Court’s decision, the case eventually arrived at the Supreme Court. The only issue presented to the Supreme Court was whether Holy Trinity had violated the law. The Supreme Court concluded that the purpose of the Act was to prohibit the importation of foreign unskilled persons to perform manual labor and manual services. A Christian, the Court reasoned, is a “toiler of the brain”, not a manual laborer; Holy Trinity Church, therefore, was found not to have violated the Act when it secured a contract for the clergyman’s employment. Only manual laborers were covered by the act. Whether or not America was a Christian nation was not even at issue in the Holy Trinity case.

15 The case was decided by Justice David Josiah Brewer, who wrote the majority opinion in favor of the English minister. David J. Brewer was born in Smyrna, (now Izmir, Turkey), on June 20, 1837 and died in Washington D.C., on March 28, 1910.14 He was born of Congregationalist missionary parents in Asia Minor and then raised in privilege. After attending Wesleyan and Yale Universities and Albany Law School, he moved to Kansas in the late 1850s to begin his professional career. There he served on the Supreme Court of Kansas (1870-1884) and the Eighth Circuit Court (1884-1889). In

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1890, President Benjamin Harrison appointed him to the Supreme Court, where he served as associate justice until his death. In all, he wrote 719 opinions. David J. Brewer was a talented speaker and a prolific writer. His writings included: The Pew for the Pulpit (1897), The United States A Christian Nation (1905).

16 A devout Christian, David J. Brewer derived his entire philosophy, including his views on legal matters, religious liberty, and church-state relations, from his Christian convictions. So, his personal religious beliefs provided a basis for understanding his decision in Holy Trinity. Justice Brewer was convinced that the United States owed its prominence among nations to its close connection to the Christian religion. For him, the role of Christianity in America was not only an historical fact but also a present reality. Moreover, he maintained an unwavering belief that the spread of Christianity was essential to the future success and greatness of America. “Clearly,” Jay Alan Sekulow points out, “he believed in the ascendancy of Christianity and felt it offered suffering humanity its only hope of ultimate comfort and justice.”15

17 In his Holy Trinity opinion, Justice Brewer wrote that “beyond all these matters no purpose of action against religion can be imputed to any legislation, state or national, because this is a religious people.”He then gave a summary of America’s religious history and concluded that “this is a Christian nation”. Finally, he rhetorically asked “in the face of all these [utterances that this is a Christian nation], shall it be believed that a Congress of the United States intended to make it a misdemeanor for a church of this country to contract for the services of a Christian minister residing in another nation?”16

18 In his ruling, Justice David J. Brewer relied on two arguments to reverse the Circuit Court’s decision. First, he argued that the statute was not intended to prohibit the importation of members of the clergy to the United States for the purpose of serving as a pastor of a church. Second, he argued that prohibiting a church from contracting for the services of a foreign pastor would be in complete contradiction to the overwhelming evidence that “this is a Christian nation”. In other words, to apply the Contract Labor Act to restrict the Christian religion would be something the government should not be allowed to do.

19 Furthermore, Justice Brewer mentioned several state and national Supreme Court cases that used the Christian heritage of the United States as a rationale to support their decisions. He cited two blasphemy cases in which the Courts stressed that Christianity was the professed religion of the people of their respective states. In the People v. Ruggles (1811), the Court declared that “the people this state, in common with the people of this country, profess the general doctrines of Christianity,” and that “the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity.”17 In the second case, Updegraph v. Commonwealth (1824), the Pennsylvania Supreme Court stated that “Christianity, general Christianity, is, and has been, a part of the Common Law of Pennsylvania…”18 In addition, Brewer made reference to Vidal v. Girard and approvingly quoted Justice Joseph Story’s acknowledgment that “the Christian religion is a part of the common law of Pennsylvania.”19 To Justice Brewer, “these, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.”20 That Justice Brewer believed the “Christian nation” maxim had legal significance is also supported by his subsequent discussion of Holy Trinity in his speeches and writings.

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20 Justice Brewer was, to a large extent, representative of most nineteenth-century jurists for whom religion and the law were intimately connected. Robert Boston goes even further: “the unpleasant truth is that nineteenth-century America was a mild form of Protestant theocracy. In this period, Protestantism was America’s de facto established religion.”21 Effectively, the United States of this period was an overwhelmingly Protestant country: more often than not, its laws reflected general Protestant religious doctrine. This was all the more so as mainstream Protestants – Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists – held power and influenced government.

21 The Civil War may have been the impetus for closer ties between church and state. Some ministers in the North were convinced that God had put the nation at war with itself as a form of punishment for excluding Him from the Constitution. They began pressing for legal changes to bring religion and government closer together. Aside from the Civil War, it is important to remember that at this time in history, most laws were local in origin and as such reflected regional religious attitudes and biases. The federal courts rarely involved themselves in church-state matters, which were left chiefly to state legislators, and disputes, if they occurred at all, were resolved by state courts. It should be added that the court decisions that emerged from the states were mostly at odds with religious freedom and separation of church and state.

3. Justice David J. Brewer’s intent: a subject of controversy

22 Justice Brewer’s famous statement that “this is a Christian nation,” has engendered significant commentary within the legal community. Efforts have been made to argue that David J. Brewer used this phrase and related discussion merely to describe the history and culture of the American nation. To this day, historians debate what David J. Brewer meant by the term. It is unclear whether he meant to say the country’s laws should reflect Christianity or was simply acknowledging the fact that most Americans are Christians.

23 Justice Brewer may have believed that the United States was officially Christian, but even he failed to use the Holy Trinity case as precedent when given an opportunity. Five years after the Holy Trinity ruling, a dispute arose concerning legalized prostitution in New Orleans. In L’Hote v. New Orleans (1900), the Methodist church challenged a city ordinance allowing prostitution in one area of the city. The church argued that prostitution should be illegal everywhere in New Orleans on the ground that the activity was inconsistent with Christianity” which the Supreme Court of the United States says is the foundation of our government.”22 Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Brewer completely ignored the church’s argument and upheld the New Orleans policy. Brewer’s bypass in this case suggests that he did not mean to imply in Holy Trinity that the United States should enforce the dictates of Christianity by law. Had that been David J. Brewer’s intention, he surely would have upheld the Methodists’ claim.

24 As previously noted, in 1905 David Brewer published a short book titled The United States A Christian Nation. What he had to say in this book is very interesting: But in what sense can [the United States] be called a Christian nation? Not in the sense that Christianity is the established religion or the people are compelled in any manner to support it….Neither is it Christian in the sense that all its citizens

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are either in fact or in name Christians. On the contrary, all religions have free scope within its borders. Numbers of our people profess other religions, and many reject all... Nor is it Christian in the sense that a profession of Christianity is a condition of holding office or otherwise engaging in public service, or essential to recognition either politically or socially. In fact, the government as a legal organization is independent of all religions.23

25 The passage strongly suggests that Justice Brewer simply meant that the United States is “Christian” in the sense that many of its people belong to Christian denominations and many of the country’s customs and traditions have roots in Christianity. Justice Brewer expounds on this theme for the rest of his ninety-eight-page book, predicting that Christianity will one day unify the American masses and make the United States a leader in world affairs.

26 What Justice Brewer says in this book is rarely quoted by Religious Right adherents since it seems to be at odds with their view. Similarly, one wonders why the Religious Right never mentions the 1797 treaty with the Islamic nation of Tripoli. Negotiated under President Washington, ratified later by the Senate, and signed by President John Adams, this treaty states that the harmony between the two countries would not be interrupted for religious reasons because the United States “is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion.”24 Instead the Religious Right insists that a Christian nation was the original intent of the Founding Fathers, which is, of course, highly debatable.25

27 The Religious Right tends to overlook the fact that Justice David Brewer is an obscure Supreme Court Justice who has never been considered one of the giants of the Court. “Today,” confirms Owen M. Fiss, is largely forgotten.”26 Whatever his views about the United States as a Christian nation, it is important to realize that the concept has never been embraced by the Supreme Court. The Holy Trinity ruling is something of a legal anomaly that has been cited favorably only once by the Supreme Court since it was handed down. Contrary to Jay Alan Sekulow who states that “by interpreting the Contract Labor Act so as to render it inapplicable to Christian ministers, Brewer took an active role in ensuring the future freedom and expansion of religious liberty in the United States,”27 Robert Boston asserts that “he had no bearing on the type of church- state relationship the framers intended for this nation.”28

28 On the other hand, The Church of the Holy Trinity v. the United States and an entire string of bizarre nineteenth-century Supreme Court rulings—that upheld segregation of the races, that decreed that women could be barred from practicing law, and that struck down laws designed to end the national scandal of child labor—cannot seriously be considered today as appropriate guidelines for American society. “They are products of their time,” Robert Boston points out, “and reflect cultural biases of the era, not solid constitutional law. Most have been relegated to forgotten volumes of legal history – where they belonged.”29 Religious Right activists often try to use these court rulings to “prove” that America is a “Christian nation”. The Religious Right looks so fondly on this period because the country at this time was dominated by white male Protestants. It does not say that “these rulings were aberrations that emerged during a period of intolerance and religious persecution.”30

29 Another case sometimes cited by “Christian nation” advocates: United States v. Macintosh (1931). It concerned an ordained Baptist minister who was denied naturalization because he was unwilling to take an oath swearing that he would bear arms in defense to be morally justified. In the opinion, Justice George Sutherland wrote, “We are a Christian people, according to one another the equal right of religious

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freedom, and acknowledging with reverence the duty of obedience to the will of God.”31 It is however to be noted that the central finding of Macintosh was overturned fifteen years later.

4. Conclusion

30 The church-state battle was already well under way during the founding of the American republic in the late 18th century, and it has continued unabated ever since. Despite the Bill of Rights and more than two hundred years of national history, the appropriate role of religion in a religiously pluralistic America has never been fully resolved. But today’s battles are much more turbulent than in the past. The well- organized Christian conservative movement, both its leaders and their supporters who seek to “baptize” America, are politically stronger, more energized, and better financed than ever before in American history. The “Christian nation” project, promoted by the Religious Right is a serious threat to America’s social, cultural and religious diversity. Emboldened by a series of recent electoral victories, Religious Right activists are now demanding full control over every aspect of public and private American life.

NOTES

1. Evangelicals are conservative Protestants who believe in the sole authority of the literal Bible, a salvation only through the acceptance of Christ as Lord and Saviour, a spiritually transformed personal life, and the necessity of proselytizing. They are more than 55 million. For further details, see Douglas A. Sweeny, The American Evangelical Story. A History of the Movement, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2005. 2. For a detailed account see Michael Lienesch, Redeeming America: Piety and Politics in the New Christian Right, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Clyde Wilcox, Onward Christian Soldiers? The Religious Right in American Politics (2nd Edition), Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2000. 3. http://www.cc.org 4. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case against Religious Correctness, New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997, p. 13. 5. James Dobson in ibid., pp. 22-23. 6. James Rudin, The Baptizing of America. The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of US, New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006, p. 44. 7. See Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, op. cit., p. 28. 8. An increasingly important outsider in American religion during the nineteenth century was the Roman Catholic Church. In 1789, there were about 35,000 Catholics, roughly 60 percent of these in Maryland. By 1830, the total number of Catholics had grown to over 300,000. In the next thirty years, the Catholic population leaped nearly tenfold to over 3,100,000. See Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, Grand Rapids, Michigan: W. B. Eerdmans, 1992, p. 205.

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9. See Robert Boston, Why the Religious Right Is Wrong about Separation of Church and State, Amherst,New York: Prometheus Books, 2003, p. 103. 1. 0Ibid., p. 105. 1. 1Robert Ingersoll, one of the most prominent secularists of the nineteenth century, employed his skill at oration for the furtherance of many causes, one of them being the separation of church and state. He was closely associated with the Liberal league, as evidenced by his selection as its presidential candidate in 1880. Later, in 1885, Ingersoll founded the American Secular Union. 1. 2 Jay Alan Sekulow, Witnessing their Faith. Religious Influence on Supreme Court Justices and Their Opinions, New York: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006, pp. 129-131. 1. 3Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U. S. 457 (1892). http://supreme.justia.com/us/ 143/457/case.html 1. 4 Owen M. Fiss, “Brewer, David Josiah”, in Kermit L. Hall et al., The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 89-91. 1. 5 Jay Alan Sekulow, op. cit., p. 139. 1. 6Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U. S. 457 (1892), op. cit. 1. 7Ibid. 1. 8Ibid. 1. 9Ibid. 2. 0Ibid. 2. 1Robert Boston, op. cit., p. 97. 2. 2L’Hote v. New Orleans, 177 U. S. 587 (1900), http://supreme.justia.com/us/177/587/case.html 2. 3 David J. Brewer cited in Robert Boston, op. cit., p. 102. 2. 4 Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, and George M. Marsden, The Search for Christian America, Colorado Springs: Helmers and Howard, 1989, p. 131. 2. 5 See Mark Weldon Whitten, The Myth of Christian America: What You Need to Know About the Separation of Church and State, Macon, Georgia, Smyth & Helwys Publishing, 1999. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State, Massachusetts & London, Harvard University Press, 2002. 2. 6 Owen M. Fiss, op. cit., p. 89. 2. 7 Jay Alan Sekulow, op. cit., p. 150. 2. 8Robert Boston, op. cit., p. 103. 2. 9Ibid. 3. 0Ibid., p. 99. 3. 1United States v. Macintosh, 283 U. S. 605 (1931), http://supreme.justia.com/us/283/605/ case.html

INDEX

Keywords: Christian Nation, Christianity, Circuit Court, Congress, Constitution, Contract Labor Act, Holy Trinity, National Liberal League, National Reform Association, New Christian Right, Religious Right, Supreme Court.

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AUTHORS

MOKHTAR BEN BARKA Université de Valenciennes et du Haut-Cambraisis

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From Crèvecoeur to Castorland: Translating the French-American Alliance in the Late Federalist Era

John A. Gallucci

I. Introduction

1 With this essay, I wish to suggest how a little-known text, the Castorland Journal, may help us read as an exercise in translation Crèvecoeur’s Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York.i My focus is on the ending of this lengthy work. This ending is in strong contrast with its beginning. At the beginning, Crèvecoeur comes very close to speaking in his own voice, identifying, for example, the author of the “Dedication” with the letters “SJDC.” At the end, Crèvecoeur writes from the persona of the visitor Gustave Herman. At the beginning of the Journey, there are references to the public leaders of France and the United States. The Journey begins with the striking “Dedication” to George Washington. The translator’s foreword refers directly to France’s contemporary political and public affairs and in particular to “the Washington of France,” Napoleon. In contrast, at the end of Volume III, we find a more private, subdued tone as the narrative is interrupted by Gustave Herman’s announcement that he has just received a letter from his father, and that he must therefore return to Europe. In taking leave of America, Herman is profuse in his thanks to his friend for his American hospitality, and the final word of the narrative is that of personal friendship. And in particular, at the end of Volume III, Herman is profuse in his enthusiasm over a certain place in northern New York named “Castorland.” What does this reference mean?

II. The Translator’s Absence

2 Let us recall how the Journey is introduced. According to the foreword, the Journey is a translation of a manuscript recovered from a shipwreck. The transmission of this text

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involves three people: the unknown author, the merchant who purchased items recovered from the shipwreck, and the translator, who has himself written this foreword.

3 As one knows or soon infers, the Journey is in fact the work of the author Crèvecoeur and not a real translation. For Crèvecoeur, the claim of translation is part of this scenario of discovery that establishes the reality, or rather, the credibility, of the Journey. One translates something pre-existing: The very fact that a text is called a translation naturally creates the assumption that prior to the act of translating another text did in fact exist. The Journey as translation is therefore, we assume, more truthful, more grounded in reality.

4 However, there is a moment in the Journey when the Translator is absent and another person takes his place. I am referring to the very end of Volume III where we find 1) Gustave Herman’s letter of farewell to his American friend; and 2) the notes that are supplied for the elucidation of this letter.

5 In this letter, in mentioning the bursting activity which he had witnessed during his travels in the United States, Herman singles out New York State and, in particular, various place-names in northern New York for attention (the numbers in parentheses refer to notes supplied by Crèvecoeur): Sir, I have received a letter from my father .... This vast ensemble is like an everchanging picture to which new lines and new colors are added every year. Without mentioning other states, what changes have taken place in New-York since our journey to Onondaga in 1789! Scarcely was the country of the Tenezee then known, even less those of the new Catarakouy, Castorland (1), Oswegatchie, Rieland, etc., the towns of Little Falls, Whiteston, Barnewelt, Roterdam, Rome, Leyden, Castorville, etc., were not even founded then, nor were the canals of Wood-Creek and Stanwich dug. Not a single dwelling as built on the banks of the great bay at Niahoure (2)....ii

6 A total of fourteen names are listed at the beginning of Herman’s letter, although the “etc.” implies that more could be listed. Two of these place names, Castorland and Niahouré, are given individual notes by the “Editor.” In other words, the names Castorland and Niahouré are singled out for special attention.

7 These explanatory notes are framed in a careful and deliberate way, and it is here that we find that the Translator has been absent. In an additional note to his note, Crèvecoeur explains the source for the Editor’s information on Castorland. He writes: Notes on the Letter from Mr. Herman* .... * The Editor, having learned that one of his friends had just received a letter from the agent in charge of the settlement of a large concession of lands which he [i.e. the friend] owns in this part of the State of New-York, thought that it would not be disagreeable to the Translator of this Work, absent for some time, nor to the public, to see inserted here several of the interesting details contained in this letter, dated the 4th of April last.iii

8 We see from this note to the note on Herman’s letter, that this information comes to the Editor and into the Journey independently of the found, “original” manuscript. We have a communication transmitted by three people: We have the agent (in America), the land-owning friend of the Editor, and then the Editor himself, who has taken it upon himself to add this information, as the Translator, for some unspecified reason, happens to be “absent for some time.” It would seem then that this “Editor” is to be distinguised from the Translator/Publisher of the title page, although all of these

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personae refer of course to Crèvecoeur. In other words, if I am reading this note correctly, the notes on Castorland are the only part of the Journey that is not portrayed as a translation. The Editor, it appears, is simply passing on information received from sources other than those that the Translator/Publisher used.

9 The manner then in which the “Editor” provides these “interesting details” adds to the credibility and realism of the Journey overall, as the Editor appears to corroborate the work of the unknown Author (and of the Author’s Translator) by supplying this information on Castorland.

10 Crèvecoeur clearly went to some trouble to make these “interesting details” on “Castorland” a convincing part of his narrative: first, by introducing them in a natural way, through the person of Gustave Herman, an eyewitness who had, it is implied, “seen” them; then, through the explanatory notes that add realism from further explanation; finally, through the alleged provenance of this information: It came to the Editor directly from the person on site in America, and so was not part of the found manuscript or its translation. The mention of Castorland at the end of the Journey is certainly deliberate and strategic (although Castorland is mentioned in passing early in the Journey),iv and is clearly meant to leave in the reader’s mind the notion of a prosperous region that only needs a few more settlers to prosper.

11 Why is there such attention to Castorland? It is here that I wish to introduce another text, the Castorland Journal, and explore its relation to Crèvecoeur’s Journey.

III. The New York Company

12 Let us consider some background. “Castorland” was the name given to a large tract of land along the Black River in northern New York. This land was purchased in 1793 by a French land company, La Compagnie de New York, which had been formed in France during the critical years 1792 and 1793. Involved in this business transaction were leading American and French speculators, such as William Constable; his partner, Alexander Macomb; and especially, James Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, the son of the Le Ray de Chaumont who, during the American Revolution, had provided a home in Paris for Benjamin Franklin. Gouverneur Morris, the American minister to France, was an associate of Constable, who encouraged this and other speculations.v

13 It so happens that Crèvecoeur was an investor in the New York Company and certainly involved in its affairs. His name is found in the list of stockholders. Out of forty-one investors, he is listed third. The legal owner of the land, Pierre Chassanis, holding 204 shares, is listed first; Le Ray de Chaumont, second, with 100 shares. Michel St. John de Crèvecoeur—that is how he is named in this list—held a more modest 10 shares of stock. The fact that he is listed third suggests that he played an important role in the New York Company, even though other investors held more stock than he did.vi

14 In 1793, the New York Company sent to America two agents, or “commissioners,” Pierre Pharoux and Simon Desjardins. Besides beginning the work of surveying, building cabins and roads, they were required by the Company’s by-laws to keep a journal of their work. The result is a daily chronology of their work and travels in America, a journal in the fullest sense of the word. The Journal provides some interesting biographical information then on Crèvecoeur and on his family. One of his sons for example visited the region and appears in the Journal. The Journal was first

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discovered in the mid-nineteenth century by the historian Franklin B. Hough and has been used sporadically since by historians.vii

15 The Castorland Journal is a narrative of hard work and disappointment. If one may give a plot to this chronological narrative, one could say that the basic story involves the discovery that the boundaries of the tract of land purchased by the New York Company were based on mistaken information; the actual tract turned out to be much less than promised. As a result, Pharoux and Desjardins would seek redress for this injustice. The story is quite heartbreaking. Eventually, Pharoux would lose his life in Castorland, drowning in the Black River in his haste to travel to Kingston, Canada. Desjardins would be replaced by another director and leave Castorland in bitterness. With his departure, the Journal comes to an end. The New York Company would continue to promote Castorland in subsequent years.

16 This promotion of Castorland is clearly one of the reasons for its inclusion in the Journey. Crèvecoeur is promoting a place, a settlement, a speculation, and this feature of his work has been underscored by scholars.viii Yet the obvious inference—that Crèvecoeur is simply promoting his own self-interest—is, I believe, insufficient to explain Crèvecoeur’s interest in Castorland or its inclusion in the Journey. For example, as we have seen, he held only ten shares of stock, well below the average number of 44 shares per shareholder (forty-one stockholders and 1808 shares).

17 I suggest that Crèvecoeur has, besides financial reasons for the promotion of Castorland, more generous reasons that have to do with the general political relations between his adopted and native lands in the years following the American and French Revolutions. I base this interpretation on Crèvecoeur’s idea of alliance; and on what I take to be a larger rhetorical goal of the Journey.

IV. Crèvecoeur’s Idea of Alliance

18 In the Journey, the word “alliance” is used in an extremely interesting way (the upper and lower case Roman numerals in square brackets refer respectively to the Volume and Chapter number of the Journey): 1. alliance between English and Iroquois [I: i]: Sir William Johnson: “This alliance contributed a great deal toward the progress of settlements, toward the peace and security of the inhabitants of the colony of New-York, and facilitated the acquisition of lands, in proportion to the greed of the Governors or companies of speculators.”ix 2. alliance between French and Missagués [I: i]: “Shortly after their settling at Montreal, the French made an alliance which, as it turned out, became very useful to them, when they were attacked by the English and Mohawks. Since this ancient time, they have not ceased being their constant and faithful allies, until the conquest of Canada.”x 3. alliance between France and the United States: [III:x: note 7]: “Finally, came the surrender of Burgoyne, which decided the alliance with France, an alliance that contributed so powerfully to the surrender of Yorktown and to peace.”xi 4. alliance Great Britain and the Six Nations: [III: xi]: “The close alliance which Great Britain contracted at the time with the Six Confederated Nations, an alliance which has persisted [to] the beginning of the Revolution,permitted the inhabitants to extend their clearings, build towns in the interior and multiply their number. It experienced in the course of all this a great expansion by the successive arrival of Germans, Irish, Flemish, Palatins, and French driven from their country by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, that shameful blot on the reign of Louis XIV.”xii

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19 These examples are presented in a discrete fashion. For example, Crèvecoeur gives no more space to the French-American alliance than he does to the other examples he provides. In fact, with the last example mentioned, he goes out of his way to criticize his native land’s treatment of its own citizens in a period of crisis—the expulsion of the Huguenots under Louis XIV—a criticism that strikes me as an indirect comment on the French Revolution and the émigrés.

20 At the same time, Crèvecoeur has firm ideas on the value of an “alliance” that are clearly enunciated. These examples are strictly parallel not only in the presentation of historical fact; but also in the emphasis on the clear, real, positive effects of an alliance on social progress and individual well-being. Each of these examples is strictly parallel to the others in this respect: “contributed a great deal,” “very useful,” “contributed so powerfully,” “permitted the inhabitants to extend their clearings ... build ... multiply ....” In each case, an alliance is greater than the sum of its parts and brings into being those values cherished by Crèvecoeur: economic progress, tranquility, social well- being, peace, a halt to cannibalism.

21 We see how the New York Company viewed the alliance in a fascinating episode in the Journal. Pharoux and Desjardins are traveling via the Mohawk River and Oswego and Lake Ontario to their lands at the mouth of the Black River in the Bay of Niahouré. But Oswego is still held by the British, and the commander of the British fort at Oswego claims that the French authors of the Journal may not proceed any further. One of the authors, Pierre Pharoux, counters this argument by making explicit reference to the French-American alliance, using it as a quasi-legal document to argue, successfully, that he and his French companions, as allies of the Americans, should be allowed to pass Oswego and go on to their lands.

22 By the author’s placing this episode within the larger political context of 1793, we see that the Castorland émigrés, while successful in this particular instance, are in fact making a belated argument for alliance. In fact, the French-American Alliance was beginning to undergo a drastic re-evaluation just as the Castorland settlement was begun. The New York Company had assumed the alliance to be as intact in the autumn of 1793 as it was in 1778 and 1779, when, in fact, the American government had already begun insisting on a foreign policy based on neutrality. In the critical year 1793, there is the antagonizing personality of Genet; the conflicts between Hamilton and Jefferson; the statements on neutrality by Washington.xiii

23 There is irony in the personal circumstances of these émigrés, who—like the Huguenots who were “driven from their country”—arrive at a time when several hundred miles away, in Philadelphia, the alliance was being reconsidered. This episode in the Journal, and the Journal as a whole, become an example of a narrative of disappointment in the attempt to use the French-American alliance as a sustaining cultural or political reality at a time when relations between the two countries were worsening.

24 Crèvecoeur’s Journey was written, I contend, at least in part, to repair this disappointment and, in the new historical context of the late 1790s, to lay the ground for an invitation to a restoration of an alliance. And the discussion of Castorland in the Journey seems meant to be a possible starting point for such a restoration, if not at the national level of foreign policy, at least as a private endeavor open to the citizens of the two Republics.

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V. Towards a New Alliance

25 These ideas of social well-being are emphasized in the Notes to Mr. Herman’s Letter. These “Notes” take up ten pages, pages 399-409 of volume III of the Journey, and extend over a total of seventeen paragraphs. The author of the Note on Castorland is presumably the Agent, who is addressing the “Friend” of the “Editor,” but this is not entirely clear. Overall, the note on Castorland reads like a typical land prospectus. We find at the outset a description of Castorland’s boundaries and then an accumulation of details on its richness and potential. There is the potential for building factories; natural resources such as prairies; the types of trees suggest rich land; the British in Canada will not intervene to oppose settlement; families are already living on the land and developing Castorland; communication by water is accessible; the Bay of Niahouré is on “coastal lands,” etc.

26 Yet besides these remarks on Castorland’s prosperity, there are other remarks that are typical of Crèvecoeur’s style in the Journey and in his Letters, for example the paradigmatic, totemic function of the animals found in Castorland, the beaver and the wolf: Of all the beaver colonies that occupy this land have built dams, only a few scattered families remain, for we have destroyed this little society, image of happiness, in whose bosom reigned the most perfect order, peace, prudence, precaution, and industry. The wiliest wolves, more warlike than the beavers, live at our expense and until now have avoided our deadly lead.xiv

27 As is typical, Crèvecoeur personifies the beaver. This animal has colonies and families; these families exist in societies and know happiness; their qualities are those of those humans who are singled out by Crèvecoeur in the Journey as examples of human leadership. One also thinks of the extended personification of the beaver, the castor, in Volume II, chapter 1, when the Manitou creates the race of beavers—called Amick— from a human being (with an obvious echo of the French word for friend, “ami”). Likewise, in this note on Castorland, one finds a typical reflection on human nature: man is a “tyrant.” This definition is not mere name-calling. Crèvecoeur provides in the Journey, as in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, serious reflection on human nature. The definition of man as “tyrant” is meant to raise the serious moral and political question of how to live in tranquillity and peace, given this essential character of man. This brief passage transforms the whole landscape of the Castorland settlement into a symbolic—if that is the word—narrative of moral and political conflict in which a small yet ideal example of society is destroyed and subjected to further menace.

28 Besides the remarks on the economic potential of Castorland, besides the story of the families of beaver and the implications for human nature, these notes give special attention to the death of a “young man” of many talents and someone who would have been key to the success of the settlement. This is a direct reference to the death of Pierre Pharoux, who had begun in the United States a brilliant career as architect and engineer. The Notes in the Journey mention him twice, the second time, by the initials “M. P.” (the initials stand for Monsieur Pharoux):

29 An event as unfortunate as it was unexpected, has retarded considerably the prosperity of this colony. The death occurred of a young man, full of talents, whom the Castorland company had sent from Paris to make a country wild, and until then

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unknown, suitable for a newborn settlement, divide the lands, open communications, begin plowings, build bridges and mills, devise machines in that area where manpower is scarce. Victim of his zeal to complete the leveling of the river, he perished while trying to cross it above its great falls.xv

30 Had it not been for the death of M. P., we should have been further ahead in our colonization, for we had to wait until another engineer arrived to finish the major land- surveying and the subdivisions.xvi

31 The work that “M. P.” would have accomplished is set out in detail, not just to signal what would have been done, but also what still needs to be done, if Castorland is to become a successful and truly prosperous settlement. The Journey mourns and commemorates his death in this passage, which forms a kind of epitaph for Pharoux. It also establishes Pharoux as a kind of human avatar of the castor, the animal that, like Pharoux, was skilled in engineering and hydraulics.xvii

32 Then, the final words of the “Note on Castorland”: the promise of a fraternal relation, of a friendship. The “Notes” to Mr. Herman’s “Letter” conclude with a quotation from a French neighbor that he is waiting for the arrival of a friend, a brother: The other day a young Frenchman, my neighbor, 7 miles away, settled for several years on the bank of the river, said to me: “... I am waiting for a friend, rather a brother; ... soon he will arrive from San Domingue where Toussaint-Loverture has permitted him to recoup some of his fortune.”xviii

33 Is it reading too much into the Journey to see this document as an attempt to restore positive relations between these two countries? As Crèvecoeur says in the “Translator’s Preface,” some of his friends were indifferent to the American example; while others felt that there were real lessons given the analogous situation of post-Revolutionary France, when one needed to be “delivered” from the “servitude” of the Revolution.xix

34 The “Notes” to Mr. Herman’s “Letter” end on a note of waiting, of expectation. They strike me as having a rhetorical parallel at the Journey’s beginning, where we find the “Dedication” to George Washington, the exemplar of the once firm alliance between the United States and France. The anaphora of the beginning that refers to Washington (“The one who ...”) is paralleled with an anaphora at the end that refers to the remembrance of friendship: (“Never shall I forget ...”).xx

35 An “alliance” can be a formal document. It can also be practical cooperation between friends. I suggest that this larger social and political goal is part of the reason for the writing of the Journey; that the Journey seeks rhetorically to re-enact an alliance. If the discovery of the New World and the creation of America is “the most interesting event in modern times, the discovery and the population of this hemisphere” (III: xi), then the history of this “event” includes the history of the practical benefits of alliance, which seem to have overcome the pessimism inherent in human society.

36 To do justice to the idea of “alliance” in Crèveceour, one ought to analyze this idea in the larger context of the various agents that, in Crèvecoeur’s writings, promote societal good. These agents include people, for example, who possess special “wisdom,” whether human or divine, such as George Washington or the Manitou, whose story is told in II: i. Certain things also may be catalysts for the creation of such social order, that is, the various verbal or written agents, such as treaties or compacts, laws, etc., which are mentioned throughout the Journey and which may lead to peace and social tranquillity.

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37 The nature of Crèvecoeur’s style and rhetoric is still to be explored. In the Journey, one finds several metaphors used to refer to Crèvecoeur’s writing. He speaks for example of need for a verbal painter to do justice in the portrayal of the “picture” of American society. The notion of translation is also one of the various ways that Crèvecoeur names his literary purpose. If a translation requires an original, then the real original of the Journey may be, in part, the Castorland Journal, a text that needed in the late Federalist period to be translated into a more optimistic language, the language of alliance and friendship.xxi How the political and literary debate would continue is another story, one that involves the next century and the names Lafayette and Cooper.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adams, Percy G., “The Historical Value of Crèvecoeur’s Voyage dans La Haute Pensylvanie et dans New York”, American Literature, Vol. 25, March 1953-January 1954, 152-168.

Adams, Willi Paul, “The Historian as Translator: An Introduction”, Journal of American History, vol. 85, no. 4 (Mar., 1999): 11283-1288.

Chevignard, Bernard, Michel Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur, Paris, Editions Belin, 2004.

Desjardins, Simon. Diary, 21 September 1795, Castorland Journal, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Elkins, Stanley and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.

Kraus, Michael, “Literary Relations Between Europe and America in the Eighteenth Century”, The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. Ser., Vol. 1, No. 3, July 1944, 210-234.

Marienstras, Elise, and Naomi Wolf, “French Translations and Reception of the Declaration of Independence”, Journal of American History, vol. 85, no. 4 (Mar., 1999): 1299-1324.

Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York, trans. Clarissa Spencer Bostelman, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1964.

Mitchell, Julia Post, St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, New York, Columbia University Press, 1916.

O’Neal, John C., Changing Minds: The Shifting Perception of Culture in Eighteenth-Century France, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2002.

Philbrick, Thomas, St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, New York, Twaine Publishers, 1970.

Plet ,Françoise, ed. Une géographie de l’Amérique du Nord à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: Saint-John de Crèvecoeur, Journey dans la Haute Pensylvnie et dans l’Etat de New-York depuis l’année 1785 jusqu’en 1798. Edition sélective et critique. Saint-Denis, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2002.

Pilcher, Edith, Castorland: French Refugees in the Western Adirondacks. New York: Purple Mountain Press, 1985.

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Rice, Howard C. Le Cultivateur Américain: Etude sur l’oeuvrre de Saint Jean de Crèvecoeur, Paris, Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1933.

[St. Jean de Crèvecoeur], Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans l’Etat de New York. Three volumes. Paris, Chez Maradan, Libraire...An IX [1801]. Case-Geyer Library, Colgate University.

Thelen, David, “Individual Creativity and the Filters of Language and culture: Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation”, Journal of American History, vol. 85, no. 4 (Mar., 1999): 1289-1298.

Ziesche, Philip, “Exporting American Revolutions: Gouverneur Morris, Thomas Jefferson, and the National Struggle for Universal Rights in Revolutionary France”, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 26, Fall 2006, 419-447.

NOTES i. I quote from Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York, trans. Clarissa Spencer Bostelman, Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1964. I have modified or corrected this translation in a few places by using the original edition of the Journey: [St. Jean de Crèvecoeur], Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans l’Etat de New York. Three volumes. Paris, Chez Maradan, Libraire .... An IX [1801]. Case-Geyer Library, Colgate University. For a recent edition of the Journey, see the abridged but useful text by Françoise Plet, éd., Une géographie de l’Amérique du Nord à la fin du XVIIIe siècle: Saint-John de Crèvecoeur, Journey dans la Haute Pensylvnie et dans l’Etat de New-York depuis l’année 1785 jusqu’en 1798. Edition sélective et critique. Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2002. ii. Bostelmann 570. I have changed Bostelmann’s numbering of the notes to this passage. Note 1 (Castorland) corresponds to Bostelmann’s no. 11; Note 2 (Niahouré) corresponds to Bostelmann’s no. 12. iii. Bostelmann 614. iv. In Volum I: Chapter iii: note 2, Bostelman, 177. v. For the history of the Castorland venture, see Edith Pilcher, Castorland: French Refugees in the Western Adirondacks, 1793-1814 (Harrison, New York: Harbor Hill Books, 1985). The original manuscript is to be found in the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society. This essay on Crèvecoeur and the Castorland Journal emerges from my work on the translation and editing of the Castorland Journal for publication. vi. See Pilcher 173-175. This period of Crèvecoeur’s life is relatively unknown. See the biographies by Rice, Philbrick and Mitchell listed in the Bibliography. vii. See Pilcher on the discovery of the Journal. viii. Cf. Plet 18. ix. Bostelmann 169. x. Bostelmann 171. For some unknown reason, Bostelmann translates mistakenly: “an alliance, which as it turned out, was useless for them....” xi. Bostelmann 604. xii. Bostelmann 557. I have modified the translation (change indicated in square brackets). xiii. The studies of this period are numerous. See in particular Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993). xiv. Bostelmann 616. xv. Bostelmann 616. Crèvecoeur alters a few details in the account given of Pharoux’s death as given in the Castorland Journal. See Simon Desjardsin, diary, 21 September 1795, Castorland Journal, Massachusettes Historical Society. Pharoux was drowned while crossing the Black River,

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but in the Journal, the drowning occurs as a result of Pharoux’s eagerness to travel to Kingston, Canada. Crèvecoeur alters slightly the details to emphasize Pharoux as engineer. xvi. Bostelmann 618. xvii. See Bostelmann, 233. See the symbolic value of the beaver in eighteenth-century French thought in John O’Neal, Changing Minds: The Shifting Perception of Culture in Eighteenth-Century France (Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2002) 18. xviii. Bostelmann 619. xix. Bostelmann 619. xx. Bostelmann xiii-xiv and 570-571, respectively. xxi. The question of translation and its applicability to American political history of this period has become a subject of interesting scholarship. See Elise Marienstras and Naomi Wolf, “French Translations and Reception of the Declaration of Independence,” Journal of American History 85: 4 (Mar. 1999): 1299-1324; David Thelen, “Individual Creativity and the Filters of Language and culture: Interpreting the Declaration of Independence by Translation,” ibid.: 1289-1298; Philip Ziesche, Exporting American Revolutions, ibid.: 419-417; Willi Paul Adams, “The Historian as Translator: An Introduction,”ibid.: 1283-1288.

INDEX

Keywords: Black River, Castorland, Castorland Journal, Compagnie de New York (New York Company), Émigrés, Exploration, French Revolution, French-American alliance, land-surveying, New York State, settlement, speculation, translation

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The Myth of Americanization or the Divided Heart: U.S. Immigration in Literature and Historical Data, 1890-2008

John F. Moe

The concept of “Americanization” is imbued with, and inextricably bound to, the American imaginary. This article examines the results of the United States Census data and, at the same time, reflects on literary and folkloric references to the idea of “Americanization.” Together, the data and the narrative sources illustrate the extent of the impact of immigration, over time, on the American imaginary. Beginning with the myth of “Christobal Colon” [Christopher Columbus], the phenomenon of immigration to the North American continent results in the enigma of identity in a pluralistic society. This article profiles the trends of population change in the United States. At the same time, I examine the literary humanistic evidence of social identity in the “New World,” the world of the “American Imaginary.” The “Old World” is not the one traditionally privileged by American Studies scholars, but rather, the “Old World” today is not only Europe, but it is also Asia and Africa as well as Latin America. Far- sighted Nineteenth Century poet Walt Whitman was perhaps the most prescient on this score when he envisioned emigrants from all continents coming to America. In “Leaves of Grass VI” Whitman hailed the world in his poem “Salut au Monde” by addressing in the opening line “You, Whoever You Are.”1 Whitman’s exuberance over people arriving from across the world echoed the attitude of many Americans during the middle of the Nineteenth Century, however this enthusiasm had faded by the end of the Twentieth Century. The problems of immigration are today both on the side of the incoming emigrant as well as the host society. Contemporary Twenty-First Century Ethiopian- American writer Dinaw Mengestu notes in his first novel, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, the conflicting aims and dilemmas of the new immigration. His protagonist thinks to himself that he really belongs to two countries, that he possesses two cultural identities. Herein lies the central difficulty of the myth and reality of

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“Americanization.” At the outset, the problem of “Americanization” is best described by the profile of the U.S. Census numbers coupled with the literary expressions of immigrant individuals themselves. The central concern of this article is to provide a framework within which to examine the emigrant life within the scope of both the historical data and the literary evidence of the world of the immigrant. I am an American who has been fortunate to live outside the United States for three years in order to teach American Studies as a Fulbright Professor at universities in Norway, Finland, and Estonia. I have lived and done fieldwork in Turkey as well. I am a product of a lifetime of academic work studying American culture. When I was an undergraduate in college, American Studies was a relatively new formal academic field. When I arrived at graduate school, I studied with professors who had earlier helped to define the nascent American Studies discipline. This generation of professors was the first generation of graduate students in the program of American Civilization Studies at Harvard University during the immediate post-World War II period in the late 1940s. As a graduate student, I studied with the academic faculty who changed the scope and landscape of American culture studies by expanding the interdisciplinary nature of American Studies from the traditional history/literature paradigm and integrating the new discipline of folklore into the conversation.2 I studied with Professor Richard M. Dorson, a student of Professor Perry Miller in the American Civilization at Harvard. Dorson, at that time, was developing the field of American folklore when people said there was no American folklore. During all of my student time, I earned university degrees in four different disciplines, all in American areas of literature, history, folklore, and American Studies. Now, as a result of my student experience and later teaching American Studies at the university, I continue to be intellectually intrigued with, as well as emotionally connected to, the constantly changing milieu of American society. American society presents a myriad of different faces to the rest of the world and, of course, not all of these faces are as favorable as they might have been to some in the immediate post- World War II years. Today, we are confronted with a bifurcated image of American society. One image is that of the sole dominant military power remaining, following the Cold War, and, the other is that of a nation that is the new home to an arriving generation of emigrants to American society. The “New Immigration” to American society during the late-Twentieth Century and the early years of the Twenty-First Century rivals in numbers and significance the historically important “New Immigration” at the turn of the last century. By way of introduction, it is important to note that the political problems of integration and social assimilation that face the United States are not unique to that country, but rather these problems are becoming social factors throughout Europe and parts of Latin America and Asia. The United States may present some distinctive factors, yet the problems related to international migration are felt throughout many societies. Since “the great migration” of the end of the nineteenth century, the United States has been beset with an ongoing internal debate concerning what it means to be an “American,” (with an equally complex debate ongoing in Canada) and the discussion surrounding this debate has oscillated with respect to the demands of the time period. Popular and high-brow literature before 1900, including the novels The Europeans (1878) by Henry James and Ragged Lady (1899) by William Dean Howells, demonstrate the clear obsession with the notion of what it meant to be an American. Both novels focus on the

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development of an American quality of character, born of a democratic upbringing, in contrast to the character of Europeans arriving out of a privileged class-ridden society. Stephen Crane (1871-1900) addressed exactly this point in his description of the plight of the emigrant in his classic naturalistic story, “The Blue Hotel” (1898). The story revolves around the dominance of ethnic and regional stereotyping in the Frontier West. With a central character identified only as the “Swede,” who was Crane’s emigrant trope for the newly arrived immigrant at the end of the Nineteenth Century, the Swede was doomed to failure in the New World as a result of his lack of understanding of the American context. Crane described the Swede in vulnerable terms: he was, Crane penned, “a shaky and quick-eyed Swede, with a great, shining, cheap valise…”3 The “cheap valise” was a signal marker for the current state of immigration and the Swede was fated because of his lack of language and cultural understanding of American social values. Early, the American populace assumed the acquisition of an American English language and an understanding of fundamental social expectations that would lead to a becoming the “ideal American,” one who would be a substantially different person from the European counterpart. Within the personal accounts and memoirs that emanated from each European culture one can read the hopes and desires that emigration to America would result in citizenship in the new country. In each European country the phenomenon was called something different. In Norway and throughout the Scandinavian/Nordic countries, it was referred to as “American fever.” At the end of the Nineteenth Century and the beginning of the Twentieth Century, this “American fever” swept through many primarily European localities where, for example, in some northern Norwegian communities, nearly half of the population left for the New World seeking opportunity that they perceived waited for people anxious to take up the reins of toil and effort to build a new life. Literary and historical examples exist for each European national group. Archetypal examples for this body of literature include Carl Wittke’s classic history of German immigration to American, We Who Built America, published in 1939, and The Italian Emigration of Our Times, by Robert F. Foerster, published by Harvard University Press in 1924. My argument, at the outset, is that “Americanization” is driven not only by the facts and numbers surrounding immigration, but also that the question itself of Americanization implies the position of national policy toward immigration, toward the sense of “otherness” that emigrants experience. Further, I suggest that the process of Americanization involves, necessarily, the existing prejudice between ethnic groups that continues on into subsequent generations. Before beginning this argument, it must be noted that the United States has been historically, and in folklore, known, as John F. Kennedy portrayed it to the rest of the world, as a “Nation of Immigrants.” This terminology of historic characterization has been the title of literally thousands of items in America from textbooks to films to museum exhibits. The idea and the folklore of the “Nation of Immigrants” have dominated the perception of what the American dream can offer and, indeed, what immigrants expect from the host culture. In addition to Census data, I also discuss the current dilemma concerning immigration throughout the United States by using examples of diversity within the American population. Immigration reached a peak of 8.8 million immigrants from 1901-1910. Steven A. Camarota notes that this number was only recently surpassed when, during the period of 1991-2000, 9.1 million legal immigrants entered the United States.4 During the intervening century, immigration averaged around four million per year, leaving the two high immigration periods as interesting “bookends” for the study of entrance

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into an American society that has changed so significantly from the end of one century to the end of the next. The historical significance of these numbers cannot be overstated. Steven A. Camarota points out that “[o]ne of the interesting features of current immigration is that such a large share of immigrants stay permanently.” Citing a study from the Population Reference Bureau in Washington, D.C., Camarota notes that because so many of the early Twentieth Century immigrants chose to return to their homelands, the overall impact on the population was not as great.5 For example, approximately 25% of Norwegians returned to Norway after a period of time. This pattern continued in Norway until the 1980s, when Norwegians returned with their big American cars, commonly called “boats” and the former emigrants initiated days called “American Days” when they drove their American cars and only spoke English.6 Another tool for examining the “myth of Americanization” is the New Immigrant Survey [NIS], a multi-cohort prospective-retrospective panel study of new legal immigrants to the United States. The NIS is supported by a wide array of national government agencies and foundations, including the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Aging, the National Science Foundation, and U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. The survey was first piloted in 1996, the first full cohort sampled immigrants in 2003, and the next round of interviews was conducted in 2008. Interviews are conducted in nineteen languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Arabic, Croatian, Farsi, French, Gujarati, Hindi, Serbian, Ukrainian, Urdu, Amharic, and Haitian Creole. The census data and the data from the NIS are presented here in an effort to examine the rough outline of the numbers of immigration to the United States and to begin my discussion of a potential “dual or double consciousness” in American society. The sheer numbers of current emigrants into the United States make the topic of “Americanization” compelling. In fact, between January 2000 and March 2005, 7.9 million new immigrants settled in the United States, the largest number of immigrants to come into the country during any five-year period in American history. Recent data from the Center for Immigration Studies indicate that the number of immigrants living in the U.S increased between 2005 and 2007 to a total of 37.3 million (see Figure 1).7

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The Center for Immigration Studies reports that the 37.9 million immigrants, both legal and illegal, living in the United States in March 2007 was the highest number recorded to date (see Figure 2).

The current number of immigrants living in the country is two and a half times the 13.5 million during the peak of the last great immigration wave in 1910.8 Of the total number of immigrants coming to live in the United States today, 3.7 million, nearly half of those who came after 2000, are estimated to be illegal aliens. Among all issues that pertain to the current immigration concerns, the impact of a disproportion of illegal immigrants poses a series of impending problems that will have important and perhaps

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dramatic consequences in the future. However, the dramatic increase of emigrants living in the United States from the former peak year of 1910 to the current level of emigrant population in 2005 is the focus for the following discussion. I am also the product of relatively recent Twentieth Century immigrants. Both of my father’s parents were immigrants while on my mother’s side her father was an immigrant and her mother was the product of two immigrants. Three of four of my grandparents were immigrants. During the time that I was growing up in Iowa, it was not at all an unusual circumstance to have immigrant grandparents, or, at least great- grandparents. Iowa was a place where many immigrants and the children of immigrants were able to find the “American Dream.” Soon after the Second World War, the Lutheran World Federation and Lutheran congregations in America enabled scores of people from the Baltic countries to settle in the Midwest of the United States.9 Many, if not most, of these people fell into the category of “Displaced Persons” and were at the time living in the famous “DP Camps” throughout Eastern Europe. Following the Displaced Persons Acts of 1948 and 1950, aimed at relaxing immigrant quotas to help resettle war refugees, the United States became a destination for many Estonians in German displaced persons camps. I went to school with their children, played sports with them in college, and became life-long friends—all without a thought about their origins.10 Though we understood how these people arrived, their Estonian and Latvian names were not so different than the existing mosaic of names we all carried. The simple fact was that we all were Iowans, living in the State of Iowa, Americans I guess too, and we all spoke with one language. Our loyalties were probably more to each other. It was certainly not uncommon at all to hear parents speak with an accent and grandparents talking in another language we did not understand, but our generation was speaking with an American English accent. Many of our parents would not teach us their former “home” language because, as my father said, “I don’t want you to have a Norwegian accent; we are Americans now.” We learned to speak without an accent probably without reflection, without dwelling on whatever language facility was lost in the transfer of generation. I remember asking my Danish maternal grandfather, my morfar, if he ever wanted to return to Denmark. He said that he went back twice after his emigration, once to visit his father who was old and failing and once more to visit his last remaining sister. My grandfather was the next to the last of thirteen children. He had no land to inherit and no prospects of much of a future in Denmark, so he came to American in 1913 along with a host of other young Danish lads looking for a new place to call home. He told me that when he came back to Iowa the last time he brought a Danish flag, but he carried an American passport. The transition to America was now complete; the last visit had been made. He had a strong Danish accent and always read to me aloud the Danish Hall newspaper. “Hör du det, [Listen], he would say, “Hör du det,” and then he would read to me a story in Danish.11 My father and my Danish grandfather would talk with each other in Norwegian and Danish. Another man who worked for my grandfather, nick-named Swede, also joined in the boisterous talk among the three Scandinavians—in Swedish. Their play in language was my first experience with seeing and judging the rivalry among the Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes. It was a lot to take in, but I never thought of it as such. The fact was that while all the students in school had different kinds of names, they all came from some part of Europe and, hence, what we thought of as differences were only as deep as the variation in the whiteness of skin color in faces from northern or southern Europe.

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Probably the most salient difference for us at that time was religion. Some people were Catholic and most were Protestant, but this was only evident on Sunday and even there the biggest tension was between the different branches of Protestantism, whether one was Lutheran or Methodist, and so on. Multiculturalism, as we call it today, was a fact of life in the 1960s, as normal to everyday existence as going to school. Perhaps it was this circumstance that inspired me to study American civilization when I arrived at college. I wanted to understand what was unique about America and what made these emigrants comfortable with their assimilation into American society. I was part of the generation that profited by the emigrant success in achieving the American Dream. Actually, it is not so different in Iowa today, but the points of origin are more likely to be India or Pakistan or Bosnia or Somalia. The question that looms today is whether the immigration patterns in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century are fundamentally different that those of fifty years ago and whether or not, what are perceived to be the current tensions are simply part of the grand continuum of emigration and assimilation in United States society. A recent story by Will Weaver entitled “Gravestone Made of Wheat” contains an example of the tensions that existed shortly after the First World War between European immigrants. Weaver’s short story tells about a German woman who, after living in Norway, came to Minnesota to marry a Norwegian farmer and how the couple faced the prejudice that existed between different northern European nationalities.12 Is the change in the composition of American society, specifically the society in the United States, a quantitative change in the rough numbers and percentages of emigration, or is it a qualitative change deriving from fundamentally different populations coming together? Needless to say, this is a question that is also occurring throughout European society as well as American society. I think of the emigrant circumstance each time I register my grades for the term at my university. I am always struck by the degree to which the names of the students in each class roster embody American multi-ethnicity and multiculturalism. Keeping in mind that the context of these classes is not New York or some similarly urbanized East or West coast place, but rather in Ohio in the middle of the Midwest, the names of the varied students become even more instructive. Each individual name—Persian, Jewish, Irish, English, German, Italian, Indian, Chinese, Hispanic—reveals a national or ethnic background and the group of names illustrate just how varied the current American social web has become. Contemporary American society is not defined only by white and black as so many people might believe—or even by white, black, brown, and yellow; but rather, the point is that the metaphor of American society today requires deeper and more subtle differentiation, one that allows for and accommodates ethnic complexity. Deriving a new metaphor compels us to find a different definition of social transformation. During each succeeding generation of Americans, people who consider the meaning of “Americanization” struggle with the question of the relationship between the individual and society. At each stage of intellectual questioning, students of American history are encouraged to consider again the timeless question posed in the Eighteenth Century by the incomparable Frenchman, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. In his Letters from an American Farmer, “What then is the American, This New Man?” Crevecoeur’s fascinating and complex question has echoed throughout American Studies and perhaps most students of the discipline framed at least one paper in their student career around this simple, provocative, and demanding query. Philip Gleason noted in

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his essay on “American Identity and Americanization” in the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980) 13 that Crevecoeur’s question “has probably been quoted more than any other in the history of immigration.” More recently, Ali Behdad, a professor of English and Comparative Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, offers a penetrating cultural analysis of Crevecoeur in his 2005 book, A Forgetful Nation. Behdad notes that Crevecoeur has been cited as America’s first “moral geography” and makes a cogent argument that the Letters from an American Farmer, as a text, offers a quintessential articulation of the emerging American identity, replete with all its faults of exclusivity, particularly the treatment of the American Indian. Nathan Glazer, the indomitable Professor of Education and Sociology at Harvard University, raises Crevecoeur’s question and answers by saying the question is not really asking what it takes to be an American, rather the question ponders a different query. Glazer notes that subtext of the question “is really, can we continue to be one American people when we are from so many diverse sources? If so, what kind of people does that make us?”14 Finally, the question, “what kind of people does that make us?” is perhaps the most fundamental question of American social and political culture today. 15 The implications of the question range from building a wall between the United States and Mexico, to fighting wars in other countries, to who will be entitled to entitlements in the social welfare system of the United States. Glazer offers a series of penetrating questions and answers to the notion of Crevecoeur’s fundamental query. Indeed, the discussion that Glazer offers in response to the question “what is an American” is at the heart of the overall concern of immigration and assimilation, to wit, what is implied by the “myth of Americanization.” Perhaps it is more appropriate to address the concern as the “matrix of Americanization” because it is at the point of confluence, the matrix that we can begin to make, to devise, an answer adequate to the meaning of the riddle of what “Americanization” actually means. I cite one example. The electrician who comes to my house is named Asad. I first noticed his name embroidered on his work shirt just above the pocket. His father is of Irish descent, so he has an Irish last name. This fact comes out when I talk to him about the fact that his son wants to go to the university where I work. I discover that his last name is very Irish. His son also has a strong Irish first name, Brendan, making his son’s whole name very Irish. When I commented on this, Asad said to me, “It gets better; my wife is bi-racial. [meaning that his wife is half Caucasian and half African American]” Therefore, in the matrix of American multi-ethnicity, this 3rd generation American with the Irish full name, is part Middle-Eastern and part bi-racial African American. The circumstance is not at all unusual in American society today. The delicate arras of American society, the tapestry woven into a cloth, the fabric of American ethnicity, race, religion, and culture, is the material culture analogue to illustrate what the concept and idea of “Americanization” might mean to the different groups within the society. The quandary in the answer to Glazer’s question, “What kind of people does that make us?”, is embedded in the balance between the vested interests that divide community and those interests that will provide unity and can unify a community. Historically, the interests that unify a community are in rough proportion to the strength of the ruling class and majority. As communities change, the dominant host culture becomes more wary of the significance of change. This has been true throughout American history, but with the dramatic change in overall population numbers during the 2000’s, the stakes of change have greatly changed. Peter A. Morrison, writing a Rand Corporation “Documented Briefing: A Demographic

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Perspective on Our Nation’s Future,” remarks that a “complex ethnic mosaic is materializing across the country.” Morrison reports that the Census Bureau projections from the late 1990s which “show a population in which Hispanics will soon outnumber African Americans; and non-Hispanic white (Anglo) persons will become the minority by 2060, comprising less than half of all Americans.”16 The demographic and cultural change in the United States is so fundamental that the concept of “Americanization” prevalent even a half century ago would now feel and appear alien to the current society wherein ethnic expression is customary. Morrison alludes to a complex ethnic mosaic that is slowly beginning to define not only a different ethnic America but also a fundamentally different society in which intermarriage is rising and, according to the RAND survey, more Americans identify themselves as “multiracial.” The recent novel by Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange, illustrates this point. Yamashita, who is from California and attended the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, describes a deeply ethnic California society interwoven with Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, and African Americans along with white European Americans.17 She uses hypertext narratives in which characters, each from a different ethnic heritage, interact tangentially in their search to fulfill individual aspirations and to solve dilemmas posed by a complicated multiethnic society that encompasses both Mexico and the United States. Let us look at a few relatively typical communities in order to understand the depth of proportionate change. Fresno, California, according to the 1990 Census, is one of the cities undergoing dramatic change. Hmong, peoples primarily from Laos, and other refugees constitute 9 percent of the population. Moreover, 14 percent of the adults in Fresno were not yet citizens and 12 percent of the children were non-citizens. In addition, over half, 55%, of the Asian-language households were linguistically isolated. Lowell, Massachusetts, one of the long-time sites of the National Folk Festival over the past twenty years, is another example of an American city undergoing tremendous ethnic change. Cambodian and Laotian refugees comprise 8 percent of the population, 12 % of the adults are not citizens, 11% of the children are not citizens, and 53% of the Asian-language households are linguistically isolated. Arlington, Virginia, a suburb of Washington D.C., is an example from another part of the country where the statistics indicate similar processes of rapid change. Hispanics comprise 13% of the population with embryonic communities of Vietnamese, Koreans, and Cambodians. In Arlington, 43% of the new immigrants arrived in the last five years. The alteration of the local urban landscape is a repeated feature throughout the United States. Minneapolis, Minnesota, has reported the largest number of both Hmong and Somali refugees, while Lansing, Michigan reportedly the second largest number of Hmong peoples. The pattern of relocation is witnessed throughout the Midwest. For example, Columbus, Ohio, has significant populations of both Somali and Arabic refugees from the respective wars in those geographic areas. In Columbus, the large ethnic Somali population numbers in the thousands, second only to Minneapolis, and has a city- funded school and many businesses, such as grocery stores and restaurants, that cater to themselves as well as the rest of the community. When I was a student of American history, we learned early about the Oscar Handlin’s influential “Uprooted” thesis regarding the plight of European emigrants who sacrificed everything in order to find a new world in which they might achieve success. Handlin’s The Uprooted was a seminal work that focused on the hardships endured by the emigrants in their journey and adjustment to the United States.18 Students

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considered immigration in the light of the “Melting Pot” and were taught that all immigrants would, within reason, meld into one composite “American” whole. Later, we learned that newer emigrants might not lose or relinquish all of their own identity and so we considered historian Carl Degler’s formulation of the “Salad Bowl Thesis” as a more appropriate metaphor to describe how immigrants would retain their fundamental identity with a covering of unique American salad dressing that made us all Americans. The metaphor of a “salad bowl” was beginning to look more like a “unique” piece of fabric made up of many different pieces of cloth, all representing different ethnicities and origins. With each emigrant and emigrant family, the mosaic of the cloth changed slightly, much like the electrician Asad who came to my house. It was assumed during these early stages of American Studies that the key to understanding the interdisciplinary nature of the issue of Americanization was the concept of “uniqueness,” that the United States was, in fact, a new and unique culture. This intellectual position held sway throughout the period from the late 1940s until the early 1980s, a period of nearly forty years. The idea of being “unique” was attractive and satisfactory to Americans who wanted the reaffirmation of their own younger society, but also to peoples in other parts of the Globe who desired some new answers for a world caught in the dilemmas of a deepening Cold War. Particularly after World War II, the appeal of “American” as an idea yielded a resolution to the turmoil and confusion that dominated the world view of the 1940s. During this same time period, there was a vast undercurrent of discontent growing in American society with the position of American exceptionalism. Intellectuals, academics, and other concerned citizens examined the reasons for the maintenance of the folklore of American uniqueness. In all of these approaches to American social history and immigration, the emphasis was on the society and impact of the immigrant on the social fabric of the United States. In the 1960s this scholarly emphasis began to focus more upon the individual emigrant themselves, examining the impact of social change. During the late 1960s, the intellectual climate in the United States shifted in favor of individual concerns, foregrounding the individual American, to wit, we witnessed the rise of women’s studies, African American studies, Native American studies, Asian American studies, Latino studies, and well as new studies of American immigration. Agency shifted from the society to the individual in immigration studies; from what was good for American society to what was the impact on the individual. However, all of this change concerned immigrants who still resembled, in their whiteness, those immigrants who came between 1890 and 1950. In recent years, the face of immigration has shifted again and the question of agency has become more difficult for those who attempt to answer Crevecoeur’s question anew. The question requires a new metaphor in order to attempt to answer not only Crevecoeur but also answer Nathan Glazer when he asks how we can continue to be one American people when we come from such diverse sources. As the question of individual agency has changed, so too has the metaphoric description. Because American society so clearly resembles a complicated fabric or textile made up of different colors and ethnicities, I am suggesting that the society of the United States be more likened to a rug, a floor covering or a wall tapestry, that incorporates the wide range of color and texture evident in the social fabric of America, the delicate arras that defines the day-to-day world of living in America. It was clear during the late 1960s that the time-honored configuration of the melting pot did not make much sense because one could observe that people were simply not becoming one

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homogeneous whole—or anything close to that central idea. Carl N. Degler wrote in his widely-used college history textbook published in 1970 that “the metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl,” Degler wrote, “for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.”19 Degler’s metaphor aptly attempted to demonstrate the subtle difference between Americans of different “stripe and color.” The salad bowl thesis made a little more sense except for the fact that the emigrant was not a strictly bordered being either; little differences continue to exist in each person that made the whole harder to determine. Finally, neither metaphor aptly described what was happening to American society. In the shift from the impact on society to the impact on the individual, it became clear that a new metaphor was required to describe what was happening in American society at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. Perhaps the new American society can be compared to a knotted rug or a traditional rag rug. The metaphor of the traditional rag rug, like the floor coverings found in nearly every society in the world, is adequate to describe an ethnic mosaic of people who must, perforce, live in one country. In every culture, people have old and worn out clothes that are put into active use in a new form, the form of the rag rug, sometimes called “trash rugs” in many societies. In every culture, people take old clothes and refashion them to produce new fabrics made of old components. In Finland, for example, the word räsymatto means a rug made of throw- away clothes. The genius of the rag rug is that it represents a complete reuse and revitalization of an old cultural item no longer in active use. The immediate suitability of the metaphor of the rag rug is that it is universal; perhaps all cultures that use cloth make some item from the used and worn pieces of cloth, as well as integrating new pieces of fabric. In the case of both the knotted rug and the rag rug, the entire rug depends upon each small piece in order for the rug to retain its original form as a rug, a rug that has wholeness (entirety) and integrity in and of itself. Finally, for our metaphor, the essence of the rug is both its usability and its potential for disruption (as in tearing or wearing out) and repair. Let us then return to Nathan Glazer’s admonition. He cautions us, as cultural critics and students of history, to pay attention to the subtext of the question of new American immigration. When Glazer asks, “Can we continue to be one American people when we are from so many diverse sources?” he is essentially asking about the central fabric, arras, of the society itself. If we use the metaphor of the rug in analyzing American society in the light of Glazer’s comment, then we can see how the tapestry of the rug has become increasingly complicated from very similar fabrics to fabrics of different hues and textures. Glazer posits a profound question when he questions further whether “it is that there is something else that properly makes an American, and that is incorporation into an America that indeed includes the Declaration and the Constitution but is so much wider than that.”20 It is perhaps precisely this point that Bernard Malamud, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, addresses in his classic novel The Assistant published in 1957. Malamud’s protagonist is Frank Alpine, a Western man from California who comes to New York and finds ethnicity through working for a Jewish grocery store owner. Malamud’s novel posits the irony of the man moving from West to east, unlike the classic move of Huck Finn to the Western territories, in order to strain the metaphor of “Americanization” itself. If we are to answer Glazer’s question of whether we can become one people, then Malamud answers in the

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affirmative through Frank’s circumcision and conversion. Malamud states in the last line in the book: “he became a Jew.”21 Through his question, Glazer searches for the common purpose inherent in the rich tapestry of the American rug. Along with many other historians, Glazer notes that the United States is a nation “that has been made up through most of its history almost entirely of one race, with a small minority of another bound up with the first from our origins, all observing the variants of one religion, speaking one language.”22 While Glazer’s notions are true, it is not as simple as it seems at first glance. The United States, and Canada for that matter, has largely a European, Judeo-Christian population; however, Glazer’s assertions seem to imply more compatibility among the elements in this population than have actually existed throughout the history of immigration to North America. John Higham’s Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, published in 1955, illustrates the depth to which nativist, anti-Catholic, and anti-radical sentiments affected the national polity at the end of the Nineteenth Century.23 As American culture largely assimilated the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe with the older population from Western and Northern Europe, real and strong ethnic tensions emerged and continued between various nationalities and religions. A brief mention of some Twentieth Century American authors in addition to Malamud illustrates this point quite well. John Dos Passos’ American Trilogy, Hemingway’s Michigan stories, John Steinbeck’s California tales, and James T. Farrell’s Chicago Studs Lonigan adventures articulate the ethnic tensions of American society during the Twentieth Century. In each author’s literary work, narratives are built around ethnic differences and tensions in order to create plot. Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flats and Hemingway’s “Indian Camp,” for example, rely on the reader’s casual knowledge of the American landscape in order to make the narrative story work and be successful. Finally, Milton Gordon’s Assimilation in American Life, published in 1964, illustrates how, by the middle of the 1960s, an American population reached a type of stasis regarding ethnicity and assimilation. Gordon argued then that the overwhelming assimilation was in the area of civic assimilation, meaning simply that people living in the United States learned to obey certain fundamental laws. By the time of his research, Gordon also demonstrated that the use of a common language, English, was by and large agreed upon, a fact that by the beginning of the Twenty-First Century was not as accepted. Most importantly, however, Gordon argued that the United States did not enjoy assimilation in many critical and important ways, indicating that the fabric of society was not united in a way that might be considered assimilated. Citing embryonic problems for American society, he noted that in the areas of social, religious, and economic assimilation there were wide disparities within the American population.24 This is not to say that all Americas were the same. The myth of a cultural hegemonic “Americanization” pervaded what was recognized as a consensus-driven impulse in society. Americans of all “stripes” continued to find strength and solace in emigrant societies and ethnic communities after the war. For example, in 1948, Chicago Estonians organized the Chicago Estonian Society that co-existed with the Estonian Lutheran Church in the Andersonville area of Chicago.25 The Estonian emigrant community on the north side of Chicago formed in an area that already was known for its Nordic roots. Not far from the Estonian Lutheran Church was the Norwegian Lutheran Church and other organizations formed by Scandinavian immigrants. The Norge Ski club was founded in 1905 by Norwegians, most of whom lived in Chicago and traveled to an area outside the city called Fox River Grove where they would ski jump.

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Norwegian emigrants also organized other athletic clubs and one group in particular sponsored soccer games (futbol) including an annual game against clubs from Norway. Sometimes the Chicago club would travel to Norway for a futbol match.26 The north side of Chicago was known for its Scandinavian communities. Swedish churches and clubs existed there since the 1880s in the areas called “Andersonville” and North Park. In this sense, Chicago was typical of new American communities across the United States where after the 1880s multi-ethnicity became standard fare. Ethnic identity and roots were strong in the New World of “Americanization.” Odd S. Lovell, the preeminent Norwegian-American historian, wrote that by 1900, there were 41,551 Norwegian residents in Chicago, mostly on the near-north side, and by 1930 there were 55,948. Lovoll remarks that “These were the golden years of Chicago’s ‘Little Norway,’ the third-largest Norwegian population in the world after Oslo and Bergen.27 Ethnic community pride is a consistent pattern of behavior in the United States. In Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1980’s one often heard the popular folklore that the suburb of Parma “was the largest Polish city outside Poland,” an assertion contested by other cities. Chicago, for example, makes a strong claim as “the largest city outside of Poland, with more than 180,000 Polish language speakers.”28 Chicago hosts the “Taste of Polonia Festival” and, according to Program, a Polish language publication in Chicago, the city is the largest Polish community outside Poland with 800,000 people.29In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Finnish emigrants came to work in the lumber camps and copper mines and today signs for Finnish food, in Finnish, abound. In addition, among new immigrant groups today, ethnic identification continues to merge with “Americanization.” For example, next to a local theater in Columbus, Ohio an Indian restaurant advertises its food as “Where Bollywood meets Hollywood.” At the conclusion of the Second World War, Americans were flush and exuberant from the experience of international success. United as a people, in the same uniform as it were, Americans of the post-war period, in the popular imagination, eagerly attempted to redefine themselves in the light of newly found appreciation of their qualities as a people. It was a time of, as one book labeled it, the “Pax America,” with all the attendant qualities of a different kind of empire than that of Rome or Great Britain, but an empire nonetheless. The new America was perceived as an empire of democracy, one of equality, of opportunity opened to all who would share in the dream and the success embodied in the idea of “America.” At the same time, the late 1940s saw the birth of the discipline of American Studies which, through the efforts of the United States government at home and abroad, grew in intellectual stature as well as breadth of undertaking.30 The work of academics such as Perry Miller, Samuel Eliot Morrison, Bernard De Voto, and Henry Steele Commager formed the cannon among those who wanted to understand the unique entity inherent in the conceptual term, “the American Spirit.” In that earliest flush of intellectual excitement, detractors to the broad acceptance of American Studies as a new academic scholarly discipline were few. The academic argument for a unique American experience seemed incontrovertible. Not only was it grounded in the academic research of Perry Miller that brought us closer to our staunch founders, the Puritans, but also it followed the common sense of citizens who simply understood that life in the United States was somehow inherently different from life and culture particularly in Europe. Bigger cars, bigger agricultural yields, bigger universities, and popular movies that exuded the American “Western Spirit” combined to fulfill a dominant

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popular culture image of a United States culture that would continue to move forward with progress and confidence. The American exposure to the rest of the world during the traumatic times of the “Big War” removed any lingering doubts that Americans were somehow more special. Soldiers were happy to be home and in the folklore of their experience they talked little of the harrowing experiences during the war. However, soldiers and their families and their communities were imbued with a confidence born of a popular film culture that continued to remind the American public that theirs was a virtuous and confidant endeavor. Bogart’s “Casablanca” and scores of Hollywood films of the era reinforced the American position of an unyielding pattern of American success in fomenting democracy and subduing dictatorships. The impending success at the close of the war led Americans to position themselves as the harbingers of freedom and democracy, on the one hand, but on the other hand, Americans were also imbued with the idea that the United States was increasingly the world’s safe haven. Because immigration was at low ebb (see graph in Figure 1), the question of whether the United States was a “safe haven” for new people did not arise. At the end of the war, the trope of freedom was unassailable. World War II stories were replete with accounts of European-American soldiers who fought for freedom in the countries of their own ancestors. Hyphenated Americans all -- Italian-Americans from New York, Irish-Americans from Chicago, and Finnish-Americans from Michigan reunited with their forebears. It was, at least in popular culture, a beautiful scene of harmony among people united by common effort. The question of “the Myth of Americanization” loomed large after the experience of the Second World War. In many ways, the dominant popular theme of unity and the idea of Americanization ran contrary to the disturbing undercurrents in American society. Many ethnic populations suffered repression in American society including the continued legal segregation of a large African American population, incarceration of a portion of the Japanese-American population that struggled pitifully in detention camps during the war, and, of course, the continued prejudice against a myriad of other Americans who were either Jewish, or Italian, or Latino/a, and many other segments of the population. President Harry S. Truman recognized the hypocrisy of American treatment of minorities and, on July 26, 1848 issued “Executive Order 9981” which finally gave legal authority to the integration of the U.S. armed forces with the words “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”31 The former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt drew attention to the plight of urban African American youth by actively supported the creation of programs for black children to attend camps and schools.32 The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (called the G.I. Bill) offered financial assistance to veterans who wanted to buy a home or attend college. Universities and colleges provided temporary housing for the families of veterans, erecting prefabricated buildings and aluminum Quonset huts for classroom use by returning G.I.s. After the war, African American soldiers and their families believed that they were returning to a new United States only to find that the walls against integration were as great as ever. Many white people and institutions resisted the post war legal and social changes. Banks would not loan money for houses in certain neighborhoods, and the Ku Klux Klan once again raised its ugly head against Black inclusion in mainstream society. Many creative writers began to address topics of social and economic inequality during the post-World War II period in the late 1940s. Some directly addressed lingering

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prejudice carried by whites from the war, where black servicemen were treated as lesser soldiers and used primarily as laborers. Minnesota novelist Sinclair Lewis, who had examined American Midwestern society for over two decades, having published his ground-breaking novel Babbitt in 1922, began to take a new and fresh look at the fabric of the Midwest culture.33 In two novels published in the forties, Lewis investigated the two dominant social themes that emerged in the United States after the war: first, the pressing problem of black-white relations and, second, the growing sense of multi- ethnicity in American social identity. Lewis dealt with the idea of biracialism and “passing” in his novel Kingsblood Royal, published in 1947, in which a white World War hero discovers that he is of “mixed” blood, descended from African American and white European-American ancestors. The protagonist, who had had always been considered “white,” decides to explore his true identity rather than to quietly “pass” for white. Sinclair Lewis begins to explore rhetorically just how deeply racial prejudice runs in the American psyche. When Lewis presents the reader with the carefully drawn narrative in which the protagonist’s wife rejects him for his “taint” of black blood, Lewis shifts the reader’s attention to an exposé of racism and to the typicality of African American middle-class neighborhoods. Sinclair Lewis’s narrative in Kingsblood Royal is remarkably prescient for the immediate post-war period and continues to be provocative even in the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. Two years earlier, in 1945, Sinclair Lewis published his novel Cass Timberlane, in which he examines the more subtle concept of intermarriage among a number of European and American Indian populations, what he terms in the novel, “mongrel blood,” meaning of course, the vast interbreeding of different types of ethnic backgrounds. Cass Timberlane, the protagonist of the novel by the same name, suffers a divorce in part because his wife could not abide “the mongrel blood of the furniture-dealing Timberlanes.” With regard to the ethnic composition of his generation, Cass estimated that on his father’s side, “he was three-eighths British stock, one-sixteenth French Canadian, and one-sixteenth Sioux Indian.” Even today, it is not at all unusual for someone from the Midwestern states to claim some American Indian blood. On his mother’s side of the family, Cass estimated that “he was two-eighths Swedish, one- eighth German, [and] one-eighth Norwegian.”34 Taken altogether, the ethnic composition of the Timberlane generation of which Cass was a member was probably remarkably average and representative. Sinclair Lewis addresses the prominent quandary of the 1940s in the United States, namely the same question that Crevecoeur posed over a century earlier, “What then is this New American?” Lewis answers the question, predictably, through the voice of a young Finnish Minnesotan, the radical Eino Roskinen. One young man in the group of World War II radicals reports: “But our star is Eino. He has Theories. He says that the new America isn’t made up of British stock and Irish and Scotch, but of the Italians and Poles and Icelanders and Finns and Hungarians and Slovaks. People like you [meaning the ethnicity of Cass Timberlane described above] and me are the Red Indians of the country. We’ll either pass out entirely or get put on reservations, where we can do our Yankee tribal dances and wear our native evening clothes undisturbed.”35 The “Yankee” reference is a rhetorical reminder for the reader of the Puritan origins of New England. The only caveat Sinclair Lewis leaves for the reader, unbeknownst to the characters in the novel, is the mixed, “mongrel” heritage and bloodline that the protagonist Cass Timberlane carries. The novel is a poignant reminder that Americans of all kinds carry much mixed heritage or blood. Lewis’s story suggests to Americans a half-century later that there has always

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been an “original settler” and there have always been immigrants. At the beginning of the Twenty-First Century, only the names have changed. The story of Cass Timberlane is a cautionary narrative containing an embedded warning of the consequences of defying conformity in a contemporary America that proclaimed a “somewhat open” society.36 Overall, even at this early and relatively quiet period of immigration, Milton Gordon demonstrated that American society was in no way assimilated to the degree that was widely assumed in the country’s popular culture.37 During the period of “consensus” of the 1950s, the radical Sixties, and the more passive 1970s, the assessments of a relatively positive assimilation reported in popular culture were believed to reflect an on-going and gradual process of “Americanization.” One interesting reflection of this relative pause in the approach of gradualism in the area of assimilation is the book- length report by John Dos Passos in 1944 entitled The State of the Nation. In the beginning of the book, Dos Passos, who had already completed his important national assessment in the U.S.A. Trilogy, contended that “I know that our system has never been perfect and that all sorts of injustices have flourished under it, but I don’t think you’ll deny that during the hundred and sixty eight years of the existence of the United States the ordinary run of men here have had a better chance to develop and to live their lives as they wanted to than any other period we know about anywhere else in the world.” Dos Passos answered, in advance, some of the concerns Nathan Glazer posed. Dos Passos announced for his country: “During that time our liberties have weathered storms. We are now in the midst of the greatest of them [World War II]…The test finds us far from ready to meet it…Still, I believe we are going to meet it.” Dos Passos offers his reason for American resolve: “The people of this country have a common language and have developed a common aptitude for the use of machinery…What holds us together as a nation is our system of liberties…To survive in the coming world at all we shall have to learn how to continue to be a nation of free men.”38 Clearly, over fifty years ago, John Dos Passos addressed the central concern that contemporary Americans feel during this period of vast demographic and political change. As I noted above, the more useful metaphor for the mosaic of American society today is much like the textile of many colors, or in material folk culture, a traditional knotted rug or the folkloric “rag rug”, a rug comprised of many different fabrics. As the society has become ever more complicated, with more colors and fabrics to incorporate into the rug, keeping the rug whole has required both new vision and renewed effort. California is a special case to the United States and current state-level statistics reveal some trends that will be reflected throughout the nation in future years. California is the natural port of entry for many of the emigrants, taking in 28% of all the legal foreign immigrants nationwide as well as one-third of the refugees and half of the amnesty applicants. What is even more interesting for our question of Americanization is that California is close to becoming the first state in which everyone will be a minority. Between the years 2000 and 2020, Anglos will fall below 50% while other groups, notably Latinos, will increase with the result being that all ethnic groups will be less that a majority. Even more interesting is the fact that this demographic change is reflected markedly in the percentages of high school graduates where the classes of 2000 and 2008 already illustrate the dramatic shift to a larger number of Latino graduates than Anglo graduates. Finally, if we examine the map of California as a whole, we can see that the demographic transformation demonstrates a complete alteration in the mosaic of minorities throughout the state. This fundamental

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transformation will have a strong impact on public policy, local governance, and ethnic representation.39 Throughout the past century of United States history, a dominant theme and concern of American citizens has been the role of identity and assimilation, “the melting pot” and “dual consciousness” in transforming a society comprised of immigrants into what continues to be “The Great Experiment.” The fluctuation of American popularity notwithstanding, immigrants persist in arriving to the shores of the United States in greater numbers than at any time in history. An examination of the critical numbers of immigrants from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Twenty- First Century, from U.S. Census Bureau data and current information from the New Immigrant Survey [NIS], demonstrate the depth of the circumstance that has seemingly caused the anxiety over immigration within the American population. The cultural information we glean from national and regional events that celebrate our varied ethnic traditions, such as the Festival of American Folklife sponsored by the Smithsonian and the National Folk Festival sponsored by the National Council for the Traditional Arts, as well as multicultural events that emerge in regional celebrations throughout the nation indicate that, as a country, the United States may be adjusting to the demographic changes. It is a commonplace assumption that, during the period from the 1990s to the present, the idea of multiculturalism emerged as a prevalent positive postulate for social welfare. In the current culture of the United States, people celebrate racial and cultural difference. In this climate, national origins and “mother tongues” are no longer aspects of personal character to be shunned, but rather celebrated. At the end of this discussion, it is apparent that the demographic scenario leaves a bifurcated circumstance. It is at once a problem in the American past and an opportunity for the future. Separate ethnically identified groups including the Hmong, Somali, Bosnians, Latin Americans, East Europeans and other immigrants and refugees have, if not assimilated, found a place in American society without losing their ethnicity and ethnic identity. If we compare the turn of the Nineteenth Century and the turn of the Twentieth Century (see Figure 2), though the number of immigrants and the growth rate of the immigrant population are now much higher than in the past, the foreign- born percentage of the population was still higher between 1900 and the mid-1920s. After World War I and the subsequent immigration restriction laws in the 1920s, the level of immigration to the United States fell considerably.40 However, the significant fact is that the current 12.1% of the population that is foreign-born is higher than at any time in nearly one-hundred years, since the 1920 Census.41 According to the 2005 Census data, the entry states of California, New York, Texas, and Florida contain far and away the largest numbers of immigrants. While the ability to assimilate and incorporate immigrants is dependent on a vast array of factors, the New Immigrant Survey of 2003 illustrates that among emigrants aged 25-64 years at the time of their lawful permanent residence, 41% of spouses of U.S. citizens and 38% of the employment principals own their own home.42 Home ownership is a positive indicator of acculturation into the emigrant’s new society. It is significant to note that the individuals and their families mentioned above, the spouses and the principals, owned their own homes, on average, approximately four months after attaining lawful permanent residence.43 Peter Morrison also reports on the phenomenon of home ownership. Among new home buyers, he notes, the most common family names for those who are realizing their

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“American dream,” as Dos Passos might have put it, are the typical European names Smith and Johnson with the Spanish name Garcia in seventh place. However, significantly, among first time home buyers in Los Angeles, California, Garcia is the most common name followed by Hernandez and Martinez with Johnson in seventh place.44 This remarkable new trend in familial names is a reflection of what is beginning to take place throughout American society. The question of a population shift is not simply related to the overall data on immigration but also the shift is detected in the numbers of children and family size of ethnic groups. On May 1, 2008, the Wall Street Journal, reported a: “Surge in U.S. Hispanic Population Driven by Birth, not Immigration.” Authors Conor Dougherty and Miriam Jordan cite new Census data reporting that in 2008, Hispanics comprise 15% of the U.S. population, an increase from 12.6% in 2000. This figure represents an increase of ten million people from 35.7 million in 2000 to 45.5 million in 2008. The article notes that between 2006 and 2007, 62% of the increase in Hispanic population came from births rather than immigration and that the Hispanic population is now moving to areas in the Southeast and Midwest, outside the normal Hispanic population centers. According to the U.S. Census figures of 2008, 67% of Americans are non-Hispanic white and 12% are non-Hispanic Black. From 2000 to 2007, Hispanic birth rates were far higher than either non-Hispanic whites or African Americans. The totals were: 8.4 Hispanic births for each 1 death, 2.4 African American births per 1 death, and 1.6 non-Hispanic white births for each 1 death. Finally, between 2000 and 2007, according to the new Census data, 16 states saw a decline in the white population and whites accounted for a majority of population growth in only 11 states. The figures from the most recent Census indicate a fundamental change in the American demographic picture at the dawn of the Twenty-First Century. Implicit in this investigation is the attempt to understand how people respond to life within a vast multicultural multi-ethnic society—one in which it is incumbent upon those citizens who are active in the social polity to play an integrative role. The society of the United States has become ever more complex and the question of the “myth of Americanization” has become very much more complicated as people begin to understand themselves in fundamental terms even as they begin to comprehend the increasingly complex nature of American society. The traditional questions that applied to American society in the 1960s are still the most pertinent avenues for understanding the role of the individual vis-à-vis the society at large: the uncertain sense of personal identity, the quickening pace of social change, and the standardization of experience. The only difference in the beginning of the Twenty-First Century is that the sequence of the questions for contemporary American society is somewhat reversed from what it was forty or even thirty years ago. The question of the standardization of experience was seen, in 1960, to refer to the idea that all Americans would somehow arrive at approximately the same spot on the landscape of social change; whether rich or poor, standardization was seen as approximately the same circumstance within which all Americans found themselves. Today, the central questions seem more properly to be the quickness of social change on the American landscape and the uncertain sense of one’s personal identity. Americans of all “stripes and colors” today wear their personal identity in overt ways, whether as a headscarf, a tattoo, a religious mark on the skin, or, simply, a traditional coat and tie. At the core of the question of the success of the society is whether or not these overt attempts at self- identification are recognized with tolerance and acceptability, whether these differences are encouraged and embraced by the citizens of the society.

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In 1903, two literary events occurred that, taken together, articulate the tension in the “myth of Americanization.” First, Henry James published The Ambassadors that initially appeared in twelve serial parts in the North American Review. The novel recounts the story of a man who, in searching for another, finds himself. James outlines a phenomenon of the American in European culture who is at once beset with what he calls, on the second page of the novel, “a double consciousness,” being two things at once,45 a thematic string that follows James throughout his career, ending in his own declaration for English citizenship later in life. At the same time, in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois published his monumental collection of essays, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he writes that an African American is torn between the sometimes warring allegiances and self- identifications of being black and being American. Du Bois also refers to the tension the “double consciousness” as the presence of two sometimes separate, sometimes conflicting, cultural identities in an individual. Du Bois argues that the “two-ness” of being “an American and a Negro” is a struggle between “two warring ideals in one black body, whose dogged strength alone kept it from being torn asunder.”46 Ironically, both writers articulate this position in the same year, perhaps both borrowing the idea from Henry’s brother William James who was experimenting with the concept in his own research. James and Du Bois posit the question, to wit, is it inevitable that those who are not part of the primary host society, fall victim to a “double consciousness.” One might argue that American society has always celebrated, to one degree or another, elements of “double consciousness” through ethnic folkways, “mother tongues,” and forms of American speech that differ from those of a common American dialect. Folk Schools and language camps for Scandinavians were as common at the turn of the last century as Saturday schools are today for Arabic speaking and Asian speaking emigrants of today. Deeply embedded in the national consciousness and the “myth of Americanization” is the notion of the Du Boisian “two-ness,” a double consciousness that offers a definition of the contemporary anxiety of being an immigrant in a host society imbued with ambivalence about the phenomenon of immigration itself. Clearly, the United States is at a crossroads, one that may not be recognized—or ignored—by those immigrants who continue to become part of American society. However, it is obvious that the current debates in the United States regarding what it means to be “Americanized” reflect the tension about identity in the country. What kind of people we might be, when we are so diverse, Glazer’s question, has been answered in a variety of ways. Ali Behdad, in a brilliant book entitled A Forgetful Nation, states that “The rhetoric of the immigrant and the foreigner as a threat to democracy and freedom suspended the myth of America as a nation of immigrants until further notice.”47It is true that the folklore about emigrants was that the immigrant helped to engender democracy and freedom by coming to America where ideas and actions were constitutionally protected. And, though Behdad is correct, emigrants are often young people of an age that will not be hampered by the current political debate. The Census data from 2008 indicates that the “American” who has emerged is a being unlike anything Crevecoeur or Tocqueville might have imagined. The creation of the idea of America, and hence Americanization, has many sources—Crevecoeur, Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Du Bois —and many roots to be examined, as Ali Behdad did, but like many articles of faith and popular culture, the story of “Americanization” has elided into a complex reality of the population shift today. That reality will evolve into a new picture and story for

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“Americanization” and it will be far different from the society that the emigrants of 1890, 1900, or 1910 might have imagined. I conclude by remembering my university students, many of whom experience this strong conflict and tension of “two-ness,” a double consciousness in their own identity. During the past year I have told students about my research into the myth of Americanization. They are, of course, duly interested, but one particular afternoon a group of students whose families are from India, young men, stayed after class to tell me about their feelings When they told me about a phenomenon called “ABCD,” I asked what that meant and they replied “American-Born Confused Desi.” “What is Desi?” I asked. Desi is identity, American-born, confused identity, they told me. What I did not realize at that moment was that two of the students were born in the United States and one in India, but they shared the same identity and essentially the same confusion. I was told in late 2008 by a female pharmacist from India that Indians distinguish between early immigrants and those who arrive more recently by referring to them as “FOB,” or “Fresh Off the Boat,” a more pejorative characterization.48 The Indian American pharmacist said she did not like the “FOB” characterization and was sensitive to the negative connotation of the phrase. Two young Ohio-born women students from Indian families told me that their parents cautioned them not to marry a “BMW.” What is that, I asked. I knew “BMW” was an acronym for a car. They said together, laughing, “Our parents mean—Black, Muslim, White—don’t marry outside Indian.” I am reminded of my Iranian-American student whose girlfriend is an Indian American, born in the United States, educated in the suburbs, and whose parents expect she will become a high-achieving, successful American. The world will be changing for her parents as well. The same phenomenon exists in Europe as well. In Ireland, young people call the confusion of identity, “IBC,” Irish-Born Children.” The “Myth of Americanization” is not now, nor has it ever been, a myth. It is, rather, a long mystery, a very long puzzle, of identity. The numbers and data from the Census and the New Immigrant Survey compel us to begin to understand more deeply the meaning of assimilation and acculturation. The overwhelming numbers of immigrants notwithstanding, the mystery of identity will continue to be more than data. Understanding the puzzle of identity will depend on an examination of deep cultural references and evidence that continue to evolve in everyday life in the United States, redefining our understanding of “E Pluribus Unum” or “E Pluribus Plura.”

NOTES

1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass VI 2. For a historiographic review of the discipline of American Studies during the early years, see John F. Moe, "They Sang to My Eye: A Humanistic Approach to the Study of Material Artifacts," The International Journal of Social Education, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1986): 37-54. 3. Stephen Crane, “The Blue Hotel,” Collier’s Weekly, V.22 (November 26, 1898), p.14. 4. Steven A. Camarota, “Immigrants at Mid-Decade: A Snapshot of America’s Foreign-Born Population in 2005.” Center for Immigration Studies, Washington, D.C. December, 2005.

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5. Steven A. Camarota, “Immigrants at Mid-Decade: A Snapshot of America’s Foreign-Born Population in 2005,” p.5. 6. Stiftelsen Norsk Utvandrermuseum og Forskningssenter (The Norwegian Emigrant Museum and Research Center Foundation), Ottestad, Norway. The folklore fieldwork research on “American Days” was conducted by the author in communities on the west coast of Norway from Bergen to Stavanger. 7. Steven A. Camarota, “Immigrants in the United States, 2007: A Profile of America’s Foreign- Born Population.” Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder, November 2007. Figures used with the permission of the author and the Center for Immigration Studies, Washington, D.C. 8. Camarota, p.1. This number includes both legal and illegal immigrants. 9. See my entry “Estonian Communities,” in Simon J. Bronner, ed. Encyclopedia of American Folklife, Vol. 1, pp. 338-341. 10. I remember one Estonian family from Chicago whose children, classmates of mine at Grinnell College, were born in the Displaced Persons Camps. 11. His name was Fred Dahl. Each of the 13 children, both boys and girls, in his family carried the middle name Christian, after the Danish King. My middle name, Frederick, comes from my grandfather’s first name. 12. Will Weaver, Gravestone Made of Wheat. The title story, one of this collection of stories, was made into a film in 2007 entitled “Sweetland.” After the war, many Germans went abroad in Europe to find employment. The woman in Weaver’s story comes to America as the result of an “arranged” marriage to wed a Norwegian from the village where she was working in Norway. 13. Harvard University Press, 1980, p.33. 14. Nathan Glazer, “Is There an American People?” What, Then, Is the American, This New Man? Washington, D.C.: Center for Immigration Studies, July, 1998, p.7. 15. An analogue to this question would be a personal encounter when a Norwegian university colleague said to me, while discussing recent Oslo immigration, “Don’t you have to be white to be Norwegian?” 16. Peter A. Morrison, “A Demographic Perspective on Our Nation’s Future,” Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001. http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB320, p.1. 17. Yamashita, Tropic of Orange. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Coffee House Press, 1997. 18. Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People, 1951. 19. Out of Our Past: The Forces that Shaped Modern America. 1957 (article), book (1970) 20. Glazer, “Is There an American People?” p.7. 21. Bernard Malamud, The Assistant. New York: Avon Books, 1980 (1957), p.297. 22. Glazer, “Is There an American People?” p.7. 23. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925. New Brunswick, NJ, 1955. 24. Milton Gordon, Assimilation in American life: the role of race, religion, and national origins, New York: Oxford University press, 1964. 25. Moe and Bronner, “Estonian Communities,” p.339. 26. During the first half of the Twentieth Century, various Norwegian-American organizations and institutions supported Norwegian immigrant transition to a hyphenated American community. Such groups include: Arne Garborg Klub, Den Norske Quartet Klub, Det Norske Nationalforbund, Den Norske Klub, Dovre Klub (politics), Sleipner Athletic Club, Norwegian Fish Club (businessmen’s luncheon group), American Norwegian Chamber of Commerce, Norwegian Pioneers Club, Norwegian-American Athletic Association, Norwegian Literary Society, Norwegian People’s Academy, Norwegian Players, Norwegian Singers’ League, Norske Skiklub, Norwegian- American Hospital, Norwegian Old People’s Home, and several non-church affiliated institutions.

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27. Odd S. Lovoll, “Norwegians,” Encyclopedia of Chicago. http:// encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/911.html. 28. A total of 181,677 Polish language speakers is reported in “The Polish Community in Metro Chicago: A Community Profile of Strengths and Needs, A Census 2000 Report,” published by the Polish American Association June 2004, pp.11,18. 29. http://polishweeklychicago.com/index.html 30. See Moe, "They Sang to My Eye: A Humanistic Approach to the Study of Material Artifacts," The International Journal of Social Education, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Spring 1986): 37-40. 31. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/9981.html 32. Joseph Lash, Eleanor and Franklin. New York: W.W. Norton, 1971. See also James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox. A Harvest Book. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1956, pp. 266 et. passim. Lash’s work is the principal study of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the outstanding proponents of equal treatment for minorities. 33. The name “Babbitt” quickly became a household term for the role of the American businessman in the 1920s and remained a profound examination of the new urban landscape in the United States. 34. Sinclair Lewis, Cass Timberlane: A Novel of Husbands and Wives. New York: Random House, 1945, p.30. 35. Lewis, Cass Timberlane, pp.44-45. 36. Sinclair Lewis’ stories in the 1940s reveal that American writers had come far regarding emigrants since Stephen Crane penned his naturalistic tale “The Blue Hotel,” Collier’s Weekly, V. 22 (November 26, 1898), wherein the only name for the emigrant character was simply “Swede.” In this story set in frontier Nebraska, where Crane worked for a time as a reporter, the ethnic emigrant, albeit from northern Europe, was suspect as one unable to comprehend the subtleties of American society. Reflections on multiethnicity are not reserved only for the United States. Writer Michael Ondaatje considers the multiethnicity of Canadian society in his novel Skin of a Lion. In discussing early factory labor, Ondaatje illustrates new immigration in Ontario by naming the different nationalities of Canadian emigrants from Ireland, Italy, the Scandinavian and Baltic countries as well as other parts of Europe. 37. Gordon, Assimilation in American Life. Chapters 1 and 2. 38. John Dos Passos, State of the Nation. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1944, p.2. 39. Morrison, “A Demographic Perspective on Our Nation’s Future,” pp.39-49. 40. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which superseded the higher cap established in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who already resided in the United States as recorded in the 1890 Census. 41. Camarota, op. cit., pp. 5-7. See also William H. Frey, “Immigration Goes Nationwide: Recent immigrant dispersal has created national policy interest,” University of Michigan and the Brookings Institution, Briefing, U.S. Capitol building, March 24, 2006. 42. Guillermina Jasso, et. al., “The U.S. New Immigrant Survey: Overview and Preliminary Results Based on the New-Immigrant Cohorts of 1996 and 2003.” September 2004, Revised March 2005, p. 15. 43. Jasso, p.15. 44. Morrison, “A Demographic Perspective on Our Nation’s Future,” pp.47-48. 45. Henry James, The Ambassadors, 1903. 46. W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, pp.56-57. 47. Ali Behdad, A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005, p.171.

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48. Interview with informant, October 20-22, 2008. I also collected the “ABCD” and the “FOB” acronyms from a male student, 19 years old, at The Ohio State University, where there is a large number of Indian and Bangladeshi students.

INDEX

Keywords: American identity, American literature, Americanization, Assimilation, Double consciousness, Immigration, Multicultural society, Social change, U.S. Census, U.S. New Immigrant Survey

AUTHORS

JOHN F. MOE Ohio State University

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I (Don’t) Hear America Singing: The List of Songs Americans Should Know and Sing1

Melinda Russell

1 In this paper I discuss an instance in which US musical culture was diagnosed, as it were, with an illness, and a prescription was suggested for its cure. I explore the range of responses to the diagnosis and the prescription, locating in them some of the central contentions of American musical culture.

2 In the July 1995 Music Educators Journal, Music Educators National Conference (MENC, now the National Association for Music Education) President Will Schmid asked his readers, “Remember Rachel Carson’s landmark book Silent Spring? It raised the specter of a spring where birds, killed off by pesticides, did not sing anymore. “Well,” he continued, “a lot of music teachers are starting to worry about whether people are singing any more (sic). They meet increasing numbers of adults who call themselves non-singers, children who enter kindergarten without having experienced family singing, and teenagers who would rather slap on earphones than sing.”

3 This bleak state of affairs thus outlined, Schmid went on to assure readers that “MENC and its affiliated organization are developing a plan to do something about this predicament,” and indeed that a team had already been assembled, comprising representatives from MENC and SPEBSQSA (Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America), who had then invited representatives from Chorus America, Sweet Adelines International, and the American Choral Directors Association. After “considerable discussion,” Schmid outlined, “we decided to launch a campaign to ‘Get America Singing…Again!’”

4 The campaign would have two main objectives, wrote Schmid. The first would be to “establish a common song repertoire that ‘Americans, of all ages, know and can sing. ‘” This repertoire list would result from a committee reviewing lists drawn up by each of the organizations represented in the meeting. Schmid envisioned the final list as one containing fifteen to twenty-four songs, which should include “not just the good old

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traditional songs,” but also “copyrighted songs written since the 1950s.” The second objective of the “Get America Singing…Again!” campaign would be to “to promote community singing,” including having audiences sing at concerts, “asking people at public gatherings to open or close the festivities with a song, and encouraging singing at club or private meetings.” Members could get started immediately, suggested Schmid, by “build(ing) up the common life of singing in your community.”2

5 The result was that in 1996, Hal Leonard published Get America Singing...Again! Sing America! A project of the Music Educators National Conference,3 containing the forty-two songs had which survived a “year-long process of sifting.” The book’s cover features, below its title, an illustration with a large American flag, in front of which stand five people. They are at the top of a hill covered in amber grasses. All appear white. A bespectacled young man, wearing trousers with a button-down shirt and t-shirt is playing guitar. To his right stands a short-haired woman in a blue skirt, and to his left are three figures. The first is a younger woman in a white or tan dress, and next to her are a young boy and girl, with the former in jeans and a short-sleeved t-shirt and the latter in a skirt (perhaps with shorts underneath). All have their mouths open in song. The iconography is simultaneously reminiscent both of Joe Rosenthal’s famed photograph of marines planting the American flag on Mount Surabachi and of the Coca Cola “Hilltop” commercial of the early 1970s.4

6 The book contains forty-three5 songs:

7 Amazing Grace

8 America (My Country 'Tis of Thee)

9 America the Beautiful

10 Battle Hymn of the Republic

11 Blue Skies

12 Danny Boy

13 De Colores

14 Dona Nobis Pacem

15 Do-Re-Mi

16 Down by the Riverside

17 Frere Jacques

18 Give My Regards to Broadway

19 God Bless America

20 God Bless the U.S.A.

21 Green, Green Grass of Home

22 Havah Nagilah

23 He's Got the Whole World in His Hands

24 Home on the Range

25 I've Been Working on the Railroad

26 If I Had a Hammer

27 Let There be Peace on Earth

28 Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing

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29 Michael (Row the Boat Ashore)

30 Music Alone Shall Live

31 My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean

32 Oh! Susanna

33 Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’

34 Over My Head

35 Puff the Magic Dragon

36 Rock-A-My Soul

37 Sakura

38 Shalom Chaverim

39 She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain

40 Shenandoah

41 Simple Gifts

42 Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child

43 The Star-Spangled Banner

44 Swing Low, Sweet Chariot

45 Take Me Out to the Ball Game

46 This Land is Your Land

47 This Little Light of Mine

48 Yesterday

49 Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah

50 The book contains an introduction by Schmid that repeats the “ Silent Spring” paragraph quoted above. Following the “teenagers who would rather slap on earphones than sing,” however, he adds “What is at stake here is not just singing, but the very spirit of community in our towns, our cities, and our nation. But…something can be done about it, and this book is a response to that need.”6 Preceding Schmid’s introduction is a foreword by folksinger Pete Seeger, who was named the Honorary National Chair of the “Get America Singing…Again! Campaign.”7 I quote it in full below: If there’s a human race still here in the 22nd Century, I believe we’ll learn the fun of singing again. To take a lung full of air and push it out with some kind of song is an act of survival, whether you’re singing in a shower, a car, a bar, in a chorus, at a birthday party, at a church, or wherever. Try it – you’ll live longer. Of course, it’ll be much harder to find songs all folks want to sing together, but that’s alright (sic). Little by little, we’re learning to like each other’s songs and getting less enthusiastic about killing each other. And if there’s still a human race here in 100 years, it won’t be because of any one big organization, whether a big church or a big political party, a big corporation or country, or even a big UN. It will be because of millions upon millions of small organizations: Save This. Stop That. We’ll disagree about so many things it’ll be funny. But we’ll agree on a few main points, like: - It’s better to talk than shoot - Bombs always kill innocent people - When words fail (and they will), try sports, arts, and food And industrialized, polluted, TV-addicted people will learn to sing again. Hooray!8

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51 The Music Educators National Conference released to the public its diagnosis and suggested a cure. Quoted in the press, where the list was widely published, MENC president Will Schmid lamented that “(m)ost parents don’t sing to their children anymore. Not even lullabies ...There’s a whole generation of kids growing up who never sang at home and who don’t know songs...not even the nation’s patriotic songs, except for the national anthem which they hear at the start of sporting events. They don’t sing; they watch television.”9 In volunteering its diagnosis of a “singing deficiency” in American culture, and in prescribing 4210 songs to cure it, the Music Educators National Conference sparked at least some degree of debate across the country. Without doubt, most of this debate consists of conversations of which no trace remains, but—happily— parts appeared in newspapers and periodicals. While it was fragmented and short- lived, the debate provides an interesting instance of self-assessment in US musical culture. In hailing, deriding, or amending the MENC list, writers took on the provocative questions of whether America has, or should have, a shared musical culture; who should decide on an answer to that question; and of what such a shared culture might consist. The first portion of this paper presents the substance of that discussion. The next analyzes parts of the debate, turning to the responses offered by various members of the U.S. public, as they relate to the twin aims of the stated campaign: establishment of a common repertoire and encouragement of community singing.

52 For the most part, MENC’s diagnosis of a singing deficiency was endorsed. Few writers challenged the basic thesis that singing has declined, and that young people “don’t know songs.” Like advocating Mom or apple pie, commentators found it easy to agree that more singing would be a good thing for America. An editorial writer in the Des Moines Register wrote: “We’re not going to go out on an editorial limb with this one but we’d like to endorse singing.11 “I would like to hear America singing,” said Former Education Secretary Bill Bennett, “(w)e have a lot of honking, cursing, and in-your-face behavior, but not enough singing.”12

53 Many newspapers ran a wire report with an account of children at an elementary school in Washington. They “recognized the titles of a dozen or so songs on the list, yet most had trouble singing more than a verse. ‘Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-aye,’ sixth- grader Shika Duncan sang as she sat on the school playground. ‘Oh—something, something—what a wonderful day’”.13 “She, like many Americans, continued one version of the story, “can't remember the words to songs that are an important part of this country's culture.”14

54 The dearth of singing was blamed on a range of modern maladies, from teen pregnancy and low church attendance to lack of music education funding and use of drugs. “It may be that in the times we’re living in now, with so many teens having children and being so involved in survival, that the farthest thing from their minds is to sing to their babies,” says Frances Prince, vocal music teacher…and president of the District Music Educators Association.”15

55 Singing, argued many, took place in the past in settings which today either don’t exist, are not attended, or lack singing. Schmid was quoted as saying that “It used to be that children learned many of the songs…in school. But children don’t sing as much in school.”16 In the Washington Times, a “local music educator” explained that (Church) is where a lot of singing is done with children,” Mrs. Prince says. “I’ll say to them ‘Didn’t you learn this in church and Sunday School?’ and they’ll say ‘I don’t go to church and

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Sunday school.’’ Working mothers appeared implicitly and explicitly among the song- eradicating forces. ”Singing gets pushed out (of the school curriculum),” opined another music educator, “and then with both parents working, they just don’t sing with the kids.“17 “I think the reason kids don’t sing is there aren’t enough people singing around them,” Mrs. Prince says. “When people sing, most of the time they’re happy. My mother sang when she was cooking or doing housework.”18

56 Many respondents also found MENC’s prescription to be appropriate. Former Education Secretary Bill Bennett said the list “looks like a core curriculum of American music.” 19 A West Virginia editorial writer commented that she “liked the whole concept of picking a list of songs every child should know, akin to the value of books children should read. And I felt smug when I discovered that I had learned, and could still sing, a list of all of those selected songs.20 A Providence, Rhode Island editorial found the list “…actually a pretty good one. At any rate, I was relieved to realize I had sung or at least knew must of the songs chosen (though I’m not sure I would recognize “List Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” or “Sakura).”21

57 Writers who lauded the list found that it, for example, “avoided... politically correct goofiness... (and) remained commendably out of step with the reformers who would purge from the nation’s hymnals the rock-ribbed old hymns,”22 and that the committee had “made an effort to be culturally inclusive”23 “It’s a surprising list that includes patriotic, religious, folk and country tunes – and it’s refreshingly un-politically correct in some instances” wrote the Charleston editorialist. “You’ll find a touch of Aaron Copland and Peter, Paul and Mary. There’s a smidgeon of McCartney, a dab of Stephen Foster, a slice of Broadway and a healthy dose of references to God. “24

58 A number of newspaper writers found experts in their own towns, whose claims were used to localize and bolster the wire service story quoted above, both in confirming the lack of singing and in affirming the value of the list.25 For many, the importance of the song list was tied in with citizenship and patriotism: “They (children) should at least be familiar with (the songs),” one Maine music teacher was quoted as saying, “(t)hey don’t have to believe them.” “I’ve always felt that we need to stay close to patriotism,” said her husband, another music teacher. “You’d be amazed at how many kids don’t know the words to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner. Music has a real place in patriotism.’” And a third Maine teacher added that “(m)aybe if children knew more of the songs that have to do with nationalism, they’d have a better appreciation of how lucky they are to be a part of this country.” 26 For others, the patriotic agenda was off-putting. “Admittedly a righteous endeavor, “averred a California writer. “Unfortunately they picked the wrong ones. Their choices were songs such as ‘Amazing Grace,” And, ‘America.’ And, ‘America, The Beautiful.’ And, ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’ And ‘God Bless America.’ And “God Bless the USA.’ Sensing a pattern?” The writer suggested Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” as a “little reality check with your patriotism.”27

59 Many who were not entirely convinced by the contents of the list still liked the idea of it. The most common strategy for these writers was to suggest additions to it. Typical of these writers was this from an Omaha editorial: “It would be easy – too easy – to find shortcomings in the list of 42 songs that the Music Educators National Conference says that every American should know…However, there’s nothing wrong with the list that couldn’t be corrected by lengthening it….Altogether it’s not a bad start…“So keep the list. Expand It.” 28 And from a local music teacher in Maine: “It’s not a perfect list but anything you do by committee isn’t perfect”29 “In this multicultural age, you’re asking

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for trouble if you try to establish any sort of official canon. So you have to admire the Music Educators National Conference’s willingness to put its members’ heads on the chopping block by publishing a list of ‘42 Songs Every American Should Know’” 30

60 While such forgiving sentiments were typical, criticism abounded. Complaints about the list ranged from the mildly disapproving to the venomous. The list, complained writers, “does little to prepare students for an appreciation of classical music,31 features little that will “cater to younger audiences”32), and is “biased toward songs of patriotism and against songs of the sea.”33

61 Many writers argued for longer lists: “Music teachers ought to know better. Americans dance to many different tunes; a list of 42 just isn’t big enough to encompass them all.34 The list was missing, among many alleged lacunae, war songs, songs representing religions other than Christianity and Judaism, Christmas Carols, Sinatra, Springsteen, “Yankee Doodle,” and “We Shall Overcome,” not to mention “I Wanna Be Sedated.” An Orlando Sentinel letter writer was typical of many who wrote in suggesting the songs of their generation. Usually these were younger writers arguing for songs newer than The Beatles’ “Yesterday,” the list’s most recent entry. In this case, a (presumably) older writer found the list indicative of the fact that “… America’s golden era of music has degenerated into the “drug rock” music that prevails today. Perhaps the Music Educators National Conference should re-evaluate the 42 songs that Americans should know while there is still time to do so. 35

62 Those who responded to the list often argued that it should be lengthened with additions suggested by the citizenry. “My major gripe with the ....list is it’s woefully short. If Americans are to preserve their culture and heritage in song, the list needs to grow to about 4,042.....I suggest the music educators not only encourage Americans to sing, but that they expand their list by letting Americans add to it the songs they want to remember as part of their cultural experience and heritage. Such a list might educate the educators. 36

63 Other writers took their criticism beyond mere additions to the list and expressed bafflement and disdain for it. “...Like so many efforts to find common intellectual and cultural ground, “said one, “the list leaves one wondering why, if these songs are so important to American cultural identity, are so many of them unfamiliar?37 The list was called “studiously uncontroversial,”38 “boring,” and “unmusical.”39 “I guarantee,” wrote one Chicago-Sun-Times reader, “that many of these songs are unfamiliar to 95% of Americans. Proving my point, let me ask you and your readers, who represent a cross- section of ages and geographic regions, how many are familiar with the following “De Colores,” “Dona Nobis Pacem,” “Music Alone Shall Live,” “Over My Head,” “Sakura,” “Shalom Chaverim,” or Simple Gifts”? The columnist answered that “Yours is not the only letter in my mailbox regarding these “educators” and their goofy list...Based on the examples you quote, one might think this to be a list of songs “hardly anyone knows” rather than ones “every American should know.” None cited were hits during this century.”40 Songs were not singled out only for their unfamiliarity; one writer expressed disgust at the “odious inclusion (of) ‘God Bless the U.S.A.,’ Lee Greenwood’s awful Reagan-era paean to patriotism.”41 In a gesture echoed across the country and proposed by many writers, that columnist invited readers to “come up with better songs... show those stuffy educators how it’s done. Send me your list of 10 songs that you think --and I’m going to change one crucial word here -- “most” Americans should know.” Other newspapers42 sought out local musicians or civilians for their own lists.

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64 Some felt that the country’s too-diverse musical tastes doom such lists: “The biggest challenge,” wrote one “is this nation’s musical tastes, which go more directions than a boxful of broken guitar strings. Grammies were awarded in 88 categories this year...Musically speaking, these people are not on the same page; these people are not in the same songbook. What are the chances you will find their fans sitting around the same campfire, singing ‘I’ve Been Working On the Railroad.’? ‘Zip...A -Dee-Doo-Dah.’ (It’s on the list, too.)”43

65 Occasionally, the credentials of the diagnostician were questioned along with the cure itself. Like the columnist above who called the educators “stuffy,” some writers found the campaign high-handed. One called the list “The latest from the what-we-know-is- what-you-should-know department”44 In Anchorage, a writer mocked the effort: If you need more evidence about the sad state of American education, all you have to do is read the list of songs that music teachers say every one of us should know... 'Songs that are part of our culture, part of who we are.' That's only true, I'm afraid, if who we are is people who can't dance…The list is, I don't know any other way to put this, totally lame….The music teachers … welded together a roster of patriotic tunes…religious music…show tunes …and folk music … and decreed that these are the songs our children should learn. As if. But then, if it was fun, we wouldn't have to force the munchkins to learn it, would we? 45

66 And Jim DeRogatis, senior editor of Rolling Stone magazine, was quoted in one widely- distributed version of the story. Along with his song suggestions:, Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” he added that “It seems to me that this group is pretty far out of touch with kids today if they think these are songs that will get them energized to sing…If you’re going to put a Beatles song on, don’t put ‘Yesterday.” Kids don’t want to sing “Yesterday.” Put on ‘Revolution.’”46

67 Perhaps the most basic question to be asked is about the primary assertion that singing has declined.In a voice decidedly in the minority, Professor Jere Humphreys, a renowned music education scholar at Arizona State University, challenged the “notion that musical life in, say, North America needs to be reenergized,” arguing that, if you include listening, people are very active musically, and also opining concerning the MENC list that “singing is not for everyone, and certainly not those particular songs.”47

68 Of course, it’s this very emphasis on so-called “active” vs. so-called ‘“passive” musical engagement that attracts fans of the list. One newspaper quoted a local music supervisor as “impressed by the national consensus behind the list and by its ...emphasis on active singing rather than passive listening.”48

69 In 2004, I interviewed a class of third-graders in Farmington, Minnesota.49 They filled out short questionnaires on which they were asked, among other things, about songs they knew “by heart,” and about some places where they sing. Of the twenty-one students, eleven said they sang at home; eleven in music class; eleven reported singing at church; nine in their rooms; seven in cars, and two in the shower. The songs listed by the third-graders were a disparate lot. Many proved impossible for me to decipher (even after I had determined that quire, quier, and cwire all referred to “choir”), but among them: “Snow White Song,” “The Drinkin’ Bone,” “Yankee Doodle,” “Jingle Bells,” “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” “ABC song,” “Yellow Submarine,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Happy Birthday,” “Three Blind Mice,” Pokemon #1,” “Who Let the Dogs Out,” “Twelve Days of Christmas,” “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” “There’s a Hole in the Bucket,” “Joy to the World,” and “Old MacDonald.” Many students referred to popular songs and artists, simply listing “Usher” and “Britney Spears” among their songs,

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noting “I know all of the songs from Martina McBride” or adding in “I love rock ‘n’ roll.”50

70 To be sure, my sample group is small here. But even this modest study is very informative. The students’ song repertoire is an amalgam of traditional and children’s songs, Christmas carols, and country and rock songs from several eras. There is evidence of diverse musical influences in the list. I interviewed the school’s music instructor, who, in answer to my question “Do you think children sing?” clarified “Not in school, on their own? Yes, I do.” When I asked for more detail about how she knows this, she said: They come in and tell me. A lot of times it will be songs that are from here that they talk to me about, and they’ll say “I had this song stuck in my head and I just kept singing it all night long, you know, couldn’t get it out of my head” or, …they sing along with the radio…(or) they’ll say “Oh yeah, I sing in church,” and share different songs that way, too. So yeah, I do.

71 She further added that she sees children teaching one another jump rope rhymes, that they learn songs from older siblings, and that they sing on bus trips, and in some non- specialist classrooms, especially in the lower grades. 51

72 “When do you sing?” I also asked the students on the questionnaire. “I sing in music at 11:00” came one reply, but most answered me less literally. Here are their responses: I sing once every day. When I have nothing to do Whenever I can Often I sing at music. Anytime almost I sing after school At church, at the radio and my CD player I sing anytime and anywhere I sing when I am happy I sung during the day. During the weekend. I sing anytime and at a birthday. After and at school. I sing at a birthday party and when I go caroling. Church. School time. I sing every day. When someone else starts to sing. At parties. I sing at church. In music class.

73 Here, too, this small group turns out to be very instructive. It’s clear that some students don’t sing much, with participation limited to church or school. Others sing “anytime almost” or “every day.” Some identify singing with particular settings (parties, church, caroling), while others seem to have a less restricted notion. Some singing, as I might well have expected from students who reported singing in their rooms or in a shower, seems to take place alone. But much sounds fundamentally social: parties, caroling, church, and “When someone else starts to sing.”

74 For all the doomsday talk about the disappearance of singing, though, some of their arguments made by MENC principals and in the press reveal that the split in opinion about U.S. musical culture is not just about active versus passive engagement. It is also

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about worthy and unworthy songs. These debates are fused together in many of the discussions, but they are separable. The music supervisor for the Loudoun County (Virginia) Public Schools observed that “The common repertoire of songs we all enjoyed 20, 30 years ago is being lost. “If you go out on a field trip you won’t even hear ‘Ninety-nine bottles.” If someone breaks out in song, it’s apt to be something from MTV or that Madonna sings.”52 In praising the MENC list, one writer argued that “Songs pass along American culture, especially when countless hordes are mindlessly muttering the tunes of corporate television commercials.”53 Both Pete Seeger’s foreword and Will Schmid’s comments to the press mention television. The former mentions it as a source of addiction (and, perhaps not accidentally, he turns next to “polluted” to describe Americans), and the latter as a direct substitute for singing.

75 People singing television jingles or Madonna, however, are not the silent birds of Rachel Carson’s pesticide-blighted spring. Their songs may be unwelcome, but they are songs. And they are being sung, albeit by polluted people. The Des Moines writer and the music supervisor are lamenting the repertoire itself, not the lack of singing. No less keen a cultural critic than Lisa Simpson has worried, after the family sings the “Armour Hot Dog” theme, ‘Doesn’t this family know any songs that aren’t television commercials?”54

76 Nor did it escape the attention of those who wrote about the MENC song list that the “natural” repertoire of Americans is drawn largely from television. “Every parent knows that what our children really learn are the songs from the latest movie-length Disney cartoon, plus the themes from the most violent Saturday morning kids TV programs.” 55 One writer’s alternative list, culled from members of the public, included the McDonald’s theme “You Deserve a Break Today,”56 and another suggested the “Flintstones” theme because “(y)ou know, of all these songs, the TV themes are the ones that probably will survive, just as predicted in the movie Demolition Man.57 “Try a simple test,” wrote one. “First, sing a few verses of ‘Over My Head,’ and ‘Music Alone Shall Live.’ Now sing ‘My Baloney Has a First Name,’ or the theme song to Gilligan’s Island. Clearly, having a song in common is not a sufficient criterion for inclusion on the MENC list.”58

77 The relationship between tunes people do know and those they “ought” to know, and the tension between the two, suffuses the MENC effort and reactions to it. While the MENC material stresses finding songs “people know” rather than those they “should know,” its initial process reflected a desire to engineer, rather than discover, common repertoire. As the public reacted, MENC responded, to a degree. First, it added “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” to the second printing of the first, and second, it prepared a second volume59 reflecting suggestions “solicited from music teachers all over the U.S. and (including) suggestions from the general public over the last four years.”

78 On a larger level, the tension is between the musical culture we have and the one certain people think we should have: from the back of the Get America Singing…Again! songbook: “[U]se singing to bring people together once again in your neighborhood, home, church, camp, school, club, or activity...Throw in a song or two at the beginning of a meeting to melt the ice and get communication going....Get out the guitar, sit down at the piano, tune up the Autoharp, add a bass, drums, or any other instruments you can lay your hands on, and have a sing-along.” These instructions point to a potential flaw in the diagnosis-prescription logic. If the “illness,” as it were, is lack of singing, is a body of songs the appropriate cure? The instructions above suggest that what is

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lacking is not, or not only, repertoire but rather singing occasions, or occasions interpreted as appropriate for singing.

79 The self-described “non-singers” encountered by Schmid and others—I include the many I found in my own Illinois and Minnesota fieldwork—are very real. But as people reveal their paths to becoming non-singers, it is clear that a songbook will not change them into singers. Their non-singer status reflects deep-rooted personal and cultural conceptions about who should be singing, when, and where. The greatest challenge faced by the MENC list is contained not in the song list itself but in these instructions to sing, to make others sing, and to transform non-singing occasions into singing ones.

80 Among the dozens of times I have interviewed people who say they do not sing, or “don’t sing much,” fear of judgment figures prominently in their understanding of their own inhibition: “Do you ever sing,” I asked one Minnesota woman in 2004. “To the kids,” she answered, “And, you know, privately in the shower. I don’t actually sing for anybody. Well, sometimes I sing in church with the little kids...Kids…are not so judgmental.”60 She went on to explain that she felt singing talent had passed her over, though others in her family were “good” singers. I also interviewed her friend, who said that she herself was “not a very good singer, but I sing because I know it’s important to kids.”61

81 More than one consultant has, ironically, cited a critical music teacher as an important silencing force, as in this interview segment with a man in his 50s: Yeah, well, I have an experience and I wanna say this was in about 4th or 5th grade, but it’s, I can still picture it, I mean it’s incredible I can picture being in this gym… there’s this chorus that’s basically made up of everybody, you know, it wasn’t select… and basically what the teacher did is she, you know, she had us singing and she started weeding people out that she didn’t think could sing and I was weeded out very early and that was sort of the end of, not that the singing career was ever a much of a prospect, but you never know…it definitely made me self-conscious, and I think of myself as someone who can sing on his own, reasonably well, you know, I’m not a great voice by any means, but I can carry a tune most of the time, on my own. But I definitely, and I don’t know whether it’s the chicken-egg, or what it is, but in collective singing situations, I’m uncomfortable, self-conscious, feel like I can’t quite carry the tune, even if I could carry the tune perfectly well. 62

82 In a hopeful sign for singing advocates, all three of these consultants expressed a willingness to let the importance of social function override their inhibitions.

83 In sharing its dismay at U.S. musical culture, and advancing its vision of a more ideal one, the Music Educators National Conference created a comparatively rare opportunity for Americans to reflect on the state of their musical culture, and particularly on the role of active singing. In responding, Americans expressed agreement with some contentions and argued with others, allowing observers to discover points of consensus and contention among these cultural participants. Some in this debate argued that the U.S. lacked songs, others that we lacked singers, and still others that we lacked singing occasions; accordingly, songs, autoharps, or calls to song were prescribed. The multiple prescriptions and prognoses offered by these confident diagnosticians obscure the fact that we have yet to determine whether, and how, the patient is actually suffering.

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NOTES

1. I thank Carleton College for its generous funding of this research project, and my colleagues for their sustained interest in it. I also thank my students, whose participation in assignments and discussions exploring the state of singing in the U.S. has stimulated my own thinking. And I thank my many consultants for their frank discussions of their own musical lives and for their patience with my questions. 2. Will Schmid, “All The Best,” Music Educators Journal 82 (May 1995): 4-5 +54. 3. See Music Educators National Conference, Get America Singing… Again! (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1996). 4. This advertisement was so popular in the U.S. in 1971 that radio stations reportedly received calls to play the ad’s song, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” Two versions, one by the Hillside Singers and the other by the New Seekers, and with the lyrics “I’d like to teach the world to sing” were in Billboard’s Top Twenty that year. The ad, and the story of its construction, can be seen at the Library of Congress website: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ccmphtml/index.html 5. Take Me Out to the Ball Game” was added after the first printing, reportedly after complaints from the Baseball Hall of Fame. 6. Music Educators National Conference, Get America Singing…Again!, 5. 7. It’s not entirely clear whether this was a good strategy. To the extent the list was viewed as the old telling the young what to do, Seeger could only amplify that. The marriage of this list of would-be “folk songs” with a vintage “folksinger” heavily identified with leftist politics was an uneasy one. The Washington Times reported that “America’s best loved commie, Pete Seeger, whose leftist propaganda songs earned him a Kennedy Center Honors award from President Clinton, now is seeking congressional support in getting America to sing again…’I was struck by how out of touch these people must be if they thought that a Republican Congress would be moved by the blatherings of an unrepentant shill for Stalin,’ says one high-ranking congressional official.” John McCaslin, “All Together Now,” The Washington Times, 6 March, 1997, A5. 8. Music Educators National Conference, Get America Singing…Again!, 5. 9. Carol Innerst, “A Notable Effort for Children,” The Washington Times, 20 May 1996, C:8. 10. “ The version of the list released to the press did not contain “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” 11. Staff, “Let’s Hear It for Song,” Des Moines Register, 27 April, 1996, 8. 12. Staff, Wire Reports, “Music Educators Tout Tunes to Retain Culture,” Houston Chronicle, 19 April, 1996, 4. 13. Ibid.

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14. Associated Press, “Educators: U.S. Should Know Songs,” The Cincinnati Post , 19 April 1996, 4. 15. Innerst, “Notable,” C: 8. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Staff, Wire Reports, “Music Educators Tout,” 4. 20. Cheryl Caswell, “My Turn: May the Melodies Linger On,” Charleston Daily Mail, 24 April ,1996, 1D. 21. N.A., “List tests Americans’ song I.Q.,” The Providence Journal- Bulletin, 18 May 1996, 11A. 22. N.A. (editorial), “Indeed, Keep the Music Alive,” The Omaha World- Herald. 22 April , 1996, 14. 23. Philip Kennicott, “Votes for notes: Music Educators Left a Number of Worthy Selections off their List of Essential Music for Americans, According to Some Local Musicians and Aficionados” St. Louis Post- Dispatch, 9 May 9, 1996, 1G. 24. Caswell, “My Turn,” 1D. 25. See, for example, the Bangor Daily News and Kennicott articles. 26. Staff, Wire Reports, “I Hear America Singing…Music Educators seek to preserve 42 songs,” Bangor Daily News (Maine), 3 May, 1996, B6. 27. Wayne Lockwood, “The Other Songs Americans Should Know,” The Orange County Register, 27 May, 1996, E6. 28. N.A. (editorial), “Indeed,” 14. 29. Staff, Wire Reports, “I Hear America Singing,” B6. 30. David Menconi, “You oughtta know these songs, educators say, but they seem to have missed some key tunes.” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), 29 April, 1996, D1. 31. Kennicott, “Votes,” 1G. 32. Ibid. 33. Allan R. Andrews, “What Americans Sing,” Pacific Starts and Stripes (Tokyo, Japan), 19 May, 1996, n.p. 34. Tom Vogt, “I Could Name That Tune But I Won’t,” The Columbian (Washington), 3 May, 1996, A8. 35. Phil Brewer, “Music’s Golden Era,” letter to the editor, Orlando Sentinel 4 May, 1996, A20 36. Andrews, “What Americans Sing,” n.p. 37. Kennicott, “Votes,” 1G. 38. Ibid. 39. Mike Doogan, “If you want kids to learn music, it’s time to rock the schoolhouse,” Anchorage Daily News, 23 April, 1996, B1. 40. Jerry Osborne, Educators’ List of Must-Know Songs Baffles Many Readers,” Chicago Sun-Times, 24 May, 1996, 14. 41. David Menconi, “You oughtta know,”D1. Menconi goes on to quote Schmid as saying that “Sometimes, the question came down to what we could get the rights to. Hal Leonard is the publisher of that one, and they said it’s their most popular country song. Choral directors were not so hot on that one, but the barbershop quartet people loved it.” Not

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coincidentally, adds Menconi, Hal Leonard is also the publisher of the MENC songbook. 42. See, for example, the Kennicott article, in which local St. Louisans ranging from Leonard Slatkin to a local restaurant promoter, contributed their ideas. 43. Tom Vogt, “I Could Name,” A8. 44. Kennicott, “Votes,” 1G. 45. Doogan, “If you want,” B1. 46. Deb Riechmann, “Name That Tune: Picking 42 for Posterity,” The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), 21 April, 1996, 18. Caswell responds to this quotation: “Poor Jim. Hasn’t he been to a scout camp, 4-H meeting, Sunday School or daycare lately? Because that’s where kids are still singing—and loving—many of the songs on the list.” 47. Jere Humphreys, “…On teaching Pigs to Sing,” Paper published on the MayDay Group website: http://maydaygroup.org/php/resources/ colloquia/VII-humphreys-reenergizing.php. 1 June, 1999. 48. Staff, “Let’s Hear It,” 8. 49. My thanks to Sue Rodman and her third graders for their good humor and patience with my questions. 50. I have also long administered an assignment to my college students concerning memorized repertoire, and the lists that they generate have much in common with those of the third-graders. 51. Doris MacNamara interview, May 3, 2004 52. Innerst, “Notable,” C: 8. 53. Staff, “Let’s Hear It,” 8. 54. In the “Lady Bouvier’s Lover” episode, Bart and Lisa are depicted doing a song and dance routine to the Armour Hot Dogs commercial jingle. Towards its conclusion, the entire family joins in. After it ends, Lisa asks her question, and after a moment of silent contemplation, the entire family begins singing the “Chicken Tonight” jingle, dancing around the table. 55. Doogan, “If you want,” B1. 56. Kennicott, “Votes,” 1G. 57. Lockwood, “The Other Songs,” E6. 58. Kennicott, “Votes,” 1G. 59. See Music Educators National Conference, Get America Singing… Again! Volume 2 (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2000). Interestingly, its cover features an illustration similar to that of the first volume, with a large American flag and a group of five people, mouths open in song. The focus is tighter, so that it’s unclear whether people are on a hill, and only their upper bodies are visible. The implied ethnicities are more varied, with some darker skin tones and facial hair. 60. Interview with Ann VandeGraff, 9/24/2004 61. Interview with Cathy Ryback, October 12, 2004 62. Interview with Robert Jefferson, October 25, 2004

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AUTHOR

MELINDA RUSSELL Carleton College

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Lincoln’s “Unfathomable Sorrow”: Vinnie Ream, Sculptural Realism, and the Cultural Work of Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century America

Gregory Tomso

I think that history is particularly correct in writing Lincoln down as the man of sorrow. The one great, lasting, all-dominating impression that I have always carried of Lincoln has been that of unfathomable sorrow, and it was this that I tried to put into my statue. --Vinnie Ream1

1 On August 30th, 1866, Vinnie Ream, at the age of 18, became the youngest person, and the first woman, to be awarded a commission for a statue by the U.S. government [see figure 1]. The commission was for a life-size marble of Abraham Lincoln to be displayed in the U.S. Capitol building, one of the first of many official tributes to Lincoln that would be made after his assassination the previous year. It would take four and half years before the work would be completed, and during this time Ream became the center of one of the most public and divisive debates ever to take place concerning the relationship between art and American nationhood. Her work, her character, and her sex were relentlessly scrutinized by senators, editorial pundits and newspaper gossips.

2 Some saw Ream as an untutored genius, a self-taught sculptor and daughter of the West who, like Lincoln himself, proved that privilege and social refinement were not requirements for success in the United States. Others saw her as an upstart opportunist who used her strikingly good looks to manipulate powerful middle-aged men, including senators, Civil War generals and at least two presidents, in order to secure government patronage for her art. Though mostly forgotten today, the sensational story of Ream’s life and the political controversy surrounding her work has been occasionally re-told since her death by a small and heterogeneous group of relatives, professional

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biographers, art historians, feminists, chroniclers of Civil War history and writers of books for children. Her statue of Lincoln still stands today in Statuary Hall inside the U.S. Capitol.2

Figure One. Photo of Vinnie Ream posing with one of her early portrait busts of Lincoln. Date unknown, c. 1866. Library of Congress.

3 As Ream’s various biographers have noted, the controversy surrounding her work sometimes had little do with Ream herself. Rather, conflicts developed out of frictions produced by changing conceptions of American nationhood and aesthetics, fueled by sexual chauvinism and regional political rivalries between predominantly Republican, establishment Easterners and predominantly Democratic, populist Westerners. Ream’s biggest supporters in the Senate debate about her commission were Democrats, while her fiercest opponent was Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, one of the so-called “Radical Republicans” who opposed Andrew Johnson’s lenient Reconstruction policies. In the course of the Senate debate, political tensions of the post-war period merged with arguments about nationalism and aesthetics, particularly in terms of the battle between classicism and realism in American art. Sumner, for example, was not only a foe of Jackson’s presidency and plans for Reconstruction; he was also a defender of the classical tradition in American art that championed the work of male sculptors such as Hiram Powers and Horatio Greenough. At stake in Ream’s Lincoln, then, was an ideological struggle for the future of American nationhood, played out both in terms of political-policy debates and in terms of aesthetics. Ream’s work provided an opportunity for some Democrats, as well as for a handful of Republicans from western states, to champion realism as the most suitable aesthetic style of national art. One defender of the classical old guard would bitingly refer to this realistic aesthetic as the “Wisconsin theory” of American art.3

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4 Crucial to the success of Ream’s realistic portrayal of Lincoln was the role of sympathy. As the epigraph to this essay suggests, sympathy played a vital role in facilitating socially acceptable experiences of nationalist identification. Sympathy, to the exclusion of almost all other responses, both emotional and intellectual, was by far the most prevalent reaction to Ream’s statue of Lincoln. Thus, building on the work of Jane Tompkins, Gillian Brown, Lori Merish, Glenn Hendler and others, I would like to look more closely at the “cultural work” of sympathy as it operates in discourses about Ream and her art, focusing on the ideological connections among sympathy, realism, and post-Civil-War American nationalism.4

5 Specifically, I argue that the much-touted, life-like features of Ream’s statue of Lincoln are not, as her most admiring biographer has claimed, evidence of “man’s propensity for naturalism,” but signs of a historical shift in the discourses of aesthetics central to what Hendler describes as the subjective process of sentimental, nationalist identification in the nineteenth century.5 As the dream of an American Athens, embodied in the classical idealism of Powers and Greenough, gave way to Ream’s realism, the powerbrokers of American art and politics did not reject, but intensified and naturalized, the ideological fervor of American nationalism and the forms of sentimental experience crucial to its expression. True to Brown’s dictum that “America will be realized in its simulacra,” Ream’s Lincoln, in its striking verisimilitude, does not so much represent life itself as it instead offers up, for public consumption, a re- vitalized fantasy of the origin of “Americanness” empirically legible in the face, eyes, tears, hair, hands and “unspeakable sadness” of Lincoln’s body.6

6 To understand how the realism of Ream’s Lincoln plays a part in the creation of this mythical “Americanness,” I will return briefly to the national debates about classicism and realism in American public art that found some of their most heated expressions in conversations about Ream’s statue. Consider, for example, the writing of California journalist E.G. Waite, who toured Vinnie Ream’s studio in the U.S. Capitol. His article on Ream, which appeared in a magazine called the Overland Monthly, nicely sums up the issues: Of the intelligent lovers of art, I would say there are two classes, having different ideas of what a national statue should be. One would have it idealized, so as to be the beatified presence of the subject, or to represent the spirit of his deeds more, and the actual likeness of the man less. The other would faithfully portray the size, form, clothing, and features of the subject; in fact, a man as nearly as possible as he was, taken at the best period in his history, and in his most favorable mood. One would represent him as a spiritualized incarnation of a great passion or event; while the other would be more intent upon a refined effort of realistic portraiture.7

7 Of the American artists who sought to “beatify” and “idealize” their subjects, representing their “spirit” as opposed to their “actual likeness,” sculptor Horatio Greenough came most famously to represent these older, classical commitments to creating monumental American art. In the U.S. Senate debate over Ream’s commission, Charles Sumner said of Greenough that he was “unquestionably the most accomplished of all in the list of American sculptors. He was a scholar, versed in the languages of antiquity and modern times, who studied the art which he practiced in the literature of every tongue. Of him I never fail to speak in praise.”8 Even a cursory look at his 1841 statue of George Washington reveals its contrast with Ream’s lifelike Lincoln, making clear the aesthetic distance between classicism and realism [see figures two and three]. Sumner, like other defenders of the classical, idealist tradition, fervently believed in

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the possibility of capturing, through art, what Waite calls “a spiritualized incarnation of a great passion or event.” The very notion that an artist could somehow create a “spiritualized incarnation” of a subject expresses just the kind of national idealism that Sumner and others would oppose to Ream’s seemingly a-spiritual realism. According to this belief, little or nothing of the physical characteristics of a great leader matters to history; nor is it important for the future of a nation for its citizens to remember precisely the minute details of a leader’s life or appearance. Instead, what remains valuable is a sort of spiritual residue, an “incarnation” of the timeless and seemingly divine aspects of a leader’s being.

Figure Two. Statue of George Washington by Horatio Greenough. Photograph, Library of Congress.

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Figure Three. Vinnie Ream’s statue of Abraham Lincoln in the U.S. Capitol. Photograph, Architect of the Capitol.

8 The debate between classicism and realism was, then, far more than merely a disagreement about aesthetics or good taste. At stake was the very possibility of creating an American history. For the idealists, spiritual and therefore historical greatness could not be signified corporeally, through realistic portraiture, but instead rendered through an abstraction, the metonymy, if we return for a moment to Waite, of “a great passion or event.” One sees here not only the emphasis on “great passion” or sentiment that became a medium for expressions of nineteenth-century American nationalism, but also the opening to an epistemological problem in the very definition of American history: how, through art, is the history of America to be known, remembered and represented, and what “incarnation” of history is appropriate for, as Waite writes here, a “national statue”? Do physical qualities such as those mentioned by Waite—“size, form, clothing, and features”—have a particular representational, epistemological or spiritual connection to history, passion or event, or are they merely trivialities?

9 If realist details are important, are they more capable than idealism of vouchsafing American nationhood and ensuring the greatness of the republic? These questions help to show how the issue at stake between classical idealism and corporeal realism cannot be boiled down to a war of good taste between a conservative, establishment “old guard” (of which Sumner was the champion) and a more democratic. progressive “new” one. While public opinion on the issue was frequently split along party lines, seeing the issue this way occludes the fact that both points of view are essentially conservative ones: for idealists and realists alike, the central question is one of how best to signify the greatness of the nation during a period of national crisis following Lincoln’s death. In fact, as I shall discuss in more detail shortly, even Ream’s “realism”

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can be read as a form of idealism, since it is precisely through her intimate rendering of Lincoln’s body that the symbolic and spiritual project of postwar nation building can move forward. The underlying question that needs to be addressed here is thus not one of aesthetics or even nationalism, but one of epistemological transformation, given that the proper means to signify national history changes from, in the decades before the Civil War, the abstract rendering of a historical figure as “passion or event” to, in the decade after, the realistic portrayal of that figure in terms “size, form, clothing, and features.”

10 To address this question more fully, I examine below two excerpts from the Senate debate about Ream’s commission for the Lincoln statue that demonstrate the often circular logics that linked realism to the project of American nation-building. The first is a series of remarks by Senator James McDougall, a Democrat from California: Where high genius is found, it has been the office of great States to cultivate the development of that genius. Did it not require the wealth and power of princes to develop the genius of Michael Angelo (sic), and Titian and Guido? It was so in past times; it has been so in our time; and we have undertaken to maintain the policy of a great State and to cultivate art, among other things . . . . All the States of Europe pursue the same policy; and for what? To illustrate their national history and their national qualities; and they have particularly encouraged historical paintings; indeed, a great picture is a history; so is a great statue a history. It is the policy of this Government, a great Government, to cultivate the same talents in our own country.9

11 Note how strikingly McDougall links the production of art to the project of American nation building. Though a Democrat, he imagines himself and his fellow Senators as possessing the “wealth and power of princes” suitable for cultivating high art that will illustrate America’s “national history” and “national qualities.” One detects here a whiff of American imperialism, a sense of how America must compete on a global scale with its European counterparts so that it might “cultivate the same talents in our own country.” Art, McDougall makes clear, is essential to the work of becoming “a great State” and “a great Government,” the two most salient political goods that, here at least, appear to be the highest possible aims of statehood. Following this logic, he would go on to argue on Ream’s behalf, claiming that she clearly possessed the genius needed for the production of high art.

12 Though his argument is somewhat circular, he seems to have made his point: “She has had the genius to do it; and it requires genius to do it; and young genius is as good as old genius, and sometimes a little better.”10 In terms of the epistemological problem of how one best creates an American history, McDougall seems happy to settle the point on ideological grounds. For him, it is clearly through “greatness” that one comes to know what history is, and thus he is able to claim that “a great picture is a history; so is a great statue a history.” One need not bother, it seems, with “spiritual incarnations” or physical features: “princes” like himself apparently know both greatness and history when they see it.

13 As McDougall’s remarks illustrate quite well, it was sometimes difficult to articulate in any precise way how it was that a painting or sculpture might actually accomplish the work of establishing American’s history and rebuilding the worn-torn nation. The circularity of McDougall’s argument about “greatness” parallels an equally circular argument about “truth” and “history” made in the Senate debate by George Franklin Edmunds, a Republican from Vermont who joined Sumner in voting against the Ream

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commission. Though he voiced no objection to Ream’s realism, he doubted her ability to make Lincoln real enough: In this instance we appeal to fidelity to truth to an exact representation of a recent person; and we ask, therefore, for a work which shall not only be true to art, but which shall be true to the truth of history and to the truth of personality in every particular. No statue of Lincoln ought ever to have a place in this Capitol that does not represent him as he was.11

14 The point here, though Edmund’s does not spell it out, is that Ream lacks the skill to represent Lincoln “as he was.” However, more interesting than his slight to Ream’s abilities is how he conflates three different forms of truth. First, Edmunds appeals “to fidelity to truth to an exact representation of a recent person,” referring, it seems, to a need for realism or verisimilitude in whatever statue of Lincoln the Senate might commission; second, he notes that the statue must be “true to the truth of history,” thereby creating a conceptual link between artistic verisimilitude and history itself, thus coming down, at least on this point, on the side of the realists; and finally, he speaks of the “truth of personality,” echoing not the realists, but something of the idealists’ notion that a national statue should express intangible qualities, like “great passion.” In effect, what Edmunds seems to be doing here, albeit in a confusing way, is using the realists’ own arguments against them, suggesting that only someone far more skilled than Vinnie Ream could possibly capture the “truth” in sculpture.

15 Whatever his intention might have been, however, Edmunds’ remarks actually leave a different impression. He repeats the word “truth” or its cognates so often that it begins to take on an almost fetishistic quality, as when he refers to “fidelity to truth” and the need to be “true to the truth” of history. It is here, I argue, that we can begin to see signs of the emerging epistemological associations among realism, nationalism and sentiment. Edmunds creates a discourse of hyper-truthfulness, of hyper-fidelity to life and personality in order to protect “the truth of American history” from the likes of Vinnie Ream and her Democratic supporters. His attack on Ream does not, as Sumner’s did, require a defense of idealism or classicism, but a more radical insistence on “fidelity to truth” of all kinds, which here seems to equate to a mandate that art faithfully depict physical features such as “size, form and clothing” that embody both ideal qualities (like personality) and America’s rightful place in “history.” The fact that his remarks are at once redundant and tautological suggest this very point, if one is willing to read his rhetorical excess around the notion of “truth” as a sign of a deepening, if unconscious, ideological commitment to realism as a signifier of American nationalism and as a sign of an equally unconscious uncertainty about how, precisely, realism could actually make that ideological leap.

16 With these examples in mind, one can begin to understand the cultural work performed by the sentimental descriptions of Ream’s Lincoln that appeared frequently in the popular press and in official comments on her work. While Ream’s detractors were vocal in the press, her supporters were far more so, and the mantra of those who championed her was that her Lincoln was the most moving and realistic depiction of “President Martyr” ever sculpted by human hands. In descriptions of the statue’s realistic features and of its melancholic affect, it is possible to trace the ideological connections among realism, nationalism and sentiment that underwrote the public’s embrace of Ream’s art. These appear frequently in the comments people made about her statue of Lincoln, including the following by American painter Miner Kilbourne Kellog in 1869:

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The head and features are forcibly, yet truthfully modelled; the hair boldly managed in flowing masses as by the skill of experience; and the expression of sadness mingled with benevolence is touchingly portrayed, well conceived and appropriate to the expression and meaning of the statue. . . . A long circular cloak covers the right shoulder and arm, falls backward off the left, being held partially under the forearm and caught up by the left hand, which grasps its ample folds as if in readiness to cover with the protecting mantle of the Government the defenseless beings who are to receive the inestimable boon of freedom . . . .12

17 And also these remarks by Republican Senator James W. Patterson of New Hampshire at the unveiling of Ream’s Lincoln in the Capitol in 1871: Sure I am that this is the lean, gaunt figure [of Lincoln], and these the solemn, earnest features we knew and loved so well in those long years of hope and fear through which the nation agonized into its new life of liberty and prosperity. The loose and slouchy dress of the yeoman, which the President only half yielded with reluctance amid the fashions of the capital, has received from the facile hand of sculpture a becoming ease and grace . . . . The benignant face seems to drop a benediction upon the proclamation of emancipation which he grasps in his hand. A momentary consciousness of the transcendent glory of that god-like act transfigures for the time the whole man, and a heavenly light glows through the fixed sadness of his features.13

18 In both of these descriptions of Ream’s Lincoln, we see signs of the discourses of truth and verisimilitude that are important aspects of the success of her sculpture. Kellog, in the first example, notes how “truthfully” Ream has modeled Lincoln, while Patterson, in the second, recognizes in Ream’s statue the selfsame “earnest features we knew and loved so well” during Lincoln’s presidency. Following the work of both Lori Merish and Bill Brown, we might notice here the important role played by specific objects or “features” in these hyper-realistic descriptions. Lincoln’s “long circular cloak,” at first objectively described by Kellog, becomes, in the space of one short sentence, “the protecting mantle of the Government,” whose “ample folds” help to incorporate the newly freed slaves into the American body politic. In the description by Patterson, the cloak has again morphed into “the loose and slouchy dress of the yeoman,” a description that binds Lincoln to the agrarian, democratic ideals of Jefferson and Crèvecoeur.

19 I propose that we label these descriptions “hyper-realistic” in order to specify how everyday objects like Lincoln’s cloak become saturated with symbolic and ideological meaning. However “truthfully modelled,” I argue, the realism of Ream’s Lincoln is not, in any absolute sense, an objective quality of the sculpture itself, but a mode of signification or a discourse of the real, particular to the era of Reconstruction, whose adherents “loved” Lincoln’s features with the sentimental verve indispensable to postwar American nationalism. In moving descriptions of the “flowing masses” of Lincoln’s hair, of the ampleness of his cloak, and especially of the “fixed sadness” and “benevolence” of his face, Kellog and Patterson did not simply describe the realness of Ream’s work, but invented the very possibility of the “real” as a vehicle for sentimental, and therefore nationalist, experience. It is not difficult to trace the nationalist excesses of their versions of the real, both in the “heavenly light” that glows through Lincoln’s form and in the evangelical hope for a “new life of liberty and prosperity” that Patterson easily reads in the statue’s “solemn, earnest features.” Through the vividness of this effigy of Lincoln, so “touchingly portrayed,” Americans, it seems, might begin to heal the war-torn nation through the very act of loving, and by

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taking possession, through a full appreciation of Ream’s artistic efforts, of Lincoln’s sadness as part of their own experience.

20 As Merish has described in her book Sentimental Materialism, objects in nineteenth- century American life became catalysts for varieties of sentimental experience that helped instantiate a particular form of political subjugation, one that she calls sentimental ownership or caretaking, that helped middle-class Americans to ameliorate, yet ultimately disavow, “feelings of political powerlessness.”14 Sentimental sympathy is not, in Merish’s account, a moral value, but a normalizing force particular to free-market capitalism that carefully allows the expression of deep feeling while protecting free-market operations and sustaining middle-class hegemony.15 Following this line of thought, we might say that those who adored Ream’s statue of Lincoln took sentimental possession of their dead President at a time of national crisis, just as countless struggling middle-class characters in nineteenth-century domestic fiction took possession of psychologically comforting and personified objects, including pets, plants, household furnishings and even slaves. One important point to be made here, then, is that the success of Ream’s statue was not, as her contemporaries repeatedly claimed, so much a product of artistry as it was of ideology, achieved through shared experiences of sentimental identification. To say so is not to disparage Ream’s achievement, but to recognize that realism functions as a technology, a catalyst for a historically specific mode of subjective self-governance that, to borrow a phrase from Amy Kaplan, “contribute[s] to the construction of a cohesive public sphere.”16 While Kaplan focuses on the illusory nature of such a sphere in her analysis of late nineteenth-century realist fiction, showing how realism ultimately fails to contain class conflict at the end of the century, in Ream’s day the problem was, in some senses, more immediate: the political hope expressed in sentimental experience engendered by realism was one of constituting America itself, particularly in the aftermath of civil war.

21 A striking example of this form of sentimental identification can be found in a description of Lincoln’s face offered by Republican Senator Matthew Hale Carpenter of Wisconsin, who spoke at the unveiling of Ream’s statue in the Capitol Rotunda: He [Lincoln] was tall and gaunt of figure, wholly destitute of grace, slovenly in dress, with a face sadder than ever was worn by man before; a face which mirrored the melancholy scenes in which he was so prominent an actor; a face which spoke of the trials which made his life almost insupportable, of nights without sleep and days full of trouble, of governmental cares, of personal griefs, of war and the sufferings which war begets, of battlefields, hospitals and graves, of widows and orphans, of a great heart-bleeding, a great soul sorrowful.17

22 Before offering this expansive description of Lincoln’s melancholic face, as Ream had captured it in her statue, Carpenter had defended Ream’s attempt to represent not a “Jupiter or Apollo,” but “Abraham Lincoln as he appeared in the White House . . . and as he did on the prairies and in the courtrooms of the West.” Hailing Lincoln as “child of nature” whom Ream, herself a product of the Wild West, had managed to capture perfectly, Carpenter here links the experience of sentimental identification with Lincoln’s all-encompassing sorrow to the American mythology of “nature” and “prairies,” shorthand references to the popular American view of the West as mythical garden, the biblical land of milk and honey. In doing so, he effectively naturalizes the pain of war itself, suggesting that Lincoln’s sadness, like America’s, is part of the transcendental spirit of nature. As a result, all who view the statue of Lincoln, and

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share in his sorrow, might claim a share in the sentimental project of healing the rift in the nation, of stanching, as it were, America’s bleeding heart. The catalyst for this sentimental re-incorporation of the body politic is Lincoln’s most striking feature: “a face sadder than ever was worn my man before.” For their own part, Americans who survived the Civil War had only to look upon Ream’s lifelike statue in order, like Lincoln, to feel more deeply than any people had felt before. To do so, Carpenter implies, is to know the greatness of the nation they had just finished tearing apart. Yet it was Lincoln who would bear the memory of “battlefields, hospitals and graves, of widows and orphans,” all of which would be sentimentally contained—that is, both preserved and carefully managed, made palatable for public consumption—in the realistic form of Ream’s remarkable statue.

23 Even the newspaper coverage of the statue’s unveiling seems to have participated in this sentimental fantasy of national healing and renewal. In addition to reprinting the remarks of those who spoke at the unveiling ceremony, the reporter who covered the event for Washington, D.C.’s The Evening Star wrote the following day of the crowds who tried to gain entrance to the Capitol to catch a first glimpse of Ream’s statue. “The vast assemblage filling the rotunda,” the reporter noted, “was made up of every class—the most distinguished, and the lowliest of the nation—and among the most interested spectators of the scene were groups of colored people, who hold Abraham Lincoln in their heart of hearts.”18 While the facts reported here may certainly have been accurate, what stands out in this account is the utterly democratic nature of the assembled crowd: distinguished and lowly, black and white, all coming together to witness the spectacle of Lincoln’s immortalized body.

24 African Americans receive special notice, not only for their presence, but also for the strength of their sentimental attachment to the dead president. They hold Lincoln in “their heart of hearts,” as if the very strength of their love for him binds them closer to America itself. If they are “lowly,” as this account implies, they are also “of the nation.” If there were any doubt left in readers’ minds about the power of such sentimental experience, the reporter dispels it completely by describing how, as the crowd moved into the Rotunda, “the vast hall seemed to rise to an immeasurable height, the various circlets of shaded lights one above another giving an idea of indefinite vastness” as the effigies of former American heroes and presidents painted in the rotunda “looked out from the canvass upon the sad, thoughtful face of Abraham Lincoln.”19 Lincoln’s “sad” face becomes the sentimental locus not only of national identification, as it connects present-day spectators with the luminaries of America’s past, but of a renewed sense of American exceptionalism. Like the dome of the rotunda, America seems to rise here to “an immeasurable height,” very close, one might say, to heaven itself. America here is also “indefinitely” vast, a sign that that not even civil war can impede the nation’s manifest destiny.

25 While the reading I have sketched out here is only preliminary, my aim has been to document a portion of the cultural work performed by sympathy in mid-nineteenth- century America. Ream’s art, and the lengthy debates surrounding it both in Congress and in newspapers across the United States, possess great value for scholars interested in the history of American nationalism, the work of women artists, the role of affect in the political economy of post-Civil War America and the emergence of realism not just as a dominant postwar aesthetic, but as a powerful catalyst for sentimental identification. Yet only recently has Ream been the subject of critical analysis that

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attempts to locate her work as examples of anything more than exemplary patriotism and the spectacular accomplishments of a child prodigy.

26 Given the wealth of archival material that Ream’s biographers have now made available to scholars, it seems that Ream is long overdue for more serious scholarly consideration. Indeed, the history of her very reception in American history could be a scholarly topic in its own right: beloved by children’s writers, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and Civil War historians, Ream became, in the second half of the twentieth century, something of a conservative American icon.20 Glenn V. Sherwood, whose 1997 biography helped retrieve Ream from obscurity, has gone so far as to claim that Ream’s story may have a “special spiritual meaning” for America and that her accomplishments may be signs of an “overruling Providence” guiding American history. Rather than looking for signs of God’s favor in the intricate lines and lifelike shapes of Ream’s sculpture, it may benefit present-day scholars to read the history of her reception in American letters as an extension, or survival, of the sentimental nationalism elicited by her work in her own time. The cultural work of Ream’s life and art continues to exert its influence today, even if its effects remain more imaginary than real.

NOTES

1. Vinnie Ream, “Personal Recollections of Lincoln . . . ,” Sunday Star, February 9, 1913, Washington, D.C. Reprinted in R.L. Hoxie, Vinnie Ream (Washington, D.C.: Gibson Brothers, 1908) 59-60. Note that the date of re-publication in the collection titled Vinnie Ream is 1908, but that the article cited was published in 1913. The article was obviously added to a later edition of the original 1908 volume, but only the original publication date of 1908 is given. 2. Ream’s most exhaustive biographer is Glenn V. Sherwood. See A Labor of Love: The Life and Art of Vinnie Ream (Hygiene, CO: Sunshine Press Publications, 1997). See also Edward S. Cooper, Vinnie Ream: An American Sculptor (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 2004). For recent critical discussions of Ream’s life and work, see: Melissa Dabakis, “Sculpting Lincoln: Vinnie Ream, Sarah Fisher Ames, and the Equal Rights Movement,” American Art 22 (Spring 2008): 79-101; and Kirk Savage, “Vinnie Ream’s Lincoln (1871): The Sexual Politics of a Sculptor’s Studio,” American Pantheon: Sculptural and Artistic Decoration of the United States Capitol, eds. Donald R. Kennon and Thomas P. Somma (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, 2004) 160-175; and Carmen A. Prioli, “ ‘Wonder Girl from the West’ ”: Vinnie Ream and the Congressional Statue of Abraham Lincoln,” Journal of American Culture 12 (2004) 1-20. 3. For more on the “Wisconsin theory,” see Prioli 14 and note 67. 4. The phrase “cultural work” comes from Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford UP, 1985). For more recent work on sentimentalism in American literature, in the vein I am interested in here, see Glenn Hendler, PublicSentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP, 2001); Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); and Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 5. Sherwood 340.

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6. The phrase from Brown comes from “Fables and Forming of Americans,” Modern Fiction Studies 43 (1997) 115-143. The text cited comes from page 115. The phrase “unspeakable sadness” comes from John Hay, “Life in the White House in the Time of Lincoln,” Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (November 1890): 33-37. I learned of the reference from Sherwood, 26. 7. E.G. Waite, “Vinnie Ream,” Overland Monthly (August 1871): 144-150. Publicly accessible electronically in the Making of America database, < http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moagrp/>. 8. The full text of the debate is reprinted in Sherwood. The passage quote appears on page 59. The full text of the debate is also available online as part of a web site published in conjunction with Sherwood’s biography. See 9. Sherwood 52. For more on the debate, see note 7 above. 10. Sherwood 52 11. Sherwood 62. For more on the debate, see note 7 above. 12. Reprinted in R.L. Hoxie, Vinnie Ream, 5. Kellog’s comments were first published “in the local papers” around Washington, D.C., in February, 1869. 13. Reprinted in Sherwood 163-164 and R.L. Hoxie, Vinnie Ream 16-28 . The original speeches were first published in The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., January 26, 1871. 14. Merish 4, 5. 15. Merish 4. 16. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) 9. 17. Sherwood 168 and R.L. Hoxie, 27. 18. Sherwood 155 and R.L. Hoxie 17. 19. Sherwood 155 and R.L. Hoxie 17. 20. See, for example, Harold Holzer and Lloyd Ostendorf, “Vinnie Ream: The Girl Who Sculpted President Lincoln,” Civil War Times, 21:3 (1982) 26-33 and Cecile Ream DeBirny, “Vinnie Ream,” Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine 107 (February 1973): 89-96. Children’s books about Vinnie Ream include: Gordon Langley Hall, Vinnie Ream: The Story of the Girl who Sculpted Lincoln (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963); Dawn FitzGerald, Vinnie and Abraham, 2006, illus. Catherine Stock (Watertown, Mass.: Charlesbridge, 2009); and Maureen Stack Sappey, Letters from Vinnie (Honesdale, Pa.: Front Street/Boyds Mills Press, 1995).

INDEX

Keywords : sentimentality, sympathy, sculpture, realism, American art, aesthetics, nineteenth century, Vinnie Ream Hoxie, Abraham Lincoln

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The Reinvention of Identity in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex

Aristi Trendel

1 In his second novel, Middlesex1, Jeffrey Eugenides is deep in the Greeks. If Melville in Moby Dick sets up an anthology of whaling, Eugenides builds his collection of Greekness. It may be because the Greeks found a mythical way out of the contradictions and the ambiguities that characterize the fragmented human being in search of unity through Hermaphroditus, the figure of an indivisible duality, quite appropriate to express the diverse reality of American unity. The Pulitzer-prized writer revisits the myth in a novel way combining it with the aporias of ethnicity. Gender trouble in Middlesex could hardly veil the immigrant and ethnic experience in America that spans three generations of a Greek family in the twentieth century. The novel is about reinventing your identity on different levels, be that Greek to American, female to male, says the author who, digging up his Greek origins, makes an original contribution to the Greek- American novel.2

2 Although reviewers, unable to see the connection, found these two levels incongruous, Eugenides bridges this apparent gap by interweaving the strands of gender and ethnicity in the narrative, as his narrator sets out to construct his identity. The hyphenated being is the epitome of this Bildungsromanand novel of quest, both forms favored by ethnic literature. At the same time, Middlesex is a sort of epic which is a genre “generally associated with ethnogenesis, the emergence of a people, and can therefore seemingly be appropriated transnationally by all peoples,” as Werner Sollors says in Beyond Ethnicity (Sollors 238).In this multigenerational saga, the Stephanides invent and construct their Americanness and their Greekness against a backdrop of an American society at grips with assimilation and multiculturalism, and a Greek community responding to these issues.

3 I will argue that there is no celebratory, aggressive multiculturalism in Middlesex; in his construction of ethnicity the author seems to opt for a middle rooted cosmopolitan way paved by the second generation which adopted American values, while preserving a native heritage under the strain of conflicting demands. George Giannaris in his study, TheGreeks Against the Odds:Bilinguism in GreekLiterature, makes clear that “the second and

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third generation […] finally declare that this […] is their origin, and that assimilation does not mean disappearance.” (Giannaris 54). I would like to inquire into the formal expression of such a declaration that occurs along the generational continuum singularly marked by discontinuities in this archive of literary discourse.3

4 Thus the second generation is prominent and pivotal in the work of this third generation writer who recreates the immigrant past through a distant historical perspective and in a distinctively fictional form. Indeed, John Reily, in “Criticism of Ethnic Literature: Seeing the Whole Story,” maintains that the assertion of ethnicity in literature can be made only through a procedure by which a writer resolves formal problems, and can be completed only as the audience makes sense of it in terms of their competence with literary expression (Reily). The main formal problem Eugenides had to solve was the connection of the reinvention of the self, an enduring theme in American literature, with its ancient Greek antecedent, and its integration in a generational pattern that bore a self or selves in constant process of confrontation and composition.

5 Some reviewers also criticized the depiction of the transsexual experience in Middlesex finding it weak, although Suzan Frelich Appleton’s essay, “Gender, Law, and Narrative: Contesting Gender in Popular Culture and Family Law: Middlesex and Other Transgender Tales,” proves the opposite. However, beyond this debate, what is of interest to us here is to see how the issue of gender becomes fully meaningful in the construction of ethnicity. K.N. Conzen and a host of other scholars conceptualise ethnicity as “a process of construction or invention which incorporates, adapts and amplifies pre- existing communal solidarities, cultural attitudes and historical memories.” (Conzen 4-5). The three pillars that support the novel are Greek mythology, history and religion, such cultural markers ensuring continuity through three generations and engineering the reinvention of ethnicity as a constitutive part of identity.

6 Sollors, in Beyond Ethnicity, questions the notion of generation and presents it as a metaphor rather than a precise location. Eugenides takes up the cultural construct of generation succession to follow the transformation of the immigrant into a public ethnic and finally into a symbolic ethnic. Precisely, this is how Foucault defines discontinuity: “jeu de transformations spécifiées, différentes les unes des autres […] et liées entre elles selon les schémas de dépendance.” (Foucault 680). Continuity is viewed by Foucault as a locus of the dissolution of identity and of change. Discontinuity is held up as positive, as the possibility to redefine the subject by his incessant mobility. The gap, the lacuna which the American experience entails by wedging a hyphen, the mark of discontinuity, into identity seems to be filled by the American dream. Giannaris points out that the Greek American novels embody the success story of an ethnic minority that is unusually responsive to the American dream (Giannaris 53). Indeed, a progressive trend of upward social mobility can be observed in the Stephanides family, whose emigration to America is precipitated by the end of the Greek dream in 1922, to recover the Turkish territories in Asia Minor. I would like to look into the generational pattern, with a special emphasis on the second generation, as it is delineated within an American society wrestling with issues of descent and consent.

7 Although Eugenides claims that it was not the immigrant experience that inspired him the most, the grandparents’ story in Middlesex constitutes a novel within a novel combining all the characteristics (fabula microstructure, frames, a worldview homologous to a new version of American history) that inform an immigrant novel

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according to William Q. Boelhower’s definition of the genre (Boelhower). One of the poles of tension that ground the structuring of the fabula, the Old World, is in the heart of the Greek sensibility, as it involves the death of the Great Idea, originally referring to the psychic union of the Greeks of the Greek Kingdom with the Greeks of the Ottoman Empire (1844), but later extended to territorial claims.

8 The narrator is a “grandchild of Byzantium,” the offspring of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, which brought his-her grandparents to America endowing them with a project. Already on the boat they reinvent themselves. From brother and sister, Lefty and Des become husband and wife, “aware that what happened now would become the truth” (75), thus hosting the recessive gene responsible for Calliope’s hermaphrodism. As the muse of heroic poetry and having Homer in her genes (4), he-she sings her grandparents’ exodus from the massacres of burning Smyrna letting the reader surmise what Eugenides makes clear in a radio interview (Moorhem), their link with Zeus and Hera who were not only husband and wife but also siblings. The process of acculturation for the Greek couple is painful and incomplete. “I do not want to look like an Amerikanidha” (94), declares Des who sticks throughout her life to the defining quality of womanhood in Greek peasant culture, “dropi,” shamefulness.

9 Lefty’s imperfectly learnt English is forgotten at the end of his life marked by his attachment to rebetika and his endeavors to restore Sappho’s poetry. Although the new world means for them salvation and what Katherine Zepantis Keller calls “a metaphysical actualisation of the self” (Keller 48), assimilation for this first generation is viewed as an imposition and the melting pot ideology as an instrument of political will. The English class graduation pageant at the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, where Lefty found a short employment, is a case in point. The successful graduates enter a giant cauldron in Old World’s traditional costumes and emerge in mufti waving American flags to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” Yet, the melting pot concept cannot be viewed simply as a process of cultural fusion, since the resolution finally points to an experience of alienation. At the end of their life, the grandparents become materially dependent upon their children and appear hardly adjusted to their environment.

10 If the grandparents’ story constitutes an immigrant novel within the novel, with the parents’ story Eugenides turns to the ethnic novel. “The dominant theme of these novels” (immigrant and ethnic), says Giannaris, “is the need for the preservation of the national and traditional identity of the Greek, while, at the same time, an ‘anti-theme’ responds to the need for an unavoidable assimilation” (Giannaris 54). This anti-theme is carried out by the two main characters and representatives of the second generation, Milton and Tessie and in particular the former, as traditional gender roles place Tessie in a secondary position. Moreover, the narrator authenticates the paternal experience, “I need to go behind the camera and see things through my father’s eyes” (257), and puts forward a construction of identity that involves not an erasing but a doubling process. Milton’s name is symptomatic of such an enhancement: behind the English poet there is an ancient Greek general, Miltiades. Likewise, Tessie and Milton’s consanguineous marriage is the result of an attraction based on each other’s American looks and attitude. But in addition to such narrative props, it is the concepts of public ethnicity and of rooted cosmopolitanism that support the construction of identity in Middlesex, and finally attempt to reconcile American values with native group’s values.

11 The concept of public ethnicity is based on the conflation of ethnicity and the operative notion of what it is to be American. As Colin Greer puts it in “The Ethnic

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Question,” “in a strong sense” the concept advances “a view of national identity which confirms, at once, the efficacy of political pluralism, immigrant success, and government support of valued citizens” (Greer 132). Milton Stephanides exemplifies the single-minded pursuer of the American dream, the rugged individualist who follows a straight-line assimilation. The early American reproductions in the couple’s bedroom, offering them “connection with the country’s founding myths” (266), are indicative of the couple’s integration. Milton scrambles up the ladder of socio- economic opportunity and achieves inclusion fighting his way alone out of overwhelming material deficiencies. Taking up his father’s bar, he sets up Hercules Hot Dogs chain and unlike Harry Mark Petrakis’s characters becomes successful in the Greek business par excellence, restaurant-ownership. Integration is achieved through education and adherence to the laissez-faire individualism and enterprise.

12 As a situation ethnic, Milton refuses to work and live in the Greek town, but threads the family’s way through the different layers of American society and up to the Grosse Point, the upper class suburb, “where you go to wash yourself of ethnicity” (382), as the narrator aphoristically states about the suburb’s private school. Through cunning and defiance, he bypasses the discriminatory codes meant to keep ethnics out of the WASP suburb thus becoming the first Greek to gain entrance, which confers a collective significance upon individual achievement. However, it is the figure of the cosmopolitan that rises against the politics of descent: Assimilation through residential integration is here the appropriation of a status.No structure of inequality and sacrifice appears inherent in assimilation. Ross Posnock, in “The Dream of Deracination,” pointing back to the birth of cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century, as the enactment of ideals of Enlightenment liberalism reminds us of the historical affinity between the cosmopolitan and the egalitarian (Posnock 803).

13 Milton follows the cosmopolitan tradition of the American egalitarian spirit. Yet once settled in Middlesex, the name of the street and of the futuristic house that symbolically evokes duality, he looks to the government for protection of the middle- class all-Americanness, inveighing against Stephen J. Roth, the judge who rules the desegregation of Detroit schools: “You see, Tessie? You understand why your dear old husband wanted to get the kids out of the school system? Because if I didn’t, that goddamn Roth would be busing them to school in downtown Nairobi” (318). Defending and defining one’s position in opposition to other groups is precisely the characteristic of the public ethnic according to Geer.

14 Nevertheless, the challenge of the cosmopolitan incites the charge of deracination. Posnock points out that “during the two-decade reign of multiculturalism [the sixties and the seventies] the cosmopolitanism and the universalism it sponsors have been under house arrest” (Posnock 804). Assimilationism does seem a challenge to descent and Hansen’s law, the transcendence of ethnicity through the proclivity of the second generation to deny its origins, dubbed as treason, is precisely a moral appraisal of such a challenge.Marcus Lee Hansen’s polarized view of the second generation as traitors and the third generation as redeemers, though severely criticised, finds some relevance in Middlesex. Milton’s attitude, measured against the three main factors of ethnicity, language, religion and origin, appears wanting. Although his discourse is marked by ethnolectal indices, the Greek terms that point to the impossibility of translation, Milton’s attempts to learn Greek are abandoned. Moreover, he is defined as an “apostate at the age of eight over the exorbitant price of votive candles” (13), and his

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challenge to the Church, the main means for the preservation of the ethnic minority surpassing language and folk tradition, remains a lifelong defining trait.

15 But the rift with the Greek community is brought about by the divergence of views and interests over politics and in particular the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. His invective, “To Hell with the Greeks” (410), seals his betrayal. In this consent over descent debate, the narrator’s comment is categorical: “In 1974, instead of reclaiming his roots by visiting Bursa, my father renounced them” (410). Thus the trip back to the Old Country, planned by Milton himself, remains suspended. This journey back to the old world, paralleling the original one to the new world, constitutes an expansion of the journey frame, a fundamental category in the immigration novel. Although this trip is viewed as tourism by Chapter Eleven, Milton’s younger son, it is textualized as an identificatory re-inscription in Greece, for it involves the fulfilment of a “tama.” This “promise to a saint,” Desdemona’s pledge to Saint Christopher to repair his church in Bithynios, if he saved her son from certain death during the second world war, becomes a structuring element in the narrative.

16 Indeed, the Church is in the heart of continuity-discontinuity dialectic. Omnipresent in the narrative, it frames the life of the group, although it is also a spring-board to comic episodes. The priest in Eugenides is not a noble figure; yet compared with the abject priestly characters in Kazan’s work, he fares better. Tessie, unable to resist her Americanised cousin, declines to marry Father Mike, but continues to be a pious church-goer. The pull to Orthodoxy, whether spiritual or cultural, remains strong, as religion becomes instrumental in the reinvention of ethnicity. Thus Milton gives his tacit agreement to his wife to fulfil his mother’s pledge (tama), when he decides to undertake the trip to Turkey, although he had never acknowledged such an obligation. However, the decisive volte-face occurs when he hands a large bill to his wife to light not one but “a bunch of candles” for his daughter after her disappearance (535), though still resisting this act of allegiance to his faith.

17 Nevertheless, the suspended trip that runs through the narrative, the vicarious candle- lighting, and the sole presence of the formerly alienated Greek group at his funeral underline the recognition of the moral and ethical weight of the community. This is how Dr Luce, the doctor who believing in nurture prescribes Callie’s eradication of maleness, refers to Milton and Tessie: “In general the parents seem assimilationist and very “all-American” in their outlook, but the presence of this deeper ethnic identity should not be overlooked.” (492). Indeed, Eugenides depicts Kwame Anthony Appiah’s rooted cosmopolitans caught in the fire of conflicting loyalties. Appiah’s ideal of rooted or partial cosmopolitanism does not ignore the challenge of engaging with difference, “does not seek to destroy patriotism”, and “is not exhausted by the appeal to moral universalism” (Appiah 222). Thus it evades the pitfall of cosmopolitanism synonymous with globalism and prepares the way to symbolic ethnicity, an invaluable asset for the third generation.

18 Mary Waters advances that “the groups which have achieved a degree of individual and group social mobility adopt ethnicity as a symbolic voluntary identity which is intermittent in its effects on the individual and freely chosen as a valued personal asset” (Waters). The adult narrator who, in full awareness, tells the story of the reinvention of his identity goes all the way from an “all-American daughter” (470) to a Greek-American male-female alternating between the “we” of Americanness and the “we” of Greekness and thus articulating what Geertz phrases as “the irremovable

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strangeness of diversity”. (Geertz 120). Appiah does note that “collective identities … provide what we may call scripts: narratives that people can use in shaping their projects and in telling their lifestories” (Appiah 22). To a certain extent, this very narrative constitutes the fulfilment of the American Dream for the narrator who dreamt of writing a book with a long Greek name to add to the Great Book series his parents attempted to read.

19 The second generation attainment of the American Dream provides greater freedom of choice for their offspring who gains entry into one of the highest institutions of American society, the State Department and becomes a cultural attaché in Berlin, an official representative of American culture. The Turkish immigrant he contemplates in the streets inspires him the aphorism, “We’re all made up of many parts, other halves” (478), which defines the American experience, and takes him backward to his Asia Minor ancestry. In spite of the grandmother’s fans that display the Turkish genocide against the Greeks, there is no irredentist ideology in Eugenides, as in Elias Kazan, another second generation writer, no desire in the third generation Greek Anatolian to recover the lost territory.

20 There is only the narrative will to capitalize on the accumulated Greek heritage and keep it alive as part and parcel of Americanness. The danger of an irrevocable loss is being diagnosed, at the beginning of the narrative, in the narrator’s description of the Greek church: “Assumption, with its spirited coffee hours, its bad foundation and roof leaks, its strenuous ethnic festivals, its catechisms classes where our heritage was briefly kept alive before being allowed to die in the great diaspora” (13). While “the old country” gradually “recedes” (20) for the first generation, and is temporarily betrayed by the second, it is redeemed in the nick of time by the third. At the end of the narrative, Cal promises his grandmother to fulfil her pledge to the Saint and repair his church thus keeping the trip back to Bursa on hold, as the narrative gap between the adolescent at the end of the novel and the adult at the beginning is not bridged.

21 However, another trip within the country, symbolically over-determined, is completed. In the search for his identity, Cal goes west and in this conquest he enacts the union of his maleness and femaleness. The show at the Western club, where he has to work to earn a living after fleeing home, acts out the ancient myth of the union between Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, the water nymph. Yet his new identity would never be legitimate without its validation by another rite of passage. At his father’s funeral, Cal staying with his grandmother who reveals to him the family secret, valiantly guards the Middlesex door. Leaving adolescence and abandoning a single- gender mode of being are sealed by the old Greek custom that requires a man to block the door so that the dead’s spirit would not re-enter the house; “Middlesex” finally yields its meaning: “it was still the beacon it was intended to be … divested of the formalities of bourgeois life, a place designed for a new type of human being, who would inhabit a new word. I could not help feeling of course, that that person was me, me and all the others like me” (595).

22 Thus gender in Middlesex becomes a metaphor for the composite self. In fact, “Americans become more ‘American’ and less ethnic all the time. But in the course of participating in this process, they may also—simultaneously—become more ‘ethnic’,” as Glazer and Moynihan state in their introduction to Ethnicity (Glazer and Moynihan 16). Eugenides,who carefully avoids the pitfalls of essentialism and nationalism through the postmodern self-reflexivity of the narrative, sets up a new version of the American

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dream, the viability of the hyphenated being. This future-orientated ethnic renaissance which, as Sollors underlines, “fits into the American tradition of backward utopias” (Sollors 211),constitutes a tentative synthesis of pluralistic and unitary impulses.

23 In this ethnic revival by memory, the author created a sense of the experience of the second generation in the frontline trenches of the cultural struggle. Through his mergence of gender and ethnicity, he amalgamated the liminality of the immigrant’s and the hermaphrodite’s experience relying on a second generation at the crossroads to create the tension of conflicting demands. Making the Greek presence felt in the American letters may augur the renaissance of the third generation Greek-American novel in a predictable discontinuity/continuity with the second generation one.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Bhabba, Homi K. “On the Irremovable Strangeness of Being Different,” in “Four Views on Ethnicity,” PMLA, 113: 1 (January 1998): 28-51.

Boelhower, Q William. “The Immigrant Novel as Genre.” MELUS 8.1 (Spring 1981): 3-13.

Conzen, K.N., et al. “The Invention of Ethnicity: The Perspective from the U.S.A.” Journal of American Ethnic History. 11 (Fall 1992): 3-41.

Eugenides, Jeffrey. Middlesex.New York: Picador,2002.

Foucault, Michel. Dits et Ecrits:1954-1988. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

Geertz, Clifford. “The Uses of Diversity.” Michigan Quarterly Review 25 (1986): 105-23.

Giannaris, George. TheGreeks Against the Odds:Bilinguism in GreekLiterature.NewYork: Seaburn Publishing Group, 2004.

Glazer, Nathan and Daniel P.Moynihan. Ethnicity: Theory and Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.

Greer, Colin. “The Ethnic Question,” Social Text, No. 9/19 (Spring-Summer 1984): 119-136.

Kalogeras, Yiorgos. “Eleni: Hellenizing the Subject, Westernizing the Discourse,” MELUS 18: 2 Summer 1993): 77-89.

Moorhem van Bram. “The Novel as a Mental Picture.” 3 A.M. Magazine, 2003.

Ross, Posnock. “The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism,”AmericanLiterary History, 12:4 (Winter 2000): 802-818.

Reily, John. “Criticism of Ethnic Literature: Seeing the Whole Story,” MELUS, 5:1 (Spring, 1978): 2-13.

Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

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Waters, C. Mary. “Ethnic and Racial Groups in the U.S.A.: Conflict and Cooperation.” www.unu.edu.unupress.

Zepantis Keller, Katherine. “Gender, Myth and Memory, Ethnic Continuity in Greek-American Narrative,” MELUS, 20: 3 (Autumn 1995): 47-65.

NOTES

1. All the quotes from the novel refer to the Picador edition, Jeffrey Eugenides. Middlesex. New York: Picador, 2002. 2. Bram van Moorhem. “The Novel as a Mental Picture of its Era,”3 A.M. Magazine, http://www.3ammagazine.com/litarchives/2003/sep/ interview_jeffrey_eugenides.html 3. As Yiorgos Kalogeras, who uses Foucault’s concept of the archive, says, “What cannot be emphasized enough is […] the fact that these culture-bound stories and history belong to the archive─the general system of formation and transformation of statements” (Kalogeras 78).

INDEX

Keywords: assimilation, Bildungsroman, continuity-discontinuity, ethnic novel, Ethnicity, gender, Greek-American literature, Hansen’s law, Hermaphroditus, identity, immigrant novel, integration, multiculturalism, multigenerational, politics of descent, public ethnic, rooted cosmopolitan, second generation, symbolic ethnic, third generation., transsexual

AUTHORS

ARISTI TRENDEL Université du Maine

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Refusing to Write Like Henry James: Women Reforming Realism in Fin- de-Siècle America1

Sarah Wadsworth

1 In her novel Roger Hunt (1892)—a novel of near Jamesian nuance and irony—Celia Parker Woolley incorporates a scene in which a handful of characters engage in “psychological analysis” (35) of the eponymous antihero: a brilliant but unscrupulous egotist who has abandoned his alcoholic wife and persuaded a naïve, infatuated young woman to unite with him in a bigamous marriage. Following several pages of discussion of the scandalous incident and its perpetrator, Kitty Somers, Hunt’s long-time friend, laments to her husband that Hunt’s new bride “will be perfectly miserable!” (3). When her husband flippantly predicts, “No, she will be imperfectly miserable; but that’s worse,” Kitty exclaims “pettishly”: “Oh, I wish you wouldn’t try to talk like one of Henry James’s novels” (36).

2 More than just a sly jab at a writerly technique that met with as much puzzlement as praise in the late nineteenth century, Woolley’s allusion to James in this, her most Jamesian, novel begs for critical scrutiny. To begin, the remark suggests that even as James creatively responded to popular writers so, too, popular writers occasionally registered their responses to James’s fiction in their own creative work.2 Revealing both a consciousness of—perhaps even a self-consciousness concerning—James’s stature and style as well as a rejection of his rhetorical maneuvers, Kitty’s remark in Roger Hunt signals a degree of discontent with the literary mode that would soon become canonized as high realism. By extension, the refusal to talk like Henry James serves as a point of entry into a vast body of work by American women writers of the late nineteenth century who chose to reject, revise, or, put differently, “reform” realism in order to fulfill their own literary and extra-literary ends.

3 Together with Woolley’s earlier novels, Love and Theology (1887) and A Girl Graduate (1889), Roger Hunt was among the more than one thousand works of American fiction displayed in the library of the Woman’s Building of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.3 This library, amounting to over eight thousand volumes of writing by women, serves as my

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pool of data for this critical inquiry. Designed to showcase the literary achievements of women from across the country and around the world, the Woman’s Building Library provides an unrivaled opportunity to contemplate fiction by American women en masse. Popular humorist Marietta Holley summed up the way many American women must have felt upon viewing this landmark collection of women’s texts when she had the folksy protagonist of her novel Samantha at the World’s Fair (1893) announce with evident pride: “right here I see my own books; there they wuz a-standin’ up jest as noble and pert as if they wuz to home in the what-not behind the parlor door, not a- feelin’ the least mite put out before princes, or zars” (255). While Samantha’s homespun homage revels in the comforting familiarity of recognized texts, the literary historian today is struck, in contrast, by the preponderance of unfamiliar, unknown, unremembered texts.

4 For those interested in non-canonical women’s writing of the late nineteenth century, the Woman’s Building Library offers an embarrassment of riches. Owing to the fact that the collection grew largely through the grass-roots efforts of women involved in the international club movement, this library more closely reflects the “reality” of the overall corpus of women’s writing than the tastes and ideals of a cultural elite self- selected to identify the “best” and most “important” works. This paper highlights three clusters of novels that depart from the canonical realist text—what I will call the domestic reform novel, the regional reform novel, and the historical reform novel. By considering both form and reform in these ubiquitous nineteenth-century novels, this essay explores the assumptions and aims of some of those late nineteenth-century writers who, like Celia Parker Woolley, preferred not to write like Henry James.

5 Despite their obscurity as literary figures, a surprising number of the novelists in the Woman’s Building Library would be easily recognizable to anyone schooled in the annals of U.S. women’s history. In fact, many prominent women who were active in reform movements, especially women’s rights, and in professional activities beyond the domestic sphere wrote fiction in conjunction with their professional and reform activities, often producing novels in tandem with nonfiction works. According to the view of these novelist-reformers, fiction—like women’s clubs, newspapers, magazines, tracts, courses of study, petitions, and church auxiliaries—constituted a potentially effective medium of social reform. And, typically, their fiction reflects precisely the social problems and concerns that they addressed through other avenues, such as journalistic writing, public speaking, club activities, community service, education, and reform organizations. The novels they published descend from the large class of fiction Jane Tompkins illuminates in Sensational Designs—fiction that “articulat[es] and propos[es] solutions for the problems that shape a particular historical moment” (xi). In the Preface to her novel Rebecca; or, A Woman’s Secret (1867), novelist-reformer Caroline Corbin sums up this approach, stating, “It is not strictly as a work of art that this book appeals to public favor and criticism. It has not been written for immortality, but to serve, if it may, a single purpose to the present day and generation” (5). In using fiction to address complex social problems, women like Corbin participated in a wide- ranging and influential literary reform movement in nineteenth-century America: a movement aimed at re-forming literature as well as enlisting literature in the cause of social reform. As summed up by a representative of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, “fiction is too powerful a weapon to be left in careless hands” (quoted in Parker 141).

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6 The existence of so many reform novels, and their inclusion in the Woman’s Building Library, is a testament to the power that many nineteenth-century writers ascribed to fiction as an agent of social change. This was a tradition of nineteenth-century women writers and reformers who identified the home as their locus of influence and sought to bring the highest ideals of the domestic sphere to bear on the world at large. In many cases, novelist-reformers of the late nineteenth century upheld this time-honored belief in the sanctity of women’s domestic role while actively engaging in timely reform efforts that targeted a wide range of social ills. More than a few of them sought to expand women’s role beyond the confines of the home, however, into such traditionally male professional havens as medicine and law. Moreover, some went beyond the reform of existing social institutions to advocate more radical solutions. Often their aims coincided with those of earlier novelist-reformers such as Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe; however, the novelist-reformers of the fin de siècle were decidedly post-sentimental in ideology and technique.

7 Many critics over the years have faulted reform fiction, “problem novels,” and protest literature for their privileging of didacticism over aesthetics. Critics of the late nineteenth century, however, often located in the best fiction of this type a synthesis of the didactic and the aesthetic. Indeed, for many readers, morality was an indispensable component of art.4 Celia Parker Woolley addressed precisely this debate in an 1893 letter to the editor of the Dial: Is our coming literature to be chiefly a medium of instruction, of moral impulse and inspiration, or of mere æsthetic or intellectual enjoyment? Is it to be dominated most by the living instincts of those who write and those who read, or by the so- called art-spirit? What is the true proportion between this art-spirit and a more didactic purpose? In a word, how real and strong and vital are we willing our literature should become? (“The East and the West, Once More” 216; quoted in Schweninger 49-50)

8 Woolley’s use of the word “real” here clearly establishes the terms of the debate. In this piece, Woolley criticizes fiction that is merely “the mouthpiece of a great idea, unveiling some social wrong or abuse, stimulating men to clearer thinking and better living” but lacking in “literary flavor” and argues for a proper balance between the “art-spirit” and “ethical purpose.” She defends “[t]he literary consciousness of the West, as represented in a writer like [Hamlin] Garland.” According to Woolley, this “literary consciousness . . . is profoundly stirred by those new ideals which demand a larger thought and life-content in literature, which would make it the servant of humanity’s most pressing needs, using it to stimulate thought, elevate social conditions and standards, sweeten and ennoble life all round.” As Woolley explains, “Mr. Garland belongs to that class of writers, of which Helen Gardiner is a still more marked example, who care more about life than about theories of the art which seeks to express and represent life: a choice wisely made from both the moralist’s and artist’s point of view” (217).

9 In crafting their fiction to fill the role of “servant of humanity’s most pressing needs,” many novelist-reformers joined Woolley in holding their fiction to high ethical as well as artistic standards and aspiring to greater humanitarian heights than they believed the “art-spirit” alone could attain.5 Strictly belletristic or “aesthetic” literature was not, for them, a loftier form, but, rather, a vitiated mode, diminished by its detachment from the troubled conditions and immediate needs of contemporary society. For Woolley and the other writers discussed here, intellectualized aestheticism saps fiction

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of its engagement with real social issues while moralism (insofar as it avoids dogmatism and partisanship) can infuse it with life and bring together “those who write and those who read” in a community of benevolence. And if such fiction was not yet universally praised, its canonization was only a matter of time, predicted some. According to a section titled “Woman in Literature” in the 1890 volume Woman; Her Character, Culture, and Calling, “the time will surely come when combined benevolent and aesthetic purposes will be considered the test of highest merit, and when that day comes, the number of women esteemed among the worthies of literature will be proportionately much greater than now” (Bourinot and Austin 107).

10 Along with Roger Hunt, Woolley’s novel A Girl Graduate typifies what I referred to earlier as the domestic reform novel. Shortly before this novel’s publication, Woolley summed up its dominant theme as the “social life and aspirations of a beautiful young girl, daughter of a working man, who has been educated beyond the sphere in which she was born.”6 In this novel Woolley, a “literary activist” of the first rank,7 tells the story of Maggie Dean, a recent high school graduate in the Midwestern town of Litchfield. Although a star orator, smart and well-liked, Maggie finds that after finishing school she has no direction, no pressing plans. Instead, “[a] hundred contradictory plans and ambitions filled her mind.” Moreover, “[u]nlike most of her mates, Maggie was unwilling to spend her days in a round of empty cares. She could not be always arranging her room or making over her dresses” (240).

11 In fact, the novel is not so much about formal education in itself; instead it reveals the consequences of education in day-to-day life, the opportunities it opens up, and the avenues that remain closed as a result of inadequate access to higher education. Woolley shows how Maggie’s real education begins only after graduation when she confronts and overcomes the limited expectations and opportunities granted her. In this particular—the novel’s studied analysis of the causes and consequences of the limitations imposed on a young woman of imagination, intelligence, and sensitivity— Woolley’s theme is not substantially different from that of James in such novels as The Europeans and The Portrait of a Lady. But in A Girl Graduate Woolley is more interested in exploring practical solutions than in exposing ambiguities and anatomizing conflicted psyches.

12 In the process of pursuing her post-high-school education, Woolley’s heroine disappoints an earnest and honorable suitor, walks a fine line between friendship and flirtation with a less serious and less honorable young man, and rebuffs the undesired advances of two much older men—a married minister, old enough to be her father, whose attentions to her are altogether repellant, and an even older judge who hopes that his high status in the town will reconcile her to a “mercenary marriage” (299). Rather than acquiescing in a marriage of convenience, Maggie spends “hours in profound study,” determined to “work . . . study . . . improve herself in a hundred ways . . . be discreet and dignified . . . [and] learn to say sharp things to people” (240-41).8 Following the example of her older sister, Maggie overcomes her “girlish dread of being considered ‘literary’ and ‘strong-minded,’ terms of opprobrious meaning in a community like Litchfield” (257) and eventually befriends Miss Graham, a somewhat Bohemian “strong-minded” and “independent spinster” who presides over a liberal reading and discussion group known as an Emerson Club. (As the narrator informs us— perhaps with a veiled allusion to her own project in the novel Love and Theology —“through the insidious paths of literature [Miss Graham] tried to lead [the young

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people’s] minds away from a decrepit theology” [196].) Maggie encounters many stumbling blocks over the course of this bildungsroman—including the grave illness of her mother, a crippling on-the-job injury sustained by her father, a social humiliation, and employment discrimination, as well as the sexual harassment alluded to earlier; nevertheless, she gains considerable independence, maturity, and self-respect along the way. In addition, by continually stressing “usefulness” and service to others, Woolley reinforces her own approach to the writing of fiction while suggesting that women who seek education and employment outside marriage are not shirking their duty but rather expanding upon and fulfilling it.

13 A close cousin of the domestic reform novel, Winnie Louise Taylor’s His Broken Sword (1889) exemplifies the regionalist novel adapted to reformist ends. Set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, His Broken Sword deliberately establishes a sense of location that is both geographically authentic and thematically significant. In this novel, Taylor conceives of the Upper Midwest as a place where the heroine, Katherine, can combine the best influences of a Southern mother, who strives to redeem her participation in slavery through philanthropical support of African Americans, and a Northern father, the product of traditional New England education and culture. With this synthesis of cultural influences creating fertile ground upon which the heroine may flourish, Taylor unexpectedly introduces the theme of prison reform, which becomes the focus of the novel. The conflict centers on Katherine’s engagement and subsequent marriage to Robert Allston, a man who inadvertently kills another man while defending her honor. Through Robert’s incarceration, the novel explores a series of questions leveled at the criminal justice system: “What must be the moral effect of all this forcing, cramping, deadening process? What kind of men were likely to be turned out from this crushing, relentless, indiscriminating governmental machine, where the good and the bad, the weak and the depraved, the young and the old, were massed in together and levelled over by a resistless plane? What chance for the bruised reed here?” (262-63).

14 In the 1893 edition of His Broken Sword a new preface by Edward Everett Hale, to whom the book was dedicated, explains that Taylor “did not write the book because she wanted to write a story” but rather “because she wanted thoughtful people in America to remember the prisoner in his prison.” Emphasizing rational inquiry, compassion, and conscience, rather than sentimentality or literary virtuosity, Hale continues: Miss Taylor would tell us that she has written this book, not for the purpose of winning repute as an author, not for the purpose of making us cry as we read of the long-wrought suffering of her hero; but to interest us, as she has been interested, in the lives of those who are within the four walls. And I think she means that the book shall ask us the question whether we do personally know the lives of prisoners, the lives of prisoners’ families, the method of administration of the prison system, as we ought to know these things. For one, I shall be surprised if any person can read this book through without a quickened conscience in these affairs. (vii-viii)

15 For Hale, and for other advocates of the reform novel, stimulating interest, activating conscience, and spurring readers to action is more important than proffering entertainment, promoting aesthetics, inflaming emotions, or cultivating the imagination. Equally important, the author does not write fiction seeking literary laurels to advance her own reputation; rather, this kind of reformed realism is a selfless pursuit undertaken in the interests of protecting the powerless.

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16 For the most part, contemporary reviewers concurred with Hale in his high appraisal of the novel’s ends and means. Although one reviewer expressed the opinion that His Broken Sword “is a strong story not dependent for its interest on the thread of earnest purpose which runs through it” (“Fiction” 186), the Wisconsin Journal of Education declared that the novel “was written with a purpose by one who in philanthropic work has had long acquaintances with prison life . . . . The good in the midst of evil even in criminals, the burden of a debased nature dragging men down who are further crushed by the harsh treatment of their fellows — all this and more as an effective plea for a more kindly, considerate, helpful and wise treatment of those who are classed as criminals” (“Our Book Table” 460). A reviewer for The Dial similarly focused on the novel’s “underlying motive,” noting that “[i]t is really an argument for prison reform, and one made all the more convincing to judicious minds by its rejection of all the methods of sensationalism . . . The plea is silently and unobtrusively enforced” (Payne 66-67). Just as Hale, in his preface, implicitly praised the novel for its lack of sentimentality, these reviews do not fault His Broken Sword for its undisguised moralism but rather admire it for its unsentimental, non-sensational, realistic, and judicious scrutiny of the problem of prison reform.

17 In contrast to canonical regionalism as represented by such authors as Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Rose Terry Cooke, which often evokes a nostalgic sense of a traditional rural past, regional reform novels tend to depict present conditions while simultaneously looking forward to the future. Similarly, historical reform novels bend generic conventions by looking ahead to the future even as they attempt to reconstruct a sense of a region’s communal past. In the preface to her novel The Heroine of ’49: A Story of the Pacific Coast (1891), novelist and medical doctor Mary P. Sawtelle evinces this dual tendency to look backwards and forwards simultaneously, remarking that she believes “full well that a time will come when a people enjoying the magnificence and marvelous wealth of these Pacific States will look back with hearts filled with gratitude to the people who laid the foundation for it all, made sacrifices and endured privations that would be difficult for any historian, however accurate or gifted, to portray, and any account of those days, however imperfect, will be held sacred by them forever” (8). In this novel, in which Dickensian, allegorically named villains mix with real-life historical figures, Sawtelle blends history, satire, romance, and politics in a peculiar hybrid form.

18 The Heroine of ’49 depicts the lives of the first white settlers of Oregon in order to expose the gender and racial inequity that persists in the present so that readers might be persuaded to put into place reforms for the future. In the novel’s preface, Sawtelle directly states her goal of disabusing readers of the commonly held belief that girls mature faster than boys, a false perception that was used to justify early marriages involving child brides. Over the course of the novel, however, Sawtelle’s scope broadens substantially, taking in the injustices of the Indian wars, the dispossession of tribal lands, the forcing of Indians onto reservations, domestic violence, divorce, land laws that encouraged men to marry simply so that they could increase their acreage, and laws that placed children of divorce with abusive fathers while depriving their mothers of children, property, income, and social standing.9 In addition to chastising lawmakers angrily for failing to protect women and children, Sawtelle directs considerable invective at the U.S. government for not honoring its treaties with Indians, not compensating Indians for their land, and not paying American citizens

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who fought in the Indian wars. Thus, she argues, the government wronged both sides— Indians and settlers—in its greed for new land. The result, according to one reviewer, was a book that, while “sufficiently striking” and “real,” is “not pleasant reading” (“Recent Fiction” 333).

19 Nancy Glazener has observed that on some occasions “reform fiction was . . . assimilated to the project of high realism” (43); yet I do not see these writers as assimilating their reformist goals to this “‘establishment’ form” (11). Nor do I see these women writers rejecting realism as “a coarse male habit” from which they retreated to “the old path of ideality and hopefulness and a glorious model of what true marriage should be or what the true woman was,” as Alfred Habegger suggests of certain nineteenth-century women writers who rejected realism (37). Instead, I see the blend of realism, regionalism, history, and domesticity in their fiction as a search for form motivated by the desire to reform realism by adapting familiar models to current social needs. Their faith in the capacity of fiction not just to reflect but to create reality underlies the observation in Lillie Devereux Blake’s 1874 novel Fettered for Life that “Just so long as all our literature is pervaded with the thought that women are inferior, so long will our sex be held in a low estimate” (254). As Blake and many other nineteenth- century women writers would have it, reforming the novel and hence reforming literature more broadly was a vital step to reforming society itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blake, Lillie Devereux. Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master. A Story of to-Day. 1874. Ed. Grace Farrell. New York: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1996.

Bourinot, John George and Benjamin Fish Austin, eds. Woman; Her Character, Culture, and Calling. Brantford, Ont., Canada: The Book and Bible House, 1890.

Corbin, Caroline Fairfield. Rebecca; or, A Woman’s Secret. Chicago: Central Publishing House, 1867.

“Fiction.” The Literary World: A Monthly Review of Current Literature 25 (June 16, 1894): 185-86. American Periodicals Series Online. Retrieved November 24, 2010.

Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Literary Institution, 1850-1910. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1997.

Habegger, Alfred. Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

Hale, Edward Everett. Introduction. His Broken Sword by Winnie Louise Taylor. 2nd Ed. Cambridge and Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1893.

Holley, Marietta. Samantha at the World’s Fair. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1893.

“Our Book Table.” Wisconsin Journal of Education 18 (1888): 457-61. GoogleBooks. Retrieved March 18, 2008.

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Parker, Alison M. “‘Hearts Uplifted and Minds Refreshed’: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Production of Pure Culture in the United States, 1880-1930.” Journal of Women’s History 11 (Summer 1999): 135-58.

Payne, William Morton. “Recent Fiction.” The Dial; A Semi-monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information 9, no. 99 (1888): 65-69. American Periodicals Series Online. Retrieved November 26, 2010.

“Recent Fiction.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 19 (March 1892): 330-33. American Periodicals Series Online. Retrieved March 18, 2008.

Sawtelle, Mary P. The Heroine of ’49: A Story of the Pacific Coast. n.p., 1891.

Schweninger, Lee. The Writings of Celia Parker Woolley (1848-1918): Literary Activist. Lewiston, NY.: Edwin Mellon Press, 1998.

Taylor, Winnie Louise, His Broken Sword. Chicago: A. C. McClurg and Co., 1889.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1986.

Woolley, Celia Parker. “The East and the West, Once More.” Letter to the Editor. The Dial; A Semi- monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion, and Information 15, no. 176 (1893): 216-17. American Periodicals Series Online. Retrieved November 26, 2010.

---. A Girl Graduate. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1889.

---. Love and Theology. Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1887.

---. Roger Hunt. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1892.

NOTES

1. I would like to thank Donatella Izzo and Greg Zacharias for organizing a fruitful workshop on “realism and its discontents” at the 2008 conference of the EAAS (Oslo). In addition, I am grateful to Wayne A. Wiegand, with whom I have collaborated on a history and analysis of the Woman’s Building Library of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (“Right Here I See My Own Books”: A Cultural History of the Women’s Library at the World’s Columbian Exposition, forthcoming, 2012, from the University of Massachusetts Press). 2. For discussions of James’s revisions of popular literature, see Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the “Woman Business” (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Adeline R. Tintner, The Pop World of Henry James: From Fairy Tales to Science Fiction (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1989); and Chapter 5 of my own In the Company of Books: Literature and Its “Classes” in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006). 3. For an overview of, as well as specialized articles on, the Woman’s Building Library, see Libraries and Culture: A Journal of Library History 41.1 (Winter 2006). 4. See Lee Schweninger, The Writings of Celia Parker Woolley, for a detailed study of how Woolley “turned to fiction in pursuit of social and political change” (146) and “use[d] the novel as a vehicle to analyze and explore social concerns such as the place of religion and the status of women in nineteenth-century America” (75). 5. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (many of whose publications appeared in the Woman’s Building Library) attempted to implement this fusion of literary and moral aims on a large, institutional scale through its Department for the Promotion of Purity in Literature and Art. As Alison M. Parker explains, “The Department for the Promotion of Purity in Literature and

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Art defined a cultural hierarchy that prioritized morality as a crucial component of aesthetics, and then created those cultural products it deemed superior according to this standard of purity.” According to this view, “that ‘which was not morally sound could not be aesthetically pleasing.’” See Parker 137-38. 6. Coldwater Republican, 19 Feb. 1889, 5; quoted in Schweninger 27. 7. The phrase is Schweninger’s. In his full-length study of Woolley, Schweninger characterizes his subject as “exemplary of her historical moment” (4)—a woman who “typified her class, sex, and generation in several ways” (5), including her active participation in the club movement— even as she “stands out as somewhat unique among her contemporaries” (23) in extending her commitment to equal rights and opportunities to African Americans and other oppressed groups. 8. One wonders if learning to “say sharp things to people” (an ironic indication that Maggie does not yet truly understand the value of reading, work, and self-improvement) is what Woolley meant by “talk[ing] like one of Henry James’s novels.” 9. On the land laws, one reviewer explained: “These were framed with extreme liberality, giving every married man a claim to six hundred and forty acres, or a section one mile square; but requiring one half of the grant to be entered in his wife’s name. No single man could hold more than three hundred and twenty acres. The result of this provision, which was framed with the object of protecting women, was in some cases most disastrous. Every man that had not a wife already set about finding one immediately. Women were scarce, and children of only fourteen, sometimes even eleven, years were married to men twice their own age.” See “Recent Fiction,” 333.

INDEX

Keywords: A Girl Graduate, A Woman’s Secret, Chicago World’s Fair (1893), divorce, domestic reform novel, domestic violence, Fettered for Life; or, His Broken Sword, historical reform novel, Indian rights, land reform, Lord and Master, Love and Theology, marriage, prison reform, realism, Rebecca; or, reform movements, regional reform novel, regionalism, Roger Hunt, The Heroine of ’49, women’s club movement, women’s education, World’s Columbian Exposition

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Negotiating Primitivist Modernisms: Louis Armstrong, Robert Goffin, and the Transatlantic Jazz Debate1

Daniel Stein

1 “Dear Pal Goffin,” Louis Armstrong wrote to his Belgian acquaintance, the lawyer, hobby journalist, and jazz historian Robert Goffin, on July 19, 1944. “‘Man—I’ve been trying to get in touch with you […]. Here’s another hundred dollars toward the five hundred. […] So accept this hundred and I’ll send the other before a ‘Black Cat can ‘Lick his ‘Bu‘hind’ ….. haw haw haw…” (80). Sending Goffin a batch of money along with this playfully worded missive, Armstrong was hoping for quick results. He had written “four books of stories” about his life in the previous months and had sent them to his prospective Belgian amanuensis. Understandably, he was eager to read Goffin’s finished version of the manuscript and couldn’t wait to see his life story—for the second time after the heavily ghosted Swing That Music (1936)—in print. Goffin’s answers to Armstrong’s letters did not survive, but what did survive are the published texts that resulted from this transatlantic collaboration: the original French version Louis Armstrong: Le Roi du Jazz (1947) and the English version Horn of Plenty, translated by James Bezou and published in the US in the same year. What survived as well are large parts of Armstrong’s hand-written manuscript, which covers the jazz musician’s life between 1918 and 1931 and was published by Thomas Brothers as “The ‘Goffin Notebooks’” in Louis Armstrong, in his Own Words (1999).2

2 This essay will offer a series of contextualized comparative close readings of Armstrong’s manuscript, Goffin’s adaptation—which turned the manuscript into a biography—and Armstrong’s autobiographical responses to this biography.3 This negotiation of Armstrong’s life story took place within a transatlantic debate about the history and meanings of jazz as an expression of American modernism, but it also stands in the context of what Sieglinde Lemke has called primitivist modernism in her book of the same title.4 A major objective of this transatlantic debate was to gain discursive control over a music that expressed difficult notions of black agency, artistry, and racial affirmation at a time when massive socio-political and musical

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changes were occurring on both sides of the Atlantic.5 In the United States, these changes involved the burgeoning African American struggle for civil rights that followed the so-called Double V campaign during World War II, which had indelibly connected the fight against fascism abroad with the fight against racism at home, and the heated arguments about the presumed commercial excesses of swing music, the potential political validity of the oncoming bebop (described as “the war come home” by Lott [“Double V” 246]), and the allegedly reactionary stance of revivalist jazz. In many ways, this was also a critical moment in jazz historiography, a moment in which many previous controversies concerning the cultural powers of jazz and its significances as a musical aesthetics very much different from European classic music clashed. I cannot do justice to the complexities inherent in this clash of controversies in the context of my argument about the Goffin-Armstrong exchange here, but I do want to at least name the two book publications of the time that most immediately contextualize Goffin’s Horn of Plenty: the Jewish jazz clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow’s collaboratively written memoir Really the Blues (with Bernard Wolfe, published in 1946) and Rudi Blesh’s 1946 study Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz, both of which contain lengthy passages on Armstrong’s apparent racial authenticity and essentialist assumptions about the racial roots of jazz.6

3 In Europe, where critics had been listening to and writing about jazz since the late 1910s, most Francophone jazz writing of the 1940s must be read against the violent excesses of fascism, the Nazi slandering of jazz as a degenerate art, and the propaganda view that jazz was noise produced by members of the inferior races.7 In Goffin’s case, the Belgian authoritarian rule in the Congo as part of its colonial empire was a second subtext. Historians have documented a profound interest in colonial anthropology and ethnography, which resulted in colonial exhibitions and a permanent colonial museum by the end of the nineteenth century (see Couttenier), as well as a “colonial propensity to engineer the past in order to meet present political objectives,” The will to “rewrite African historiography” (Fraiture 9) and the violent regional anti-colonial uprisings that led to the construction of relégation camps in the 1930s (cf. Yervasi 16) are additional factors that certainly colored Goffin’s engagement with American jazz as the music of recently freed and musically unrestrained blacks.8 These issues are, however, only very rarely made explicit. They make themselves heard just briefly in the first chapter of Goffin’s Jazz: From the Congo to the Metropolitan (1944), where Goffin states: The history of jazz has a social significance of which I am quite aware and which I am fond of stressing. At the very moment when America goes to war to defend the democratic spirit against the totalitarian challenge, it is fitting to remember that, in the last twenty years, jazz has done more to bring blacks and whites together than three amendments to the constitution have done in seventy-five. (1)9

4 As these few words already indicate, the fascination with American jazz and its social significance emerged from an idealization of jazz as a quintessentially democratic (as opposed to dictatorial) and free (in opposition to repressive and persecuting) music. This idealization, as my analysis of Goffin’s biography of Armstrong will illustrate, rests significantly on the construction of the black jazz musician as an especially gifted member of an oppressed but cohesive racial collective that has managed to carry its gifts—mainly music and dance—from the African Congo to the American Metropolis. As Hugues Panassié proposes in The Real Jazz (1942), compared to white people,

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the Negroes prove more gifted, and while the Negro masses themselves have an instinctive feeling for this music [i.e., jazz], white people approach it with resistance and approach it slowly. (21)

5 Musical expression is very much racialized in statements such as this, which assert that specific musical styles belong to specific peoples. Panassié elaborates: What characterized the extraordinary creative flow produced by the Negroes at the beginning of the twentieth century was that it was spontaneous—unconscious of its novelty, untarnished by the slightest design. (22)10

6 As I argue elsewhere, it is exactly the conscious spontaneity of Armstrong’s writings and the conscious design of his music that account for his complex position in jazz historiography and American cultural history (Stein, Music is My Life), but I believe that Panassié’s remarks can be read against the horrors brought upon France and other European nations by a decidedly uncivilized and uncultured German dictatorship: “We must […] say that in music primitive man has greater talent than civilized man” and that “[a]n excess of culture atrophies inspiration, and men crammed with culture tend too much to play tricks, to replace inspiration with lush technique under which one finds music stripped of real vitality” (21).11These are statements first and foremost about music, but their disavowal of modern culture and civilization is prominent enough to suggest a moment of political disillusion and resistance.

7 These transatlantic debates and discourses contextualize my analysis of Armstrong’s and Goffin’s collaboration. My starting assumption is that the ways in which Armstrong and Goffin negotiated divergent notions of primitivist modernism certainly relied on the long history of Francophone primitivism as it manifested itself in visions of the “noble savage” and “les choses Africaines” (think of Michel de Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Guillaume Apollinaire). But, perhaps more substantially, they were also the result of a series of transatlantic misreadings that led to Goffin’s rewriting of Armstrong’s vernacular manuscript as a primitivist biography. These misreadings, I will argue, were (at least in part) the result of Armstrong’s performative engagement with American discourses of blackface minstrelsy as well as Goffin’s tendency to take these discourses at face value.12 I believe that this kind of analysis is useful because it allows us to think of the construction of Armstrong’s popular image as an American jazz icon and entertainer less in terms of an exclusively American project and more in terms of the transatlantic collaboration that had, from the beginning, influenced the development of jazz criticism far more substantially than some critics are willing to acknowledge.13 As Ted Gioia indicates, the “[primitivist] mythology of jazz has extended its influences far beyond the area of historical research. It has come to shape the critical standards which define the art form” (47). Moreover, while Horn of Plenty was not the first book about Armstrong’s life—Swing That Music preceded it by about a decade—it was the major public narrative of his New Orleans childhood and his early successes as a jazz musician in the 1940s and thus marks an important point between the swing discourse of the musician’s first autobiography and the more nostalgic tone of his second autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans (1954).

8 In the manuscript that served Goffin as the raw material for Horn of Plenty (i.e., “The ‘Goffin Notebooks’”), Armstrong focuses on personal anecdotes rather than larger historical events. Indebted to a vernacular practice of spontaneous storytelling, he frequently digresses from the basic storyline, relating off-color jokes and crude puns indicative of a humorous approach to public self-performance. Armstrong essentially expresses a flexible understanding of his anecdotal life narratives as momentary

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snapshots rather than a carefully composed and definitive autobiography. The voice of the autobiographer meanders through a maze of personal recollections; it is performative rather than carefully composed. One result of this performative approach to life writing is an unconventional orthography, which includes the idiosyncratic use of what have been called indexical markers and annotations: single and multiple apostrophes, single and multiple underscores, ellipses, dashes, occasional parentheses, and unorthodox capitalization.14

9 Goffin preserved the basic elements of Armstrong’s narrative, even though his chronology and geography are frequently questionable.15 He included almost all of the anecdotes and snatches of events that Armstrong relates in the “Notebooks.” This is important because it demonstrates the complicated mixture of biographical depiction and traces of autobiographical recollection (or self-representation) that characterizes Horn of Plenty. Yet Goffin edited out nearly all of Armstrong’s orthographic quirks. Apparently, he never took the musician’s writing style seriously; it seems that he simply did not believe that Armstrong’s colorful language and unorthodox orthography might have to tell us anything about his life or music (even though he later claimed he had done so out of respect for Armstrong’s authentic writing style16). About the manuscript itself he says nothing, and only once does he refer to Armstrong’s penmanship, calling the letters he wrote to fellow New Orleanian cornetist Joe Oliver “painfully scrawled replies” (146). Armstrong, in turn, was obviously aware of what he must have thought of as Goffin’s superior writing skills, and he afforded his biographer with a maximum of editorial discretion. On May 7, 1944, he noted in a letter to Goffin: There may be several spots that you might want to straighten out—or change around … What ever you do about it is alright with me … I am only doing as you told me … To make it real—and write it just as it happened. (78)

10 This statement communicates a self-conscious understanding of the autobiographer’s tenuous position as a black autobiographer with little authorial repute: while the uneducated black Southern musician delivers the raw material, an accomplished white European like Goffin is responsible for polishing up a culturally viable final product. It would not be too far-fetched to read this communicative situation as emblematic of the larger socio-cultural and economic contexts that had shaped the production and reception of jazz since early decades of the twentieth century.17

11 While Horn of Plenty includes most of the events covered in Armstrong’s “Notebooks,” it nonetheless exerts substantial control over the musician’s life story. Goffin invents scenes and dialogue and turns Armstrong’s reminiscences into largely primitivist fare. This primitivism emerges from a perceived connection between jazz and “the torrid Congo”—references include “deep-voiced tomtoms,” “wild jungle dances” and “voodoo worship” (6)—and from an understanding of a racially inherent musical genius passed down from “father to son,” who are “writing in sweat and blood the heart-rending epic of [the African] race” (141). Apart from direct references to primitivist ideology—Goffin speaks of “primitive hearts” (136) and “the primitive cry of the New Orleans blacks” (201)—a notion of “the black man’s soul” underpins Goffin’s message: “What magic powers did the music possess which slept in the souls of the blacks and raised them from their helpless state, yes, even as high as the esteem of the white man” (159)? In passages like this, black Americans are celebrated as a lowly but spellbinding people whose allegedly uninhibited and primeval spirituality can be embraced as a cure against feelings of modern alienation and fragmentation.18 Questions of musical technique and training are notably absent here: “The search for the primitive goes

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hand in hand with the search for the pastoral,” as Berndt Ostendorf notes in a different context (588).

12 But how exactly do these primitivist premises “color” Goffin’s narrative? A first example is the depiction of Armstrong in performance. In Armstrong’s “Notebooks,” musical performances are seldom the object of narration. Armstrong’s account of his success at Chicago’s Vendome Theater with the Erskine Tate Symphony Orchestra in 1925, for instance, only includes phrases such as “the ‘opening night was sensational” and “I became quite a ‘Figure at the ‘Vendome.’ Especially with the Gals” (95). Goffin’s substantially longer version gets much mileage out of imagining the performance: Eyes closed, he felt himself borne to heaven on the wings of inspiration, and came down to earth only when a thunder of applause brought him back to reality. [...] Then time stood still once more. Louis shed all restraint and played. He was a pure musical spirit freed of all earthly ties. (Horn 217)

13 This version sharply contrasts Armstrong’s own account, which insists on the very earthly ties—the context of the performance; the “Gals” in the audience—that Goffin denies. In an earlier chapter, Goffin writes about Armstrong’s performance at the Lincoln Gardens with the Joe Oliver Band: In a flash the young musician was blowing out his soul through the mouth of his trumpet. He blew so hard that the skin of his nape was stretched hard; he had closed his eyes, and seemed in a trance, out of the living world, completely possessed by unalloyed musical exaltation. (167)

14 This passage contains all the hallmarks of celebratory jazz fiction: the sexual dimension of staged musical blackness (the “nape […] stretched hard”), the romantic understanding of creative expression as unmediated expression, and the trance-like effect that the music has on the listener and that is projected back onto the performing musician. Yet it is very much unlike Armstrong’s later version in Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, where the musician cites his familiarity with Joe Oliver on and off the bandstand as the reason for their musical understanding and excellence (cf. 239).

15 Note also Goffin’s curious comments about Armstrong’s singing: He wrenched out the word baby as if torn from the depths of his being. A shiver ran through his listeners. Everybody had stopped dancing. Louis finished the stanza and broke out at once into a toothy grin, wrapped his lips around the trumpet, shut his eyes, and climbed up an up.

16 As a biographer who claims to be privy to Armstrong’s inner life (“the depth of his being”) as well as to the perspective of the audience, Goffin continues: The spectators were frozen into silence at the sight of this giant with the bulging neck, his nose flattened by the force of vibrancy, his left hand clutching a spotless handkerchief, who could stir up a whirlwind of strange music. (Horn 251)

17 It is remarkable that the musician’s image on stage appears larger than life (Armstrong was actually of relatively small height and definitely not a giant), that the music is heard as racially Other (“strange”), and that racial features are exaggerated in the process: “toothy grin,” “bulging neck,” “nose flattened.” In the Goffin text, we thus find a shuttling back and forth between Armstrong’s supposed emotions (“he felt himself borne to heaven on the wings of inspiration”) and the Belgian writer’s rapturous gaze across the Atlantic at the mysterious black genius beyond rational explanation (“trance,” “unalloyed musical exaltation,” “pure musical spirit freed of all earthly ties”).

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18 A second example is Goffin’s presentation of New Orleans dance hall entertainment. For the purpose of my argument, it makes sense to reverse the chronology of the exchange between Armstrong and Goffin by introducing Armstrong’s version—told nearly twenty years after Horn of Plenty—before I deal with Goffin’s earlier portrait. In his interview with Life magazine (April 1966; revised for book publication in 1971), Armstrong recalls the dances at Funky Butt Hall, a place which Goffin had called “the birthplace of jazz” in Horn of Plenty (38) and which Armstrong had not mentioned in the “Notebooks”: When I was about 4 or 5, still wearing dresses, I lived with my mother in Jane’s Alley in a place called Brick Row—a lot of cement, rented rooms sort of like a motel. And right in the middle of that on Perdido Street was the Funky Butt Hall—old, beat up, big cracks in the wall. On Saturday nights, Mama couldn’t find us ’cause we wanted to hear that music. Before the dance the band would play out front about a half hour. And us little kids would all do little dances. […] Then we’d go look through the big cracks in the wall of the Funky Butt. It wasn’t no classyfied place, just a big old room with a bandstand. And to a tune like The Bucket’s Got a Hole in It, some of them chicks would get way down, shake everything, slapping themselves on the cheek of their behind. Yeah! At the end of the night, they’d do the quadrille, beautiful to see, where everybody lined up, crossed over—if no fights hadn’t started before that. Cats’d have to take their razors in with them, because they might have to scratch somebody before they left there. If any of them cats want to show respect for their chick—which they seldom did—they’d crook their left elbow out when they danced and lay their hat on it—a John B. Stetson they’d probably saved for six months to buy. When the dance was over, fellow would walk up and say, “Did you touch my hat, partner?” and if the cat say “yes”—Wop!—he hit him right in the chops. (Meryman 7-8)

19 The setting, mood, word choice, and narrative pacing illustrate Armstrong’s command of oral storytelling. Note the tight structure of the anecdote (as well as the literal punch line), the use of black dialect (double negatives as in “wasn’t no” or “if no fights hadn’t started”), slang (“chicks,” “cats,” “get way down,” “chops”), exclamations (“Yeah!” and “Wop!”), and direct speech. The peeping of the children and the illicit sexuality of the dancing add to the overall erotic appeal of the tale, as does the sexual innuendo, which unfolds through a series of puns: the “big cracks in the wall” and the “Hole” in the bucket resonate with the “cheeks” of the women’s “behinds” as well as the title phrase “funky butt.” The slang expression “scratch” for cutting somebody with a razor belongs to the same word field (in the sense of “scratching one’s behind”).

20 According to Armstrong, jazz is music of the lower classes: “wasn’t no classyfied place”; “a John B. Stetson they’d probably saved for six months to buy.” It is played in an environment of unabashed sexuality (“chicks would get way down, shake everything”) and male violence (“Cats’d have to take their razors in with them”); it is integrated into the communal structures of black New Orleans both geographically—Armstrong lives right next to Funky Butt Hall—and socially—kids and grown-ups go out to dance to it on Saturday nights. It is also a musico-cultural hybrid: the quadrille that ends the dancing had been imported to New Orleans by French settlers, but it is played in a “ragged” style at Funky Butt Hall and is accompanied by a dance Armstrong calls “funkybuttin” (qtd. in Bergreen 105).

21 Compare this to Goffin’s startlingly discrepant depiction of what is ultimately the same scene: A crowd pushed and jostled at the bar, with many a drunken and half-naked wench emptying her whisky glass at one gulp between puffs of smoke from a fat cigar. Louis hesitated; dare he go in? The jerky rhythm beat like his own pulse. A hulking

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Negro with shiny black face, white eyeballs, and glistening teeth, was hugging a “high yaller” who pretended to swoon as she crushed a camelia [sic] to distended nostrils. (Horn 22)

22 The references to the “half-naked wench,” “hulking Negro,” “shiny black face,” “white eyeballs,” “glistening teeth” mobilize images of black primitives and blackface minstrels. In fact, Horn of Plenty is filled with minstrel images. We encounter a young Armstrong “stuffing cakes between his thick lips” (28) and feasting on watermelon (32); the neighborhood is populated by “darkies” (47), “half-naked wenche[s]” (22), and pickaninnies [...] rolling their eyeballs” (12).

23 In Goffin’s depiction of Funky Butt Hall, Armstrong’s evocation of “funkiness” and the erotic movement of body parts (the Funky Butt), which connects body odor with musical and physical exertion (raunchy sweat as a sexually enticing odor), is interpreted as depravity and lewdness: To this day the denizens of Perdido have not forgotten that ill-smelling establishment. Its very name betrays a wanton etymology, graphically characterizing the awful smell that always pervaded the air after the dances were over. They were totally unrestrained in their lewdness, and the black dancers’ sweaty bodies heightened the general atmosphere of depravity. (17)

24 Goffin’s primitivist gaze motivates a moment of literal nose-thumping: expressions such as “ill-smelling,” “awful smell,” and “atmosphere of depravity” insinuate a racial difference that is coded in olfactory terms, and they distinguish between a culturally superior self interested in the sonic productions of the primitive Other (the musical sounds emitted from black bodies) and the physical strangeness of that Other (black body odor). A later account of the same dances related in a portrait piece on Armstrong in Ebony magazine, however, illustrates the potentially positive connotations of body odor: [Armstrong] peeked through the windows of the Funky Butt Dance Hall […] and saw two or three hundred sweaty bodies grinding together as a shirt-sleeved trumpeter named Buddy Bolden urged them on, shouting: “All right now, all the good gals is home to bed. Ain’t none left but the stinkers. That’s good, ’cause they living up to the name of this dance hall. Hey, any of y’all left your behinds at home? Hope not, ’cause you gonna have to shake ’em plenty to keep time with this stuff we ’bout to play.” (Sanders 142)

25 While it is enough for Armstrong and the writer for Ebony to evoke this scene and let Buddy Bolden’s sexual commentary stand on its own—including the reversal of conventional notions of propriety inherent in the idea that being bad and stinky is a good thing—Goffin imagines Armstrong’s own feelings in order to promote the primitivist gaze: His heart beat faster as a wave of nostalgia swept over him, stirred by the same remote call which had come from the depth of the African bush to quicken the pulse of his ancestors on some dim past. He could hear the thud of the tom-toms pulsating in the night. Louis Armstrong had never known Africa, but Africa was throbbing in his heart. (Horn 22)

26 In Horn of Plenty, “Africa” thus functions as the sonic signifier (“tom-toms”) of racial essence: Armstrong has no direct knowledge of African music, but he allegedly knows the music because it is in his blood (“pulsating,” cited above; “writing in sweat and blood”; “beat like his own pulse”).

27 Armstrong himself only began to trace his ancestry and music back to Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s.19 In a 1962 interview with Studs Terkel, he explained that African

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American musicians had “copied” the “[t]om-toms and drumbeats” from the Africans, “who brought the music with them […] when the slaves came.” One should note here that Armstrong is actually reversing Terkel’s assumption that jazz had influenced African music (“The highlife music of Ghana […] stem[med] from the jazz of America?”). In other words, he rejects the idea that jazz in the 1950s and 60s is an expression of a distinctly American cultural excellence and presents his tours through Africa as a journey back to his roots (“It brought me back to generations, my ancestors in Africa, in New Orleans …” [qtd. in Terkel 145]). Thus, most important in Armstrong’s continued negotiation of the meanings with which his life story could be invested is the public recognition of these African roots: “I came from here, way back. At least my people did. Now I know this is my country too. After all, my ancestors came from here and I still have African blood in me,” he explained to reporters in 1956 during his first African tour (qtd. in Von Eschen 61). When he returned to the African continent in 1960, his allegiance with its peoples and places was even more pronounced: I feel at home in Africa—more so now that I’ve been all through the place. I’m African-descended down to the bone, and I dig the friendly ways these people go about things. I lived the same way in New Orleans and they get my message here. I got quite a bit of African blood in me from my grandmammy on my mammy’s side and from my grandpappy on my pappy’s side. (qtd. in Millstein 24)

28 Not only does he feel at home in Africa, a place that differs decidedly from Goffin’s primitivist “Congo,”and not only does he embrace Africa as an ancestral birthplace, but he also uses the media attention his trip had garnered to make a complex, and ultimately ambiguous, statement about race relations in the U.S. He claims an exclusively African racial heritage (“I’m African-descended down to the bone”) on the one hand, but at the same time, he also seems to acknowledge a history of racial mixing: “I got quite a bit of African blood in me from my grandmammy on my mammy’s side and from my grandpappy on my pappy’s side.” This sentence may imply, however slightly, that there could have been interracial sexual contact among his ancestors (since he is not a full-blooded African), but it also insinuates that this contact may have occurred on unequal terms, perhaps in the common form of white slaveholders raping their female slaves. This inequality, one can possibly conclude, is expressed in the very wording of the statement, the terms “grandmammy” and “grandpappy” hinting ever so slightly at the unequal distribution of power encoded in the sounds and images of blackface minstrelsy.20

29 Armstrong’s efforts to “write back”—to supplant Goffin’s notions of Africa and “blackness” with a series of more complex and more self-determined images—can be interpreted as significant attempts to do more than renegotiate the primitivism of the biographical narrative promoted in Horn of Plenty. They also engage with the substantial sway of visual images, sonic signifiers and verbal depictions of black culture that nineteenth-century blackface minstrelsy had bestowed on American popular culture, including ragtime and jazz, and that had resurfaced in Goffin’s presentation of Armstrong as both primitivist noble savage and minstrel musician. And indeed, Goffin frequently evokes the singing and dancing Sambo figure readers would have known from blackface minstrelsy, coon songs and other racially deprecating representations of African American culture. Take a scene from Armstrong’s youth through which Goffin seeks to connect the musician’s performances (here: dancing) with minstrelsy by revisiting “Ethiopian Delineator,” Thomas D. Rice’s story of the origins of “Jump Jim Crow” (1829). According to Rice’s own account, he had met an “old Negro” in 1828

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whose right shoulder [was] deformed and drawn up high, his leg gnarled with rheumatism, stiff and crooked at the knee, doing an odd-looking dance while singing: “Weel about and turn about and do jus so; / Ebery time I weel about, I jump Jim Crow.” (qtd. in Toll 28)

30 Rice claimed that he memorized the words and song and even bought the dancer’s clothes as stage attire. The changes Rice made, adding verses as well as “quicken[ing] and slightly chang[ing] the air [i.e., tune],” allegedly preserved the original flavor of the performance while turning it into a presentable form for the stage (28). The application of blackface is excised from the account, and it is telling that the origins of American popular culture are constructed as black, disabled and anonymous, yet powerfully productive.21 What we have here is essentially an exercise in racial ventriloquism and imaginary racechange: white (and predominantly Northern or Midwestern) minstrels speaking “black” through the guise of imaginary black slaves or ex-slaves and, as I have shown, the white Belgian Goffin narrating Armstrong’s life story and speaking “black” (as well as speaking “jazz”) by inventing the musician’s speech and thoughts.22

31 Compare Rice’s story with Goffin’s depiction of Armstrong as a young dancer: “Louis knew only one kind of dance. He would buckwing his way into the center of the group of kids, and imitate a hunchback or a lame man, then straighten up abruptly and dance a lively jig” (Horn 44). In the surviving portion of Armstrong’s “Notebooks,” no such passage can be found, but banjo player and Armstrong contemporary (and later accompanist with the Hot Five and Seven in the 1920s) Johnny St. Cyr remembers a similar event. Setting the performance at Pete Lala’s Cabaret in New Orleans, St. Cyr explains: [O]ld man Lala had a limp and he would come across the floor, limping and shaking his finger at Louis […]. After he had turned his back, Louis would go into a little dance which would end up with him taking a few steps with a limp and shaking his finger just like the old man. This of course would bring the house down. Louis was always a comedian […]. (qtd. in Pinfold 26)

32 Like Thomas D. Rice’s Jim Crow, Lala is an old man, and he is limping. More remarkable about this performance, however, is that St. Cyr situates the dance within an African American context (the originator and the appropriator are black men; the performance takes place in a black New Orleans honky tonk) and wrestles the power of the performance away from blackface minstrelsy (without, however, erasing its echoes): Armstrong, the soon-to-be jazz king, uses Lala’s funny walk, not a version of Rice’s Jim Crow, as the raw material for his act. The warbled history of cultural borrowings makes for the complexity of such assessments. It is ultimately impossible to know exactly in what ways the Jim Crow influences had traveled: whether Rice had copied a black folk dance that survived until the 1910s, when Armstrong used it to ridicule Lala; whether Armstrong was familiar with Jim Crow-based minstrel dances (or visual illustrations of them); or whether Goffin and St. Cyr simply channeled their recollections through the familiar minstrel lens.

33 Notably, Armstrong’s own recollections of his comedic dancing and funny skits revise Goffin version of the story. Here, the sight of self-confident black dancers moving their bodies to the rhythms of a jazz tune is connected with minstrel comedy at first. Armstrong describes a contest at the Sunset Café in Chicago, which climaxed in an ultra-fast version of the Charleston, a dance popular in the mid-1920s. The

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retrospective telling emphasizes the comic physique of Armstrong and three of his band members: There was Earl Hines, as tall as he is; Tubby Hall, as fat as he was; little Joe Walker, as short as he is; and myself, as fat as I was at the time. We would stretch out across that [dance] floor doing the Charleston as fast as the music would play it. Boy, oh boy, you talking about four cats picking them up and laying them down—that was us. (qtd. in Shapiro and Hentoff 105)

34 He recalls elsewhere: All the white people, all the nightlifers, the rich people from Sheridan Road and the big hotels would come out there on the South Side. [...] I’d sing songs through a megaphone and four of us [in the band] would close the show doing the Charleston. (Meryman 36)

35 In Armstrong’s version of the story, Goffin’s “lively jig” is complicated: The dancing must have been rather acrobatic (“four cats picking them up and lying them down”), especially when we consider the speed of the musical accompaniment (“as fast as the music would play it”). What is more, such performances were meant to entertain white audiences (“[a]ll the white people), and not just any white people, but “the rich people from Sheridan Road and the big hotels.” Armstrong thus displays a self-conscious awareness of the particular contexts and purposes of his performances: they are designed to be sold to an audience of white slummers (who “would come out there on the South Side”) and, even if they fall back on minstrel conventions, they also provide Armstrong and his fellow musicians with economic opportunities and a successful career in show business.23

36 Armstrong further mentions a specialty number he did with drummer Zutty Singleton in drag at the Metropolitan Theatre. Even though he gives no indication of stage setting and club décor, the elements of the show alone would have evoked plenty of minstrel connotations: the number with Zutty evokes the “wench” routines of the minstrel shows and vaudeville, the comic dancing recalls Jim Crow’s jerky jumping, and the comedy invests the music with a minstrel aura of “mirth and hilarity” (Variety magazine; qtd. in Lemke 84) that was typical of black entertainment in Harlem: Zutty […] would dress up as one of those real loud and rough gals, with a short skirt, and a pillow in back of him. I was dressed in old rags, the beak of my cap turned around like a tough guy, and he, or she (Zutty) was my gal. As he would come down the aisle, interrupting my song, the people would just scream with laughter. (qtd. in Shapiro and Hentoff 106)

37 While Armstrong describes the minstrel comedy but ends his account with a reference to his and Zutty’s effective handling of their audience (“people would just scream with laughter”), Goffin’s depiction of an earlier dance act by Armstrong’s vocal quartet in New Orleans essentially casts the dancing Armstrong as a minstrel figure: [T]he quartet’s big hit was a side-splitting scene in which Louis Armstrong made passionate love to Redhead Happy. While the three others were blowing a discreet accompaniment Louis declared his love in passionate terms and rolled his eyes in a simulation of desire. [...] Louis would break forth in his low voice, his lips drawn back to show the pearliest set of teeth in Dixie, and sing his biggest hit: ‘Everybodys [sic] gal is my gal, and your gal is my gal too! (Horn 45)

38 Whether Goffin invented this scene or not is unclear, but the American translation is very explicit about his minstrel assumptions: “rolled his eyes”, “pearliest set of teeth in Dixie.” In this and other instances, the minstrel discourse in Horn of Plenty was amplified by the translator, James Bezou, who occasionally added minstrel references

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where there are none: “noirs” (54) is translated as “darkies,” for instance (47), and “les vieilles mégères” (132) as “mammies” (124), while “toute bouche ouverte avec les dents les plus blanches et les plus régulières” (53) appears as “lips drawn back to show the pearliest set of teeth in Dixie” in the quotation above. The transatlantic negotiation of racial discourses is thus inscribed within the very processes of language translation that brought Goffin’s biography to an American readership.

39 In order to pinpoint final differences between Armstrong’s and Goffin’s respective representations of events, we may turn to Armstrong’s various accounts of a train trip to St. Louis. In his second major autobiography, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, Armstrong provides a glimpse at two “southern colored boys” taking the train up North. When the conductor tells people to change trains, Armstrong acts in a slow- witted and clumsy manner: [M]y ears pricked up like a jackass. When I grabbed all my things I was so excited that I loosened the top of my olive bottle [...]. In the rush to get seats somebody bumped into me and knocked the olives out of my arm. The jar broke into a hundred pieces and the olives rolled all over the platform. [...] I felt pretty bad about those good olives, but when I finally got on the train I was still holding my fish sandwich. Yes sir, I at least managed to keep that. (190-91)

40 Ten years prior to this account, Armstrong had already described the same train trip in his “‘Goffin Notebooks.’” The basic story line is identical while the way it is told and some of the specific people and places involved are different. “We left New Orleans ‘by ‘Train and by me not traveling to any place before, I did not know what to do as far as Lunch was concerned,” Armstrong writes and continues: So I went to ‘‘PRATS ‘RESTAURANT and Bought myself a Big ‘‘Fish Loaf—I think it was trout. I also Bought myself a Big Bottle of ‘‘Olives’ I had it and the Fish Wrapped up in a Paper Sack. We had to change trains at a little town called GAILSBURG ILL. The Station was Crowded with people Changing Trains for All Directions. Our Train Arrived and by me rushing along to catch the train with David Jones (mellophone player)—I Dropped the ‘‘Fish Sandwich on the ground the ‘Olives Dropped’ also and the Olives Bottle Broke and ‘‘Olives were running all over the place. The Fish Sandwich Bag Busted and the Fish fell all over the ground. ‘‘Oh Boy’’ was I Embarrassed—I thought sure, David Jones would help me pick up those things—But ‘‘SHUCKS He only walked away Embarrassed also. (83-84)

41 Horn of Plenty, however,rewrites Armstrong’s version by changing the tone (from humor to an emphasis on fear), by altering the cause of the accident (from the overcrowded platform to Armstrong’s clumsiness), and by introducing a moment of minstrel hokum that smacks of racial deprecation (the white trainman cursing the black klutz): Before leaving the city he went to Segretta’s grocery, bought a fish sandwich and a bottle of olives, and took them away in a brown paper bag. Then—alas!—at the place where they had to change trains, as Louis was asking a white trainman which track they should go to, he dropped the brown bag and the bottle broke, splattering the trainman’s uniformed leg with vinegar and olives. The man cursed him roundly, and Louis cast an imploring glance at David Jones. But David was suddenly engrossed in the scenery, ignoring Louis’s predicament. So Louis, afraid to make a false move, boarded the train for St. Louis both crestfallen and hungry. (Horn 139)

42 Goffin further omits Armstrong’s positive attitude toward this experience as a moment of bonding—“David Jones and I ‘laugh about that situation every time we run into each other” (Armstrong, “‘Goffin Notebooks’” 84)—thereby changing the autobiographer’s

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self-conscious reflection on his role in the music industry to an unconscious pandering to the minstrel gaze.

43 On a more general level, Armstrong’s “Notebooks” and Goffin’s Horn of Plenty participate in a larger debate over the meanings and significances of jazz, a debate which was shaped by a transatlantic competition for interpretive hegemony between writers such as Goffin and the French Hugues Panassié and American jazz critics of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s such as J.A. Rogers (especially his “Jazz at Home” essay in Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology24), Frederick Ramsey, Jr. and Charles Edward Smith (mainly their book Jazzmen of 1939) and Rudi Blesh (Shining Trumpets). This competition took place within the parameters of what may be called “popular primitivism.” To clarify my position, it will be helpful to connect my understanding of this type of primitivism with Sieglinde Lemke’s conceptualization of primitivist modernism.25 Lemke understands primitivist modernism as “an overdetermined discourse” (75) that takes place across a variety of media, and she identifies a “gamut of primitivist tropes— vitality, gaiety, rhythm, movement, color, and laughter” (84)—all of which indeed saturate Horn of Plenty. “This is a relic of nineteenth-century romanticism,” she adds, “suggesting that white people admire a person or people of color (albeit in a remote way) because they feel that blacks are uninhibited, dynamic, and free.” Thus, “[w]hen the term is used in that sense, people of color [...] are implicitly opposed to the modern world’s self-control, discipline, and shame” (25). Lemke finally suggests that the American reception of jazz was structured by an exotic gaze at the black musician that was fundamentally different from European forms of primitivism (cf. 67). In that sense, rebelling against Victorian values by embracing black music did not necessarily imply a primitivist motivation; many of those who went to Harlem to listen to jazz “were merely slumming in the exotic” (67).26 Lemke therefore argues that the American discourse did not so much revive European primitivism than “reinscribe […] blacks into the old Sambo image updated to the context of a modern leisure society” (85).

44 While I generally agree with Lemke’s argument and am substantially indebted to it, especially in terms of its transatlantic scope, my understanding of “popular primitivism” differs from her conceptions in the sense that it is more flexible towards the synchretic dynamics of popular culture. In my view, the largely European notion of the jazzman as a noble savage and the largely American perception of musicians like Armstrong as modern minstrel figures frequently converged in culturally productive ways, of which the potent mixture of primitive exoticism and minstrel comedy that emerges from Goffin’s Horn of Plenty and Armstrong’s manuscript/responses is an instructive example. Moreover, I believe that we should focus more extensively on the discursive output of the black jazz musician: Armstrong’s repeated efforts to bring different versions of his life story to potentially global, but at least transatlantic, audiences as well as his ability to aid in the inscription of several such versions—from the modernist jazz soloist to the roving Ambassador Satch, but also from Samboesque entertainer to an Uncle Tom figure—into the popular record of American culture long beyond his death in 1971. In that regard, the life narratives of black American jazz musicians like Armstrong can be fruitfully discussed as elements of a larger struggle for expressive agency and creative freedom that was always intricately conjoined with an interest in furthering the singer’s and trumpet player’s star power and musical fame.27 Indeed, Armstrong’s writings may be sensibly understood as discursive interventions in the struggle for autobiographical self-determination, but it is also striking that they are

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presented and disseminated in such a way that they ultimately lead to more stories (from Horn of Plenty tothe latest biographies by Teachout and Riccardi as well as my own forthcoming monograph) rather than endorse one definitive version.28

45 When Armstrong began his career, “the status of jazz in early twentieth-century culture was not as a modernist art itself, but as primitivist fodder—as Dionysian instinct, passion, emotions, subconscious impulse—for the ‘true’ modernists,” John Gennari observes. While Pablo Picasso’s sculptures were touted as the works of a modernist artist who had found a way of revitalizing Western art through primitive Africanisms, Armstrong was “celebrated [...] for being a ‘primitive,’ a creature of instinct, who was struggling nobly to incorporate European rationalism” (“Jazz Criticism” 465). Obviously, such celebrations are relatively rare today. In fact, more often than not, we now encounter exceptionalist readings of Armstrong as the genius who happened to be black but was gifted with an innate musical geniality and a quintessentially American will to overcome all cultural barriers and fulfill one’s destiny. Yet if we aim for a more comprehensive, more complex, and also more critical perspective on Armstrong’s role in American culture, we are well advised to recall Goffin’s and Armstrong’s transatlantic negotiation of popular primitive modernisms, which teaches us that our perception of music is always determined to a substantial degree by the discourses that both surround it and bring it into language.

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NOTES

1. This essay is based in parts on different segments from my monograph Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz, forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press in 2012. Many issues that are only touched upon here—Armstrong’s writing style and autobiographical voice; intermedial interfaces among textual, visual, and musical modes of

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performance; the cultural poetics of blackface minstrelsy—are discussed in greater depth there. I wish to thank Barbara Buchenau and Richard Ellis for organizing the panel “Primitive Modernisms and Diasporic Identity” at the European Association for American Studies conference in Oslo (2008), where an earlier version of this paper was delivered. I also want to thank and Simon Stein for his help with Goffin’s French writings and Reinhold Wagnleitner for his encouragement and support. Finally, I am deeply indebted to the many comments provided by the members of my doctoral committee: Frank Kelleter, Heinrich Detering, and Winfried Herget. 2. The manuscript is held by the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. Armstrong regularly supplied written material for prospective biographers; for instance, he wrote several lengthy letters to the British Max Jones, who reprinted some of them in Louis: The Louis Armstrong Story 1900-1971. 3. I will focus on the English version, Horn of Plenty, rather than the French version, Le Roi du Jazz, mainly because the English text is the one to which Armstrong responded and also the one that left its mark on the American jazz discourse. 4. For Lemke, any assessment of American modernism must be aware of its “chiaroscuro” effect, its essentially hybrid nature as a transatlantic but also interracial phenomenon (Lemke 4). While I subscribe to Lemke’s general approach, I believe that her focus on Paul Whiteman’s autobiography Jazz (with Margaret McBride, 1926) marginalizes the perspective of African American musicians like Armstrong and others. On jazz and (primitivist) modernism, see Appel; Gioia; Radano; cf. also Reinhold Wagnleitner’s characterization of jazz “as musical equivalent of the culture of modernity” and an “essential sound of modernity” (20). 5. In that sense, my perspective both draws on, and differs from, William Kenney’s approach in his essay “Negotiating the Color Line: Louis Armstrong’s Autobiographies.” I retain the notion of Armstrong’s autobiographical narratives as the result of negotiations (with co-writers, publishers, audiences) but move from a national to an international (i.e., transatlantic) view (cf. 38, 39). 6. Blesh’s romantic enthrallment with what is perceived as an innocent culture comes across forcefully in a passage that celebrates the mythological appeal of the music: “primitivism does not mean crude and unformed or ill-formed, tentative or barbarous. It means instead a point of view, a way of looking at the world innocently, directly, and imaginatively. Like the primitivism of children, it sees without veils and records in its own peculiar, powerful, magical symbols” (13). While largely conserving the primitivist gaze (“innocently, directly, and imaginatively”; “children”; “peculiar”), this passage also seeks to reorient the debate toward a more liberating and race-conscious view that recognizes the cultural capital (“magical symbols”) provided by jazz and, in that sense, is clearly indebted to W.E.B. Du Bois’s TheSouls of Black Folk (1903). In fact, the wording of Blesh’s remarks strongly recalls Du Bois’s notion of double-consciousness. The most insightful constructions of the jazz debates of the 1940s (and other periods) are DeVeaux; Gendron; Gennari, “Jazz Criticism” and Blowin’ Hot and Cool; Raeburn. 7. On jazz during the Nazi era, see Kater; Zwerin. 8. I cannot go into detail here about Goffin’s political convictions and understanding of Belgian colonial rule. This subject deserves its own extended study. For historical context, see the section “Belgium and Its Colonies” in Poddar, Patke, and Jensen (6-56). 9. Goffin is most likely referring to the 13 th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the United States Constitution, which abolished slavery, established citizenship rights, and prohibited the denial of voting rights based on race. 10. Gennari speaks of a “primitivist fallacy that discolored the French critics’ perception of jazz” and that viewed “Negroes [as] blessed with trance powers, natural rhythm, and superior instinct” (“Jazz Criticism” 469).

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11. Panassié’s and Goffin’s writings were among the first who sought to develop a cultural history and an aesthetic theory of American jazz. Both Panassié’s Le Jazz Hot (1934; trans. Hot Jazz, 1936) and The Real Jazz and Goffin’s Aux Frontiers de Jazz (1932) announce their view of Armstrong as the quintessential jazz musician early on: Aux Frontiers de Jazz is dedicated toArmstrong as the “real King of Jazz,” while Le Jazz Hot/Hot Jazz are prefaced by a brief letter from Louis Armstrong and The Real Jazz carries an Armstrong quotation as its epigraph. Goffin also contributed the essay “Hot Jazz,” which anticipated many of his later positions, to Nancy Cunard’s Negro anthology (1934). 12. My focus on Armstrong should not be taken to mean that popular representations of primitivism and minstrelsy were confined to a single musician; indeed, while Armstrong is a particularly interesting case study, dealing with these discourses and representations was integral to the lives and careers of virtually all black jazz musicians. Duke Ellington, for instance, fashioned himself as a “primitive pedestrian minstrel” in his memoir Music Is My Mistress (441), performed his music as part of primitivist (or at least exotic) floorshows in places like the New York Cotton Club, and recorded compositions with titles like “Jungle Nights in Harlem” (1930). 13. For a rebuttal of the European beginnings of jazz criticism, see Collier. 14. On Armstrong’s spontaneous and provisional writing aesthetics, see the introduction in Brothers; Edwards, “Louis Armstrong”; Kenney; Stein, “Performance” and “Jazz Autobiography”; Veneciano. 15. His account of Armstrong’s hometown New Orleans connects musicians and events ahistorcially, such as when he writes that Armstrong knew and regularly heard Buddy Bolden (22-24, 29, 40) perform. He also uses Armstrong’s trademark name “Satchmo” anachronistically; the musician was given the name in the early 1930s. The early years of Armstrong’s life, not covered in the “Notebooks,” had already been described in Swing That Music, which provided an additional source. Goffin’s knowledge of Swing That Music is indicated by an explicit reference to the text (140) and by several sentences that are clearly inspired by the autobiography (cf. 157, 174, 302). 16. Cf. Teachout 300. 17. Kenney proposes a similar argument about Swing That Music when he suggests that the reliance on white authenticators and ghostwriters (crooner Rudy Vallee’s introduction; Horace Gerlach’s musical appended musical explanations; many passages that were obviously ghosted) recalls Armstrong’s reliance on white managers and promoters in the music business. For selected engagements with the socio-cultural and economic contexts as well reception and discursive construction of early jazz, see Evans; Ogren; O’Meally. 18. Due to restrictions of space, I cannot connect Armstrong’s and Goffin’s exchange with the complex role of primitivist ideologies and representational forms in Harlem Renaissance cultural production and intellectual thought (Carl Van Vechten, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, and others). Alain Locke’s distinction, in The Negro and His Music (1936), between the “healthy and earthy expression in the original peasant paganism” of the black folk and “its hectic, artificial and sometimes morally vicious counterpart which was the outcome of the vogue of artificial and commercialized jazz entertainment” is not too far removed from Goffin’s perspective, which again illustrates the genuinely transatlantic nature of the jazz debate. Locke argues that “the vogue of jazz” in the 1910s and 20s was “first a reaction from Puritan repressions and then an escape from the tensions and monotonies of a machine-ridden, extroverted from of civilization […]. Its devotees, especially at the height of the craze, rationalized this in a complete creed and cult of primitivism” (qtd. in Walser 78-79). In many ways, Locke simultaneously dissects and reinforces essential primitivist positions. For analyses of these issues, see Anderson; Chinitz. On the transnational interchanges between New York and Francophone intellectuals during the 1920s and 30s, see Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora.

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19. Armstrong toured Africa twice, in 1956 (sponsored by Edward R. Murrow) and in 1960-61 (sponsored by the State Department). On the state department tours, Armstrong’s relation with African politics, and his role as Ambassador Satch, see Davenport; Von Eschen. 20. Armstrong had declared Ghana as “my country, too” in late 1956, thus claiming double citizenship metaphorically. In 1957, he judged the civil rights violations in the South as being “so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country” (“Louis Armstrong, Barring” 23). On the complex entanglements of American civil rights rhetoric and notions of Africa, see Monson; for a concise summary of Armstrong’s public protest against acts of racial discrimination such as the barring of the Little Rock Nine from attending an Arkansas high school, see Meckna; these events are covered in greater detail in the two recent insightful biographies by Terry Teachout and Ricky Riccardi. 21. This exemplifies Eric Lott’s “love and theft” dynamic (see Lott, Love and Theft) as well as Berndt Ostendorf’s pronouncement of a double process of “[a]ppreciation and caricature” (579). Most historians agree that Rice’s recollection may have been fabricated to promote his act. 22. On racial ventriloquism and racechange, see Gubar. 23. For more extensive analysis of Armstrong’s connection with jazz dancing, see Harker. 24. It is telling that one of the key terms of the New Negro anthology is “primitive” (cf. Lemke 119-33). 25. Lemke distinguishes among “chronological primitivism,” which asserts the superiority of pre-modern people; “cultural primitivism,” which associates non-Western peoples with romanticized notions of instinct, naturalness, and sexuality; “spiritual primitivism,” which allots power to an inexplicable and irrational form of mysticism; and “aesthetic primitivism,” which describes the process of assimilating non-European art forms into Western art (26). 26. The concept of primitivism, Lemke maintains, “is often used synonymously with exoticism, implying an admiration of the noble primitive” (25; cf. J.A. Rogers’s reference to jazz in Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology as a “[t]ransplanted exotic”; 216). 27. Lemke devotes a chapter to Josephine Baker’s negotiation of black physicality, her danse sauvage, on the Paris stage in La Revue Nègre (1925). My analysis of Armstrong follows many of her objectives in this chapter. 28. I take the notion of the jazz musician’s “discursive intervention” from Eric Porter’s analysis of Charles Mingus (139).

AUTHOR

DANIEL STEIN Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. This article contains revised copyrighted material from Daniel Stein, Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, forthcoming 2012).

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