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The Riotous Presence in American Literature and Culture Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports 2009 The riotous presence in American literature and culture Rebecca Skidmore Biggio West Virginia University Follow this and additional works at: https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd Recommended Citation Biggio, Rebecca Skidmore, "The riotous presence in American literature and culture" (2009). Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports. 4442. https://researchrepository.wvu.edu/etd/4442 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by the The Research Repository @ WVU with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you must obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/ or on the work itself. This Dissertation has been accepted for inclusion in WVU Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports collection by an authorized administrator of The Research Repository @ WVU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Riotous Presence in American Literature and Culture Rebecca Skidmore Biggio Dissertation submitted to the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English John Ernest, Ph.D., Chair Timothy Sweet, Ph.D. Timothy Dow Adams, Ph.D. Kathleen Ryan, Ph.D. Kenneth Fones-Wolf, Ph.D. Department of English Morgantown, West Virginia 2009 Keywords: riot, lynching, violence, Reconstruction, race Copyright 2009 Rebecca Skidmore Biggio ABSTRACT The Riotous Presence in American Literature and Culture Rebecca Skidmore Biggio This project seeks a comprehensive understanding of riot as an operating principle in American history and culture—a principle variously revealed in, explored, or obscured by literature produced by popular and political novelists at the turn of the twentieth century. In defining riot as a presence, I identify as central to US history a haunting incoherence between fundamental cherished ideals of representative government and the use of violence or threats of violence to assert the privilege of one group through the subjugation of another. Because representations influence the way we characterize historical events both prospectively and retrospectively, I conduct my investigation through the reading of iconic and influential literary texts. These literary texts, published broadly between 1880 and 1910, function as historical interventions rather than simple records of the American past. Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Albion W. Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand (1879), and Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s The Leopard’s Spots (1902) are set in the present and shape the very cultural context on which they comment. Pauline Carrington Bouvé’s Their Shadows Before (1899), Mary Johnston’s Prisoners of Hope (1898), and Pauline E. Hopkins’s Winona (1902) join issues of the past with issues of the present, establishing the continuity of historical events. Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899) are prospective rather than retrospective, confirming the adaptability and embeddedness of riot, its many uses and manifestations in US culture, and its many disguises. Through the privileging of contexts beyond cause and effect, through the exploration of the normal functioning of the society in which these events can and do occur, literature offers a field for exploration of the social and cultural conditions necessary for the violence of riot to occur. iii Acknowledgements John Ernest, my mentor and my friend. Katy Ryan and Tim Sweet, my generous readers. Tim Adams and Ken Fones-Wolf, my thoughtful committee. My seminar group at the 2007 Dartmouth Futures of American Studies Institute, especially Donald Pease and Rebecca Adelman, for their early inspiration and ongoing support of this project. My family and friends, especially John Biggio, Mike Skidmore, and Linda Atwell. I also wish to express my appreciation for the generous financial support provided by the WVU Dissertation Fellowship, the Stephen Crocker Dissertation Fellowship, the Wilson Grant for Doctoral Research, the Jackson Family Doctoral Fellowship, the William E. Vehse Graduate Student Travel Award, the Eberly College Graduate Student Travel Award, the Eberly College Academic Affairs Doctoral Student Travel Award, and additional support provided through the Department of English at West Virginia University. iv Table of Contents Introduction. Rethinking Riot 1 The Riotous Presence 4 Reading and Writing Riot 16 Chapter 1. “De w’ite folks is riz”: Riot, Revolution, and Race War in The Marrow of Tradition 22 Riot 26 Revolution 35 Insurrection 44 Race War 55 Chapter 2. “From all such proffers of friendship”: Dixon, Tourgée, “Brothers,” and Liberals 69 Romancing Race and National Reunion 73 Ideologies of White Fraternity and Regenerative Violence 85 Citizen Soldiers and the New Nation 99 Chapter 3. “Both Domestic and National”: Three US Women’s Narrative Interventions in Masculine Histories of Collective Violence 117 “White Lamb” for the “Black Sheep”: Pauline Bouvé’s Their Shadows Before 122 “With but a change of masters”: Mary Johnston’s Prisoners of Hope 135 “I will carry the war into Africa”: Pauline Hopkins’s Winona 153 A Violent Past in the Present 168 Chapter 4. “A Riot is At Bottom the Language of the Unheard”: Riot and Rumor in the Works of Sutton Griggs and Mark Twain 174 Two Americas 177 Ordering Disorder in Connecticut Yankee 183 The Circus of Riot 195 Imperium in Imperio 200 Rumor, Race War, and The Specter of Cooperative Democracy 213 Coda. Meditations on An Activist Agenda 226 Bibliography 237 Curriculum Vitae 257 1 Introduction. Rethinking Riot When I first began this project, the 100th anniversary of the Atlanta race riot had recently passed. Commemorating the violence of 22-25 September 1906, with walking tours and historical research made public via the internet, The Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot has begun a project of remembrance and redefinition. The Coalition to Remember is one of many emerging organizations serving to honor the victims of late-nineteenth- and early- twentieth-century race riots like those that occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, in Chicago, Illinois in 1919, in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, and in Rosewood, Florida in 1923. In 1993, for example, five university professors submitted “A Documented History of the Massacre Which Occurred at Rosewood, Florida, In January 1923” to Florida’s Board of Regents. In 1997, the Oklahoma House of Representatives requested the formation of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. In 2000, North Carolina’s General Assembly founded the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission “to develop a historical record of the event and to assess the economic impact of the riot on African Americans locally and across the region and state.” In addition to promoting awareness, some of these groups, like the Tulsa and Rosewood organizations, have sought reparations for the victims’ families. Each of these public initiatives represents both a commendable recuperative effort and an important trend toward a collective attempt to uncover the lost truths behind these painful reminders of domestic terrorism occurring Within Our Gates, to borrow the title phrase from Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 cinematic response to the riots in Chicago. In part colluding with and in part diverging from the work of these vital programs, I argue against the collective tendencies of the public to see these events as contradictions, as exceptional, irrational occurrences outside of the normal functioning of American history and 2 culture. Instead, I argue that these race riots are fundamentally American, that they are an ongoing and central part of American social process. Isolating individual riots as spontaneous and aberrant events, as breaks in the cultural process rather than as moments of revelation, is dangerous, because this type of thinking alienates the symptoms from the disease. Recognition of the individual events and of the victims is essential, yet it is also critical to look beyond these seemingly discrete tragedies to the larger structural instabilities that they reveal. The Riotous Presence in American Literature and Culture looks for patterns, for repetition, for similarities, so as to understand these events in national, cultural, and historical contexts. In order to be truly productive, recognition must also be preventative and transformative. We must place these events in the context of a larger culture of violence, of revolution and resistance, and of the underlying ideologies that guide us in our understanding of violence as aggressive or defensive, as aberrant or normative. There remains significant disagreement about how to identify these isolated events, these symptoms of greater cultural maladies. In their introduction to Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (1998), Timothy B. Tyson and David S. Cecelski discuss at length the available “descriptive terms,” any one of which might be a more procedurally accurate or desirable designation for what happened in Wilmington: “‘coup d’état,’ ‘massacre,’ ‘revolt,’ ‘pogrom,’ ‘revolution.’ Each conveys a part of the truth, yet none captures the full scope of these events.” Tyson and Cecelski go on to explain their use of “race riot” in their title in terms of paying “homage to conventional usage” and in the interest of ensuring “that we would be understood” (6). While I find this quest for a satisfying descriptor a useful one, this sort of redefinition is not exactly what I am after. Rather, it seems necessary to me to approach 3 the same set of questions from a slightly different angle, to ask, instead: What does it mean to call something a race riot? My project looks less to the “history of what happened” than to the discourses surrounding eruptions of violence like the Wilmington race riot (6).
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