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UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Youth of the Nation: The Space-Time of Adolescence in the Turn of the Century United States Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7s30v5pf Author Connelly, Albert Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ THE YOUTH OF THE NATION: THE SPACE-TIME OF ADOLESCENCE IN THE TURN OF THE CENTURY UNITED STATES A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LITERATURE by Albert P. Connelly, IV September 2013 The Dissertation of Albert P. Connelly, IV is approved: _______________________________ Professor Chris Connery, chair ________________________________ Professor Susan Gillman ________________________________ Professor Rob Wilson _________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Table of Contents Introduction....................................................................................................................1 Chapters I. “Rode Only Fast Trains”: Mobility and the Construction of Youth.........................23 II. “Thridding the Maze”: The Race ofYouth............................................................110 III. “Administrators of the Future”: Maps of the Adolescent Imperium...................219 Appendix I.................................................................................................................334 Appendix II................................................................................................................335 Bibliography..............................................................................................................339 iii The Youth of the Nation: The Space-Time of Adolescence in the Turn of the Century United States Albert P. Connelly, IV Abstract This dissertation argues that at the turn into the twentieth century a constellation of genres and disciplines including genetic psychology, race science, political rhetoric, and romance constructed youth as a spatio-temporal category. While youthfulness as an abstraction had already been yoked to the rise of capitalist democracy, these discourses fundamentally shaped a youth concept specific to the material and ideological demands of the moment, one with far reaching consequences for future generations of the young. A new subject position emerged, abstracted from statistics and anecdotal evidence, postulated by scientific theory, and shaped by the logic of cultural production in an age of incorporation. Youth, in the sense that it was used during the period, served to symbolize a range of experiences and conceptions as a generalized identity, one that, while open to variations and following different trajectories, never fully accounted for what it purported to describe. A key focus of post-Darwinian sciences of human development, youth became the protagonist of biopolitical concepts such as race, nation, empire, and “the West.” iv For my family, who read to me. v Acknowledgements Thanks to the good comrades of the Literature board at UC Santa Cruz for their guidance and generosity. I am particularly grateful to Chris Connery, Susan Gillman, and Rob Wilson, who in their different ways stoked the coals of my intellectual curiosity and furnished me by their deeds and words with scholarly exemplars. Without an income derived from steady employment I would never have finished this dissertation, and for this I owe a debt to Saul Steier and the Humanities Department at San Francisco State University. Finally, I am thankful to Julia. vi Introduction: Commemoration and Crisis I. Centennial Over the course of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia ten million people crowded around the Corliss Walking-Beam Engine-- seven hundred tons and forty feet high, generating 1,400 horsepower. As a machinic totem for masculine power the Corliss seemed to offer evidence that the nation had come of age: “‘What the country really celebrated’” at the Exposition, a character in Henry Blake Fuller’s With the Procession remarks glibly, “‘however unconsciously, was the ending of its minority and the assumption of full manhood with all its perplexities and cares’” (qtd. in Kazin 24). The May 10 opening of the International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine was damp. Rain fell for hours while a review of troops including the State Fencibles and the Weccacoe Cornet Band tramped through the mud. As the crowd continued to gather, the Brazilian national hymn (one of eighteen played at the ceremonies) accompanied the portly Dom Pedro II’s arrival. He gestured with his top hat at the boisterous crowd-- praise indeed for the Emperor of the world’s last slave state-- his consort trailing at his side wearing a dress of “a rich lavender silk, en traine, with satin bonnet and delicate lace shawl” (Ingram 80). The orchestra played a special number, the “Centennial Grand March,” composed by Richard Wagner, at the conclusion of which a bare-headed Bishop Simpson arose to give a lengthy thanks to God for allotting to his “chosen people” this portion of the earth (“Thy footstool”) whose “unnumbered products and untold treasures” so enriched the nation (82). Elaborating his prayer to include “labor saving machinery,” and “books and periodicals” he asked a blessing upon President Grant, 1 Secretary Fish, the Supreme Court, the members of the Centennial Commission and “all the nations of the earth” with special reference to those “come to exhibit the triumphs of genius and art in the development of industry and the progress of civilization” (81-86). Above all, intoned the reverend, “May the new century be better than the past” (85). With this final adjuration at an end, the crowd shuffled expectantly to the “Centennial Hymn,” a prelude to the official handover of the Centennial buildings by John Welsh, the President of the Centennial Board of Finance, a man with side- whiskers so regal they overlapped the lapels of his coat. Accepting this charge was the President of the Centennial Commission, Joseph Hawley, who thanked President Welsh amid great cheering and deferred to Dudley Buck, who then led the Centennial Chorus in his own composition, the “Centennial Cantata,” featuring lyrics by Sidney Lanier. The performance completed, President Hawley rose again to present the Exhibition to President Grant, referring to “the remarkable and prolonged disturbances in the finances and industries of the country” occasioned by the crash of ’73 which had made the organization and funding of the Exposition such an arduous task (89). His popularity not yet tarnished by the Whiskey Ring, the Credit Mobilier scandal, Black Friday, and the Sanborn Incident-- though the neologism “Grantism” already denoted graft and greed-- President Grant spoke of the labor of building a nation. According to the Centennial Scrapbook his speech invoked an epic of “felling forests, subduing prairies, building dwellings, factories, ships, docks, warehouses, roads, canals, machinery, etc., etc.” (91). With a nod to visiting dignitaries Grant 2 looked out over the crowd-- as many as 186,272 people (110,000 of whom held free passes)-- and announced, “I declare the International Exhibition now open” (92). A year later in the course of the first nationwide strike American workers in West Virginia, Illinois, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, unconvinced of the felicity of progress, felt the force of state violence when federal troops and militia fired upon them. Beginning in Martinsburg, West Virginia and lasting 45 days, when the great railroad strikes of 1877 were over, a hundred people were dead, a thousand people had gone to jail, 100,000 workers had gone on strike, and the strikes had roused into action countless unemployed in the cities. More than half the freight on the nation’s 75,000 miles of track had stopped running at the height of the strikes. (Zinn 246).1 The antagonism between workers and owners intensified in the years that followed, and from the patchy statistics gathered concerning industrial conflict it appears that between 1881 and 1905 there were 36,757 strikes involving 6,728,048 workers, many of whom were immigrants (Montgomery 99). Of the 14,359 common laborers employed by Carnegie’s Pittsburgh plants, for example, 11,694 were recent arrivals from South and Central Europe who earned below-subsistence weekly wages of $12.50.2 Such conditions, their employer wrote in 1889, were the product of “the law of competition,” a mechanism which in the long term benefitted “the race,” because “it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development,” (26). As the basis of social evolution, he affirmed, prevailing inequalities were to be celebrated rather than simply tolerated. After all, Carnegie argued, it is “upon the sacredness of property [that] civilization itself depends.” 1 For a contemporary (and reactionary) account of the strike see Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States (Chicago: CB Beach. 1877) by Joseph A. Dacus. 2 See Herbert Gutman, “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919. The American Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 3, (Jun., 1973), pp. 531-588. 3 Others were not so sanguine about the effects of capitalist industrialization, particularly in terms of the need for immigrant labor to feed the rapidly expanding manufacturing sector. Rena Atchison’s study, Un-American Immigration: Its Present Effects