The Pennsylvania State University
The Graduate School
College of the Liberal Arts
REIMAGINING THE FREE MARKET:
AMERICAN LITERATURE AND ECONOMICS FROM THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
THROUGH THE GREAT DEPRESSION
A Dissertation in
English
by
Peter Collins
© 2011 Peter Collins
Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
August 2011 ii
The dissertation of Peter Collins was reviewed and approved* by the following:
Robin Schulze Professor of English Head of the Department of English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee
Deborah Clarke Professor of English at Arizona State University
Janet Lyon Associate Professor of English, Women's Studies, and Science, Technology, and Society
Christopher Reed Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture
Adam Rome Associate Professor of History
*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii
Abstract
This dissertation examines the role that U.S. literature played between 1880 and the start of World War II in challenging and rethinking free market ideology. The post-Civil War period saw ever larger businesses and cooperatives begin to dominate the U.S. economy, while economic depressions and frequent labor strikes shook people‘s faith in the free market system.
By the late nineteenth century these problems had led to a rich and vital debate over America‘s economic future, a debate that played out not only in politics and judicial proceedings but in social and cultural milieus as well. While most research on literature and economics during this period has concentrated on the expression of revolutionary and socialist ideology, this dissertation examines those writers whose views were reformist, rather than revolutionary. In so doing, it argues that the Progressive Era and the Great Depression were historical periods in which liberalism turned inward, confronting and attempting to solve the problems inherent in its orthodoxy. The texts examined cover a range of literary fields, including late nineteenth-century utopian fiction (Edward Bellamy‘s Looking Backward and some novelistic responses to it), naturalism (the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser), and modernism (John Dos Passos‘s U.S.A. trilogy in particular). In analyzing these texts, this dissertation draws connections between literary works often separated by disciplinary boundaries, demonstrating their responses to the shared exigency of economic crisis. iv
Table of Contents
Introduction 1 The Free Market in Turmoil
Chapter 1 18 A Utopia of Abundance: Edward Bellamy and the Free Market
Chapter 2 60 The Irrational Consumer: Economics and Agency in Gilman, Loos, and Cozzens
Chapter 3 102 Natural Fortunes: Chance, Fitness, and the Individual in Literary Naturalism
Chapter 4 149 The New Deal and the ―middle-class liberal‖: Labor, Consumption, and Capital in Dos Passos‘s U.S.A.
Conclusion 192 Economics and Literature
Works Cited 196 1
Introduction: The Free Market in Turmoil
A useful definition of modernism posits that the literary movement arose from
Enlightenment ideology facing its own failures—the failure to extend human rights to women, dark-skinned people, and other minority groups, the failure of imperialist nations to respect the rights of colonized peoples, and the failure of the liberal economic policies that first took form in the works of thinkers like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith. While the policies informed by such thinkers may have driven industry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by the last decades of the nineteenth century they had led to frequent economic depressions, labor strikes, poor working conditions, unpopular monopolies, and substantial gaps in wealth. As a result, economic reformists of the Progressive Era began to challenge the once dominant ideology of the free market, and to suggest alternative ways to organize the economy.
This project examines the role that U.S. literature played between the 1880s and the
1930s in challenging and rethinking free market ideology. The tremendous economic instability that marked the post-Civil War period inspired thinkers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to address economic questions. Among these were numerous literary writers, who used both fiction and non-fiction works to comment on economic topics. Edward Bellamy was prepared to write a wide-ranging economic critique in his utopian novel Looking Backward in part by the journalism he did in the 1870s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman not only wrote Women and
Economics, she also incorporated economic ideas into her fiction. Frank Norris researched the
Mussel Slough tragedy prior to writing The Octopus, and Theodore Dreiser was interested enough in communism to visit the Soviet Union. John Dos Passos wrote articles about economics for the New Republic while working on U.S.A. By exploring the ways in which 2
literature developed as a response to a period when the free market was undergoing severe challenges, this project sheds light both on literature from this period and on how people conceptualized and sought to influence economic change.
The range of texts explored is unusually broad for a critical work whose primary methodology is literary exegesis, ranging from late nineteenth-century utopian literature to naturalism to modernism, but while the works discussed come from a wide range of literary styles and traditions, they share a common bond in their ambivalence toward the free market.
These works neither reject the utopian promise of the free market outright, nor do they ignore the problems that arise out of an insufficiently or improperly regulated market. Furthermore, these texts do economic work by confronting economic issues directly. While much modernist literature attempts a critical distance from the commodified, materialistic nature of the modern world, this project concentrates on those works that delve into the specifics of capitalism. Of course, more typically modernist works like T. S. Eliot‘s poem ―The Wasteland,‖ or Gertrude
Stein‘s novel The Making of Americans also do a form of economic work. Fredric Jameson, for instance, famously argues that the ―make it new‖ aesthetic of modernism‘s more avant-garde works represents a rebellion against the stultifying normativity of consumer culture. This rebellion is then absorbed by capitalism, which repackages it as a commodified object in its own right.1 However, while such texts may represent interesting and important interventions in economic ideology, they typically do so in a manner that avoids openly debating the merits of different forms of economic organization. By avoiding these works and instead analyzing works which do debate economic issues explicitly, this project reclaims an area of economic discourse now more commonly associated with the conservatism of writers like Ayn Rand than with progressivism. To study and write about, for instance, the stock market or department stores, is 3
not necessarily to embrace or acquiesce to the status quo. Many of the writers discussed in this project found support for their views in such a direct study of the object of their critique.
Though firmly rooted in history, the analyses in this project initially grew out of my sense that the United States is again, as it was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, at an economic crossroads. No longer forced to compete with Communism, it has become an economic system for the few, not for the many. Thus this project is, in part, an effort to reclaim the ability to question what has too often become unassailable in free market ideology. At its most basic, to question both what the free market is and what it could be. The two questions that lurk behind this inquiry, then, are first, how did people conceive of and understand the changes in capitalism that they lived through? And second, what does literature have to do with this moment of crisis and change?
The first question can have no single, monolithic answer. However, there are a series of economic issues that arise repeatedly in literary texts from this period. At the most basic level,
Progressive Era writers devoted considerable energy to answering the questions, what is a free market and how does it operate? These questions are deceptively complex. Avoiding government regulation had always been a cornerstone of free market economics, but since the complete absence of government oversight had never been achieved, what level of freedom defined the free market remained an arguable point. In addition, the term free market implied that the market would free people, but concerns about economic slavery remained powerful. While Adam Smith claimed that a free market would guarantee people‘s ―natural liberty‖ and result in ordered economic progress, this view became increasingly difficult to uphold as the actual economy suffered multiple recessions and depressions. These questions gave rise to others. Some people saw, in the increased wealth that had accompanied industrialization, the possibility of 4
tremendous abundance. This posed both practical questions, as theorists debated how to handle the overproduction crises of the nineteenth century, and ethical questions. While the apparent inevitability of poverty had justified its existence, as the supply of goods increased and it began to look possible that everyone‘s basic needs could be met, the continued existence of poverty amidst plenty posed a significant moral dilemma for those who had more than enough. Finally, as it became clear that the tenets of classical liberalism did not actually ensure the freedom they promised, many writers began to wonder how the good parts of it—specifically individualism, self-regulation, and freedom from government tyranny—could be saved. While some people were willing to jettison these tenets in favor of the communal good, others saw liberalism as valuable, even if it had not always lived up to its promises. In various ways, these issues percolate throughout the works discussed in this project. Some authors are more concerned with one issue than with the others, but they share a common concern with questioning the merits of maintaining a free market at a time when its future was uncertain.
Questioning the Free Market
The term free market suggests freedom from government control, but a market entirely free from government intervention and regulation is a utopian ideal, existing solely as a rhetorical construct. While the consequences of free market ideology are material insofar as they manifest in the form of political and economic policies, the free market itself is a linguistic formation. There has never been (and likely can never be) a market that exists outside of all regulatory mechanisms.2 In recent years, multibillion dollar bank bailouts have coexisted with claims that financial regulation disrupts the free market, and increasingly stringent copyright and patent laws have evolved alongside the push to deregulate media companies. Late in the 5
nineteenth century, government granted utility contracts were a major source of wealth for private businessmen, and the same companies that resented government regulations like the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act embraced government aid in breaking worker strikes.
Such apparent contradictions are part of the fabric of the free market. In the fifth book of
The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith registers the impossibility of doing away with the government‘s role in the nation‘s economy by explicating an odd paradox in industrial society.
As private businesses during the Industrial Revolution increase production, Smith says, the duties of the government will increase, not decrease. In other words, a free market requires more government, not less. He argues that the increasing complexity of society calls for an increasingly complex system of government in order to regulate and maintain the conditions necessary for the market to flourish. As specialization of labor leaves most people unable to defend their own land or mobilize as a military force, Smith writes, the government must increasingly be responsible for the maintenance of a standing army. As parents spend less time with their children and skills like literacy increase in importance, the government needs to provide education. And since increased trade demands improved infrastructure—Smith concentrates on roads and ports—the government must ensure that the nation's infrastructure is properly maintained. The apparent paradox contained in Smith's work demonstrates that he never envisioned a market entirely void of government intervention. Rather, what he foresaw was a market in which the old barriers of class and caste that had previously ruled Europe were replaced by a system of private capital and competition.
In the century following the publication of The Wealth of Nations, two principles came to form the basis of free market economics: laissez-faire and free competition. Laissez-faire is the principle of government non-interference in private business, and it serves as the primary 6
justification for opposing government regulations. The doctrine of free competition holds that individuals should be allowed to compete with each other without restriction, thus allowing the businesses and individuals with the greatest merit to rise to the top. Free competition can describe both competition between laborers over jobs and competition between businesses over customers. The role of consumption is of central importance to free competition since the need to convince consumers to utilize services or buy products is the primary impetus to competition between businesses. Hence, consumer freedom and consumer choice are necessary corollaries to free competition. While early free market theorists saw no contradiction between free competition and laissez-faire, some Progressive Era thinkers began to see them as in direct conflict with each other. For instance, the presence of monopolies discouraged—or even rendered impossible—real competition. Thus, advocating government regulation of business could be seen as sacrificing laissez-faire in order to ensure free competition.
Even the ability to accurately describe the economic practices of turn-of-the-century
America, however, did not guarantee an understanding of what those practices do to the country.
While early liberal theorists had seen the free market as an organizing force for progress—Adam
Smith famously described the ―invisible hand‖ that guides the market—this view came under attack as frequent recessions and depressions destabilized the actual economy. New attacks on the free market occurred alongside new defenses of it, though. The burgeoning of Darwinian science provided one such defense for the free market. Darwin‘s description of nature as a battleground where the fit survive and prove themselves in competitive struggle resembled, for some economic theorists, an idealized version of the free market. Thinkers later dubbed ―Social
Darwinists‖ by the historian Richard Hofstadter, most notably the British sociologist Herbert 7
Spencer, wedded Darwinism to the liberal values of individualism and self-interest, as well as an optimistic belief that evolution would continue to improve people, and hence society.
Central to debates about the ordering and disordering effects of the market was the issue of abundance. For most of European and American history, people had lived in a state of scarcity, with constant struggle necessary just to procure essential goods. With the Industrial
Revolution, however, that had begun to change. As scarcity ceased to seem inevitable, people began to question the fairness of economic systems in which poverty remained widespread. By suggesting the possibility of a world in which scarcity was not inevitable, the Industrial
Revolution changed the context of poverty. As the historian Daniel J. Fox notes, ―The Industrial
Revolution did not create poverty. Industrialization made poverty visible, and economic growth raised questions about the necessity of having the poor always with us‖ (Discovery of Abundance
5). No longer regarded as inevitable, poverty could instead be viewed as the result of defects in the economic system. Such a view was not ubiquitous, however, and some thinkers suggested that poverty was the result of the individual failures, biological or otherwise, of the poor.
The American thinker most instrumental in expressing the belief that the economy was undergoing a fundamental change in relation to poverty and scarcity was the economist Simon
N. Patten. Patten opens his 1907 economic treatise, The New Basis of Civilization, by telling two stories about encounters with other people who were interested in the same phenomenon he was—the transition from a ―pain or deficit economy‖ to a ―pleasure or surplus economy‖ in the
United States (9). The first person is a religious man, an Adventist, who sees the coming abundance as a sign that the world is degenerating, and the second coming of Christ is at hand.
Both Patten and the Adventist have come to a spot overlooking a ―plentiful valley‖ full of industrious and wealthy farmers in the hopes that the site will inspire their writing. But while the 8
Adventist finds that the valley ―fortified his belief that divine wrath must be invoked upon a region carnal and depraved,‖ Patten thinks, ―Here is the basis of a new civilization; here is evidence that economic forces can sweep away poverty, banish misery, and by giving men work bring forth right and enduring character within the race‖ (4). The second person Patten recalls encountering is a ―social reformer‖ and ―cultured University man‖ (4). Like Patten and the
Adventist, the reformer has taken note of the increasing abundance of the industrial era.
However, when Patten reminds the reformer of ―the series upon series of improvements in the conditions of workingmen‘s lives,‖ the ―numerous pleasure-yielding motives to work which have been given to the poor,‖ and ―the familiar truth that their consumption of goods has been enormously increased, widely varied, and remarkably cheapened,‖ the reformer shakes his head and replies, ―I have lived in Berlin, Paris, London, New York, and Chicago, and in all of them the misery of the masses is as acute as it ever was‖ (5).
Patten‘s two encounters illustrate that, while there was a growing consensus among
Americans that increased productivity was changing the economy, individual reactions to the change still varied widely. Would the new basis of civilization—abundance, rather than scarcity—bring degeneration or renewal? Would it increase economic stratification and lead to class warfare or would it raise everyone‘s standard of living? By 1907 these were already pressing questions for the United States, and over the next three decades their urgency would increase. While historians and economists both tend to point to the post-World War II years as the period when American society got its first real taste of abundance, it was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that Americans first began to think critically about the economic and social significance of abundance.3 Prior to this point, economics had been primarily the study of scarcity. Perhaps the most exemplary version of an economics of scarcity 9
comes from Thomas Malthus, who believed that the only way to limit the spread of poverty was through carefully controlling reproduction, thereby limiting population size. Malthus‘s argument assumes that scarcity is a basic rule of nature, that resources are severely limited, and that as such human populations must also be strictly limited. Patten, in optimistic contrast, states that
―Population once pressed hard upon food and employment; now food is ready for consumers and capital calls for workers‖ (186).
Fox argues that one of the key questions for economists, starting with Adam Smith and his contemporaries, and continuing until Patten, was just how much industrialization would be able to increase production. Most economists believed that industrial society would eventually hit a stable plateau, and cease to grow more productive. This, in effect, put a natural limit on the possibility of abundance, one that was endemic to the environment and to human nature and that as such could not be overcome by any trick of science or industry. Patten, Fox argues, fundamentally changed this ―frame of reference‖ (Discovery of Abundance vii–xi, 1–12). While
Patten admits that scarcity has part of its basis in heredity, he goes on to say that although most people have looked for the reasons why scarcity is the rule of life in ―some fatal defect in the constitution of the earth itself‖ (31), the actual reasons for scarcity are institutional rather than natural. That is to say, Patten takes a predominantly sociological rather than a biological view of human behavior. Patten claims that the need to survive against a hostile world leads humans toward the evolution of cooperative traits. However, ―the unification of interests, and the consequent hastening of evolution which it could have brought about, was disturbed at the dawn of civilization by a change in the form of the stored wealth. . . . A large and old surplus . . . gradually replaces altruistic traits by selfish and short-sighted qualities in the men who control it‖
(36–37). The result of the surplus which has robbed men of their cooperative qualities is that 10
―The conquered man has been controlled by the man with the surplus until it has come about that the poor are born on one side of a line and the aristocrats are born on the other‖ (38). The resulting division of the populace is biologically beneficial to no one: ―While the weakening of stimuli is clogging the primary instincts of the rich, the poor degenerate under the throttling of want‖ (42). Thus, Patten claims, the rich cease to be productive members of society, and the poor, unable to imagine a life free from want, degenerate into a state in which scarcity appears to them to be inevitable, and hence better accepted than warred against. As industrialism continued to increase productivity, however, Patten saw the possibility that a social program, properly carried out, could eradicate the old biases and lead to an era characterized by abundance.
Of course, scarcity and abundance are both relative terms. In economics, scarcity typically refers to a situation in which the supply of a good or service is insufficient to fulfill demand for it. If human desire is infinite, then scarcity is an inevitable part of any economy, and people are constantly choosing between different scarce resources, since they cannot have everything they want. There can never be enough goods to fulfill all desires. For Patten, however, scarcity had a somewhat different meaning. The age of scarcity had been marked by a large number of people living without sufficient wealth to maintain a family in good health. For a long time, western culture had accepted poverty on the grounds that there simply was not enough wealth to raise the whole population out of poverty. The age of abundance, or so Patten hoped, would be characterized by enough goods that poverty could be beaten. Everyone, or almost everyone, would be able to live above the level of poverty. In this sense, abundance had less to do with generating vast amounts of excess than with creating a sufficient quantity of the necessities of life. 11
While Patten takes a positive view of abundance, others saw abundance as equally, if not more, threatening than scarcity. The problem with scarcity is obvious—at the very least it leads to frustrated desires and unfulfilled wishes. In cases where the basic necessities of life are scarce, it can lead to poor health and even death. Abundance has its own share of problems, however.
Starting in the 1920s, an abundance of agricultural goods drove food prices down and resulted in many farmers going bankrupt. Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to solve this problem with the controversial Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to kill excess livestock and leave fields fallow. Abundance, however, does not pose a problem solely for those trying to monetize an abundant resource. Patten describes a cotton farmer who, thanks to an unexpectedly abundant harvest, ends up with seventeen dollars left after paying his bills. His wife, who formerly worked as a washerwoman, stops working, and the farmer says of the money that he does ―not know what to do with it or with himself, since the rent was paid and the larder stocked‖ (128). In Time and Money, the historian Gary Cross argues that one of the primary economic concerns that stemmed from abundance was the fear that abundance would lead to too much leisure time and a disintegration of work ethics (16–24). The story of the cotton farmer expresses just such a fear.
Patten has a solution, though—he suggests that the way to motivate the cotton farmer and his wife to keep working is to offer them access to recreation. In other words, Patten claims that people are content with having enough only because they are not yet cognizant of the pleasures of having more than enough. Anticipating his audience‘s possible moral objections to the expansion of recreational activities, Patten writes, ―Taken alone, pleasure appears sinful, and work is a drudgery, but when the two are united in just proportions the effects seem magical‖
(164). 12
Though Patten made a powerful case for the benefits of abundance, the economic shifts of the Progressive Era and the Great Depression years frequently led reformers—like the
―cultured University man‖ Patten recounts speaking with—to the conclusion that the American economy was in trouble. The post-Civil War economy saw a vast restructuring of American businesses into ever larger units. This consolidation of capital into large corporations tended to increase efficiency (and hence abundance), but it also disrupted the personal relationship between employer and employee, rendering workers expendable and interchangeable.
Furthermore, the increased wealth generated by larger businesses was unequally shared among the populace, and poverty remained common. Because the demand for products sometimes failed to keep up with the supply, the nineteenth century also experienced a series of overproduction crises, typically resulting in the closure of factories. Frequent factory closures meant low job security and high unemployment for workers, while a lack of social welfare programs meant that most workers could ill afford to be without work for an extended period of time. Other concerns regarding abundance concentrated specifically on the dangers of consumerism. Female consumers in particular were frequently described as irrational and voracious in both sociological literature and the press.
Abundance also posed a challenge for liberalism. The new ethical considerations it raised were sometimes taken to justify a switch to a more socialist concentration on the communal good over individual freedom. While socialism did begin to gain a firmer foothold in America, however, many progressive reformers wanted not a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but a market society that was stable and provided a fair chance for advancement to the working class.
Even the New Deal, the most ambitious effort of the period to redefine the role of the government in the American economy, is best viewed not as an effort to redefine liberalism 13
outside the context of classical liberal economics, but as an effort to pragmatically redefine the free market in terms that acknowledged the necessary role of government in preserving a workable system of private industry. While liberalism had always, in various forms, been the belief that people should be made as free as possible, early liberals had often viewed laissez-faire as a guarantor of freedom. The new era of abundance, however, gave rise to concerns that a new aristocracy of money was replacing the old aristocracy of bloodline. Concerns about wage slavery replaced concerns about feudal slavery, and liberalism was forced to deal with the fact that simply limiting government interference in the economy did not create a free populace. The result was a political liberalism increasingly suspicious of dogmatic versions of laissez-faire.
One way this change manifested was through a series of political platforms that claimed to be
―new‖—Theodore Roosevelt‘s New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson‘s New Freedom, and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt‘s New Deal.
Perhaps the preeminent economist of the new liberalism, John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay titled ―The End of Laissez-Faire‖ in 1926, outlining—just as Adam Smith had done—what amount and sort of government regulation was necessary to maintain a functioning market. In this essay, Keynes claims that free market theories were always founded on a set of paradoxes and ―long-exploded sophistries‖ (17–18). While Keynes makes for an interesting case study of the changing attitude towards government intervention, he gets at least one thing wrong—the days of laissez-faire were not at their end in 1926. In spite of the numerous blows the doctrine took throughout the Progressive Era and into the Great Depression and the New Deal, it remained alive. Of course, Keynes did not intend his essay as a death knell for the free market, but as a wakeup call. His actual targets of derision are not Adam Smith and his successors, but
―the popularizers and the vulgarizers‖ who misinterpreted and spread free market theories (22).4 14
His essay is less an effort to oppose the basic principles of capitalism than to prevent it from drowning in its own dogma. Keynes seeks to rehabilitate capitalism so as to prevent radical communist or anarchist ideologies from gaining power, reasoning that the best protection against unworkable extremist ideologies is to show how the free market, with the aid of some progressive modifications, can support an equitable and free society.
Keynes‘s critique of laissez-faire exemplifies a politically moderate liberalism that sought reform rather than revolution. Keynes‘s stance—that the free market could be salvaged, but only by accepting the necessity of some government regulation—was informed by the increasing economic instability of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. And though Keynes was
British, his ideas influenced the American New Deal and left an indelible imprint on American liberalism. Keynes‘s claim that a rationally organized society could control the instability of the market appealed to progressive thinkers who had long argued for scientifically grounded regulation of society. Because Keynes believed that a stable capitalist market was attainable, his views were palatable to those who feared that the Bolshevik Revolution could be repeated in the
United States. Though—with the possible exception of John Dos Passos—none of the literary writers discussed in this dissertation are Keynesians per se, they share with Keynes a desire to rethink American economics without rejecting entirely the rubrics of liberalism and the free market.
The first chapter, ―A Utopia of Abundance: Edward Bellamy and the Free Market,‖ analyzes Edward Bellamy‘s utopian fiction as an early effort to grapple with the possibility that the economic condition of the twentieth century could be one of abundance, rather than scarcity.
Reading Bellamy counter to the trend of viewing him as an authoritarian state socialist, this chapter argues that his work is best understood as engaging with late nineteenth-century changes 15
in the free market, particularly those surrounding trusts and monopolies. While the trend among progressives in the years following the publication of Bellamy‘s Looking Backward was to eschew monopolies for their deleterious effects on competition, Bellamy instead sees utopian possibility in the heightened efficiency of consolidated capital. Awash in the bounty wrought by industrial efficiency, Bellamy‘s utopian citizens seek out a genteel, middle-class existence of political and civic participation while pursuing self-improvement through culture and science.
Imagining human desire as finite, Bellamy suggests that abundance will lead to a society in which everyone has as much as they need and want.
The second chapter, ―The Irrational Consumer: Economics and Agency in Gilman, Loos, and Cozzens,‖ analyzes the work of a trio of authors who are less sanguine about the effects of abundance. As goods became cheaper and more readily available, the consumer began to emerge as a definite type. While a small leisure class of consumers had long been a characteristic of
American society, the democratization of consumerism during the twentieth century made consumption an interesting subject for intellectual activity. Frequently, western thinkers—like the Adventist that Patten writes about—viewed consumers as irrational and threatening. Anti- consumer crusaders often focused on women in particular, utilizing Enlightenment discourses that portrayed women as prone to hysteria and irrational beliefs. The writers discussed in this chapter respond to these discourses, providing visions of consumerism that highlight systemic problems with the way the free market handles abundance. By highlighting systemic problems, they critique both the market‘s handling of abundance and gendered attacks on consumerism.
The third chapter, ―Natural Fortunes: Chance, Fitness, and the Individual in Literary
Naturalism,‖ examines the work of two naturalist writers, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, who are both keenly interested in the dual meanings of fortune as both wealth and luck. Reading 16
them in the context of Darwinian and Spencerian ideas of evolution, this chapter argues that
Norris and Dreiser challenge discourses of fitness by inserting chance into their descriptions of economic relations. In so doing, each of these authors asks us to consider the fate of the individual when subjected to a system in which the individual has little control over their fate.
Chapter four, ―The New Deal and the ‗middle-class liberal‘: Labor, Consumption, and
Capital in Dos Passos‘s U.S.A.,‖ argues that Dos Passos‘s U.S.A. trilogy follows a strain of New
Deal liberalism in identifying the big money of the booming 1920s investment market as a central factor in destabilizing the economy. For Dos Passos, investment is a problem because it unbalances the connection between productive labor and consumption. The ideal life is one of hard (but not too hard) work, and consumption without excess. By rigging the economy so that some people work too hard for too little while others sink into dissipation as a result of having too much and doing too little, unstable capital markets become not just an economic problem, but a human problem as well. In response, Dos Passos places his faith in the ―middle-class liberal,‖ who he imagines as outside of the class struggle that divides the working class from the owning class.
Though wildly divergent in the specifics of their critiques, the writers analyzed in this book shared the willingness to identify and examine the economic problems that faced the
United States during their lifetimes. Their works are not revolutionary texts that sought to overthrow capitalism, but reformist texts that understood the free market as a malleable concept, one that, as Keynes argues, can and must be adjusted to respond to the changing exigencies of a changing world. Today, when the dogmatism of the post-Reagan years has frequently replaced critical thinking about what it means to support a free market, their works serve as an impetus to 17
challenge orthodoxies and to think again of the free market as a wide umbrella that has always included various forms of regulation and control, at least in practice if sometimes not in theory.
Notes
1 This is one of the primary points that Jameson argues in the first essay of
Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
2 This is not a new or particularly radical point to make, and this study takes it as axiomatic that the concept of the free market has encapsulated a wide range of actual economic practices, all of which to varying degrees have involved some form of interaction between government and economy. In The End of Reform, Alan Brinkley lays out a similar viewpoint (8–
11).
3 The historian Daniel J. Fox argued in 1968 that ―scarcity—the struggle to subsist—is being replaced by affluence, abundance, or an age of expanding mass consumption‖
(Introduction vii). The economist Paul Krugman refers to the Progressive Era as part of ―the
Long Gilded Age‖ (17), claiming that a real end to widespread scarcity had to wait until after the
Great Depression. Krugman also points to the post–World War II era through the 1970s as having a consistently high rate of overall economic growth.
4 Keynes‘s particular target of derision is Jeremy Bentham (and the utilitarian movement more generally, by association). Keynes notes that ―Bentham—who was not an economist at all‖ introduced the term laissez-faire to British economists (24). 18
A Utopia of Abundance: Edward Bellamy and the Free Market
The economy of abundance that Simon N. Patten prophesied was still a long way off in
1888 when Edward Bellamy published his first utopian novel, Looking Backward: 2000-1887.
Just as Patten would almost two decades later, though, Bellamy foresaw a future in which the problem of scarcity would be solved, and goods could be produced so easily and efficiently that luxury, not hardship, would be the dominant factor in life. Bellamy‘s utopia of abundance was so appealing that Looking Backward quickly became one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century. Its popularity crossed cultural and linguistic barriers, and the novel was translated into dozens of other languages, becoming an international success as well. It launched Bellamy into the public spotlight and sparked an economic debate that flourished in newspapers and drawing rooms. The novel not only influenced important individuals—including the labor activist Eugene
Debs, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen, the suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the anarchist
Peter Kropotkin, and the theosophist Madame Blavatsky—it also affected American politics. The book spawned dozens of politically involved (though somewhat short-lived) Nationalist Clubs, and influenced the Populist Party during the 1890s. Looking Backward experienced a return to popularity during the Great Depression, and, according to one observer, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt gave its sequel, Equality, a prominent spot in his library.1 Because of its popularity,
Looking Backward inspired dozens of novelistic responses from both critics and supporters, and these responses ranged from unauthorized sequels, including Richard Michaelis‘s Looking
Further Forward (1890), Ludwig Geissler‘s Looking Beyond (1891), and J. W. Roberts‘s
Looking Within (1893) to indirect revisions like William Morris‘s News from Nowhere (1890) and Bradford Peck‘s The World a Department Store (1900). 19
The popularity of Bellamy‘s novel, as well as its political impact, suggests that the economic troubles Bellamy addresses were at the forefront of many American‘s consciousness as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Bellamy‘s readers could likely relate to his protagonist,
Julian West, who, upset by the frequent labor strikes and seemingly insoluble economic turmoil of the 1880s, hires a hypnotist to help cure his insomnia. Unlike his similarly anxious countrymen, however, West sleeps in a buried vault for over a century, until, in the year 2000, he is discovered and woken up by Dr. Leete, a retired medical professional and citizen of the utopian Boston of the year 2000. Thanks to cooperative labor and capital, as well as technological and industrial advances, this future Boston is a land of happy, wealthy citizens—a utopia of abundance. The rest of the novel mixes Dr. Leete‘s explanations of how the Boston of
2000 differs from the Boston of 1887 with a budding romance between West and Dr. Leete‘s daughter, Edith, who turns out to be the great granddaughter of West‘s former fiancée, Edith
Bartlett.2 Dr. Leete‘s expositions form the basis of Bellamy‘s economic system, which he dubs
―nationalism.‖ Bellamy would continue to refine the ideas present in Looking Backward for the rest of his life, first via speeches and newspaper articles then by publishing the sequel to Looking
Backward, titled Equality.
In a general way, utopian literature is always about abundance. While early utopias saw abundance (and hence utopia) as fantastic and remote, however, Bellamy sets his utopia in
Boston only a little over a century in the future. Bellamy‘s utopian vision and his political efforts to realize that vision leave little doubt that he actually believed in the possibility of a world in which scarcity had been entirely conquered. Though most aspects of Bellamy‘s utopia did not come to be, the century following Looking Backward‘s publication was one of enormous industrial expansion. The consolidated capital of large businesses, advances in technology, and a 20
relatively low level of income inequality after World War II set the stage for a booming post-war economy that brought an era of abundance to many Americans. While this newfound abundance has not ushered in the utopian era that Bellamy hoped it would, Bellamy was remarkably canny both in realizing that vastly increased production is not far off and in analyzing the factors leading to an economy of abundance.
Fredric Jameson argues that utopian science fiction imagines a future in order to reflect on the present as though the present were the past (286–89). In other words, by imagining a fictional future, utopian science fiction allows writers to historicize their present moment, suggesting the potential outcomes of current actions. In keeping with Jameson‘s thesis, this chapter examines the ways in which imagining a future of industrial abundance allows Bellamy to reimagine how the economy might work in his own day so as to bring about the future utopia that he depicts in his novels. The first section argues that reading Bellamy‘s utopia through the lens of capitalist theory, rather than Marxist theory, illuminates Bellamy‘s interest in the utopian potential for abundance present in a self-regulating market. In particular, this section suggests that Bellamy‘s views on monopolies are pivotal for understanding the appeal of Bellamy‘s nationalism. Consolidated capital, handled cooperatively, forms the basis for an economy that utilizes workers efficiently while eliminating waste. The second section compares Bellamy‘s utopian ideas to those of William Morris in order to highlight the ways in which Bellamy imagines a consumer utopia—that is, a utopia in which consumers‘ desires dictate what is produced, and in which the economy exists for the purpose of ensuring adequate goods and services for all its citizens.
21
“The Revolution Made Us All Capitalists”: Utopian Abundance and Monopoly Capitalism
While Bellamy avoids referring to his utopia as socialist, neither his contemporaries nor later critics had any trouble identifying the roots of his utopia in socialist theory.3 The government in Bellamy‘s novel controls all industry and is the sole purveyor of goods and services. All citizens receive the same yearly income, and there are no privately owned businesses. Some early reviews of Looking Backward referred to Bellamy‘s utopian scheme as
―a sort of reformed communism‖ (Reade 2), an ―interesting dream of a completed socialism‖
(―Note and Comment‖ 4), and ―a scheme of socialism . . . not entirely devoid of the appearance of feasibility‖ (―Socialism‘s New Form‖ 1). A less complimentary review stated that ―This theory of Nationalism, as it is called, is neither more nor less than communism‖ (―Mrs. Ward,
Bellamy, and the Clergy‖ 4). In fact, it is both more and less than communism; Bellamy‘s economic system is a hybrid that draws its ethical imperatives—and some of its ideas—from socialist theory, while it remains attached to certain strands of capitalist economic theory.
Specifically, Bellamy remains devoted to the possibility of a self-regulating market with minimal government interference. He even suggests that monopolies have the potential to revolutionize the economy for the better, ushering in a non-competitive era of abundance, shared equally among all citizens.
In Equality, Dr. Leete makes a surprising comment about the (apparently) socialist economic organization of utopia. Dr. Leete tells West that ―The Revolution made us all capitalists.‖4 Given the obvious influence of socialism on Bellamy‘s thoughts, it might be tempting to dismiss Dr. Leete‘s proclamation as a rhetorical flourish—an effort to make socialism more palatable by cloaking it in the guise of capitalism. However, both Looking
Backward and Equality consistently portray nationalism as an economic system built on 22
capitalist principles. After explaining that everyone is a capitalist in the year 2000, Leete goes on to justify his claim by noting that ―the idea of the dividend has driven out that of the stipend‖ (E
91). Workers no longer sell their labor. Instead, they labor so as to increase the value of their capital, that capital being the nation and its industry. They then collect the annual dividend on their share of stock in the nation. Thus, the capitalists are never overthrown by the proletariat in
Bellamy‘s utopia. Rather, capitalism triumphs, and in its triumph it eliminates the proletariat and turns everyone into a capitalist—literally, an owner of capital.5
A number of critics have noted Bellamy‘s avoidance of the vocabulary of socialism. John
Baer claims that ―Bellamy used the word, ‗Nationalist,‘ because he was too cautious to use the word ‗socialism‘‖ (372), while Matthew Beaumont suggests that ―Bellamy called his scheme
‗Nationalist‘ in order to purge it of the slippery and sometimes pungent associations of the word
‗Socialist‘‖ (201). Beaumont goes on to call Looking Backward a ―socialist utopia‖ (202), though he admits ―Bellamy‘s politics were in important aspects far closer to those of the capitalists than to those of self-styled communists and anarchists‖ (202). Comparing Bellamy unfavorably to William Morris, Stephen Coleman writes that the ―economic features of capitalism are transcended in Morris‘s Nowhere, but not in Bellamy‘s Boston of the year 2000‖
(3). Herman S. Preiser describes nationalism as a model of ethically-informed capitalism that has the potential to serve as a buffer against socialism (434–46). In his biography of Bellamy, Arthur
E. Morgan notes that according to the socialist Cyrus Willard, one of Bellamy‘s confidants,
Bellamy had not read any Marx at the time he wrote Looking Backward, and was repelled by what he knew of historical materialism (372). Bowman, in contrast, finds evidence that Bellamy became interested in German socialism while in college (Edward Bellamy 6), and that he was reasonably familiar with Marx‘s ideas, at least through secondary sources, well before writing 23
Looking Backward (Edward Bellamy 26–27). Frank Rosemont notes that Bellamy did occasionally refer to ―nationalism‖ as a form of socialism in his speeches and newspaper articles
(―Introduction‖ 9), though he goes on to note that Bellamy‘s ideas are ―too wildly divergent for the occlusive orthodoxies that have passed for ‗dialectical materialism‘‖ (―Introduction‖ 11).
Part of the problem when dealing with Bellamy‘s ―socialism‖ comes from the fact that socialism was not, in the nineteenth century, the clearly delineated economic theory it became over the course of the next century. Morgan suggests that Bellamy avoided the word for this reason (367–68). While societies structured along communitarian lines had existed in America at least since the seventeenth century (and arguably much longer if we include some Native
American communities), socialism remained virtually unknown among the wider culture until the 1870s (Quint 3–36). Even then, socialism, for most Americans, remained poorly understood.
Most Americans associated it with recent European immigrants, particularly Germans, who, in the eyes of their fellow Americans, simply had not yet realized that the injustices of the Old
World were absent from the New World (Quint 4). This view defanged socialism, rendering it a
European holdover with little relevance to American politics. For all these reasons, Bellamy found himself perfectly situated to invent American socialism. Ultimately, Howard Quint argues,
American socialism ―owed more for its inspiration to Edward Bellamy‘s Looking Backward than it did to Karl Marx‘s Capital‖ (vii). But the inventor of American socialism probably never seriously thought of himself as a socialist, and the easy acceptance of Bellamy‘s utopia as a socialist utopia obfuscates the depth of his engagement with economic theories traditionally associated with capitalism.
The odd confluence of capitalist and socialist economic theory in Bellamy‘s works is best read as an attempt to come to grips with industrial capitalism and the free market not by rejecting 24
it utterly, but rather by asking what can be done to alleviate the problems that follow in its wake.
Rather than rejecting the free market, Bellamy was enticed by its utopian possibilities, even while he remained critical of its abuses. While a few critics have noted that Bellamy‘s utopia responds to the late nineteenth-century market economy, none has provided a detailed look at the way free market economics makes its way into Bellamy‘s ―nationalism.‖ Jonathan Auerbach argues that Looking Backward ―has less to do with socialism as a clear-cut economic alternative to market relations, and more to do with registering changes taking place in market society itself‖
(25). He goes on to note that, in Bellamy‘s utopia, ―the state is itself subject to principles governing commodities and labor—principles that more closely resemble laissez-faire individualism‖ (33). Auerbach claims that Bellamy envisioned a government that lacked any actual power to change the market—that is to say, a government whose sole duty was to run what little bureaucracy was necessary to keep the perfectly balanced and rationally functioning market afloat. This government appealed to Bellamy, Auerbach argues, because it suggests that humans are incapable of effecting social change. Because humans are impotent, they also lack any responsibility for running the nation (and hence any guilt for the crimes of the nation):
―History [according to Bellamy] is a nightmare from which you can escape; the escape route depends simply on recognizing your impotence. And this impotence is precisely the source of the book‘s enormous attraction for nineteenth-century readers. . . . Instead of struggling to overcome such weakness, Bellamy urges the nation rather to embrace its collective impotence‖ (41).6
Though Auerbach is right that Bellamy constructs a self-sufficient market machine, Looking
Backward served as a call to action, not inaction, for many of his readers. Bellamy as well saw his ideas as a call to act. He became a public figure first in the short-lived nationalist movement then in the Populist Party. He ran a nationalist newspaper called The New Nation, gave public 25
speeches, wrote numerous editorials, and encouraged the formation of quasi-political groups with nationalist and utopian agendas. While Bellamy‘s utopia may have appealed to people precisely because it projects a future in which human agency is no longer necessary to run the economy, its most immediate effect was to inspire a great deal of action from a great many people. Furthermore, Auerbach‘s argument largely ignores the ethical dimension of Bellamy‘s utopia, dimensions that Bellamy highlights. Dr. Leete states in Equality, ―There can be but one science of human conduct in any field, and that is ethical. Any economic proposition which can not be stated in ethical terms is false. Nothing can be in the long run or on a large scale sound economics that is not sound ethics‖ (E 194–95). The absence of human agency in the economy of Looking Backward is better read not as an attempt to alleviate buried guilt, but as an attempt to organize society in such a way as to prevent individual vices from ruining the perfection of rational organization. In his desire to excise human error from the machinery of government,
Bellamy imagines a utopia in which the power of the free market reigns supreme. Humans do not need power in utopia because the market no longer requires human adjustment. Rather, it has attained the state of perfection towards which the free market strives—it has become self- regulating.
Bellamy's romance with the free market did not, however, mean that he rejected socialism. Part of what Looking Backward reveals is just how slippery the line between capitalist and socialist economic theory can be. The trouble scholars have locating Bellamy's form of socialism in any single theoretical model stems from Bellamy‘s attraction to socialism as an ethical system first and as an economic system only secondarily. Samuel Haber claims that
Bellamy, along with many of his contemporaries, viewed socialism not as ―inextricably tied to particular programs of redistribution,‖ but as a system of ―three traditional ideals—fair shares, 26
the community of brotherly love, and the abolition of poverty‖ (419–20). Rather than rejecting socialism, Bellamy's utopia attempts to fulfill the ethical imperatives of socialism by taking free market economic theory—certain choice parts of it, at least—to its logical endpoint. Looking
Backward and Equality explain how the basic structures of laissez-faire, when divorced from competition and wedded, instead, to cooperative systems of business, can help bring about a new era of productivity, shared equally by all. What is curious about Looking Backward, then, is that the fulfillment of a (capitalist) dream of a self-regulating market looks an awful lot like state socialism. While the Cold War would render socialism and capitalism competing opposites,
Bellamy‘s work provides valuable insight into a cultural moment in which people were still able to imagine market relations outside of this dichotomy. Writing at a time when it was not yet clear what socialism or what capitalism would become, Bellamy imagines a world in which the two are one and the same. Bellamy does not merely blend two economic theories together, nor does he imagine that socialism will follow industrial capitalism as the next stage in the telos of economic progress. Rather, Bellamy‘s work suggests that capitalism contains socialism within it, and vice versa.
The key to understanding Bellamy‘s blending of laissez-faire capitalism and socialism lies in his response to the dilemma posed by monopolies.7 By the late nineteenth century, monopolies had brought the two central tenets of free market economics—free competition and laissez-faire—into conflict with each other. For Bellamy, only the abandonment of a competitive system could resolve the conflict and lead to a stable and self-regulating market. The monopoly becomes, in Looking Backward, both a symbol of the failure of competition, and a symbol of the utopian possibilities of cooperation. Looking Backward and Equality embrace the dream of laissez-faire—a self-regulating market that requires no outside adjustment—but suggest that 27
cooperation between the citizens of a nation, not competition, can achieve such a system.
Bellamy‘s desire for a cooperative economic system stems in part from his ethical beliefs, but also in part because he sees cooperation as more efficient than competition. As the most efficient means of producing wealth, monopolies promise an end to scarcity and an era of abundance.
Bellamy‘s interest in preserving monopolies runs contrary to the general political trend of his day. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, there was a concerted and bipartisan political push to protect competition from the threat of monopolization. Two years after the publication of Looking Backward, Congress passed (almost unanimously) the first piece of federal anti-monopoly legislation, the Sherman Antitrust Act. Initially, the Sherman Act posed little impediment to monopolistic business practices. It was not used effectively against business monopolies until Theodore Roosevelt earned himself the moniker ―Trust-busting Teddy‖ by using it to prevent the formation of the Northern Securities Company in 1902. Roosevelt later brought suits against dozens of other monopolies, as did his successor, William Howard Taft.
Although enforcement of antitrust laws did not occur until more than a decade later, the passage of the Sherman Act was a preliminary move in a larger effort to save competition at the cost of sacrificing laissez-faire policies.
While support for the Sherman Act was widespread, so was a concern for the possibly deleterious effects of dissuading larger and more efficient businesses. Ohio Republican John
Sherman, explaining the purpose of the bill to his fellow senators, drew a sharp distinction between business partnerships that tended to increase the efficiency of production and distribution, and those that tended to prevent competition:
When corporations unite merely to extend their business . . . they are proper and
lawful. Corporations tend to cheapen transportation, lessen the costs of 28
production, and bring within the reach of millions comforts and luxuries formerly
enjoyed by thousands. . . . Corporate rights open to all are not in any sense a
monopoly, but tend to promote free competition of all on the same conditions. . . .
This bill does not seek to cripple combinations of capital and labor . . . but only to
prevent and control combinations made with a view to prevent competition, or for
the restraint of trade, or to increase the profits of the producer at the cost of the
consumer. (Cong. Rec., 21 March 1890, 2457)
Senator Sherman‘s speech carefully stresses the benefits of anti-monopoly legislation to consumers. Sherman explains that while larger businesses tend to produce cheaper products, monopolies tend to drive prices up by limiting the availability of commodities. In the House,
Illinois Representative William Mason—also a Republican—took a different tack. Instead of stressing the value of anti-monopoly legislation to consumers, Mason admitted that in some cases monopolies may benefit the consumer. He insisted, however, that even in such cases they were undesirable due to their effect on other businesses: ―Some say that the trusts have made products cheaper, have reduced prices; but if the price of oil, for instance, were reduced to 1 cent a barrel it would not right the wrong done to people of this country by the ‗trusts‘ which have destroyed legitimate competition and driven honest men from legitimate business enterprise‖
(Cong. Rec., 1 May 1890, 4100).8
While Mason‘s comments privilege competition over government non-interference,
Bellamy‘s distaste for competitive practices inspired his support for monopolies. In Looking
Backward Dr. Leete describes the root of utopia in a single monopoly that grows so large and powerful that it effectively owns everything. Somehow, the monopoly then becomes the government (or perhaps the government takes control of the monopoly) and ushers in an era of 29
efficient, centralized production. Dr. Leete first mentions the importance of monopolies when
West asks what has happened to the ―labor question‖ in utopia. Dr. Leete assures him that it has been solved—or more precisely that ―It may be said to have solved itself‖ (LB 72). He goes on to enumerate all of the problems associated with the rise of monopolies in the late nineteenth century, and how they contributed to the labor problem. The problems Leete mentions include the diminishing importance of the individual laborer, the inability of new businesses and small businesses to survive, the concentration of capital into the hands of a few individuals, and the growing gap between the rich and the poor (LB 72–75).
What begins as an apparent warning about the evils of monopolies, however, takes a sudden turn when Dr. Leete notes ―The fact that the desperate popular opposition to the consolidation of business in a few powerful hands had no effect to check it proves that there must have been a strong economical reason for it‖ (LB 75). Dr. Leete goes on to explain that
Oppressive and intolerable as was the regime of the great consolidations of
capital, even its victims, while they cursed it, were forced to admit the prodigious
increase of efficiency which had been imparted to the national industries. . . . To
be sure this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer . . . but the fact
remained that, as a means merely of producing wealth, capital had been proved
efficient in proportion to its consolidation. (LB 75-76)
Bellamy‘s faith in the greater efficiency of big industry could have come straight out of Adam
Smith, who opens The Wealth of Nations with a discussion of the increased efficiency wrought by the ―division of labor‖ (14; bk. 1, ch. 1). As manufacturing jobs become more specialized,
Smith argues, workers waste less time switching between tasks, and become much quicker at performing their own, specialized duty. What sets Bellamy apart from Smith is his faith in the 30
monopoly itself as the figure of economic progress. The operative difference is that, while
Smith‘s defense of industrialism rests on the greater efficiency afforded by the division of labor,
Bellamy concentrates instead on the consolidation of capital. Bellamy claims that merely concentrating wealth in a central body can increase the efficiency of the economy.
By the time Bellamy wrote Equality, he had abandoned his notion that nationalism would rise directly out of an actual monopoly. He continued, however, to define his utopian world in terms of the practices of monopoly capitalism. Furthermore, Equality clearly and succinctly lays out Bellamy‘s defense of the monopoly as a utopian structure:
It is in vain to pit the moribund system of competition against the young giant of
private monopoly; it must rather be opposed by the greater giant of public
monopoly. The consolidation of business in private interests must be met with
greater consolidation in the public interest, the trust and the syndicate with the
city, State, and nation, capitalism with nationalism. The capitalists have destroyed
the competitive system. Do not try to restore it, but rather thank them for the
work, if not the motive, and set about, not to rebuild the old village of hovels, but
to rear on the cleared place the temple humanity so long has waited for. (E 333-
34)
Bellamy favors the consolidation of capital because it eliminates the possibility of competition, which Bellamy accuses both of encouraging anti-social behaviors, and of leading to vast amounts of waste. Monopolies preclude competition.
Whereas Sherman and Mason both stress the tendency of monopolies to cause problems in spite of the increased efficiency of their operations, Bellamy‘s objections to competition stress the loss of efficiency in unconsolidated businesses. Describing Boston in the year 2000, Dr. 31
Leete explains to West that ―a form of society which was founded on the pseudo self-interest of selfishness, and appealed solely to the anti-social and brutal side of human nature, has been replaced by institutions based on the true self-interest of a rational unselfishness, and appealing to the social and generous instincts of men‖ (LB 207). Dr. Leete raises two objections to competition. The first, and simpler, objection he raises is a moral objection—the contrast Dr.
Leete draws between selfish competition and social generosity leaves little doubt as to where he stands on the issue of the morality of competition. However, Dr. Leete does not decry competition solely on moral grounds, but also insists that selfishness is actually a form of
―pseudo self-interest‖ that contrasts with ―the true self-interest of rational unselfishness.‖ Dr.
Leete continues, offering a variety of explanations as to how competition serves to defeat the self-interest of the nation as a whole. For instance, competition destroys some businesses, resulting in the waste of the capital invested in the business. In a similar vein, failed businesses result in at least temporary unemployment, and unemployment equates with wasted labor power
(LB 180–81). Both wasted capital and wasted labor power result in the decreased efficiency of production, hence the path of actual or rational self-interest lies in rejecting competition.
Bellamy‘s critique of the irrationality of competition goes deeper than a simple critique of inefficiency, though. Dr. Leete also explains that competition between people in the same trade can, in the long run, lead to scarcity and increased prices of goods:
One‘s worst enemies were necessarily those of his own trade, for, under your plan
of making private profit the motive of production, a scarcity of the article he
produced was what each particular producer desired. . . . To secure this
consummation as far as circumstances permitted, by killing off and discouraging
those engaged in his line of industry, was his constant effort. When he had killed 32
off all he could, his policy was to combine with those he could not kill, and
convert their mutual warfare into a warfare upon the public at large by cornering
. . . and putting up prices to the highest point people would stand before going
without the goods. (LB 181)
The passage is particularly notable for how precisely it mirrors Adam Smith‘s discussion of the effect of monopolies on the market price of objects: ―The monopolists, by keeping the market constantly understocked by never fully supplying the effectual demand, sell their commodities much above the natural price, and raise their emoluments . . . greatly above their natural rate‖
(57; bk. 1, ch. 7). Both Smith and Bellamy warn about the same basic problem—that a cornered market can quickly become an unfriendly market for consumers. The difference, however, is that while Smith contrasts a monopolized market with a competitive market, Bellamy insists that competition is actually to blame for the existence of monopolized markets. In effect, Bellamy lays out a problem—competition leads to monopolies as some businesses inevitably prove more successful than their competitors, thus driving their competitors out of business. However, the existence of monopolies precludes competition. Thus, competition leads inevitably to its own demise. Bellamy‘s solution is to adopt a form of government monopoly, and to build an economy that does not rely on the self-destructive and thus unstable force of competition.
Bellamy‘s concern that monopoly is always the endpoint of competition does surface, albeit briefly, in the senate debates over the Sherman Act. Right before the passage of the
Sherman Act, a Democratic senator from West Virginia, John Edward Kenna, attempted to introduce an amendment to the bill that would prevent it from ―provid[ing] a penalty for such conduct on the part of any citizen of this country engaged in the commonest and most legitimate callings of the country, who happens by his skill and energy to command an innocent and 33
legitimate monopoly of a business‖ (Cong. Rec., 8 Apr. 1890, 3151). Kenna‘s amendment would have limited the Sherman Act to censuring only partnerships or combinations, not individuals, whose business practices tend to monopolize an industry. After a brief debate, the amendment was struck down, with the opposed senators arguing that an individual who corners a market and thereby obstructs trade is just as pernicious to the general welfare as a pair or group of people doing the same. Kenna‘s concern, however, highlights the difficulty of distinguishing between a successful businessman who beats out his competitors through greater ingenuity and a monopolist. Though it attempts to stimulate competition, the Sherman Act risks punishing those who compete too successfully.
Looked at with the above contradiction in mind the utopian potential of monopolies becomes clear: they pit laissez-faire against free competition. Competition ensures a fair and stable market, but competition itself, Bellamy argues, leads to its own dissolution, requiring the constant regulation of the government in order to reestablish a competitive market. Being an opponent of competitive business practices, Bellamy‘s initial version of utopia, in Looking
Backward, opposes regulation of monopolies and insists that we can achieve a utopian society simply by allowing monopolies to overrun the economy, eventually toppling the competitive system of capitalism. That is to say, Bellamy supports laissez-faire in opposition to free competition, and argues that a non-competitive market, properly designed, can regulate itself with greater stability and efficiency than a competitive market. In Equality, Bellamy is less sanguine about the transition from monopoly to utopia. As a result, Equality stresses more fully the active role that government will play in bringing about a utopian world. Nevertheless,
Bellamy remains committed to laissez-faire, though he does not accept it as an absolute. 34
Bellamy‘s utopia requires a self-regulating market in part because Bellamy‘s embrace of monopolies left his system open to authoritarian abuses of power. Because monopolies possess consolidated capital, they possess consolidated power as well, a point Senator Sherman makes clear:
If the concentrated powers of this combination [a monopoly] are intrusted to a
single man, it is a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government.
. . . If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king
over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we
would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade,
with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. (Cong.
Rec., 21 Mar. 1890, 2457)
Due to the association between monopolies and autocratic power, Bellamy‘s critics frequently mischaracterized his utopia as authoritarian.9
Although Bellamy‘s utopia features a central government that regulates all production, and which thus appears authoritarian, in Looking Backward Bellamy goes to great lengths to explain how the structure of monopoly capitalism can be disengaged from authoritarian abuses of power. Bellamy was well aware of the abuse of power that, in the nineteenth century, went hand in hand with monopolistic business practices, and as early as 1973 Bellamy wrote articles for the Springfield Daily Union attacking large aggregations of capital for their tendency to consolidate too much power in too few hands (―Overgrown Fortunes‖ 215-18; ―Industrial
Feudalism‖ 218-19). At times, particularly in Looking Backward, the anti-authoritarian strain of
Bellamy‘s thinking is not readily apparent. Bellamy withholds voting rights from citizens until after they retire, provides harsh penalties for people who refuse to work at their assigned job, is 35
dismissive of the working class, and segregates women, giving them a separate women‘s government in lieu of a vote in the men‘s government. In spite of these issues, Bellamy had some champions among anti-authoritarian activists. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin, in his obituary of
Bellamy, argued that Bellamy‘s authoritarianism was vestigial and not central to his economic plan: ―I am positive that were Bellamy to have met an Anarchist who could have explained to him our ideal, he would have accepted it. The authoritarianism which he introduced into his utopia was useless there and contradictory to the very system. It was simply a survival, a concession, a tribute to the past‖ (42).10 In Equality, Bellamy revisits his system of democracy, advocating for direct democracy on all major changes to national law. He also provides dissenters with the option of taking a piece of land to cultivate and live on outside the purview of the government, and he makes considerable improvements to the role of women in his government, giving them full and equal participation in all aspects of civil life. Finally, he takes back his earlier criticism of the working class, and elevates them to a position of heroism.
Bellamy‘s willingness to renounce the authoritarian elements of his original utopian scheme suggests that these elements are, as Kropotkin suggests, not essential to his economic vision. Rather, what some critics have identified as an authoritarian government, Bellamy described as a self-regulating system. When West expresses concern about the potential for government abuse or incompetence, Dr. Leete explains, ―The machine which they [government officials] direct is indeed a vast one, but so logical in its principles and direct and simple in its workings that it all but runs itself; and nobody but a fool could derange it‖ (LB 151). While some critics have concentrated on the vast machine and the centralized power structure of Bellamy‘s utopian government, Bellamy himself provides few specifics concerning how the government will function and what it will and will not be able to do. Rather, Bellamy relegates such concerns 36
to a place of secondary importance by insisting that the government will rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to exercise its powers. The power held by the government is secondary; it is the incorruptible mathematics of the market itself that reign supreme.
In order plausibly to represent the government as anti-authoritarian, Bellamy protects two particular aspects of the economy from the possibility of government corruption—labor and consumption. Dr. Leete explains that when people enter the job force they list their top choices both regarding where they want to live and what they want to do, and every effort is made to give applicants one of their top choices. The government has the ability to decide where people work only when some industries are suffering either a glut or a dearth of workers. Such a situation is improbable, though, as Dr. Leete explains, because a simple process of supply and demand ensures that all jobs will be filled:
The rate of volunteering for each trade is closely watched. If there be a noticeably
greater excess of volunteers over men needed in any trade, it is inferred that the
trade offers greater attractions than others. On the other hand, if the trade tends to
drop below the demand, it is inferred that it is thought more arduous. It is the
business of the administration to seek constantly to equalize the attractions of the
trades, so far as the conditions of the labor in them are concerned, so that all
trades shall be equally attractive to persons having natural tastes for them. This is
done by making the hours of labor in different trades to differ according to their
arduousness. The lighter trades, prosecuted under the most agreeable
circumstances, have in this way the longest hours, while an arduous trade, such as
mining, has very short hours. There is no theory, no a priori rule, by which the
respective attractiveness of industries is determined. The administration, in taking 37
burdens off one class of workers and adding them to other classes, simply follows
the fluctuations of opinions among workers themselves as indicated by the rate of
volunteering. (LB 82–83)
According to Dr. Leete, the government does not determine the relative value of one hour of work in two different trades, the workers do. More precisely, the relation between the supply of a particular type of laborers and the demand for those laborers in any given line of work determines the relative value of one hour of a laborer‘s time.
The prices for commodities are set according to the same system of supply and demand.
West raises the concern that, because the government is the sole purveyor of goods and services, it might make a particular good unavailable, thus robbing people of the chance to spend their credit as they wish. Dr. Leete, to assuage West‘s worries, clarifies that the government actually has no authority to determine whether or not to offer a commodity:
The administration has no power to stop the production of any commodity for
which there continues to be a demand. . . . A government, or a majority, which
should undertake to tell the people, or a minority, what they were to eat, drink or
wear . . . would be regarded as a curious anachronism indeed. Possibly you had
reasons for tolerating these infringements of personal independence, but we
should not think them endurable. (LB 152–53)
Dr. Leete explains that the government has no power to determine what commodities to produce.
The government must create a supply sufficient to the demand of the populace. The demand of the populace, however, will depend on the cost of the article produced, and Dr. Leete explains to
West that ―the cost of the labor which produced it was recognized as the legitimate basis of the price of an article in your day, and so it is in ours. In your day, it was the difference in wages that 38
made the difference in the cost of labor; now it is the relative number of hours constituting a day‘s work in different trades, the maintenance of the worker being equal in all cases‖ (LB 153).
Dr. Leete‘s claim that cost of production was already the ―legitimate‖ determinant of price in the late nineteenth century is a bit misleading. In fact, the price of a good in most market economies depends on how much people are willing to pay for it, and in some cases this may be substantially more than the actual cost of production (in other cases it may be less, but in that case no one will continue to produce the article for very long). In tying prices directly to production cost, Bellamy is actually eliminating one of the primary ways that monopolies can control prices. Normally, a monopoly can limit the supply of a good in order to drive up prices as consumers effectively bid against each other for a scarce object. However, if the sale price is tied directly to the production cost, this becomes impossible.
Bellamy‘s utopian market begins with consumer demand. Based on changes in consumer demand, the government increases or decreases the supply of a good by increasing or decreasing the number of workers who produce it. The government can increase or decrease workers in a given industry only by lengthening or shortening the hours they work. Lengthening or shortening the hours of workers in a field results in the price of goods produced by those workers decreasing
(in the case of lengthening hours) or increasing (in the case of shortening hours). An increase or decrease in price then results in a change in the level of demand, as a smaller or greater number of consumers are willing to pay the newly adjusted price. The sole responsibility of the government is to make adjustments in worker hours (and thus in the price of goods) to achieve the point at which supply and demand meet. Thus Bellamy renders the monopoly an institution not of authoritarian power but of egalitarian community. The monopoly provides an opportunity for people to work cooperatively rather than competitively, while a self-regulating market 39
maintains a system of diffuse power that prevents the abuses associated with monopoly capitalism in Bellamy‘s own day.
Freedom and the Free Market: Utopias of Consumption and Production
Bellamy‘s utopia is a utopia of abundance. Improved industrial technology and more equitable systems of labor distribution and goods distribution have resulted in the production of enough goods to satisfy all the desires of all the citizens of future Boston, with excess left over.
Bellamy‘s utopia is also a consumer utopia—a utopia designed to maximize people‘s ability to consume while minimizing their need to labor.11 While the belief that a good life is a life of consumption became commonplace (at least in the United States, and arguably throughout the world) in the century following the publication of Looking Backward, Bellamy presents a sharp departure from earlier American socialist utopias, most of which were religious and organized around an ethos of shared poverty. Bellamy, in contrast, organized his utopia around an ethos of shared wealth—not excessive wealth, but a genteel, middle-class wealth of simple desires, easily satiated. Bellamy explicitly attaches the ideas of freedom and equality that underpin his utopian scheme to consumerism. Freedom, for Bellamy, means primarily the freedom to consume according to one‘s individual predilections, while equality means equal access to consumer goods.
Bellamy is able to imagine a world of consumer abundance in part because he imagines a utopia in which human desires are finite and relatively modest. Once financial equality renders conspicuous consumption obsolete, the citizens of utopia want only basic comforts along with access to spiritual and intellectual enrichment through art, religion, and culture. Because human desires are limited, it is possible for utopia to satisfy everyone entirely—and this is precisely the 40
goal of the economic apparatus that Bellamy calls nationalism. Thus, while Bellamy prophesies a utopia in which consumption drives the economy, consumption remains a largely uninteresting activity. When Bellamy describes West‘s visit to a store, he stresses the store‘s absence of aesthetic appeal. Rather than attempt to make their goods appealing to customers, the salespeople stand by until they are called upon to fill an order. The goods are arranged as simply as possible, with cards describing in accurate and unexaggerated language the properties of each object. All advertising is absent from utopia.
In spite of the absence of a consumerist aesthetic in Bellamy‘s utopia, the economy remains driven by consumption. At least since the early eighteenth century, when the economist and philosopher Bernard Mandeville first published The Fable of the Bees, pro-capitalist discourses have highlighted the material benefits of a free market economy. Mandeville contrasts a hive full of greed and material desire, which
Had carry‘d Life‘s Conveniencies,
It‘s real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease,
To such a Height, the very Poor
Liv‘d better than the Rich before,
And nothing could be added more (28) with a virtuous hive in which
As Pride and Luxury decrease,
So by degrees they leave the Seas.
Not Merchants now, but Companies
Remove whole Manufactories.
All Arts and Crafts neglected lie; 41
Content, the Bane of Industry,
Makes ‗em admire their homely Store,
And neither seek nor covet more. (33–34)
Mandeville glorified the search for material gain as the driving force behind a market economy, contrasting greed with contentment in order to show that the former serves as a useful incentive to work and productivity, while the latter results in stagnation and decline. For Mandeville, living better meant having and consuming more. The ―real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease‖ of the world come from possession of commodities. Bellamy accepts the basic term of Mandeville‘s argument, that material prosperity is the goal of economics, but differs from Mandeville in desiring to restrain rather than unleash greed. Part of the appeal of Bellamy‘s utopia is that it does not ask people to forego material pleasures, but neither does it hold forth material pleasure as the sole or greatest good. Bellamy‘s citizens practice restraint and generosity, rather than greed, so they can continue to view themselves as good, moral people even as they experience the pleasures of ownership.
By the time Looking Backward was published, consumerism was beginning to exercise an expanding influence on American culture. William Leach argues that growing consumerist tendencies from the 1880s to the 1930s created a ―highly individualistic conception of democracy [that] emphasized self-pleasure and self-fulfillment over community or civic well- being‖ (6). Writing near the beginning of consumerism‘s growing dominance, Bellamy still believed in the importance of citizenship, but he also argued for the importance of self-pleasure and self-fulfillment through consumption. Bellamy‘s utopia joins the older value of civic responsibility, to the consumerist value of personal fulfillment through goods. Gary Cross argues 42
that, during the twentieth century, ―the promise of a democracy of consumers co-opted class identity‖ (All-Consuming Century 2):
In the context of consumerism, liberty is not an abstract right to participate in
public discourse or free speech. It means expressing oneself and realizing
personal pleasure in and through goods. Democracy does not mean equal rights
under law or common access to the political process but, more concretely, sharing
with others in personal ownership and use of particular commodities. (All-
Consuming Century 3)
In fact, the idea of class struggle appalled Bellamy, and his elevation of everyone to a middle- class lifestyle signals his acceptance of wealth‘s power to render life more pleasant and amicable.12 In Looking Backward Bellamy portrays a world in which equal access to material goods has rendered class struggle obsolete. Bellamy‘s utopia expressly describes freedom in terms of the freedom to consume as one pleases, and Bellamy also comes close to making literal the economic claim that you can ―vote with your dollar‖ or ―vote with your wallet.‖ In Looking
Backward, people effectively vote on what gets produced, thus on the relative value of different jobs, through their purchases. Because the government can only produce what people want, and must produce everything they want, production directly correlates with consumer buying habits.
If people want anything not already being produced, Bellamy even makes allowance for them to sign a petition in order to get the government to begin producing the desired article (LB 152).
At the heart of Bellamy‘s utopia, then, rests the belief that consumer desire can be met by efficient production, and that the goal of a utopian economic system ought to be the fulfillment of those desires. The monopoly appeals to Bellamy because it is the institution best structured to produce goods efficiently. Bellamy also places a great deal of faith in technology, and imagines a 43
world in which laborsaving devices have made mass production simple and not unpleasant to the workers. Gone are the Dickensian factories of the nineteenth century and their attendant health problems—or as Dr. Leete explains, ―Health and safety are conditions common to all industries.
The nation does not maim and slaughter its workmen by thousands, as did the private capitalists and corporations of your day‖ (LB 83-84). The relative ease of labor combined with the efficiency of consolidated capital creates a world absent of want and unfulfilled desire. Indeed,
Bellamy‘s whole economic model exists solely for the purpose of creating such a world, something he makes abundantly clear in his descriptions of the industrial army: ―We have no wars now, and our governments no war powers, but in order to protect every citizen against hunger, cold, and nakedness, and provide for all his physical and mental needs, the function is assumed of directing his industry for a term of years‖ (LB 78). Bellamy‘s industrial army exists to fight against poverty, and by the year 2000 Bellamy expects that the war will have largely been won.
In Equality, Bellamy even argues that one of the fundamental flaws of the previous economic system lay in its failure to sufficiently guarantee the right of consumers to hold private property. Responding to a query from West about whether or not private property still exists, Dr.
Leete explains,
Before the Revolution very few of the people had any property at all and no
economic provision save from day to day. By the new system all were assured of
a large, equal, and fixed share in the total national principle and income. Before
the Revolution even those who had secured a property were likely to have it taken
from them or to slip from them by a thousand accidents. . . . Under the new
system the title of every citizen to his individual fortune became indefeasible, and 44
he could lose it only when the nation became bankrupt. The Revolution, that is to
say, instead of denying or abolishing the institute of private property, affirmed it
in an incomparably more positive, beneficial, permanent, and general form than
had ever been known before. (E 120)
Bellamy‘s utopia is a utopia for consumers in this sense—it derives its appeal from the possibility of owning everything one desires.
Such a utopia is possible, however, only if desire is finite.13 Bellamy goes to great lengths to argue that desire only appears infinite because of problems with the current economic system.
In Looking Backward, Dr. Leete explains to West why the possession of large quantities of material objects is no longer desirable:
In your day, if a man had a house crammed full with gold and silver plate, rare
china, expensive furniture, and such things, he was considered rich, for the things
represented money and could at any time be turned into it. Nowadays a man
whom the legacies of a hundred relatives, simultaneously dying, should place in a
similar position, would be considered very unlucky. The articles, not being
salable, would be of no value to him except for their actual use or the enjoyment
of their beauty. (LB 112)
Dr. Leete draws a distinction between two sorts of value that objects can have—their value as
―salable‖ commodities, and their ―actual use‖ to people. The distinction is similar to Marx‘s
―exchange value‖ and ―use value,‖ though Bellamy puts the distinction to a different purpose.
For Bellamy, salable value, combined with financial uncertainty, leads to infinite desire. As long as the possibility of losing one‘s wealth persists, one cannot have enough wealth. 45
Bellamy diagnosed one other factor able to render consumer desire infinite—the connection between material wealth and social prestige. Explaining why clothing styles in utopia vary so widely, Bellamy writes that fashion was ―the natural result of a disparity of economic conditions prevailing in a community in which the rigid distinctions of caste had ceased to exist.
It resulted from two factors: the desire of the common herd to imitate the superior class, and the desire of the superior class to protect themselves from that imitation and preserve the distinction of appearance‖ (E 60). Dr. Leete later makes a similar observation when he explains why jewelry has fallen out of style: ―The main reason why gems and the precious metals were formerly used as ornaments seems to have been the great convertible value belonging to them, which made them symbols of wealth and importance, and consequently a favorite means of social ostentation‖ (E 126). Here Bellamy claims that the desire for social prestige—equivalent, in a competitive economy, to the desire to appear wealthy—drives people to incessantly purchase different clothing and more expensive jewelry as part of an effort either to emulate those richer than them, to avoid the emulation of those poorer than them, or simply to display their wealth in commodity form.14 But in utopia, Bellamy explains, prestige will no longer result from wealth— cannot, in fact, result from wealth since all people possess equal wealth.
In addition to rendering desire finite, the disentanglement of material wealth from social prestige will, Bellamy predicts, enable people to pursue both more varied and more personally satisfying consumer habits. When West asks Edith how to reconcile the variety of different sizes of houses with the principle of economic equality, she replies, ―although the income is the same, personal taste determines how the individual shall spend it. Some like fine horses; others, like myself, prefer pretty clothes; and still others want an elaborate table. The rents which the nation receives for these houses vary, according to size, elegance, and location, so that everybody can 46
find something to suit. . . . It is a matter of taste and convenience wholly‖ (LB 107). Edith goes on to question West as to whether or not people in his day really bought houses ―they could not afford for ostentation, to make people think them richer than they were,‖ and when West affirms that it was so, Edith explains that ―it could not be so nowadays; for everybody‘s income is known, and it is known that what is spent one way must be saved another‖ (LB 107). In the absence of the need to appear wealthy or to live according to the dictates of one‘s class,
―personal taste‖ becomes the new arbiter of consumer habits. Bellamy thus draws a distinction between socially constructed desires, which are limitless, and personal desires, which are limited.
The elimination of socially constructed desires will also, according to Bellamy, allow people to express their individuality in spite of their economic equality. A common complaint raised against Bellamy was that too much equality conflicts with people‘s ―natural‖ differences.
For instance, one of the utopian writers to revise Bellamy‘s world via an unauthorized sequel,
Richard Michaelis, asks, ―Is the leading principle in creation equality or variety? You find sometimes similitude but never conformity. . . . Inequality is the law of nature and the attempt to establish equality is therefore unnatural and absurd‖ (30). In a similar vein, J. W. Roberts‘s novel
Looking Within imagines Bellamy‘s future leading inevitably to the desire to make all people exactly the same. Angry that some people are stronger, smarter, or more attractive than others, the citizens of Bellamy‘s utopia (in Roberts‘s reimagining of it) eventually create a system of cloning by which all people can be rendered exactly identical in all details. While pressing concerns for Bellamy‘s critics, Bellamy insists that economic equality, far from promoting uniformity, will promote a greater amount of individual difference. No longer under the slavish necessity of trying to appear as though they belong in a particular social class, the inhabitants of 47
Bellamy‘s future Boston are able to fully express their personality through the purchases they make.
Bellamy‘s utopia is a consumer utopia in another sense, as well. Consumption drives
Bellamy‘s market. Labor exists in Bellamy‘s utopia solely for the purpose of satisfying demand for goods. Because Bellamy casts demand as finite, his government can not only fulfill demand, it can do so by working people for a relatively short period of time. Citizens enter the industrial army at the age of twenty-one, and they retire from it at the age of forty-five. Rather than a life of luxury and constant material improvement, Dr. Leete suggests that a life of leisure benefits people the most. Commenting on the young retirement age, Dr. Leete tells West, ―we all agree in looking forward to the date of our discharge as the time when we shall first enter upon the full enjoyment of our birth-right, the period when we shall first really attain our majority and become enfranchised from discipline and control, with the fee of our lives vested in ourselves‖ (LB 160).
At the heart of Bellamy‘s economic system, then, rests the belief that people are—or at least will be if exposed to the right social milieu—rational consumers with limited material desires. Because the government has a limited quota of desire to fulfill, Bellamy‘s only problem is in finding the most efficient and least despotic means of fulfilling that quota. Bellamy‘s self- regulating market can regulate itself only so long as desire regulates itself. An excess of desire risks breaking the regulating mechanism, rendering the government no longer able to meet demand with supply. In order to maintain utopia, Bellamy requires a closed circuit of desire, one in which the introduction of new desires happens only infrequently, if at all. Bellamy‘s government only produces what its populace already desires, but in the absence of advertising or industrial innovation the populace can only desire what the government already produces. The 48
citizens of Bellamy‘s utopia derive both their freedom and their individuality from consumption, and they derive their equality from equal access to goods and services.
Bellamy‘s use of consumption as the driving force behind his economy brought him into conflict with a socialist reformer across the Atlantic, William Morris. Reviewing Looking
Backward, Morris wrote ―though he [Bellamy] tells us that every man is free to choose his occupation and that work is no burden to anyone, the impression which he produces is one of a huge standing army, tightly drilled, compelled by some mysterious fate to unceasing anxiety for the production of wares to satisfy every caprice, however wasteful and absurd, that may cast up amongst them‖ (―Looking Backward‖ 194). In other words, Morris objects to the fact that consumers decide what will be produced. He suggests, instead, that decisions about what to produce should rest with laborers. Morris goes on to object to another aspect of Bellamy‘s utopia—the retirement age of forty-five:
I believe that the ideal of the future does not point to the lessening of men‘s
energy by the reduction of labour to a minimum, but rather to the reduction of
pain in labour to a minimum, so small that it will cease to be a pain; a gain to
humanity which can only be dreamed of till men are even more completely equal
than Mr. Bellamy‘s utopia would allow them to be, but which will most assuredly
come about when men are really equal in condition; although it is probable that
most of our so-called ―refinement‖, our luxury—in short, our civilization—will
have to be sacrificed to it. (―Looking Backward‖ 194)
Morris‘s objection to Bellamy comes from a fundamental disagreement over the purpose of an economic system. For Bellamy, an economy exists in order to guarantee people the ability to consume. Morris objects to Bellamy because, for Morris, freedom is not fundamentally freedom 49
to consume; it is freedom to work. Because Morris‘s primary concern is labor, he challenges
Bellamy‘s model of monopolistic industry. While Bellamy strives primarily for efficiency in his system, Morris remains essentially unconcerned about how much is produced, or whether or not people have the consumer goods that make up ―refinement,‖ ―luxury,‖ and ―civilization.‖
Morris began working out his ideas about labor well before Bellamy wrote Looking
Backward. In ―The Art of the People‖ (1879), Morris suggested that true pleasure can only come from producing something: ―Pain he [man] has too often found in his pleasure, and weariness in his rest, to trust to these. What matter if his happiness lie with what must be always with him— his work?‖ (29). In the same essay, Morris warns about the evils of luxury: ―luxury cannot exist without slavery of some kind or other, and its abolition will be blessed, like the abolition of other slaveries, by the freeing both of the slaves and of their masters‖ (33). Morris thus draws out a distinction between the wrong kind of pleasure, the pleasure of consumption, and the right kind of pleasure, the pleasure of production. In ―Useful Work Versus Useless Toil‖ (1884), Morris says of ―all those articles of folly and luxury‖ produced for the rich that ―These things, whoever may gainsay me, I will forever refuse to call wealth: they are not wealth, but waste. Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use‖ (131). Morris‘s attack on luxury may appear relatively similar to Bellamy‘s distaste for fashion or jewelry, but Bellamy remains focused on the consumer—jewelry is silly because it does not fulfill a real need, it simply adds to the wearer‘s social prestige. Morris‘s attack on luxury, in contrast, stems from his belief that ―labour, to be attractive, must be directed towards some obviously useful end‖ (138). The production of luxury items, not being a ―useful end,‖ destroys the pleasure people take in labor. Morris also claims that workers need ―[v]ariety 50
of work‖ in order to enjoy their labor (138), a view that leads him to reject the division of labor that Bellamy encouraged as tending to increase efficiency.
The contrast between Bellamy and Morris becomes particularly clear in the writings of
Veblen, who borrows ideas extensively from Bellamy. Commenting on Morris‘s predilection for more time and labor intensive forms of industry, Veblen claims that inefficiently produced goods serve primarily as a signifier of social status affordable only by the rich:
the visible imperfections of the hand wrought goods, being honorific, are
accounted marks of superiority in point of beauty, or serviceability, or both.
Hence has arisen that exaltation of the defective, of which John Ruskin and
William Morris were such eager spokesmen in their time; and on this ground their
propaganda of crudity and wasted effort has been taken up and carried forward
since their time. (107)
Veblen was right that the general inefficiency of Morris‘s mode of production led to expensive items that carried social distinction. Veblen‘s critique works by ignoring the terms of Morris‘s argument, however. That only the rich could afford to purchase the ―hand wrought goods‖ of
Morris or his followers hardly matters; the creation of goods, not the consumption of them, was
Morris‘s primary aim. In comparison, Bellamy describes utopia as full of machine-made goods.
There is no mention of hand-crafted objects anywhere in either of his two utopian novels.
While Morris‘s earlier essays attend to the importance of labor over consumption, Morris worked out his scheme for a utopia of production most thoroughly in News from Nowhere, his literary response to Looking Backward. 15 Like Bellamy‘s novel, News from Nowhere features a sleeper, William Guest, who wakes up in the future—though it is a future London, not a future
Boston—and finds that the world has entered a utopian era. As the name Guest foreshadows, 51
Morris‘s sleeper only stops briefly in Nowhere, and at the end of the novel he wakes to find himself back in the London he left. In between, he travels about London and the surrounding countryside, learning about Nowhere from a number of its inhabitants, a task that Guest finds somewhat more difficult than West since most of the people of Nowhere find history an uninteresting subject. Guest eventually meets an old man, Hammond, who knows enough of the nineteenth century to explain the changes that the world has since undergone. While conversing with Hammond, Guest learns about the attitude towards labor that underpins Morris‘s utopian future.
Hammond begins by pointing out to Guest that Nowhere is not entirely devoid of the fear of scarcity, though the scarcity that concerns them in not a scarcity of material goods: ―whereas we are not short of wealth, there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that we shall one day be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of losing, not a pain‖ (79). When Guest asks him how labor has become a pleasure, Hammond responds that the key lies in ―the absence of artificial coercion, and the freedom for every man to do what he can do best, joined to the knowledge of what productions of labor we really want‖ (80). Hammond‘s first point explicitly defines freedom in terms of production, and contrasts sharply with Dr. Leete‘s explanation of what it means to be free: ―I am aware that you called yourselves free in the nineteenth century.
The meaning of the word could not then, however, have been at all what it is at present, or you certainly would not have applied it to a society of which nearly every member was in a position of galling personal dependence upon others as to the very means of life‖ (LB 199). Bellamy takes financial independence as the key to freedom, while Morris insists on the freedom to labor how and when one chooses as the essential element of freedom. 52
The difference in priorities between Bellamy and Morris results, perhaps inevitably, in a different attitude toward the market itself. While Bellamy ultimately affirms the value of a self- regulating market and the efficiency of an industrial economy built around one, Morris explains that the nightmare of the nineteenth century came about as the direct result of the ―World-
Market‖ taking upon itself the agency that ought to belong to humans. The result was a market that warped production by causing people to desire ever more goods. Hammond describes the process to Guest as follows:
in the last age of production men had gotten themselves into a vicious circle in the
matter of production of wares. They had reached a wonderful facility of
production, and in order to make the most of that facility they had gradually
created (or allowed to grow, rather) a most elaborate system of buying and
selling, which has been called the World-Market; and that World-Market, once set
a-going, forced them to go on making more and more of these wares, whether
they needed them or not. So that while (of course) they could not free themselves
from the toil of making real necessaries, they created in a never-ending series
sham or artificial necessaries, which became, under the iron rule of the aforesaid
World-Market, of equal importance to them with the real necessaries which
supported life. (80)
The language of Hammond‘s description highlights the World-Market‘s existence as separate from and outside of human control. People did not create the market, they merely ―allowed it to grow,‖ and in return it ―forced them‖ to produce unnecessary luxury items while ―they could not free themselves‖ from its ―iron rule.‖ For Bellamy, the self-regulating market provided a chance to avoid human corruption, but for Morris the prospect of a market that regulates autonomously 53
is the source of corruption. However, this does not mean that Bellamy believed in a system of rigid control while Morris eschewed such a system. Rather, it means that Bellamy believed a market could, potentially, set people free, while Morris believed that only the absence of a market could do so.
Consumerism and Monopolies in the Twentieth Century
In Looking Within, J. W. Roberts criticizes Bellamy for having failed to take into account the middle class in his descriptions of the economic situation of the nineteenth century. Roberts writes that Bellamy‘s description of the divide between the rich and the poor, while ―not entirely delusive, is yet very defective, from this fact among others, that it utterly ignores the great middle class of the people, constituting a majority of all‖ (13). Bellamy pictures the world as split between the indolent rich and the impoverished working class with no ground in between.
And yet, Bellamy‘s utopian future is ultimately a middle class future. It is a future in which everyone is able to develop basic good manners and procure a decent education, a home, and the necessities of life, along with some of the pleasures. It is a world of wealth without excess, and labor without exhaustion. In many ways, it is also the future that America got.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Theodore Roosevelt‘s crusade against monopolies may have looked like a death knell for consolidated capital, but as Peri E. Arnold writes,
―Roosevelt saw two distinct ways of acting on the trust issue: through the Sherman Act, to preserve a vanishing individualism in the economy, which he thought was futile; or by recognizing that combinations are central to modern business and supervising them‖ (44). While
Roosevelt curtailed the worst abuses of monopoly capitalism, he did not stop the more general trend towards larger businesses with increased economic power. The idea that competition leads 54
inevitably to monopoly remained forceful in the early twentieth century as well, and in 1915 one economist wrote, ―The climax of competition is monopoly, and all competition is nothing but a striving for monopoly‖ (Liefman 13).
As businesses grew larger one of the side effects was, as Bellamy predicted, a tremendous increase in productive capacity. Retailers also increased in size, and the department store rose to prominence. Wanamaker‘s and Macy‘s, for instance, both began to departmentalize and expand in the nineteenth century, but did not open the huge stores for which they would become famous until early in the twentieth. Following a plan of budget prices and vast selections, with profits made from bulk sales rather than high markups, department stores brought consumerism to the masses, and were instrumental in the expansion of the middle class.
The years preceding the Great Depression democratized desire, even if they failed to equalize wealth.
Thus, while Bellamy‘s dream of economic equality remained just a dream, parts of his vision of the future became a reality. Though not the utopian world he imagined, the twentieth century did build a world two of whose most striking features match the two features of
Bellamy‘s utopia discussed in this chapter: increasing consolidation of capital and expanding material wealth (at least in the United States and other countries that industrialized early). But the absence of any real effort to achieve economic equality (at least until the New Deal), meant that the decades following the publication of Looking Backward did more to make a mockery of
Bellamy‘s dream than they did to realize it. To borrow Marx‘s famous quote about historical repetition, Bellamy shows us that capitalism was invented twice: the first time as utopia, the second time as farce. 55
Notes
1 Sylvia Bowman discusses Bellamy‘s popularity in the United States at length (Edward
Bellamy 110–29), as does Alexander MacDonald (―Introduction‖ 17–28). Bellamy also experienced a great deal of popularity abroad, which Bowman et al. chronicle in Edward
Bellamy Abroad.
2 Looking Backward‘s phenomenal success stemmed not only from the appeal of his economic and political ideas, but from Bellamy‘s talent as a storyteller. One reviewer noted that
―Besides the novel industrial scheme which is developed, the book is one of rare literary merit. It has been said that ‗Looking Backward‘ presents the best example of prose literature seen in this country since the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne‖ (Kansas City Star 2). The comparison to
Hawthorne is particularly apt not only because of Hawthorne‘s experience with the utopian community at Brook Farm, but also because Bellamy‘s fiction is deeply concerned with dream states and the possibility of the supernatural. Bellamy learned more than a little from the
Romantics.
3 Peter Beilharz stresses Bellamy‘s connection to Marx and Durkheim, though he also notes a number of ways in which Bellamy differs from each of them, claiming that Bellamy‘s version of socialism has a lot in common with the (somewhat later) theories of Trotsky (600–
604).
56
4 Equality, 91. All future reference to Equality and Looking Backward will be parenthetical in the text and will be abbreviated with E for Equality and LB for Looking
Backward.
5 Sylvia Strauss offers an alternative reading of why Bellamy‘s utopia might turn away from class warfare and proletariat victory. Strauss criticizes Bellamy for his distrust of the working class, classifying his economic theory as elitist and classist (―Gender, Class, and Race in
Utopia‖ 70–71). In a similar vein, Milton Cantor suggests that Bellamy avoided writing about the working class extensively because he modeled utopia after his hometown, Chicopee Falls, as he remembered it in its pre-industrial days (25–26). These may be fair critiques of Looking
Backward, which is frequently critical of the lower classes, but Bellamy substantially reworks his ideas about the working class in Equality (E 206–11). Ron Howe notes that the Nationalist
Clubs Bellamy inspired were quite diverse in terms of the socioeconomic status of their members
(423), a situation that likely helped to reform Bellamy‘s views. Suffice it to say, simple distaste for the working class fails to adequately explain Bellamy‘s structuring of Boston in the year
2000 around capital rather than labor.
6 Samuel Haber has a similar analysis to Auerbach, arguing that Bellamy‘s utopia springs out of a sense of guilt (432–38).
7 Critical discussions of Bellamy‘s utopian scheme have tended to elide his interest in monopolies. Peter Beilharz, for instance, dismisses Leete‘s explanation as simply ―reflecting the early period enthusiasm for trustification‖ (601). Sylvia Bowman, in spite of giving an extended defense of Bellamy‘s plan for achieving utopia in his later speeches and editorials, almost
57
entirely ignores what Bellamy has to say on this topic in Looking Backward (Edward Bellamy
42). John L. Thomas argues that Bellamy never provides a satisfying description of the transition to utopia because he believes it will come about through ―ethical revelation‖ rather than Marxist
―social upheaval‖ (243). Thomas also characterizes the transition to utopia as a massive ―change of heart‖ akin to the change West experiences after walking out alone in the Boston of 2000 and suffering a panic attack (241).
8 Robert H Bork, referring to the congressional debates over the Sherman Act, argues that the act was intended to be ―confined by the policy of advancing consumer welfare‖ (20).
Sherman certainly insists upon this, but Bork overlooks the fact that other congressmen had differing opinions as to the purpose of the law.
9 His unfortunate use of the term ―nationalism‖ to describe his economic system, and
―industrial army‖ to describe his workforce ensured that this critique would continue to surface among critics up until the present day. Coleman, for instance, calls Bellamy‘s utopian scheme
―not democratic‖ and ―highly centralized and bureaucratized‖ (3). Nadia Khouri cites Bellamy as evidence that ―our repressive civilization has produced repressive utopias‖ (377). Reimer
Jehmlich calls Bellamy‘s utopia ―a centrally directed, rigidly departmentalized economic system‖ (31), though Jehmlich correctly points out that the real power rests in the hands of the economic machine Bellamy has set into motion, not the government. The most thoroughgoing effort to date to read Bellamy as an authoritarian, however, has been Arthur Lipow‘s book
Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement. Lipow claims Bellamy as a precursor to both authoritarian socialist regimes like the Soviet Union and
58
German fascism (x–xi). Rosemont has argued against Lipow (―Bellamy‘s Radicalism
Reclaimed‖ 204).
10 Citing Bellamy‘s efforts to remove remnants of authoritarianism from his utopia,
Rosemont takes an even stronger stance than Kropotkin, describing Bellamy as a ―libertarian, egalitarian, socialist-feminist fighter for the emancipation of humankind‖ who has, unfortunately, ―frequently been caricatured as an elitist, authoritarian, and even military-minded technocrat‖ (―Introduction‖ 14). Rosemont calls the authoritarian aspects of Looking Backward
―anomalous,‖ and suggests that the description of nationalism in Equality ―is less regimented, less monolithic, more open, more receptive to the demands of freedom and diversity‖
(―Introduction‖ 15).
11 Beaumont has also argued that Bellamy‘s utopia exists primarily to facilitate consumption (197–98).
12 David Herreshoff has also noted the middle class nature of Bellamy‘s utopia (112–13).
13 In discussing Looking Backward, Cross argues that Bellamy‘s belief in the finitude of desire resembles views held by both Marx and John Stuart Mill (―Time and Money‖ 18).
14 Thorstein Veblen would later build off of Bellamy‘s claim that the desire for social prestige drives consumption in The Theory of the Leisure Class, which at times reads like little more than an extended development of Bellamy‘s ideas.
15 A number of critics have compared Bellamy‘s utopian ideas to Morris‘s, but while the disagreement between the two utopianists over the importance of labor versus the importance of consumption occasionally comes up in this body of work, the dominant trend by far has been to
59
contrast Bellamy‘s industrialism with Morris‘s pastoral ideals, or to call Bellamy an authoritarian while extolling Morris for his anti-government support of individual freedom. T. M. Parsinnen, for instance, highlights Morris‘s disagreement with Bellamy over the importance of the industrial city. Khouri and Coleman both accuse Bellamy of being authoritarian, in contrast to Morris.
Khouri also highlights the mechanized nature of Bellamy‘s utopia, in contrast to the pastoral qualities of Morris‘s, as does Jehmlich. What such views fail to consider is that freedom meant something fundamentally different for Bellamy than it did for Morris. MacDonald provides a more nuanced contrast between Bellamy and Morris that highlights the absence of dissent in
Bellamy‘s utopia and the presence of dissent in Morris‘s. MacDonald also provides an overview of earlier comparative readings of Bellamy and Morris (―Bellamy, Morris, and the Great
Victorian Debate‖). 60
The Irrational Consumer: Economics and Agency in Gilman, Loos, and Cozzens
Prior to the twentieth century, economic theory paid relatively little attention to consumption. The predominating conditions of scarcity made production a far more important and interesting topic of study to economists. A small leisure class did exist, but even within that class consumption did not have the vast significance that it would begin to assume late in the nineteenth century, and that would, by the beginning of the twentieth century, force economic theorists to treat consumption as something other than an afterthought. In The Wealth of Nations,
Adam Smith describes the exchange of goods as a straightforward process in which self- interested buyers keep the greed of sellers in check by refusing to buy overpriced products, while sellers keep the buyer‘s stinginess in check by refusing to sell underpriced products. The transaction is thus enacted at the ―natural‖ or ―market‖ price of the object, a price that allows the seller to turn a large enough profit to remain in business, without turning so large a profit as to unbalance the distribution of wealth. Although Bellamy did not accept scarcity as the fundamental condition of life, his utopia of abundance upholds the belief that consumers have only limited desires, centered mostly on access to culture. Freed from the need to use consumption as a means of displaying social class, Bellamy‘s shoppers enact and display their individuality through the freedom to spend as they please. Their consumer choices function as a way of exercising their freedom, and in spite (or in Bellamy‘s terms, because) of their economic equality they remain a diverse and heterogeneous group.
By the late nineteenth century, however, increased consumerism led to the fear that a plethora of consumer goods might destroy, rather than enhance, people‘s rationality and individuality. Literature was frequently a vehicle for expressing this fear, and writers 61
increasingly became expressed the fear that temptations wrought by advertising and by the artful display of goods in department stores and shop windows sapped consumers of their agency, turning them into a consuming crowd or mob. Émile Zola‘s The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames)—first published in serial form in 1882, then as a novel in 1883 and translated into
English the same year—describes a mob of shoppers at the titular department store:
There was an elbowing, a feverish crushing around the shelves and baskets
containing the articles at reduced prices, lace at two sous, ribbon at five, garters at
three the pair, gloves, petticoats, cravats, cotton socks, and stockings were all
tumbled about, and disappearing, as if swallowed up by the voracious crowd. . . .
All the morning this crush went on increasing. Towards one o‘clock there was
a crowd waiting to enter; the street was blocked as in a time of riot. (213)
Zola‘s imagines the crowd of shoppers as ―feverish‖ and ―voracious,‖ they consume the clothes on sale as though they were actually swallowing them up. The crowd of bargain hunters becomes a riot that requires a police presence to control.
As department stores became increasingly common in the United States, news stories about sometimes-violent mobs of shoppers began to pepper American newspapers. One story, about a number of deaths and injuries suffered at a department store sale opens with the ominous line, ―Dishpans were cheap at a bargain sale here yesterday, but life was cheaper‖ (―Big Tragedy in Dishpans‖). Another article reports that a stampede occurred—injuring several people and killing at least one child—after someone yelled fire during the opening sale at a Detroit store.
The article blames the false alarm on two women fighting over the same piece of merchandise:
―Two women are said to have reached simultaneously for the same article and to have begun scuffling over it. This caused a little excitement in their immediate neighborhood and attracted 62
the attention of those nearby. Onlookers pressed about them and suddenly the cry ‗fire‘ was heard‖ (―Frightened Women‖). Although there is no explanation concerning why two fighting women would suddenly result in a cry of ―fire,‖ the story suggests a causal link between the supposed hysteria of the two women after the same great bargain and the cry that resulted in death and injury.
This chapter argues that intensified consumerism—a product of the material bounty secured by industrialism in conjunction with capitalist markets—gave rise to a general fear that shoppers lacked agency, self-control, rationality, and individuality. While early free market economists paid little attention to consumption, by the late nineteenth century consumerism had become a topic of great interest. Philosophers, sociologists, and literary authors began to express and respond to the claim that consumers were irrational mobs. This chapter examines three writers whose fiction engages with these concerns: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Anita Loos, and
James Gould Cozzens. While the work of these three writers spans more than forty years and each comes from a vastly different background, what they share is a keen attention to the types of agency one can and cannot exercise as a consumer. Each responds to a culture increasingly obsessed with consumption, and each seeks to analyze this culture through the medium of fiction. Gilman and Loos do so from a feminist perspective, examining the patriarchal structures that give rise to the female consumer. Since there was already a long tradition of viewing women as irrational and prone to hysteria, and since women were more likely to engage in leisure shopping (particularly as department stores increased in importance), female shoppers were a particularly frequent target of claims that consumers were irrational or lacked agency. Both writers challenge discourses that pathologize women shoppers by suggesting that it is the culture that gives rise to them that is actually diseased. Cozzens‘s novel Castaway, in contrast, is 63
concerned not with patriarchy but with the department store itself, which takes form in this allegorical novel as a space in which individuals must face their own lurking irrationality.
Pathologies of Consumption in “The Yellow Wall-Paper”
The Ladies’ Paradise traces the fate of the titular department store as it grows to be an increasingly influential presence in Paris, and Zola portrays the department store‘s owner,
Octave Mouret, as a brilliant manipulator of crowds of women. In one scene, Mouret brags about his grasp of ―the mechanism of modern commerce,‖ which he claims revolves around ―the exploitation of woman‖:
It was for woman that all the establishments were struggling in wild competition;
it was woman that they were continually catching in the snare of their bargains,
after bewildering her with their displays. They had awakened new desires in her
flesh; they were an immense temptation, before which she succumbed fatally,
yielding at first to reasonable purchases of useful articles for the household, then
tempted by their coquetry, then devoured. (69)
This speech comes at a moment when doubts about the success of his business are plaguing
Mouret. By imagining women as the helpless victims of the new department stores, and casting himself as their conqueror, Mouret envisions women as easy to control commercially, just as he finds them easy to seduce sexually. While the speech may seem exaggerated, the novel largely bears out Mouret‘s claims. In spite of his initial fears, Mouret‘s business flourishes, and it flourishes in exactly the way he surmises it will—through the exploitation of women.
Furthermore, the only woman who resists Mouret‘s sexual advances is the novel‘s heroine
Denise, but she is one of his most vocal advocates among small business owners whose 64
livelihood Mouret‘s success threatens. While Denise is not as easily conquered as other women, she never seriously threatens the existence of The Ladies‘ Paradise, though Mouret‘s advisors and partners fear she will. Instead, she uses her power over Mouret—which she gains from being the only woman he cannot seduce—to enact progressive social changes to the way The Ladies‘
Paradise is run. These social changes make life easier for the staff, and if anything they further consolidate Mouret‘s power. In the end, Mouret marries Denise and successfully integrates her into his business.
Mouret‘s attitude toward female consumers was not unusual. Although some recent cultural critics have challenged the stereotype, the passive, easily-controlled female consumer has been invoked in writing about consumer culture for over a century.1 Rita Felski, however, points out that the considerable cultural anxiety that surrounded female consumers suggests that they posed a threat to patriarchal society, noting, ―if consumer culture simply reinforced women‘s objectified and powerless status, it becomes difficult to understand why the phenomenon was attacked so vehemently as a threat to men‘s traditional authority over women‖
(66). Part of the reason why female consumers embodied a threat to patriarchy is because mobs of female shoppers suggested that the evolution from an economy of scarcity to an economy of abundance rendered desire unlimited. The women who shop at The Ladies‘ Paradise do not possess the limited wants of the citizens in Bellamy‘s genteel, middle class utopia. Consumed by their unlimited desire to consume, they become hysterical members of a mob, a crowd, or a riot.
This portrayal renders female consumers problematic, or even dangerous, an uncontrolled force that reveals the irrational core of consumer culture. In 1895 another Frenchman, Gustave Le
Bon, wrote a study of the crowd that highlighted its capacity for absorbing and subjugating the individual. Le Bon claimed that ―In the collective mind the intellectual aptitudes of the 65
individuals, and in consequence their individuality, are weakened. The heterogeneous is swamped by the homogeneous, and the unconscious qualities obtain the upper hand‖ (6).
Rationality and individuality die together in Le Bon‘s description of the crowd. Le Bon also refers to crowds as displaying the characteristics of ―women, savages, and children‖ (10). This description links crowds to those groups traditionally denied full agency and rationality in
European thought, and suggests that within a crowd people lose those qualities that allow them to be considered rational agents. That female shoppers could represent such a crowd meant that they were a threat to a rationally functioning society.
The threat posed by the irrational female consumer gave rise to discourses intended to contain that threat. For instance, Elaine Abelson explains how, between 1870 and 1914, the spread of middle class lady shoplifters in American department stores gave rise to the invention of a new disease, kleptomania. Kleptomania explained otherwise respectable women stealing goods as an individual biological or psychological problem. As a result, Abelson explains,
―Neither the excesses of the institutions nor consumer culture were indicted‖ (12). In contrast,
Gilman‘s short story ―The Yellow Wall-Paper‖ responds to portrayals of female consumers by indicting the patriarchal culture that gives rise to the consuming crowd. If the invention of kleptomania served to conceal the systemic problems of increased consumerism, ―The Yellow
Wall-Paper‖ turns this around by aggressively insisting that patriarchal systems of consumption produce pathological women. While the narrator of ―The Yellow Wall-Paper‖ is neither a thief nor a kleptomaniac, she does suffer from madness that stems from her husband‘s insistence that she be a consumer rather than a producer. Furthermore, the story attacks a medical discourse—
Silas Weir Mitchell‘s ―rest cure‖—that removes women from productive labor. Read alongside 66
Women and Economics, in which Gilman explicitly treats the problems of consumer culture, this story unveils the extent of Gilman‘s critique of consumerism.
The semi-autobiographical ―The Yellow-Paper‖ criticizes Silas Weir Mitchell‘s rest cure, which Gilman had herself been prescribed, and insists on the importance of work and productive labor to mental health. The story is comprised of a series of journal entries by an unnamed narrator. On account of a nervous disorder that arose immediately after giving birth, the narrator—whose husband John is also her doctor—is confined to a country home. She is
―absolutely forbidden to ‗work‘‖ even though she states, ―I believe that congenial work, with excitement and change, would do me good‖ (39). Having already performed the single act of production allowed to a doctor‘s wife, childbearing, she is disallowed from continued productive behavior.
While other critics have noted the desire to work as central to Gilman‘s novel, few critics have explored the economic dimensions of the protagonist‘s madness. Instead, discussions of pathology in the short story tend to concentrate on madness either as a gothic trope or as it relates to medical discourses of the day.2 Walter Benn Michaels is the most notable exception, and his reading combines psychological and economic contexts. Michaels claims that Mitchell‘s rest cure resembled economic discourse in that it stressed saving and frugality, which clashed with
Gilman‘s own ethos of marking and expending (3–28). Michaels‘s analysis, however, concentrates primarily on the role of production in the story. Gilman‘s concerns about production and working, however, are inextricably tied to concerns about spending and consuming. As
Joanne B. Karpinski argues, Gilman ―regretted the inevitable connection of producing to selling that characterizes capitalist economics‖ (37). In Women and Economics, Gilman creates a dichotomy that links production to health and independence, and consumption to pathology and 67
dependence. Though perhaps not as thoroughly articulated as in Women and Economics, this same dichotomy is present in ―The Yellow Wall-Paper.‖ Indeed, the rest cure itself is a form of consumer luxury, obtainable only by those women whose labor (domestic or otherwise) was not essential to the functioning of their household. In ―The Yellow Wall-Paper‖ the rest cure becomes not only a consumer luxury pursued by the ill, but a consumer luxury that exacerbates the narrator‘s illness.
Before discussing ―The Yellow Wall-Paper‖ in greater depth, however, it will be helpful to examine Gilman‘s more fully fleshed out anti-consumerism argument in Women and
Economics. The treatise takes as one of its central theses the idea that the role of women as consumers is a problem, and that real gender equality will be possible only when women become independent economic producers as well as economic consumers. Gilman further suggests that the apparently limitless desire and greed of the American public derives from the creation of a class, or more precisely a gender, of consumers. While Gilman realizes that women have always performed valuable labor, particularly related to housework and childcare, she complains that this labor has not allowed them entrance into the economy as independent economic entities.
―[W]hatever the economic value of the industry of women is,‖ Gilman writes, ―they do not get it‖ (14). Only by allowing women professional opportunities of the same sort and status as men,
Gilman argues, can we fix the ―sexuo-economic‖ relationship between men and women.
In challenging the cultural norms that cast women as consumers and men as producers,
Gilman lays out a distinction between people who are economically dependent and ones who are economically independent. While Gilman admits that no one is fully independent and everyone depends on a larger economic system to support themselves, she also notes the substantial difference in the level of dependence between those who earn their own income and those who 68
depend on the income of a husband, father, or brother for sustenance. As Gilman explains, ―She
[Woman] gets her living by getting a husband. He [Man] gets his wife by getting a living‖ (110).
Because the operative inequality stems from how people obtain access to wealth, simply giving married women the legal right to a percentage of their husband‘s income is not a real solution.
Women must be able to work for their living, just as men do. In other words, equal access to wealth (and hence to consumption) does not guarantee equality; only equal access to labor (and hence to earning) can do so.
Gilman offers two main reasons why women‘s economic independence is desirable, the first of which draws on Bellamy‘s ideas about economic cooperation. Gilman explains,
The basic condition of human life is union; the organic social relation, the
interchange of functional service, wherein the individual is most advantaged, not
by his own exertions for his own goods, but by the exchange of his exertions with
the exertions of others for goods produced by them together. . . . the progress of
society rests upon the increasing collectivity of human labor. (100–101)
Here Gilman describes an idealized version of market relations. Cooperative labor and individual specialization leads to greater productivity, and independent agents then exchange the results of their labor in a manner that is mutually beneficial. But while progress depends on collectivity,
Gilman warns, the splitting of the human race into economically dependent units and economically independent units who must care for them has forced an undesirable and self- destructive tendency towards competition. Gilman explains how this affects women, noting that they ―obtain their economic goods by securing a male through their individual exertions, all competing freely to this end. No combination is possible‖ (109). Men find the situation similarly debilitating: ―Competition among males, with selection by the female of the superior male, is the 69
process of sexual selection, and works to racial improvement. . . . But there is a radical difference between sex-competition and marriage by purchase. In the first the male succeeds by virtue of what he can do; in the second, by virtue of what he can get‖ (111). A state of affairs in which wealth is the most important thing a man can have, Gilman argues, has led to a system in which consumption, not production, has become the highest good: ―To make the sexual gain of the male rest on his purchasing power puts the immense force of sex-competition into the field of social economics . . . thus accounting for our multiplied and intensified desire to get,—the inordinate greed of our industrial world‖ (111). That is to say, consumers cannot be rational agents because the economic subjugation of women results in ―multiplied and intensified desire to get‖ and ―inordinate greed.‖
The second reason Gilman gives in support of women‘s economic independence is much simpler, but just as important. Gilman claims that production is necessary for human wellbeing:
The creative impulse, the desire to make, to express the inner thought in outer
form . . . this is the distinguishing character of humanity. ‗I want to mark!‘ cries
the child, demanding the pencil. He does not want to eat. He wants to mark. He is
not seeking to get something into himself, but to put something out of himself. . . .
This is the natural process of production, and is followed by the natural process of
consumption, where practicable. But consumption is not the main end, the
governing force. (116–17)
Our primary relationship to objects, then, is the relationship of producer. Being a consumer is of secondary importance, and consumption, or so Gilman claims, is in fact simply a byproduct of production ―where practicable.‖ Even eating becomes, in Gilman‘s terms, of secondary 70
importance. The child does not desire food; he desires expulsion—―to put something out of himself.‖
The problem facing the narrator of ―The Yellow Wall-Paper,‖ then, is not only that she is forbidden from production, but also that she is commanded to consume. She reports that her husband has brought her out to the country in part to take in the fresh air: ―food [depends] somewhat on your appetite; but air you can absorb all the time‖ (40). Rather than consume the country air, however, she becomes interested in a domestic consumer object, her room‘s yellow wallpaper. Gilman details the narrator‘s interactions with the wallpaper extensively, as she becomes increasingly obsessed with the pattern. She gazes at it, first troubled then fascinated, then finally possessive. She starts by visually consuming the wallpaper in all its intricate detail, and soon she is glaring jealously whenever she catches either her husband or her maid looking at or touching the wallpaper. The wallpaper has, at least in her mind, become hers and hers alone.
Her greedy hoarding of it to herself is like a miser‘s; she desires complete possession of the wallpaper for herself. Thanks to the wallpaper her physical health begins to improve, and she writes that ―Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be‖ (48), the ―excitement and change‖ she initially hoped to get from productive work now supplied instead by a commodity.
She soon begins to fantasize that the wallpaper has consumed another woman (or perhaps multiple women), and that the consumed woman creeps around behind the pattern in the wallpaper, attempting to escape. The narrator‘s mental state continues to deteriorate, and she reverts to infantile actions that alternately involve attempts to consume her surroundings—the narrator can hardly eat any food, but she gnaws on her bedstead—and attempts to be consumed by the wallpaper, which she presses herself against leaving long ―smooches‖ in it. The narrator‘s 71
decision to gnaw on the corner of her bed rather than go outside and consume the country air enacts the unnaturalness of trying to get an object inside oneself.
On one level, the story is a warning about the power of domestic objects to consume women who have been denied the opportunity to produce. As Jackson Lears points out, during the nineteenth and twentieth century people in the west increasingly envisioned abundance as stemming from industrialism, rather than nature. As a result, women ceased to be depicted as the source of abundance—as they had been in earlier depictions of the fertility of Mother Nature— and were instead reduced to ―mere passive consumers of the stuff generated by the male genius of mass production‖ (19). The narrator‘s depression after the birth of her child, followed by her obsession with a mass-produced object, reenacts the devaluing of female fertility in favor of industrialism. Her own act of reproductive creation brings her no joy, but the wallpaper becomes a fetishized object, ripe with hidden meanings and fantasies.
Furthermore, the story links the narrator‘s obsession with the wallpaper to her deteriorating sense of self. The story culminates with the narrator locking herself in her bedroom and tearing the wallpaper off of the wall in an effort to release the woman she has seen trapped inside of it. This act involves the narrator‘s identification with the trapped woman, an identification that conversely empties out her own identity. Not only does she undergo an infantile regression (she has been staying in an old nursery, her husband calls her ―little girl,‖ and she ties herself to the bed with a rope resembling an umbilical cord), she ends the story creeping around the room in imitation of the creeping woman she believes she has freed. As previously noted, Le Bon described crowds as similar to both women and children as a means of denying the agency of crowds. The use of imagery that ties the narrator to childishness serves to heighten the sense that she is no longer a rational agent. The end of the story also links the wallpaper to a 72
mass of infantilized women, as the narrator notes that she can now see a multitude of creeping women, all of whom she imagines having emerged from the wallpaper: ―I don‘t like to look out of the windows even—there are so many of those creeping women, and they creep so fast. / I wonder if they all come out of that wallpaper as I did?‖ (52). The image of masses of creeping, crawling women having emerged from the wallpaper is a disturbing one, even to the narrator who is rapidly becoming one of them. The story suggests that the enforced position of consumer rather than producer has left women unable to escape from an eternal, horrific childhood.
Thus ―The Yellow Wall-Paper‖ depicts the rest cure inverting what Gilman identifies in
Women and Economics as the healthy relationship between person and product. The narrator, whose husband has denied her the chance to produce and to mark (she specifically mentions needing to write her diary surreptitiously), is instead marked by the wallpaper. In one scene the narrator records her maid‘s comment ―that the paper stained everything it touched, that she had found yellow smooches on all my clothes and John‘s‖ (48). The marking of the narrator by the wallpaper reverses the desire of the child to mark paper, even as it predicates the narrator‘s mental breakdown. When we become consumers we are no longer authoring and creating the world, and we cease to be agents. If we are consumers rather than producers we do not mark our objects, our objects mark us.
The story ends with a scene that exhibits the reaction of John—who as doctor and husband belongs to two of the patriarchal institutions that encourage female dependence—to the irrational consumer he has made out of his wife. John walks in on his wife, and, seeing her crawling about the floor of the room with the wallpaper torn down around her, he faints.
Throughout the story, John constantly insists that his wife is irrational. Refusing to believe that she is really sick, he treats her like a child to be coddled and ignored. She is denied agency—she 73
is not, in John‘s eyes, a rational being capable of making rational decisions. But when faced with a truly irrational, infantilized version of his wife John is unable to cope with the sight and faints rather than face the consequences of his actions. Greg Johnson reads the narrator‘s final act of tearing down the wallpaper as a defiant gesture against male power that ―represents a prelude to psychic regeneration and artistic redemption‖ (522), but in spite of the potentially liberating symbolism of ripping the wallpaper off the wall, the narrator remains trapped by it. She thinks, ―I suppose I shall have to get back behind the pattern when it comes night,‖ then adds that she will not go outside because ―outside, you have to creep on the ground, and everything is green instead of yellow‖ (52). Even in its destruction, the wallpaper continues to exert a powerful influence on her.
Gilman enters into debates about female consumers by accepting the initial terms of the debate—that there is something deeply alarming about (female) consumers. Rather than deflect blame from institutions to individuals, however, Gilman unveils the role of social institutions that leave many women with little else to do but consume. Consumption in turn leads to increasing dependence, as seen in the ever more child-like narrator. ―The Yellow Wall-Paper‖ criticizes a culture that encourages women to view themselves as consumers rather than producers, then turns away in horror from the voracious, irrational consumer it has created.
Parodies of Consumption in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Gilman‘s critique of discourses surrounding the irrational female focused on patriarchal economic structures that encouraged female consumerism, highlighting the importance of productive labor, appropriately rewarded with fair pay. Given Gilman‘s concentration on production, Lorelei Lee—the gold digging protagonist of Anita Loos‘s 1925 novel Gentlemen 74
Prefer Blondes—would appear to represent everything Gilman stood against. Throughout the novel (originally published serially in Harper’s), Lorelei makes her living by seducing various wealthy men, essentially trading the spectacle of her body for diamond jewelry. Loos‘s satirical novel, however, is as much a response to discourses that cast female consumers as lacking in agency as is Gilman‘s work. In particular, Loos‘s novel mocks the naturalist novels that drew on the ideas of sociologist Thorstein Veblen, and suggests an alternative interpretation as to why women shop.
Veblen forcefully articulated an anti-consumerist ideology that cast women as essentially passive. Though not as widely accepted today, Veblen‘s work continued to exert significant influence on anti-consumerism reformers, such as Stuart Chase, through the Great Depression
(Lears 240–42). In The Theory of the Leisure Class Veblen claims that excess consumption, or conspicuous consumption, exists primarily as a means of signaling social class. People spend money in ostentatious ways to prove that they have money, and thus prove that they are more worthy of money than others. To explain how this situation came about, Veblen claims that consumerism first became a problem long ago when a man claimed a woman as his own during a raid on a neighboring tribe. Owning a woman became a status symbol, a way for the man to show off his raiding skills. Providing the woman with goods, also won through combat, became a concurrent method of displaying his fighting ability. From this disreputable origin, Veblen says, sprung the tradition of husbands working so their wives can spend money. In this analysis, consumption exists largely to satisfy vanity, not to satisfy needs. More importantly, while consumption may once have been connected to ability, as with the successful warrior who carries off the neighboring tribe‘s women, Veblen notes that this connection has since been severed.
Conspicuous consumption no longer serves to demonstrate ability; instead, it demonstrates only 75
wealth. Veblen‘s theory is notable for the role it assigns to women—women are both the original commodity and the primary conspicuous consumers. Both roles, however, leave them entirely without agency. As commodities, women exist to serve as status symbols for men. As consumers they fulfill much the same purpose, their purchasing power directly reflecting, and ostentatiously displaying, their husband or father‘s wealth.
Veblen‘s ideas powerfully influenced American naturalists. Characters such as Carrie, from Theodore Dreiser‘s Sister Carrie, and Undine Spragg from Edith Wharton‘s Custom of the
Country lack agency and self-control. Their greed drives them to obtain ever more wealth—and both are quite successful at it—but the portrayal of both characters highlights the fact that they are themselves subject to, rather than agents of their desire. Both Carrie and Undine manifest their desire first and foremost for the objects that will make them the most desirable—clothing, particularly dresses. Each, in turn, becomes an object of desire—a commodity for which a troop of male characters vie.
Written after the heyday of American naturalist fiction, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes invents a heroine who satirizes the view of women as both commodities and agencyless consumers. In contrast to the heroines of naturalist novels, Lorelei is, as Laurie J. C. Cella puts it,
―mistress of her own grand confidence game‖ (47). Furthermore, Lorelei‘s game works precisely because the male characters in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes view Lorelei as the dumb blonde— lacking in agency—that she pretends to be. That is to say, Lorelei manipulates men by pretending to be the kind of woman that many men would have expected her to be. Furthermore, the novel‘s end shows that Lorelei‘s goal is actually to become a producer—literally, a film producer—not just a consumer. Ultimately, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes satirizes exactly the portrayals of women that its male characters believe Lorelei mirrors. 76
While Lorelei met with a great deal of popular success—Gentlemen Prefer Blondes spawned a Broadway play (1926), a silent film (1928), now believed lost, a Broadway musical
(1949) that toured internationally, and finally and most famously a Hollywood musical (1953) starring Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee—her critical reception has been lukewarm at best. In spite of signs pointing to a growing critical interest in the novel, most scholars remain dismissive of the character Lorelei.3 They describe her as ―too myopic to see beyond the day after tomorrow‖ (Carey 98), ―the ultimate . . . dumb blonde‖ (Churchwell 143), and an example of
―female-intelligence-despite-itself‖ (Matthews 208). They rarely read Lorelei as anything other than a witless fool, or the novel as doing anything other than poking fun at its supposed heroine and the morally bankrupt culture that spawned her.4 John T. Matthews‘s response to Lorelei typifies critical responses to her in assuming she lacks any agency in the success of her numerous schemes—her intelligence is accidental. Such criticism tends to highlight Lorelei‘s lowbrow taste. She spells poorly and finds art museums boring. She talks constantly about her desire to gain an ―education,‖ but rather than read Joseph Conrad‘s Lord Jim, she asks her maid to read it for her and tell her what happens. These analyses, however, miss the way in which Lorelei‘s character satirizes views of women that concentrate on their supposed lack of agency— particularly in dealing with economics.
Although Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is written as though it were Lorelei‘s diary, the narrative plays with this form by suggesting that the diary exhibits a public, performed identity for Lorelei, rather than recording her private thoughts. In an early section of the novel, for instance, Lorelei mentions having to defend herself in court after shooting her boss, Mr.
Jennings. Lorelei was involved with Mr. Jennings (the specifics of her liaisons are never made explicit in the text) when she discovered that he was having an affair with a girl ―who really was 77
famous . . . for not being nice.‖ ―So when I found out that girls like that paid calls on Mr.
Jennings,‖ Lorelei continues, ―I had quite a bad case of histerics and my mind was really a blank and when I came out of it, it seems that I had a revolver in my hand and it seems that the revolver had shot Mr. Jennings‖ (32). Lorelei‘s displacement of agency onto the revolver typifies her frequent disavowals of agency. Her claim that ―my mind was really a blank,‖ exploits beliefs about female hysteria, suggesting that her lover‘s actions distressed Lorelei so much she lost control of herself, although such an explanation leaves unanswered the question of where the revolver came from. Lorelei‘s prosecutor, apparently, never asked this question. She describes the trial as follows:
everyone at the trial except the District Attorney was really lovely to me and all
the gentlemen in the jury all cried when my lawyer pointed at me and told them
that they practically all had had either a mother or a sister. So the jury was only
out three minutes and then they came back and acquitted me and they were all so
lovely that I really had to kiss all of them and when I kissed the judge he had tears
in his eyes and he took me right home to his sister. I mean it was when Mr.
Jennings became shot that I got the idea to go into the cinema, so Judge Hibbard
got me a ticket to Hollywood. So it was Judge Hibbard who really gave me my
name because he did not like the name I had because he said a girl ought to have a
name that ought to express her personality. So he said my name ought to be
Lorelei which is the name of a girl who became famous for sitting on a rock in
Germany. (32–33)
When Lorelei stands trial she realizes that the legal system constitutes a spectacle that she and her lawyer can manipulate. Her lawyer universalizes her experience as a woman, appealing to the 78
jury by reminding them of the women in their own lives, and Lorelei reinforces his words by acting out the role of a charming young lady, kissing everyone. Lorelei, however, presents this performance as though it was inevitable—she ―really had to kiss all of them.‖ Notably, she attributes her sudden decision to go to Hollywood to this event, implying that the trial has awakened her to the potential agency available through the performance of fictional identities that conform to social stereotypes. She convinces Judge Hibbard to buy her a ticket—the first of many gifts men will buy for her—and gets a new name out of the bargain as well. The diary carefully frames these events as having happened spontaneously, without Lorelei‘s active will.
The new name creates a stage personality—the only personality her diary ever reveals. We never learn Lorelei‘s real name. The Lorelei of German legend became a siren that lured men to their deaths after her own lover‘s death drove her to suicide. The Lorelei of Gentlemen Prefer
Blondes becomes a siren after shooting her faithless lover, then being exposed to the power that performance holds to manipulate men.
While Lorelei invents herself through the judicial system and Hollywood, Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes quickly moves from these spaces to spaces of commerce and shopping. Three episodes in particular, each of which deals with one or more shopping trips, satirize views of female consumers present in naturalist novels. In each one Lorelei outwits the men she is with by pretending to be exactly what they expect her to be. In the process she accrues diamond jewelry, which in turn makes her a more desirable commodity in the eyes of the men she dupes. Lorelei is not, however, an unwitting commodity—she is perfectly aware of her value as an object of conspicuous consumption, something she reveals when she comforts one of her jilted beaus by assuring him that he can ―point me out to all of his friends and tell them that it was he . . . who educated me up to my station,‖ all the while reflecting that this will not cost her any social 79
capital: ―I really do not care what he says to his friends, because, after all, his friends are not in my set, and whatever he says to them will not get around in my circle‖ (162).
Depictions of female shoppers often stressed the supposed vanity of women, however in the first of the three episodes Lorelei‘s actions reveal the vanity of a British lord, Sir Francis
Beekman. In Theodore Dreiser‘s Sister Carrie, Carrie feels ―a flame of envy‖ (23) when she goes to a department store and sees how beautiful the shop girls look. The narrator says of
Carrie that ―She realized in a dim way how much the city held—wealth, fashion, ease—every adornment for women, and she longed for dress and beauty with a whole and fulsome heart‖
(23). Carrie‘s desire for beauty transfixes and overcomes her, filling her with envy. Dreiser‘s narrator also claims that humans are ―more passive than active, more mirrors than engines‖ (78).
The image of the mirror reinforces the idea that humans lack agency—reflecting rather than engineering their environment—while suggesting that human desire takes the form of narcissistic imitation. Rachel Bowlby follows Dreiser‘s example and describes the relationship between female and commodity as follows: ―Seducer and seduced, possessor and possessed of one another, women and commodities flaunt their images at one another in an amorous regard which both extends and reinforces the classical picture of the young girl gazing into the mirror in love with herself‖ (32).
In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, however, Lorelei‘s interactions with Sir Beekman work to invert this association between women and vanity. When Lorelei first meets Sir Beekman (or
Piggie, as she calls him), she plays the part of the narcissistic woman. In an effort to convince
Piggie to buy a diamond tiara for her, she tries it on in front of him and talks about how good it makes her look. When her gambit fails to impress him, however, Lorelei changes tactics and appeals to Piggie‘s vanity; in the end, Piggie, not Lorelei, succumbs to narcissism. Piggie‘s 80
vanity, however, does not stem from his desire to mediate his self-gaze through commodities.
Rather, it stems from his desire to mediate Lorelei‘s gaze upon him through commodities.
Lorelei begins seducing Piggie by convincing him to send her a dozen orchids a day. She pulls off this trick through the expedient of sending herself a dozen orchids while Piggie is present.
She then pretends to believe that Piggie sent the orchids, and showers him with compliments: ―I started to make a fuss over him and I told him he would have to look out because he was really so good looking and I was so full of impulses that I might even lose my mind some time and give him a kiss. So Piggie really felt very very good to be such a good looking gentleman‖ (60).
Lorelei‘s compliments concerning Piggie‘s appearance please him so much that Lorelei easily convinces him to take her shopping for a picture frame, in which she will put his picture. She describes the visit as follows:
I told him I had to have a silver picture frame because I had to have a picture of
him to go in it. Because I told Piggie that when a girl gets to know such a good
looking gentleman as him she really wants to have a picture of him on her
dressing table where she can look at it a lot. So Piggie became quite intreeged. So
we looked at all the silver picture frames. But then I told him that I really did not
think a silver picture frame was good enough for a picture of him because I forgot
that they had gold picture frames until I saw them. So then we started to look at
the gold picture frames. So then it came out that his picture was taken in his
unaform. So I said he must be so good looking in his unaform that I really did not
think even the gold picture frames were good enough but they did not have any
platinum picture frames so we had to buy the best one we could. (61–62) 81
Shopping, for Lorelei, serves as both a performance, in this case intended to snare Piggie, and a chance to convert her social and sexual assets into economic assets. The purchase of the gold picture frame is both a means to an end, and an end in itself. She desires the frame for its market value, making sure Piggie buys for her the ―best‖ (in other words, most expensive) picture frame in the store, all the while lamenting that she cannot find a more valuable, platinum one. At the same time, Lorelei takes Piggie shopping as part of an effort to ―educate‖ him into buying the diamond tiara for her. By having Piggie buy her consecutively more expensive gifts (first orchids, then a gold picture frame, then the tiara), Lorelei teaches him to spend money on a woman.
The lesson works because it preys on Piggie‘s vanity, teaching him to desire the image of himself offered by commodities. Lorelei displaces the vanity we expect her to evince into a performance in which she pretends to desire Piggie‘s image, rather than her own. Piggie then comes to desire her desire for his image. The thought of Lorelei staring at his picture leaves him
―intreeged.‖ He seeks to replace the iconic image of the girl gazing at herself in the mirror with an image of Lorelei gazing at him in a frame on her dressing table. Because he wants to frame his image as seductively as possible for her, he allows Lorelei to convince him to buy her the most expensive picture frame available. Lorelei‘s manipulation thus plays with assumptions about female vanity, inverting them so that it is the male character whose vanity requires the female gaze to gratify it.
In the second episode, the novel challenges the association of female desire for commercial goods with erotic desire. As previously noted, Zola‘s Mouret claims to be able to seduce his customers commercially in the same manner that he can seduce them sexually. Rita
Felski notes that ―The erotically driven nature of female consumption provides the leitmotif in 82
Zola‘s novel‖ (69). Whereas Zola associates female desire for material goods with female sexual desire, Lorelei—along with her friend and traveling companion Dorothy—plays off of the commercial and sexual lust of a pair of lawyers sent by Lady Beekman to retrieve the diamond tiara from Lorelei. When the two lawyers, Louie and ―Robber,‖ find Dorothy and Lorelei unwilling to return the tiara, they explain to Lady Beekman that in order to retrieve the tiara they will need to spend a lot of time with Dorothy and Lorelei, and they convince her to foot the bill for some shopping trips and sightseeing tours. The trips serve a dual purpose for the lawyers, however. They wish to steal the tiara and sell it to Lady Beekman, but they also wish to spend time with the two charming girls. Lorelei quickly sees through their plan, however, and hatches a plan of her own. At first, Lorelei simply dangles the tiara in front of the lawyers to hold their interest, while they take her and Dorothy out on the town. After a bit of sightseeing, the lawyers each approach Dorothy separately, and they try to convince her to steal the tiara and sell it to them. Each one hopes to cut the other out of the exchange, thereby getting all of the reward money from Lady Beekman for themselves. Rather than sell out her friend, Dorothy tells Lorelei what the lawyers are up to, and Lorelei decides to have Dorothy sell a fake, paste tiara to Louie.
Lorelei will then steal it back and allow Dorothy to resell it to Robber. Their plan succeeds so well that they not only keep the real tiara, they keep the fake tiara and get a bundle of cash besides. The two lawyers try to cheat each other, but Dorothy and Lorelei stick together and split the money they get from the lawyers.
Lorelei is able to pull off this confidence game because, although the plan to take the girls out and enjoy their company until they find a chance to snatch the tiara originates with the lawyers, the men‘s uncontrolled lust quickly gets the better of them. The diamond tiara and the girls both charm the lawyers equally. In one scene that highlights the slippage between sexual 83
lust and lust for wealth that pervades this section of the novel, the lawyers take Lorelei and
Dorothy to see a nude show at the Folies Bergère. The lawyers simultaneously lust after the tiara, the girls, and the female performers. Caught up in their lust, they neither notice that the tiara they desire is a fake, nor that the girl they believe they are tricking is actually tricking them.5
In the final episode Lorelei enacts the role of a female consumer unable to control her spending. She does so in an effort to drive off her boring husband-to-be, Henry Spoffard. Having convinced Spoffard to propose to her in writing, rather than in person, Lorelei wants to convince him to break off the engagement. She will then use his letters to blackmail him into giving her a tidy sum of money—a ploy that she has carried out before. Lorelei drives Spoffard away by going shopping and buying an expensive emerald and a string of pearls on Spoffard‘s credit. She then leaves Dorothy at her apartment to greet Spoffard when he arrives, with instructions to ―tell him about all of my shopping and how extravagant I seemed to be and he would be in the poor house in less than a year if he married me‖ (155). Dorothy‘s embellishments about her friend‘s greed drive Spoffard off handily.
This ploy functions because Lorelei‘s uncontrolled spending mimics the uncontrolled spending of many other fictional females. Dreiser‘s Carrie and the titular heroine of Zola‘s Nana both destroy the fortunes of men who have the misfortune of falling for them. Perhaps the most relevant comparison, however, is Edith Wharton‘s The Custom of the Country. Wharton‘s protagonist, Undine Spragg, marries, bankrupts, and divorces a number of men throughout the novel. Like Lorelei, Undine is mercenary in her dealings with men. She views them as a means to an end, and becomes quite adept at manipulating them to get what she wants. On the surface, she appears to differ from Lorelei primarily in that she marries men before she bankrupts them.
Lorelei skips this step. However, The Custom of the Country casts Undine‘s actions as 84
thoughtless rather than thought out. Wharton describes Undine as ―fiercely independent and yet passionately imitative‖ (14). Wharton suggests that, in spite of all her drive and ambition,
Undine remains uncertain of what she wants. She learns to desire by observing what others desire. At times she wants wealth, but at other times she wants a noble title, entrance into the old money crowd at New York, or love. Undine desires without restraint whatever she sees other people have. When her father, exasperated by her excessive materialism, explains to her that business is going poorly and he cannot continue to spend money on her every whim, the narrator describes her reaction as follows: ―Her eyes grew absent-minded as they always did when he alluded to business. That was man‘s province; and what did men go ‗down town‘ for but to bring back the spoils to their women?‖ (28). Undine‘s inability to imagine where money comes from, or how it reaches her pockets, contrasts sharply with Lorelei‘s skill at manipulating men‘s pocketbooks.
Unlike Undine, Lorelei knows precisely what she wants when she finds it—entrance into the economy as a producer. Throughout the novel, Lorelei finds herself repeatedly confronted with possible ways to enter into the economy, each of which she rejects until she ultimately settles upon a career as a film producer and actress. Her first career, as Mr. Jenning‘s secretary, results in him taking advantage of her sexually, and eventually her shooting him and going to trial. Mr. Jenning hires her before she has graduated from stenography school, and clearly he is not smitten by her secretarial abilities. Rejecting a life of virtual prostitution as a secretary,
Lorelei could become a housewife—an option she also explores and rejects early on in her diary.
She briefly considers marrying a famous writer, Gerald Lamson, who tells her not to dress up and who feeds her ―nourishing‖ food because he ―does not like a girl to be nothing else but a doll, but he likes her to bring in her husband‘s slippers every evening and make him forget what 85
he has gone through‖ (13). In the end, though, Lorelei decides ―I mean to go to Paris and broaden out and improve my writing, and why should I give it up to marry an author, where he is the whole thing and all I would be would be the wife of Gerald Lamson?‖ (20). Lorelei rejects both Lamson and the role of housewife because she does not want to give up her own chance at success. Later in the narrative, while traveling in the ―Central of Europe‖—where one of her lovers, Gus Eisman, has sent her to get an ―education‖—Lorelei articulates the possibility of a working class life. Looking out the window of the train, Lorelei records that Dorothy and she
―saw quite a lot of girls who seemed to be putting small size hay stacks onto large size hay stacks while their husbands seemed to sit at a table under quite a shady tree and drink beer . . . . I became quite depressed because if this is what Mr. Eisman thinks we American girls ought to learn I really think it is quite depressing‖ (101–2).
Once Lorelei decides what she wants, she pursues her goal in a manner that inverts the gender roles on display throughout the novel. After meeting a Hollywood script writer named
Mr. Montrose, Lorelei decides to marry Spoffard after all. She then takes control of his fortune, and uses it to reenter show business, both as a performer and, this time, as a producer. In order to get Spoffard to reconsider his decision to not marry her, Lorelei follows him onto the train by which he is fleeing town, and berates him for believing the act that she and Dorothy put on to fool him into thinking she would send him to the poorhouse. She claims that she and Dorothy perpetrated the hoax so as to test Spoffard‘s loyalty, and she goes on to tell him, ―if he could not tell the difference between a real square cut emerald and one from the ten cent store, that he ought to be ashamed of himself. And I told him that if he thought that every string of white beads were pearls, it was no wonder he could make such a mistake in judging the character of a girl‖
(159). She then quickly returns the jewels to the jewelry store, so Spoffard will not receive the 86
bill for them and find out that they were, in fact, real. This deception reverses the deception of the fake tiara. Rather than passing fake jewels off as real ones, she passes real jewels off as fake ones. Both deceptions work because she knows that the men she deals with cannot tell the difference between a real jewel and a fake one—nor can they differentiate between the real
Lorelei, and the fake one. Social and literary discourses have conditioned them to believe that women are vain, greedy, and foolish, but their reactions to Lorelei inevitably point out their own susceptibility to these vices. Further inverting gender roles, Lorelei‘s post-marriage career as an actress purchases her an excuse to spend time with the writer, Mr. Montrose, and thus to carry on an affair with him—even as she produces his art films, which other Hollywood producers refuse to touch. Throughout the novel Lorelei has been trading the spectacle of her body for the money of men. In the end, however, Mr. Montrose trades his body in return for Lorelei‘s money. Gender and economic roles are inverted, and Lorelei becomes a major broker of wealth and power—she is now able to keep a man, just as men once kept her.
The overall effect of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is to highlight the inadequacy of early twentieth-century discourses about female shoppers. It suggests that the female shopper possesses agency in her actions, and that female desire for consumer goods is not an uncontrollable and irrational condition, but rather a perfectly rational and self-interested response to a situation that offers few desirable alternatives. Whereas Gilman‘s response to cultural anxiety about irrational female consumers uncovers the role that economic dependence played in robbing women of their agency, Loos‘s satirical work instead suggests that the irrational female consumer is a misleading rhetorical construct. Lorelei‘s conspicuous consumption is never an end in itself; it is part of a process that allows her to pursue economic independence. In
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, independence is ultimately predicated on production, just as it is 87
Gilman‘s work. Even more importantly, while Loos‘s work does not, as Gilman‘s does, accept that female consumers are pathological, the two share a keen eye for the systemic inequalities that give rise to forms of apparently pathological consumerism. The playful, mocking tone of
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes may not cause John to faint in horror, as he does at the end of ―The
Yellow Wall-Paper,‖ but it is nevertheless a biting look at the relationship between rampant consumerism and the economic inequality of women.
Robinson Crusoe in the Department Store
James Gould Cozzens‘s novel Castaway, published in 1934 but first drafted during 1930 and 1931, provides a trenchant critique of American consumerism, and particularly of the emergence of the department store as a primary site of consumption. Though Cozzens denied having been influenced by the Great Depression, his decision to write a piece that he described as exposing ―the insanely wide profusion of material things, gathered without regard to the fundamental necessities of life‖ only a year after the market crash renders Cozzens‘s claim suspect (qtd. in Bruccoli 107). Castaway, which Cozzens described as ―a perhaps slightly cock- eyed Robinson Crusoe yarn‖ (qtd. in Bruccoli 107), tells the story of a lone man—identified only as Mr. Lecky—who tries to survive in a modern department store, much as Crusoe tried to survive on a deserted island. The novel never explains why or how Lecky finds himself alone in an abandoned (though perfectly stocked and maintained) department store, though from the early pages of the novel it seems that Lecky is fleeing some unseen (and perhaps imaginary) but terrifying enemy.6 By the time of the novel‘s publication there was plenty to fear—economic depression at home, along with fascism and communism abroad made the world a scary place.
Lecky‘s isolationist escape mirrors his country‘s, and though the unparalleled access to 88
consumer goods that Lecky has was well out of the reach of most Americans during the
Depression, the department store remained one of the dominant fixtures of consumerism in the
U.S. until after World War II. In the early chapters Leckey builds forts for himself, seeks out food, and prepares to defend himself against antagonists. While wandering the halls of the department store, Lecky comes face to face with a being he calls ―the idiot,‖ an apparently reasonless and irrational man whom Lecky, scared and unable to establish communication, hunts, shoots, and kills. Satisfied that he has conquered any immediate danger, Lecky then sets out to enjoy the material bounty of the department store until the ringing of the store‘s alarm draws him to the basement, where he has dumped the idiot‘s corpse. Looking closely at its face,
Lecky realizes that the idiot is actually himself. At that moment Lecky‘s watch, which stopped at the beginning of the novel, starts again. The novel then ends.
While the empty hallways of Lecky‘s abandoned department store share few external similarities to the crowded ones at The Ladies‘ Paradise, Cozzens‘s novel nonetheless partakes in a critique that suggests consumerism saps people of agency.7 While the tale of confronting and destroying one‘s doppelganger could be a tale of triumph, the murder of the idiot is in no way heroic. Lecky‘s delayed realization of what he has done, along with the novel‘s rather abrupt ending, suggests, as Cozzens himself said of the novel, that it demonstrates ―the proposition that the principle of living adds up to self-killing‖ (qtd. in Bruccoli 120). In Castaway, a character who believes himself a rational agent forcefully confronts his own irrationality, and—horrified by what he sees—destroys himself in an effort to eradicate it. By writing the story as a kind of twisted Robinson Crusoe tale set within a department store, Cozzens suggests that the department store is where the liberal subject goes to die, or more precisely to act out a nightmare of self-destruction. 89
Cozzens‘s novel has numerous parallels to Robinson Crusoe, ranging from plot similarities (Lecky and Crusoe both carry a blade and a gun, they both spend their first night as high off the ground as they can manage, and they both build a fort to live in) to thematic similarities—both explore isolation, survival, and, as this section will argue, the nature of man as an economic being. During the latter half of the nineteenth century Robinson Crusoe became an important text for economists, who used it to explore homo economicus outside the influence of culture. Defoe‘s story provided an example of a man who had only his own labor as a source of sustenance and could not rely on trade to procure the necessities of life. For instance, the British economist Alfred Marshall drew on Robinson Crusoe when explaining his theory of marginal utility, which treated demand as a variable rather than a static quantity. The example of a man alone on an island furnished, for Marshall, a useful narrative about the changing value of objects in the face of severe scarcity (Schleifer 157–63). Even Karl Marx, though he mocked other economists for their love of Defoe‘s novel, offered his own reading of Crusoe‘s economic situation as an allegory for the value of labor and the worthlessness of capital (169–72).
Central to economic analyses of Robinson Crusoe‘s plight is the fact that Crusoe approaches his situation in a manner befitting a rational agent.8 He plans out what he needs to do to survive, and he keeps meticulous books explaining the labor cost for each object he must produce in order to survive. Crusoe repeatedly evinces his determination to behave rationally.
After his initial panic at discovering he is shipwrecked, he weighs the evil and good of his situation, attempting to do so ―impartially, like debtor and creditor‖ (54). Crusoe understands objectivity in explicitly economic terms, and his effort to view his own situation from this perspective is the beginning of his shift from despair to acceptance. Defoe also casts Crusoe‘s facility as a producer as stemming from his rationality: 90
here I must needs observe, that as reason is the substance and original of the
mathematicks, so by stating and squaring every thing by reason, and by making
the most rational judgment of things, every man may be in time master of every
mechanic art. I had never handled a tool in my life, and yet in time by labour,
application and contrivance, I found at last that I wanted nothing but I could have
made it. (55)
The reason for Marx‘s interest in Crusoe is manifest in passages like this one—Crusoe‘s story exemplifies the dignity and necessity of labor.
Unlike Crusoe, Cozzens‘s Lecky exhibits both incompetence and a lack of agency. The early pages of Castaway establish Lecky‘s enslavement to his situation. Whereas Crusoe makes a number of trips to the shipwreck in order to scavenge useful tools before another storm blows the wreckage out to sea, Lecky‘s early grasping for tools happens haphazardly and without forethought. When Lecky sees a kitchen knife he might use for defense, Cozzens writes that he was ―Stirred . . . but not with really conscious volition; not going so much as strongly drawn‖ to the knife (4). After the lights in the basement, where Lecky has entered the department store, suddenly begin to dim, Lecky panics and runs up stairs only to find that the lights have been set to dim automatically by a machine. Lecky reflects on his actions: ―What had made him run was the thought of a hand stretched out to throw a switch. Machines were something else. They knew neither hate nor murder; they had no heads full of urgent desires or bloody, incalculable plans‖
(5). Lecky‘s escape from the basement is not a tactical effort at survival, but an uncontrollable response—he is ―made‖ to run by the fear of human agency. Discovering that a machine, not a person, has dimmed the lights, relief overwhelms Lecky. Machines are preferable to humans because they have no agency and no desires, they cannot plan or feel emotion. 91
When foraging for food Lecky proves incompetent as well. Unable to get the lid off a jar of figs, he ends up breaking the glass jar. When trying to eat a ham Lecky finds that he has misplaced his knife, and he winds up trying to gnaw it out of its package with his teeth, only to discover that his incisors are insufficient to the task. Later he injures himself after exploding a can of soup he is trying to cook, and still later he finds himself unable to figure out how to cook a chicken. Whereas Crusoe exhibits great ingenuity in making clay pots to use for cooking and baking bread, Lecky—who is surrounded by industrially manufactured pots and pans, and has the use of a portable stove with fuel—cannot manage to cook a can of soup.9
The contrast between the almost superhumanly self-sufficient Crusoe and the utterly inept Lecky forms the basis of Castaway‘s critique of consumerism. Castaway maps the result of switching from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers, and the result is the degraded humanity of Lecky, for whom even acts of production as simple as cooking remain out of reach.
Lecky‘s physical weakness is constantly at issue in the novel, as Lecky faints a number of times while trying to climb the nine flights of stairs separating the basement of the department store from it‘s top floor (he cannot work the elevator). While this has the effect of heightening the nightmare quality of the story—Lecky‘s locomotive difficulties are similar to those many dreamers experience when having a nightmare—it also highlights the fact that Lecky clearly does not work with his body. Combined with his corpulence and his lack of even mediocre athleticism, Lecky‘s sluggish movement pegs him as an office worker rather than a manual laborer. His failures at production are matched only by his persistent failure to succeed in taking pleasure in consumption.
Like Crusoe, Lecky begins the novel by going through all of the motions of survival, though the effect in Castaway is considerably more comical since it involves Lecky becoming 92
estranged from the ordinary uses of many commodities. And even though he is surrounded by a greater wealth of goods than Crusoe could have imagined, Lecky makes at best bumbling attempts at survival. He takes doors off of their hinges to use as the floors of a fort he tries to build high off the ground (like Crusoe spending his first night in a tree), where he thinks he will be safe. While he is able to make his fort tall enough that he has trouble getting in to it, he admits that a more athletic pursuer would not find the height insurmountable. Afraid of being surprised by a quiet assailant, Lecky lines the edge of his fort with small toys to serve as an alarm system.
Later Lecky builds a fort on the ground out of furniture tied together with leather belts, and uses coats for bedding—even though actual bedding is not far off. Lecky‘s efforts at building a shelter for himself require that he look at consumer goods as building materials rather than finished products. They replace the wood, rock, animals, and vegetables that Crusoe must deal with, forming an artificial landscape of unnatural resources in which Lecky must carve out a place for himself. Lecky‘s failure to do so, in the midst of plenty, serves as an indictment of the modern consumer, who is unable to live up to Crusoe‘s example in spite of the many supposed advantages purchased by membership in industrial society. Similarly, the novel invites us to question the value of the goods Lecky utilizes. Removed from the social setting in which they are typically located, the goods become valuable only insofar as they promote survival. While
Lecky, upon first discovering the toy department, does have a moment of joy, expressed in explicitly American terms that call to mind the imperialist rhetoric of westward expansion and manifest destiny—the narrator notes, ―No wagons conquering plain and mountain to jolt at last into an Oregon ever found vaster relief or simpler joy‖ (13)—Lecky‘s relationship to goods at this point in the novel is largely confined to his efforts to use them for practical ends. The style or fashionableness of the coats he uses for bedding is unimportant; all that matters is their 93
softness. He does not pick furniture for the social status it might imply, but for its sturdiness as a barricade against danger. The fact that even the toys become objects of utility in Lecky‘s first fort demonstrates a movement away from viewing objects as a means of fulfilling abstract desires. Lecky, like many others living through the Depression, cuts back to the necessities.
While waiting out the night in his shelter, Lecky‘s mind wanders back to his two childhood fears—wild animals and mad men—both of which suggest that Lecky fears the loss of rationality and agency. The furniture fort Lecky has built reminds him of similar forts he built as a child to ward off imaginary wolves and bears. Lecky then remembers his childhood fears as
―exemplified by chance solitude in what he had considered deep woods,‖ where he suddenly became aware of ―A great evil—no more to be named than, met, to be escaped‖ (45–46).
Tormented by the awareness of this evil, the young Lecky leaves the woods for ―an open road where he need not watch for anything he could not see‖ (46). This train of thought leads Lecky to think of the slightly less nebulous danger of being assaulted by madmen: ―He knew less than the little to be learned of the causes or even of the results of madness. Yet for practical purposes one can imagine all that is necessary. As long as maniacs walk like men, you must come close to them to penetrate so excellent a disguise. Once close, you have joined the true werewolf‖ (46).
The mention of a werewolf along with Lecky‘s fear of the deep woods, and straying off the open road, are doubtless inspired by ―Little Red Ridinghood.‖ In the classic tale, the wolf consumes the little girl. Lecky reimagines being eaten by the wolf as ―join[ing] the true werewolf.‖ The conflation of the werewolf with madness suggests that the werewolf is a fearful creature because it, like the mad man, appears human at times, but hides a bestial, irrational core. That Lecky knows ―less than the little to be learned‖ about madness further suggests the inexplicability of madness, its existence outside of systems subject to rational explanation. Lecky—yet again 94
following Crusoe, who has the same worry—quickly moves from fear of werewolves to fear of cannibals: ―Mr. Lecky‘s maniacs lay in waiting to slash a man‘s head half off, to perform some erotic atrocity of disembowelment on a woman. Here, they fed thoughtlessly on human flesh; there, wishing to play with him, they plucked the mangled Tybalt from his shroud‖ (48). Lecky fears that he will be consumed (eaten) by a werewolf/mad man, and in being so consumed he will become mad. Figuratively, he fears that he will be consumed by madness. This fear is closely tied to fear of intense and inappropriate desires. Lecky imagines the ―erotic atrocity‖ of a maniac‘s assault on a woman. The invocation of Tybalt reminds the reader of the series of passion-inspired decisions that lead to his death, as well as the death of Mercutio and, ultimately,
Romeo and Juliet. To have too much passion or desire is to destroy oneself. To be consumed by madness is also to be consumed by desire.
Lecky‘s fantasies of danger take material form in the idiot, whom Lecky first spots in the food department, ―wolfing‖ down the sardines with his bare hands, ―more like a dangerously large ape in man‘s clothing than a man‖ (51). Although the previous day Lecky had eaten the sardines with the same desperation, too hungry to find silverware first, he is still appalled by the apparently uncivilized brute. When he finds that the idiot cannot speak he shoots at it with his shotgun, missing and scaring the idiot away. Lecky then chases the idiot throughout the store, finally managing to kill him and dumping his body in the basement, where it will be out of sight.
Lecky does not, at this point, realize that the idiot is his double, though the novel hints at this when Lecky shoots a mirror during the hunt. While Lecky hunts and kills his irrational and bestial doppelganger, the hunt is not a triumph over those aspects of himself, but rather the result of Lecky‘s refusal to confront his own irrationality. His fear of maniacs and werewolves, who appear as other people until one approaches too closely, turns out to be a fear of himself, or at 95
least of the self that is brought out by his presence in a department store. Lecky‘s disgust at seeing the idiot doing exactly what he had been doing the day before makes this manifest.
Cozzens turns the hunt into a parodic affair, titling the chapter in which it takes place ―The Idiot
Hunt‖—as Fowler points out, a reference both to what is being hunted and to the fact that the hunt itself is foolish (57). Lecky proves his incompetence repeatedly during the hunt, missing at point blank, dropping ammunition, and injuring his shoulder with the shotgun‘s recoil.
After defeating the idiot, Lecky‘s fear dissipates and he is at last able to enjoy his access to so many goods. Waking up the day after the hunt, Lecky ―was pleasantly aware that today he would be free to make a thorough examination of the riches of the extraordinary domain now his.
Never in his life having been able to own or enjoy quite enough of anything which cost more than the most trifling sum of money, the thought that now he had everything excited him‖ (75–
76). Again, Lecky‘s feelings mimic those of Crusoe, who observes, ―I was king and lord of all this country indefeasibly, and had a right of possession; and if I could convey it, I might have it in inheritance, as compleatly as any lord of a manor in England‖ (80). For Crusoe, however, the observation is largely ironic. Crusoe refers to his island as ―The Island of Despair‖ (57), and rather than desiring to keep it, he wishes to escape it and return to living among other people.
Compared to Crusoe, who realized at the outset that isolation was a curse, not a blessing, Lecky seems hopelessly naïve as he sets out to enjoy his empire. He tries on a series of coats, determined to replace his current, ―disreputable coat‖ (82), but quickly finds that without anyone to show off to, every coat seems essentially the same to him. Lecky then moves out of his self- made fort and into a display bedroom, but again the transition disappoints him. Moving through the rooms set up to display furniture, he glimpses ―with impotent appreciation, the setting for lives less strait, more expensive and easier than his own had ever been. To wash and relieve his 96
natural wants merely as a matter of course in such a bathroom as he passed now . . . might epitomize Mr. Lecky‘s mortal hopes‖ (85). When Lecky attempts to use the bathroom, however, he discovers that, since it is intended only for display, it has no running water. Lecky believes that what he wants is something that appears expensive, but keeps discovering that, in the absence of society, objects are only good insofar as they are useful.
Lecky‘s problem, in effect, is that he is trying to engage in conspicuous consumption only to confront the fact that there is no one to find him conspicuous. However, Lecky is unable to make the logical leap that Crusoe makes when he contemplates the meaning of value on a deserted island: ―the nature and experience of things dictated to me upon just reflection, that all the good things of this world are no further good to us, than they are for our use. . . . The most covetous griping miser in the world would have been cured of the vice of covetousness, if he had been in my case‖ (103). Lecky never quite abandons his covetousness, but when visiting a perfume counter he is ―prodded by the unrest of things desired, not had; the surfeit of things had, not desired‖ (91). His survey of the perfume counter leads Lecky to an epiphany: ―Not even in the hopeful, miracle-craving fancy of those who used the perfumes could a bottle of liquid have any actual magic. Since the buyers at the counters must be human beings, nine of every ten were beyond this or other help‖ (92). The fantasy world of advertisement, in which perfume leads to love, now appears empty to Lecky. The human condition is beyond the help of commodities.
While Lecky‘s initial attempts to use the commodities in a department store for survival purposes highlights his own incompetence amidst abundance—a point enhanced by comparison to Crusoe‘s competence in the face of paucity—Lecky‘s desperate search for joy after killing the idiot demonstrates the non-utilitarian nature of desire. Rather than being glad to have the working lavatory he has used thus far, Lecky wishes he could use the non-working bathroom that 97
exists only for show. The perfume Lecky sees excites his erotic fantasies, even as he realizes that perfume has no ―actual magic‖ to help those who are ―beyond . . . help.‖ Unable to find either utility or satisfaction inside the department store, Lecky is drawn to the basement for his final confrontation with the idiot. Studying the ―familiar strangeness‖ of the idiot‘s face, Lecky suddenly knows ―who had been pursued and cruelly killed, who was now dead and would never climb more stairs. He knew why Mr. Lecky could never have for his own the stock of this great store‖ (115). The final sentence suggests that Lecky undergoes an epiphany in which acceptance of his own irrational core is also acceptance of his inability to take ownership of the department store‘s cornucopia.
In Of Civil Government, John Locke argues that the right to property stems from the right to own oneself: ―every man has a property in his own person; this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his.
Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property‖ (16). All ownership, Locke claims, is derived from self-ownership. Lecky, however, has never owned or controlled himself. From the novel‘s opening pages he is drawn or driven by outside forces, and rather than face his lack of agency he seeks to slay and repress it. His final epiphany, then, is that consumer paradise is unobtainable because the very goods in which he seeks to luxuriate have sapped him of the agency he needs to take ownership of them. Alone on an island, Crusoe can believe that he is the lord of all he surveys; trapped in a department store, however, he cannot.
98
“Demolishing the Bakeries”
In 1930 The Revolt of the Masses, by the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, linked the creation of the ―masses‖ to industrialism, and the concomitant increase in consumer goods:
the very perfection which the nineteenth century brought to the development and
structure of certain orders of life has caused the masses who are the beneficiaries
to think of this organization as a part of nature. We can thus define the absurd
viewpoint of these masses: they are concerned only with their own well-being,
and, at the same time, they show no concern for the causes and reasons for that
well-being. They are uninterested. Since they do not see, behind the benefits of
civilization, the marvels of invention and construction which made it possible and
which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, they imagine that their
role is limited to demanding these benefits peremptorily, as if they were natural
rights. In the past, when disturbances were provoked by a scarcity of food, the
masses often concluded their search for bread by demolishing the bakeries. This
may serve as a symbol of the public behavior which, on a vaster and more
complicated scale, displays the attitude of the contemporary masses toward the
civilization by which their standard of living is maintained. (48)
Here Ortega y Gasset describes the masses as consumers who believe that wealth and goods are theirs by right. Prosperity has, in this formulation, blinded people to the processes that achieve it.
The masses come to believe that a share in the products of industry and scientific ingenuity is a
―natural right,‖ and they forget that these products are produced by the same (capitalist) economic system that the masses hate for keeping them poor while others are rich. Ortega y 99
Gasset‘s critique of the masses, launched during the Depression, went on to become a staple in those attacks on the welfare state that portrayed welfare recipients as lazy or greedy. The masses,
Ortega y Gasset implies, have no actual right to the bread (no matter what they may think) because they fail to understand how the bakery works. Indeed, one of the ominous signs of a degraded future that Ortega y Gasset sees is a supposed dearth of people entering into the sciences (69). People no longer care about the science that goes into creating goods, even though they care more than ever about the goods themselves.
On one level, then, Ortega y Gasset might be read as blaming the masses for their failure to earn their keep. Even as Ortega y Gasset calls the masses ―absurd,‖ however, he imagines that the very presence of abundance is the prime factor in turning people into an unthinking mass.
Whereas Adam Smith saw the exchange of goods as a straightforward exercise in rational self- interest, Ortega y Gasset claims that too many goods leads necessarily to self-destructive desire—―the very perfection‖ of nineteenth-century industry gave rise to the modern masses.
Ortega y Gasset‘s masses are still self-interested, but they lack the foresight to realize that smashing the bakery to get at the bread is a short term solution with long term destructive consequences. And yet, if the masses lack the foresight to realize the harm they are doing, Ortega y Gasset‘s critique suggests that the root of the problem is actually systemic—much like the work of Gilman, Loos, and Cozzens, who each search for the institutional factors in the creation of the irrational consumer. Ortega y Gassett‘s work thus contains the suggestion that liberalism had begun to turn inward, and ask itself where it had gone wrong. 100
Notes
1 Rachel Bowlby and Chuihua Judy Chung both explore the portrayal of female consumers as passive objects rather than active agents.
2 Greg Johnson and Carol Margaret Davison both treat the novel‘s gothic themes, while
Jane F. Thraikill writes about its relation to medical discourses.
3 For more on the history of critical interest in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, see Hammill.
While critical interest in Loos‘s prose has never been great, her films have inspired a somewhat more considerable body of critical work. A recent PMLA article by Brooks E. Hefner that examines thematic consistencies between Loos‘s films and her literary works suggests that this trend might be shifting.
4 Also see Blom (40), and Hammill (37). Cella is a notable exception to this critical trend, and her analysis of Lorelei concentrates on the same issues of performance discussed here, though it does not relate these issues to consumer culture or shopping. Internationally, reception of the novel varied quite widely. Ankum discusses its reception in Germany, and Loos provides a
(highly questionable) account of its reception in Russia (Cast of Thousands 74).
5 Hegeman has an alternate reading of the slippage between sex and diamonds (541-43).
6 The absence of explanations within the text combined with the suggestion that Lecky is paranoid or otherwise unbalanced leaves Castaway easily open to psychological readings.
Alastair Fowler, for instance, reads it as a novelistic expression of the ideas in Freud‘s
Civilization and its Discontents.
101
7 Frederick Bracher notes that Lecky can be read as an example of mass man, though he also claims that ―Castaway reiterates Cozzens‘ pervading sense of the differences between the aristoi and the masses‖ (45). Unfortunately, Bracher‘s cursory overview fails to clarify precisely how the novel establishes any sort of contrast since Lecky is the only character, so no other way of relating to consumer goods presents itself. Rather than criticizing one way of relating to goods, then, the novel would appear to criticize consumerism more generally.
8 Ian Watts gives an extended reading of Crusoe‘s status as a symbol of economic man
(63-92).
9 Bracher also reads the contrast between Crusoe and Lecky as emphasizing modern man‘s unfitness for survival (42–45). 102
Natural Fortunes: Chance, Fitness, and the Individual in Literary Naturalism
The word ―natural‖ has been used to describe the free market at least as far back as Adam
Smith, who used it extensively in The Wealth of Nations in order to signify the way a market ought to operate when free of government interference. Smith describes the ―natural price‖ of commodities, the price set by the market when free of the influence of monopolies and other presumably ―unnatural‖ forms of interference. He refers to the duty of the government not to infringe on the ―natural liberty‖ of people to do business—though more than many later, more dogmatic advocates of the free market, he was willing to consider exceptions for the national good. And he writes about the ―natural progress of opulence‖ as nations become progressively wealthier over time in a capitalist market economy. But while Smith made rhetorical use of the word ―natural,‖ more complete justifications of the free market as a natural means of organizing society would have to wait until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Darwin‘s description of evolution as a product of natural selection led to justifications of the free market that made use of the same terms. John Maynard Keynes aptly summed up the attitude of thinkers
Richard Hofstadter would later dub Social Darwinists to the free market in ―The End of Laissez- faire‖: ―The Economists were teaching that wealth, commerce, and machinery were the children of free competition—that free competition built London. But the Darwinians could go one better than that—free competition had built Man‖ (20).
The application of Darwin‘s theory of evolution to the realm of economics made a certain degree of sense given that Darwin had himself been influenced by economic theory when writing
The Origin of Species—specifically the work of Thomas Malthus. Darwin is explicit about his debt to Malthus, noting in the introduction to The Origin that the struggle for existence he 103
describes is ―the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole animal and vegetable kingdom‖ (5).
The doctrine of Malthus to which Darwin refers asserts that scarce resources limit populations.
From this point, Malthus argued that poor laws were economically counterproductive because they encouraged the poor to reproduce more, leading to overpopulation and, ultimately, to more poverty. Malthus‘s ―An Essay on the Principle of Population‖ locates the source of his thoughts in the natural world:
Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms Nature has scattered the seeds of life
abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand; but has been comparatively
sparing in the room and the nourishment necessary to rear them. The germs of
existence contained in this earth, if they could freely develope themselves, would
fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years. Necessity, that
imperious, all-pervading law of nature, restrains them within the prescribed
bounds. The race of plants and the race of animals shrink under this great
restrictive law; and man cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it. (ch. 1,
par. 21)
Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century, there had already been a long history of the intertwining of the natural sciences and economics. Malthus‘s observations of nature colored his economic views, and these economic views in turn formed the basis of Darwin‘s theory of natural selection, which was later picked up by supporters of laissez-faire capitalism, who used it to argue for the naturalness of free competition.
This chapter examines the intersection between economic discourses and discourses of nature in the literary naturalism of two American writers, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser.
Both writers viewed market capitalism as a natural phenomenon, but in contrast to many laissez- 104
faire polemicists, they did not view this naturalness as unequivocally positive. Even when highlighting the brutality of the survival of the fittest, discourses that take the market as natural tend to see nature as bringing order and structure to the economy, linking natural markets to benign social progression. To call a market ―natural‖ is to claim not only that it works efficiently, but that it creates a better society. Norris and Dreiser, however, remind us that nature may be destructive as well as constructive, and both describe the market in terms of natural disasters: for
Norris, maelstroms, vortices, and whirlpools, for Dreiser, storms. While critics frequently read both writers as working within the conceptual framework of Social Darwinism generally and of
Herbert Spencer—one of the key economic theorists to make use of Natural Selection—in particular, this chapter will refute that claim by highlighting the degree to which the works of these authors challenge the ability of individual fitness to overcome the arbitrary destructiveness of nature. In order to approach the work of these two authors, the first section will elucidate two key differences between Darwin‘s theory of evolution and the so-called Social Darwinism of
Spencer. While critics have pointed out numerous ways in which Spencer misappropriates
Darwin, this section will concentrate on only two interconnected areas of disagreement: the role of chance, and the role of aggregate communities in evolution. This chapter then turns first to
Norris, then to Dreiser, in order to highlight the tensions about what it means for the market to be natural.
Chance and the Fate of the Individual in Darwin and Spencer
Perhaps the clearest application of Darwin to the realm of economics is Spencer‘s 1884 essay, The Man Versus the State. In this essay, Spencer cites Darwin‘s theory of evolution as a reason to decry government aid to the poor: 105
The process of ‗natural selection,‘ as Mr. Darwin called it, co-operating with a
tendency to variation and to inheritance of variations, he has shown to be a chief
cause . . . of that evolution through which all living things, beginning with the
lowest and diverging and re-diverging as they evolved, have reached their present
degrees of organization and adaptation to their modes of life. So familiar has this
truth become that some apology seems needed for naming it. And yet, strange to
say, now that this truth is recognized by most cultivated people—now that the
beneficent working of the survival of the fittest has been so impressed on them
that, much more than people in past times, they might be expected to hesitate
before neutralizing its action—now more than ever before in the history of the
world, are they doing all they can to further survival of the unfittest! (131)
Here Spencer follows Darwin in differentiating between manmade institutions and naturally occurring ones. Just as Darwin picked the term natural selection to differentiate nature‘s work from that of humans who purposely breed plants and animals for particular uses, Spencer suggests that government charity—one unnatural attempt to breed a better civilization— hampers the salutary and progressive effects of nature and of natural selection. Spencer‘s argument thus implies, in keeping with Smith‘s initial descriptions of the ―natural‖ workings of the free market, that a laissez-faire market is more natural than other sorts of markets.
Spencer‘s writings experienced a vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, fueled at least in part by their ability to answer a question that greatly troubled people at the time: why do people fail at business? More specifically, why do some people fail and others succeed?
Scott A. Sandage notes that it was only after the Civil War that the verb ―to fail‖—and its concomitant noun and adjective forms—came to have meaning outside the realm of business in 106
America. The shift from labeling businesses as failures to labeling humans as failures signified a shift in attitudes: increasingly, success in business was taken as a measure of success in life more generally. At the same time, the nineteenth century saw a series of depressions and a host of businesses and businessmen ruined by them (2–6). While the newly minted failures may have blamed their fate on bad luck or hard times, defenders of the free market agreed that success and failure were not random or chance events. Instead, they were signs that the universe was functioning exactly as it should be, weeding out the folks who ought to fail while raising those who ought to succeed to the top. Because nature worked in such perfect harmony, human efforts to help those who fail or limit the power of those who succeed were at best unnecessary and at worst counterproductive.
Darwin, however, suggests a view of nature fundamentally at odds with Spencer on at least one key point. Darwin‘s nature is not a perfectly ordered machine that churns out evolutionary fitness and thus progress. Far from it, Darwin views nature as a vast field where chance and fitness interplay resulting in a steady stream of unpredictable changes. These changes occur without any definite progress, however, as Darwin makes clear: ―natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, does not necessarily include progressive development—it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life‖ (120). Whereas Spencer, whose early work in evolutionary theory was inspired by Lamarck, views the passage of time as ordered progress, Darwin sees it as an unpredictable field of chance and variation. As Elizabeth Grosz puts it, for Darwin ―Life is construed as a confrontation with the accidental as well as the expected, a consequence of the random as well as the predictable‖ (7). When Darwin defines natural selection he writes that, owing to the struggle for existence, 107
variations, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if they be in any
degree profitable to the individuals of a species, in their infinitely complex
relations to other organic beings and to their physical conditions of life, will tend
to the preservation of such individuals, and will generally be inherited by the
offspring. The offspring, also, will thus have a better chance of surviving, for, of
the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small
number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if
useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection. (61)
Here Darwin acknowledges that a greater level of individual fitness does not provide an organism with any guarantees. Darwin‘s language constantly equivocates, noting that useful traits ―tend‖ to be preserved, that such traits will ―generally‖ be passed along, and that creatures with beneficial mutations will ―have a better chance‖ than those without. The struggle to survive and reproduce is like a poker game—skill helps, but so does luck. All evolution does is give some organisms better odds than others.
Throughout The Origin of Species, Darwin repeatedly mentions the role of chance in determining which organisms do and do not survive. For instance, when discussing the circumstances favorable to evolution, Darwin identifies the importance of a ―large number of individuals‖ in a particular ecosystem, which ―by giving a better chance within any given period for the appearance of profitable variations . . . is, I believe, a highly important element of success‖ (97). Similarly, Darwin explains the importance of a long period of time to the operation of evolution: ―Lapse of time . . . gives a better chance of beneficial variations arising and of their being selected, accumulated, and fixed‖ (100). In both cases, the large sample size 108
generated either by a big population or a population over a long period of time allows chance to do its work.
Furthermore, evolutionary changes in populations, according to Darwin, can only be seen when a population is looked at in the aggregate, not when we examine organisms individually.
Darwin makes this point clear when he discusses an article from the North British Review:
The author takes the case of a pair of animals, producing during their lifetime two
hundred offspring, of which, from various causes of destruction, only two on an
average survive to procreate their kind. This is rather an extreme estimate for
most of the higher animals, but by no means so for many of the lower organisms.
He then shows that if a single individual were born, which varied in some manner,
giving it twice as good a chance of life as that of the other individuals, yet the
chances would be strongly against its survival. Supposing it to survive and to
breed, and that half its young inherited the favourable variation; still, as the
Reviewer goes on to show, the young would have only a slightly better chance of
surviving and breeding; and this chance would go on decreasing in the succeeding
generations. (87)
But while even a substantial increase in relative fitness gives an organism only a slight increase in its chances of survival—too slight, at least in the case of lower organisms, to account for evolution—Darwin goes on to explain, ―certain rather strongly marked variations, which no one would rank as mere individual differences, frequently recur owing to a similar organisation being similarly acted on. . . . In cases of this kind, if the variation were of a beneficial nature, the original form would soon be supplanted by the modified form, through the survival of the fittest‖
(88). Here Darwin draws a distinction between the effects of natural selection at the individual 109
level, and its effects at the communal level. Individually, even fitness provides no substantial likelihood of survival, but if any beneficial variation occurs frequently enough throughout a population, it will eventually be selected for. Hence, natural selection shifts from chance and unpredictability to a more stable process only when examined in the aggregate. Large populations, long periods of time, and frequently recurring mutations can lead to a slow and incremental species change, but the fate of individuals along the way remains fraught with uncertainty.
While chance is central to Darwin‘s conception of nature, it exists uneasily on the margins of Spencer‘s economic theory. Spencer admits that chance misfortune renders some level of charity necessary, but he writes that limiting charity to ―individual aid‖ rather than governmental aid will have ―the effect of fostering the unfortunate worthy rather than the innately unworthy‖ (MvS 128). Spencer thus places the poor into two categories: those who are poor because they are ―unfortunate,‖ and those who are poor because they are ―unworthy.‖ The problem with government aid is that it fails to distinguish between these two categories, and hence fosters the latter as well as the former. Individual charity, Spencer claims, is both more discerning and perfectly able to handle those cases that are fit for charity. Spencer‘s view allows him to dismiss chance from his equation and to return to his initial thesis—that a laissez-faire market will necessarily encourage progress by allowing the fit to survive while weeding out the unfit. Appeals to nature justify this view, however, only if chance plays a relatively negligible role in nature. If we ascribe to Darwin‘s description of nature, Spencer is immediately faced with a problem—individuals, even fit individuals, are cast out into a harsh world where chance and mishap can easily destroy them. 110
While Spencer deals with chance briefly and dismissively, he, like Darwin, is concerned with the effects of evolution on aggregate groups, not just individuals. While The Man Versus the State is often associated with right wing individualist movements, Spencer does suggest that the ultimate goal of encouraging fitness is to improve civilization, even as he mocks the left for trying to fit the unfit into utopian economic and social schemes: ―The belief, not only of the socialists but also of those so-called Liberals who are diligently preparing the way for them, is that by due skill an ill-working humanity may be framed into well-working institutions. It is a delusion. The defective natures of citizens will show themselves in the bad acting of whatever social structure they are arranged into‖ (MvS 105). The only solution, for Spencer, is to build a better working citizen, and this can only be done by rejecting any government programs that encourage the survival of the poor (hence defective) citizens of a nation. As with his hasty dismissal of chance, however, Spencer again differs fundamentally from Darwin‘s view of nature. First, Darwin‘s evolving populations are not moving towards a utopian or even a better state of existence. They merely change to fit the environment where they already dwell. Second, in addition to explicitly denying the existence of progress, Darwin claims that even adaptation is unreliable on an individual level because of the interference of chance. Whereas Spencer sees the evolution of the individual as the salvation of the community, for Darwin individual evolution is haphazard and unpredictable. Nature only clarifies into something approaching order when viewed over a great period of time and a great number of organisms.
Darwin‘s view of nature as indifferent to the individual and unreliable on the scale of the individual is a frequently expressed viewpoint in naturalism. In ―The Law of Life,‖ Jack London writes that the ―barbaric‖ Koskoosh knows from observation that nature ―ha[s] no concern for that concrete thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the species, the race.‖ Such a view is 111
inherently in tension with much laissez-faire theory, however. Spencer commends the free market in part because it is not just the market that becomes free, but we who become free by partaking in the free market. That is to say, Spencer remains connected to the idea of liberal individuals as their own agents, and his work was well-received by readers who wanted to believe that their success was a result of their fitness, and hence was deserved, just as the poverty of others was a result of their unfitness. Thus Spencer opens The Man Versus the State by decrying the decrease in freedom that he sees as concomitant with the creation of Poor Laws, and ends with the claim that ―The life of a society . . . depends on maintenance of individual rights‖
(164). What Spencer fails either to recognize or to accept in Darwin‘s work is that nature is not, in fact, concerned with the preservation of the species through the preservation of the individual—rather, Darwin‘s nature preserves the species in spite of the destruction of the individual, though even the species is only preserved in part, since species are able to continue by changing, not by remaining stagnant. Thus the biological and Darwinian elements of
Spencer‘s argument, far from supporting his individualism, contradict it.
These are the two central tensions that this chapter will take up: the uncertain fate of the individual juxtaposed to the survival and evolution of the aggregate, and the role of chance in survival juxtaposed with the role of fitness. While both of these tensions arise in both Norris and
Dreiser, the following section on Norris deals primarily with the former, while the section on
Dreiser deals primarily with the latter.
112
“The Individual Suffers, but the Race Goes On”: The Individual and the Aggregate in The
Octopus and The Pit
The Octopus—the first novel of Frank Norris‘s intended trilogy (Norris died before he began the third book) about the production, distribution, and consumption of wheat—tells the story of a group of wheat farmers in California whose livelihood is threatened by a railroad monopoly (metaphorised as the titular octopus). The railroad raises the cost of transporting wheat whenever the value of wheat increases, preventing the farmers from making more than a marginal profit and keeping them in poverty. The farmers‘ problems are further exacerbated by the fact that the railroad owns much of their land, though they have an old—and not legally binding—agreement to purchase the land from the railroad at a low price that does not include the value of any enhancements they make to the land. When it finally comes time for the railroad to sell, it refuses to honor the original agreement, instead selling the land at exorbitant prices in an effort to force the farmers off of it. Angry at the unjust treatment they get from the railroad, the farmers band together and form the ―League,‖ which engages in bribery and other forms of political chicanery in an effort to secure the farmers‘ interests. In spite of its machinations, the
League ultimately fails to secure any rights in the face of the monopoly‘s apparently unstoppable power, and when the railroad sends men to evict the farmers from their land, violence erupts.
The farmers are defeated, some of them get killed, and the monopoly triumphs in spite of the tremendous injustices it has wrought.
On the level of plot, The Octopus appears to be an anti-monopoly work dedicated to exposing the damage that monopolies do to small businesses. Norris‘s source material, the
Mussel Slough gunfight in which angry farmers fought and killed two agents of the Southern
Pacific Railroad, supports this reading. The farmers became local heroes, revealing the extent to 113
which opinion turned against the railroad.1 Theodore Roosevelt seems to have shared this view of the novel, and Terry Beers writes, ―Roosevelt gave little credence to the colorful version of the Mussel Slough gunfight that Frank Norris created for The Octopus, but he still recognized one of the novel‘s fundamental themes: things were bad in California, especially if you were a farmer dependent upon the Southern Pacific Railroad‖ (2).
The novel‘s ending, however, complicates the claim that the novel is simply an anti- monopoly polemic. The poet Presley, a friend of the farmers, goes to visit the CEO of the railroad, Shelgrim. Expecting to find Shelgrim a hateful and despicable man, Presley is shocked when he discovers that this is not the case. Presley‘s encounter with Shelgrim begins with him overhearing Shelgrim‘s decision not to fire a perennially drunk employee on the grounds that the employee has a wife and three children. Instead, Shelgrim gives the employee a raise in the hopes that sufficient funds will encourage him to give up his drunkenness. The scene leaves
Presley confused: how can he reconcile the Shelgrim who has destroyed the fortunes of his friends with the Shelgrim who can pardon an alcoholic employee? Shelgrim suggests to Presley that the answer to this quandary lies in Shelgrim‘s own lack of agency:
try to believe this—to begin with—that Railroads build themselves. Where there
is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. Mr. Derrick, does he grow his
wheat? The Wheat grows itself. What does he count for? Does he supply the
force? What do I count for? Do I build the Railroad? You are dealing with forces,
young man, when you speak of Wheat and the Railroads, not with men. There is
the Wheat, the supply. It must be carried to feed the People. There is the demand.
The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs 114
them—supply and demand. Men have only little to do in the whole business.
(Octopus 576)
Shelgrim, in this monologue, compares the growth of the railroad to the growth of wheat, a sort of natural miracle that may be enabled by humans but that is ultimately the result not of human agency but of natural forces. Under such a view the monopoly is merely the actualization of the law of supply and demand, recast by Shelgrim as not just the rule that governs the free market but as a law of nature. Shelgrim compares himself to the wheat farmer who ―can burn his crop, or he can give it away, or sell it for a cent a bushel—just as I could go into bankruptcy—but otherwise his Wheat must grow,‖ and ends by asking ―Can any one stop the Wheat? Well, then no more can I stop the Road‖ (Octopus 576). Beholden to the people who own railroad stock,
Shelgrim casts himself as just as much a pawn of nature as the farmers. This point of view initially shocks Presley, but Presley eventually accepts Shelgrim‘s words and realizes that the wheat must, indeed, continue to flow. Presley ends the novel with the realization that ―the
WHEAT remained. Untouched, unassailable, undefiled, that mighty world-force, that nourisher of nations, wrapped in Nirvanic calm, indifferent to the human swarm, gigantic, resistless, moved onward in its appointed grooves. . . . the individual suffers, but the race goes on‖
(Octopus 651–52).
Presley‘s final realization could be taken as an exculpation of the railroad monopoly, an affirmation that it is, in fact, an inevitable part of nature as Shelgrim claims, and thus something that transcends categories of right and wrong. This reading, however, ignores the great lengths towards which the narrative goes to depict the suffering wrought by Shelgrim‘s monopoly.
Alternately, Donald Pizer reads the ending as an expression of ―some of the more optimistic qualities of Le Conte‘s evolutionary theism, those which he [Norris] had already begun to 115
develop in his popular novels. He could stress man‘s spiritual uniqueness rather than his animal past, and he could dramatize natural laws with greater emphasis on racial and social benefits than on individual destruction‖ (Novels of Frank Norris 114). Under such a reading, Pizer explains,
Presley‘s views crystallize into three stages:
Presley‘s preoccupation with individual tragedy and his personal involvement
hinder him from achieving the ―larger view.‖ This is his earlier, moral attitude.
However, led by his second perception of the wheat and by Shelgrim, he
formulates an amoral, impersonal conception of force. This too fails to answer his
doubts. It is only with the return to a moral position, now on a cosmic level, that
he achieves the ―larger view‖ and Truth. (Novels of Frank Norris 139–40)
Pizer goes on to note that while Presley‘s conclusion is ―logically consistent within the religious core of the novel,‖ on an emotional level it ―lack[s] validity‖ (Novels of Frank Norris 146). That is to say, if The Octopus‘s message is that it is acceptable for the individual to be sacrificed to the greater good, the continuation of the race, then the novel is an aesthetic failure because we still feel an emotional attachment to the individuals who are being destroyed. Their ruined lives do not strike us as acceptable sacrifices for the abstractions that Presley sees.2 Leaving aside questions of aesthetic merit and authorial intention, however, we might rephrase Pizer‘s point to say that the novel illustrates a tension between individual suffering and aggregate progress then does not to resolve that tension.3 This has frustrated many critics of The Octopus, who have typically dealt with it either by dismissing Presley‘s final vision as merely Presley‘s vision, and not the novel‘s vision, or by accepting that the novel is, on some level, a failure.4 Steven Frye, for instance, writes that the ending is odd because ―there is no event in the novel that manifests this triumph of good [that Presley sees]‖ other than the ―contrived‖ death of one of the railroad‘s 116
most despicable henchmen, Behrman, and the ―inadequately rendered‖ idea that the wheat will feed the hungry (219).
Rather than see Presley‘s last thoughts as a statement of the novel‘s thesis, we might instead view them as a statement of the novel‘s central tension—the tension between individual suffering and the continuation of the race.5 The continuation of the race involves the creation of capitalist markets that follow the law of supply and demand—which Norris accepts as a law of nature—but these same markets inevitably have little regard for the individual, who may quickly and brutally be swept away by them. Norris‘s novel thus sees nature in a manner quite close to
Darwin. At the individual level everything appears dysfunctional and chaotic. There is no justice, and lives are destroyed without apparent reason. The order of things only comes into focus when we look at nature as an aggregate in which individuals matter very little. At this aggregate level everything continues to run in a manner that ensures the continuation of both the market and the race.
While Shelgrim‘s view of the world is an aggregate view, Norris presents us his foil in the farmer Magnus Derrick, head of the League. The narrator describes Magnus Derrick as
―always ready to take chances, to hazard everything on the hopes of colossal returns. . . . there was no more redoubtable poker player in the county. . . . The old-time spirit of ‘49, hap-hazard, unscientific, persisted in his mind. Everything was a gamble—who took the greatest chances was most apt to be the greatest winner‖ (Octopus 64–65). Derrick is a gambler and a gold prospector at heart, ―willing to play for colossal stakes, to hazard a fortune on the chance of winning a million‖ (Octopus 298). When he finally decides to gamble on politics and bribe some key people in order to influence the upcoming selection of members for the railroad commission, he soon finds himself blackmailed: ―Gambler that he was, he had at last chanced his highest stake, 117
his personal honor, in the greatest game of his life, and had lost‖ (Octopus 461). The triumph of
Shelgrim and the railroad is thus the triumph of the monopoly over the lone gambler. Norris consistently connects Derrick to the west and to the frontier spirit, and the suggestion here is that the old, every-man-for-himself spirit that fueled westward expansion cannot stand up to the monolithic power of big business. The distinction also recapitulates the distinction in Darwin between the functioning of chance at the individual level and order at the aggregate level, though the distinction functions somewhat differently for Norris. For Norris, in The Octopus, the monopoly is large enough to overcome the workings of chance, though at the cost of individual livelihoods.
In The Pit, however, Norris revisits the role of the market in disrupting the lives of individuals. The novel opens by invoking a typical Victorian marriage plot. Laura Dearborn has just moved to Chicago, and is faced with three suitors trying to win her hand in marriage: an ambitious young boy named Landry Court, an artist named Sheldon Corthell, and a businessman named Curtis Jadwin. Laura never takes Landry‘s attentions seriously, rendering the pursuit of
Laura‘s hand a competition between art (Corthell) and business (Jadwin). This conflict is highlighted by the novel‘s opening scene, in which Laura goes to the opera to see a performance of Gounod‘s Faust. Enthralled by the beauty of the music, Laura closes her eyes and dreams about love, explicitly contrasting a chivalric conception of life to ―the sordid, material modern life‖ (Pit 22). ―But a discordant element develop[s]‖ as Laura hears some nearby businessmen discuss the recent collapse of Helmick, who has just failed in an attempt to corner wheat (Pit 22).
Furthering the contrast between art (which the novel associates with chivalry and the past) and business (which the novel associates with the present, modern world) Jadwin is a self-made man, risen from relative poverty through his business acumen, while Corthell comes from old money. 118
Laura‘s eventual decision to marry Jadwin rather than Corthell thus appears to affirm business and modernity over the romantically conceived past.6
The novel, however, does not end with Jadwin and Laura happily married. Rather, what would be the end of The Pit were it a traditional marriage plot, is only the midway point. Aside from one early chapter in which Jadwin engages in some minor wheat speculation, and the discussion of Helmick‘s failed corner at the opera, business concerns remain largely absent from the novel‘s first half. But the second half, which picks up after Laura and Jadwin have married, is split almost equally between discussions of Laura‘s unhappy home life and of Jadwin‘s efforts to corner wheat. As Jadwin falls deeper into speculation, Laura feels progressively more abandoned and considers committing adultery with Corthell. In effect, the business novel inserts itself into the marriage novel, disrupting it. The structure of The Pit thus suggests that business life is fundamentally opposed to romance and domestic life. This critique is reiterated in a number of scenes in which the novel explores aesthetic questions. For instance, in one scene Landry reports
Corthell‘s opinion that ―the novel of the future is going to be the novel without a love story‖ to which Laura, disgusted, responds, ―It will be long after I am dead—that‘s one consolation‖ (Pit
56). Insofar as Laura embodies the Victorian heroine whose story ends in marriage, she is right.
The eclipsing of the marriage story by the business story signifies her disappearance from literature and thus, figuratively, her death.
Furthermore, the marriage plot traditionally links the institution of marriage to civic order. The working out of various relationships into monogamous, heterosexual pairs that correspond to and reinforce a hierarchical model of society signifies the appropriateness of a patriarchal heirarchy in society at large. If the order and stability of the family are the foundation of the order and stability of the country as a whole, then the death of the marriage plot ought also 119
to be the death of civic order. This is not quite the case, however. As with The Octopus, The Pit draws out a distinction between the dysfunction of the economy at an individual level and its ordered functioning at an aggregate level. When Jadwin brings his co-speculator, Gretry, to see his personal art collection, Gretry comments about one painting that up close ―it‘s just a lot of little daubs‖ but that, from a distance, it comes into focus and the picture clarifies (Pit 199). As with Presley‘s observations about the suffering of the individual, Gretry‘s aesthetic commentary reveals a tension in the novel between the way things look to characters who are too close to them or too caught up in them, and the way they look to characters who have the luxury of stepping back and viewing them from a critical distance.
The Pit‘s central metaphor—that the Chicago wheat pit is a ―vortex,‖ ―whirlpool,‖ or
―maelstrom‖ (Pit 259, 373, 402)—plays explicitly with the idea that businessmen get sucked into speculation and lose the ability view the larger picture. Laura initially imagines Chicago as ―like a great tidal wave,‖ going on to think, ―It‘s all very well for the individual just so long as he can keep afloat, but once fallen, how horribly quick it would crush him, annihilate him, how horribly quick and with such horrible indifference‖ (Pit 63). Later, the narrator describes businessmen walking to work in the morning as ―mere flotsam in the flood‖ that pours into the wheat pit (Pit
78). As the novel progresses, Jadwin enters the vortex, and although he initially believes he can control it, his attempt at a corner ends when he drives the price of wheat so high that farmers all over the country plant more wheat than they have ever planted before. The narrator describes the backlash against Jadwin‘s corner as though nature itself is turning against Jadwin:
The Wheat had broken from his control. For months, he had, by the might of his
single arm, held it back; but now it rose like the upbuilding of a colossal billow. It
towered, towered, hung poised for an instant, and then, with a thunder as of the 120
grind and crash of chaotic worlds, broke upon him, burst through the Pit and raced
past him, on and on to the eastward and to the hungry nations. (Pit 392)
Jadwin is initially proud of his vision, his ability to ―see‖ what wheat prices will do, as with the following conversation he has with Gretry when he first decides to start buying wheat: ―The rest of the Bear crowd don‘t seem to see it, but I see it. Before fall we‘re going to have higher prices‖
(Pit 195). Jadwin‘s vision, however, becomes distorted the further into the maelstrom he ventures. Thus Jadwin‘s final act as a speculator is to venture into the pit while his corner is collapsing, yelling that he wants to buy, until he suffers a nervous collapse. The order that he sees from outside the pit, his uncanny ability to predict which way wheat prices are headed, leaves him as he gets more and more personally involved in speculative ventures.
At this point we might ask why, in The Octopus, the railroad monopoly succeeds and appears to be in accord with nature, while in The Pit Jadwin‘s attempted monopolization of the wheat is doomed to failure. The key lies in the difference between Shelgrim and Jadwin.
Shelgrim evacuates his own agency in order to become a mere extension of the railroad. He believes that to be head of the railroad is to respect it as a force of nature in its own right, one that must grow just as wheat must grow. Jadwin, in contrast, treats his wheat corner as a source of personal power—he is consistently compared to a great general fighting the ―Battle of the
Streets,‖ and is repeatedly called ―Napoleonic.‖ In fact, Jadwin is far more like Magnus Derrick than he is like Shelgrim. The lone speculator, like the lone gambler or prospector, has little chance of survival.
Compounding his mistakes, Jadwin consistently feels that he is the master of chance. The first time in the novel that he speculates on wheat, he does so because Gretry claims to have a sure way to make money, and explains to him ―this ain‘t speculation. You can see for yourself 121
how sure it is. . . . Look here, J., you aren‘t the man to throw money away. You‘d buy a business block if you knew you could sell it over again at a profit‖ (Pit 86). Jadwin initially tries to resist the allure of speculation, but he finally gives in:
In spite of himself he felt a Chance had come. Again that strange sixth sense of
his, the inexplicable instinct, that only the born speculator knows, warned him.
Every now and then during the course of his business career, this intuition came
to him, this flair, this intangible, vague premonition, this presentiment that he
must seize Opportunity or else Fortune, that so long had stayed at his elbow,
would desert him. In the air about him he seemed to feel an influence, a sudden
new element, the presence of a new force. It was Luck, the great power, the great
goddess, and all at once it had stooped from out the invisible, and just over his
head passed swiftly in a rush of glittering wings. (Pit 87)
Jadwin decides to flip a coin on whether or not he will join with Gretry, but even as he does so he feels certain it will come up heads—and it does, with the result that he enters into the speculative deal. Jadwin‘s belief that he can control chance—that luck, fortune, and opportunity follow patterns that he can discern and master—initially seems well-founded. We soon learn that luck is, indeed, with him. ―Luck, the golden goddess, passed with the flirt and flash of glittering wings‖ over Jadwin while he sells short against a Bull market on the strength of Gretry‘s tip (Pit
104). The deal works out well for both Gretry and Jadwin due to ―Jadwin‘s luck—the never- failing guardian of the golden wings‖ (Pit 110). Jadwin later mimics Gretry‘s language when he explains to his friend Cressler, who disapproves of speculation, that what he did was not speculating: ―this wasn‘t speculating. . . . It was a certainty. It was found money‖ (Pit 110). In contrast to Jadwin, when another group of investors draws Cressler in by promising him that 122
―there won‘t be much speculating‖ involved in their sure thing, Cressler ends up failing and eventually committing suicide (Pit 274). Cressler‘s failure serves as a reminder that luck cannot be eliminated from speculation, nor can it be fully controlled. Jadwin‘s eventual failure, though slow in coming, proves that his fate is not immune to the interference of luck and the other uncontrollable forces of the maelstrom.
Norris‘s whirlpool is a destructive force, but like The Octopus, The Pit ends with an assertion that order still exists—that is, that the market still functions. The wheat that Jadwin‘s corner had been damming up is allowed to flow freely again, and the laws of supply and demand are again fulfilled. To a certain extent, then, Norris appears to affirm the free market. He naturalizes the market, and in particular he naturalizes the laws of supply and demand.
Furthermore, Norris suggests that nature will rebalance any temporary aberrations that hinder the functioning of the laws of supply and demand. Whatever local difficulties might arise—whether cornered markets or local disputes between farmers and railroads—the market eventually smoothes over and fixes them. In contrast to Presley‘s epiphany that the market works, though,
The Pit ends with Laura‘s despair and bafflement: ―For a moment, vague, dark perplexities assailed her, questionings as to the elemental forces, the forces of demand and supply that ruled the world. This huge resistless Nourisher of the Nations—why was it that it could not reach the
People, could not fulfill its destiny, unmarred by all this suffering, unattended by all this misery?‖ (Pit 420). Individual suffering, which Presley learns to accept, remains for Laura a source of consternation. In this consternation we can see how Norris‘s ―natural‖ market functions differently than Spencer‘s. For Spencer, laissez-faire capitalism allows individuals to reach their full potential. If you fail in a free market it is because there is something wrong—biologically wrong—with you. Norris‘s vortex, however, does not allow for the individual to exercise any 123
power at all. Jadwin‘s belief that he can become a great general and a controller of wheat is what undoes him. The market does not empower us as individuals, it steals our agency and leaves us, like Shelgrim (whose name implies that he is merely a sad shell), empty. Whereas Spencer saw laissez-faire capitalism as the triumph of the individual, Norris portrays it as the death of the individual and the emptying out of identity and power from human hands.
“The Element of Chance that Faces Us All”: Luck and Fitness in The Financier
Readings of The Financier—the first novel in Dreiser‘s Trilogy of Desire about the brilliant capitalist and businessman Frank Algernon Cowperwood (based in large part on the real life financier Charles Yerkes)—tend to align Dreiser with Spencer and with Social Darwinism, claiming that Cowperwood embodies evolutionary fitness. Indeed, Dreiser‘s interest in Spencer is well documented enough that Walter Benn Michaels quips, ―nothing about Dreiser is better known than his susceptibility to Spencerian ‗physico-chemical‘ explanations of human behavior‖
(76). Dreiser himself admitted his debt to Spencer in his 1922 autobiography (Myself 457).
Additionally, evolution interested Dreiser greatly, and his thoughts on the subject—including, at times, critiques of evolutionary theory—frequently appear in his essays. ―The Essential Tragedy of Life‖ compares evolutionary theory to older pagan religions and explores how each one explains the disorder of the universe, while ―Mechanism Called Life‖ and ―The So-called
Progress of Mind‖ both use evolution as an explanatory mechanism. In his Russian diary, Dreiser recounts discussing evolution with a fellow traveler while en route to the Soviet Union (44). The
Russian diary provides a particularly informative view of Dreiser‘s thoughts about the relationship between economics and evolution, since he frequently reflects on how ―human nature‖ may render the Soviet experiment a failure. Early in the diary he writes, ―I think—if only 124
human nature can rise to the opportunity—here is one for the genuine betterment of man. But, mayhap, the program is too beautiful to succeed;—an ideal of existence to which frail and selfish humanity can never rise‖ (68–69). Later, Dreiser notes, ―The trouble with these people is that they seemed convinced that in changing a form of government they are changing humanity. But right here in Moscow . . . I see sufficient to convince me that in no way has humanity changed‖
(86). Dreiser‘s concerns here mirror Spencer‘s The Principles of Sociology, which argues that human nature renders socialism unworkable (Part 8, Chapt. 22, sect. 842, 570–71). Although
Dreiser sounds less certain than Spencer, and evinces at least some desire to be convinced otherwise, he nevertheless accepts the basic terms of Spencer‘s argument: that man‘s biology limits his economic possibilities, and that some form of capitalist marketplace more readily corresponds to man‘s nature than does a socialist alternative.
Early critics often read The Financier as Dreiser‘s endorsement of Spencer and of survival of the fittest. The Financier follows Cowperwood‘s early success, his later fall from prominence after the Chicago fire of 1871 bankrupts him and exposes his shady fiscal and scandalous sexual dealings, and his return to wealth and power after he makes a million dollars selling short during the financial panic of 1873. In the story of Cowperwood‘s rise, fall, and rise again critics have consistently seen the workings of Spencerian Social Darwinism. F.O.
Matthiessen, for instance, writes that, in Cowperwood, Dreiser found a protagonist ―who could fuse . . . what Balzac and Spencer had helped teach him‖ (131). Though Matthiessen does register ―Dreiser‘s mixed attitude‖ (131) towards financiers, he goes on to note, ―The mature
Cowperwood is no reader, but though he does not formulate his career in these terms, he is
Dreiser‘s version of ‗the survival of the fittest,‘ intermingled with traits of Nietzsche‘s
‗Superman,‘ and possessing also what Dreiser calls a ‗Machiavellian‘ brain‖ (132). In a similar 125
vein, James Lundquist argues that ―Spencerian and Nietzschean superman overtones sound throughout the Trilogy,‖ although he reiterates that ―Dreiser was, it must be remembered, influenced by Progressivism‖ (72). While Matthiessen and Lundquist both note an apparent ambiguity or contradiction in Dreiser‘s attitude towards Cowperwood, they also admit that The
Financier provides an essentially Spencerian view of economics and of biological fitness. Other critics have made similar observations without equivocations. Richard Lehan, for instance, writes that, in The Financier, ―we see power in conflict with power, Yerkes-Cowperwood pushing and his enemies pushing back, a process that Dreiser believed was consistent with Spencer's laws of force‖ (99). Pizer concentrates primarily on Nietzsche's influence on Dreiser's portrayal of
Cowperwood, but notes that Nietzsche likely appealed to Dreiser in part because his ―will to power‖ resembled ―Spencerian Social Darwinism‖ (Novels of Theodore Dreiser 158), which
Dreiser had already accepted.
Perhaps the most obvious reason to read The Financier as a text that upholds a
Spencerian view of man comes in the most famous of the novel‘s early scenes in which the young Cowperwood observes a lobster and a squid placed together in a glass aquarium at a fish market. As the days go by the lobster repeatedly attacks the squid, cutting off a tentacle or two each time before the squid escapes. The squid has no means of fighting back, so as the days pass the lobster wears it down until eventually, mangled and slowed, the squid succumbs to the lobster, which kills and consumes it. The experience is a formative one for the young
Cowperwood because ―It answered in a rough way that riddle which had been annoying him so much in the past: ‗How is life organized?‘ Things lived on each other—that was it‖ (Financier
8).7 Applying this lesson to human society, Cowperwood realizes that men live on other men— that strong men live on the weak ones. Thus the novel opens by suggesting a fairly 126
straightforward, Spencer-inspired view of the world: the fit survive, the unfit do not.
Cowperwood‘s conclusion explicitly forestalls any possibility that chance could have changed the outcome: ―The squid couldn‘t kill the lobster—he had no weapon. The lobster could kill the squid—he was heavily armed. . . . What was the result to be? What else could it be? He didn‘t have a chance‖ (Financier 8). Thus the novel opens with a view of nature and of natural selection untroubled by the possibility that things could work out any other way than they do work out. Cowperwood views life as deterministic and determined, and as perfectly ordered by a hierarchy of fitness.
It would be premature, however, to assume that the novel necessarily upholds
Cowperwood‘s views. In fact, his experience with the lobster and the squid is perhaps most notable for how thoroughly it misleads Cowperwood, arming him with a false idea about the world that later contributes to his financial downfall. The novel, far from upholding a Spencerian view of economics as a struggle in which the fit survive and the unfit perish, challenges such a viewpoint by insisting that the market—specifically the stock market—is actually a form of gambling in which chance and luck play substantial roles. Indeed, The Financier is, in many ways, an extended meditation on the role of chance in economic life. Whereas Norris‘s work juxtaposes the operation of chance on the individual level with a sense that order is always upheld in the aggregate, Dreiser‘s novel is in many ways far bleaker. The individual suffers (at times) and triumphs (at other times), but there appears to be no greater order at stake. True, the race continues, but this holds no special significance for Dreiser. While Lundquist and others note Dreiser‘s inability to fully accept Cowperwood as a hero and tie Dreiser to the Progressive hope that people can control their own fates, The Financier is actually aggressively anti-
Progressive. Luck and chance sit side by side with individual abilities, and Dreiser holds out 127
little hope that we can control or predict the future. The fit man, like a talented poker player, might play so as to maximize his odds of winning, but in the end his life is still a gamble. Even
Cowperwood, in spite of his largely Spencerian view of the world, admits to the importance of luck when he reflects on the traits most important to success: ―Nerve, ideas, aggressiveness, how these counted when one had luck!‖ (72).
Cowperwood initially realizes that the stock market is a form of gambling early in the novel, and this realization creates an immediate challenge to his faith in survival of the fittest, gleaned from the example of the squid and the lobster. While the aquarium tank with the squid and the lobster offers an example of a world without chance, where the winner is predetermined,
Cowperwood finds that the stock exchange is not devoid of uncertainty. He becomes disabused of the notion of orderly markets while working as a stock agent for Tighe & Company, a banking and brokerage business. When Cowperwood begins work as a floor trader on the stock exchange,
Tighe explains to him,
Sure, anything can make or break a market . . . from the failure of a bank to the
rumor that your second cousin‘s grandmother has a cold. It‘s a most unusual
world, Cowperwood. No man can explain it. I‘ve seen breaks in stocks that you
could never explain at all—no one could. It wouldn‘t be possible to find out why
they broke. I‘ve seen rises the same way. My God, the rumors of the stock
exchange! They beat the devil. If they‘re going down in ordinary times some one
is unloading, or they‘re rigging the market. If they‘re going up—God knows times
must be good or somebody must be buying—that‘s sure. Beyond that— (39–40)
Cowperwood‘s immediate response to this description of the stock market is somewhat ambivalent. The narrator initially registers compatibility between Cowperwood‘s personality and 128
the stock market—―This subtle world appealed to him. It answered to his temperament‖ (40).
Cowperwood, however, quickly becomes disillusioned with the stock market: ―this buying and selling must be, and always was, incidental to the actual fact—the mine, the railroad, the wheat crop, the flour mill, and so on. Anything less than straight-out sales to realize quickly on assets, or buying to hold as an investment, was gambling pure and simple, and these men were gamblers. He was nothing more than a gambler‘s agent‖ (42). Although this state of affairs ―was not troubling him any just at the moment,‖ Cowperwood believes that ―A Man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler—acting for himself or for others—he must employ such.
A real man—a financier—was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led‖ (42). Thus
Cowperwood sets out a dichotomy between ―real men,‖ who control their own fates, and those whose fate is either at the mercy of chance (gamblers) or at the mercy of another, more powerful man (agents and tools). The real man is a creator, but not precisely in the sense of being a producer. While Cowperwood recognizes that stocks are ―incidental‖ to the productive work of mines, railroads and other such businesses, he never seriously considers a career outside of finance. He does, however, attempt to gain ownership of street car lines so that he can make money safely off of the service industry. Based on his initial analysis of the market, however, and in light of the turbulent economy in the aftermath of the Civil War, Cowperwood decides not to become a ―stock gambler,‖ but to pursue instead ―bill-brokering, a business which he had observed to be very profitable and which involved no risk as long as one had capital‖ (46).
Cowperwood‘s initial rejection of stock trading, in spite of his temperamental affinity for it, is specifically a reaction against the elements of risk and chance involved in the stock market.
Unlike the case of the squid and the lobster, the stock market involves a substantial chance of failure, even for those who are best equipped for it. 129
Cowperwood changes his mind about the stock market only after he discovers—or believes he discovers—a way to render stock ventures secure and without risk. When
Cowperwood is beginning as a financier, he pays close and envious attention to the actions of the top finance firms, and quickly discovers one of the facets controlling the stock market: ―He noticed how often a rich man‘s word sufficed—no money, no certificates, no collateral, no anything—just his word. If Drexel & Co., or Jay Cooke & Co., or Gould & Fiske were rumored to be behind anything, how secure it was!‖ (63). Cowperwood learns that the equation of wealth with the absence of risk stems from the ability of the wealthy to control the market. With enough capital, an individual or a business can afford to flood the market with orders to sell, thereby reducing prices, or flood it with orders to buy, thereby driving prices up. The power of a rich man‘s name goes beyond that, though. In addition to being able to control market prices through buying and selling stocks, someone with enough capital to command the respect of other financiers can also make a venture secure simply by attaching his name to it, thereby increasing the value of its stock through a process of endorsement. Hence the chaos that Tighe sees at the heart of the market becomes, for Cowperwood, an ordered system in which powerful financial players manipulate and control the market.
Cowperwood‘s new understanding of the stock market is quickly followed by his becoming a stock trader. Initially enlisted by George W. Stener, the Philadelphia city treasurer, to perform some financial sleight of hand on city loans, Cowperwood quickly gains almost unlimited access to city funds. He uses these to manipulate the stock market and start making his fortune. Thus the story of Cowperwood‘s rise to prominence in the Philadelphia financial world initially appears to support his interpretation of the encounter between the lobster and the squid.
Cowperwood discovers that he can manipulate the market so as to beat the competition and turn 130
a profit on his investments. His competitors have no chance. Cowperwood, as one of the economically and biologically fit, is able to survive and flourish where others fail. Indeed, the lobster and the squid might be a better analogy to Cowperwood‘s financial undertakings than even he realizes. After all, the squid in the lobster tank is part of a system set up by the fish merchant in order to attract attention to his stall.8 Out in the ocean the squid would have a much better chance of escape, but the dictates of the (fish) market have prevented the squid from having that opportunity. Because the tank is not large enough for the squid to ever really escape from the lobster, the squid is doomed. Cowperwood, like the lobster, is the beneficiary of a rigged game. The Philadelphia politicians need him to make certain that the city loans he is handling sell at their full value, to cover up the fact that the city treasury is being run for the profit of the politicians and their financial cronies. Since he has the favor of the politicians,
Cowperwood is able to engage in any number of shady transactions, using city treasury money for personal investments and setting up dummy companies so that he can buy and sell to himself in order to create the illusion of increased activity around certain stocks. The loans themselves can only be turned into cash by people who have the favor of the politicians. Anyone else is told that there is no money to pay the loan and they must wait longer or trade it (at a loss) to someone else (presumably someone with political connections, who can turn it into ready money).
Cowperwood is thus never really the winner in a game of free competition. Rather, he is able to profit off of a non-competitive system set up to guarantee his victory. Cowperwood‘s rise to power thus subtly challenges a Spencerian view of the market. He is fit not because he can successfully compete in a free market, but because he knows that he does not have to do so.9
While Cowperwood‘s early successes in the market make an interesting study of the ways in which Dreiser undermines discourses about free competition, they occupy only about the 131
first quarter of The Financier.10 Most of the novel is concerned not with Cowperwood‘s rise, but with his fall. Like Norris‘s Jadwin, Cowperwood learns that the market is more difficult to control than he had originally expected. When the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 strikes,
Cowperwood finds his finances stretched thin due to having hypothecated almost all of his stocks
(that is, Cowperwood has used his stock holdings as collateral for loans, which he has in turn used to buy more stocks, which he has then used as collateral for more loans, and so on). When the value of his hypothecated stocks begins to plummet, the banks call back Cowperwood‘s loans, and he goes bankrupt. His fortunes plummet even further when, due to his failure to properly deposit a check he has received from Stener, Cowperwood finds himself arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to jail for stealing public funds. At the same time as Cowperwood‘s financial fortunes wane, one of his former political allies, Butler, discovers that Cowperwood has been carrying on an affair with Butler‘s daughter Aileen. Enraged, Butler does everything in his power to ensure that Cowperwood goes to jail for as long as possible. Throughout his fall,
Cowperwood shifts from incredulity to eventual acceptance. Cowperwood accepts not only his fate, but the fact that the universe does not, ultimately, function along ordered lines of progress.
The story of Cowperwood‘s rise and fall critiques discourses of economic determinism and economic fitness. Scholars have noted that the moral failures of Cowperwood and his fellow financiers overturns the link between money and morality prevalent in religious discourses of the time.11 However, this observation generally assumes that The Financier upholds a Darwinian model of biological fitness.12 Up to a point this is correct—Dreiser‘s metaphors repeatedly cast the market in terms of a natural occurrence (or natural disaster), and Dreiser at times suggests that Cowperwood is innately fit for the financial industry. But the model of nature and fitness in
The Financier is not nearly as simple as Spencer‘s—there is no one-to-one connection between 132
fitness and success. In fact, Dreiser‘s version of nature is much closer to Darwin‘s actual model of nature as inherently unpredictable. That is to say, Dreiser responds to discourses about biological fitness by reinserting the element of chance—present in Darwin but elided in
Spencer—back into his model of fitness. Thus the novel upholds many of Tighe‘s initial observations about the stock market: even if the reasons for its rises and falls are not entirely unknowable, they are at least unpredictable. The novel ultimately shows Cowperwood‘s belief that fitness alone can render him invincible to be delusional.
The novel does not, however, simply dismiss the value of Cowperwood‘s fitness for financiering. In the conclusion of The Financier Cowperwood remakes his fortune during the panic of 1873, which results, ironically, from the closure of Jay Cooke & Co.—one of the wealthy companies whose name Cowperwood had once thought sufficient to render any venture secure. Lois Hughson writes of Cowperwood‘s financial triumph at the end of the novel,
It might appear to one familiar with the financial history of Yerkes that he
recovered his fortune in exactly the same way that he lost it—through a
circumstance over which he had no control. And from one perspective this is
certainly true. Jay Cooke‘s failure and the panic it precipitated was
Cowperwood‘s opportunity. His ―great hour‖ comes and he has done nothing to
bring it. But it is crucial that he has been preparing for and expecting the
opportunity. If it had not been Jay Cooke it would have been another. The
instability of his world made it certain and he knew it. Dreiser is at pains to show
Cowperwood the master not the creature of changing financial reality. (65)
Hughson correctly points out that Cowperwood, like all talented gamblers, places himself in a position to take advantage of the chance situation that he knows must eventually arise. However, 133
this does not render Cowperwood ―the master . . . of changing financial reality.‖ 13 The power of
Dreiser‘s novel derives from the interplay between chance and fitness, and Dreiser‘s repeated insistence that humans cannot control either nature or their fate. This is not to say that
Cowperwood is not a brilliant financier—clearly he is. Rather, Dreiser‘s point seems to be that nature always exceeds our capacity to control it.14
Dreiser‘s most explicit examination of the role of chance in nature—―The Factor Called
Chance,‖ published posthumously in the unfinished volume Notes on Life—sheds considerable light on The Financier. Dreiser opens the essay by drawing a distinction between the expected and the unexpected, then immediately questioning that distinction: ―When we look at or register the world around us, there appears to us to be two kinds of events—the usual or expected kind and the unusual or unexpected kind. . . . Why should this be so? Because obviously, it makes little or no difference to nature what we expect‖ (39). Here Dreiser playfully mocks humans for believing that they can know whether or not something will happen. He goes on to explain how chance plays into the success or failure of individuals:
Somewhere, we may assume, and it may be true, that for each individual male or
female, there exists the right environment, or stimuli, for his particular
temperament. Also, somewhere the most harmful environment or collection of
stimuli. And either—should he chance to meet up with and be controlled by it—
would be or prove his fate. By the one, he would be greatly furthered, developed,
made most effective, by the other least so, his natural powers whatever they might
be would be frustrated or destroyed. And this is the element of chance that faces
us all. (40) 134
Here, Dreiser‘s description of how some people chance upon the environment that best fits them revises a Spencerian view of nature—the world is not split into the fit and the unfit, rather it is split into those who fit into the particular surroundings they find themselves in, and those who do not. A round peg may not fit into a square hole, but this does not mean the round peg is not fit, merely that it does not fit. Fitness itself becomes contextual rather than absolute. Some people may indeed be more fit than others for survival in a particular market economy—but change the way the economy functions and those same individuals may ―be frustrated or destroyed‖ while others rise to the top. Spencer, in effect, is robbed of his moral valence—the free market is no longer the only ―natural‖ market formation capable of determining in absolute terms who is and who is not fit. Rather, it becomes one context among an infinite possible number of contexts, any of which determines only an organism‘s ability to fit into that context. Dreiser‘s description of the individual who does find his place calls to mind his description of Cowperwood, for whom, as noted earlier, the stock exchange ―answer[s] to his temperament‖ (40).
As the essay progresses, Dreiser lists examples of the workings of chance in nature, and his final example, which refers to spiders, is particularly informative: ―The entire spider family with its webs and traps (to say nothing of the entire human family), its evolutionary divisions and species is nothing if not an illustration of the operation of chance and, at the very same time, an excellent and exact illustration of the law of cause and effect‖ (43). Dreiser goes on to explain that the spider is a product of many apparently chance events, a twisting and turning evolutionary road that leads to its present web spinning, but which no one could have predicted beforehand— even though it was inevitable. Furthermore, whether or not any individual spider will successfully capture insects in its web is also a matter of chance. Though we know, as Dreiser points out, that some spiders will and others will not succeed at catching a meal, and that some 135
insects will and some insects will not be caught. Which spiders will catch which insects is predetermined, Dreiser claims, but because no one can know and account for all of the factors that determine this certain fact, chance nevertheless exists. Thus Dreiser reconciles chance with a deterministic universe—events may not be truly random, but because we are fundamentally incapable of foreseeing the future, we live our lives within the domain of chance. Dreiser‘s description of spiders here calls to mind his description, in The Financier, of Cowperwood as
―Like a spider in a spangled net, every thread of which he knew‖ (Financier 140). Cowperwood, like the spider in ―The Factor Called Chance,‖ is as much a beneficiary of the chance workings of the universe as he is a beneficiary of his own fitness, his unique temperamental affinity for the stock market—itself a vast game of chance.
Much as Dreiser uses spiders to reconcile the individual‘s experience of chance with his belief in a mechanistic universe, other metaphors in The Financier similarly make recourse to nature. For example, Dreiser compares stock panics to storms. After the Chicago fire threatens to reveal Stener and Cowperwood‘s embezzlement, the Philadelphia political boss Henry A.
Mollenhauer—who intends to ruin Stener and take advantage of the situation to make a considerable amount of money—feels a brief moment of pity for Stener‘s wife:
No doubt she had worked hard, as had Stener, to get up in the world and be
something—just a little more than miserably poor; and now this unfortunate
complication had to arise to undo them—this Chicago fire. What a curious thing
that was! If any one thing more than another made him doubt the existence of a
kindly, overruling Providence, it was the unheralded storms out of clear skies—
financial, social, anything you choose—that so often brought ruin and disaster to
so many. (Financier 200–201) 136
Mollenhauer‘s invocation of ―the unheralded storms out of clear skies‖ casts the market as a natural occurrence, but storms—though undoubtedly natural—are hardly predictable. Even if we accept that weather is mechanistically predetermined, our limited knowledge forces us to speak of the weather in terms of probability rather than certainty.
When Cowperwood reflects on the market he does so in the same terms as Mollenhauer.
When he decides to stretch his resources thin in a bid to take control of some lucrative streetcar lines, he feels safe because ―There was no storm in sight‖ (Financier 135), though he recognizes the possibility that a stock panic might occur at any moment. When the Chicago fire comes, it
―burst unexpectedly and out of a clear sky, and bore no relation to the intention or volition of any individual‖ (Financier 147–48). Here the weather metaphor heightens the sense that nature acts outside of the possibility of human control. The storm/panic that breaks is specifically not the product of human ―intention or volition‖ but is merely the product of fortune, and the fact that it
―burst unexpectedly and out of a clear sky‖ calls to mind Dreiser‘s wry note that ―it makes little or no difference to nature what we expect.‖ Dreiser‘s view here is fundamentally anti-
Progressive, and even anti-Enlightenment. While Progressivism epitomized a certain branch of
Enlightenment thinking—the belief that people can and should seek to control nature and bend it to their will—Dreiser‘s primary concern here is with nature‘s resistance to human control. If
Cowperwood represents a version of the tragic hero, his tragic flaw is his belief that he can control the market, which, in the novel‘s terms, is also the belief that he can control nature. All along Cowperwood desires money because he believes that money can grant him power, enabling him to fulfill his primary prerogative—―I satisfy myself‖ (Financier 121). As it happens, even money cannot render Cowperwood—or his ventures—secure, something
Cowperwood only begins to realize as a result of his trial. 137
Cowperwood‘s initially conceives of the law as ―a place where the accidentally wounded were ground between the upper and the nether millstones of force or chance‖ (Financier 290–
91). Cowperwood‘s lawyer, Harper Steger, reiterates this viewpoint when he tells the jury that
―Only the most unheralded and the unkindest thrust of fortune‖ has brought Cowperwood to the court, and goes on to say that he does not blame the court or the law, but that he does ―condemn and deplore the untoward chain of events which has built up a seeming situation‖ (Financier
377). Even after being jailed, Cowperwood reflects that ―Unlike most men in his position‖ he has done nothing wrong and is ―merely unfortunate‖ (Financier 386). Finally, even the narrator suggests that misfortune rather than wrongdoing are to blame for Cowperwood‘s situation by noting, ―Those who by any pleasing courtesy of fortune, accident of birth, inheritance, or the wisdom of parents or friends, have succeeded in avoiding making that anathema of the prosperous and comfortable, ‗a mess of their lives,‘ will scarcely understand the mood of
Cowperwood, sitting rather gloomily in his cell these first days, wondering what, in spite of his great ingenuity, was to become of him‖ (Financier 395–96). The point is not that Cowperwood is not guilty, just that his breaking of the law has very little to do with his imprisonment.
Mollenhauer and Butler (among others) are, after all, just as guilty as Cowperwood, though the law does not punish them.
Cowperwood‘s imprisonment is the result of the confluence of two chance events: the first the Chicago fire, and the second Butler‘s discovery of his affair with Aileen. While some early critics tended to see the novel‘s romance plot as incompatible with and incongruous next to its business plot,15 Michaels suggests that Cowperwood‘s shifting affections mirror his change from a businessman in search of safe profits to one willing to take risks (61–65). As noted earlier, Cowperwood‘s initial attraction to the market stems not from a love of risk but from the 138
belief that he can control the market and avoid risk. When Cowperwood‘s attention is drawn to
Aileen Butler, the narration suggests an attraction to risk in language that links Aileen to the
Chicago fire: ―it was interesting to him to see how deliberately and even calculatingly—and worse, enthusiastically—he was pumping the bellows that tended only to heighten the flames of his desire for this girl; to feed a fire that might ultimately consume him—and how deliberately and resourcefully!‖ (Financier 119). The detachment implied by Cowperwood‘s position as someone who looks on at his own thoughts heightens the sense that Cowperwood is surprised by his willingness to take risks. Meanwhile his characterization of his own actions as feeding a fire foreshadows the fire that, in conjunction with Butler‘s wrath over Aileen, will destroy him.
When Cowperwood and Aileen first begin to meet illicitly he assures her, ―You are perfectly safe, except for one thing, chance exposure‖ (Financier 129). As long as one risks ―chance exposure,‖ however, one is not, in fact, ―perfectly safe,‖ and it is indeed a chance exposure that brings their affair to Butler‘s attention at precisely the moment when Butler is able to ruin
Cowperwood.16 Romance, like the weather, lies beyond human control.
The end of The Financier sees Cowperwood back atop a financial empire, and seemingly once again in control of his destiny. However, the novel‘s second epilogue, ―The Magic Crystal,‖ reminds readers that Cowperwood‘s return to a financial high point is, like every other part of his career, contingent and momentary. After referring to Cowperwood and Aileen as ―now apparently so fortunately placed,‖ the epilogue predicts that their future will be one of ―sorrow, sorrow, sorrow‖ (Financier 448). When Cowperwood‘s story picks up again in The Titan, he has learned a valuable lesson: ―He was sick of the stock exchange, anyhow, as a means of livelihood, and now decided that he would leave it once and for all‖ (Titan 1). While The Titan portrays a more financially cautious Cowperwood, his caution does not entirely save him. After their 139
marriage, Aileen asks Cowperwood, ―You do everything you want, don‘t you?‖ Cowperwood responds, ―Not quite . . . but it isn‘t for not wanting to. Chance has a little to say about some of these things‖ (Titan 24). As the novel goes on, Cowperwood fails repeatedly to get what he wants—first failing to enter ―society‖ with Aileen, then failing to secure a perpetual monopoly on streetcars in Chicago. Cowperwood‘s final defeat in The Titan comes when the people of
Chicago rise up in rebellion against his stranglehold on the city, toppling his streetcar empire.
Pizer reads the ending of The Titan as the enactment of Dreiser‘s ―equation inevitable,‖ which Dreiser develops in a number of essays in Hey, Rub-A-Dub-Dub (Novels of Theodore
Dreiser 157–59). According to the equation inevitable, nature balances out disruptions in power that cause society to swing too far towards any particular ―mood.‖ In this reading the people who rise up against Cowperwood fulfill the role Dreiser ascribes to reformers in his essay ―The
Reformer.‖ In this essay, Dreiser argues that when a reformer ―is successful he merely represents an inevitable tendency in nature to maintain a balance or equation between one type of mood and another‖ (206). Dreiser concludes that we do not, in fact, need reformers—instead, ―What we really need is a better stomach for life as it is, and Nature, in the course of time, may possibly build us such‖ (211). Suggesting a solution to the problem of reformers (ironically playing the part of the reformer by reforming our intention to reform the world) Dreiser argues that only evolution can fit us for the world in which we live. Dreiser thus enlists nature not to increase our efficiency or to justify the morality of the free market, but to equip humans with the attitude appropriate to its amoral and random processes. Dreiser appears to cast his lot in with the financiers over the reformers, but in so doing he reasserts the financier as a part of nature‘s machinery. Noting that the financier is still an individual and an individualist, distinct from the masses who cry for his overthrow in the name of reform, Dreiser writes: 140
Personally I believe that most of us would prefer that the mass should not sweep
away the individual, for each of us would prefer to be somebody in however small
a way rather than mere unrecognizable cogs in a machine or bees in a beehive. At
best, we are little more than that; even our greatest individuals, individual as they
may seem. They, too, are but minute factors in the total machinery, little able to
forefend against disaster or the ultimate nothingness that swallows them.
(―American Financier‖ 83)
So while celebrating the financier as an individual, Dreiser also notes that even individuals are not particularly individual, and that, in the grand scheme of nature, the financier is just ―a highly specialized machine for the accomplishment of some end which Nature has in view‖ (―American
Financier‖ 74).
In his reading of the end of The Titan, Jack E. Wallace interprets Cowperwood‘s failure to beat the masses as supporting laissez-faire: ―the real consequence of the mob‘s uprising in
Chicago is not to achieve a moral balance between the mass and the individual but to support the argument for Social Darwinism. Such an argument must demonstrate that a free economic system, like the order of nature, protects itself against tyranny that might destroy competitive balance‖ (68). To a degree this is correct, but Wallace misses the fact that the very mechanisms which Dreiser shows protecting the ―free economic system‖ themselves violate the principle of economic laissez-faire. The people of Chicago insist that the government step in and refuse to allow Cowperwood a continued monopoly on streetcars. Furthermore, while he may pursue a laissez-faire policy in his personal life, seeking only to satisfy himself, Cowperwood is no more above manipulating the government to get what he wants than are the masses. Dreiser writes that
―there is apparently in Nature no such thing as the right to do or the right not to do‖ (―American 141
Financier‖ 87), which has been taken to exonerate the amorality of the financier, but which might equally well exonerate the reformists. Whereas Spencer sees the law of nature, survival of the fittest, as in harmony with man‘s ―natural right‖ to determine how his property is disposed of, for Dreiser the right to property cannot be a natural right because there are no natural rights. The reformer who seeks to redistribute wealth more evenly enacts nature‘s will just as much as the financier who seeks to hoard wealth to himself.
Naturalism against Nature
Both The Pit and The Financier, then, apply what London called ―the law of life‖ to market society, and both come up with a picture of laissez-faire that highlights its destructive effects on the individual as concomitant to its ―naturalness,‖ even as they accept that it serves a greater good (in the case of Norris) or maintains balance or equation (in the case of Dreiser).
How are we, as readers, to feel about this? When London describes the law of life that Koskoosh knows, he writes that it is ―the deepest abstraction old Koskoosh's barbaric mind was capable of.‖ We could read this statement to mean that the law of life is so plainly obvious that anyone in tune with nature can grasp it, even if they are not of a philosophical bend of mind. In this reading, Koskoosh‘s belief that it is natural for his tribe to leave him to die now that he is a burden is a straightforward statement of the law of life, a law that we cannot circumvent.
Alternately, we could read London‘s use of primitive imagery as an invitation for us, his
―civilized‖ readers, to feel superior to Koskoosh. The law of life is ―the deepest abstraction old
Koskoosh's barbaric mind was capable of,‖ but it is not the deepest abstraction that we are capable of. Koskoosh can only think of sex in terms of the pleasure he takes when looking at a
―maiden‖ who is ―full-breasted and strong,‖ but who will become an ―old squaw‖ who ―only the 142
little children‖ can still find joy in, unlike Laura and Jadwin, and even Cowperwood, who are capable of the abstraction of love. Unlike Koskoosh‘s tribe—London‘s story invites us, his readers, to believe—we do not need to let the old, the infirm, and the unfit die in the name of the survival of the race. While mutually contradictory, these two possible readings nevertheless coexist in ―The Law of Life,‖ just as they do in the work of Norris and Dreiser. Even as they support a conception of the free market as natural and inevitable, they remind us that nature is not always kind and caring, and that a ―natural‖ market may very well, like a hungry vortex or a sudden storm, be something we want to avoid.
Note
1 Adam H. Wood offers an in depth analysis of how Norris uses the Mussel Slough shootout, and of what he changes (109–17).
2 A number of critics have followed Pizer in seeing the ending as the novel‘s actual moral center. Thomas Austenfeld, for instance, takes The Octopus as an example of the intersection between Naturalist discourses and utilitarian discourses (including but not limited to Spencer).
3 Torsten Petersson argues along similar lines that Presley‘s ―optimism, propounded with great vigor and conviction in the final pages, jars harshly with the tenor of the rest of the book‖
(77). Petersson explains the rift biographically, as stemming from the contrast between Norris‘s
Christianity and his evolutionary determinism.
4 Joseph McElrath, for instance, takes the former position (98–100).
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5 Wood makes a similar observation, claiming that The Octopus ―unconsciously reveals the process of myth construction in the reification of the market of wheat as a natural phenomenon‖ (108). The myth construction thus revealed demonstrates ―capitalism‘s contradictory ideology of the ‗forces‘ and ‗conditions‘ that control humankind‘s fate‖ (126).
6 The contrast between the business plot and the marriage plot in The Pit has caused problems for a number of critics, much as the contrast between the ending of The Octopus and the rest of the novel has. Pizer largely dismisses The Pit, noting, ―Neither the business nor the love plot of The Pit is really successful, yet they are more successful independently than together‖ (Novels of Frank Norris 174). McElrath treats the two sides of the novel more or less separately, reading the love plot as a critique of Romanticism and the business plot as a critique of the market, though he does note that some themes remain parallel between the two plots—for instance, both involve a character who feels a great deal of hubris (107–21). Other critics have tended to take McElrath‘s route, exploring the thematic similarities of the two plots while reading the plots as parallel rather than intersecting. See, for instance, David Zimmerman‘s article ―Frank Norris, Market Panic, and the Mesmeric Sublime,‖ which reads the theme of mesmerism in both plots. Other critics have concentrated almost solely on one of the plots or the other: Clare Virginia Eby notes the ―longstanding critical misjudgment‖ of The Pit that has led critics to concentrate on the business plot in eschewal of the love plot (149). Karsten H. Piep provides an overview of the failure of scholarship since the late 1940s to reconcile the two plots
(28–31). Piep‘s article is also noteworthy for being one of the few attempts to tie the two plots together on more than thematic lines—Piep convincingly portrays the relationship between the
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call for companionate marriage and Progressive ideas about the importance of cooperation in industrial capitalism and argues that the novel pursues a Progressive political stance that joins these two agendas together. Alternatively, Howard Horwitz claims that the novel‘s aesthetic problems stem from the fact that the two plots are too parallel, resulting in the romanticizing of the business plot (―To Find the Value of X‖ 215–16).
7 I use the text of the 1927 edition of The Financier. Dreiser first published a substantially longer edition in 1912, which he felt to be poorly edited and rushed on account of financial pressures he was feeling at the time. When his pecuniary situation improved he re- edited the novel resulting in a second edition. For more on the differences between the two editions, see the Kevin Jett article.
8 Bruce Robbins has a similar analysis of the lobster and the squid. He writes, ―In nature, the squid had a chance of escaping. It has no chance here precisely because this competition is not natural but man-made. It‘s not that life is organized, but that it has been organized in a particular way‖ (122). Running with the analogy, Robbins suggests that Cowperwood is actually less like the lobster than he is like the merchant who places the two combatants together in the tank: ―People, who live on lobsters, have placed lobster and squid in the tank together, and it is presumably those people who benefit in some sense from the competition in which they do not themselves participate. The same might be said of Cowperwood, who uses city funds to profit safely from the rising and falling investments of others who must risk their own money‖ (122).
What Robbins misses is that Cowperwood cannot, in fact, ―profit safely‖ from others without
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risking his own fortune—he only thinks he can. Lois Hughson similarly notes the artificiality of the struggle between the squid and the lobster (53).
9 Bruce Robbins has also noted that Cowperwood does not operate within a free market system (119), as does Howard Horwitz (By the Law of Nature 196–205). Henry Nash Smith claims that Cowperwood is a hero in the novel, but notes that the view of the market that The
Financier offers does not correspond to Adam Smith‘s belief than an ―invisible hand‖ controlled and maintained the free market: ―the world of business is not a harmony maintained by an invisible hand but an anarchy of trouble‖ (101).
10 The 1912 edition of The Financier spends considerably more time on Cowperwood‘s youth, but Dreiser made particularly heavy cuts from this section of the novel when he revised it.
11 Larzer Ziff makes this argument explicitly, while Alex Pitofsky notes the ways in which The Financier undercuts the middle-class morality of Horatio Alger. In contrast, Stephen
C. Brennan views Cowperwood as an alternate Jesus, both Christ and anti-Christ, while Robbins notes the hints of a new form of civic morality in the actions of the Pinkertons.
12 Zimmerman, for instance, writes, ―Conventional morality holds no sway here; each man looks out for his own interests. The law of survival of the fittest . . . determines the fortunes of stock operators‖ (―The Financier and the Ends of Accounting‖ 6).
13 Richard Lehan forwards an argument similar to Hughson‘s. Lehan suggests that the mechanistic nature of Dreiser‘s universe leaves no space for chance, writing that the characters in The Financier ―are machines, and their natures are fixed, just as the nature of a machine is fixed. The product of their own temperament, driven by inner necessity, Dreiser's characters are
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governed by physical compulsions that make their motives as instinctual and mechanistic as those of a cat when he sees a bird‖ (108). Such a view is not easily reconciled with the apparent importance of luck in the novel, as Lehan reveals when he writes that, while ―Chance events bring momentary reversals,‖ these changes in fortune are only ever temporary. Even though the
Chicago fire destroys Cowperwood‘s first effort at establishing a financial empire,
―Cowperwood is larger than any one chance defeat, and he is there to ride the waves of another chance event—the collapse of Jay Cooke and Company—to financial fortune and to the start of a new and even more successful career‖ (110). As such, Lehan concludes, ―As important as chance and circumstance may be in Dreiser‘s fiction, as often as they may bring about a fortunate or an unfortunate sequence of events, one can only evaluate Dreiser‘s characters at the novel‘s end.
Here one can see that behind the realm of chance is a realm of causality, of destiny. . . . All of
Dreiser‘s characters carry the seed of victory or defeat within themselves‖ (111). That is to say, in Lehan‘s view chance is merely a chimera and the actual working of the universe described in
The Financier is purely mechanistic. Such a view is initially tempting insofar as narrative itself implies a sort of deterministic universe. Because Cowperwood does end the novel by regaining and even surpassing his previous wealth, it appears that he must end the novel in this manner.
The novel, however, consistently suggests that luck plays a tremendous role in both
Cowperwood‘s successes and his failures.
14 Michaels suggests a similar reading of the role of chance in The Financier, noting that, while ―nothing in Dreiser‘s work provides a better example of‖ his ―susceptibility‖ to Spencer‘s ideology ―than the allegory of the lobster and the squid,‖ which Michaels claims shows the world
147
―as Cowperwood and Dreiser come to see it,‖ that this view of nature does not adequately explain ―the events of The Financier itself, which persistently exhibit nature not primarily as an organizing force dedicated to the survival of the fittest but as the ultimate measure of life‘s instability‖ (76). Michaels goes on to write, ―the business crisis, understood by Dreiser as an essentially natural phenomenon, cannot be mastered or even predicted by any system of thought, any account of life‘s ‗organization‘—theological, scientific, even economic‖ (77). As a result,
―Cowperwood‘s whole career is a glorification of chance, and the constant lesson of The
Financier is that accidents will happen‖ (78). Since chance is part of nature, Michaels concludes,
―Nature in The Financier is the speculator‘s ally‖ (83), creating the uncertainty on which the speculator gambles. David A. Zimmerman provides an analysis of the role of chance similar to
Michaels‘s, suggesting that ―The Financier documents the operation of nature and its laws as they reveal themselves in the title character‘s fight with other men and his attempt to impose stability upon an unpredictable universe‖ (4). However, Cowperwood‘s attempts to impose stability ultimately fail: ―Panic puts an end to Cowperwood‘s prospects because, for Dreiser, the universe, governed by inscrutable and impersonal forces, subject to chance and flux, must frustrate any attempt to bring the future into line, to plot it, to see it prospectively. . . . Nature defies any attempt to contain it within a single vision or hold it hostage to a single design‖ (9).
While my argument will run along somewhat similar lines to those of Michaels and Zimmerman,
I concentrate more intently on the interaction between fitness and chance that plays out throughout the novel, and on the consequences of this interplay to the elements of Darwinism and Social Darwinism in the novel.
148
15 Donald Pizer in particular has made this argument, though he sees it as more of a problem in The Titan than in The Financier (170–71).
16 The timing of this chance exposure, and more generally Cowperwood‘s affair with
Aileen, are the parts of the novel that depart most thoroughly from the life of Charles Yerkes
(Pizer 162–63). However later critics might feel about the love story, this suggests that Dreiser, at least, saw these details as important enough to warrant a departure from his otherwise fairly accurate portrayal of Yerkes. 149
The New Deal and the ―middle-class liberal‖: Labor, Consumption, and Capital in
Dos Passos‘s U.S.A.
In 1916, the year before the United States entered World War I, the poet Edwin Arlington
Robinson published ―Cassandra‖ in The Man Against the Sky. Named after a Greek prophetess cursed by Apollo so that no one would believe her prophecies, this poem criticizes America for its complacency at a time of historical crisis, even as the poem‘s title suggests that Robinson expects to be ignored:
Your Dollar, Dove, and Eagle make
A Trinity that even you
Rate higher than you rate yourselves;
It pays, it flatters, and it's new. (29–32)
The trinity of wealth, peace, and patriotism that Robinson blames for blinding Americans to the encroaching global catastrophe of World War I returned in the post-war 1920s. The patriotic fervor of the Great War provided Woodrow Wilson an excuse to lock up communists and labor activists, whom he accused of trying to disrupt American industry during the war. The peace and prosperity of the post-war years then lulled Americans into what, from the perspective of the
Great Depression, looked like foolish complacency. Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser warned that investment markets were unpredictable maelstroms, liable to escape human control in spite of the energy and ingenuity dedicated to controlling them. Even as Dreiser was editing a new edition of The Financier, however, the rapidly expanding market of the 1920s convinced many
Americans, like Cowperwood, that the economic boom would continue indefinitely. Severe 150
agricultural crises in the 1920s, brought on by high surpluses and low prices, did little to persuade urban populations that the country was headed for crisis.
While the 1920s thus produced relatively few criticisms of the stock market, during the
1930s many American writers reflected regretfully on what now seemed the excesses of the previous decade. F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s 1931 short story ―Babylon Revisited,‖ for instance, takes place shortly after the 1929 stock market crash, and tells the story of Charlie Wales. Charlie makes a fortune on investments during the 1920s only to lose it in the crash. At the start of the story, Charlie returns to Paris, the site of many of his orgiastic pre-crash parties, to reclaim his daughter, Honoria, from the custody of his dead wife‘s sister. Complicating his mission is the fact that his sister-in-law, Marion, blames him for his wife‘s death. She is not eager to relinquish
Honoria into the hands of someone she considers an irresponsible drunk. Charlie almost convinces her in spite of these reservations, but a couple of old friends ruin his chances when they appear, drunk and unannounced, at Marion‘s house just as she is about to agree to his request. The story ends with Charlie vowing to come back in a few months, and try again. The short story, which is partially based on Fitzgerald‘s own experience of marital trouble and separation from his daughter, is a tale about searching for redemption in the post-crash years.
Honoria‘s name suggests that Charlie‘s attempt to prove he is trustworthy enough to raise his own daughter is also an attempt to redeem himself from the shame of his Jazz Age debauchery.
Central to Charlie‘s redemption is the fact that he has returned to work. When explaining to Marion and her husband Lincoln why they can trust him not to slide back into alcoholism, he says, ―I worked hard for ten years, you know—until I got lucky in the market, like so many people. Terribly lucky. It didn't seem any use working any more, so I quit‖ (641). Charlie blames his unproductive years of drink-fueled partying on his success in the market. The reminder that 151
he worked for a decade before making his fortune in the market is his proof that he has the ability and inclination to be a useful member of society. Later, when feeling glum, he reminds himself not to dwell on his past: ―The present was the thing—work to do and someone to love‖
(643). Charlie lives now for work, on the one hand, and love for Honoria on the other. If Charlie is to redeem his lost honor, he must do so through work.
Charlie‘s revaluing of work accompanies a devaluing of his past excess. Charlie takes exactly one drink a day, and he does so, he explains, only because ―It keeps the matter in proportion‖ (639). The loss of control linked to Charlie‘s alcoholism, and to his earlier wealth, has been replaced by a carefully controlled consumption performed as a self-monitoring that is itself a kind of work. Though at the beginning of the story Charlie still feels nostalgic for the
1920s, while walking through Montmartre he has an epiphany: ―All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word
‗dissipate‘—to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something‖ (635). Insofar as production involves making something, Charlie imagines his years of living off his investments as a form of nihilistic anti-production, an ―utterly childish‖ unmaking. Taking this lesson to heart, at the end of the story Charlie is able to articulate that the actual tragedy was not the financial crash, but the years leading up to it, and he explains to the barkeep, ―I lost everything I wanted in the boom‖ (647).
―Babylon Revisited‖ is Fitzgerald‘s mea culpa for the twenties. It expresses a return to valuing hard work and family after a decade of self-indulgence that ended spectacularly in an economic collapse that Fitzgerald likened to his own personal crises involving alcoholism and his wife‘s mental breakdown. More specifically, the story is a critique not of wealth in general—
Charlie mentions that he is doing quite well with the salary from his new job in Prague—but of 152
wealth obtained through investment. The key difference that the story explores is the difference between the present day Charlie whose wealth comes from working, and the pre-crash Charlie whose wealth came from investing. In one scene, Lincoln explains to Charlie that one reason
Marion is loathe to part with Honoria stems from an old piece of bitterness: ―I didn‘t touch any of the prosperity,‖ Lincoln tells him, ―because I never got ahead enough to carry anything but my insurance. Marion felt there was some kind of injustice in it—you not even working toward the end, and getting richer and richer‖ (644).
Lincoln‘s comment would likely have rung true to Fitzgerald‘s audience. During the
1920s wealth became both more concentrated in fewer hands and less connected to work and wages. In 1929, wage income made up less than 10% of the total income of the wealthiest .01% of Americans, while capital income (mostly dividends from stock investments) made up over
70% of their combined wealth. Among those between the 90th and 95th percentile the reliance on capital income was lower, but still substantial: about 60% of income from wages and 20% from investments (Picketty and Saez 16–17). As a result, wealth correlated strongly with investments, rather than with work. The richer one was, the less likely one was to derive one‘s income from working. At the same time, pre-Depression America saw a widening of the income gap between the rich and the poor. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the wealthiest tenth of Americans controlled between 40% and 47% of the nation‘s wealth, levels that dropped steeply during the
1940s and that would not be reached again until the 21st century. A substantial portion of this wealth was held by the richest 1% of Americans who, right before the stock market crash, controlled close to 20% of the nation‘s wealth (Picketty and Saez 11–12).
The disconnection between labor and wealth that marked the 1920s posed a problem for justifications of capitalism that relied on linking hard work and success. The booming stock 153
market of the 1920s meant that the people getting the furthest ahead were not only not the ones working the hardest, they were often the ones not working at all. Due to the highly visible role of the stock market crash in bringing about the Great Depression, leftist writers of the 1930s who were interested in economics frequently attacked stock ownership and other forms of capital investment. This chapter will examine John Dos Passos‘s U.S.A. trilogy as one such critique of capital. Although Dos Passos began to write U.S.A. during the 1920s, it did not come together as a trilogy until the 1930s, and in The Big Money in particular Dos Passos, like Fitzgerald, reflects on the previous decade from the vantage point of the Great Depression.
Dos Passos‘s critique centers on the ways that capital unbalances production and consumption in the lives of certain individuals. The people who work hardest in Dos Passos‘s trilogy often have little or nothing to show for it. Their labor goes not to enrich themselves but to create profit. And those who have the most often work too little, instead living off the profit generated by others. At the time Dos Passos was finishing the trilogy he was also breaking with the far left. The first section of this chapter explores his efforts to find common ground with the moderate liberalism of the New Deal at a time when some New Dealers were mounting their own critiques of capital and business profits. The second and third sections then analyze Dos
Passos‘s portrayal of consumption and production through the characters of Charley Anderson and Mary French, both of whose lives are destroyed by the interference of capital. The interrelated critiques of capital embedded in their stories suggest that capital is a problem in part because it throws production and consumption out of balance in the lives of individuals. Those who work the hardest may gain little, their labor siphoned off into profit, while those who consume the most may work little, instead living off of the labor of others.
154
Dos Passos’s Liberalism and the Problem of Capital
When Dos Passos began to rework The 42nd Parallel into the first third of a trilogy, rather than a standalone novel, he added a prologue that bore the same title as the trilogy—―U.S.A.‖
This prologue provides a glimpse of a solitary man who moves through a crowd, navigating the space between the individual and the community:
The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into the night
streets; feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy for warm curve of faces,
answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a shoulder, the way hands
spread and clench. . . . The young man walks by himself searching through the
crowd with greedy eyes, greedy ears taut to hear, by himself, alone. (42P xiii)1
The greed of the nameless young man, a greed for human contact and social connection, contrasts sharply with the economic greed that Dos Passos portrays so vividly in The Big Money, which he was writing at the same time as he wrote the prologue. The description seems to be of a working class man, whose tired feet and loneliness imply a vagrant lifestyle like that of the characters Fenian McCreary (whose story Dos Passos tells in the ―Mac‖ section of The 42nd
Parallel) and Joe Williams. His loneliness in the middle of a crowd suggests one of the novels central concerns: the relationship between the individual and the community. As the prologue continues, Dos Passos suggests that stories can mediate this tension:
It was not in the long walks through jostling crowds at night that he was less
alone, or in the training camp at Allentown, or in the day on the docks at Seattle,
or in the empty reek of Washington City hot boyhood summer nights, or in the
meal on Market Street. . . . 155
but in his mother‘s words telling about longago, in his father‘s telling about
when I was a boy, in the kidding stories of uncles, in the lies the kids told at
school, the hired man‘s yarns, the tall tales the doughboy told after taps;
it was speech that clung to the ears, the link that tingled in the blood; U.S.A.
U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies,
some aggregations of trading unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network,
a chain of moving picture theatres. . . . But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the
people. (42P xiv)
The final sentence of the prologue suggests both that the United States is constructed through speech, and that Dos Passos‘s U.S.A. serves as a repository for that speech. The trilogy creates community out of language, binding people together through acts of shared storytelling.
While the prologue suggests a hopeful joining of individual voices into a wider community, Dos Passos‘s actual relationship to communal politics was complex, and the trilogy as a whole explores the problem of preserving individualism in the midst of the necessity for communal action. Malcolm Cowley seems to recognize this central tension in a pair of reviews of U.S.A he wrote for The New Republic shortly after the 1936 publication of The Big Money. In the first article, titled ―The End of a Trilogy,‖ Cowley calls The Big Money a ―collective novel
(defined simply as a novel without an individual hero, a novel of which the real protagonist is a social group)‖ (23). He elaborates, ―In Dos Passos‘ case, the leading idea is the one implicit in his choice of subject and form: it is the idea that life is collective, that individuals are neither heroes nor villains, that their destiny is controlled by the drift of society as a whole‖ (23). In
―Afterthoughts on Dos Passos,‖ the second article, Cowley returns to this comment, drawing a distinction between ―art novels‖ and ―collective novels.‖ An art novel, he explains, is ―one that 156
deal[s] with the opposition between a creatively gifted individual and the community surrounding him—in brief, between the Poet and the World.‖ He goes on to note that he had previously believed Dos Passos‘s novels to be collective novels in which the ―real hero was
American society at large‖ (134). When he first came up with the distinction, Cowley writes, he believed that art novels were necessarily bad, and collective novels necessarily good, and he had criticized Dos Passos for taking an element of the art novel—specifically, the Camera‘s Eye sections—and inserting it into his collective novels. Cowley goes on to retract his earlier judgment, though: ―I no longer believe that the art novel is a ‗bad‘ type of fiction (though the philosophy behind it is a bad philosophy for our times), nor do I believe that the collective novel is necessarily a ‗good‘ type (though it has advantages for those trying to present our period of crisis)‖ (134). Cowley suggests that Dos Passos is creating a hybrid of the art and collective novel, one that borrows thematic and formal elements from both of them. In other words,
Cowley recognizes that the tension between the need for communal action and the desire for individualism is central to the trilogy.
Studies of the origins of the novel have frequently concentrated on what Cowley calls the
―art novel,‖ arguing that the novel as a genre arises alongside liberalism—and particularly alongside liberal individualism—and contains the same set of core values. Ian Watt, for instance, claims that the novel required two conditions before it could arise as a literary form: ―the society must value every individual highly enough to consider him the proper subject of its serious literature; and there must be enough variety of belief and action among ordinary people for a detailed account of them to be of interest to other ordinary people‖ (60). Watt explains that both these factors ―depend on the rise of a society characterised by that vast complex of interdependent factors denoted by the term ‗individualism‘‖ (60). The distinction Cowley draws 157
between the art novel and the collective novel recognizes that, by the modernist era, there existed an alternative kind of novel, one not organized around the individual as its proper subject. Dos
Passos‘s prologue, with its references to the stories told by mothers, fathers, uncles, children, hired men, and doughboys, grounds this type of novel in folk tales.
Cowley‘s preference for collective novels over art novels stemmed from his leftist politics. The relationship between the art novel and the liberal value of individualism conflicted with his communist sympathies. Dos Passos, however, was more ambivalent about the relative value of individual liberty and communal good. Townsend Ludington notes that although Dos
Passos visited Soviet Russia while writing The 42nd Parallel and left feeling cautiously optimistic about communism‘s potential, he still refused to make a firm commitment to any political party or ideology (John Dos Passos 267–81). Ludington writes of Dos Passos that ―his instinct for individual liberties dampened his ardor for Communism‖ (John Dos Passos 268). By the time he was writing The Big Money, Dos Passos‘s disillusionment with the communist party had initiated a political swing to the right. Instead of communism, Dos Passos placed his faith in the ―middle-class liberal,‖ a figure he defined in terms of its independence from the front lines of class warfare.2 In a 1930 article for The New Republic, Dos Passos criticized the Fish committee—a precursor to McCarthy‘s House Un-American Activities Committee—for its
―efforts to club American working-class dissenters into submission‖ (―Wanted: An Ivy Lee for
Liberals‖ 371). The piece is not a spirited defense of communism so much as it is a call for civility and an end to brutality in class warfare. To this end, Dos Passos suggests that the class which has the least stake in the battle is also the class most likely to exert a civilizing influence on it. He then sets out to identify this class: 158
I think the class that has the least stake in the game and the most stake in
preserving the civilization without which it‘s too disorganized to live at all, is the
section of the business class whose jobs would be necessary under any system of
organization of industrial society. Engineers, scientists, independent manual
craftsmen, artists, actors, writers, experts of one kind or another occupy very
much the same position in Russia today under vigorous state socialism as they do
in the United States under capitalism. (―Wanted: An Ivy lee for Liberals‖ 372)
Dos Passos continues, ―If the liberal middle classes could be made to feel their power as neutrals
. . . they could do a great deal to mitigate the bitterness of the class struggle in this country‖
(―Wanted: An Ivy lee for Liberals‖ 372). Their supposed independence from larger economic structures attracts Dos Passos to the middle-class liberals. The middle-class liberal owes nothing to trade unions or other cooperative labor movements, and similarly owes nothing to corporations or other large aggregations of capital. This independence means they have a stake, or so Dos Passos claims, only in the continual smooth functioning of civilization itself, not in any particular economic system. Though likely not an accurate picture of middle-class interests, Dos
Passos‘s claim reveals his interest in mediating between the two poles of class warfare— uncontrolled monopoly capitalism and state communism. It also reveals the value he placed on independence.
In spite of his sympathies with communism, then, Dos Passos remained strongly attracted to individualism and individual liberty. Like others in the early twentieth century, however, Dos
Passos did not see the ideals of communal good as conflicting with individual liberty.3 The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw the rise of corporate interests and businesses controlled not by individuals who knew their employees personally, but 159
by increasingly distant corporate boards answerable to even more distant investors. As a result, a substantial portion of the population was subject to what, for Dos Passos and many other left- leaning intellectuals, appeared to be economic slavery. Throughout U.S.A, Dos Passos consistently portrays characters as trapped by their economic circumstances. Mac, the Irish, socialist laborer of The 42nd Parallel has to abandon his work for the International Workers of the World in order to earn money to care for his family. In 1919, the sailor Joe Williams is forced by poverty to return repeatedly to the sea, in spite of his desire to settle down on land.
Margo Dowling, in The Big Money, attempts to escape her sexually abusive stepfather by marrying a Cuban named Tony, since she lacks the funds to escape from home in any other way.
In Cuba, however, she finds that poverty leaves her just as trapped in a different, but equally abusive, home. The characters in the trilogy thus repeatedly play out motifs of entrapment in which poverty forces characters into a series of undesirable actions with even less desirable results.
While U.S.A offers a forceful demonstration of how poverty traps members of the working class, Dos Passos was hardly the first liberal to realize how tricky it is to be liberated in a modern industrial economy. Woodrow Wilson made this topic a major theme of his book, The
New Freedom:
In most parts of our country men work, not for themselves, not as partners in the
old way in which they used to work, but generally as employees,—in a higher or
lower grade,—of great corporations. There was a time when corporations played a
very minor part in our business affairs, but now they play the chief part, and most
men are the servants of corporations. (5) 160
Wilson recognized that Jeffersonian agrarianism no longer adequately described American life.
The lone farmer, working his own land and responsible for his own livelihood, had been replaced by the employee, servant of a corporation. Wilson continues,
Yesterday, and ever since history began, men were related to one another as
individuals. To be sure there were the family, the Church, and the State,
institutions which associated men in certain wide circles of relationship. But in
the ordinary concerns of life, in the ordinary work, in the daily round, men dealt
freely and directly with one another. To-day, the everyday relationships of men
are largely with great impersonal concerns, with organizations, not with other
individual men. (6–7)
And shortly afterward he adds, ―American industry is not free, as once it was free; American enterprise is not free‖ (15). Wilson‘s New Freedom proposed a redefinition of liberalism in a post-agrarian American society. Freedom, for Wilson, did not only mean freedom from government tyranny, it meant freedom from corporate tyranny as well. While classical liberalism upheld the free market, Wilson‘s brand of liberalism had to contend with the fact that government policy informed solely by laissez-faire principles could not protect the individual from corporate servitude. The result was a complex balancing act in which individualism could only be preserved through a political agenda that had some communal elements.
Returning to the prologue, the tension that Dos Passos creates between the young man alone in the crowd and the wider community through which he travels constitutes his attempt to grapple with the fate of the individual in a system of laissez-faire capitalism that left the working class indentured to impersonal corporate interests. Sartre wrote that 1919 illustrated how, ―In capitalist society, men do not have lives, they have only destinies‖ (65). This is an apt statement 161
of the trilogy‘s central dilemma. The characters long for self-determination, but instead they find themselves trapped in a prison forged by powerful economic realities.4 However, the way to escape from a capitalist destiny is not, for Dos Passos, to embrace communism. Instead, as the rest of this chapter argues, U.S.A. attempts to reinvent liberalism by returning to valuing productive work, followed by consumption. Dos Passos criticizes both production and consumption when they become excessive, a situation that arises when the disrupting influence of capital itself—the ―big money‖ after which Dos Passos names the trilogy‘s final novel— interferes with business relationships. The same corporate enterprises that Wilson criticized for ending the era of relationships between individuals, U.S.A. criticizes for eroding the connection between production and consumption that allows individuals to profit from their hard work.
Laborers work too hard for too little, and those who make their money from capital work too little and consume too much. By placing Dos Passos‘s work into the context of the New Deal and the growing interest in Keynesian economics that swept the nation during the Great Depression, this chapter demonstrates U.S.A.‘s engagement with a wider project of reinventing liberalism.
Although Dos Passos‘s own political and economic beliefs were slowly aligning with new forms of liberal thought apparent in the New Freedom and the New Deal, Dos Passos remained skeptical of both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first mention of the New Freedom comes in The 42nd Parallel, when the leftist intellectual Jerry Burnham tells
Janey Williams, ―I‘m for it [the New Freedom], frankly. I think Wilson‘s a big man. . . . Maybe there won‘t have to be a revolution‖ (42P 123). But Burnham‘s cautious optimism sets up what
1919 portrays as Wilson‘s betrayal of his ideals. Dos Passos was angered by Wilson‘s decision to enter World War I after campaigning on the promise to stay out of the war. He saw the decision as a capitulation to corporate groups that had interests overseas, particularly J. P. Morgan. 162
Morgan loaned money to the allied forces, especially France and Russia. Throughout 1919, Dos
Passos also derides Wilson‘s crackdown on pro-labor groups—including communists and labor unions—during the war. Dos Passos critiques Wilson‘s insistence that these groups are un-
American and un-patriotic, and reveals Wilson‘s identification of ―America‖ not with the workers, but with the business-owning class.
While Dos Passos does not portray Wilson in a flattering light, his disagreements with
Wilson are not, at their heart, disagreements with the ideals of the New Freedom. Rather, Dos
Passos condemns Wilson because of the disconnect between rhetoric and reality that mars his tenure as president. In his biography of Wilson, ―Meester Veelson,‖ Dos Passos portrays Wilson not as an evil mastermind, but as a failed idealist whose naïve faith in language presages his fall.
Describing Wilson‘s upbringing, Dos Passos writes, ―the Wilsons lived in a universe of words linked into an incontrovertible firmament by two centuries of Calvinist divines, / God was the
Word / and the Word was God‖ (NN 191). Dos Passos then goes on to trace out the growing gap between Wilson‘s words and his actions that occurs after his election to the presidency, citing in one passage Wilson‘s handling of the Tampico Incident: ―I wish to take this occasion to say that the United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest; / and he landed the marines at Vera Cruz‖ (NN 194). The juxtaposition between Wilson‘s words and his deeds serves as a warning that the connection between ―God‖ and ―the Word‖ has begun to disintegrate. Dos Passos next describes how Wilson finally embroils the United States in World
War I: ―First it was neutrality in thought and deed, then too proud to fight when the Lusitania sinking and the danger to the Morgan loans and the stories of the British and French propagandists set all the financial centers in the East bawling for war, but the suction of the drumbeat and the guns was too strong‖ (NN 194). Later, during the negotiations that end in the 163
Treaty of Versailles, Clemenceau and Lloyd George dismantle Wilson‘s Fourteen Points, so that when he returns to the United States he must ―explain to the politicians who‘d been ganging up on him meanwhile in the Senate and House and to sober public opinion and to his father‘s God how he‘d let himself be trimmed and how far he‘d made the world safe / for democracy and the
New Freedom‖ (NN 197). After failing to convince congress to ratify the Treaty of Versailles,
Wilson has a stroke that leaves him ―a ruined paralysed man barely able to speak,‖ whose final words, ironically, are ―I have no further communication to make‖ (NN 198).5
The failure of language that Dos Passos traces in the Wilson biography contrasts with the utopian potential of language to unite people explored in the prologue to The 42nd Parallel. This contrast is typical of the trilogy, which moves between criticisms of the misuse or failure of language, and recognition of the importance of language to a revolutionary cause. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final Camera‘s Eye section of The Big Money (and thus of the trilogy), in which Dos Passos describes the frantic effort of Sacco and Vanzetti‘s supporters to prevent the anarchists‘ execution. The section ends by describing the power of the state—which is backed up by ―submachineguns sawedoffshotguns teargas and vomitinggas,‖ and which has
―the power that can feed you or leave you to starve‖—and the relative impotence of the revolutionary forces, whose reliance on language the passage dramatizes with its final abortive sentence fragment, ―we have only words against‖ (BM 420). The novel then moves immediately into the biography of Samuel Insull, ―Power Superpower,‖ that completes the sentence fragment that finishes the Camera‘s Eye section. Typical of the trilogy, the passage both points out how paltry words are against a force that can wield violence and money, and highlights the power and importance of language in fomenting revolution. 164
While Dos Passos critiques Wilson as a failed idealist whose words are not able to prevent the tyranny of ―Power Superpower,‖ he finds in Franklin Delano Roosevelt a liberal who he believes can match deed to action. After Roosevelt‘s 1932 election, Dos Passos—who had voted for the communist party candidates William Z. Foster and James W. Ford—was initially skeptical. However, by March 1933 he had begun to warm up to Roosevelt, and he published a more or less complimentary piece concerning the fireside chats in Common Sense, though he ended the piece by wondering whether or not any good would come of Roosevelt‘s promises.
Dos Passos reprinted the piece a few months later without the skeptical ending (Ludington, John
Dos Passos 309–10). In contrast to Wilson, Roosevelt uses words well. In the fireside chats
Roosevelt soothes his public and explains the actions being taken in order to fix the economy.
Dos Passos describes Roosevelt ―telling in carefully chosen words how the machinations of chisellers are to be foiled for youandme, and how the many cylindered motor of recovery is being primed with billions for youandme, and youandme understand, we belong to billions, billions belong to us, we are going to have good jobs, good pay, protected bank deposits‖ (qtd. in
Ludington, John Dos Passos 310). The key words for Dos Passos may have been ―good jobs‖ and ―good pay,‖ two things that Dos Passos, like Fitzgerald, believed had grown too distant from one another during the 1920s. Roosevelt‘s New Deal appealed to Dos Passos because it gave workers the opportunity to pursue good jobs with good pay while severely curtailing the corporate and investor profits that had previously prevented workers from getting paid the value of their work. In short, Dos Passos‘s support of Roosevelt accorded with his sympathy for the pro–working class policies of the New Deal, and was inspired by his sense that Roosevelt‘s fireside chats were giving voice to a form of liberalism that matched its rhetoric with actions. 165
New Deal support for the working class manifested in two distinct, and at times even contradictory, directions. Roosevelt sought to hold prices steady and prevent inflation at the same time as he attempted to reduce unemployment and increase wages. These two goals, taken together, served as an attempt to increase the purchasing power of American workers. Decreased demand, went the argument, had resulted in businesses needing to hire fewer workers, thus increasing unemployment. As unemployment went up, consumer purchasing power went down further. Layoffs decreased demand and decreased demand resulted in more layoffs. To counter this trend, Roosevelt surmised, prices needed to go down while wages and employment needed to go up. In 1933, Hugh Johnson, head of the National Recovery Administration, wrote,
Never for one moment forget that 80 per cent of the buying in this country is done
by people who earn less than $1,800 a year, and that is the overwhelming majority
of the population. Whether we come out of this depression depends on whether
we can put this great army of buyers back to work and to buying, by giving them
wages high enough to permit them to buy and start business going. (qtd. in Jacobs
111)
Johnson‘s words highlight the growing recognition of the importance of purchasing power, and he expresses one of the central tenets of the New Deal—that we can beat economic downturn only by buying our way out of it. The demand for high wages, however, was in conflict with the demand for low prices since higher wages resulted in higher costs for businesses, which in turn translated into higher prices. Nevertheless, Roosevelt attempted to forge a coalition between consumers and laborers—since, after all, consumers were also laborers and vice versa—in the hopes that stimulating purchasing power would reverse the downward trend of the economy
(Jacobs 104–22). 166
So, while early views of consumption contrasted it to production, during the New Deal the two became indissolubly linked. The consumer created the demand that gave the laborer a job, and the laborer in return became a consumer. Lizabeth Cohen, in A Consumer’s Republic, argues that one of the goals of the New Deal was ―Making ‗consumers‘ a residual category and empowering them to speak for the public‖ (24). By appealing to people as consumers, Cohen continues, New Dealers hoped ―to resuscitate a severely damaged economy without jettisoning the basic tenets of capitalism. Empowering the consumer seemed to many New Dealers a way of enhancing the public‘s stake in society and the economy while still preserving the free enterprise system‖ (24). With the looming threat of a popular uprising followed by a totalitarian takeover— a very immediate concern, given the success of fascism in Europe and communism in Russia— convincing Americans to think of themselves as consumers provided the government with a way to defuse revolutionary fervor by drawing people‘s attention to the ways in which they were benefiting from increased industrial efficiency.
Keynesian economics provided another pressing reason to convince people to view themselves as consumers. Although John Maynard Keynes did not become central to the New
Deal until its later stages—Keynes‘s General Theory was not even published until 1936—the early years of the New Deal did have a Keynesian bent (Brinkley 7). Fear of underconsumption replaced the old nineteenth-century fear of overproduction, and the government became increasingly concerned about the buying power of the American consumer (Jacobs 95–135). In
The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money, Keynes explicitly argued that a lack of consumption could increase unemployment:
An act of individual savings means—so to speak—a decision not to have dinner
to-day. But it does not necessitate a decision to have dinner or buy a pair of boots 167
a week hence or a year hence or to consume any specified thing at any specified
date. Thus it depresses the business of preparing to-day‘s dinner without
stimulating the business of making ready for some future act of consumption. It is
not a substitution of future consumption-demand for present consumption-
demand,—it is a net diminution of such demand. (210)
Keynes continues by explaining what the effect of diminished demand is on employment: ―since the expectation of consumption is the only raison d’être of employment, there should be nothing paradoxical in the conclusion that a diminished propensity to consume has cet. par. a depressing effect on employment‖ (211). Keynes‘s primary contribution to discussions of consumption, then, was to link consumption directly to production. Every object one person bought was an object someone else had to craft. While previous economists had believed in Say‘s Law, which
Keynes summarizes as ―supply creates its own demand‖ (18), Keynes reverses the terms of the statement and claims that demand drives the economy, creating its own supply along with the employment needed to produce that supply.
While the New Deal thus sought to convince people to think of the interconnectedness of consumption and production, most of the early New Deal programs actually did more to empower farmers and labor unions than they did to keep prices low. Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York sponsored the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which passed in 1935 on the heels of a series of successful strikes in the spring of 1934 that energized labor leaders and swelled the ranks of unionized workers (Jacobs 138–39). The NLRA gave unprecedented power to unions to organize and bargain collectively. Wagner‘s aid, Leon Keyserling, wrote in a draft of the act‘s preamble, 168
The tendency of modern industry toward integration and centralized control has
long since overturned the balance of bargaining power between the individual
employer and the individual employee, and generally has rendered the individual,
unorganized worker helpless to exercise actual liberty of contract, to secure a just
reward for his services, and to preserve his standards of living. (qtd. in Jacobs
146)
Keyserling‘s language here closely resembles Wilson‘s. Keyserling notes that changes to industry have disempowered the individual worker. Power can only be restored if workers are allowed to organize in the same manner that corporations have organized, thus leveling the playing field for all. Keyserling‘s concern is couched in terms that make clear the extent to which collective action is necessary in order to guarantee individual freedom.
While the NLRA helped workers get better wages, it left the problem of price inflation largely unresolved. In a report that followed closely on the heels of the 1934 strikes, Leon
Henderson—who was with the National Recovery Administration—suggested a solution to this dilemma by claiming that business profits rose more rapidly than labor wages during the 1920s and sank more slowly during the 1930s (Jacobs 139). The way to fight price inflation without rolling back labor gains, then, was to force corporations to bear their share of the burden of the depression via reduced profits. Henderson‘s controversial solution was not without its own problems. As profits sank, investors began to hold onto their capital instead of investing it, and some critics of the New Deal blamed the Roosevelt Recession of 1937 on reduced capital flow
(Jacobs 164). However, as an ideological stance, the belief that the economy could be fixed by reducing business and investment profits and returning those profits to the hands of laborers had considerable appeal among liberals. It also had considerable appeal for Dos Passos. 169
Early in The Big Money, Dos Passos criticizes the unfair accumulation of profits at the expense of workers. In his biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor, ―The American Plan,‖ Dos
Passos paints Taylor as an iconoclastic engineer whose obsession with ―the rules of conduct: / selfrespect, selfreliance, selfcontrol / and a cold long head for figures‖ leads him to develop a managerial style that substantially increases productivity (BM 15). In Taylor‘s 1911 book, The
Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor defines scientific management, and explains how it can improve the lot of both workers and bosses:
It would seem to be so self-evident that maximum prosperity for the
employer, coupled with maximum prosperity for the employé, ought to be the two
leading objects of management, that even to state this fact should be unnecessary.
And yet there is no question that, throughout the industrial world, a large part of
the organization of employers, as well as employés, is for war rather than for
peace. . . .
The majority of these men believe that the fundamental interests of employés
and employers are necessarily antagonistic. Scientific management, on the
contrary, has for its very foundation the firm conviction that the true interests of
the two are one and the same; that prosperity for the employer cannot exist
through a long term of years unless it is accompanied by prosperity for the
employé, and vice versa; and that it is possible to give the workman what he most
wants—high wages—and the employer what he wants—a low labor cost—for his
manufactures. (9–10)
Taylor criticizes both employers and workers for their failure to realize that increased efficiency can be mutually beneficial. Dos Passos, however, uses Taylor‘s life in order to criticize big 170
business for its failure to share the greater profits that came with the Taylor system: ―If he was a firstclass man and did firstclass work Taylor was willing to let him have firstclass pay; that‘s where he began to get into trouble with the owners‖ (BM 17).
While Dos Passos is at least partially sympathetic toward Taylor, he is also cognizant of the greater toll that the Taylor method took on workers. He compares Taylor‘s management method to slave driving, claiming that Taylor never questioned the ―dominant Quaker Yankee‖ work ethic of ―the New Bedford skippers [who] were the greatest niggerdrivers on the whaling seas‖ (BM 17). Taylor justifies making the lives of workers tougher by promising them a piece of the American dream: ―production would make every firstclass American rich who was willing to work at piecework and not drink or raise Cain or think or stand mooning at his lathe,‖ but Taylor himself ―never saw the working of the American plan‖ because he dies before any of the profits of industry can trickle down to the workers (BM 19). In place of Taylor‘s utopian dream of greater efficiency leading to greater prosperity for all, then, what America gets from the
―American plan‖ is just the increased exploitation of workers, and a growing gap between the rich and the poor. In the Newsreel section immediately following the Taylor biography, Dos
Passos highlights this point by juxtaposing headlines that display the economic optimism of the
1920s—for instance, ―BANKERS HAIL ERA OF EXPANSION‖ and ―PROSPERITY FOR
ALL SEEN ASSURED‖—with a headline more likely to have appeared during the Great
Depression: ―JOBLESS RIOT AT AGENCY‖ (BM 20). Dos Passos shows the promise of widespread prosperity as the prelude to economic collapse.
But for Dos Passos, capital is not just—or even primarily—an economic problem, it is a human problem. At one point in The Big Money the mechanic Bill Cermak complains to his newly rich boss, Charley Anderson, about the ―damned efficiency expert,‖ clearly a devotee of 171
the Taylor method, who their company has hired. When Charley responds that the efficiency expert is ―a genius at production,‖ Bill quips, ―Maybe, but he don‘t give the boys any chance for reproduction‖ (BM 246). Later, Bill repeats to Charley that the workers are unhappy, and
Charley responds with a litany of excuses and explanations:
But damn it, Bill, why can‘t you tell those guys to have a little patience . . . we‘re
workin‘ out a profitsharin‘ scheme. I‘ve worked on a lathe myself. . . . I‘ve
worked as a mechanic all over this goddamn country. . . . I know what the boys
are up against, but I know what the management‘s up against too. . . . Gosh, this
thing‘s in its infancy, we‘re pouring more capital into the business all the time.
. . . We‘ve got a responsibility towards our investors. Where do you think that
jack I made yesterday‘s goin‘ but the business of course. The oldtime shop was a
great thing, everybody kidded and smoked and told smutty stories, but the
pressure‘s too great now. If every department don‘t click like a machine we‘re
rooked. (BM 249, ellipses in original)
What Charley neglects to mention is that when he and the other managers put money back into the business, they gets stocks out of it, thus further increasing their wealth when the business grows. Additionally, the novel gives no indication that the ―profitsharin‘‖ scheme Charley mentions is real and his apparently flustered response, rendered vague and inarticulate by Dos
Passos‘s use of ellipses, gives little indication that he has seriously considered the effect that the company‘s responsibility to its investors has had on its employees. As Bill has already jokingly pointed out to Charley, the situation that Charley sees as absolutely necessary to attract capital and keep the business growing, is for the employees a deeply personal problem: ―the boys work so hard they can‘t get a hard on when they go to bed, an‘ their wives raise hell with ‘em‖ (BM 172
246). Charley‘s brief moment of nostalgia for the ―oldtime shop‖ only serves to highlight the fact that personal relationships and camaraderie must take second place to the economic imperative of efficient production if they are to continue attracting investors.
Thus Dos Passos reiterates the concern, increasingly prevalent among New Deal liberals, that too great of a concentration on corporate profits is destroying the working class, and he adds to it a concern for the welfare of individuals caught up in a moment of unevenly distributed industrial abundance. In Bill‘s jokes the impotence of non-unionized labor is literalized in the impotence of the overworked men who go home to wives they cannot satisfy sexually. The novel conflates economic problems—how to manage laborers and how to distribute wealth—with the deeply personal issues of sex and marriage. Dos Passos, however, does not reserve his concern for the working class alone. Rather, The Big Money shows capital interfering in and destroying the lives of many different classes of people caught up in the big money of the stock market, land speculation, and Hollywood. Capital disconnects work from wealth. The poor have to work harder so that investors can get their due, and the rich in some cases can forego work altogether, living off the labor of others as they sink into drunkenness and dissipation—just as Charlie
Wales does in ―Babylon Revisited.‖
The two following sections analyze how the characters Dos Passos creates serve as case studies in the failure to integrate production with consumption. The first follows his portrayal of the engineer turned investor Charley Anderson, whose life veers too far towards consumption when he gives up his wrench for a stock portfolio. The second examines his portrayal of the sympathetic but self-destructive labor activist Mary French, whose life slowly comes apart as a result of her rejection of all forms of consumption in pursuit of social justice.
173
The Engineer Becomes the Investor
In The Big Money, Dos Passos‘s biography of Thorstein Veblen, titled ―The Bitter
Drink,‖ is unequivocally complimentary of its subject. Dos Passos writes of Veblen that
he established a new diagram of a society dominated by monopoly capital,
etched in irony
the sabotage of production by business,
the sabotage of life by blind need for money profits. (BM 81)
One of the texts Dos Passos may have been thinking about when he wrote those lines is Veblen‘s
The Engineers and the Price System. In fact, when Dos Passos claimed that engineers belonged to the liberal middle-class that could save America, he was repeating a suggestion that Veblen had made a decade earlier. Veblen contrasts the goals of engineers with the goals of ―Vested
Interests‖—stock owners and business owners. The vested interests want to make a business as profitable as possible, he argues, while engineers wish to make production as efficient as possible. Veblen suggests a number of scenarios in which these two goals conflict, including when businesses spend money and labor on advertising, purposefully produce shoddy goods, or allow factories to lie idle in order to decrease supply and drive up prices. Veblen aligns all of those who are not part of the vested interests with the engineers: ―The underlying population is dependent on the working of this industrial system for its livelihood; and their material interest therefore centers in the output and distribution of consumable goods, not in an increasing volume of earnings for the absentee owners‖ (106). When discussing the role of engineers in America‘s economic future, Veblen wrote, ―The chances of anything like a Soviet in America . . . are the chances of a Soviet of technicians,‖ though he went on to note, ―anything like a Soviet of
Technicians is at the most a remote contingency in America‖ (134).6 While The Big Money does 174
not advocate for a Soviet in America, the novel still shares considerable common ground with
Veblen‘s view of capital as a potentially disastrous interference with production.
In addition to his general sympathy for Veblen‘s distrust of capital, Dos Passos followed
Veblen in valorizing the engineer. No one in The Big Money better represents Dos Passos‘s version of the ideal engineers than the Wright Brothers, whom Dos Passos portrays in ―The
Campers at Kitty Hawk.‖ His biography of the brothers begins by describing the telegram sent by the Orville and Wilbur to their father after their first successful flight. The message captures the spirit of euphoria that Dos Passos imagines having energized them. Dos Passos goes on to write approvingly of the brothers, ―they were practical mechanics; when they needed anything they built it themselves‖ (BM 223). At Kitty Hawk they are able to live in seclusion from the naysayers who think flight is impossible, and they spend their days in an Edenic paradise of work, with nothing to worry about save the mosquitoes. After their first successful flight, however, the early spirit of play and camaraderie is quickly supplanted by economic haggling:
after that Christmas of nineteen three the Wright brothers weren‘t doing it for fun
any more; they gave up their bicycle business, got the use of a big old cowpasture
belonging to the local banker for practice flights, spent all the time when they
weren‘t working on their machine in promotion, worrying about patents,
infringements, spies, trying to interest government officials, to make sense of the
smooth involved heartbreaking remarks of lawyers. (BM 224)
As a result, the Wright brothers now lie ―in their beds at night sleepless with the whine of phantom millions, worse than the mosquitoes at Kitty Hawk‖ (BM 225). While the Wright brothers quickly became famous, Dos Passos reports, ―they remained practical mechanics / and insisted on doing all their own work themselves, / even to filling the gasolinetank‖ (BM 225). 175
Dos Passos likes the Wright brothers because they maintain their work ethos in the face of the temptation of wealth and fame that haunts their nights. Even though the invention of the airplane results, during World War I, ―in the snorting impact of bombs and the whine of and rattle of shrapnel and the sudden stutter of machineguns after the motor‘s been shut off overhead,‖ the
Wright brothers remain admirable to Dos Passos because
not even headlines or the bitter smear of newsprint or the choke of smokescreen
and gas or chatter of brokers on the stockmarket or barking of phantom millions
or oratory of brasshats laying wreaths on new monuments
can blur the memory
of the chilly December day
two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio,
first felt their homemade contraption
whittled out of hickory sticks,
gummed together with Arnstein‘s bicycle cement,
stretched with muslin they‘d sewn on their sister‘s sewingmachine in their
own backyard on Hawthorn Street in Dayton, Ohio,
soar into the air
above the dunes and the wide beach
at Kitty Hawk. (BM 226)
Dos Passos‘s repeated references to the homemade nature of the first plane, highlighted by his use of line breaks to separate each element that went into the plane‘s manufacture, shows his belief in the value of work and independence. The first airplane is made of parts that are
―whittled,‖ not made in a factory, and the only machine used in their manufacture is a humble 176
sewing machine. Dos Passos‘s description of the Wright brothers as ―shivering bicycle mechanics‖ suggests a sort of modesty on the part of Orville and Wilbur. Human ingenuity aided by a few household items, not big business supported by wealthy investors, is what builds one of the most amazing inventions of the twentieth century.
In contrast to the Wright brothers, Dos Passos‘s fictional character Charley Anderson is an engineer who betrays the ideal of hard work in pursuit of easy wealth through investment.
Charley first appears in The 42nd Parallel, as a young mechanic who works on cars in his brother‘s garage. As The Big Money picks up his story again, he is just returning to America from France, now a decorated pilot and war hero thanks to his service in World War I. The war has left Charley without a taste for work, and he expresses his bitterness at the fact that he needs to work as a mechanic in New York to support himself: ―It was too goddamned hellish to have everything close in on him like this after getting his commission and the ambulance service and the Lafayette Escadrille and having a mechanic attend to his plane and do all the dirty work‖
(BM 60). Later, he says, ―I sure would like to get a job where I could keep my hands clean‖ (BM
62). Although no such opportunity presents itself to him initially, Charley does eventually manage to become involved in a trade that does not involve manual labor—gambling on the stock market. While the Wright brothers are uneasy in their relations to capital, preferring engineering to accounting, Charley takes quickly to the stock market. He sees it as his way out of having to do the practical mechanics‘ work that the Wright brothers value.
While Charley‘s involvement in the stock market does allow him to keep his hands clean in the literal sense, it also necessitates that he (figuratively) dirty his hands by betraying his friend and partner, Joe Askew, with whom he starts an airplane business called Askew-Merritt.
Charley gets his first whiff of stocks when he and Joe start looking for a way to finance their 177
venture. Part of their funding comes from Andy Merritt, an investor whose interest in aeronautics is purely financial—as Charley notes, ―He don‘t seem to know a Liberty motor from the hind end of a blimp‖ (BM 70–71). In his initial meeting with Merritt, Charley feels confused by all the accounting talk. Satisfied that the financial aspect of his business will be handled by others,
Charley settles down to do the mechanical and engineering work and to design a new airplane motor that will be the patent which launches their business. It is not until a year later that the financial side of the business really begins to interest Charley. Charley goes to meet an old friend named Nat Benton, who now works as a stock broker. When meeting Benton he quips that it is
―The first time I‘ve had my overalls off in a year‖ (BM 157). Benton convinces Charley to abandon the work and save ethos that he has been following thus far, and to turn all of his money into stocks. When Benton finds that Charley has a couple thousand dollars just sitting in the bank, he asks Charley, ―why not put it to work?‖ (BM 175). Pretty soon, ―Charley had made two killings in Auburn and was buying up all the Askew-Merritt stock he could lay his hands on‖
(BM 175). As his money starts working harder, however, Charley begins working less and the novel soon afterwards notes that Charley ―was fed up out at the plant and he knew Joe thought he was a slacker‖ (BM 177). Charley‘s growing feud with his partner comes to a head when
Charley, depressed over the end of his affair with a wealthy woman who jilts him, goes on a drinking spree. This culminates with him signing his stocks over to a rival company, the Tern
Aviation Company, in return for stocks and a job at their plant in Detroit.
Charley suffers an initial feeling of remorse after he moves to Tern, resulting in nostalgia for his old life as a mechanic. Even before moving to Tern, Charley corrects his friend and employee, Bill Cermak, whenever Bill refers to him as ―boss.‖ When a drunk Charley visits Bill on Christmas, he asks, ―I belong with the mechanics . . . don‘t I, Bill? You and me, Bill, the 178
mechanics against the world‖ (BM 181). Once in Detroit, one of the Tern managers, Cyrus
Bledsoe, questions Charley about his intentions, and Charley replies, ―I‘m a mechanic, that‘s all.
I know that‖ (BM 233). Bledsoe tells him he had better not be just ―a goddamned bondsalesman‖ and suggests that Charley ―go home and get drunk or go wenchin‘ or whatever you do when you‘re worried‖ and start thinking up a new starter for the Tern engine (BM 233). Charley, still remorseful from his binge in New York, replies, ―I‘m through with that stuff . . . I had enough of that in New York‖ (BM 233). Charley‘s efforts to return to the life of a working man ultimately flounder, however. He enters into an expensive and unhappy marriage, and admits to Bill, ―I wish I was still tinkerin‘ with that damn motor and didn‘t have to worry about money all the time‖ (BM 246). An airplane accident—which kills Bill, who by this time is Charley‘s last contact with the labor side of Tern Aviation—and a messy divorce leave Charley short on funds but even more determined to make his fortune in the market. He goes back to drinking and
―wenchin,‘‖ gets tangled in land investments in Florida, goes deep into debt, and finally injures himself in a car crash while driving drunk. The crash leaves Charley with peritonitis, and he dies shortly afterwards.
Charley‘s financial rise from hardworking mechanic to traitorous stock broker serves as one of U.S.A.‘s indictments of capital. Dos Passos‘s Charley Anderson (like Fitzgerald‘s Charlie
Wales) revels in the lifestyle afforded by making money through investment rather than work.
As Charley ceases working he becomes increasingly dissipated, even as he longs to return to the dignity of labor. While Charley is working—as he is when he first starts at Askew-Merritt, and again when he begins at Tern Aviation—he stays out of trouble and keeps sober. The allure of the stock market, however, proves too strong for him in both New York and Detroit, and his attempts to chase the big money of investment result in his alcoholism and ultimately his death. 179
That Charley dies of peritonitis is particularly apt, given Dos Passos‘s message. With his intestine ruptured, Charley‘s body is no longer able to intake food or drink. At the hospital he complains to the nurses about wanting water, but, concerned about the effects of trying to pass liquid through his ruined digestive system, they refuse to let him have any. After a long bout of drinking too much, Charley dies thirsty.
Investing in the Future: Communism and Perpetually Delayed Gratification
Although Dos Passos‘s critique of investment in The Big Money centers primarily on capitalism, in The 42nd Parallel the Irish laborer Fenian McCreary (or just Mac, as the section titles refer to him) has his own encounter with an economic ideology that asks him to invest in his future—communism. Though Dos Passos still felt generally optimistic about the Soviet experiment when he was writing the first novel of the trilogy, his portrayal of Mac‘s experience with the communist party suggests that he already had doubts about some of the party‘s principles and practices. When Mac first joins an International Workers of the World (IWW) group in Goldfield, Nebraska, he enjoys both the printing work and being useful to the IWW.
When the labor leader Bill Hayward gives a speech, however, the narrative highlights what will become one of the recurring decisions in Mac‘s life—he is forced to choose between a woman and communism. Mac‘s girlfriend Maisie, whom he has promised to marry, writes him that she is pregnant and that she needs him to return to her immediately. As he listens to Bill Hayward speak about ―solidarity and sticking together in the face of the masterclass‖ he wonders ―what
Big Bill would do if he‘d got a girl in trouble like that‖ (42P 80). The juxtaposition of the communist speech with Mac‘s dilemma dramatizes the conflict between political ideals and personal responsibility that will occur repeatedly in Mac‘s story, as he is torn between his desire 180
to aid the revolution and a series of personal ties that prevent him from being able to fully commit to the IWW, the communist party, or any other pro-labor cause. Once Mac decides to return to Maisie he tells Fred Hoff, the local IWW leader, that he has to quit. Fred chastises him for having gotten his girl pregnant, and Mac replies, ―hell, Fred, I‘m made of flesh and blood like everybody else. For crissake, what do you want us to be, tin saints?‖ Fred is characterized primarily by his abstention—he has just disapprovingly refused to join in the drinking following
Bill‘s speech, when Mac goes to speak with him—and his response is typical of his attitude: ―A wobbly oughtn‘t to have any wife or children, not till after the revolution‖ (42P 82). Fred‘s response suggests that communism demands an investment that, like all investments, pays off tomorrow at the cost of delayed gratification today. When Mac asks if Fred wants the workers to be ―tin saints,‖ he implies that the abstention Fred demands conflicts with human nature. U.S.A. largely bears out Mac‘s claim—Dos Passos‘s characters are rarely able to resist their desires in a manner that matches Fred‘s standards. The sort of investment that Fred asks for does, indeed, appear to be impossible for them.
Numerous critics have noted that Dos Passos‘s characters appear unable to control their impulses. Whereas Sartre saw this as an example of capitalism robbing people of their lives,
E. L. Doctorow reports that some critics of Dos Passos ―objected to the characters‘ lack of ideas,
Dos Passos‘s refusal to give them any consequential thought or reflection not connected with their appetites‖ (xi). Doctorow‘s own impression of the novel, though less critical, is not far from that mark. He writes that the characters in U.S.A. ―are beings occupied almost entirely with their sensations and plagued by their longings, given mightily to drinking and fornication while their flimsy thought provides no anchor against the drift of their lives‖ (xi). Charley fits this description well, and though he has moments when he successfully controls his drinking and 181
excess—moments that coincide with him working—he ultimately falls victim to his appetite.
Mac, however, does not exhibit the same lack of self-control that characterizes Charley. Though
Mac does occasionally go out drinking, his real problem is not dissipation, but a conflict between his socialist ideals and his desire for a normative family life. When his promise to take Maisie out for a night on the town interferes with his desire to help the IWW during a free speech rally,
Mac goes out drinking to escape from his dilemma. At the beginning of the drinking bout Mac explains to another patron of the bar, ―I‘ve got swell kids,‖ and ―Maisie‘s a fine girl, too, and I like her better all the time‖ (42P 92). Shortly afterward, however, he admits, ―A man‘s got to work for more than himself and his kids to feel right‖ (42P 93). The narrative never gives Mac a chance to have it both ways, however. He has to either work for his family or work for something more. When Maisie gets pregnant, he has to choose between her and his IWW work.
When he wants to help out the IWW with their free speech protest in San Diego, he again has to choose between them and Maisie. When he wants to help with the revolution in Mexico he again has to make a choice—and this time he chooses to go to Mexico, abandoning his wife and children. In Mexico, however, he ends up dropping out of the revolution yet again in order to settle down with a new woman and a small business.
While Mac often fails to live up to the ideals of working class solidarity that motivate
Fred Hoff, the problem is as much with the ideals as with Mac. Caught on the front lines of class warfare, Mac is placed in an impossible situation. He must either invest himself completely in a future that he may never live to see—that, in fact, may never come—or he must give up his revolutionary hopes entirely. Given Dos Passos‘s developing interest in the middle-class liberal as a figure whose primary appeal is that they are not caught up in class warfare, it comes as little surprise that The 42nd Parallel portrays Mac‘s situation as untenable. 182
While the 42nd Parallel thus contains a critique of the IWW and of the socialist labor movement, it is in the Mary French section of The Big Money that Dos Passos presents his most forceful attack on communism. Mary presents a foil to Charley, whose story portrays the danger of a life given over to consumption. Like Charley, Mary‘s life is plagued by capital, but rather than seek out the big money Mary compensates by developing an obsession with work. Although at first glance the opposite of Charley‘s uncontrollable desire to consume, Mary‘s desire to work is equally self-destructive. Unlike Mac, who remains torn between his desire to help the revolution and his desire to have a family, Mary gives herself entirely to the class struggle, becoming the tin saint that Hoff valorizes as the ideal worker.
Mary has her first encounter with capital early in her life. Growing up in an unhappy family, the daughter of a poor doctor who treats patients that are frequently unable to pay, she
―barely remembered a time when she was very very small when it had been different and they‘d lived in Denver in a sunny house with flowering bushes in the yard. That was before Brother was taken and Daddy lost that money in investment‖ (BM 85). After her brother‘s death, Mary‘s mother gets ill and the combination of expenses from her mother‘s illness, her brother‘s funeral, and the money her father lost in an unspecified investment result in the family having to move to a small mining town named Trinidad. Dos Passos‘s use of free indirect discourse renders the precise reasons for the move unclear—through the eyes of the child Mary the losing investments become wrapped up in her brother‘s death and her mother‘s illness as part of what caused her life to become unhappy, even as the circumstances surrounding the investments and their actual impact on the family‘s wealth and her parents‘ marriage remain unclear.
The association between death and investments continues when Mary‘s grandfather dies, leaving them enough life insurance money to move to a nicer town, Colorado Springs. While 183
Mary‘s mother is happy about the move, her father objects to it since he wants to continue treating the poor miners, who he believes need his help. Mary‘s primary memory of the move is hiding in her room while her parents fight. The change of scenery does not improve her parents‘ marriage, and when Mary‘s mother inherits enough stock from her brother to have a comfortable independent income, she gets a divorce. Throughout Mary‘s childhood, then, she repeatedly associates capital with loss and strife: first, the death of her brother and the disintegration of her parents‘ marriage, then the move to Colorado Springs and further marital problems, and finally her parents‘ divorce.
The narrative thus sets up Mary as a character who will be troubled by capital throughout her life, though she is not able to vocalize a specific critique of it until her mother offers her money to help support her while she goes to school at Vassar. Mary refuses the money because
―she said nobody had a right to money they hadn‘t earned‖ (BM 91). Later, when a Spanish influenza outbreak sends Mary hurrying back home to make sure her parents are okay, Mary decides to help her father with his practice rather than return immediately to college. As the influenza epidemic worsens, Mary watches her father grow progressively more exhausted even as he refuses to turn down patients. Her father‘s condition continues to worsen, perhaps as a result of having contracted the flu himself from one of his patients, but he continues to work on in spite of his growing weakness. One day, Mary walks in on her father to find that he has died.
Her father, whose heart we have already learned is weak, has literally worked himself to death.
Upset by her father‘s death, and determined to do something with her life besides just live off her mother‘s income, Mary drops out of college and gets a series of jobs, first as a social worker, then as a countergirl at a cafeteria, and finally as a newspaper reporter—a job she loses when she writes an article insufficiently critical of communism. 184
This portion of Mary‘s story thus sets up a dichotomy between the mother, whose sole concern is with consumption, and her father, whose sole concern is with work. The narrative‘s criticism of the mother is straightforward—she is uninterested in helping others and overly concerned for her public image. She cares more about joining country clubs than she does about her family, and she displays overt anti-Semitism by criticizing her daughter‘s friendship with
Ada Cohn, daughter of a wealthy Jewish family that has helped Mary‘s father set up a medical practice in Colorado Springs. Where the mother is shallow and materialistic, the father appears generally selfless and hardworking, and is certainly the parent Mary favors. While he clearly cares about his work and his patients, however, his selflessness does not extend to the same degree to his family. Though he loves Mary, he remains unconvinced by her mother‘s argument that moving to Colorado Springs will furnish Mary with a better education. Whereas her mother is parasitic, Mary‘s father is self-destructive. Neither represents a sustainable way of life.
The second half of Mary‘s story, which the novel does not pick up until near the end, details Mary‘s own downward spiral into sickness as her obsessive desire to help the working class leads her to emulate her father‘s example. After being fired from the newspaper, Mary gets a job first in a museum, then in a department store. The department store job paves the way for another job doing research on the garment industry for the International Ladies‘ Garment
Workers, and ―At last she felt what she was doing was real‖ (BM 352). While Mary appears satisfied with her work, the narrative hints that her choices will have deleterious consequences.
Although she continues to express high ideals regarding her unwillingness to take money she has not earned through work, Mary‘s drive to donate every spare cent she can make to her various causes leaves her constantly broke. Inability to afford rent leads her to share a room with her friend Ada, who pays the rent for her and also donates generously to the causes Mary supports. 185
When she meets Ben Compton, a Jewish intellectual and labor leader with ties to the communist party, her financial difficulties increase. Ben has just finished a jail sentence and he has emerged shaken and ruined in both physical and mental health. In an effort to help Ben and nurse him back to health, Mary breaks her vow not to accept money from her mother‘s inherited stock investments. As Mary turns more and more to the people around her for financial support, the untenable nature of her ideals becomes increasingly clear. While Mary criticizes Ada for her frivolity, Ada‘s money is the only thing that sustains Mary‘s work. Furthermore, Mary‘s own frenetic efforts to help the working class seem to make little difference, something Mary notices in a rare moment of self-reflection when she says to Ben, ―didn‘t he think they‘d do better work if they didn‘t always try to do so many things at once‖ (BM 358). This period of Mary‘s life culminates in her pregnancy with Ben‘s child, a pregnancy she is forced to abort because it might otherwise interfere with their work:
Once they decided they‘d get married and have a baby, but the comrades were
calling for Ben to come and organize the towns around Passaic and he said it
would distract him from his work and that they were young and that there‘d be
plenty of time for that sort of thing after the revolution. Now was the time to fight.
Of course she could have the baby if she wanted but it would spoil her usefulness
in the struggle for several months and he didn‘t think this was the time for it. (BM
358–59)
This scene repeats the rhetoric of delayed gratification that marks Fred Hoff‘s conversation with
Mac in The 42nd Parallel. The present becomes something not valuable for its own sake, but rather valuable as an investment into a future that may never be reached. While Ben opposes the pregnancy on the grounds that this is the wrong time, the narrative does not suggest that the right 186
time will ever actually present itself. Rather, the novel‘s trajectory displays Mary becoming increasingly obsessed by her work. The passage also suggests an attitude towards people that sees them primarily as means rather than ends. Mary‘s pregnancy is undesirable because it will
―spoil her usefulness.‖ Personal considerations do not enter into the equation; all that matters is usefulness to the cause.
The novel highlights the bleakness of Mary‘s life by detailing her intense pleasure in a rare and solitary moment of consumption that occurs shortly after her affair with Ben Compton ends. Mary moves to Boston to work on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and there she decides to write a novel as well. In order to facilitate her writing she purchases ―some school copybooks in a little musty stationer‘s shop and started right away taking notes for the novel. The smell of the new copybook with its faint blue lines made her feel fresh and new. . . . Her mother had sent her a check for Christmas. With that she bought herself some new clothes and quite a becoming hat.
She started to curl her hair again‖ (BM 361). The pleasure Mary takes in a few small consumer luxuries is striking because it draws the reader‘s attention to the ascetic emptiness that previously dominated Mary‘s life. Mary‘s pleasure in her new copybooks is short-lived, however, as she quickly becomes trapped again in fighting for a hopeless cause. She starts having nightmares about trying to complete Sisyphean tasks, like mending a teapot that continually breaks apart and sewing a dress that keeps ripping, until finally ―It was a sort of relief when she herself was arrested‖ (BM 364).
The final portion of Mary‘s story details the slow decay of personal relationships that follows in the wake of Mary‘s obsessive need to work. In jail she meets a communist organizer,
Don Stevens, with whom she begins an affair after their release. As with Ben, however, Don abandons her in favor of helping the communist party, and, without telling Mary, visits Russia 187
and marries a Russian communist whom he meets while there. At around the same time, Don and the other communists expel Ben from the party on the grounds of ideological differences. Ben‘s ideas are too individualist, not in keeping with the communal sympathies of the party, which values obedience over independence. The novel mirrors Don‘s betrayal of Mary and Ben with
Mary‘s betrayal of Ada. After she learns about Don‘s marriage, Mary becomes sick from grief and overwork, and Ada nurses her back to health. While Mary continues to think of Ada as frivolous, she accepts Ada‘s help and begins to recover under her care. However, when the suicide of Ada‘s friend, Eveline Hutchins, drives Ada into despair, Mary refuses to take her phone calls, explaining to her secretary, ―I have too much to do to spend my time taking care of hysterical women‖ (BM 446). Coming as it does at the end of Mary‘s last section, which is also the novel‘s penultimate section, Mary‘s rejection of her friend presents a bleak contrast to the nameless vagabond who opens U.S.A. by using storytelling to forge imaginative bonds with his countrymen. Whereas U.S.A. began with the utopian possibility of a united country that maintains the possibility of individuality within a powerful communal framework, it ends with
Mary‘s loneliness even as she believes she works for the communal good. While Mary‘s work is admirable for its intentions, it proves to be disruptive both to her own welfare and to the welfare of her family and her only remaining friend. Mary‘s work, which she pursues with the intention of helping others, ought to bring people together, but instead it leaves Mary an exile in her own life. Her uncompromising zealotry damages both herself and her loved ones.
Dos Passos‘s criticism of the labor movement in Mary‘s story stems partially from his growing disillusionment with the left, but it also indicates changing cultural attitudes toward the relationship between consumption and production. Mary‘s life of production unmitigated by consumption appears just as hollow as Charley‘s life of consumption unmoored from productive 188
labor. While New Deal rhetoric stressed that people needed to think of themselves as both producers and consumers, Dos Passos‘s trilogy portrayed production and consumption as empty endeavors when unconnected. While the trilogy never portrays a workable middle path, Dos
Passos‘s journalistic writings about the middle-class liberal suggest that Dos Passos believed in at least the possibility of a country that catered neither to monopoly capitalism nor to communism.
A New Language for Liberalism
Dos Passos‘s U.S.A. articulates the problems with an economy in which consumption and production are dissociated from one another. In so doing, it gives voice to what was, as the trilogy‘s prologue suggests, ―the speech of the people‖ who were clamoring for more jobs and pay. In 1932 a pro-labor poet publishing under the name Mr. Modestus wrote a poem that claims both the desire to work and the desire to consume are natural human desires. The poem opens with the lines,
Men are asking for work
But who really wants to work?
Many of these men need food for their families.
They are willing to sell their labor to get it.
But do any of them really want to labor? (1–5)
The poem‘s speaker then answers his own question, suggesting that men do not just want money, they really do wish to perform useful labor: ―To let the natural powers be idle too long, is to lose them. / Not to gain the end desired—takes meaning out of life. / Yes, there are men who really want to work‖ (8–10). The speaker then shifts focus: 189
Change the question, then—
What man just wants to labor?
What man would not prefer leisure?
Labor—for the sake of just living?
Labor—the grind—the collar—just to keep alive? (25–29)
While labor, the poem argues, gives life meaning, labor alone is insufficient. People must have leisure as well, lest labor become slavery. In supporting a view of life that valued work alongside leisure or consumption, Dos Passos and Mr. Modestus repeated what William Morris had said approximately half a century earlier, that people find happiness in work, so long as they have
―hope of rest; hope of product; hope of pleasure in the work itself‖ (―Useful Work Versus
Useless Toil‖ 129).
In the decade after the Great Depression, the dream of a life of work wedded to a life of consumption became, increasingly, a reality for many Americans. During the 1940s the size and political influence of the middle class expanded tremendously. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, a period of time known to economists as ―the Great Compression,‖ income inequality dropped substantially (Krugman 37–44). The richest 10% of the population held only about 32%–33% of the nation‘s wealth for most of this period, and the middle-class grew in numbers substantially
(Picketty and Saez 11). Battles over prices, profits, and labor unions did not disappear from the political landscape, but the relative prosperity of the Great Compression meant that they no longer had the same virulence. The Fish Committee, whose tactics Dos Passos hoped the middle- class liberals would guard against, gained a spiritual descendant in Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy, however, did not seriously threaten the burgeoning welfare state that the New Deal had forged.
Even capital became increasingly democratized. During the 1920s only a small portion of the 190
population owned stocks, and the ownership of capital was a major marker of one‘s economic class. In the post-war boom, however, more and more families owned stock as part of retirement accounts or other savings.
Dos Passos‘s liberal middle-class was hardly a perfect cure for persistent, and perhaps ultimately irreconcilable, conflicts of interest between labor and capital, but the Great
Compression nevertheless bore out some of Dos Passos‘s hopes. The United States did carve out an economic destiny between laissez-faire capitalism and state communism.
Notes
1 All citations of Dos Passos‘s novels will use the following abbreviations: 42P for The
42nd Parallel, NN for 1919, and BM for The Big Money.
2 Ludington writes that around 1930 Dos Passos was becoming interested in the ―middle- class liberal,‖ because they were the class best able ―to stand clear clear of the violent struggles engendered by capitalism between laborers and employers. . . . The result of new understanding would be change, not to more capitalism but not to European Communism either. The change would be peculiarly American‖ (Dos Passos 291). However, with the exception of David
Heiniman, few Dos Passos critics have attempted to understand the influence of this strain of his thinking on U.S.A.
3 As early as 1912, Franklin Delano Roosevelt argued that Americans needed to concentrate on ―the struggle for the liberty of the community rather than the liberty of the
191
individual‖ (qtd. in Smith 84). Alan Lawson has also noted that Roosevelt put considerable effort into convincing the public that cooperation did not conflict with individual liberty (38–39).
4 Note, however, that Dos Passos does not create a rigidly deterministic universe in
U.S.A. While most of his fictional characters seem caught up in the currents of their time, the biographical segments of the trilogy describe powerful men and women who (for better or for worse) have shaped the world instead of simply allowing it to shape them. As Ludington puts it,
―Economic forces oppress the common man, but they are remediable, even if Dos Passos could not perceive exactly how to ameliorate man‘s lot‖ (―Dos Passos‘s Naturalism‖ 40).
5 In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes offers a similar criticism of Wilson. Keynes supported the League of Nations, and opposed the heavy reparations demanded from Germany, correctly predicting that they would cause Eastern European economies to collapse. Like Dos Passos, Keynes portrays Wilson as a fallen hero—someone who looked to be in a position to usher in a new age of cooperation and mutual good, but who ultimately falls short of that potential.
6 In addition to associating engineers with efficiency, Veblen‘s belief that engineers represented the most revolutionary class in America derived partially from his contact with
Morris Cooke and Henry Gantt during the 1910s. Both were involved in restructuring the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers so as to remove more overtly business-oriented interests, and his contact with them likely led Veblen to overestimate how widespread revolutionary feelings were among engineers (Layton 64–72). 192
Conclusion: Economics and Literature
A recurring problem in economics is how to measure the fiscal health of a nation. While economists seek to raise the standard of living, the quantitative data that most economists prefer to collect often does a poor job of accurately portraying the welfare of a nation‘s inhabitants. Per capita gross domestic product (GDP) can give a general sense of how wealthy a nation is, but it says nothing about the distribution of wealth. A country with a small class of very wealthy individuals and a large class of impoverished people could have the same per capita GDP as a nation with a large middle class and relatively few members at the margins. The experience of living in the two countries would, however, be vastly different. Stock indices are even more problematic, both because the citizens of a nation share unequally in the bounty of a booming stock market, and because stock prices can become falsely inflated, giving an inaccurate picture of the health of businesses. Unemployment statistics are valuable, but they leave uncounted those people who have stopped looking for work—regardless of whether they have stopped out of despair or lack of necessity. Furthermore, unemployment numbers do not report how many people are underemployed—stuck in jobs that fail to utilize their training and that they likely find unrewarding, while they are unable to find quality work in a field they are better suited for.
In an effort to find statistics that give a clearer picture of how the economy is treating the majority of citizens, economists are paying increased attention to statistics regarding the distribution of wealth. Paul Krugman‘s The Conscience of a Liberal treats income distribution as one of the primary measures of economic health, claiming that increased inequality since 1979— what Krugman terms the ―Great Divergence‖—has destabilized the economy and reduced the quality of life in America. Journalist Timothy Noah recently wrote that income distribution in 193
America has become ―more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador‖ (1). Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank has developed a new measurement of economic health that draws on income distribution data, which he calls the Toil Index. The Toil Index measures the number of hours per month a median income worker must work just to pay for a median value house. Frank‘s measurement is based on the fact that housing prices correlate strongly to the quality of public education, so what he attempts to measure is how difficult it is for an average worker to obtain an average quality education for their children.
The recent concentration on income inequality as a measurement of economic health has yielded a renewed understanding of the ways in which our current economy resembles the economy of the Progressive Era and the Great Depression, another period in American history in which inequality was at extremely high levels. While the post–World War II years have been years of amazing economic growth, the Great Divergence has resulted in conditions that in some ways resemble those of a century ago more so than those of fifty years ago. With poverty and lack of access to health care still widespread, America has in many ways failed to eliminate scarcity to the degree that Patten hoped and thought possible. Given the parallels between the present and the past, studies of Progressive Era and Great Depression economics provide a way to reflect on current conditions by placing them within their historical context. This is not to say that current economic problems are simply and straightforwardly copies of past problems—the differences are as numerous as the similarities—but that history remains our best guide as we grope our way into the future. And if nothing else, such historical reflections remind us that the world we live in is not an inevitable ―end of history,‖ but a contingent moment with problems that can and must be addressed, and that have been addressed before. As John Maynard Keynes 194
wrote, ―I do not know which makes a man more conservative—to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past‖ (―The End of Laissez-faire‖ 21).
Attention to income inequality has also yielded a second, and perhaps even more important result. It has shifted economists‘ attention toward trying to understand the human experience of living within any given economy. Frank, for instance, writes that the Toil Index is an effort to ―remind us that what really matters is families‘ ability to achieve their most important goals‖ (5–6). While this goal is admirable, quantitative data alone can never give a complete view of the way an economy feels to those who must live within it because life is fundamentally a qualitative, not a quantitative experience. People do not experience a percentage of unemployment, but they do notice when relatives and neighbors are out of work or when their employer is laying off their colleagues. They do not experience income inequality as a statistic, but they do know when they see incredible wealth in some places and obscene levels of poverty in others. They do not experience a Toil Index, but they do know when mortgage payments or rent are getting tougher to squeeze into the monthly budget.
Writing about the value of the humanities in understanding economics, Jane Smiley notes that ―quite often what the free market values little (the ozone layer, child sex workers), humans value very much.‖ Smiley‘s critique of economics as a discipline concentrates on the failure of economists to understand the human costs of economic theories. It is precisely these costs that literature is able to highlight. Literature provides valuable economic insights because it gives us a sense of how people understand the world they live in. Quantitative data can help explain the material basis of that lived experience, but without insight into how people have conceived of their place in the world, numbers are inert. Perhaps the most important factor binding the writers discussed in this dissertation together is their shared interest in recording the world both as they 195
experienced it and as they believed it could be. Their works provide an invaluable resource for understanding a particularly turbulent period in American economic history. In 1949, more than a decade after completing the U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos wrote, ―The only way to find out anything about what kinds of lives people led in any given period is to tunnel into their records and to let them speak for themselves‖ (Ground We Stand On 403). In keeping with Dos Passos‘s advice, this project has attempted to elucidate something about the economic life of Americans during a half-century of tremendous trouble, but also tremendous potential for change and improvement. 196
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Peter Collins – Curriculum Vitae
The Pennsylvania State University 710 S. Atherton St., Apt. 601 Department of English State College, PA 16801 107 Burrowes Building (814) 769-6581 University Park, PA 16802 [email protected]
Education
Ph.D., English. The Pennsylvania State University, August 2011 M.A., English. The Pennsylvania State University, May 2007 B.A., English. University of Maryland, College Park, May 2003
Publications
“The Ghosts of Economics Past: John Henry Days and the Production of History.” Forthcoming in African American Review.
Teaching Experience
The Pennsylvania State University, 2005 – 2011
Literature Courses: Alternative Voices in American Literature, Contemporary Literature, The Short Story, The Poet in America, Literature of the Occult
Composition Courses: Tutoring in the Writing Center, Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition, Advanced Rhetoric and Composition in the Humanities
Selected Conference Presentations
―‗The Element of Chance that Faces Us All‘: Luck, Fitness, and the Natural Market in The Financier.‖ Presented at the American Literature Association Conference. Boston, Massachusettes, May 2011.
―A Girl Like Lorelei: Anita Loos‘s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Female Professionalism during the Modernist Period.‖ Presented at The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. Louisville, Kentucky, February 2010.
―Commemoration and Commodification: John Henry Days and the Violent Production of History.‖ Presented at Celebrating Contemporary African American Literature: The Novel Since 1988. State College, Pennsylvania, October 2009.