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The forgotten radical: Hamlin Garland and the Populist revolt
Martin, Quentin Ellis, Ph.D.
The Ohio State University, 1994
UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor. MI 48106 THE FORGOTTEN RADICAL:
HAMLIN GARLAND AND THE POPULIST REVOLT
DISSERTATION
Presented in Pertial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate
School of the Ohio State University
By
Quentin Ellis Martin, B.A., M.A.
The Ohio State University
1994
Approved by Dissertation Committee: Thomas Wood eon L
Steven Fink Adviser Department of English Debra Moddelmog ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It is a pleasure to acknowledge the unflagging support
and guidance provided to me by my dissertation director.
Professor Thomas Woodson, and the other two members of my
committee. Professor Steven Fink and Professor Debra
Hoddelmog. Their insightful criticisms kept me on the
right path, however much 1 tried to stray from it. 1 also wish to thank the Ohio State University Graduate School for awarding me a Presidential Fellowship, which gave me the
luxury of devoting ay efforts to this project for twelve months. Finally, I offer profound thanks for the loving support of my wife and children, which helped carry me through this project.
ii VITA
Hay 3, 1956 ...... Born - Duluth* Minnesota
1979 ...... B.A.* Western Michigan University* Kalaszoo* Michigan
1986 ...... M.A., Western Michigan University* Kalamazoo* Michigan
1986-1989 ...... Editor, Inside Sports Magazine* Evanston, Illinois
1969-Present ...... Graduate Student* Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio
PUBLICATIONS
"Einstein* Heisenberg, and Hemingway: A Note on 'The Killers.'" Ihe_Exp1icator 52 (Fall 1993): 53-57.
FIELDS OF STUDY
Major Field: English
ill TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... ii
VITA ...... ill
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
CHAPTER PAGE
I. "HO! FOR THE GOLDEN WEST": THE PROMISE OF THE NEW FRONTIER ...... 64
1 - The Desert in the W e s t ...... 66 2 - The Garden in the W e s t ...... 60 3 ~ and the Proaiae of the W e a t ...... lOO
II. "SWEAT, FLIES, HEAT, DIRT AND DRUDGERY": DROSSY REALITIES IN THE GOLDEN W E S T ...... 110
1 - New Viewa of the New W e s t ...... 117 2 - Women in the New W e s t ...... 126 3 - Garden or D e s e r t ? ...... 149
III. "THOSE WHO FARMED THE FARMER": EXPLOITATION IN THE NEW W E S T ...... 166
1 - Jason_Edwards and the Monopoly of Land 175 2 ~ J h e R i s e g f _ Boom town and the Fradulent Booming of the L a n d ...... 167 3 - "The Return of a Private," "Under the Lion's Paw,*' and the Monopoly of Honey 204 4 - A_Member_of_the_Third_Houae and the Monopoly of Transportation ...... 226 5 - Despair, Flight, and Rebellion . . . . 236
iv IV. "THIS SPREADING RADICALISM": A_SPOIL_OF_OFFICE AND THE CREATION OF PO P U L I S M ...... 259
1 " Spoil and "Trut Popullaa" ...... 270 2 - The Grange ...... 277 3 - The Politicized Farmer ...... 283 4 - The Birth of P o p u l i s m ...... 295 5 - The Death of Populism ...... • 311
V. CONCLUSION ...... 326
WORKS CITED ...... 341
v INTRODUCTION
Hamlin Garland, much like the farmers he depicts in
his fiction, has fallen on hard times. For the past half-
century his writings have either been ignored or adduced as
examples of bankrupt literary standards. His early fiction
is routinely dismissed for being "inartistic" because of
its immersion in contemporary political issues. One
critic, for example, writes that Garland's early novels are
"forward-looking sociologically" but are "undistinguished
as fiction" (Wagenknecht 206>, as if sociological and
fictional concerns were mutually exclusive. Garland's
later work serves as another text for literary sermons: his desertion of his acrid Middle Border subject matter in the mid-lB90s in order to write tepid Rocky Mountain romances, dim-witted books on psychic phenomena Mencken called them), and eight thick volumes of garrulous and self-advertising personal and literary reminiscences Claude Simpson's essay "Hamlin Garland's Decline" set the tone for this later Indictment. And while Simpson, in 1 1941, saluted Garland's early work and waa sympathetic to the pressures that caused Garland to search for more marketable literary material, such mitigations soon disappeared. In 1953, Simpson's assessment was directly questioned by Bernard Duffy, as the title of his essay, "Hamlin Garland's 'Decline' From Realism," indicates. Garland, Duffy argues, never "declined" from his early and commendably realistic studies of farming life in the prairie and plains states: no, he was always a literary hack, a literary opportunist whoring himself to suit any editor who would pay. He wrote dark stories in the dark days of the late 1380s and early 1890s because they had a market, and he wrote light stories from then on because they had a market. "From the beginning," Duffy claims. Garland seemed “never to hesitate over any necessary compromises" (74). The repository of received literary opinion of mid-century America, the Robert Spi1ler-edited Literary_Hlatory_of the United States (1948), also casts doubt upon Garland's early work. These earlv stories. Spiller writes (he is the author of the section on Garland), are not much more than 11lustrations of the ideas of other people, specifically "radical scientists" such as Henry George, Hippolyte Taine. and Herbert Spencer. Hence, Garland is a derivative writer and "not a profound" thinker (1 0 2 0 ). Indead, in the literary-critical ciinate of post-World War II America, when the second generation of New Critica came to the fore (Graff 67-74)» firm dlatlnctions were commonly made between "art" and "politics": art was something trans-historica1 and eternal, pare of the dirty clay of journalism, political causes, sociology, ideology, and other inherently time-bound, transient things. Some critics, of course, balked at these restrictions. Quentin Anderson, in his foreword to Warner Berthoff'a The Ferment of Realism (1965). praises Berthoff for "renew!ingl one's faith in literary history as a genre," but regrettably notes that such an approach has been "tacitly or explicitly questioned" by the critics of the day who wish "to step out of time into an eternity of forms” (vii-viii). These formalist critics, when they acknowledge Garland at all, argue that his work is damaged in proportion to the amount of politics in it. As far back as 1936, Arthur Hobson Quinn laments that in Garland's early novels, “Garland the reformer overshadowed Garland the artist" (455). In 1973, Arthur Voss notes how Garland's propensity for "social protest" damaged the artistry of his stories, oftentimes turning them into "tracts": he praises two of his stories ("Mrs. Ripley's Trip" and "The Return of a Private") "because they embody less social protest than the others" (107-08). Garland's early political writings, then, are 4 generally seen as examples of mere fictionalized journalism or propaganda which have no place among serious works of art; and his post-1895 works are seen as examples of vulgar literary opportunism, if not prostitution.Cl) Warren French's 1970 essay "What Shall We Do About Hamlin Garland?" sums up what he calls the "received opinion" about Garland. tike Duffy, French sees Garland as a literary prostitute, and compares him to P. T. Barnum, George Babbitt, and deodorant ads.[2] He argues that Garland did not write literature but rather engaged in "ephemeral forms of communication . . . forms that use words to turn a quick buck" (335): the "prolixity" of Garland's autobiographies, furthermore, is nothing more than evidence of his "great narcissism" (337). The only interest Garland creates, French writes, is “not as an individual artist, but as an example of an American type- - the man who made it quickly and then hung around too long" (330). French confidently predicts that these views are "likely to remain for some time the 'received opinion' about Garland's position in American literature" (330>. French, moreover, cannot imagine any counterarguments to this received opinion, so, as he says, "1 see no reason even to make the attempt" (331). This, then, is what literary critics should do with Hamlin Garland--ignore him or ridicule him.[31 Garland's 5 treatment In studies of American literary naturalism, where hia position and importance once seemed secure, is indicative of this obscuration and belittlament. The first thorough study of the genre, Lars Ahnebrink's The 1DO1 _9^-Naturalism inAmerican Fiction (1950), treats Garland at length as a pivotal influence on American naturalism and on other naturalist writers (as Ahnebrink labels them), such as Stephen Crane and Frank Norris. Six years later, however, Charles C. Walcutt in his American Literary Naturalism, A Divided_Stream (1956), while maintaining Garland's importance as an "adumbrator" of naturalism, gives far more attention to his shortcomings. Garland's "rather pathetic failures" (63) and his "genteel elegance and romantic compromise" (59), Walcutt writes, ensure only a "modest survival of Garland's name" (61). But even this chary assessment has proved to be sanguine. Three recent studies of American literary naturalism completely ignore Garland. John Conder's Naturaliamin American_Fiction (1984) and June Howard's Form_and History iD_American Literary^Natural ism (1985) do not even mention his name, and Lee Clark Mitchell's Determined Fictions^ American Literary Naturalism (1989) mentions Garland once, hidden in a list of "other" naturalists (viii)--so hidden, in fact, that he doesn't crack the index. 6 This increasingly dismissive tone, if not outright neglect, is also seen in the general literary histories of the period. Whereas literary historians of the 1920s and '30b treated Garland as a fundamentally important writer (as I will explain below), by the time of Alfred Kazin's On Native_Grounds (1942), the New Critical modernist depreciation had partially set in. Garland may be a "pioneer realist" (16), Kazin concedes, but he wrote "embarrassing" novels and “narrow" short stories (37), which are the products of “a dreary mind and a pedestrian talent" (36 ). Grant Knight in his The_Cr1tleal_Period_in American_Literature (1951) echoes Kazin in acknowledging Garland's Importance in the eventual victory of realism over romanticism, but offers only brief readings of Garland's Main-Travel1ed Roads (1891) stories and little else. This brief yet somewhat sympathetic treatment, though, evaporates by 1965 with Berthoff's influential study The_Ferment, of Realism, which covers the same ground as Knight's book. Berthoff expends only one page on Garland and is much more condescending: reflecting the by- then "received opinion" about Garland, Berthoff casually notes that "it is easy to make fun of Garland" (134). Larzer Ziff's equally influential The, American_1890s (1966) gives a more careful and detailed treatment of Garland, but still echoes and stresses the Claude Simpson-decline 7 thesis: Garland, Ziff says, went downhill after Main; TravelledRoads, his “first and best book," and soon "retreated" to "romances and journalistic commissions" (117). Ziff, like others, employs the second-generation New Critical condemnation of the inartiaticness of such vulgar things as social protest, concluding that Garland "was carried, by his devotion to abstractions like veritism and the single tax, far off the literary mark" (119). Also indicative of the rapid obscuration of Garland is his treatment in what are perhaps the two most influential intellectual literary histories of the previous and current generation, Henry Steele Commager'a The_A»ftrAcan_Mind (1950) and Alan Trachtenberg's The.Incorporation of America (1984). To Commager, as to his announced intellectual ancestor Vernon Louis Parrington, Garland is a vitally important figure, a key to understanding the mood of the age. To Trachtenberg, however, though he explores at length the issues of the West and Populism, Garland is apparently unimportant: he mentions Garland only once, buried among a list of ’’regional" and other writers (201).141 Indeed. Garland's work in general has fallen into near-complete obscurity. Not since 1980, when Jean Holloway's biography Hailin_Garland and Donald Pizer'a Hamlin_Garland^_s_Early_Wgrk_and_Career both appeared, has a 6 full-length study been published on Garland.t51 None of Garland's books Is in print (aside from a few available from expensive reprint services), including Main-Travelled Rgada, and only two or three of his stories survive in literary anthologies: “Under the Lion's Paw" (by far the most common), “The Return of a Private," and (rarely) "Up the Coule," all of which are from M«in-Travelled Roads. The few essays written on Garland in the past decades by and large repeat the ideas of earlier critics, as Donald Pizer has pointed out (see note 3). Jackson Bryer and Eugene Harding note that "the amount of substantial and worthwhile commentary on [Garland's) work is relatively small . . . one can almost count on the fingers of two hands the critically valuable contributions on Garland in books and periodicals" (290-91). This comment, made in 1970, remains true to this day. Pizer points out that there is still no adequate Garland biography, bibliography, or collection of letters; nor is there available a modern edition of his work or "a major analysis of his strengths and weaknesses as a writer of fiction. . . . In short, almost every phase of Garland's life and work remains open for exploration" ("Hamlin" 45). Yet, the "received opinion" about Garland--namely, that there isn't much to say about him and what there is has already been said and is not very flattering--has not budged since Warren French defined It a quarter of a century ago. Garland is a completely static, if not a continually diminishing, figure on the American literary landscape. Why should anyone care about Garland's obscurity or want to challenge it? I believe, contrary to the weight of the past few decades of received critical opinion and practice, that Garland is a vitally important figure in many ways, which I will group under three interdependent though, for heuristic purposes, separable headings: 1) historically: -2> hietorioqraphically; and 3> critically, specifica1ly, in how his work both fits into the current debate in literary criticism about "what Is literature." yet offers important refinements of that debate. Garland's obscuration, therefore, leaves large and serious caps in these and other fields, ones that can be filled only by a resurrected interest in his work. 1 - Garland's Historical Importance Garland provides the most articulate fictional voicing of Populism, still the most thorough and serious challenge ever made to American political, social, and cultural institutions. Originating in various uncoordinated and fitful protests against conditions that were creating economic privation in the agricultural South and West, Populism matured into a broad-based, comprehensive attempt io to create a political culture in opposition to the increasingly dominant capitalist culture of post-Civil War America. It challenged the country's financial, industrial, and political institutions, which were primarily headquartered in the Northeast--its banks, mortgage companies, railroads, land offices, courts. Republican and Democratic parties and their traditions, habits, and beliefs— and proclaimed that a revolution would occur if its demands were Ignored. The Populist movement, intent on restoring "the government of the Republic to the hands of the 'plain people,'" as the 1892 party platform put it (Hicks Appendix 441)[61, bubbled over in that election year. In November 1692, the Populists won five seats in the United State Senate and ten seats in the House of Representatives, and their Populist presidential candidate, James B. Weaver, received over a million votes, the first third party candidate in American history to receive that many. (He carried four states, earning 22 electoral votes.) On the state level, the Populists won three governorships (in Kansas, North Dakota, and Colorado) and roughly 1,500 legislative seats. The two-party stranglehold on the country, especially strong since the Civil War, was tottering because of the efforts of the Populists, a group that Just a few years earlier had been dismissed as a 11 minority of aalcontente, socialists, rubes, and hayseeds. One such hayseed was Hamlin Garland, who, until he was 24 years old, labored unceasingly on his family's farms--in Wisconsin, Iowa, and finally in Dakota--until he fled East in 1884. "I know Western farm life," he later wrote. "I have been stung by hail, and smothered in dust behind the harrow. 1 have spaded manure in the rain and husked corn in November's mud and snow. I have risen at dawn month after month to milk cows and curry horses" (Roadside 255). His own life, and the lives and his family and friends, were battered by end Less, back-breaking labor and acute financial distress. In addition, both of Garland's sisters died somewhat mysteriously in their late teens, Harriet in the prairie lands of Iowa in 1875 and Jessica on the flat and dusty Dakota plains in 1889; Jessica's death especially grieved Garland and his 1895 novel Roae ofDutcher^c CooJly may have been an attempt to give hie little sister the long and fruitful life that was denied her on what Garland called the "sterile environment" of the plains (Son 400: Holloway 117). Garland's own mother suffered a paralytic stroke while working on their farm in Dakota, from which she never fully recovered: and his father, though healthy and long-lived, perpetually teetered on the verge of bankruptcy and despair, until he finally quit farming life in the early 1890s. "No important American writer," James 12 Nagel writes of Garland, "sprung from more humble origins" < 2 ) . Garland attempted to escape these origins in 1884 when he made his way to Boston, the Mecca of many literary aspirants before him. Like Lemuel Barker in William Dean Howells's novel The_Hinieter'aCharge (1887), Garland had high though vague hopes for success, but was crippled by a lack of money and of educated Eastern polish. Garland rented a cold, bare, cockroach-infested room near the Boston Public Library and by strictest economy was free to study for months without having to get a lob. Within a few years, though, he had made contacts with many of the leading literary figures in Boston, including Howells himself. (Garland describes these experiences in his autobiographical masterpiece, A_Sonof_the^Middle Border C19171, chapters 26 ff.) He began teaching and lecturing in Boston and wrote book reviews and some verse and prose sketches of Western life; he was seemingly on the verge of an Eastern-based literary life, one for from his humble origins. But two return trips to the West in 1887 and 1888 made him realize that his literary future was in the West not the East. On these trips he was reminded of the strenuousness and penury of Western life and was shocked by the evidence and accounts of the sufferings of his friends, his 13 relatives, and his own family. After seeing these ills firsthand, he returned to Boston burning with Indignation and protest, and with an entirely new view of the purposes of his own life and literary productions: "My eyes were opened to the enforced misery of the pioneer," he writes. "As a reformer my blood was stirred to protest. As a writer 1 was beset with a desire to record in some form this newly-born conception of the border" (Son 375). Garland now thought of himself of "as a proletariat" (440), and he planned to expose and combat "the comfortable, the conservative, those who farmed the farmer" (415). He wondered, furthermore, why the "stern facts" of Western life— the grinding poverty, the exploitation of farmers by politicians, railroads, and real-estate speculators, the unending toil, the chattel status of most frontier women-- have "never been put into our literature . . . Why has this land no storytellers?" (Son 356). Garland consciously set out to fill this void and become the West's first real storyteller. Fellow Western novelist Joseph Kirkland claimed that Garland was indeed "the first actual farmer in literature" (Roadside 117). In all, these return trips to the West marked, as Garland later said, "the beqinning of my career as a fictionlat” (Son 375). Garland soon joined political organizations that were exposing and combatting both the rural and urban ills of 14 1880b America: the Anti-Poverty Society, Henry George'a Single-Tax League, and finally the Farmers' Alliance (which became the Populist Party). Garland joined the Alliance lecturing system in the 1891 and '9 2 election years, and attended the epochal Populist Convention in Omaha in 1892. He met, wrote about, and corresponded with most of the famous agrarian leaders of the day, including Mary Elizabeth Lease, Tom Watson, James Weaver, and "Sock less" Jerry Simpson, and knew many other leading reformers. But most importantly he wrote plays, short stories, and novels that dramatized the Populist grievance and attempted to create sympathy for the suffering of the agricultural masses, understanding of their political anger, and support for their political rebellion. These were the goals of hie ’’art." Garland and other social critics. Populist and not. argued that the American systemhad failed. With one-third of all American farmers reduced to sharecropping or tenant status by 1895 (and another third, as William Peffer points out, living in homes that were mortgaged for more than they worth (1961), with industrial laborers menaced by low wages, layoffs, and armed strike breakers, and with over one-half of the nation's wealth in the pockets of a mere 25,000 people (representing just .04X of the population), America was becoming, as the 1892 Populist platform phrased 15 It, a land of "tramps and mi 11ionairea" (Hicks Appendix 440).C7) Critics frequently pointed out, furthermore, that while people were underfed and underclothed in the auahrooaing ghettos of American cites, especially in the hard times of the 1890s depression, farmers were getting ten cents for a bushel of corn and seven cents for a pound of cotton, far below the costs incurred to raise them: hence, many farmers burned their crops for fuel or let them rot in the fields rather than bring them to market at a loss. These low prices, farmers were told, were the result of "overproduction." A contemporary social critic, William Barry, writing in The Forum magazine, bitterly commented on this "great and scandalous paradox whereby, though production has increased three or four times as much as the mouths it should fill, those mouths are empty" ("Signs" 174). Grover Cleveland claimed in his 1688 farewell address to Congress that "the gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening" and that the average citizen "is struggling far In the rear or is trampled to death beneath the iron heel" (qtd. in Merrill 136). Populist writers and other social critics believed that the country was slipping back into feudal conditions and the result would inevitably be class warfare on the European model. The distinctive features of American 1 ife--including its wide open spaces and apparently endless opportunities, its “geographic and social fluidity [that! prevented the hardening and sharpening of class lines" (Booratin viii)--had once seemed a guarantee against serious social conflict. But in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, ruthless and bloody strikes, armies of tramps, union-forming, union-busting, and the rise of socialism, communism, and anarchism were staples of the American scene. A character in Henry Blake Fuller's superb novel With__the_Procession (1895) asks where are the “simple hopes and ideals of this Western world of fifty years aqo — even of twenty years ago?" "Take a man who was born in 18&0," this character continues, "what would be his idea of life? Contention, bickering, discontent, chronic irritation" (201). One writer claimed in an 1833 book that "within the last twenty years, we have taken immense strides in placing our country in the position in which Europe is found after a thousand years of feudal robbery" (qtd. in Martin 109). Another character in With_the Procession says that “to-day we have all the elements possessed by the old world itself" (201). The 1892 Populist platform notes that the embattled industrial workmen are "rapidly deqenerating into European conditions" (Hicks Appendix 440). Henry George, the great economic and social critic whose monumental book Prggrese_and Poverty (1879) had an immense impact on the reformers of 17 this era, wrote that "our civilization haa reached a critical period, and that unleaa a new atart ia made in the direction of aocial equality," civilization aay crumble (100). And Howelle, in a well known letter to Henry Janea in 1688, wrote that America aeema to me the moat grotesquely illogical thing under the aun; . - . after fifty years of optimistic content with "civilization" and its ability to come out all right in the end, I now abhor it, and feel that it la coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases Itself anew on a real equality. CSelected Letters 231) In Howells'a novel of that year, Annie_Kilburn, a character declares that Americans are living "in an age of seeming preparation for indefinite war. The lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on either side the forces are embattled" (804). Yet the political parties refused to address or even acknowledge these ills and concerns. The post-Civil War political system--with its closed conventions, open courting of financial support, indirect elections, lack of a secret ballot or the right to the initiative or referendum, limited suffrage, and reactionary Judiciary-- was peculiarly resistant to popular pressure. Both parties preferred to discuss old issues rather than new ones, and thus spent moat of their time invokinq and exploiting their wartime roles--northern Republicans "waved the bloody shirt" and southern Democrats titled themselves "the party of our fathers"— while privately courting commercial 18 Interests and contributions. Politics was reduced, in the words of economic historians Thomas Cochran and William Miller, to a "quadrennial squabble for office to determine which group would be the stewards of the ruling interests" <16S>. The reigning political philosophy of the era. often termed Social Darwinism, contributed to this resistance to popular pressure and popular concerns. It invested laissez-faire capitalism and politics with the mandates of Nature and/or God. John D. Rockefeller, for example, claimed that "the growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest. . . . It is merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God" (qtd. in Ahnebrink 8). Thus, nearly all social action was deemed to be dangerous interventionism, "paternalism," creeping socialism, if not impiety. Change was considered not only impossible but positively perilous (Hays 39). Grover Cleveland, back in office in the 1890s and back to his more conservative beliefs, explained his veto of a drought-relief measure by stating that "though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people" (qtd. in Goldman 73) . Given these political facts and beliefs, all attempts by the rural and urban Populists to address society's ills were ignored or vilified. A writer in on 1693 Forum article denounced the "virus of paternalism" that was 19 spreading through America (Tracy 340) and claimed that the Populists were ushering in a "tide of communism" and that the West was "honeycombed" with socialist ideas <342, 335); the people attending the Omaha Populist convention, he wrote, were "thoroughly communistic" <339). The title of William Graham Sumner's well known essay, "The Absurd Efforts to Hake the World Over," also reflected this distaste for reformers and reform schemes. Trying to amend the political and business system, Sumner claimed, was like trying to change nature: the "tide" of human affairs, he wrote, “will not be changed by us. It will swallow up both us and our experiments" (91). James "Cyclone" Davis, a Populist lecturer from Texas, noted that anyone "who speaks plainly of the bad influence" of corporate powers "incurs the risk of being suspected of communism" <29>; an editorial in the Topeka Advocate, a Populist newspaper, stated that "every person who has the temerity to sugqest that changes are possible by which a better state of society might secured, is denounced as an impractical visionary and crank" (349). Thus, Populism's attempt to subject "corporate capitalism to the control of the democratic state" (Destler 24) created what Alan Trachtenberg has called a "cultural earthquake" in American society (177). It broke through the lethargy of poat-Civil War political life and broke 20 down many of its shibboleths. Populism, as a summation and amalgamation of the leading reformist impulses of the preceding several decades, gave a coherent and compelling voice to the country's "plain people." It "formulated an extraordinarily penetrating critique of industrial society." as a recent historian has argued (Pollack. Be&PQn&e * and brought into mainstream politics demands and a consciousness that were instantly branded “eccentric" and "socialistic" by conservative elements in society. Vet these demands--such as the nationalization of the railroads and the telegraph and telephone systems, a graduated Income tax. the direct election of United States senators, the Australian (secret) ballot, the initiative and referendum, currency reform, female suffrage, the eight-hour workday, and term 1imltations--dominated the political discussion of the Progressives and Socialists of the next generation, laid the groundwork for much of the New Deal, and continue to color the politics of today, as the frequent appropriation of the word "populist" testifies. The Populist Party platform of 1892, Henry Steele Conaager writes, formulated a "program of economic reform which in one way or another was to dominate politics for the next half century" (46). The now-casual acceptance of nearly all of the "radical," "communistic" demands listed above is proof of 21 the Populists' success in introducing structural refers to the American capitalist system. The anti-Populist rhetoric, then, can now be seen as ironic: what the anti- Populiate said would ruin their system, saved it. And if today the dire Populist predictions of impending social chaos if not class warfare and its description of society as one of “tramps and millionaires'* seem overblown, it is not because they were absurd claims but because the efforts of the Populists and their heirs in the Progressive and New Deal eras obviated such eventualities. The massive and bloody class warfare described by the Populist politician and writer Ignatius Donnelly in his vivid anti-utopian novel Cae e a r " s C p i u m n (1890) remained speculative, and the book itself a curiosity piece, because the conditions it indicted were altered. Garland's perspective of the agrarian unrest that culminated in the formation of the Populist Party in 1891 profited from his good timing — he began his literary career in the late 18SOe just as the unrest and political response were peaking--and from what he called his "triple viewpoint" of being a native of the prairies and plains, a city man, and a reformer (Son 361>. All these strands contributed to the creation of a literature unique in American letters, one that stirred heated reaction at the time and one that provides an abundant and essential record 22 for later historians and literary critics. Kls writings, alone in American letters, describe the great migration to the new West of the prairie and plaina states, the motives, spurs, and beliefs of those who filled the Middle Border lands, and how much of that migration was in fact a result of the ideological manipulation and outright cozenage of railroad land offices and real estate speculators, often in league with political leaders and lobbyists. (This is the subject of my first chapter.) Then, in equally full detail. Garland describes the various ills that beset the farmers once they did arrive in the West. Among these was the absence of free land supposedly guaranteed by the 1862 Homestead Act. The land was either exorbitantly priced or, if free, valueless because of its distance from transportation lines and water. These land prices, as well as the prices of other necessities, were made additionally expensive by the appreciation of money and the depreciation of crop prices brought about by a calculated contraction of the currency. Farmers were also beset by tariffs on the products they bought and a free market and continually falling prices on what they sold. And any attempts by the farmer to get out from under the lion's paw of these forces were frustrated by the machinations of railroad companies and other powerful institutions, by the venality and indifference of 23 the two >aln political parties (as the gutting of the 1867 Interstate Commerce Act testifies), and by the property and soney-clasa bias of the judiciary (as the Supreme Court's invalidation of the 1894 income tax law testifies). Meanwhile, the endless toil, drudgery, and social and cultural barrenness of the farmers' lives in what was supposedly the "Golden West" augmented their bitter despair. All these factors led to an acute bitterness and disillusionment, resulting in massive flight--and occasional madness and suicide--and, for those who stayed, massive and unprecedented political rebellion. (These are the subjects of my second and third chapters, what I call the "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" ills of farming life in the new West that led to the Populist revolt.) Finally, Garland describes that revolt itself and how a Populist ideology and coalition were formed in the 1870s by the Grange organization (which stressed social unity and cooperative economic action) and in the 1880s by the more radical Farmers' Alliance, whose various platforms enunciated a philosophy of greenback antimonopolism and of union with other beleaguered groups in America, specifically industrial laborers, blacks, and women. Garland, along with Populist leaders such as Henry Demarest Lloyd and Tom Watson, tried to define in his works, especially his 1892 novel A_ Spoi io f Of flee, what "true 24 Populism" was, what it should stand for, and who it should include. Spoil triumphantly proclaims the genuine revolutionary character of Populism, but warns that Populism will assuredly fall if it deserts, as it indeed did by 1696, its core beliefs. (This is the subject of my fourth and final chapter.) The story of Populism has been told and told well by historians, with John Hick's The..Popul 1st_Reyolt (1931) still an invaluable and compelling account; recent historians, such as Lawrence Goodwyn, Norman Pollack. Robert HcHath, Gene Clanton, and others have added to and Intelligently refined this account. Garland's work, though, by dramatizing the various aspects of the Populist mood and movement, offers a unique rendering of Populism. His writings and their relation to the Populist grievance and struggle yield a remarkably thorough history of the "cultural earthquake" engineered by the Populists. Garland, furthermore, as the foremost fictionalist of the movement, produced work that serves not only as a reflection of Populism but also as a fabricator of the Populist "story"; his work gave a unique voice to the distressed men and women along the Populist battlefield and constituted an immensely important shaping force in how it understood itself and announced its grievances and goals. As John Chamberlain writes, "For a literary pattern of the 25 Populist revolt one must go to the pages of Hamlin Garland" (95) . Garland's work Is the Uncle __To*'a .Cabin of Populism, a fictional window to a movement that stirred millions of people. By casting the Populist movement in dramatic terms, it is possible to Intellectually and emotionally comprehend it and the otherwise arcane and remote material that is vital to understanding it: the ideological concepts of the "Desert Myth," the "Agrarian Myth," and the "safety valve," the arguments over currency reform, the disposal of the public domain, tariff policies, communication and distribution monopolies, land speculation, and the formation of the Populist ideology itself. Populism and its connection with these concepts and practices acquire immediacy and emotional force in Garland's fiction. It's one thing to talk abstractly about how slaves were traded and treated and another thing to see Uncle Tom separated forever from his wife and children and eventually beaten to death by Simon Legree. Similarly, it's one thing to talk about the myths of the West and the flaws of the Homestead Act and another to see these things wreck the lives of the settlers in Garland's fiction. Garland's importance, historically, lies, as does Stowe's, in his ability to transmit a unique and powerful (if at times crude and sent!mentalized> understanding of a crucial period of 26 American history. Y«t, Inexplicably, Garland's complex dialogue with Populism has yet to be explored or explained; even his early admirers, such as V. L. Parrington and John Chamberlain, did not investigate this dialogue in any detail and entirely overlooked many of his Important works. Contemporary criticism, as noted, has been even more remiss, largely content to ignore Garland or merely echo earlier assessments of him. Thus, my study aims to end this neglect of Garland, a neglect that has robbed both American literary and historical studies of an enormously valuable body of writing. 2 - Garland's Historiographic Importance My study, largely by implication, takes aides in various historiographic debates. Recent works in Western historical scholarship, such as Richard Slotkin'a Regeneration Through Violence (1973) and The Fatal Environment (1965), Richard Drinnon's Facing West (1980), David E. Stannard'a flaerican^Holpcauat:_Colu»bua and the Cgngueatofthe NewWorld (1992), among innumerable others, have attempted to transform the conventional understanding of the West as a land of derring-do and character- and netion-formation (the Turner thesis, roughly) into one marked by economic exploitation, ideological manipulation. 27 environmental devastation, race genocide, and other warty realities. This historiographic tussle between those who celebrate the West and those who malign it--what Larry McMurtry calls "the debate between the Triumphalists and the Revisionists" (36)--has affected popular conceptions of the Weat as well. A widely used American history college textbook, the Robert Divine-edited AmericaiPast «nd Present, for example, in its first two editions (1979, 1986) titled its chapter on the West "Exploring an Empire," but its moat recent edition (1991) changed it to "Exploiting an Empire." HcHurtry'a article was the feature atory in TheNewRepublic, and the magazine's cover gave clever and pithy phrase to this transformation in views: "Western Ho-Hum."£63 Garland's writings clearly support this "new" non- heroic interpretation of the Weat. Hia writings, many of which, to repeat, have never been studied by literary critics or historians (while his writings that were once studied are now ignored), provide dramatic specifics for this revisionist interpretation of the West: they reveal a Weat that was indeed a land of economic, political, and ideological exploitation, and the scene of massive mistreatment of the American Indian population. As one character says in Garland's early novel, JasonEdwarda, the real story about the settlement of the West "knocks an eye 28 out of the American eagle" (188). Garland differs, though, in being somewhat optimistic about the promise of the West. Unlike Slotkin and Stannard, for example. Garland does not see the West as an inherently and massively evil place nor its settlers as foaming homicides who forever defined the American character: most are simple and decent people, in Garland'a view. The Weat, according to Garland and other Populists, was being temporarily (it was hoped) poisoned by exploitive people and institutions, the so-called "non producing" class. Remove those influences. Garland believes, and the West will become a good place again. Another contentious historiographic debate concerns the status of Populism itself. The early historiographic view of Populism— marked most notably by John Hick's 1931 book--waa that it was a progressive, liberal movement that enacted needed and beneficial reforms. Other early Populist histories, such as C. Vann Woodward's brilliant biography of Tom Wataon published in 1938, operated under the same view. But in the 1950s "the winds of revisionism swept the plains of Populist historiography," as Leonard Levy and Alfred Young put it notably Richard Hofstadter, began to view both Populism and Progreasivism not as liberal, forward-looking movements, but as reactionary, backward-looking ones, led by groups wishing not to enact enlightened social legislation but rather to reassert their own slipping importance and economic dominance. Populism waa indicted, moreover, for being an anti-industrial, "hayseed" movement which laid the groundwork for a reactionaryism that was "proto-faacietic" and anti-Semitic (Pollack, Populiatjjind xxiii). In The Age_of_Refgrm (1355), Hofstadter claims that the Populist- Progressive movement contained "much that was retrograde and delusive, a little that was vicious, and good deal that waa comic" (12), and that parts of the movement "foreshadow Cedi some aspects of the cranky pseudo conservatism of our time" (20). Populism was placed in what Norman Pollack (who defended the Populist record in his 1362 book The_Populiat Response to_Industrial America) calls a "retrogressive framework" because of its assumed antagonism to and ignorance of industrialism and labor movements and because of its assumed attempt to "turn back history" (2) to a time when farmer was king. Its historical role waa seen, therefore, as necessarily reactionary and transient. Populism, in short, waa attacked for being a conservative, head-in-the-sod movement, out of touch with the urban industrial reality of late-nineteenth-century America and therefore doomed to obsolescence and failure. 131 To Richard Slotkin, then, writing in the wake of Vietnam, the typical Western settler was a budding Green Beret: to Hofstadter, writing in the 30 early 1950*, the typical Weatern Populist was a budding Joe McCarthy. A related attack, one emanating sore fro* the New Left critics of the 19&0a Revolutionary era end the Civil War--was a failure because it waa unable to see the forest for the trees. Even if one takes the Hicks view that Populla* was liberal and progressive, Populla* resains a failed movement, these critics argue, because it merely patched the system, allowed it to run more smoothly, but failed to eradicate it or enact any meaningful or fundamental change in it. John Chamberlain, in his 1932 Marxist study, claims that Populist and Popu11at-11ke reforms served only to "congeal capitalism" (viii), and thus "the results of the three decades of strife antecedent to 1919 are, perhaps, minimal" <307). A leading New Left historian, Gabriel Kolko, argued that Progressivism, in fact, ushered In "the triumph of conservatism," as the title of his 196.3 book phrases it. This 1930a and 19&Oa critique, picked up today by many new historicist, Marxist, and cultural literary critica-- who have been directly or indirectly indoctrinated into the New Left world vlew--ls based on a fundamentally anti- capitalist perspective. Because Populism helped to 31 reconfigure and palliate capitalism, which made it more acceptable and entrenched, it ia ipao facto a retrogreseive aoveaant and an unfortunate if not conspiratorial example of capitalistic “accommodation." In the faddish phrasing of these critics (using, specifically, the phrases of Raymond Williams), Populism is seen as confirming the power of the "dominant culture" --the "prevailing hegemony," new historicist calls it (Shulman 252)--to co-opt "residual" or "emerqent" cultures for its own ends. Walter Benn Michaels, to cite perhaps the most famous new historicist who concerns himself with turn-of-the-century America, claims that Theodore Dreiser, like everyone else at the time, was completely overmastered by finance capitalism, and thus he could in no way effectively criticize it or even clearly see it. The equally touted Amy Kaplan asserts that the current "historical understanding1' of capitalism is that it is "a culture of consumption and surveillance which sweeps all social relatione into a vortex of the commodity and the spectacle'1 (1, emphasis added). Kaplan's invoking of "historical understanding" is a clumsv rhetorical strategy: this so-called historical understanding is really the understanding of Althusser, Foucault, and their current Anglo-American lapdoga, who claim that all "reform" results in greater oppression, that there is no escaping the tentacles, the "apparatuses," of 32 the Modern capitalist state. Thu*, It is impossible to determine Dreiser's views of capitalism, to return to Michaels, because to do so depends on "imagining a Dreiser outside capitalism who could then be said to have attitudes about it"; "you can't," Michaels argues, "transcend your culture." Sister_Carr1*, then, is not an attack on cap!talism--that la literally impossible in the Michaels framework --but rather an "unabashed and extraordinarily literal acceptance" of it <35> . By extension, the Populists, in this new historicist view, are hopelessly trapped within the culture of capital ism'-sucked into the "vortex" to use Kaplan's clever metaphor--and are blindly doomed to operate within its limits, no matter how "radical" they may think they are. Since they cannot transcend finance capitalism, or even attain any clear vision of it, they are fated to support it. To these New- Left and New Left-inspired critics, then, the Populists are inescapably conservative, if not pathetic, self-deluded capitalist stooges. To New Left critics anything short of a socialist or Marxist revolution that supplants capitalism is a failure. (The new hietorlciats. in assert1ng--though not demonatrating--the insuperability of capitalism, do not even consider the possibility of aupplantation.> Under these terms, it must be acknowledged that Populism was 33 indeed "comervative" end a ''failure." Thus, both the 1950s reviaioniata who placed Populism in a "retrogressive framework" and later critics who placed it in a Marxist or new historicist framework, have "denied (Populism! its traditional place as a democratic social force" (Pollack 6). Populists, who were formerly reviled for being too radical (to be called a Populist in the 1880s and '90s waa a stronger term of abuse than being called a Red in the 1920a and '30s CDestler 221), are now reviled for being too conservative. I argue--with support from other "counter revisionists," such as John Higham, C. Vann Woodward, Pollack, Martin Ridge, Walter T. K. Nugent, Lawrence Goodwyn, Peter Argerslnger, Gene Clanton, and others--that other terms and frameworks are both possible and preferable when analyzing Populism. By escaping the retrogressive framework (Populism is little more than quaint and cranky Bryaniam, marked by an absurd "cross-of-gold" mentality) and the Marxist framework (in which the destruction of capitalism is the determinant of success). Populism is seen as a serious, forward-looking, progressive movement that did enact meaningful reforms that changed the face of American society for the better. Despite the claims of anti-Popul1st historians--many of whom, as Norman Pollack points out, often ignored the vast bulk of primary sources 34 CKtnd xxiv-xxv)--Populism was not a retrogreaaiva aocial fore*, nor waa it anti-Semitic, anti-labor, anti industrial , aacapist, obscurantist, or proto-faacistic. Indeed, its proposals were in large part socialistic and its philosophy in many ways Marxist, such as in its acceptance of industrialism, its class consciousness, its emphasis on social conditioning, its attacks on capitalist ideology, and its belief in a perfectible society. Many Populists did feel the system needed fundamental restructuring if not demolishing. The Faraer'B_Alliance newspaper, for example, proclaimed in an 1889 editorial that "without a complete eradication of this system the people cannot for once hope for relief of a permanent character" (qtd. in Pollack, Response 28). In the words of the most recent thorough historian of the movement, Lawrence Goodwyn, Populism represents this country's "sole previous mainstream attempt to bring democratic structural reform to a triumphant industrial system" (xxiii). In sum, my study of Garland's Populism, especially in the context of Populist primary sources, attempts to support the current reviaionary non-heroic view of the West, though not to the degree or in the terms of writers like Richard Slotkin; it also supports the post-1950s, pro- Populist, counter-revisionist case of Pollack, Goodwyn, Clanton, and others; and finally, it ignores most of the 35 contemporary critical coRnunlty, with ita Marxist and new historicist givena about historical eventa and processes, ita vague and incoaplete underatanding of nineteenth- century America, its aupine deference to the views and terminology of thinkers who are equally ignorant of the details of America's past (uncritical use and praise of writers such as Gramsci, Lukacs, Geertz, Althusser, Foucault, and Williams appear in nearly every new historicist book and article, as if they were passwords to intellectual respectability and editorial acceptance), its ultimately ahiatorlcaL hiatoriography.C101 3 - Garland's Literary-Critical Importance The critical devaluation of Garland, discussed at the beginning of this Introduction, la a product of literary standards that are now being rigorously questioned and attacked by many of today's literary critics. The poet* World War II New Critical concentration on literary form and on the text itself is now viewed by today's critics, including myself, as an absurdly limited way of approachinq and evaluating literature. Myra Jehlen, in her introduction to Ideology_and Classic_American Literature (1986), for example, notes that many works, such as Narrative_qf_the_Life_of_Frederick_Dquglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe's UncleTgm^aCabin, used to be neglected on 3b the grounds that, "thay wera tore ideological than literary. That distinction has essentially disappeared" (14). This changed literary climate, then, gives the tools and rationale to reevaluate Garland, which 1 as convinced will lead to an imsense appreciation of his Invaluable and unique contribution to American thought and literature. Garland was once so appreciated. Earlier critics (up through the 1930a or so) argued for Garland's importance, though they did not, as 1 said, explore in any depth the historical and ideological ramifications of his work (Henry Nash Smith's landmark study yirgln_Land [19501 is a crucial exception), nor did they discuss many of his important works. Still, thiB earlier view — before the New Critical devaluation of political fiction, and before the Claude Simpson-led obsession with Garland's decline, set in--1 a worth recalling. Howells, for example, praised Garland's books for being "as indigenous . . . as any our country has produced" (“Mr. Garland's" 142). Many contemporary critics, in fact, frequently compared Garland to Turgenev, Hardy, and Millet for his ability to bring the rural life of America into art, for being the "storyteller'' of the Weat. A large part of Garland's indigenousness lay, of course, in his unique articulation of the farmers' revolts of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. When Howells reviewed Garland's Hain-Tray«lled^Roads in the 37 September 1891 issue of H«rper^sMonthly, he wrote that if any one ia atill at a loaa to account for that uprising of the faraere in the Weat which ia the tranalation of the Peasant's War into Modern and republican terms, let him read Main-Travelled„Rgada, and he will begin to understand . . . ("Editors" 16) Others testified to Garland's importance. Henry James argued in an 1896 essay that Garland's "saturation" in his "surrounding conditions" is "so precious ae to have almost the quality of genius"; Garland, James continued, is a "soaked sponge of his air and time" (qtd. in HcElderry 435). (James also appreciated the fact that Garland, nearly alone among contemporaries, understood the importance of James's own work; Walt Whitman was similarly gratified by Garland's praise at a time when he also had few admirers.) Theodore Dreiser declared that Garland was one of the few "realistic writers of Import" (Riqqlo 190) and cited Main-Travel1ad Roads as one of the handful of American books he admired (Hakutani 206). Zona Gale saluted the "epic" qualities of Garland's first two autobiographical volumes, A_Sonof_theMiddle_Border (1917) and A Daughter_of theMiddleBorder (1921), and proclaimed that these "intolerably precious" books, along with The Education_of_Henry_Adams, are the only three books that future generations will need in order to interpret the spirit of the aqe (852). Howells ranked Son'-Garland's account of the transformation of his family from eager 36 Mttlart to defeated^ disilluaionad, and raballioua Populiata--wlth tha graataat autobiographies aver written, surpassing those of Goethe, Rousseau, Franklin, and others, which are "thinner and narrower" in coapariaon (Rev. of Son 63). The historian Allan Kevins called Son "the beat description of rural life in the Northwest ever written" (114). Sinclair Lewis was equally overwhelned by Son. After reading it, he wrote to Garland "that nowhere else say be found a aore convincing picture of the Middle Border as it was in the asking" (qtd. in Schorer 248). In another letter to Garland, Lewis declared that "if I ever succeed in expressing anything of Minnesota and its neighbors you will be largely responsible, I fancy" (qtd, in Schorer 230). Lewie later aade public his adairation of and indebtedness to Garland at the aoat prominent literary forua conceivable, the Nobel Prize ceremonies. In hie acceptance speech at Stockholm in December 1330, Lewis praised Main-TrayelledRoads and Rpse._pf _Dutcher' a Coolly as two "valiant and revelatory works of realism" that had an immense impact on him and "made it possible for me to write of America as I see it." "Given this vision,” Lewis continued, "I waa released. I could write of life as living life" ("Nobel" 308). Literary historians were nearly as effusive. To V. L. Parrlngton, writing in the late 1320a, Garland's works "constitute a landmark in our literary history, for they were the first authentic expresaion and proteat of an agrarian America then being aubmerged by the induatrial revolution" (43). Carl Van Doren, writing earlier in the decade, declared Garland to be "the principal apokeaman of the distress and diaaatiafaction along the changed frontier" (80). To Harxiat critics of the 1930s, looking back on what many of them believed to be the final gaap of proteat againat the complete incorporation of American life. Garland's Populist writings were invaluable. Chamberlain in his book Farewell_to_Reform (1932) argued for the “enormous historical value" of Garland's "savage stories" (99) and proclaimed, as already quoted, that Garland provides a "literary pattern of the Populist revolt." Granville Hicks in The_Great_American_Tradition (1933) declared that Garland produced "the finest atoriea yet written of American farm life--direct, comprehensive, moving and savagely honest" (146); like Chamberlain, Hicks argued that Garland waa "the spokesman of Populism" (143). But Garland, as noted, was soon removed from hia perch by the Hew Critical literary climate that was emerging when Garland died in 1940. The genius became a deodorant ad. Another change in the literary climate has, of course, occurred in the past decade or so, one that has once again made "political fiction" legitimate and important, with 40 many critic* going ao far aa to claia that all fiction ia political. "The traditional dichotoay between art and ideology--* pillar of the old conaenaue--ia problematic" <639), Sscvan Bercovitch argued in the mid-1980s, and that pillar haa been crumbling ever since. Being erected in its place ia one that puta an emphaaia on the aocial, cultural, political, ideological and other "contexts" of the text under review. Thia changed critical climate haa led to the re-diacovery and diacovery of writera who were formerly "aidelined" for being "too ideological," aa Jehlen writea. My study, then, ia firmly rooted in and dependent upon the current critical climate in literary atudiea, and my ■pacific attempt to "rediscover" Garland ia built upon the rediscovery of writera auch aa Frederick Oouglaaa, Susan Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Cheatnutt, and others, and upon the renewed or changed interest in Howells, Norris, Dreiser, and others. It la scarcely believable that Frederick Douglaaa, for example, waa not even mentioned in Spiller's 1,400-page Literary Hi*tory of.the. United States, as Werner Sollora has pointed out (253). This exclusion, like the exclusions of Melville, Whitman, and Dickinaon from former anthologies of American literature, ia a reminder of the arbitrariness and Instability of literary standards, aa many critics have pointed out, and a justification for 41 questioning, altering, and even jettisoning reigning literary standards. Aa Paul Lauter has argued, "standards of literary eerit are not absolute but contingent" (xx). At its best, this critical activity, often called "canon reforaation" or "canon reconstruction," has lifted leaps into dark corners of America's literary and historical past, shedding light on iaauea--abolition, slavery, domestic life, gender roles, economic theory, evangelicalism, medical practice and theory--that had been deemed unsuited for "artistic" literary studies. Susan Gillman in her recent book on Hark Twain, for example, has explored what were once considered Hark Twain's "non1iterary" writings (3), such aa those on pregnancy and legal paternity, to unearth a Twain troubled by his and his society's identity-formation, especially aa it applies to race and gender identity-formation. Using these and other works by Twain and the "journalistic, scientific, legal" writings of his contemporaries, Gillman, by "speak ting] both through Hark Twain . . . and for Hark Twain" (11), attempts "to open up the literary canon in terms of how we understand both Hark Twain and late nineteenth-century questions of identity" (3). Garland's work, then, like this "dark twin" side of Twain and like works such as Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglaas, Uncle.Tom'e Cabin, "Life in the Iron Hills," TheAwakening, Jhe 42 Octopus, the Frank Cowperwood trilogy, and others, needs to be brought back to tha canon and valued for the vary things it waa once sidelined for. By exploring Garland's "nonliterary" worka and the worka of hie conteaporariea. 1 wish to open up the canon in teraa of how wa understand Garland and late nineteenth-century Populisn. Booka like Garland's had, aa Jane Tompkins aays, "aenaational designs" on their readers, "in the aenae of wanting to make people think and act in a particular way" and of "redefIn Cingl the social order" Cxi). Garland had no intention of creating rarefied "art" objects: like B. 0. Flower, his editor at Arena magazine. Garland had little patience with those who, aa Flower said, "are ever prating about 'Art for Art's sake'" while American society waa, in their minds, speeding over a cliff (Rev of Jason 37). "The supreme mission of art," Flower argued, "is to further Justice, progress, and enlightenment. . . . Art for art's sake may be very fine, but art for progress sake is finer still" (qtd. in Dickaaon 149). But since books that had these designs were deemed "suspect from a modernist point of view," if not "merely sensational and propagandistic," aa Tompkins writes, they were cast aside by modernist critics Cxi). Garland's "designs," though, despite today's changed critical climate, remain unexplored. Even his early 43 admirers, aa noted, did not explore Garland'a work in detail. Furthermore, only a handful of Garland'a worka have received conaideration by aoat of hia early and recent critlca. Theae critics concentrate on "Under the Lion's Paw” and a few other stories in Hain-Jr9 yelled_Rgads (1891) , A_Spoil_of_Office <1892), Ja*on_Eduards <1892), Roseof Dutcher'oCool1y <1895), and occasionally A Son_of the Middle Border. Hany other important works are usually Ignored, such aa A_Little_Norsk <1892), Prairie. Folks <1893), and the full autobiographical sequence. Furthermore, some worka--such as the Dakota fiction of Rise Qf.Bogmtgwn, "John Boyle's Conclusion," and "Land of the Straddle-Bug"--are rarely or never discussed at all. These works, much l.ike the Hark Twain works explored by Susan Gillman, provide a Garland new even to hia early defenders and certainly new to those who hold "received opinions" about him. With Tompkins, Gillman, and other challengers to the canon and its attendant aesthetic standards, then, 1 wish to make known and to make legitimate Garland'a Benaatlonal designs on his readers. 1 salute and am indebted to the worka by contemporary critics who have challenged and, to a large extent, reformed the canon and made legitimate the emphasis on a work's context. It is now possible to jettison what are seen as the peculiarities of former aesthetic standsrds. 44 such as the rigid separation of "art" iron "politics'* and the undue emphasis on--to use Tompkins itemization of the Mew Critical atandarda--styliatic density, psychological complexity, moral ambiguity, and eplatemological sophistication (xvii). These are the standards that made Henry James a god in English departments from World War II to just recently and that made Theodore Dreiser an embarrassment. Gerald Graff recalls that in the 1950s "to confess an admiration for Dreiser's novels within hearing of the literature faculty was to make oneself an object of ridicule and incredulity," and adds that he “still occasionally witness tea] this derision today" ("American Criticism" 107). Garland, like Harriet Beecher Stowe and other social novelists, surely knew that an overly dense and complex style would counteract the major goal of communicating to a hopefully large audience the pressing essentials of the issue at hand: slavery and ten-cent corn were more important than Jamesian complexity. Indeed, a simpler, if not a somewhat crude and melodramatic, style was required to effect this goal. To lambaste Garland and similar writers for lacking a Jamesian style is akin to lambasting a potato for not being an avocado. Yet I remain wary of some of the arguments and conclusions of the canon reformers. If, for example, many former aesthetic standards are unsatisfactory, does that 45 lean that all aesthetic atandarda ara inherently unaatiefactory? What atandarda ara to be used lnataad? Tompkins, for Instance, apparently finds the aere popularity of a book or of a book's subject setter reason enough to include it in literary studies. Tonpkins argues that Susan Warner's WideA Wida_Wprld (1850) is a crucial "text" in large part because It, unlike the canonized Aserican Renaissance books, provides a key to "how people in the antebellum era thought about their daily lives" (158). In other words, the Interests of a literary historian are no different from those of a cultural or social historian; presumably, under the Tompkins model, literary critics of 100 years from now should explore the texts of Danielle Steel rather than those of, say, Alice Walker or Bernard Halamud, since Steel is certainly more popular and certainly provides a better key to how people in the 1980s and '90s thought about their daily lives. For every article on Thomas Pynchon or Donald Bsrthelme there should be a thousand on James Michener or John Grisham. Furthermore, the distinction between literary productions and other cultural artifacts la being obliterated. Annabel Patterson notes that for many critics of the past decade "all texts were now equal" (186>). There is no "literature," merely various expressions of cultural issues: a Boy Scout manual is just as worthy of 46 consideration as Dreiser's novels in illustrating the formation of certain American habits of thought (see, for example. Hark Seltzer's BodiesandMachines)• Other "literary*' critics--their announced positions and critical activities require that the word literary be put in quotation marka--now study and write about sex manuals, arcane economic philosophies, 1930a Hollywood movies, shifts in legal history, television advertisements, women's fashion, etc., rather than, say, meter, symbolism, irony, and so forth. Cutting-edge literary critics, seemingly intent on displaying their liberation from old-fashioned notions of literary study, are fleeing literary works. Aesthetics and a concentration on the "text" have become discredited. Camille Paglia notes that the typical "English department book . . , has lost interest in English literature or canonical art in general" (98): a glance at any catalog of a scholarly publishing house will bear out this observation. A reversal has occurred, then, in critical methodology and philosophy: in the past the text was everything, now the context is everything; in the past, literature had little or nothing to do with politics, now literature and politics are not only deeply interwoven they are the same thing. Tompkins in her celebrated defense of Wide2 _Wide WorId, for example, spends much time on the evangelical 47 movement in antebellum America, with copioua quotationa from the publicationa of the American Tract Society. Queationa that people ralae about the book'a quality--ahe aaya the question "But ie it any good?" is frequently asked of her--strike her as the product of a confused, manipulated mind. Aesthetics, ahe argues (as do other canon reformers), is a chimera, a manipulative blind erected by a "cultural elite" (201) to validate and perpetuate its submerged ideology; Tompkins later identifies this elite aa "the male-dominated scholarly tradition" (268) and its goal the shaping of “the way the country thinks across a broad range of issues" and of "the picture America draws of itself" (201). Aesthetics, like everything else, is masked politics. Tompkins, to avoid this manipulation, has anaestheticized herself. She says, in a remarkable sentence, that she has trained herself to "value everything that criticism has taught me to despise; the stereotyped character, the sensational plot, the trite expression" (xvi, emphasis added). The overall argument of Tompkins, Lauter, and other canon reformers may, 1 believe, be fairly paraphrased as follows; "Since literary standards are factitious and have been established to suit other (conservative) political goals, why shouldn't we establish other standards and other 'classics' that will suit our (liberal) goals?" 48 Other critics, though, have begun to question these arguments and back away from these concluaiona. If literary atandarda are "radically contingent"--aa Barbara Herrnatein Smith, like Lauter, has argued (IS)--then what Justification la there for any aesthetic formulation and any canon? If canon-creation ia really and only a power game, then are the current canon reformers just as guilty of arm-twisting as that "male-dominated cultural elite" they love to hate? Even if canon reformers are more up front about how their "standards" are arrived at, the case remains that their cultural power and dominance is what's permitting these standards to reign. Some critics, furthermore--though they know they will be accused of "nostalgic elitism," as Robert Merrill says (264)--insist that aesthetics are not purely relative or contingent. Annette Kolodny, for instance, while fully agreeing that literary standards are not "infallible, unchangeable, or universal" and require constant reconsideration, notes that "to expose and reexamine is not always to replace." In replacement, ahe warns, we may "throw out some fine babies with the bathwater" (qtd. in Merrill 282). Donna Haraway also has reservations about critics (she's apeaking specifically of feminist critics) who judge all standards, even all knowledge, as simple "power moves, not moves toward truth" (184). Feminists, she argues, "have to 49 insist on a better account of the world; it la not enough to show radical hiatorical contingency and aodea of conatruction for everything*' (187). Pure relativiai won't do. FMiniata, ahe inaista, auat "climb the greaaed pole leading to a uaable doctrine of objectivity" (188). Robert Merrill, in hia defenae of Hemingway against feminist attacks, makes similar claims. Yea, ha readily grants, "all values may be relative, aa people had begun to suspect long before Foucault and Derrida, but this does not require ua to throw up our handa if aaked to decide whether Nathaniel Hawthorne or Susan Warner is the better writer" (265). "Let ua grant," he further aaya, that our atandarda and assumptions are not ordained by some higher power, critical or metaphysical; let ua grant too that our own individual judgments may be culturally biased. Ia this really a good argument to atop making such judgments? <266) Edmund Wilaon raised the same question in 1938--a melancholy reminder of the cyclical nature of auch debates- -when he, though no formalist critic, attacked what he saw as the excesses of a social-baaed (generally Marxist) criticism then in force. The critic who "is merely looking for simple social morals," Wilaon writes, "1b certain to be hopeleealy confused" (205). A literary critic, Wilaon argues, “must be able to tell good from bad, the first-rate from the second-rate. We shall not otherwise write literary criticism at all, but merely aocial or political 50 history as reflected in literary texts" (267). This is precisely what most of today^s Marxist (and cultural, feminist, and new historicist) critics do. The current critical climate, then, as the Wilson quote indicates, represents yet another cycle in the seemingly endless and largely repetitive debate about art: is it autonomous or is it social? trans-historical or historical? should the emphasis be on the text or the context? art for art's sake or art for the world's sake? Academic criticism, like other cycles in art, has made dramatic shifts from a predominately social-polltlca1 orientation (as in the lS90a, 1930s, and now) to a predominately aesthetic orientation (as in the 1910a-20s and 1940a-&0a), while making few stops in between. Criticism which is able to comfortably put its feet in both camps simultaneously tends to come from left-wing but non- academic sources, such as Wilson, George Orwell, Irving Howe, and others. One academic, Yvor Winters (though he called himself a poet first, a critic second), declared that "the paraphraaable content of the work is never equal to the work, and that our theory of literature must account not only for the paraphraaable content but for the work itself" (4). "The critical and the historical understanding," he adds, using these terms to mean the textual and contextual approaches to literature, "are 51 Merely aspects of a single process’* (565). Alfred Kazln, writing at a tiae <1942) when social-baaed criticisa was being challenged by foraallat criticisa, lamented that ’’most serious criticisa of our day*’ is riven by the "twin fanatideas'* of "the purely sociological and the purely t e x t u a l e s t h e t i c ' approach" (x-xi). What is needed. Winters and Kazin argue, is a synthesis of social and aesthetic critlciaa. Tompkins, to ay aind, should be able to say that Wide* WideWorId does helpfully illustrate and dramatize some interesting cultural tendencies, that it perhaps verges on a feminist critique of its society (though 1 find this difficult to swallow), and that for the social historian it is Indeed worth reading and studying, but that the novel itself (rather than its paraphraaable content) remains a shoddy one, full of intellectual inanities--specifically a smug and sappy Christianity--vapid characters, and excessive aentiaentality (the first 27 pages of the book contain 21 mentions of crying), not to mention that the book, for what it delivers, is too God-awful long. Warner unironically presents John Humphreys as the novel's philosophical touchstone: his priggish Christianity and insufferable pedantry are held up as model behavior* Collins of Pride andPrejudice and Cecil of A_Room_With a View have found their day in the sun at the hands of 52 Warner. Warner alao proffers political quietism as the noblest approach to life--Ellen is told by her saintly Mother that "though we must sorrow, we must not rebel" (12)--which Tompkins lauds because it corresponds to her new historiciat belief in the futility of all political action; Warner, furthermore, complacently assumes that New England Protestantism is ultimate truth. Whether Tompkins cannot or will not see these textual (and contextual) shortcomings is irrelevant: the point is that ahe and others are in the position of having no grounds upon which to argue that their students and other readers should bother with any one book over any other aside from popularity or political reasons. These critics, furthermore, can in no way distinguish between books that perform equally important "cultural work": both Widef._Wi.de Wor1d and TheAwakening illustrate important social and cultural trends, both provide endless source material for paraphrasers, therefore they are of equal value. Chopin's ear for nuance and irony, her evocation of Creole sensibility, her careful symbolism, her Gallic brevity and precision, her intellectual depth and restlessness that complicate rather than simplify issues--all this is nothing but bourgeois claptrap to the Tompkinses of the academic world. Why have any intellectual complication? What we want is political blueprints and action! Many of today's 53 canon reformers are the "childish" readers whom Vladimir Nabokov flaila in hia afterword to Lolita, a book the cutting-edgera are aimply unable to read except aa an example of aexiam and an encouragement of sexual abuse. They are contemptuous of or clueleaa about what Nabokov calls “aesthetic bliss"; they instantly smell a reactionary rat. A belief in the "radical contingency" of aesthetic atandarda offers, to repeat, no way in which to distinguish between books. A Danielle Steel novel can in no way be distinguished from The_ Color ..Purple (and many college students and college-educated adults in fact prefer the former): all the arguments that are routinely Invoked by the canon-refoners--that each work needB to be read in the context of the "cultural work" it was intended to perform, that all aesthetic values are contingent and change or that there is no such thing as aesthetics, that unlike our autocratic (and white male) critical predecessor we must not impose necessarily false, invidious, and rigid literary standards, that such standards have served to silence or depreciate marginalized writers and issues, that all standards and Indeed all issues are wide open, that to make judgments is elitist, anti-democratic, and illustrative of the West's ugly hierarchies, etc.--can be just as easily applied here to "prove" that Danielle Steel ia just as 5 4 defensible an author aa Alice Walker. Indeed, given her auch vaater popularity, ahe actually aarves aa a better '‘artifact" for 1iterary/cultural historians than Walker does, just aa the beat-selling Suaan Warner is More "iMportant" than the aparaely-aelling Herman Melville or Thoreau. For all the standard claims for attempting to establish a writer's super tority--sty1ietic felicity and freshness, intellectual daring and depth, imaginative originality, complex characterization, interesting plot line--have been "exposed" for being mere constructs, mere power moves. Thus, we have the paradox of highly trained, well read, educated professors unable Winters pointed out this paradox nearly fifty years ago (which again illustrates the circularity of literary debates >: The professor of English literature, who believes that taste la relative, yet who endeavors to convince his students that Hamlet is more worthy of their attention than some currently popular novel, is in a serious predicament, a predicament which is moral, intellectual, and in the narrowest sense professional, though he commonly has not the wit to realize the fact. (10) Around the same time, James Baldwin, though he veers too much toward the "textual-'esthetic' approach," expresses a similar frustration with a criticism divorced from aesthetics. One ia accuaed of "frivolity" and "decadence," Baldwin writes, if one suggests that a politically laportant and progreaalve novel (such aa UncleTom'aCabin, Baldwin'a subject) ia "both badly written and wildly improbable." "One ia told," Baldwin continues, "to put firat thinga firat, the good of society coming before the niceties of atyle or characterization" (IB). Baldwin arguea, though, that this argument (which la in force today) la the reault of "an insuperable confusion, since literature and aociology are not one and the same" (19). Contemporary canon reformers run into other confusions as well. How, for example, do they evaluate anything that is not socially progressive or does not in any significant way present cultural issues? Can these critics, who fancy themselves aa being liberal, see value in booka that assert an apparently non-liberal position? George Orwell found Gulliver'sTravela to be politically reactionary and morally repugnant, yet said it ia one of the world's best books because of its "terrible intensity of vision" (223). Orwell, writing in 194B, knocks as parochial and short sighted the current critical belief, in British left-wing literary circles, that "any book that has genuine literary merit will also be more or less 'progressive' in tendency" (223). He claims that a good book can be written by "a 56 Catholic, a Coaaunlst, a Faaciat, a Pacifist, an Anarchist, perhaps by an old-atyle Liberal or an ordinary Conservative" (223). Qul Uv e r ' a Travela, Lol ita, and other perceived reactionary books serve as a teat caae, then, for distlnguishing those who value literature for its own sake and those who value it for propagandistic purposea. Can canon reforaera see any value (aside froa serving aa case studies of how not to think politically) in the Fascist- leaning novels of Celine, In aany of the reactionary, anti- deaocratic, and at tiaes anti-Seaitic poeaa of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound, and in the conservative nonfiction prose of Saauel Johnson, Edaund Burke, Alexander Haailton, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and countless others? Has criticisa returned to the aood of Granville Hicks's The Qr9 ®X_Xradltign, which proclaiaed that the only real and great literature was coaaunlst literature, that any writer who falls to "ally hiaself with the working class . . . aerely deceives and confuses hiaself" (303, 304)? Gerald Graff interestingly argues that it was the reaction against Hicks's intellectual vulgarity which aade all political criticism suspect ("American Criticisa" 101), setting the stage for the second generation of New Critics. A reaction, then, to the siaple-ainded "cultural work" critics of today is inevitable. And since the cultural work case is as loopy and lopsided as the Granville Hicks 57 case was, the reaction will aost likely again be an overreaction, kicking in another and equally overstated and insufficient New New Criticism. Thus, I foresee that a "New Aestheticiam" movement will sweep through academia in ten years or so, and any critic who discusses social or political issues in books "texts") will be chuckled at, ridiculed, reviled, etc.. Just as the mention of aesthetics today--in a defense, say, of Lglita--is equivalent to declaring oneself a Nazi. Literary criticism will continue to be trapped by the "twin fanaticisms." Criticism is so accustomed to inhabiting only one house at a time— textual or extra-textual--that my attempt to Inhabit both will most likely appear Impossible or illogical. What I'm saying ia that Tompkins is half-right: that it ia perfectly Justifiable to "value" books that have sensational designs, are sentimental or even melodramatic and crude, and to focus one's attention on a book's parsphrasable content in order to address and analyze social, political, and historical issues. Much of my own discussion focuses on the historical context of Garland's Populist writings (especially in chapter 1 and in other sections), during which time I ignore "literary" concerns. But it is all to get back to Garland and a qualitative assessment of his work; to answer the question, "But is it 58 any good?" What ia not right in the Tompkins model, then, is to "value" sensational designs for their own sake and to ignore all the other “non-paraphrasable" features of the book; to sacrifice everything else as long as needed "cultural work" is being performed, to be solely concerned with the contextual matter. Tompkins is right to say that it is inappropriate to exclude works that contain sentiment and politics, but she is wrong to say that sentiment and politics are enough to include a work. yncleTo»^s_Cabin has sentiment (though not to the extent of WideA_Wide_World> and sensational design, but also contains substantial narrative skill, several believable and compelling characters, some Intellectual depth, and, among other virtues, a defensible ideology and a ati11-compel1ing subject matter; thus it is extremely worthy of inclusion in any American canon. Wide, Wide_World has sentiment and sensational design, but its non-paraphrasable content is juvenile (its paraphraaable content is not much better in my mind) and it is not worthy of inclusion. The New Critical school rejects both books; the canon reformers accept both. The criticism I'm arguing for, that marries formalist and social concerns, would accept one, but not the other. In short, criticism needs to only connect. 59 In reading and judging Garland'a work, it la clear that, a purely political, cultural-work approach la insufficient (just aa a purely aeathetlc approach haa been and reaalna insufficient). Many of hla stories and novela concern the aaae topics--exploitation of woaen, corruption in public office, capitalist depredations on faraera--yet are handled better in aoae works than in others. The paraphraaable content and argument are the same, to use Winters's distinction again, but the works themselves are different. In Garland's better works, the characters dramatize rather than merely enunciate the positions, the conflicts are more intelligently and complexly presented, the writing is fresher, and, among other virtues, the plot la less predictable, all of which I maintain legitimately and necessarily differentiate the works. As a literary critic, therefore, I recognize and note that much of Garland's work is poor and not, to the literary student at least, of much value. There is, in short, a difference between the crude A_Hember_of_the Third House and the more polished A_Spoil _gf_Offi.ce that an exclusively social, cultural work, paraphraaable criticism could not and would not discern, since both novels deal with large and important political issues. Spoil, though it has some stereotyped characters and crude effects, remains a significant work; indeed, I rank it ahead of 60 Janes'a Th«_Wingao£_th«_Dove, that stylistically dense, norally ambiguous, psychologically complex, and epiatemologically sophisticated disaster. But, on the other hand. Member is overly crude, simplistic, a stylistic and narrative disaster. But the canon reformer could in no way distinguish it from Spoil or from, say, The_0ctopua or The_Financier, since all three "texts" deal with political and economic corruption and exploitation, all perform similar "cultural work," all have similar "sensational designs." Any distinction regarding the manner and quality of treatment of those Issues is deemed a bourgeois affectation and deception by moat of today's misguided "literary" critics. Notes 1. Edwin Cady specifically uses this sexual metaphor, indicting Garland for "whoring" in his later work (143). 2. French is apparently unaware of the irony in the comparison to Babbitt. As will be discussed later in this Introduction, the creator of Babbitt, Sinclair Lewis, openly declared that it was Garland who made poaaible hia literary career. 3. Of course, of the relatively few critics who have diacuaaed Garland in the last half-century not all have ridiculed him. Jamea D. Koerner, in hia 1354 "Comment on 'Hamlin Garland's "Decline" from Realism,'" specifically attacks Duffey'a portrayal of Garland aa a literary opportunist <427). Donald Pizer, Garland's best and most thorough critic, argues in various essays and books, especially HamlinGarland'a_Ear1yWorkandCareer (I960), that Garland ia an integral figure in late nineteenth- century American social and literary history. Pizer 61 carefully explores Garland's relation to various political and intellactual aoveaants of the day and argues, in a 1967 essay, that Instead of Merely echoing the decline thesis, critics need to do further research. “What is needed at this point," Pizer says, "is less theorizing about Garland and sore knowledge about his" ("Healin'* 45). Hark Schorer, in 1962, points out that, despite Garland's "well enough known" literary faults, "It is his virtues that literary history of late has neglected to observe" (Afterword 266); Schorer, though revealing his New Critical bias, further states that Garland's stories have Interest beyond "the merely historical** (269). Jases Nagel, who provides a judicious sussing up of Garland criticise through 1962, laments the inability of modern scholarship to arrive at a "balanced assessment" of Garland's "modest but permanent" contribution to American literature (1). And, among other examples, in the recent Cglumbla_Literary_History_gf_the yolt.ed_States (1966), Eric Sundquist praises Garland's "panoramic intensity and acute historical consciousness" (E. Elliott 519-20). Still, the very brevity of Sundquist's comments and the barely noticeable trickle of any kind of commentary in recent decades reinforces my main point about Garland's increasing obscurity. 4. Regional writers in general were demoted during the New Critical years. The term itself, like its virtual synonym "local colorists," helped feed this demotion. Paul Lauter notes that "designating certain works, like those of Stowe, Hary Wilkins Freeman, Charles Cheatnutt, or Hamlin Garland as 'reglonaliat' effectively helped limit perception of their value as well as their use in curricula" (xx), Other names could be added, such as Alice French, Hary Hurfree (Garland admired the work of both of these writers), George Washington Cable, and Joel Chandler Harris. Some of these "regionallata" have been recently promoted, moat notably Kate Chopin, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the first three writers mentioned by Lauter. Amy Kaplan Interestingly argues that the reigning "romance thesis,** most associated with Richard Chase, also served to demote certain works and limit the canon. By claiming that the romance is a particularly American novellstic form. Chase and others made realism appear as "an anomaly in American fiction . . . an inherently flawed Imitation of a European convention . . . un-American” (4). This, Kaplan argues, helps to explain the "toppling of Theodore Dreiser from the American pantheon" (4). Thus, Garland, as a "regional1st" and as a "realist," was doubly damned by these New Critical literary approaches and philosophiea. 62 5. A biography was published in 1976 in tha Twayne series, Joaaph McCullough's Ha*lln_Garland> but. since this series publishes a study on nearly every American writer, its appearance signalled no special or newfound interest in Garland. 6. The 1692 Omaha Platform, aa well as several other important Alliance-Populist platforms, are conveniently grouped in the Appendix to John Hicks's The.Popu11st Revolt, pp. 427-44, All references to the various platforma will come from this Appendix and will be labelled "Hicks Appendix." 7. The wealth-diatribution statistic cornea from an 1669 study by Thomas G. Shearman, p. 42. This statistic, or one very similar, was quoted widely in many contemporary newspapers, magazines, and books. An 1690 editorial in the Farmera'Alliancs, for example, makes the identical claim that 25,000 people control one-half of the nation's wealth, adding that the next 5,000 richest people own another 1/10 of the wealth: thus, 30,000 people control three-fifths of the nation's wealth. “Our country," the editorial continues, “ia fast going the way of Egypt, of Greece, of Rome, that is, to the certain death that awaits all nations alike when the wealth of all falls into the hands of the grasping few" (Editorial 16). George K. Holmes, in an 1693 article that Norman Pollack calls "the classic study" of wealth distribution" (Response 76), comes up with slightly lower figures, arguing that .03* of the population owns 20x of the national wealth, and that 9* owns 71*. A modern historian, Harold U. Faulkner, claims that “it is safe to conclude that 80 per cent of Americans lived in 1900 on the margin of subsistence while the remaining 20 per cent controlled almost the entire wealth of the country" (91). 6. McHurtry makes clear that many of the so-called "Triumphaliata" were just as aware of and forthcoming about the “messy truths" of the West as today's “breathless revisionists" are (33, 34). In attempting to balance the picture of the West, furthermore, many revisionists, as Richard White argues (35), have created new imbalances resulting in a ati11-aimpllstic, though reversed, stereotype: the good old West is now the bad old West. 9. This attack resurfaced in the 1970s with Karel Bicha's book WesternPopul1amJ^Studies_inAmbiyalent_Conaeryatis», which set off another round of historiographic debates. See the exchange between Bicha and Peter Argersinger in Agricultural_History 56 (1984), pp. 43-69. 63 10. Of courat, I > not. the firat or only peraon who has noticed and attacked what ia to aa the patent intellectual aloppineaa of aoat new hiatoriciata. Brook Thoaaa'a recent book, The_NewHiatoricl§!»?nd_Oth«rgid;Fa§bio[!#d_Tgpica <1991), though it auffera froa aoae bloated acadeaic proae, ia a auperbly documented critique of new hletoriciaa; especially noteworthy la Thoaaa'a perauaalve debunking of Walter Benn Michaela. After deatroying aoat of Miehael'a theories and stateaenta, Thoaaa concludes: "To read a Michaela eaaay againat the grain ia to expoae it to the ragged edgea of history that he triea to weave together into a unified structure" <133). CHAPTER I "Ho! for the Golden Uleet": The Promise of the New Frontier In Hamlin Garland's early short story "Up the Coule" (collected in Maln-Travelled Roads, 1831). one of the main characters. Grant HcLane, has come to a horrible realization. Like farmers all across the prairies and plains in the last years of the nineteenth century, he has learned that farming is a nearly hopeless struggle, a life of dirt, drudgery, and deprivation that results more often than not in impoverishment, if not in bankruptcy and insanity. "Anything under God's heavens is better 'n farmin'," Grant exclaims (b2). Garland's character is voicing no merely localized or temporary complaint. Farming in the post-Civil War years was, aa Richard Hofetadter writes, suffering through an extended period "of economic tragedies and largely futile struggles against money and monopoly" (American 177). In western Kansas, for example, in lust four years (1888 to 1892) a full one-half of the farming-dominated population was forced to abandon its land, leaving behind empty homes and ghost towns (Mark 474); in South Dakota, 30,000 farmers 64 65 went bankrupt in the same four-year period (Billington 733). In some Kansas counties, 90% of the farms were taken over by loan companies (Hicks 84), John Hicks notes that "whole districts in this region (the western halves of Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota] were almost totally depopulated" (34). The immigration tide had reversed: John Chamberlain writes that "a bystander at the Missouri bridge at Omaha in 1890 might have counted thousands of creaky covered wagons--going eastt" (28). Land-tenancy rates skyrocketed all across the country, with 25.5% of all farmers reduced to tenant or sharecropping status by 1880, a rate that grew to 35.3% by 1900. In that year, the rate was a staggering 62% in Mississippi--the setting and situation explored in William Faulkner's short story "Barn Burning"--61% in South Carolina, 60% in Georgia. 58% in Louisiana and Alabama, and 50% in Texas. Rates were lower in the new farming lands in the West, mostly because of the absence of a large and impoverished black population, yet distress was still high: tenancy and sharecropping rates, in 1900, reached 39% in Illinois, 35% in Kansas and Iowa, 31% in Missouri, 27% in Nebraska, and 22% in South Dakota (Shannon 418). According to historian Harold U. Faulkner, the closing decade of the 19th century "marked in many ways the lowest status of the farmer in American history" (48). Grant McLane, like many farmers, realizes that "farmin' 66 ain't, so fr«e a life as it used to be. . . . [A farmer! simply wallers around in the manure for somebody else" <86- 87) . Farming life in the "new West" of the prairies and Great Plains was not supposed to be like this. Millions of American and European emigrants had gone west, especially in the years after the Civil War. to enioy what was promised to be the freedom and wealth of the still untapped frontier beyond the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, the so-called Middle Border (a term popularized by Garland, and which refers to the westward shifting "border" of settlement through the country's middle regions). Garland's own family followed this shifting border from Wisconsin, to two different farms in Iowa, and finally to the Dakota Territory, with the conviction (especially held by Garland's father) that each move would bring them the riches the West was promised to contain. But the family became--as did Grant McLane in "Up the Coule" and untold others--disi 1lusioned and embittered by their actual farming experiences, and when Garland began writing in the late 1880s the despair of the Middle Border settlers was leading to massive flight and mounting rebellion. In the Wisconsin of "Up the Coule," years of hard labor have netted the settlers nearly nothing: they live in bare, ramshackle houses, many are forced to rent, and most 67 feel like slaves <66). Grant, hiaself grows "sore an' aore down-hearted an' glooay every day,*' and his sother fears that he is going insane (94). He tells his brother, Howard, that "life ain't worth very Much to ae. . . . I'm a dead failure. I've come to the conclusion that life's a failure for ninety-nine per cent of us" (101). Thus, "most all the boys have gone West" (61), looking, as Garland's own family did, for the economic security and good life that have continued to elude them. Some of the settlers, though, remain behind and are beginning to take the path toward the Democratic Party and radicalism (65). The story, thus, powerfully captures the various moods and actions that were sweeping the beleaguered West in these years: despair and disillusionment, which was creating flight and rebellion. The prevailing mood in “Up the Coule," however, ia one of bitter hopelessness. Grant, though only 30 years old, spurns his brother's offer of help in the story's last scene because he feels "it's too late" (lOl). Garland was determined to explain the causes of this despair and the resultant anger and rebellion. He and other Populists believed that the post-Civil War settlement of the new West--land stretching from roughly the 9bth meridian to the Rocky Mountains, containing the western portion of the prairies and all of the Great Plains--was a 66 deceptively tangled process and a thoroughgoing tragedy, one especially bitter because it was for the moat part man- made and therefore avoidable. The roots of this tragedy lay deep in American history, politics, and ideology, and in order to understand the ongoing anger and rebellion among the Middle Border settlers. Garland and other Populist writers often referred to these root causes: Jeffersonian agrarianism and the subsequent ideological idealization of rural life; national and state public land disposal practices; the financing and construction of railroads; currency and tariff policies, especially as espoused by the Eastern Republican power base; the very mechanics (and seemingly inevitable corruptions) of American political institutions; and the theory and practice of American business, such as laissez-faire capitalism and the formation of trusts. Populists believed that these and other aspects of American life constituted a "vast conspiracy against mankind," as their preeminent document, the 1892 Populist Party Platform, proclaimed (Hicks Appendix 440). Garland, though primarily concerned with describing the current despair and qrowing rebellion in the new West, makes repeated reference in hie writings to these root causes in order to explain why the mass of settlers had landed in such a "slough of discouragement," as he wrote in hia autobiography ASonof the Middle Border 69 (425)- Only by understanding the promises and ideals connected to the eettleaent of the new West does Garland's work and the angry and rebellious Populist mood become clear.Cl] 1 - The Desert in the West The Middle Border settlers had poured into a vast region of the country that, lust a few years earlier, was considered to be an uninhabitable wasteland: the changed perception of the new West is the first tangled and tragic aspect of the settlement process. Up through the time of the Civil War. the land west of the 95th meridian was for the most part empty of white settlers, a large, flat. dry. treeless region used to drive cattle through, fight and put displaced Native Americans in, or cross over to reach what was thought to be the more fruitful lands beyond the Rocky Mountains. The 1840s. for example, had seen thousands of "overlanders" take the Oregon Trail to the Pacific Coast in hopes of seizing opportunities that the intervening plains did not apparently offer. The settlement of the United States "leapfrogged over the Great Plains," as one historian explains, "jumping ahead to the Pacific Coast" of Kansas and Nebraska and to the 98th in Texas (Shannon 26> . Host settlers were still sore interested in the newly acquired lands of California and Oregon than in the enpty and seemingly valueless plains. The area between the 95th meridian and the Rocky Mountains was devoid of agricultural settlers largely because it was considered to be unfit for farming: indeed, many maps in use before, during, and after the Civil War labelled this region the "Great American Desert." This designation had its origin in 1810 with the publication of the journals of Zebulon Pike, an early explorer of the plains. He asserted that the region was a "sterile waste like the sandy deserts of Africa" and that this desert, "unsuited to any kind of agriculture,*' would restrict settlement to the borders of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers (Smith, Virgin 175). Thus, the plains would be left, as Pike said, to the "wandering and uncivilized aborigines of the country" (qtd. in Limerick 16). This notion of a Great American Desert was confirmed by the Stephen Long expedition into the West in 1819-20; following this journey. Long produced "a map on which he laid down the Great American Desert, and thus the desert region became a reality to the American mind*’ (Webb 147). James Fenimore Cooper's ThePrairie (1827), the most famous fictional rendering of this region before the Civil War, echoes the assessments of Pike and Long. In fact. Cooper, who never visited the region he described in the novel (Overland 77), obtained his notions of the land from a close readlng--and occasionally a close transcription--of Long's account, which had been published in 1823, four years before The_Prairie appeared. Indeed, Orm Overland argues that Long's book was “the book on Cooper's desk" during the composition of the novel. And this "dependency . . . on one single source"--which Overland labels "laziness" (97)--helped perpetuate the idea of the Great American Desert. The Prairie is set in what Cooper calls "the American deserts" (40), 500 miles west of the Mississippi River on the "denuded plains that stretch to the Rocky Mountains” (6); this "barrier of desert" has been placed by nature. Cooper argues, in order to prevent "the extension of our population in the West" (9). In Cooper's 1849 introduction to the novel, he writes that the "absence of the two great necessities"— "wood and water"— render this region "incapable of sustaining a dense population" (4). This ugly, denuded land is "the final gathering place of the red man" <4>, lust as Zebulon Pike had sard in 1810, and serves in the novel as a metaphor for the misuse of other lands of the continent. Leather-Stocking (called "the trapper" in this novel) says that "1 often think the Lord has placed this barren belt of prairie behind the 72 St.at.ea to warn aen what their folly May yet bring to the land ! *' ( 24) . Later commentators followed and strengthened the Pike- Lonq-Cooper assessment of the trans-Mississippi lands. The following decade witnessed another famous writer subscribing to the idea of the Great American Desert. Alexis de Tocqueville, like Cooper, never visited the plains, yet that did not stop him from claiming that the "immense plains" on the western side of the Mississippi River are "covered with a granitic sand and irregular masses of atone" as one approaches the Rocky Mountains (20). As Patricia Limerick points out, Tocqueville "had fallen for the reports of explorers like Stephen Long" and for the "myth of the Great American Desert," a myth "powerful enough to trick wise people like Tocqueville" ( 3) . Even people who actually travelled through the plains could not escape the power of this myth; their belief in the Desert tradition and in the very maps they used counteracted any contradictory evidence around them. Thomas J. Farnham journeyed across the plains in 1639 and wrote (in his 1843 book, Trayels_in_the_Great Western Prairies) that the Great American Desert extends 300 miles east of the Rocky Mountains and is nothing but a "burnt and arid desert" (qtd. in Smith, Virgin 204). The most famous 73 overlander, Francis Parkaan, was equally tricked, Travelling on the Oregon Trail in 1846, three years after the Oregon eaigratlon boos had begun, he describes the Platte River Valley in central Nebraska as a "boundless waste" (58), a "sun-scorched landscape" (101) filled with "huge skulls and whitening bones of buffalo" (82) and with "lizards dart ting] over the sand" (81). The Platte River, Parkaan writes, is at the center of "'The Great American Desert'--extending for hundreds of miles to the Arkansas on one side, and the Missouri on the other" (81). In short, the Great Plains, to Parkman'e eyes, are "an expanse of hot, bare sand" (81-2). Such first-hand reports persisted through the Civil War. In 1884, General John Pope, sent West to fight Indians after failing to successfully fight the Confederates at the Second Battle of Bull Run, claimed that "the great region now roamed over by the Indians offers no inducements to settlement and cultivation." Pope, like Pike and Cooper, saw the plains as a fitting habitation for the Indians since no white man could conceive of desiring this land. "There is no longer the necessity of interfering with the wild Indians of the great plains," Pope stated, "further than to secure immunity of travel for white emigrants" (qtd. in Robbins 226). And secondary reports continued to echo the Pike-Long- Cooper-Tocqueville-Farnham-Parkman-Pope view. The 1840s 74 were in fact "the heyday of the Great American Deaert idea," according to hiatorian Martyn Bowden (56). An 1S44 article in the BritiahandFoieign_Raview argued that "an impassable wilderness extends for several hundred miles east of the Rocky Mountains" (qtd. in Unruh 5>. A July 1845 article in the New York Herald commended the pioneers who journeyed over the Oregon Trail to the Pacific Coast for enduring the "hazardous and exhausting Journey of the American Desert, and of that waste and wilderness of the Rocky Mountains" (qtd. in Unruh 25). Some travellers were so convinced of the accuracy of these reports that when they Journeyed across this region they used camels (Webb 199-200). The editor of the NewGeneaeeFarmer, for example, suggested that overlanders should use camels for transportation since the region was "likely to remain impenetrable" by other forms of transportation (Unruh 27). "As late as 1861," as Everett Dick points out, a United States senator, in opposing the admission ol Kansas into the Union as a state, declared that "alter we pass west of the Missouri River, except upon a few streams, there is no territory fit for settlement or habitation. It is unproductive. It is like a barren waste." (1 - 2) Legislation affecting the region was oftentimes labelled as "Desert Acts" all the way up to the year of 1877. As John Unruh notes, "The myth of the American desert persevered in some quarters until almost I860" (3). 75 This, then, was the Desert. Myth, one palpably aythlcal. Original Misperceptions by Pike and Long, which Made "the Moderately arid and treeless Plains register as full-scale deserts" (LiMerick 3>, had been coepounded and perpetuated by second-hand reports, "laziness," tradition, faulty Maps, and the power of Myth. Some careful observation and the bravery to discount an inherited idea would overturn the myth of the Great American Desert. For the only real American desert is west of the Rockies, not east. Furthermore, much of the land beyond the 95th meridian was and is fertile, especially that which lies between the 95th and 98th meridian (the latter being the approximate dividing line for the Great Plains), such as eastern and central Nebraska and Kansas, and the eastern Dakotas; this land, in fact, is still part of the more humid prairie lands. But many earlier settlers, also carrying and trusting maps with the "Great American Desert" plastered across the middle, travelled beyond these fertile lands to settle in the more agriculturally precarious lands west of the Rocky Mountains. The Desert Myth, then--this "nonmaterial force," as Henry Nash Smith calls it ("Symbol" 29>--undoubtedly misled many early pioneers, causing them to bypass good land in order to farm poorer land, and certainly brought about the odd “leapfrog" of settlement that Limerick describes. Parkman notes, in a somewhat 76 confusing passage, that he and other emigrants passed over a "wide and fertile belt that extends for several hundred miles beyond the extreme frontier," which questions, implicitly, the wisdom of the overlanders' venturing all the way to Oregon instead of taking advantage of the good land of this "intervening country" (43). Hence, this belief in the American Desert had--as most historians believe, with the exception of Bowden--a direct impact on the settlement of the country. The concept of the Great American Desert, as Maxine Benson writes, "became fixed in the minds of the American people and to a large extent blocked expansion and settlement in the region until after the Civil War” (xiv). Ray Allen Billington, in his immense study of American settlement, argues that until after the Civil War the impression persisted that the farming frontier could never invade that inhospitable region. For a generation the Great Plains were looked upon as a barrier standing between the Mississippi Valley and the fertile areas beyond, to be passed over as quickly as possible. (413-14) It is, of course, certainly true that much of the land between the 96th meridian and the Rocky Mountains is comparatively dry--most parts receive less than 20 inches of rainfall a year, which is generally considered the minimum amount needed for successful agriculture--and these lands are clearly flat and treeless. But a real desert receives under 10 inches of rainfall annually (arid conditions), has sparse vegetation, and is wholly or partly 77 sandy. The Great Plains, on the other hand, are aemlarid (seaning they receive 10 to 20 inches of annual rainfall) and the ground underfoot is composed of dark and occasionally humid soils, not of sand. By using this ground wisely, it could be made arable. And indeed, the major inherent barriers to farming this land--the related problems of treelessness and dryness. Cooper's "wood and water-were being solved by agricultural innovations of the mid- to late-nineteenth century. These innovations included the development of dry farming (a variety of techniques used to preserve and maximize the use of the small amount of precipitation); the invention of various farming equipment, such as a chilled- iron plow, a spring-tooth harrow (soon replaced by grain drills and listers), a baling press, a cornhusker, and a progressively sophisticated harvester culminated by the combine (Billington 692-97; Merk 433-37): the use of fertilizers: and the importation of tougher seed, the most famous being the Russian "Turkey Red" wheat, which could survive in semiarid conditions. These innovations produced remarkable results: an acre of wheat, which had once required 61 hours of labor to produce from the initial plowing and seeding to harvest, now required only three hours of labor. A single farmer in 1890 could effectively plant and harvest 135 acres of wheat, whereas before he 78 could do no more than seven and a half acres (Billington 697). Furthermore, a revolution in the methods of grain handling, namely the grain elevator system, slso allowed for the massive storage and transportation of grain Ctterk 435-37). Finally, hopeful and viable plans for Irrigation and well construction in the late nineteenth century, when combined with the innovations mentioned above, offered genuine solutions to the aemlarid, though not arid, conditions of the plains. Another problem for the settlers of the new West was the lack of timber (Cooper's "wood"). East of the 98th meridian, trees were the primary material used for the construction of fences and homes; without trees it was seemingly impossible for farmers to build a place to live, prevent livestock from trampling their crops, or keep their property separate and secure from other farmers. The Great Plains also lacked stones and, for the most part, the ability to support the planting of hedges, both occasionally used as substitute fencing in the East. Various remedies--new kinds of hedges, wire fencing, importing of wood--were tried in the early years of the settlement of the treeless West and all failed. The problem was so grievous that "this factor alone prevented thousands of emigrants from establishing themselves in the prairie states" (Hayter 94). The solution, of course, was 73 the famous invention of barbed wire, usually credited to Joseph Glidden of Dekalb, Illinois, in 1873 (Hayter 230; Webb 298). As for homes, the ground itself provided the building material, and thus the sod-buster living in "dugouts" or "soddiea” became a trademark of early plains life. But all these inventions and innovations were, unfortunately and significantly, not the Major spur for overhauling the Desert Myth nor for the subsequent mass migration to the new West. The real spurs were cultural and political, based on a counter myth, one that was more embedded in the national psyche and hence more powerful: the Agrarian Myth. And the reappearance of this myth, especially in the 1840s and afterwards, would prove even more misleading and destructive than the Desert Myth. This Agrarian Myth, as applied to the plains region, served to conjure a Desert into a Garden, one not requiring any special approach to make it arable. The Agrarian Myth, like the Desert Myth, blinded people--both from afar and those travelling to and in the lands themselves--to what was really around them. While the Desert Myth had made the Plains a "burnt and arid desert,” as Farnham had said, the Agrarian Myth made it a farming wonderland, an Eden of fertility and beauty. The Desert Myth caused the foolish leapfrog settlement of the West; the Agrarian Myth caused 80 the equally fooliah over-concentrated settlement of the West. But, meanwhile, the true geologic and climatic conditions were unchanged by any mythologizing, and thia latest myth would lead to massive disillusionment and rebellion, mostly because it obscured the stubborn realities of the plains and discounted the agricultural innovations needed to deal with those realities. The tragedy of the settlement of the Great Plains from the 1870s to the end of the century is the result of a society crippled by its inability to distinguish myth from rea lity. 2 - The Garden in the West To comprehend the force of the Agrarian Myth and its ability to redirect and upend attitudes toward the new West, Henry Nash Smith in hie invaluable study VirginLand (1950), compares Francis Parkman's 1849 description of the Nebraska plains as an "expanse of hot, bare sand" with this 1881 description of a quarter section of land in the same state of Nebraska: "It is a museum of wonder and value. . a pearl in an emerald setting" (182-83>. This "transformation" of attitudes, as Smith points out, had taken Just thirty years (213>. How and why did thia transformation occur? Part of the reason was that the Desert Myth was an absurd exaggeration of the conditions of the plains, one Justly 81 correctable. John Fremont, who In 1858 became the Republican Party'a presidential candidate, made a aeriea of tripa through the plaina in the late 1830a and early 1840a and clearly saw arable land (Dary 227-28); in the late 18S0a, another revisionist explorer, William Reynolds, also declared that agriculture was possible in the plaina. though he carefully atreased that the dry climate would make it difficult (Dary 228). Sober r©assessments such aa these, however, were not the principal cause for the death of the Desert Myth. Hot aand became a pearl because of the counter myth, the Agrarian Myth, which, to repeat, had little to do with an increaaed understanding of the physiographic features of the plains and how to beat adapt to them. The Great American Desert became the Great American Eden because of embedded myths concerning the farmer and farming life in America. Farmers and farming life had traditionally been seen as the exemplars of America and American institutions, making possible the glorious freedom, democracy, clasaleasness, hopes, and dreams of the nation. The farmer--with his "honest industry, his independence, his frank spirit of equality, hie ability to produce and enjoy a simple abundance" (Hofatadter, Age 23>--was considered the backbone of the true American body politic. Thia yeoman farmer, who was supposedly "independent of the 82 Marketplace as he was of the favors of others" and who "owned a small farm and worked it with the aid of hia family," waa "the incarnation of the simple, honest, independent, healthy, happy human being," as Richard Hofatadter ironically puts it (Age 37, 24>. These notions formed the base of the Agrarian Myth and were considered indisputable truths to most Americana well before the discovery of the new Ueat. From at least the seventeenth century, countless American politicians and writers of all sorts paid homage to the glories of agrarian life and saw it as having significant American applications. Ben Franklin, for example, argued that "the great Business of the Continent is Agriculture" (qtd. in Smith, Virgin 125). This attitude was developed and further popularized by the "best known expositors of the agrarian philosophy in the generation after Franklin": J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur and Thomas Jefferson (Smith, Virgin 126). Crevecoeur, in hia well known Letter III, "What is an American?" of Letters_froman American Farmer (1762), saw in American farming the root of all the elements--the presence of democratic egalitarianism, industry, and sobriety, and the absence of religious zeal, poverty, crime, and class envy--that made America "the most perfect society now existing in the world" (67>. 83 Jefferson's belief in the Agrarian Myth waa even stronger, and hia detailed articulation of it aade him the Myth's patron saint. From Locke and the French Physiocrats he developed the notion that agriculture waa the source both of a nation's wealth and of its moral and social values (Griswold). Jefferson wanted a rural not an industrial republic because commerce and industry, he believed, lead to employee status, and this "dependence begets subservience and venality, Candl suffocates the germ of virtue" <161>. So, as he continues in "Query XIX" of his Hotes^on the Stat® of Virginia (1787), "let our workshops remain in Europe" and thereby prevent the creation of industrial centers and urban "mobs" which "add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body” (162). Jefferson believed, as he wrote to John Jay in 1785, that "cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous" (530-31). And in a widely quoted phrase, Jefferson proclaimed in another 1785 letter that "small land owners are the moat precious part of a state” (qtd. in Griswold 661); in Notes gn_the_State_of Virginia, he similarly wrote that "those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God" (lbl). 84 For Jefferson and others, these agrarian notions led to the belief that it was the government's responsibility to remove all impediments to westward expansion and to foster agriculture in all cases, for if the country ran out of farming land and the people "get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as Europe” (Jefferson 566>. Jefferson's own political program reflected this desire to create a country forever agrarian. In his home state, he tried to ensure that every Virginian would own his own small plot of land (50 acres), and he successfully pushed through bills that abolished primogeniture and entail in order to prevent "the creation and perpetuation of a landed aristocracy" (Griswold 660); his proposals amounted to an earlier version of the Homestead Act (Smith, Virgin 128). And. nationally, he set up the Northwest Ordinance and engineered the 1803 Louisiana Purchase in order to create a huge supply of free lands. "Our governments will remain virtuous," he wrote in a 1787 letter, "as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America" (565-66). As long as "we have land to labor," he wrote in Ngteaon_the_State_of Virginia, "let ua never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff" (161-62). And though Jefferson later backed off from his desire for a purely agrarian country-- he eventually believed that the United States should have 8 5 "an equilibrium of agriculture, Manufactures and commerce" (qtd. in Griswold 870)--hia early agrarianism remained hugely influential and was repeatedly invoked by hia followera. Later agrarian ldealizera clearly depended on these early formulations of the Agrarian Myth. A late eighteenth-century description of Kentucky calls it a "land of promise, flowing with milk and honey" (qtd. in Smith, ¥A?T9iD 129). James B. Lannan, who lived in Michigan during its settlement boom of the 1830s, argued that "agricultural enterprises . . . should be encouraged as a safeguard of a country, the promoter of its virtue, and solid foundation of its permanent happiness and most lasting independence": in his discussion of urban life, furthermore, lannan employs Jefferson's own metaphor, calling cities "sores of the political body" and full of "pernicious Influences" (qtd. in Smith, Virgin 142-43). In 1851--on the eve of the opening of the new West and as the Desert Myth was startinq to be dismantled--these notions were being aired again. Representative George Julian of Indiana declared that a farmer's life "does not impose excessive toil, and yet it discourages idleness. The farmer lives in rustic plenty, remote from the contagion of popular vices, and enjoys, in their greatest fruition, the blessings of health and contentment" (qtd. in Smith, Virgin 171). Thus, tha Agrarian Hyth was applied to each succeeding frontier, from the trans-Allegheny to the Northwest (Smith, Virgin 142). Alan Trachtenberg notes that "Agriculture then seemed to most Americana the truest foundation of national wealth, and uncharted acres beyond the Appalachians stirred visions of a Western 'garden' tended by yeomen-farmers" (11). In the 1650a these visions had become an established part of the newly formed Republican Party, whose very name was freighted with homage to Jefferson and his agrarian beliefs. In I860, president elect Abraham Lincoln declared that "in regard to the homestead bill, . . . I am in favor of settling the wild lands into small parcels so that every poor man may have a home” (qtd. in Robbins 206). And by this time a new concept, one adumbrated by Lanman's term "safeguard," had entered the mythology: the West was not only a guarantee of America's egalitarian institutions, it was also a guarantee of social order, a "safety valve," which would prevent the appearance on these shores of a specter that waa haunting Europe, namely that of a turbulent and rebellious proletariat. This concept, though connected to Jefferson's notion of urban "mobs,” assumed a newer and more palpable form in these years. This waa the threat of 1846, contained both in the revolutions of that year and in the appearance of Marx and Engels' Cgmmunist_Manifesto. The 87 older agrarlaniSK of Crevecoeur, Jefferson, and others, then, waa joined by a newer and specifically political sgrerlaniss, if not outright political fear, to strengthen and perpetuate the Agrarian Myth, The Republicans, drawing support froa both their Jeffersonian and Whig traditions, vigorously supported and ultiaately passed into law (Lincoln signed the bill) what they believed would satisfy the older and newer goals of their agrarianiaa: the 1862 Homestead Act. As Henry Nash Saith points out, this newer political version of the Agrarian Myth had received its first thorough formulation by the National Land Refora movement under the leadership of George Henry Evans (1805-1856). Evans, a devotee of Thomas Jefferson, had emigrated to America from England in 1820 and had soon become involved with the growing labor movement. But when the Panic of 1837 torpedoed that movement, Evans went into seclusion for seven years, re-emerging with a new plan to protect the rights of labor. He now believed that if the West waa opened up and properly administered--meaning, with Jefferson, If land was made cheap and farm units were kept small and non-transferrable--it would siphon off unemployed and underpaid laborers from the industrial East and thus, as he said, "prevent such a surplus of workmen in factories as would place the whole body (as now) at the mercy of the ea factory owners" (qtd. in Smith, Virgin 169). All workers would be happy, either by staying in the factories and earning decent wages (because there would no longer be an overabundance of laborers driving down wages) or by hitting the sunset trail and starting up farms in the West. In a November 1644 article in the Wgrking_ Man^e Advocate, the New York-baaed labor Journal that Evans edited, Evans echoed Jefferson's concern about the ills of "dependence." He wrote that the current land system is "fast debasing us to the condition of dependant tenants, of which condition a rapid increase of inequality, misery, pauperism, vice, and crime are the necessary consequences" ("Memorial" 120). To solve these problems, he urged that "Public Lands . . . be laid out in Farms and Lots for the free use of such citizens (not poaaeaaed of other land) sa will occupy them" (120). This "Agrarian plan” would create "Equal Right to the Soil," which would have manifold benefits, among them a reduction of city populations, curtailment of land speculation, and "universal peace and universal freedom" (121-22). Soon Evans was urging workingmen to "Vote yourself a farm" in order to "disarm this aristocracy [of avarice) of its chief weapon" and bring to an end "the antagonism of capital and labor" ("Vote" 123-24). 69 Evans's campaign acquired a very prominent adherent in the 1840a: Horace Greeley. Greeley "studied the columna of Evans's paper, . . . attended their (the land ref on e r s ' ] weekly meetings, . . . and reprinted their ideas in the Tribune," the paper Greeley owned and edited (Robbins lOO); he even used Evans's cry of "Vote yourself a farm" in his own articles (Commager, Era 123). But while Evans's principal concern was for the rights of labor, Greeley's was for social order. He was troubled by the growing numbers of homeless and unemployed people roaming New York City, numbers increasingly augmented by the first massive tide of immigration to the United States (the rate of immigration increased sixfold from the period of 1820-40 to the period of 1840-60 [Divine 361]), and by January 1846 he was citing the plan of Evans's National Reformers as "the best that can be devised" to address this problem (qtd. in Robbins 102). Soon, Greeley became the most prominent advocate of a homestead act, and made its passage one of the central planks of the new Republican Party, which he had helped found in 1654. In that year he made a classic statement of his homestead beliefs. In a Tribune article, he urged the government to Hake the Public Lands free in qusrter-sections to Actual Settlers and deny them to all others [to prevent land speculation), and earth's landless millions will no longer be orphans and mendicants. . . . When employment fails or wages are Inadequate, they may pack up and strike westward to enter upon the possession and 90 culture of their own lands . . . EWork-stoppage strikes! will be glaringly absurd when every citizen is offered the alternative to work for others or for himself . . . The mechanic or laborer who works for another will do so only because he can thus secure a more liberal and satisfactory recompense than he could by working for himself. (qtd. in Smith, Virgin 201-02) Fellow Republican James R. Doolittle, a senator from Wisconsin, argued that a homestead act would "postpone for centuries, if it will not forever, all serious conflict between capital and labor in the older free States" (qtd. in Smith, Virgin 205). The Homestead Act, to Republicans such as Greeley and Doolittle, would be the greatest strike-breaker ever, worth a thousand Pinkertons. They wanted to avoid the ills that both Jefferson and Evans saw in crowded industrial centers, not so much for the sake of the worker, but, as said, for the worker's employer, the capitalist claas--the merchants, bankers, industrialists, factory owners— who wished to keep their streets free of beggars and their work force free of "European" agitation. Greeley's famous remark, "Go West, young man, go forth into the Country," is best understood, then, as a proclamation of the revamping of the original Agrarian Myth of Crevecoeur and Jefferson to include this newer political goal of social order, a "safety valve." In other words, Greeley was hoping that the country's unhappy young workers would leave the city, not dynamite it. 91 The Republican East assuredly had another Motivation for supporting a homestead act: homesteading would accelerate Western settlement that would require concomltants, such as railroads, banking offices, grain and livestock processing centers, etc., which it could establish and invest in. The West would provide seemingly safer Investment opportunities than the industrial East, with its dizzying and destructive cycles of business booms and busts; ma.1or economic panics had occurred in 1819, 1837, 1857, and 1873, making even the most sanguine capitalist uneasy. Thia new land would also generate new consumers for its products--shoes, textiles, home and farm goode--a prospect that convinced many reluctant industrialists, who liked having an oversupply of workers, to support the Homestead Act (Merk 230). Trachtenberg claims that the Republicans supported homesteading proposals with two goals in mind: to provide an agricultural "safety valve" for surplus or discontented urban workers, and a Western population base for an enlarged domestic market for manufactured goods. . . . Thus, Incorporation took swift possession of the garden, mocking those who lived by the hopes of the cultural myth. (21. 22) When the settlement booms did occur in the West--from the end of the Civil War to the Panic of 1873 and then the larger one of roughly 1878 to 1886--lt was. as Smith notes, "not surprising that enthusiasm for the development of the 92 West became widespread in Eastern cities" (Virgin 184-85). Capital flew to the new West: "In Massachusetts alone," Frederick Merk points out, "the amount of capital invested in western farm mortgages in the 1880s amounted to 8 or 10 million dollars annually" (473). Thus, for reasons of social order and economic prospects, Evans's and Greeley's safety-valve theory and homestead proposal became official Republican doctrine. The party and its Eastern power base could proffer this proposal under the cover of the older, traditional version of the Agrarian Myth--namely that it was to ensure egalitarianism, promote yeoman values, etc.--when for many Whiggish Republicans the goal of the proposal lay in the newer political version of the myth, namely that the "safety valve" would eliminate radicalism and create new profit opportunities. These strands of politics and ideology led to the passage of the Homestead Act in May 1862, the legal incarnation of the Agrarian Myth. All of the benefits of the opening of the Weat--expanded farming opportunities, perpetuation of American institutions, prevention of a pauperized, restive proletariat--were seemingly about to be realized. The Act's purpose, stated in its opening lines, was "to secure homesteads to actual settlers on the public domain." Any male or female head of family, 21 years of age or older, could claim "one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands" and would receive a “final certificate" for the land after five years Provided, as the Act emphasized, the settler had not claimed any other public land, was not claiming the land on behalf of any other person, and had cultivated the land, erected a dwelling-house, and continued to reside upon the land; the only cost involved waa a $10 registration fee ("Homestead Act"). These provisions were intended to prevent speculators from buying up large tracts of land and using or selling them for purposes other than cultivation. Thus, the deeply held beliefs of Crevecoeur, Jefferson, Evans, Greeley, and others had found their expression: America would remain agrarian and thus egalitarian; in addition, it would be forever free of poverty, strikes, hunger, and all the other "sores" that a crowded, urbanized, and industrialized republic is heir to. Farming, indeed, seemed to be entering a great new age, and with 25 of the country's 31 million people, or 80* of the population, still living in rural areas as of 1860, America's future seemed to be still a predominately agrarian one. Horace Greeley triumphantly proclaimed, in a column written the month the Homestead Act was passed, that the Act represents the 94 consummation of one of the Most beneficent and vital reforma every attempted in any age or clime . . . tit will] diminish aenaibly the number of paupera and idlera and increaae the proportion of working, independent, aelf-subsisting farmers in the land evermore. (qtd. in Robbins 206) Frederick Herk remarks that the Homestead Act "fulfilled dreams reformers had long cherished" and that its passage "constituted a landmark in American frontier history" <236). But there was a problem. Settlers, by the time the Homestead Act was passed, were filling up the last available good land in the Mississippi Valley, and with enthusiasm about the trans-Rocky Mountain lands having waned, there was apparently a limited amount of usable land to accommodate all the old and newfound benefits that agrarianism would supposedly confer. The West of the Great Plains, which waa now "America's last frontier" (Billington 690), was still considered by many to be a wasteland if not a desert, the preordained haunt of the "wandering and uncivilized aborigines" as Pike and Cooper envisioned it. What waa the ex-factory hand, immigrant, or pioneering yeoman supposed to do in this expanse of hot, bare sand? The Agrarian Myth, now with all its recent political connotations, had run into the Desert Myth, and what ensued waa a battle of mythologies and perceptions that had little connection to the external reality of farming life or the land argued about, but a powerful connection to political 95 and economic agendas. As Henry Nash Smith writes, "the westward extension of the myth of the garden . . . had to confront and overcome another myth of exactly opposed meaning, although of inferior strength--the myth of the Great American Desert" (Virgin 175). The Agrarian Myth, as Smith argues, was stronger and within several years, as has been noted, the Desert had become a Garden. For the new agrarian mythologizers, no foolish prattle about arid conditions was going to prevent them--both the sincere and the cynica1--from believing what they wanted to believe. The new West was Eden, and words would make it so. Thus, new reports began appearing that described the West not as a desert but a garden. The key issue--lack of precipitation west of the 98th meridian--was "solved" by claims that the plains were in fact getting wetter, claims that were bruited by popularizera such as Joalah Gregg, and seemingly substantiated by so-called scientific studies. In 1867 the Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories was initiated, and in its report of that year it said (rightly) that precipitation in the Great Plains had Increased the last twelve to fourteen years, but claimed (wrongly) that tuch increase was permanent--the area has always experienced cycles of high end low precipitation. "I am confident," the report's author wrote, "that this change will continue ss to extend across the dry belt to the foot of the Rocky Mountains as the settlements extend and the forest-trees are planted In proper quantities" (qtd. in Smith, Virgin 180). Operating under the sub-myth that "rain follows the plow," the Survey's author, along with many other interested parties, helped the new "Garden in the West" myth to further bloom. State surveys followed suit: a Nebraska state publication, for example, assured readers that the state's average rainfall was 32.3 inches, comparable to the amount in the prairie state of Illinois < Kicks 6). The soon -infamous argument that "rain follows the plow" was based on the idea that by cultivating the soil moisture is released into the atmosphere which returns in the form of rain. Other causes of increased rainfa 11--the stringing of telegraph wires, the clanging of locomotives (Merk 473)— were also cited to further establish a link between settlement and precipitation. One booster claimed in an 1871 book. Resources_of Kaneas, that "railroads and telegraphs do have an effect upon the climate and cause an increased and more frequent rainfall" (qtd. in Dary 235). The aforementioned 1867 Survey of the Territories claimed that increased settlement and the planting of timber had increaaed and would continue to increase precipitation levels in the West (Smith, Virgin 180). 97 As David Dary polnta out, agrarian mythologizers and settlement booatara did not hesitate to quote in their publications this "aclentific" confirmation of their claims of increased precipitation <236). A Union Pacific Railroad brochure claimed, for example, that the Platte Valley in Nebraska was a "flowery meadow of great fertility clothed in nutritious grasses, and watered by numerous streams'* (qtd. in Hicks 6). In 1675, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad published a series of accounts about the West by various Journalists (who had been given a free tour through Kansas and Colorado). One Journalist gushed that "the soil of Kansas is certainly one of the best in the world for cereals," and another wrote, "No water in Kansas? There is more rain there in a year than in Ohio" (qtd. in Dary 234 >. This progressively humid Western land, furthermore, was inherently better than Eastern land because it was much more easily cultivated: the West's flatness and absence of rocks and trees made plowing a snap when compared to the East. Indeed, this humidifying, cost-free, painlessly tilled land was nothing less than a health resort. A promotional pamphlet put out by the Northern Pacific Railroad "insisted that the people of Montana never became ill except from overeating" (Shannon 43); other promoters claimed that the climate in the West was "so healthy that 98 doctors were not needed*' (Dary 233) . The title of an 1856 book, The_Garden_of_the_Worldi_or_the_Great_West, was aynptoaatic of the sood. The breathless author, "an old settler," assures readers that the West is "the Canaan of our tine," a land of "silk and honey," containing "a soil sore fertile than human agriculture has yet tilled" <13- 14). As Ray Billington writea, "When compared with the Far West pictured by those expert boosters, even the Garden of Eden seemed unattractive" (706). So, a decade after the Desert Myth had peaked in the 1840a, revisionism waa carrying the day (Bowden 58-61), and by the 1870a, as both Bowden and Smith assert, the Desert Myth had been plowed under (Smith 183; Bowden 49). Early settlers of the plains could not believe that the rich land they were cultivating was once called a desert. In the emigration boom of the iate-1870s and 1880s, rainfall seemed to be following the plow, just as the railroad brochures, state immigration boards, and federal surveys had said it would. Some areas in Dakota, for example, received 40 inches of rain a year in this period (Schell 12). The Desert had indeed become a Garden, and the settlers began to formulate their agricultural efforts accordingly, planting intensive cash-grain crops, such as wheat, oats, barley, and even corn, as if they were indeed in perpetually humid lands. 99 In Garland's early novel The_Riae_of_Bogmtown (written aoatly in 1887 but never published in his lifetime), the settlers joyously praise the richness of the Dakota soil. For "on this land," which a few years ago the geographers had called the Aserican Desert and which Sibley (a Minnesota politician and geographer] had spoken of as parched and alkaline, the wheat shocks stood in thicker droves than the big brown buffaloes in the past. It waa not to be wondered at, therefore, that the farmers were wild with enthusiasm over such a soil and climate. (383) The Garden Myth brought about the massive settlement of what was once believed to be the desolate plains but that had now magically become, for tangled reasons, the land of milk and honey, the last great rich frontier, the last great hope and home for the tired, poor, and huddled masses of the country and world, who were yearning to breathe free in the great open lands of the American West. And with the Homestead Act, this supposedly vacant and arable land was now virtually free. An economic spur to migration was present as well. The Panic of 1873 had inaugurated the nation's worst depression to date, causing social and labor unrest, capped by the crippling railroad strike of 1877 and its ruthless suppression by various state militias, under the order of President Hayes. Threats of layoffs and wage reductions tormented workers everywhere, who at the time lacked meaningful union protection; employers could continually lOO reduce wages and lock out. strikers because the desand for work, by natives and immigrants, was insatiable. The new and newly mythologized West would, as Evans and Greeley had hoped, address these very ills; the timing was right, and the lands would perform their Jeffersonian and Greeleylte function. 3 * J?Bon_Edwards and the Promise of the West Hamlin Garland's first novel JaBonEdwarda, published in January 1832, addresses this very situation of labor unrest leading to dreams of an agrarian safety valve. In the novel's preface. Garland writes: For more than a half century the outlet toward the free lands of the West has been the escape-valve of social discontent in the great cities of America. Whenever the conditions of his native place pressed too hard upon him, the artisan or the farmer has turned hie face toward the prairies and forests of the West. The emigrant not only bettered his own fortunes, on the whole, but he bettered the conditions of his fellows who remained, by reducing the competition for employment. Thus long before the days of '43, the West had become the Golden West, the land of wealth and freedom and happiness. All of the associations called up by the spoken word, the West, were fabulous, mythic, hopef u1. The novel, set in the early 1880s, has as its protagonist a member of the crowded, underpaid, restless urban proletariat who feels trapped by his conditions. But with the availability of the free and fertile land in the new West in these post-Civil War years, he has an escape 101 and takas advantage of it. The title character ia "an average »an''-*this is the book's subtitle--who feels squeezed by rising rents and falling wages. Walking home to his fetid Boston tenement from work one day, Edwards sees another Irishman who tells him that he's out of work "ag'in": "They've shut down f'r two nunts. Too nanny goods-- over production ag'in." "I'm still workin' [Edwards says], at the same rate- -their 'temporary cut' of ten per cent, ain't likely to be changed, except go lower." "Oh, they'll cut ye down, be Gob, till they'a nawthin' lift. All they want now la to raise the rint on us, an' we'll be in the aupe." "They'll do that fast enough," said Edwards. <46) When Edwards's rent is indeed raised, he reaches the end of his endurance. The "they" in the above passage have the average man cornered, both at work and home, with their absolute controx of wages, production, and rents. "Hain't they got no mercy, these human wolves?" Edwards exclaims. He tells his family that "I don't know what we're goin' to do. I don't see what's coming in', but we're bein' squeezed out, that's sure" (53). Edwards's 'Job in the foundry, along with being arduous, dangerous, and unreliable, la unremunerative, paying just S10 a week. He begins to wonder if he should continue to work under such conditions--especially since he and his wife and two daughters are now going to be forced to move into an even worse tenement in order to afford the 102 rent--whan there is a new and attractive alternative in the West, where lands are virtually free and where he can, without "excessive toil," live in “rustic plenty," enjoy the "blessings of health and contenteent,“ and eacape the "contagion of popular vices," all as Representative Julian had proaiaed and countless other agrarian aythologizere had proclaimed. Edwards eventually decides that it is foolish to stay in the crowded tenements of Boston, which are only getting "hotter, shabbier, rottener" (S3), when there is an escape from this horrible life: the West, "the El Dorado of the home-eeeker" (Preface), now open, free, fertile. Edwards is clearly articulating and fulfilling the political goals of Evans and Greeley's agrarianism, the belief that the new West will serve as a safety-valve siphoning off underpaid labor and preventing disorder that leads to the formation of a pauperized and rebellious proletariat. In Jaaon_Edwards, ominous signs of this rebellion are already appearing. One neighbor in the Edwardses' tenement, a German immigrant named Berg, protests against a civilization that he labels as "feudalism." He recounts that he had come to America to find an escape from European feudalism, but has discovered that in America he is "a slave under anoder name." Having lost hope, he has become one of "those men who believe in dynamite" (55). Edwards is also fulfilling the agrarianism 103 of Jefferson by adding himself and hie family to the sturdy yeomanry of the country, for in Part II of the novel he takes his family to Dakota to begin a life of farming. He and his family are leaving the distaff and workbench In order to improve the land, themselves, and the country, to help tip the balance of the nation's future to the agrarian, not the industrial, side. With the American frontier suddenly expanded, Jason Edwards, like millions of others in the late 1870s through the mid-18dOa, finds a way to escape urban industrial life. The Edwardses seize this escape with the spirit and beliefs established by the traditional Agrarian Myth. To the Edwards family, as the narrator describes it, there was "something mythic in the West. . . . It represented a faraway, hopeful region, where work was plenty and rents low" (72). Edwards, reading brochures and looking at posters about the West, tells his family that they'll take the "road to health and wealth" (64) and escape to a land where "they ain't no landlords an' no rent" (61) and where "everybody is happy" (60). He shows his family a brochure, one of many distributed by the railroads advertising the new West, with titles such as "Hoi for the Golden West!" and "Free farms for the homeless!" (61). And then, as he and his family alt in their crowded, raucous, stinking tenement apartment, with anarchists plotting next door. 104 Edwards rhapsodizes in Jeffersonian and Crevecoeurian tones about the democratic, just, Edenlc West, a land "where they ain't no rich an' no poor. Where they ain't no bosses an' no servants. Where people don't live all cooped up in dens like this. Where they raise such corn as that." Here he unrolled a gaudy poster, which showed a bunch of resplendent, enormous ears of corn. "Where people have homes of their own, and cows, and trees, and brooks full o' trout runnin' by like this," he ended, displaying a poster, on which was an alluring picture of a farmhouse with a broad river in the background, on which a boat floated idly, containing two women, presumably the farmer's wife and daughter. The farmer himself in the foreground was seated on a self-binding reaper, holding the reins over an abnormally sleek and prancing pair of horses. <61- 6 2 ) The family then sings a song--one with strong autobiographical power, for Garland's own pioneering father used to sing it endlessly--that captures this mood of hopefulness and escape that has seized Edwards and his family. The Edwardses, like the Garlands and their pioneering friends, joyously chant the hopeful verses of "Sunset Regions" in these hopeful years of the dawning of the new West: Cheer up, brothers, as we go O'er the mountains, westward ho! While herds and buffalo Furnish the cheer Then o'er the hills in legions, boys Fair freedom's star Points to the sunset regions, boys, Ha, ha! Ha, ha! When we've wood and prairie land Won by our toil. We'll reign like kings in fairy-land. Lords of the soil. (66-67) 105 The song captures not only the pioneer spirit, but also the spirit of the traditional Agrerisn Myth: naterlal plenty (the settlers will be "furnished" with goods), self- sufficiency (lands "won by our toil"), egalitarianiai ("fair freedom"), and rugged Independence ("reign like kings," "lords of the soil," with none of the "subservience and venality" that Jefferson saw arising out of "dependence"). The appeal of the new West waa irresistible to the Edwardses and all the others who migrated to the Middle Border, filling the land of Garland's boyhood and fictional world. Between 1860 and 1900, 8.2 million people poured into the seven states of the northern prairies and plains: Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas (Shannon 38). Billington notes that "a larger domain was settled in the last three decades of the century than in all America's past" (705). By the mid- 1880s emigration "attained the full proportions of a boom" (Hicks 18). The emigration boom in South Dakota, where Garland and his family lived in the 1880s, and where he set many of his best and most Important stories and novels, was typical. In the 1880s, the population increased 234%, from roughly 98,000 in 1880 to 328,000 in 18SO (Schell 363); Brown County, where Garland's family lived and which is the model for the "Buster County" of his Dakota fiction (with 106 "Booatown" as the county aeat), grew fro> a population of 353 to 12,241 in that decada (Schell IBS). In 1882, 16 traina were arriving daily in Huron, a town aouth of Brown County, with iaaigranta awaraing in and on top of the cara. Theae nuabera, furtheraora, are not fully reflective of the magnitude of the booa becauae by the aecond baae year, 1890, the booa had already ebbed; in the Dakota Territory (the tera for South and North Dakota before they attained atatehood in 1889), for exaaple, the population increaaed 400* froa 1880 to 1685, before dropping back down in 1890 (Billington 717). Garland witneaaed thla booa flrathand and givea an excellent account of ita character in Thefilaeof Booatown. The aptly named Booatown la a fictional rendering of the booa town of Ordway, South Dakota, though aa the narrator aaya, it “closely reaeabled any one of a hundred other towna acattered newly upon the prairie froa Texaa to northern Dakota" (353). The narrator of Rise, Albert Seagravea, who haa coae to Booatown to claim some of the great free land and to atart up a newspaper, describes the "vast tide" (375) of iaaigranta arriving on trains. Indeed, the railroada could not handle this "army of land seekers" (385), and it became "a common aight to see dozens of men riding on the roofs of the freight cara" (378). 107 Everything waa working. The Desert Myth had been justly debunked. The Komeatead Act had been paaaed. Railroad construction, another pet project of Greeley and the Republicans, waa booming, ready to haul the crowded Masses to the great open landa of the West, oftentimes at very cheap prices. In sum, "that vast domain--the Great Plains--was for the first time accessible to settlers, its isolation a thing of the past" (Billington 652>. And with the increasing labor difficulties of the 1870a, the "safety valve" waa greased and ready to open. Open it did, and the tide of settlers, who also believed in the Agrarian Myth and that to be a true American was to be a farmer, flooded in. The overcrowded trains, steaming over new rails, arrived at the brand new train stations, and the hordes disembarked and looked with wonder at the ballyhooed golden West, ao flat, fertile, and free of stumps and rocks that plowing it, they were assured, would be virtually effortleaa and planting it quickly remunerative. Jeffersonian and Greeleyite agrarianism had arrived: instead of ragtag industrial Mobs disfiguring the landscape and striking against if not dynamiting industrialists, the country would now be filled with healthy, contented, patriotic yeoman farmers spreading the reign of democracy, individual initiative, and investment opportunities. 108 When these settlers got to their reportedly free land and began their farming experiences, what did they discover? They had been promised an escape and sanctuary from whatever conditions they may have previously suffered from: farmers in the East from crowded, expensive land: urban workers from unemployment and tenement life; European immigrants from potato famine, pogroms, cholera epidemics, and a rigid class system that made social rise difficult. They had also been promised, as Edwards had been, that the new West was a place without rents and landlords, a land of wealth and health, of resplendent crops raised eaaily and joyously. The majority, especially those in the great settlement boom of the late-1870s to mid-1880s, discovered that these promises were empty ones. They found that the new West was something much different from what the myth-makers and railroad and real estate people said it was, and within twenty years this great new golden West would become, as Garland's work shows, the source of massive unrest and of the moat radical political movement to attain popular support in American history. For the Republican Whigs who had helped create the new Agrarian Myth, the goals of eliminating radicalism and creating new profit opportunities withered in the dusty plains. The Garden Myth, because it was even further removed from 109 physiographic reality, would have a shorter life than the Desert Myth. The opening of the new West entirely failed to remove unhappy and potentially rebellious laborers from the citiea--the notion of a "safety valve" was as fabulous as the Desert Myth and the Garden Myth--and its economic strategies, by and large, eventually washed out. "Incorporation" may have taken swift possession of the garden, as Trachtenberg says, but that possession soon soured. Western settlement Ironically created a backlash of intense and massive radicalism. A policy intended to forestall radicalism created it. Notes 1. Garland's work, and my study, are concerned with the northern Great Plains and the northern side of the Populist revolt--much different from the southern Great Plains and southern Populism. It would be cumbersome to repeatedly use "north" and "northern," so all future references to the plains and Populism should be understood as designating the northern side. CHAPTER II "Sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery": Drossy Realities in the Golden West Garland helped to kill the Garden Myth and bring agricultural and political discussion about the West closer to reality. His writings both nocked and bridged the gap between the idealized conception of agrarian life and its actual condition. Garland, who was the ‘‘first actual farmer in literature" according to his friend and fellow writer, Joseph Kirkland (Garland, Roadside 117). knew that the Myth was ludicrous. For George Julian's description of farm life as one of "rustic plenty," full of "the blessings of health and contentment," Garland substituted descriptions that showed that farm life to be full of "sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery" (Son 416). With Garland's stories, as Henry Nash Smith argues, "it had at last become possible to deal with the Western farmer in literature as a human being instead of aeeinq him through a veil of literary convention, class prejudice, or social theory" (Virgin .Land 249) . Carl Van Doren, in a 1921 essay, puts his finger on exactly how Garland's agrarian fiction differs from that of HO Ill nearly all hla predecessors: "The roaancera had studied the progress of the frontier in the lives of ita victors; Hr. Garland studied it in the lives of ita victims" (82). Garland, Sinclair Lewia says, finally killed the pastoral myth concerning the new West that had blinded people, especially writers. As Lewia describes it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, until Garland's books came out the fictional rendering of small town life was dominated by the notion "that all of us in Midwestern villages were altogether noble and happy; that not one of us would exchange the neighborly bliss of living on Main Street for the heathen gaudiness of New York or Paris or Stockholm." In Garland, Lewis found "one man who believed that Midwestern peasants were sometimes bewildered and hungry and vile" (308). Garland cleverly summarizes how most agrarian writers had presented farm life before the publication of his first book, Main-Travelled Hoads (1891). "Up to this time," Garland writes writers on farm life had arranged the weather pleasingly. It was always lovely June and the haymakers "tossed the fragrant clover" wearing Jaunty, wide-rimmed hats, while the girls in dainty white gowns looked on from the shade of a stately tree. At frequent intervals the toilers gathered about the mossy well curb and sang "The Old Oaken Bucket." Corn- husking was equally social. Laughing lads and blushing lassies gathered in the barn of a moonlit October evening to husk the ears from garnered stalks and the finders of red ears won kisses from the maidens. I am not exaggerating; such were the plays and stories 112 descriptive of country life in the Old World and the New. All our rustic plays contained a male quartet, toilers who apent a great deal of tiae in the shade leaning on their hay forks and yodeling. (Road sida 178) Not every rural writer before the publication of Main: Jrsyelled_Roads, though, romanticized farm life, and Garland makes clear his indebtedness to these earlier writers.il) Edward Eggleston--whom Garland calls "our pioneer midwest novelist" CWestward 31), “the father of us all" (Roadside 361)— depicted some unseemly elements of rural life in his 1871 novel, TheHooaier Schoolmaster: corrupt government officials, indentured servants, a noisome poor-house, and a social life made barren by the dominance of narrow-minded religionists. Still, the essential charm and picturesqueness of this life is stressed, and these good features triumph in the end. E. W. Howe's The Storjf of a Country. Town (1883) is a grimmer Indictment of Western farming life. Garland argues that "the prairie West had no novelist" before this book came out (Roadside 94), and John Chamberlain claims that Howe's book represents "the first inkling, in fiction, that the Western country could be something other than glorious" (92). Set in two small towns in antebellum Missouri, Howe previews some of Garland's complaints about agrarian life: nearly all the settlers are "miserable and discontented, . . . the men surly and the women pale and fretful" (2); 113 the children are "put. to work early, and kept, steadily at it" (21); the lack of trees, shrubs, and rain aakea things unattractively "dusty" (2-3); and the predictable people pass around "second-hand opinions" (199). Howe also attacks the absurd ronanticizing of farming life by a repeated and increasingly satirical use of the Greeley- based popular phrase, "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country." The very first line of Howe's novel — “Ours was the prairie district, out West, where we had gone to grow up with the country" (1)--introduces the attack on this bromide, and the attack becomes more obvious with every subsequent use as the young settlers grow older and never manage to "grow up with the country." Joseph Kirkland himself wrote anti-pastora 1 novels: ZuryX-Ttie M e a n e s t M a n i n S p r i n g C o u n t y (1637) is the most famous, and it is generally cited as the final forerunner of Garland's work.(2) Garland believes that Kirkland wrote the "truest fiction of the mid-West" (Henson 15). Zury, though, olfera a sunnier, Eggleston-1 ike picture of pioneer farming in the West. The Greeley phrase, "growing up with the country," is used here too (38)„ yet it is not mocked, indicative of the differing mood of the book from Howe's. Nonetheless, anti-pastoral elements are apparent, especially in the early stages when the settling of the prairie frontier-- here Illinois in the second quarter of the nineteenth 114 century--is described. (Though thia book, like Howe'a, la aet in the antebellum prairiea, both are clearly representative of the anti-agrarian aood in the new West of the tiae of their publication.) V. L. Parrington praiaea theae early chapters for containing "admirable bits of realism" (290). The novel's first sentence introduces this darker aide of pioneer farming and, as do Garland's works, the importance of one's perspective on it: "Great are the toils and terrible the hardships that go to the building up of a frontier farm; inconceivable to those who have not done the task" <1>. The family's life in these early days is nothing but "poverty, toil, and distress, and the terrible need for money" (30). Despite laboring unceasingly, the family has, for a long time, nothing to show for it: "not one cent in money, nothing to eat, drink, or wear, a growing crop that might be worth ten cents a bushel three months hence" (50). It was Garland, however, who drew all these strands of the new anti-pastoral genre together: its indictment of the drudgery of frontier farming, of the social and cultural barrenness in Western communities, and of the climatic harshness of the Western environment. These conditions constitute what I will call the "intrinsic ills" of farmino life, those directly associated with the daily tasks and activities on the farm and in the community. Furthermore, 115 Garland, unlike the earlier writers, began the fictional indictment of what 1 will call the "extrinsic ilia'* of farming life, namely the railroad, banking, manufacturing, and political forcea that cauaed untold auffering in the agricultural West and South. Parrington pointa out that in "these earlier atudies Cby Eggleston and otheral there waa no brooding senae of social injuatice, of the wronga done the Middle Border by unjust laws" (268). In Zury, for example, Parrington notea that “there ia no outcry against governmental favoritism or the law'a Injustice" (289). Garland's “striking originality" (292), according to Parrington, lies in hia understanding of these extrinsic forcea, along with his complete presentation of the intrinsic ills of farming. Garland's critique is more thorough and penetrating because he ia aware of the deeper political, economic, and ideological causes for the farmer's distress. Garland'a work, thus, is not only primarily responsible for having reversed the mythologizing of farming life in imaginative literature, it is the first to explain in any detail the manifold causes of the agrarian revolt that erupted in the last decades of the nineteenth century. In this chapter, 1 will concentrate on Garland'a treatment of the intrinsic ilia of farming life (chapter 3 will concentrate on the extrinsic ills). Garland develops 116 his critique of these ills, and by extension of the Agrarian Myth and agrarian myth-makers, by first establishing the iaportance of eerapect. i ye--that is, the conflicting views of farming life froa afar (those who don't work on a farm) and froa up close (those who do). If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are. Garland maintains, no agrarian mytholoqizera on working farms. A large gap exists between the advertised West and the actual West, the ideal and the real, that direct farming experience makes rigorously clear. Western life is not. Garland argues, some sort of escape to a Heidi-like realm of fresh air and clean living but a grinding, relentless one. devoid of social and cultural opportunities, which brutalizes rather than liberates the settlers, especially the women. The West, furthermore, is not a land of beauty but one ravaged by droughts, blizzards, and insect plagues. In sum, the Agrarian Myth, the notion of a Garden in the West, is to Garland a complete fraud, one blandly and ignorantly, if not cynically, palmed off on the settlers. The so-called Golden West is in fact a land of economic and psychological devastation, not the Promised land but a plagued land, and the result, when combined with farming's extrinsic ills, is disillusioned flight or angry rebellion. 117 1 - New Viewa o£ the New West An overriding theme in Garland's anti-pastoral work la the importance of perspective, or experience. From afar, which ia the perspective of most agrarian mythologizers and prospective emigrants, the West was indeed Golden. The Southern Populist Tom Watson writes that "it takes these city fellows to draw ideal pictures of Farm life--pictures which are no more true to real life than a Fashion Plate is to an actual man or woman" (qtd. in Woodward, Watson 127). A contemporary critic, Rodney Welch, argues that agrarian mythologizers "learned much about the pleasures and profits of farming and the delights of rural life" by reading "pastoral poets" from Theocritus to Whittier, by sailing by farms on the Hudson River and observing other farms "from the windows of a palace car while riding through eastern Pennsylvania," and by attending farm shows. "Certainly," Welch sarcastically adds, these "Greeleyitea" are "competent to give instruction about husbandry and to supplement it with advice" (587). He concludes that "the pleasures of the country, like the joys of Heaven, are presented to the poor and wretched in over-populated cities by persons rich in faith but destitute in knowledge” (593). In Jason_Edwards, the title character has "the eastern laborer's Ignorance of the West," and so "it was all fabulous to him" <€>2). The Edwardses and untold others 118 brought, with them to the Wsat alluring images of farming life: the independent farmer going joyously about his pastoral tasks, cultivating the virgin soil, in touch with the natural and elemental processes of life, perpetuating the sturdy yeomanry character of the republic, far from the artificial and poisonous environment of factories and smokestacks and office buildings and time clocks and waqe wars and layoffs and strikes: meanwhile, his wife and children, out in the glorious wide open land, breathing the clear and healthy air of the great West, en Toy the bountiful and fresh food of the overladen dining table, commune with the verities of Nature, and pursue their pristine, noble, and uplifting rural duties. Jason, as quoted in the previous chapter, is sure he is taking "the road to health and wealth" (64). This was not an invented viewpoint, a straw-man argument concocted by Garland and other anti-pastors 1 writers. One contemporary agrarian mythologizer claimed, for example, that the exhilarating atmosphere of a rural life, the invigorating exercise afforded by its various occupations, the pure water, the abundance of all the necessaries of subsistence, leading to early and virtuous marriages, all point to this pursuit as best adapted to the comfort of the individual man. its beneficial bearing upon the state is no less obvious. These notions, similar to those expressed in the posters and brochures Jason Edwards studied in Boston, were 119 repeated by Jeffersonian orators and reprinted In circulars distributed across the country and overseas, and were undoubtedly believed, though In varying degrees, by most settlers.C31 But such beliefs quickly evaporated when one"a actual nose was in the bucolic mud and manure of the daily round of farm duties. Thia was Garland's perspective and he repeatedly stresses the disparity between it and the perspective from afar of the mythologizer. And though his perspective is less heart-warming and uplifting than the mythologizer"s , it does, he feels, have the virtue of truthfulness. *’I grew up on a farm," he writes, “and I am determined once for all to put the essential ugliness of its life into print. I will not lie. even to be a patriot. A proper proportion of the sweat, flies, heat, dirt and drudgery of it all shall go in. I am a competent witness and I intend to tell the whole truth" The conflict in perspective between the mythologizer and actual farmer erupted into a verbal duel at the 1893 World's Exposition in Chicago. At the Exposition-sponsored Literary Congress, Garland gave a speech on the importance 120 of an author writing "of nothing but the country he was bred in and the people lost familiar to him" (qtd. in Pizer 116). To this and other notions--which Garland developed in his collection of essays published a year later, Crumbllng_Idola--Mrs. (Mary Hartwell) Catherwood, a popular historical novelist of the day, spoke up for the importance of writing about "old heroes" (Pizer 116). With Alice French, Catherwood criticized Garland (and Joseph Kirkland) for over-emphasizing the sourness of modern farming life. Garland heatedly responded. What do you know of the farm realities I describe? You are the daughter of the banker in the country town riding up our lane in a covered buggy. You look across the berbed-wire fence and you see two young men binding grain on a Marsh harvester. "How picturesque," you say. "How poetic!" But I happen to be one of those binding the grain. 1 have been at it for ten hours. 1 have bound my half of eight acres of oats. My muscles are aching with fatigue. My fingers are worn to the quick and my wrists are full of briars. . . . You city folk can't criticize my stories of farm life--l've lived them. (Roadside 25b) William Dean Howells, in a review of Garland's first autobiographical volume, A_Son_of_the_Middle Border (1917), also remarks on the distant and unrealistic perspective of the agrarian mythologizer and the up-close corrective that Garland's work provides: From the outside, the country life has been seen by the poets who have never practically known it or have forgotten it, but here tin Son} country life is shown as it is, or was, in the course of empire. The toll of it, early and late, in heat and cold; the filth of it among the cattle and horses; the helpless squalor and insult of it in the unwashed bodies of the men reeking 121 with the sweat of the harvest fields, end served In their steaa and stench at table where the hapless women wearily put their seat and drink before them, are facts which have not been confessed, or even suggested before, except perhaps in the gruesome chapters of "La Terre,'* but which are not allowed to escape our senses in Mr. Garland's unsparing page. (66) Bradley Talcott, the protagonist of Garland's 18 "glittering purple and orange domes of the oaks and maples"; the trees are so beautiful that "the eyes lingered upon them wistfully." Yet the corn-husking, which is "one of the bitterest of all farm tasks when the cold winds of November begin to blow," combined with the endless other farm chores, prevent any lingering, and the young Talcott concludes that a sight such as this may be beautiful but only "if one could have looked upon it from a window in a comfortable home" (31). Talcott attains this perspective when he escapes from the farm to become a political office-holder. He can now appreciate the beauty of the landscape. Returning to Iowa in the spring he notices how "very beautiful" the country i s : 122 Groves heavy with foliage, rivers curving away into the glooms of bending elm and basswood trees, fields of wheat and corn alternating with smooth pastures where the cattle fed--a long panorama of glorified landscape wh ich hia_escape_from_manua^_labor_now_enabled_him_to •ee_the_beauty_of, its associations of toil and dirt no longer acutely painful. (169, emphasis added) Jason Edwards, once he begins actually farming in Dakota instead of merely thinking and reading about it 2,000 miles away in Boston, also develops the up-close and hence realistic perspective of farming life and is soon forced tc discard hia belief in the Garden Myth. Jason Edwards is indeed a novel of agrarian initiation, a ruralized instructional fable: Jason (and other pioneers) acquire mature views of farming life that leave them sadder but wiser. One character satirizes the advertising cant that brought them to the West--"So this is the 'homestead in the Golden West, embowered in the trees, beside the purling brook'" <142)--and Jason himself mocks "the great free West! Free to starve in" <164>. A character in another work of Dakota fiction, "John Boyle's Conclusion" (written in 1S68 but never collected), has become similarly disillusioned. He, too, satirizes the Agrarian Myth phrases that convinced him and others to emigrate: "We have tested 'poetical farm life.' the 'free and independent," this character says, "and found it N.G." <71). By "testing" farm life, rather than merely viewing it from afar or repeating other people's views of it, the empty 123 proatia.es of the Agrarian Myth are inevitably exposed. "We've busted a healthy crop of delusions." the character says. "Exploded divers and sundry myths" (71). In "Up the Coule"--the story referred to at the beginning of chapter 1 — the conflict of perspectives about farming life creates the story's dominant tension and works as a metaphor for the disparity between the romanticized and real versions of agrarian life, between the Agrarian Myth and the agrarian reality. Howard McLane. the older brother of the Grant McLane quoted in chapter 1. is visiting hia family's Wisconsin farm after years of success as an actor and playwright in New York City. The story's opening paragraphs, which contain a description of Howard's train ride across the state of Wisconsin, quickly establish the dominant themes. As in Spoil, Garland makes clear in this story that the countryside is indeed beautiful, especially among the bluffs and coulees (ravines) of western Wisconsin: looking out the railroad window (much like the situation described by Welch), Howard sees a "panorama of delight, a road full of delicious surprises." To Howard, the countryside "has majesty, breadth. The farming has nothing apparently petty about it. All seems vigorous, youthful, and prosperous" (49). Having been away from the "toil and dirt" of farming for ten years and now seeing the land from a train window, Howard has the 124 mythologizer'a perspective In which farming life appears pleasingly bucolic. But when Howard arrives at the farm itself, the majesty fades. The Agrarian Myth, Garland insists in this story and in countless others, cannot survive in an agrarian setting. Howard learns that hia family's home has been seized by the bank (the letter telling him of this and asking for help never reached him). Then, walking to the new farm, he sees things that are not noticeable from the seat of a speeding train: a small drab-colored barn, with a sagging ridge-pole; a barnyard full of mud, in which a few cows were standing, fighting the flies and waiting to be milked. An old man was pumping water at the well; the pigs were squealing from a pen near by; a child was crying. (57) "Instantly," the narrator notes, "the beautiful, peaceful valley was forgotten" (57). Farm life, "with all its sordidness, dullness, triviality, and its endless drudgeries” (57), spoils the beauty of the landscape. It is only beautiful if one doesn't have to tend the crops, the cows, the pigs, the children, the buildings: in other words, if one isn't a farmer. "To be a tourist and to be a toiler in a scene like this," Garland writes in another story, "are quite different things" (Prairie_Fglks 203). Howard's education--or re-education, since he had fled from farm life earller--has begun. 125 Howard's perspective receives further correction at the calloused hands of his dour brother. Grant, who has never escaped the farm. His endless, grisy, back breaking, and unreaunerative labor creates a continued contrast with the aplendora of the countryside. The story, in fact, sets up a repeated antithesis between the beauty of the landscape and the ugliness of the labor occurring there, one that appears in aany of Garland's anti-paatora1 works. (Mark Schorer notes "the contrast throughout these CMain-TravelledRoada] stories between the beauties of the natural world and the rigors of human effort" (Afterword 2663.) The narrator states that "it was magically, mystically beautiful over all this squalor and toil and bitterness" (76). For "in the midst" of this "panorama of delight," Grant, in 111-smelling clothes and great boots that chafed his feet, went out to milk the cows--on whose lega the flies and moaquitoea swarmed, bloated with blood--to sit by the hot aide of a cow and be lashed with her tall as she tried frantically to keep the savage insects from eating her raw. (76) The milking of cows, often romanticized as one of the pleaaing verities of farm life--part of the "invigorating exercise afforded by its various occupations"--1s repeatedly used by Garland to expose and symbolize the gap between the perceived and actual condition of farm life, between the perspective from afar and up close. Garland developed this contrast at length in his autobiography A 126 Sono£_the_Hiddle Border, where he recall* hie own experience* of milking cows as opposed to the absurd romantlcization of it: Milking the cows is spoken of in the traditional fashion as a lovely pastoral recreation, when as a matter of fact it la a tedious job. We all hated it. We saw no poetry in it. We hated it in summer when the mosquitoes bit and the cows slashed us with their tails, and we hated it still more in the winter time when they stood in crowded malodorous stalls. . . No, no it won't do to talk to me of "the sweet breath of kine." 1 know them too wel1--and calves are not "the lovely, fawn-like creatures" they are supposed to be. To the boy who is teaching them to drink out of a pall they are nasty brutes--quite unlike fawns. They have a way of filling their nostrils with milk and blowing it all over their nurse. They are greedy, noisy, ill-smelling and stupid. They look well when running with their mothers in the pasture, but as soon as they are weaned they lose all their charm--for me. (Son 129) Only out in the pasture, far away, do calves seem like "lovely fawn-like creatures" and do "kine" have sweet breath. In "Up the Coule," once Howard is back on the actual farm, he remembers and understands the distinction between mythologized cows and real ones. Observing a farmhand's struggles to milk a cow, Howard realizes that the romanticizing of this chore is the product of the perspective of "the poet who writes of milking the cows . . . from the hammock, looking on" <76). This is the perspective of the "rustic plays" that Garland ridicules, not of the rural realism he is trying to create in this story and others. 127 By observing cow-milking and the other chores of iarn life and hearing the complainta of hia brother, hia brother's wife, and other faraera, Howard's education ia furthered, aa ia. Garland hopes, the reader's. Howard now la moved by and understands "the infinite tragedy of these lives which the world loves to call 'peaceful and pastoral'" (SO). This early atory, which appeared for the first time in Main-Trayel1ed_Roads, is one of Garland's most successful, perhaps because it lay so close to his own experiences and deepest feelings. In the returning Howard McLane, Garland ia obvloualy creating a partial self-portrait: Howard, like Garland, ia a writer who has succeeded in the East but feels enormously guilty about those he has left behind in the West. (Garland's brother, Franklin, was a successful actor in Boston and New York, which makes the portrait of Howard a composite of the two brothers.) Howard has "a distinct consciousness of neglect of duty" (56), especially toward his long-suffering mother (58), and admits to Grant that "I've been negligent and careless" 08). Howard attempts to expiate these sins by buying back the family's old farm, but Grant, bitterly resentful of Howard throughout the story, rebuffs the offer, telling him that "you can't fix this thing up with money" (98). Garland's characterization of Howard, thus, is not just an act of 128 self-portraiture but of self-reproach: Howard enjoys and flaunts his successful urban life, making several vulgar and showy mentions of his financial resources, his trips to Europe, and hia "yachting.” Grant accuses Howard of "toadyCingl to millionaires" (70). Howard's plan to buy the farm--which Garland himself did for his parents a few years later--is presented as cheap conscience-salving, much like Charlie Wales's attempt to buy back his past and expiate his sins in F. Scott Fitzgerald's story "Babylon Revisited." In both cases, money is insufficient, and in fact reveals the protagonists' inability to fully comprehend the enormity of their actions. "Up the Coule," despite some weak moments--Howard'a mention of yachting is overdone and the lost letter is narratively clumsy--remains a memorable and powerful portrait of the enormous hardships of late nineteenth-century agricultural life, made even more galling by its continued romanticizing by train-riding agrarian mythologlats. 2 - Women in the New West As a result of the unremitting, labor-filled life of farming, so different from the one advertised by the agrarian mythologizers, most of the once eager and buoyant settlers of the new West--children, women, and men--became both broken-down and rebellious.t4D Garland saw this 129 transformation in hia own family. Hia unci* David McClintock, was a big, hearty, joyoua man with a special talent for fiddle-playing that always mesmerized the young Garland. Like Garland's father. Uncle David waa alao an incurably optimistic and indefatigable pioneer, a "veritable Leather-stocking" (Son 22). He and the Garland family continually hit the "sunset trai1 leaving their homes near the Neshonoc River in Wisconsin, going first to Iowa and then to Dakota--for the sake of adventure and the farming opportunities that the new lands supposedly offered. Garland writes that “these sons of the border bent to the work of breaking sod and building fence quite in the spirit of sportsmen” <21). But a life of sweat, flies, heat, dirt, and drudgery-- along with other intrinsic ills of new West farm life, such as droughts and blizzards, as well as the extrinsic ilia-- transformed everybody, even a veritable Leather-stocking like Uncle David. He began calling himself a "failure" <190), and desperately moved from Dakota to Montana to Oregon and finally to California. His following of the sunset trail led only to a dead end: he could go no further west, and the continual and colossal setbacks in his life wrecked his body and spirit. Uncle David became emblematic to Garland of the disillusionment with the ballyhooed West and of the emptiness of the Agrarian Myth; he also served 130 as a basis for Many of the once-hearty but now broken-down faraers In his fiction, such as the title character in "Daddy Deerlng" (collected in PrairieFolks), Williams in "Alien in the Pines" (collected in WaysideCourtshlge), and, to a lesser extent, Howard HcLane's uncle, William HcTurg, in "Up the Coule." Garland, with hia family, visited Uncle David and hia wife in California in late 1892 after a 15-year separation, and the reunion scene is perhaps the most poignant moment in ASonoftheMiddleBorder. Garland by then understood the tragedy of Uncle David's life: "David, who like my father, had been following the lure of the sunset all his life, was in deep discouragement" (Son 450). While sitting together. Garland's father coaxes Uncle David into playing the fiddle for them (a scene duplicated in "Daddy Deerlng"), but hia playing with "work-worn fingers" shows that "the power of expression he had once possessed" was gone. He ends abruptly and exclaims: "I can't play any more,--I'll never play again," he added harshly as he laid the violin away in its box like a child in its coffin. We sat in silence, for we all realized that never again would we hear those wistful, meaningful melodies. Wordless, with aching throats, resentful of the present, my mother and my aunt dreamed of the bright and beautiful Neshonoc days when they were young and David was young and all the west was a land of hope. (452 > Other Garland characters are equally ravaged by their farming life. In "John Boyle's Conclusion" the title character ie "stooped with thirty years of terrible toll" (61-62). In this early and soaewhat crude story, the representativeness of Boyle and his life ia spelled out for the reader: Boyle, the narrator explains, is "a pathetic, alaost tragic exaaple of toil-worn aan" (62). He and his wife, who eventually goes insane, reach a "conclusion" that is slallar to that of Grant HcLane's: they believe that "it ain't no use strugglin'" any aore (65). Like the Edwardses— who are their fictional neighbors on the Dakota plain--the Boyles's dreams of a healthy and wealthy West have becoae as blighted as their crops. At the end of the story, after a devastating hailstora has ruined their field of wheat, John Boyle, like Daddy Deerlng, commits suicide: he wraps a heavy chain around his body and throws himself in the river. The characters in Jason ..Edwards reach a similar conclusion, and as in "John Boyle's Conclusion," the representativeness of their case is made clear. According to Walter Reeves, a reporter who serves as Garland's mouthpiece in the novel, Edwards's failure is "a typical American tragedy--the collapse of the working man." When one of Edwards's neighbors who "couldn't stand the strain" ia taken "to the insane asylum--a ravin' maniac" (191), the representativeness of his case is also stressed: this insane neighbor, "one o' the beat fellers in the country" <191), is Just "a product of our civilization" 132 (193) where a bad crop ralaea "a crop o' aulcidea" (178). But. in Garland's fiction it ia the farming women who are the moat beaten down by the demanda of farm life, the ones moat cheated, disillusioned, and embittered by its endleaa toil and empty promises. Indeed, Garland's gallery of suffering women comes close to dominating hia work. Larzer Ziff, speaking of the Main-Trayelled_Roads stories, argues that "the emotional center of most of these stories is the inhuman condition of the prairie farmer's wife" (97) . As with other central and powerful aspects of his work. Garland's treatment of women in hia fiction has strong autobiographical roots. Because of the travails of his mother, who suffered a paralyzing stroke while working on the Dakota farm, and the tragically young deaths of his two slaters. Garland was intensely aware of what he termed the "futility of woman's life on a farm" (Son 356). On a return trip to Dakota in the late 1880s, Garland's eyes were opened to what he called in a later story the "never- ending succession of petty drudgeries which wear the heart and soul out of so many wives and mothers" (Wayside 148). Garland writes that: I no longer looked upon these toiling women with the thoughtless eyes of youth. . . . I began to understand that my own mother had trod a similar slavish round with never a full day of leisure, with scarcely an hour of escape from the tugging hands of children, and the need of mending and washing clothes. I recalled her 133 as she passed froi the churn to the stove, from the stove to the bedchamber, and fro* the bedchamber back to the kitchen, day after day, year after year, rising at daylight or before, and going to her bed only after the evening dishes were washed and the stockings and clothing mended for the night. (Son 366) And though Garland's mission was, as previously quoted, "to tell the whole truth" about the realities of farm life in the new West, he later admitted that he could not bring himself to tell the whole truth about women. "Before the tragic futility of their suffering," he writes, "my pen refused to shed its ink. Over the hidden chamber of their maternal agonies I drew the veil" (Son 416). With the portrait of Lucretla Burns in "Sim Burns's Wife" (collected in PralrieFoika), though. Garland comes close. Lucretla, perhaps the most intensely suffering woman in Garland's fiction, is subject to the same ills that the male farmers of the new West are--namely, woeful poverty, unrelenting labor, fearsome climate, lack of social and cultural opportunities--but, as with other farm women, in a more severe form. Lucretla, once "attractive with health and hope" (106), is now "distorted with work and child bearing" (101). For it is in child bearing and the sole responsibility for child rearing that first sets off the woman's experience on the farm from the man's. As this grim story opens, Lucretla is performing that most hated farm chore, milking the cows. Instantly the female aspect of farm life is introduced, with one 134 Buffering female adminlatering to the needa of another, both aharing the flies, mosquitoes, and filth of the barn. The maternal aympathy Lucretla feela for the cows ia made clear later in the atory when ahe heara aome unmilked cowe moaning in the barn; despite being exhausted herself, ahe goea to milk them becauae "ahe could not rid heraelf of the thought that they would suffer. She knew what the dull ache in the full breaata of a mother was" (.106). Lucretla haa three children, and in theae yeara when puerperal fever and other diaeaaea claimed the lives of milliona of mothera and their babies--the infant mortality rate ranged from 25 to 30X (Nyrea 156)--it ia likely ahe gave birth to others, moat probably while lying alone on the floor of her bare farm houae. Joanna Stratton, in her invaluable compilation of the reminiscences of several hundred Kanaaa farm women during theae aettlement yeara, notes that "for the moat part, women atruggled through labor and delivery with little aaaiatance" (86). A second difference between the experiences of men and women on the farm was that women never atopped working. When Lucretla returns to the house in the evening after her long day of work, her duties are not over. Her husband, Sim, can stretch out and have hia dinner aerved to him. but Lucretla, with her "never-resting hands" (116), must make that dinner aa well as the dinner for their children. Sim, 135 too, can go to bed, while Lucretla auat continue to tend to the childran--Sim repeatedly tells Lucretla to "take care o ' y^r young onea" (111, emphasis added)--and perform all her other taaka. Lucretla'a identification with another female animal, a mare, symbolizes her life of unremitting labor and reinforces her chattel statue: She thought of a poor old horae which Sim had bought once, yeara before, and put to the plough when it was too old and weak to work. She could see her again as in a vision, that poor old mare, with sad head dropping, toiling, toiling, till at last ahe could no longer move, and lying down under the harness in the furrow, groaned under the whip--and died. (113) This chattel atatua ia reflected in the story's title: Lucretla ia linked to the cows and horsea in that all are the property of her surly husband, all are Sim Burns's. Like the mare, furthermore, Lucretla was bought in a market and la now nothing more than a piece of depreciated goods that la drooping towards death though still forced to be in harness: the narrator baldly notea that her former beauty would have "brought her competency once--if sold in the right market" (113). With Sim Burns, ahe sold herself to the wrong buyer. A similar situation exiate in a nearly equally grim story, "Before the Low Green Door" (collected in Wayaide_Courtships). The aptly named Matilda Bent, while on her deathbed, spurns her husband, who in name and fact bent her body and life. Matilda realizes that her "thirty years of ceaseless daily toil" (255) have resulted 136 in a life that is a "failure" (256). She biases her failed life on her husband, telling a friend that "I've never been happy aence [marrying]. It was the beginning of trouble to ■e" (258). Theae troubles end only with her death. With the last line of the story--"MatiIda Fletcher had found rest" (262)--Garland signifleantly uses her maiden name to reinforce the idea that her escape from being "bent” cornea only when ahe escapes marriage to her huaband. Like the mare in "Sim Burns's Wife, Lucretla, Matilda, and other farm women toiled and toiled until they dropped. The duties of Mrs. Hawkins in "Under the Lion's Paw" (collected in H«in;TravelledRoads) are typical: she "cooked for the men, took care of the children, washed and ironed, milked the cows at night, made the butter, and sometimes fed the horses and watered them” (166). This toil was inescapable even on Sundays and holidays. In "The Return of a Private" (collected in Main-Xrayel led ..Roads > , Sundays may create "sweet and sudden relaxation to man and beast," but "the women, never resting, move about at the housework" (139). In "Mrs. Ripley's Trip" (also collected in Main-Travelled_Roads), the title character complains that "I'm sixty years old an' I've never had a day to myself, not even Fourth o' July. If I've went-a-viaitin' 'r to a picnic, I've had to come home an' milk 'n' get supper for you menfolka" (173). In another story, a 137 character who la travailing to Dakota for tha flrat tlae aska someone, "What do the woman do out here?'* Ha'a told that "They work Ilka the man, only more so” (Wayside 239). These women, furthermore, were generally shut up In their houses or their Immediate farmyards all day, and thus felt completely isolated: thia constituted the third difference between men's and women's lives in the new West. "I ain't never seen anything an' don't know anything," Lucretla laments in "Sim's Burns's Wife" (113), a complaint that ia echoed by many other female characters in Garland's fiction. Mrs. Markham, in the moving and underrated story, "A Day's Pleasure" (Main^Trayelled_Roads, 1922 edition), feels imprisoned by "the sickening sameness of her life" (175) and complains to her husband that "1 ain't been out o' this house fer six months, while you go an' go" (173). Farming men at least were out in the fields during the day and had to travel to towns in order to buy and aell farming products. Even when Mrs. Markham's husband, Sam, does relent and take her into town, her day of pleasure is not very pleasurable because she is forced to carry a "cross and tired" baby in her arms, has poor clothes on, and 1 ittle money to spend on anything. She is forced to wander the streets, eat the lunch she brought with her, and ask a grocer for a glass of water. The town, she realizes, ia created for men to derive some diversion and pleasure from. 138 not. for woman to do mo. Am one character in the atory mays, "The saloonkeepers, the politicians, and the grocers make it pleasant for the man--so pleasant that he forgets his wife" f179>. The West's social and cultural barrenness is a staple of Garland's anti-paatoralism and has been widely discussed by historians of the Weat. Lucretia is socially and culturally starved: confined in her "box-like" house, she lives a life with "no music, no books" (108, 125>. With farms dispersed widely over the frontier, the nearest neighbor was often miles away. One settler quoted by Joanna Stratton lamented that "I never saw a light from our home at night all the time we lived on the farm" (86). Traveling to a neighbor's house or to the village, furthermore, involved a difficult trip through generally bare land. The unappealing roads that led from home to home and from home to village served as the title of Garland's Ms in-Travelled_Rgads and symbolized the cramped and unornamented lives of the characters in those stories: The main-travelled road in the West (as everywhere) la hot and dusty in summer, and desolate and drear with much mud in fall and spring, and in winter the winds sweep the snow across it . . . Mainly it is long and wearyful, and has a dull little town at one end and a home of toil at the other, (epigraph to Main-TravelledRoads) Socializing was limited to church and school functions, and to tasks that required cooperative effort. 139 such a* barn-raislngs or threshing parties.[51 Cultural opportunities were equally United. A character in one Garland story says that "Nothing worth seeing ever comes into these little towns . . . no music, no theaters" (Wayside 127). When any form of diversion is offered, the farmers, starved for release from the hardships and barrenness of their lives, react with wild enthusiasm. A midwinter revival meeting in "The Test of Elder Pill*' (collected in PrairieFolka) attracts every farmer and villager in the vicinity. The meeting-place la jammed because on these lonely prairies life la so devoid of anything but work, [and] dramatic entertainments are so few, and appetite so keen, that a temperature of twenty degrees below zero is no bar to a trip of ten miles. The protracted meeting was the only recreation for many of them. (56) In Rofle of Dutcher'a CooIiy <1895), Garland's most ambitious novel, the arrival of the circus at a neighboring town is "the mightiest event" of the people's lives, "the mightiest contrast to their slow and lonely lives that could be Imagined." Hence, "the whole country awoke to the significance of the event and began preparation and plans, though it was nearly three weeks away" (42). Rose "trembled with excitement" during these preparations, and when the blessed day arrives and she enters the circus's big tent, she feels as if she is in St. Peter's dome. But when the circus ends. Rose and everyone else leave with a 140 “curioua sort, of hush, as If In sorrow to think it was all ovar, and the husdrua world was rushing back over them" <57). Theaa rare diveraions served only to highlight what Bros Weber calls the "cultural poverty and social atosization of the agrarian West" For Lucretia Burns, all the ills and confinements of her life lead her to a state of "utter despair" (106). She can no longer withstand, physically or mentally, this life of unrelieved toil and is on the verge of a nervous breakdown: she "cuffs" her children repeatedly, sobs frequently and uncontrollably, swears and yells in frustration and anger, and ia "too desperate" to care about anything (104). When some hungry calves spill a pail of milk Lucretia has brought to them, she reaches the limits of her endurance: the wonan fell down on the damp grass and moaned and sobbed like a crazed thing. The children came to seek her and stood around like little partridges, looking at her in scared silence, till at last the little one began to wail. Then the mother rose wearily to her feet, and walked slowly back toward the house. (104) Lucretla has finally awakened to the hopelessness of her life as a woman in the new West. She tells her sister- in-law, Mra. Councill, that "I've lived in hell long enough. I'm done. I've slaved here day in and day out f'r twelve years without pay--not even a decent word" <118). She tells Mrs. Councill that "I'd take poiaon if it wa'n't 141 f'r the young ones" (lid). Indeed, Lucretla repeatedly expresses a desire for death, though ahe la always checked by the thought of her children. "I hate t' live," ahe saya. "But they ain't no hope. I'm tied down. I can't leave the children, and 1 ain't got no Money" (112). Lucretia, like Matilda Bent, biases her husband for most of her problems and has decided to atop sleeping or speaking with him. Her heart full of "fierce hate" (105), her thoughts and words "rebellious" (103), ahe apurna all attempts to comfort her, both by Mrs. Councill and the local schoolteacher, Lily Graham. Lily, much like the various Christian counselors in WideA_Wide_Worid, tells Lucretia that ahe should emulate Christ and seek solace in the "hope of another world" (13d), but Lucretia will not accept such platitudes. She cuts Lily off and tells her, "Don't talk that. I don't want that kind o' comfert, . . . 1 want 'o rest an' be happy now." Lily is shocked by this angry response. She begins crying and is unable to think of what to say to this "desperate woman" (13B). The answer lies in what is the story's second awakening, one that applies to all farmers, men and women; namely, that their problems are in large part the result of "extrinsic" forcea, largely out of their control. These extrinsic forces have created a farming population that is enslaved to its land, which in turn brutalizes theae 142 slaves' llvea. Sia Burns and the other struggling farmers have only a vague understanding of theae forces. What they do know la that, despite their continued labor, "things get worse an' worse." The farmers repeatedly remark that "corn an' wheat Care] gittin' cheaper 'n' cheaper. Machinery eatin' up profits. . . . Taxes goin' up. Devil to pay all round; 1 d'know what in thunder is the matter" <122>. They have heard the various remedies proposed by the Democrats, the Republicans, the Grangers, and the Greenbackera, but are "unable to find out what really was the matter." Sim "thought and thought" about these things “till he rose with an oath and gave it up" (122). But Lily Graham has a better understanding of theae forces, especially after talking with her sweetheart, the "young radical," Douglass Radbourn (who appears in a similar role in several of Garland's stories). Radbourn, a budding Populist, knows that the farmers' problems lie in the monopolistic control of the land and the existence of trusts that interfere "with the equal rights of all." His tentative solution involves the nationalization of oppressive private businesses, "the abolition of all indirect taxes" (presumably tariffs), and, from Henry George, the appropriation of "all ground rents to the use of the state" (128). Until these solutions or others are instituted, though, farmers will remain, Radbourn says. 143 ''machines CthatJ serve others more lucky or more unscrupulous than themselves" (126). Radbourn claims that farmers "are forced" to lead lives that are “little higher than their cattle" (127). He further argues that farmers have been hoodwinked by a “soporific" religious ideology (127) and by the still-reigning Agrarian Myth. He tells Lily that writers and orators have lied so long about "the idyllic" in farm life, and said so much about the "independent American farmer," that he himself has remained blind to the fact that he's one of the hardest-working and poorest-paid men in America. (125) It is this Populist explanation, although vague and undeveloped, rather than the Christian one, that reaches Lucretia. It reconciles her to her life and her husband, and even makes Lily's continued references to faith more palatable. Lily convinces Lucretia that both she and her husband are "cattle," that farming life has brutalized them both. "You mustn't forget what Sim endures too," Lily tells Lucretia. "The case is not all in favor of the suffering wives, and against the brutal husbands," ahe adds. "If the farmer's wife is dulled and crazed by her routine, the farmer himself is degraded and brutalized" (137). Lily tries to convince Lucretia that it la short sighted for her and other women to blame their farmer husbands. The Populist perspective would teach them that 144 the blame lies elsewhere, that wives and husbands should not fight each other but join together to fight the extrinsic forces oppressing them. Lily tells Lucretia that "if you will only aee that you are both to blame and yet neither to blame, then you can rise above it" (140). Lucretia is apparently convinced by this reasoning and decides to return to the house and "become a wife and mother again, but"--the narrator crucially adds in this last line of the story--“in what spirit the puzzled girl [Lily] could not say" (140). The Popullatic awakening, then, does not cancel out Lucretia'a first awakening: her life is more comprehensible, perhaps, but not any leas burdensome. As in "Up the Coule," Garland offers in "Sim Burns's Wife" no simple solutions, no pat answers to the complex and grievous problems facing the agrarian population, especially its women. The ending of "Up the Coule" shows that no melioration is possible; the ending of "Sim Burna'a Wife" that the melioration may be very insubstantial. “Sim Burns's Wife" contains a compelling statement of most of Garland's major thoughts about the condition of farming women. Furthermore, it is a persuasive example of the virtues of polemical fiction. It clearly has "sensational designs" on its reader, wanting to overturn the Agrarian Myth as it pertains to women, and educate the 145 audience about, what Garland baliavaa are the realities of fara life. Garland pounds In tha point that woaan are, despite the myths, slaves on the fars, not nuch above other chattel. If at all. He also pounds in the fact that fara life is one of unreaittlng squalor, filling his descriptions of the scene and the people with aalodoroue adjectives. Such goals and Methods, coaaon in Garland's Populist fiction, have struck the fussy New Critics as outside the bounds of "art," as I have explained in ay Introduction. This fussy, "aesthetic" criticise has thus robbed Aaerican literature of a vital piece of work. Yet, at the saae tiae, "Sis Burns's Wife" is saved froa the Wide,_W1de_Worid problea of being aerely a crude, aolean, witless piece of propaganda. Garland's story, with its shifting and thoughtful politica--as developed by the double awakening, feainist and Popul1st--its refusal to latch onto siaple answers, its precise and assured knowledge of fara life, its careful aniaal syabolisa, its "terrible intensity of vision," rises above being a aere "paraphrasable" lesson. Though the story reaalns somewhat too prograaaed and thesis-driven, and its characters lack the depth of those in "Up the Coulee," it is nonetheless a powerful and important work of art. Garland's sympathy with suffering woaen and the voicing in his work of a wide range of women's rights make 146 hi*, according to one recent critic, "the *oet interesting of the Anerican aale feminist writers of the late nineteenth century" (Kaye 135),. He was "the only aale author of literary significance," Francis Kaye claims, "who specifically endorsed in his writing woman's rights, woaan suffrage, and woaan's equality in aarriage" (135) A conteaporary reviewer argues that, because of Garland's work, "the woaen of the prairie, the siaple farmer's wivea, have found a voice to depict their miseries" (Reid 52). Another reviewer links Garland's work with that of Mary Wilkins Freeman, saying that each presents an "honest record" of farming women's lives and each shows that "the life of the farmer's wife is hard. East and West; and that it may be that the American woman is bearing more than her share of the burden and heat of the day" (Matthews 42>. Before Garland's work began appearing (and indeed after), farming woaen--like farming life in general--had been absurdly romanticized by agrarian mythologizers. As the historian Allen Nevins notes, "How happy rural housewives always appeared in American literature until Mr, Garland began drawing veracious sketches of some not so happy" (111) . £6) The role of women in the settlement process in general has been mis- or under-represented. Garland's work indeed gave women a voice that most other fictionalists and 147 historians either Ignored or distorted. Sandra Hyres, for instance, notes that " [Frederick Jackson! Turner's frontiers were devoid of woaen" (his frontiers were also devoid of Indians as Hofatadter conplains in The E?°9 re«aiye_Historlana [1053), and this caused "succeeding generations of historians . . . to interpret the westering •oveient In sasculine terns" (8). Garland, In a brief 1927 study of the history of western settlement, restates the hardships frontier women suffered from and their continued neglect in histories of the period. While the men were doing their outside work. Garland writes, the women were wearing out long days in small, rude cabins, rearing their children in constant fear of snakes and wolves, far from doctors, schools, and churches. Without the basic necessities of life, they grew old and died in the front ranks of the battle line. Few of the books dealing with these days give even casual praise to the heroic wife and mother of the border. (Westward 18) Only in recent years, with the publication of such books as John D. Faragher's Wo * e n _ a n d H e n _ g n _ t h e O y e r la nd _ T r a i1 (1979), Stratton's Pioneer Woian (1981), Myras's Westering Women (1982), Glenda Riley's The_Female_Frontier (1988), among others, has this misrepresentation and neglect been reversed in historical scholarship. Garland anticipated this historiographic "discovery" by a century. With his depiction of farm women, Garland augments his Indictment of the reigning agrarian mythology. This depiction also strengthens his project of telling the 148 "whole truth'* about the farning experience in the new West. Indeed, it was the suffering of women that perhaps contributed sost to the growing bitterness and rebellion among the settlers of the new West. For women the gap between the ideal and the real was the greatest (recall Edwards's poster that portrays the women lolling by the river). It's not surprising, then, that when this disillusionment was transformed into political action it was women who in unprecedented numbers filled the ranks and the leadership of the Grange and the Farmers' Alliance. The image of toil-worn, rebellious, platform-jumping women helped to further tarnish the ideals of the new West as a safety valve opening to a land of health and wealth. For these women--as well as for the boys, girls, and men of the new West--the pastoral image of farm life was a lie if not a fraud. Millions had poured into the new West expecting to begin leading prosperous lives, to be free of encumbrances and be their own bosses, to become true independent yeoman-farmer Americans. But what they became was--ln a word that is sprinkled all through Garland's farm fletion--slaves. And if the slavery was not to urban employers and landlords, as was the case with Jason Edwards in Boston, it was now to forces just as tyrannical and even more insidious because they were disguised by honeyed lies; the slavery was compounded by the base alloy of hypocrisy. 149 This hypocrisy helped to fuel the “rebellious anger" (Prelrle_Folks 202) of the farming population, which would soon have political expression. 3 - Garden or Desert? Garland exposes another gap between the Agrarian Myth and agrarian reality, another unexpected intrinsic ill, that deepens the farmers' disillusionment and anger. Instead of a West blessed by an “exhilarating atmosphere," sclentifically confirmed humidifying conditions, rich and easily plowed land that is perfectly suited for cash-crop farming, a land full of "flowery meadows of great fertility" that flows with “milk and honey," Garland presents a land cursed by strange and fearsome physiographic conditions. Especially in his Dakota plains fiction (as distinct from his Wisconsin and Iowa prairie fiction) is this fearsomeness--the summertime heat, droughts, dust storms, and hailstorms, and the wintertime cold and snowstorms--made a central aspect of the settlers' experience. The Great Plains offered other peculiarities as well, such as the flatness and treelessness of the physical landscape, which added to the travails of farm life and helped lead the settlers down the path to flight or rebellion. 150 In A_Little_Nor«k, a superbly written short novel published In serial end book fora in 1892, Garland moat fully explores this intrinsic physiographic ill. He argues that this ill is such an unexpected and devastating one that it alone--though it is Inevitably accoapanied by other ills, intrinsic and extrinaic--ruins Western life and leads to the settlers' flight. The novel's two aain aale characters. Ana and Bert, eaigrated to Dakota with characteriatic high hopea, but have since becoae characteristically disillusioned. Previously discussed intrinsic ills, nsaely the endless toil of faraing life and its social and cultural barrenness, are partly responsible for this transforaation. Garland's description of a typical day captures this life of toil: The two sen set to work ferociously at the seeding. Up early in the wide, sweet dawn, toiling through the day behind harrow and seeder, cosing in at noon to a poor and badly cooked seal, hurrying back to the field and working till night, cosing in at sundowns, so tired that one leg could hardly be dragged by the other--this was their daily life. <93-94> Furthermore, few social or cultural diversions are available to thes. "They ain't nothin' goin on," Ans cosplains, "nothin' to see 'r hear" (1191. The few neighboring shanties are siles away and the nearest town, Belleplain, has just "one little street" that is devoid of interest or excitement even on a Saturday night (97-98) 151 But. the biggest, causes of their dlsllluslonsent are the peculiar physiographic features of Dakota. As the novel opens, a Christaas Day blizzard (corresponding to the brutal winter stora that struck the plains in 1680-81) is keeping Bert and Ans snowbound in their shanty. Bert. looking out the window, is disheartened by what he sees: The plain was alaost as lone and level as a polar ocean, where death and silence reign undlaputedly. There was not a tree in eight, the grass aainly burned, or buried by the snow, and the little shanties of the three or four settlers could hardly be said to be in sight, half aunk, as they were, in drifts. . . . If any of these pioneers could have forecast the winter, they would not have dared to pass it on the plains. (3-4) The scene is additionally unsettling because the shanty closest to theirs has not shown any light or smoke for the past few daya. Ans decides to walk the two miles through the blizzard to investigate, and he comes upon an equally horrific sight: a woman, dressed only in a nightgown, frozen to death--"cold an' hard as iron," with "mice a-runnin' over her," as he later says <14, 24)--her body and other clothes covering a small girl who is nearly dead from exposure and starvation. This is the Little Norsk (Norwegian), who is called Flaxen; her father had died earlier when he tried to travel across the plain to get supplies, so she is completely orphaned. Ans takes Flaxen in his arms and carries her back to his and Bert's shanty, and the two rough bachelors instantly adopt her. 152 Freezing to death, as Flaxen'e parents did, was not an uncoaaon occurrence on the plains in these years. The fearsome blizzards generally caught the aettlers unprepared, Just as they were unprepared for many other aspects of plains life. "Host of [the settlers] were from wooded landa," the narrator of “Land of the Straddle-Bug" (another short novel by Garland set in Dakota) points out, “and the sweep of the wind across this level sod had a terror which made them shake" (261). The Dakota historian Herbert Schell remarks on the peculiar character of northern plains blizzards, stating that “not infrequently aettlers, unprepared for the rigorous Dakota climate, were found frozen to death in their claim shacks" (160). The powerful, unchecked winds of a "norther" barrelled over the flat, empty landscape picking up dust particles, resulting in a blinding, painful, and bitterly cold blast. "When the men attempted to face it Cthe blizzard's wind)," Garland explains in an early autobiographical work, "they found the air impenetrably filled with fine, powdery anow, mixed up with the dirt caught up from the ploughed fields by a terrific blast, moving ninety miles an hour" Everett Dick writes that "the blizzard was a storm peculiar only to the open plains." During these blizzards, "a veritable cloud of icy particles . . . beat with such 153 •tinging cold that neither nan nor baaat could atand to face It." "A pereon'e face," Dick writes, waa covered with Ice Instantly, the eyes frozen shut, and hla breath taken away, while the fine particles were driven into his clothing until he waa encased In Icy amor In a aoaent. The cattle . . . were completely encased In Ice. Their heads aasuaed the size of bushel baskets as they became covered with masses of Ice formed from congealed breath, and the animals, unable to support the great weight, rested their heads on the ground. It was necessary to knock the Ice off with a club. (Dick 223) Oftentimes during the blizzard, Dick adds, "it was necessary to run the clothes-line or a rope from the house to the barn and follow It so as not to lose one's way between the two structures" (225). In the early pages of Norsk, then, with the blizzard pounding the landscape and the people (In two caaea to the point of death), the novel's major theme has been powerfully introduced; the pitilessneas of the Dakota plain and Its demolishing effect on the people who try to settle it. The insignificance and impotence of humans in this environment are expressed In a poem by Garland that serves as the novel's preface; Godt What power is in the wind! I lay my cheek to the cabin side To feel the weight of his giant hands-- A speck, a fly in the blasting tide Of streaming, pitiless, icy sands. This pitilessness is not confined to the winter: the summertime conditions in Norsk are equally fearsome and “peculiar." Indeed, the heat and hot winds of the plains 154 have an avan *or« daat.ruct.iva affect on the people and what they produce* and on the entire ideological underpinning of the Myth of the Garden in the new West. The narrator of Norsk daacrlbea a typical auaaer day* one that serves as a companion piece to the typical winter conditions established at the beginning of the novel: It waa nearly one o'clock on an Intolerable day peculiar to the Dakota plain. A frightfully hot* withering* and powerful wind was abroad. The thernoneter stood nearly a hundred in the shade* and the wind* so far froa being a relief* waa suffocating because of its heat and the duet it swept along with it. C H S ) Bert and Ana and the other farsers are afraid that this "furnace-like blast" (116) will blight their fields of wheat and corn (corn was grown in the early hopeful years of Dakota) before they're fully ripened. They "watched feverishly . . . praying or cursing* for the wheat was just at the right point to be blighted" (116-17). Several days later their fears are fulfilled: "the wide level fields of grain . . . ripened prematurely" because of the "blazing sun" <125). The drought conditions described in Norsk* and in Garland's other Dakota fictions, directly contradicts a central plank of the ravanped Garden Myth. As I discussed in chapter 1* claims of increased rainfall were the most important justification for replacing the Desert Myth with the Garden Myth. Agrarian mythologizers asserted that 155 precipitation in the new West waa wore than adequate to •upport caah-crop farming, and in the huaid years of the *id-1870a to aid-1860a--what Waiter Prescott Webb calls the "deceptive wet years" <342)--their claims seeaed Justified. These rain-follows-the-plow fantasies, however, established the groundwork for bitter and costly disillusionment. The plains aettlers, acting upon these humid assertions, began an agricultural practice that was suited for the timberlanda of the Ohio Valley or the truly subhumid lands of the prairie states, not for a semiarid land requiring new agricultural strategy. Thus, when the inevitably dry conditions returned to the plains, the crops and hopes of the settlers, such as Bert and Ans, quickly turned to dust. By the aid-lS80a, the setting for most of Norsk, these conditions had asserted themselves: rainfall amounts had dropped back to their typical and characteristic levels. In the eastern half of the Dakota Territory, which is the setting for all of Garland's Dakota fiction, precipitation levels dropped to only a few inches above 20 a year, and in the semiarid western half precipitation dropped to roughly 15 inches a year. But even this characteristic semiaridity did not last long. In the summer of 1887, one of the worst and longest-lasting droughts in American history began. By the late 1880s the farms in the James River Valley ("Jim Valley" in Garland's fiction) had nearly gone barren, with 156 the average ylald of wheat par acra pluaaetlng to just one buahal. In 1694, one of the worst years of the drought (along with 1687 and 1889), "the diatraaa waa ao great that officials [in many Dakota counties] abandoned all efforts to collect taxes*' (Schell 344). In neighboring Nebraska that year, the drought completely destroyed the crops in 61 of the state's 91 counties (Faulkner 54). The Dakotas, one landowner said in 1890, are "dryer than Prohibition" (qtd. in Garraty 56). John Hicks notes that froe 1887 to 1897 "there were only two years in which the central and western [plains] states had enough rainfall to insure a full crop, and that for five seasons out of ten they had practically no crops at all.*' Thus, Hicks crucially adds, "the attractive stories that had circulated concerning the westward migration of the rain belt were soon demonstrated to be false" (30). This intense drought caught the settlers unaware. They had not built wells, explored irrigation possibilities, constructed windmills, nor even practiced the dry farming techniques that were well known by the late nineteenth century; even the fundamental principle of water (riparian) rights were ignored, for in the "flowery meadows" of the great Golden West where rain follows the plow why should they have been concerned about river water? Furthermore, most aettlers had not at all conaidered the 1S7 possibility of diversifying thsir agriculture, such as having a six of caah-grain and feed-grain crops (the latter to support various livestock), which would have provided sose economic stability by Integrating the farmers into the dairy and hog market (NcKath 27-26). Nor had they developed new or heartier crops, such as Siberian alfalfa, a nearly drought-resistant crop not used until early in the twentieth century. The new West aettlers even failed to expand their unita of land, an essential measure on the dry plains. Walter Prescott Webb notes that to match the productivity of 160 acres in the East, a Plains farmer needed 2560 acres in the West (406). This stubborn fact alone made the Homestead Act, with its limiting each settler to 160 acres, a nearly irrelevant and counter productive measure. Farmers, in sum, forced their land to exclusively support intensive caah-grain crops, predominately wheat and corn, in the belief that their land was no different from the humid and aubhumid land that moat of them came from. As a result, settlers harvested the first dust storms of the plains and their own bankruptcy. Today, it is clear that Dakota and the other semiarid plains states require fundamentally different agricultural practices than those in humid and aubhumid lands; caah- grain crops, even with all the agricultural advances of the present day, are not well suited to the plains. South 15a Dakota, for axaapla, currently derivas 79* of its farm incoaa froa livestock and livestock products, and only 21* froa caah-grain crops (Schell 355-56). It la no wonder, then, that aoat 1680s Dakota faraera--nalvely breaking the aod with horae- or oxen-driven plows, planting their wheat and corn with no wells, Irrigation, fertilizers, or insecticides, using seeds with no special drought resistance, and trying to entirely support theaselves on just 160 acres of land devoted to Just one or two aoil- demanding crops--went bankrupt within a few years. The conclusion of an early student of the plains, Willard Johnson, is precise and Mournful: [Plains farming) was an experiment in agriculture on a vast scale, conducted systematically and with great energy, though in ignorance or disregard of the fairly abundant data, indicating desert conditions, which up to that time the Weather Bureau had collected. Though persisted in for several years with great determination, it nevertheless ended in total failure. Directly and indirectly the money loss involved was many millions of dollars. Full measure of the harm resulting should take account also of the immigration into other regions of a_cl aas_of _|>eggle_brgken_in spiritaswel1_aa_in.fortune. (qtd. in Webb 342, emphasis added) Garland witnessed and recorded the effects of the devastating drought of 1867-1697. He returned to Dakota twice in the late 1660a--the time when Bert and Ans and the other farmers in Norsk are "praying or cursing" over the climate--and he quickly noticed that "an ominous change had crept over the plain" since the last time he was in Dakota, 159 in 1884, during th* deceptive wet year*. In the drought of the late 1880s, Garland remarks that •Riling faces were leas frequent. Tiaid souls began to inquire* "Are all Dakota suaaers like this?" and those with greatest penetration reasoned, froa the quality of the grass which was curly and fine as hair, that they had_unwittingly_aettled_upon arid^ol1. In Th«_Riae_gf.|gg*town, the once-buoyant settlers also cone to this painful realization that the new West is not the huald wonderland it was advertised to be but rather a stubbornly arid land that would sake all agricultural efforts difficult and precarious if not futile. One Booatown settler, gazing at the "baked earth," ruefully concludes that Dakota has a "regular ol' Sahara of soil anyhow" (366). With the word "Sahara," all the rosy talk about purling brooks, resplendent crops, "the exhilarating ataoaphere of rural life," rain following the plow, etc., has coae to this: Francis Parkaan, back in 1849, with his description of the new West as a “sun-scorched landscape," was aore on the aark than the blathering aythologizers. The West was a desert of sorts, after all, and the hoodwinked settlers were now stuck in a semiarid environment, piled under a cloud of dust and debt, with no prospect of ever getting free of either.C7] Bert and Ans, aided by Flaxen, manage to survive approximately ten years of unremitting fara labor, blizzards, and drought on the Dakota plain. But eventually ISO these hardship* wsar them down. After another blizzard'" which corresponds to the one of January 1888, which was "probably the worst blizzard experienced by Dakota settlers" (Schell 181)--Bert feels "well-nigh desperate" and that he is "wasting his life" (91). "Life for his had been a silent, gloomy, and almost purposeless struggle" (97). The two once-hearty and buoyant settlers begin thinking of selling their claim and eacaping the plains. Bert and Ans, like most settlers in Dakota and all across the new West, are completely disillusioned and defeated: they had expected a "healthy” climate and a land conducive to cash-grain crops, but instead have encountered a land clogged with dust in the summer and snow in the winter. In "Sim Burns's Wife," Garland had set forth a feminist and Popullatic awakening to illustrate the brutal reality of Western farm life for women (and men); in Norsk, Garland sets forth a physiographic awakening, one that awakens Bert, Ana, and other plains settlers to another brutal reality. Bert and Ana's visit back to the mostly prairie lands of Minnesota, where Flaxen la attending a boarding school, reinforces this physiographic awakening. Minnesota, with its "leaf-dappled streams and waving trees and deep, cool forests," reminds the two men of what they had left behind in coming to the flat, dry, treeless plains. For these 161 "forMt-born" men, visiting Minnesota is "like getting back home out of a atranga desert country to . . . [where] the country waa well diveraified with wood and prairie" (127, eaphaaia added). The treea alone aake Minnesota sees like a "fairy land" after ao many years apent on the "treeless prairie" (136). The contrast between Minnesota and Dakota completes Bert and Ana's awakening and finally convinces thea to give up plains life. (Their unhapplnesa over Flaxen'a marriage to a worthless man, which also means that she will never return to their Dakota home, also plays a role in their decision.) The reat of the short novel concerns Flaxen'a unhappiness and the eventual reentry of Bert and Ans into her life. The two men decide to settle in Mlnneaota and start a cart- and wagon-building business. After Flaxen'a husband deserts her when she's about to give birth to their child and after he loses all his money gambling, he flees to his family's home in Wisconsin. He later dies, and Bert-'who has for years been attracted to Flaxen--is prepared to propose to her, which she will presumably accept. These last twenty to thirty pages of the novel nearly ruin it. Donald Pizer accurately complains that the "novel descends to the cliche of the acoundrel--good-woman--good- man triangle" and criticizes "the sentimental inevitability 162 of it* denouement" CEarly_Work 103). Tha interesting sexual tanaion and Jaalouiy betwean Bart and Flaxan-'Rade Rora polntad by tha gap in thalr agaa and tha fact that Bart and Ana ware "papa" to her--ia insufficiently developed and alapllatically aolved by the marriage, while Will's convenient death ia a classic caae of narrative clumsiness and implausibi1ity. A larger problem, though, ia that the book's dominant theme--the phyaiographic pitilassness of the plains environment and Bert and Ana's awakening to this reality--which had given the book its vividness and power, is completely deserted, swept aside by the weaker romantic sub-plot. Norsk, though, remains a thoroughly readable and, at times, impressive and vital work. Yet it has mysteriously escaped the attention of almost every critic: even Garland's early admirers snd his few current ones Csuch as Pizer) either ignore or hastily depreciate the novel. A few non-admirers have registered their dislike, though: Robert Gish, for example, calls it "feather-weight fiction" (37), and Bernard Duffey cites it as proof of Garland's early romantic leanings and genteel compromising <69). Apparently, neither critic read the first three-fourths of the novel. Howells's ranking of Norsk among Garland's best books (in his review of ASonoi the_Midd1e Border> is one notable exception, though he does not discuss the book in any detail. Thus, Norsk remains as 163 buried a« the blizzard-swept ahantlsa it to tenorobly detcrlbtt, it* vital role in Garland's project of de- mythologizing the "exhilarating atmosphere" of the new Weat unacknowledged. For Bert and Ana, the Edward* family, Lucretia Burn* and her husband, the Boyles, Grant McLane and the other coule farmers, and all the other suffering aettlers in Garland's fiction, these staggering intrinsic llla--the endless, grimy, back-breaking toll unrelieved by social or cultural outlets, the agriculturally reaistant and often ferociously destructive climate, and the eerie physical landscape--have educated them about the realities of farming life in the new Weat and transformed them and the entire wave of once-hopeful aettlers into one that is impoverished, bent, and despairing. Their perspective has changed: gorgeous agrarian romance has became grim agrarian reality; the Garden has become a Desert. But an even greater awakening is in store for the settlers. They slowly realize that the hardships of farming life, unfortunately, are not limited to Intrinsic onea. Though harder to see and certainly harder to understand, a range of extrinsic forces, originating outside their quarter sections, bore their crippling weight even heavier upon the settlers. The struggle with these 164 extrinsic hsrdahips creatad the moat bitter raaantient on the part of the aettlers, for these hardships were the product of human agents, people and policies, which, unlike droughts and blizzards, could be blamed, fought, and argued against. Coming to grips with these extrinsic forces was the settlers' second step toward a complete understanding of their position and toward their subsequent rebellion. Grant Mclane in "Up the Coule" not only learns that "anything under God's heaven is better 'n farming," he also learns that a farmer "simply wallers around in the manure for somebody else" (87). Who this somebody else is will be discussed in the next chapter. Notes 1. Nearly every critic who deals with Western literature traces this progression of writers up to Garland. For a good and representative discussion of this progression see Lars Ahnebrink pp. 50-59; Henry Nash Smith pp. 224-49; or Jay Martin pp. 105-24. 2. Kirkland's mother, Mrs. Caroline Kirkland, also wrote realistically about frontier life, though her book A New t!Q*®ZZyh9 lll_Fgllow (1839) deals with the settlement of an eastern Michigan farm during that state's boom in the 1830a; it, like the rural realism of Harold Frederic's Seth^s_Brother_^s_Wife (1887) and Stephen Crane's Whi lgmyille_St.gr ies (1900), which are both set in upper New York state, lies outside the prairie and plains setting of my st u d y . 3. Ray Billington claims that the millions who peopled the new West, both natives and foreigners, "were attracted by the most effective advertising campaign ever to influence world migrations" (706). This advertising literature described the West in terms that made "the Garden of Eden 165 seem unattractive," aa quoted and developed in Chapter 1. The enthueiaaa of the Norwegian iaaigranta in 0. E. Rolvaag's Gianta_in_the_Earth (1927), which ia perhapa the beat novel about the aettleaant of the new Weat, ia typical. In the 1870a they caae to America, apecifically the farming landa of eaatern Dakota (near the aettlng of Garland's Dakota fiction), becauae they were convinced that it waa "the Promiaed Land" (39). LiJ« Crevecoeur, they believed America waa an egalitarian, democratic, bountiful land, where their freedom and livelihood would not be threatened by any "old worn-out, thin-ahanked, pot-bellied king" (44). 4. Moat boya and girla were expected to work ae adulta by the age of ten or ao. Garland himaelf waa literally put into harneaa at age ten when hie father ordered him to run the plow-team at their new farm in Iowa (Son 85-69); aee hie aemi-autobiographical novel Boy_Life_on_the_Prairie (1899) for further detaila of thia child-labor and how it leada at timea to a feeling of being "enslaved" (183). Child leborera appear regularly in hie fiction aa wall: tha nine-year-old aon of the Haakina family in "Under the Lion's Paw" ia alao forced to plow the fielda; young Milton Jennings in "Daddy Deering" worka on hia father's farm by age twelve; young girla were generally compelled to help their Mothers with the "female" labor of cooking, cleaning, mending clothea, churning butter, tending livaatock, etc., though aome were alao forced to work in the fielda, auch aa Julia Peteraon in "Among the Corn Rowe" (collected in Main- Tra v a l l e d R o a d a , 1891). The cauae for thia child-labor waa not neceaaarily parental inaenaitivity or cruelty. Rather, it waa economic: moat farmera could not afford to hire an adult farmhand but alao could not farm the land alone, and ao were forced to put their children to work. Mr. Haakina of "Under the Lion'a Paw," for example, "loved hia boy, and would have aaved him from thia [labor] if he could, but"-- unable to afford a farmhand--"he could not" (164). The boy, like the father, ia under the paw of forces he cannot surmount. 5. Frontier women made aome efforts to counteract the barrenness of Western social and cultural life by establishing reading clubs, dramatic societies, wool- picking parties, quilting bees, etc. Indeed, Myres argues that "frontier women were rarely isolated from people" (167). But since a woman's endless farm chores required her to be in or near her home moat of the time, a woman's interaction was usually with her own family and with other male farmera. "Women often lived for months without seeing 166 another uoian," Kyras writaa (168). 6. Garland, it naads to be aada claar, did not dapict only baatan and daapairing woman. Ha alao portrayed another aapact of tha Waatarn woman: one recognizing and clamoring for her righta. Tha Weat witnaaaad tha firat and largaat braakthrougha in famala suffrage (by tha lata 1890a woman in four Waatarn atataa could vote in all alactiona) and has hiatorically welcomed woman into traditional mala profeaaiona. Tha firat Univaraity of Iowa claaa in 1856, for example, waa 1/3 famala; by 1893 31k of tha studanta at tha Univaraity of Kanaaa Medical School ware woman. Of the nearly one million woman living weat of tha Miaaiaaippi in 1890, 13X ware in tha profeaaiona. Woman alao ran ahope, hotela, and restaurants— aae Garland's "A 'Good Fallow's' Wife,** for example (collected in Main-Xraya1ledRoade, 1922 edition)--and became teachers, preachers, writera, butchers, blacksmiths, lighthouse keepers, etc. (Myrae passim). Divorce lawa were alao liberalizing in tha Weat, with South Dakota leading the way: it became a divorce colony, which Garland describes in "A Fair Exile" (collected in WayeidaCourtahipa). Even on the farm, Myrea arguea, woman were making braakthrougha. Many had an important role in decision making and knew the details of the farm business: "Many women,” Myrea writaa, "considered theira a cooperative rather than a competitive enterpriae, and they certainly did not view their poaition aa 'second claaa'" (165). Many men, furthermore, performed "woman's" Jobs aa well (164). In addition, with the Homeatead Act open to women, many alao owned and ran their own farma--"The Land of the Straddle-Bug" deacribea many much pioneera--and it ia eatimated that a remarkable one-third of the land in the Dakotaa in 1886 waa held by women (Myrea 258). In aum, "the frontier did offer many new opportunitiaa for women and an expanded definition of 'woman'a place'" (Myrea 212), though it waa ultimately "induatrlaliam and the city, not tha Waatarn farm, [that) opened new avenuea for women" (239) . Garland bringa thia liberated women into hia fiction and nonfiction, eapecially in hia remarkable novel Rgae_of Dutchsr's_Coo11y (1895). Robert Bray argues that Garland's frank treatment of Rose'a aearch for aexual, aocial, and economic equality anticipataa Kate Chopin's The_Awakening (1899) and Dreiser'a Sister_Carrie (1900) (394-95); "the portrait of Rose," Bray continues, "gave tha Midwestern woman in fiction a new psychological reality, a new sense of intellectual and creative integrity and a different sensibility" (404). Because of hia portrait of Rose and other strong women, such as Ida Wilbur in ASpoilof 167 Office, Lara Ahnebrink claims that Garland waa "one of the firat American writera to portray the 'New Woman'" (61). 7. Weatern hiatorian Maxine Benaon notea that "perhaps Pike and Long and (Edwin) Jaaea had had the right idea after all, however euch Weaternera dial iked admitting much a posaibility" "Those Who Farmed the Farmer": Exploitation in the New Weat Grant HcLane'e creator knew who the farmer wallowed around in the manure for. In a speech at the Chicago Single Tax Club, one of the many organizations spawned by Henry George's book Progress and Poverty (18791(11, Hamlin Garland declared that farmers are now "armed aoainst the three great fundamental monopolies--the monopoly of land, the monopoly of transportation, and the monopoly of money" (qtd. in Pizer, Hamlin 94J. These monopolies constituted the "extrinsic" forces that, when combined with the intrinsic ones discussed in chapter 2, created untold hardship, disillusionment, bitterness, and. finally, organized anger that fueled the agrarian revolts of the last decades of the nineteenth century. The three monopolies of land, transportation, and money dominated Populist thought and served as a centerpiece for its preeminent political statement, the Omaha Platform of July 1892. "The heart of the platform," Robert McMath writes in his recent study of Populism. "waB a succinct statement of the movement's position on the 168 169 venerable trinity of issues--money, transportation, and land, with particular emphasis on the first" <167>. To Henry Demareet Lloyd, who in the 1890a was Populism's "leading intellectual" (Pollack, Populist.Response 63), monopoly of all kinds was the crucial issue in post Civil- War America. Lloyd had spent his life fighting political and commercial monopolies that controlled state and national politics, and that hung (Haymarket) and shot down (Pullman) those that got in their way. He was the author of the first sustained indictment of this malign force ("The Story of the a Great Monopoly" (1861), concerning Standard Oil) and broadened the attack in his landmark book. Wealth AgainstCommonwealth <1894). in that book, he writes that "Monopoly is our greatest social. poiitical, and moral fact" (12). These monopolies, Lloyd continues, include "land monopoly, transportation monopoly, trade monopoly, political monopoly in all its forms, from contraction of the currency to corruption in office" (169). These monopolies exploited the farmer economically and ideologically in ways that, a hundred years later, defy belief. Nearly every conceivable aspect of agricultural life was blighted by these extrinsic forces: the cost, availability, and quality of the land ("monopoly of land"); the very money farmers used to pay for their land, homes, and other necessities ("monopoly of money”): and the costs 170 and practices of railroads and other alddleaan organizations which made it nearly impossible for farmers to function in the American economic system ("monopoly of transportation"). Garland's work represents the most complete and complex fictional treatment of these extrinsic abuses that, when combined with the intrinsic ills of farming (which Garland's work also provides the best fictional treatment of) led to the Populist movement.121 By casting these abuses in narrative form. Garland allows readers to see their origin, their progression, and--sinee they are in large part the result of human actions— their amenability to beneficial manipulation by reformers, such as the PopuliBts. Garland's work prevents the exploiting classes from palming these abuses off as natural or inevitable occurrences in the settlement of the West, beyond human control. Garland's "conscious histoncism, " to use a phrase of Georg Lukacs 126), exposes the constructed and generally fraudulent character of the settlement of the West. Western settlement was, and to a large part remains, dressed up with pleasing notions, oftentimes condensed into familiar phrases such as "Westward Expansion," ‘Manifest Destiny," "Jeffersonian Agrarianism," or simply “progress" or "civilization," all of which cloak the ugly realities of the settlement process. Garland's work demystifies these 171 "ideological abuses," to use Roland Barthes' language, by grounding then in a historical process, just as his work demystifies the Agrarian Myth. Garland, in short, performs a function similar to that which Lukacs credits to Scott and Balzac, namely, providing "historical awareness of the decisive role played in human progress by the struggle of classes in history" (27), Eric Sundquist araues that Garland "recorded with panoramic intensity and acute historical consciousness the dissolution of America's Western garden" CE. Elliott 519-20), Garland's "historical awareness" and "historical consciousness" came from what he heard from family members and what he observed and experienced firsthand. His own father was swept up in the settlement hysteria concerning lands east of the Mississippi: Richard Garland migrated from Maine to Wisconsin in the late 1640s, succumbing to the "lure of the sunset reqions" as Hamlin describes it in his thinly fictionalized account of hie father's life, Troil-Makers_of the Middle Bprder (1926). Like Jason Edwards, Richard Garland and other Easterners read "tales of golden sands and flourishino prairies in the West," where "a man could amass a fortune with a few crops of wheat" on "those distant free lands" (4B-49). "Why groan and sweat at heaving rocks in the East." settlement brochures would ask. "when you can raise forty bushels of 172 wheat to the acre in Wisconsin on land without a atone?" (60-61). Thia settlement, moreover, would further not only one'a individual fortunes but the nation's aa well: proapective aettlera were told by Fourth of July orators in the heady daya of the 1840s that "it ia our manifeat destiny to govern from aea to aea" (48). Richard Garland, thua, "felt himaelf a part of a tremendous movement, a soldier in the march of a nation" (69); he and other settlers were "believers in the westward march of the republic" (SI). Again, the autobioqraphical source for Jason Edwards is apparent: Richard Garland, like Jason Edwards, was convinced that by cultivating the Western lands he would also cultivate himself, hia family, and his nation as a whole. Yet, Richard Garland and the other emigrants did not find a "Promised Land" (the ironic title of chapter six of Trail-Makers) in the West. Instead, they found endlesa and backbreaking labor, expensive land, economic reversal, and finally, disillusionment, all of which fed their desire to go to the new "Promised Land" across the Mississippi after the Civil War, a second miqration that Hamlin, born in 1860, experienced himself. The earlier miqration to Wisconsin (and other eastern prairie states), and its ultimate failure, foreshadowed the even more massive migration to the even more ballyhooed new West of the 173 western prairies and Great Plains. And when that Migration also soured, in an infinitely larger degree than the earlier one, there was no sore new West, no sore new "Promised Land" to escape to--the settlers turned their wagons and anger back upon the East, demanding answers and restitution. This constituted the agrarian revolt of the last three decades of the nineteenth century. George Bernard Shaw believed that what gave Henry George his penetrating insight into the workings, contradictions, and ills of modern industrial capitalism was the fact that he was born in America when he was tin 1839). "Only an American," Shaw writes, "could have seen in a single lifetime the growth of the whole tragedy oi civilization from the primitive forest clearing. An Englishman." Shaw continues, grows up to think that the ugliness of Manchester and the slums of Liverpool have existed since the beginning of the world: George knew that such things grow up like mushrooms, and can be cleared away easily enough when people come to understand what they are looking at and mean business. iqtd. in Aaron G2) Frederick Engels, in an 1693 letter to Henry Demarest Lloyd, voices a similar idea: "It is only in industrially young countries like America and Russia," Engels writes. "that Capital gives full fling to the recklessness oi its greed" tqtd. in Pollack, Populist Response 84); in later stages these evils become masked, more integrated into everyday life, more "natural." Only in these early stages. 174 then, la Meaningful criticism and change possible, because only then are the true workings of the industrial system apparent (Pollack 84)* Garland, born in the midst of the vast Western settlement process, understood as no one today can the tragedy of the "forest clearing" in both the old West of the eastern prairies and the new West of the western prairies and Great Plains. He saw through the pleasing, self-serving myths concerning the settlement of the West because he, in a single lifetime, shared in two settlement processes, during which times the same myths concealed the same brute realities, leading to similar disillusionment. Garland, like Henry George, knew that the western settlement was a "mushroom" phenomenon, and he was determined to hietoricize its development, make clear its constructed and fraudulent character, so that people would "come to understand what they are looking at and mean business." Henry Nash Smith maintains that in Garland's work, "the ideal of the yeoman society" is revealed to be "nothing but a device of propaganda manipulated by cynical speculators" (yirgin_Land 248). Garland, in short, rescues the truth of the Western settlement from the myth-makera. The West— whether east or west of the Mississippi--is the scene, not of a male quartet leaning on their hay forks and yodeling, but of bitter, pinched, toil-worn men and women 175 dragged into bankruptcy and political radicalism by brutal intrinsic and extrinsic forces. 1 - and the Monopoly of Land Reading brochures about the new West in hie Boston tenement, Jason Edwards comes across a magical phrase-- "Free Farms for the Homeless" (61). This is the phrase and promise that caught the attention of Edwards and untold others and was the principal cause of their emigration to the western prairie and plains states in the decades following the Civil War. It was the most prominent claim of Evans, Greeley, and other promoters of the new West, and was enshrined in the vaunted Homestead Act of 1662. Greeley, for example, had commanded the restless urban laborer to "strike off into the broad, free West, and make yourself a farm from Uncle Sam's generous domain” (qtd. in Smith, Virgin Land 189). Everett Dick notes that western states and railroads sent immigration agents around the world barking the slogan, "Free Homes for the Millions." "This alluring phrase," Dick writes, was printed on dodgers, in pamphlets, and even published in the newspapers of the European countries advising the common people who could never hope to own land if they stayed in Europe, that they could have free land in America for the taking. (“Free" 226) Free land. Nothing so prodigious and tempting had ever been offered to the common people in American history; 176 Indeed, excepting perhaps the massive land transfers of Church property during the French Revolution, this American land policy was, it seemed, the most beneficent and democratic program ever offered anywhere. Here was a chance for anyone, such as the impoverished, tenement-bound Edwards family, to get a fresh start, to become self- sufficient if not wealthy in the glorious American West. The landless people of the world could achieve a dream deep in their past: to be landed yeoman, land-owners instead of tenants. A letter written by a Scottish immigrant woman, who had married an Iowa homesteader, illustrates the importance of land ownership to the landless. She wrote to her friends back in Scotland that "I'm a lady now. I married a lord" preparing for their move West and already dreaming oi Dakota, are just as ecstatic: with visions of "Boone and Crockett" in their eyes <66-67), they sing and dance to pioneer songs and believe, as the Dreeleyites have instructed them, that they are now going to "grow up with the country" <93). In chapter 2. 3 described how the intrinsic ills of farming life disabused the Edwardses and most, emiarants. But undoubtedly the most profound disillusionment concerned the coat and availability of the "Free Farms for the Homeless." Edwards had expected to come West, pick out a 177 nice stretch of land <160 acres, called a quarter section) and, by merely payinq a £>10 registration fee and agreeing to live on and cultivate the land for five years, be given title to that land. Like the Scottish immigrant, he and his family would then become lords and ladies. But when the Edwardses and the millions of others arrived in Dakota and elsewhere, they discovered that nearly all the good land was in private hands and therefore not available for homesteading. The land was largely owned by railroads and real estate speculators, who had no interest in giving anything away. A disgruntled emigrant in JasonEdwards complains that "there wasn't any free land within 40 miles of the railroad" C130>. The local land speculator in the novel. Judge S. H. Balser (a recurring fiaure in Garland's Dakota fiction), tells people like Edwards that "You can take your choice, go thirty miles from a railroad and get government land, or give me ten dollars an acre for my land" (103). With access to the railroad essential tor transportation of livestock and grain, and with railway ed iacent land usually of superlor quallty, this was a bleak dilemma. And so, within days if not hours of landing at the Golden West, Edwards learns that 160 "free acres" are really going to cost him as much as SI,600, well beyond the reach of the ten-dollar-a-week salary he earned in Boston <75, 78). To purchase good land near a transportation 178 line, Edwards is forced to take out a huge loan* Thus Edwards discovers that the West does have landlords tor creditors) who ere just as rapacious as the slualords in the urban tenements, and that it does have rents (or Mortgages) which are just as high as the ones he and his family fled from. Their vertical tenement, Garland argues, has merely been replaced by a horizontal one. What happened to the Homestead Act? How did Judge Balser and similar figures get this land that they were selling instead of dispensing? Why did Jason Edwards and the rest of the earth's landless remain landless despite the trumpeted claims of "free land" by brochures, newspapers, emigrant guide books, politicians, and all the rest, a claim seemingly substantiated by the existence oi the Homestead Act? The failure oi the Homestead Act to do what it intended originated when the national and state governments ceded massive tracts of land to the railroads to induce end reward them for building across the prairie and plains. Because the lands were empty and at places very difficult to build across, railroads would not contemplate the project without some sort of assistance, especially since a precedent of land cessions had been established in the 1850s; henceforth, railroads considered these cessions their rightful due. Thus, most railroads were given alternate sections (640 acres) of land along the 179 railway--resulting in a checkerboard pattern of railroad ownarahip--which became, becauae of their very proximity to the railway, the most valuable land; the railroad conpaniee alao built in the beat areaa of the West, for both ease of construction and to gain poaaeaaion of the beat land (Gates 657). These land cessions, which often went 20 miles deep on either side of the track C40 miles deep in territorial land), created up to an dO-mile-wide swath of alternate lands owned by the railroad (Shannon 6b). This resulted in a give-away that was originally believed to have amounted to 156 million acres of land (over 200,000 square miles), which, as one Populist writer later pointed out, was "larger than the territory occupied by the great German empire" (qtd. in Hicks 72). These giant land holdings "did more than anything else to upeet the homestead principle of 'land for the landless'" (Billington 701). William A. Peffer, the important Populist senator from Kansas, complains in his persuasive and passionate book* The Farmer's Side (1891), that “so larqe a proportion of the public lands was taken up by these grants to corporations that there was practically very little land left for the homestead settler" (73). The sinqle grant to the Northern Pacific Railroad, for example, "was almost equal to the whole of New England" (Merk 439). The western historian Ray 160 Billington— by combining the railroad grants (which he and other Modern historians estinate to have totalled 161 Million acres) with the 140 Million acres granted to states (who sold Most of their land to speculators, who then sold the land to settlers at Much higher prices), the 100 Million acres of direct sales by the Land Office (such sales were still permitted after the passage of the Homestead Act), and the selling of 100 million acres of Indian land to speculators--concludes that 521 million acres of the "free and glorious West," as one character in Jaaon_Edwards sarcastically puts it (145), were gobbled up by investors. In all, "half a billion acres were surrendered to monopolists," Billington exclaims, "in an era when orators boasted the United States was qiving land free to its poverty-stricken massesl" (700-03). The railroads, which represented "the mightiest aggregation of private capital the world had seen up to that time" (Mark 440), were freely given an astonishing one-tenth of the total land area of the continental United States (Shannon 65), while the largely impoverished settlers had to pay up to fourteen dollars an acre for land (Stover 90). Of the remaining land available for homesteading (the alternate sections not owned by the railroad and the area beyond the land-ceasiona belt), much of it was gobbled up by speculators who sidestepped the Homestead Act promise to 181 live on end cultivate the land by havinq "dummy buyers" file claims on the land. These buyers then turned the land over to the speculators who, in turn, sold it to the desperate emigrants. As a result of these fraudulent homestead claims-~in addition to the land bought outright from the railroads, states, the Land Office, and from the dispersal of Indian lands--"speculators were generally able to secure the most desirable lands, that is, those easily brought under cultivation, fertile and close to timber, water, markets, and lines of communication" (Gates 662>. In 1865, William A. J. Sparks, the United States land commissioner, said that "the public domain was beinq made the prey of unscrupulous speculation and the worst forms of land monopoly through systematic frauds carried on and consummated under the public land laws" (qtd. in Gates 690). When reform did occur, including the termination of railroad grants and of direct land sales and the amendment of land acts, it was too late for the impoverished emigrant because the best agricultural land had passed into private ownership (Gates 681). The corporations and speculators had run off with the country's best land long before the barn door was closed.[3] Because of this "land fraud cancer," as agricultural historian Fred Shannon puts it (74), an emigrant, upon arriving in the West, "was confronted with a dozen 162 advertisements for land that was 'Better Than a Homestead'" (Billington 703). Better, yes; freer, no. Richard Hofatadter writes that of all the farms opened up in the supposedly free West, only one in ten went to a bona tide homestead farmer (Age 54). If settlers wanted free land they were usually forced to "remote parts of the frontier" (Hofatadter 54), and since these lands were generally far from the two essentials for successful farming in the West, railroads and water, two-thirds of these homestead claims went bust by 1690 (Shannon 54). In 1689, the Edwards family went bust, brought down by endless and back-breaking labor, devastating droughts, and brutal blizzards (intrinsic ills), and by crippling mortgage payments (extrinsic ills). Jason had bought his "Better Than a Homestead" land from Judge Bo leer and quickly realized that, as in the East, he was under the lion's paw. The once hopeful, indomitable pioneer is completely broken. "I may jest as well die," Jason says towards the end of the novel. "It ain't no use--l can't never git up with all them mortgages" (205). The plight of Jason--who, as the novel's subtitle notes, is "on average man"--is emblematic of the plight of the West (and of the East). In Part I, set in Boston and entitled "The Mechanic," Jason was nothing more than a "prisoner to the treadmill," a "slave" <70, 75); in Part 163 II, set in Dakota and entitled "The Farmer," he ia nothing more than a "failure . . . a pauper" (210>. Both the East and West bring about a similar enslavement of the average man. That the West was anything but an escape from the East, anything but a safety valve, is made clear in the very details of daily Western life. As in their Boston tenement, the Edwardses have to keep the windows and doors of their shanty open to get air (133): despite the boundless expanse of land in the plains, the family, especially during the winter, is enclosed in the "prison" of one small room as it was in Boston (144-451. Jason's younger daughter, Linnie, says that life in boomtown, Dakota, is "almost as bad as living in Pleasant Street [their address in Boston], ain't it?" (136). As in boston, even the names of their homes mock them: Boston life was the opposite of pleasant and their Dakota lives are far from booming. In Boston, Jason had complained that "we're bein' squeezed out, that's sure" (51). He went west to escape this squeeze but discovered that "we're squeezed out again. Squeezed out of the city, and now we're squeezed out of a country of free land — I'm lust about ready to quit” (163). This urban-rural connection (which will become a Populist rallying cry) is frequently made in Garland's fiction: in "John Boyle's Conclusion," for example, the narrator says that "most farmers are on par 184 with tenement dwellers" (73), and in “Sim Burns's Wife," the narrator writes that the "poor of the Western prairies lie almost as unhealthily close together as do the poor of the city tenements" (114) Walter Reeves, the reformist reporter in Jason Edwards, points out the typicality of Edwards's life for both the East and the West. He feels that with Edwards he is "in the presence of a typical American tragedy— the collapse of a working man." "The common fate of the majority of American farmers and mechanics." Reeves believes, is that they die before their time as a result of "under-pay and over-work." “Yes," Reevees concludes, "Edwards is a type" (208). In placing public land in private hands, the fraudulent Homestead Act failed Edwards and the nation. Instead of creating a safety valve for disgruntled eastern workers and other impoverished people and forming a West that was truly healthy and vibrant, American land policy created an economic wasteland and literal dustbowl. It robbed the average settler of his or her lew finances and large hopes while it lined (albeit temporarily for many) the pockets of corporations and already rich land speculators. Richard Hofstadter, who is no bleedlnq-heart advocate of the farmer or the Populist cause, argues that the Homestead Act "was a triumph for speculative and 185 capitalistic forcaa" (Age 55). The painful reversal of hopes suffered by those early agitators for the Homestead Act, and by all Jeffereoniana--who had envisioned the West as a solution to industrial woes and as a place where Anerica'a yeoman society would be perpetuated-- is well phrased by Fred Shannon: "In its operation the Homestead Act could hardly have defeated the hopes of the enthusiasts of 1840-1860 more completely if the makers had actually drafted it with that purpose uppermost in mind" <54). Indeed, very few of the emigrants to the new West were urban laborers. The Greeleyite advice was not only cynical but also impractical and l11-conceived: the safety valve never opened for these workers. The trek west by Jason Edwards and his family was the exception not the rule. Fred Shannon notes that most new West emigrants came from farming communities east of the Mississippi <36). Kansas, for example, was "occupied mainly by persons from Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa" (Shannon 38; Billington 6S8). A central pillar of both the Jeffersonian and Greeleyite versions of the Agrarian Myth was a shadow: the new West was not a perpetuation of the country's sturdy and self- reliant yeomanry nor an obviation of strikes and anarchy for the simple reason that urban workers could not and did not leave the city. The new West was filled with other farmers (from America and Europe) not with restless proles. 166 But. soon many of those farmers, migrating back to the cities, would become restless proles themselves. And those who stayed on the farm became restless agrarian radicals who, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, would attempt to Join hands with their fellow sufferers in the cities to create the Populist revolution. That the Jefferson-Evans vision of the West had been betrayed, Garland makes clear in his preface to Jaaon Edwards. Garland expresses his lament for the largely factitious and fraudulent passing of the agricultural West: . . . to-day this dream (of escape to the "Golden West**3--this most characteristic American emotion--is almost gone. Free land is gone. The last acre of available farmland has now passed into private or corporate hands. The nation has squandered the inheritance of the unborn os well as the living, and henceforward the stress of emigration must run athwart the speculator's barriers or rise to the level of his greed. In the novel, a rebellious farmer, who was forced to take poor land far from the railroad line and has since loined the Farmers' Alliance (the forerunner of the People's Party), sums up the folly and cost of the mismanagement of the Middle Border lands: "If we hadn't give away s' much land to the railroad an' let landsharks gobble it up, an' if we'd taxed 'em as we ought to," he says, "we wouldn't be crowded way out here where it can't rain without blowing hard enough to tear the ears off a cast-iron bull-dog" <185). JaBonEdwords, as Henry Nash Smith argues, "is an 167 apologue on the closing of the safety valve" (247). 2 “ Tbe_Ri®e_pf_Boo*town and the Fraudulent Boosing of Land In TbeRiseof Boomtown, another early Dakota novel,. Garland further explores and explains the failure of the West and its absorption by speculative forces. Though uncompleted and never prepared for publication, and thus unpolished and fragmentary. Boomtown nonetheless captures, as no other work of Garland's or anyone else'a does, the boomtown psychology and fatal mushroom development of Western towns. This boomtown psychology contributed to the massive failure of the initial settlement of the new West and to the settlers' turn toward radicalism. The leading citizens of such towns--town officials, merchants, bankers, land owners--shared with the railroads a vested interest in attracting settlement. To do so, both the railroad and town boomers were obliged to exaggerate or invent the West's virtues and suppress its defects. The result was "the most effective advertising campaign ever to influence world migration” (Billington 706). The railroads, in order to make any money in the long run, had to have the lands adjacent to their tracks settled with people who would consistently and heavily use the railroad for a variety of purposes. Thus, they organized land departments and bureaus of immigration. To boom Nebraska alone, the Union Pacific and the Burlington railroads each spent nearly a million dollars (Shannon 306). Much of this booming involved the massive distribution of pamphlets and brochures, both in the East and overseas, to entice potential settlers. Indeed, the "gaudy poster" that Jason shows his family in the Boston tenements— with its pictures of waving fields of corn and wheat that are seemingly grown with little effort, the farmer riding a fancy reaper, hla white shirt immaculate, while his wife and daughter float idly by in a river boat — ia railway-produced <61-fc>2). Stories were circulated and readily believed, as the tenement dwellers and factory workers in Jason_Edwards believe, of people who came West with nothing and "in a few short years had arrived at comfortable prosperity" (Hicks &). New West lands, according to the language of one chirpy railroad brochure, were "cheaper, more eaBily tilled, better adapted to cultivating and harvesting by machinery, more productive, and increasing in value much faster than any of the Eastern states" (qtd. in Hicks 12). The railroads succeeded in convincing millions in America and overseas that "homes and wealth awaited everyone in -the Shangri La" of the West (Billlngton 708>. (See chapter 1 for further examples of the creation of this Garden Myth.) 189 Railroads, furthermore, offered cheap rates to allow prospective settlers to visit the virgin lands; and if the settlers decided to emigrate, they were offered discounted rates to help move themselves and their goods west. Everett Dick notes that "seed was sometimes given to the emigrants, feed for stock was hauled free, and other accommodations were rendered" in order to encourage settlement (Sod-House 187). The image of the railroads as a kindly, beneficent, public-spirited operation was cemented by such practices. As Boomtown notes, the town of Boomtown was plotted by the railroad and is full of people lured by the "rainbow tints of those seductive circulars" which had appeared "in every part of the United States and Cenada--nay, even England" (3Sb>. Once the emigrants arrived at their Western homes, the local leading citizens began their own booming practices. These local boomers, like the railroads, had a vested interest in making their lands as attractive as possible and in obscuring the realities of farm life in the new West. These leading citizens would reap immense profits if the demand for local land and services would go up. The rising value of land, and the immigration of additional settlers, would not only allow them to sell their property for a large profit but would also increase the population and tax base which would support the town's ventures, such 1 90 as hotels, restaurants, newspapers, saloons, and Municipal buildings. This would put a steady aaount of aoney at the town's disposal which would enable it to perpetuate the boon by attracting further railroad construction: railroads would oftentimes build toward towns that would offer to help pay for the construction, resulting in intense bidding wars between towns that knew that being a railroad center was crucial to their survival and growth. A wealthy boom town could also attract other prizes, such as county seats, land offices, and even state or territorial capitals. In Boomtown, Garland exposes boomers and their booming practices. The name of the town itself parodies the practice of Western towns' choosing names that make them sound instantly prosperous and worth investing in. Everett Dick notes several examples in Kansas alone: New Babylon, Eureka, home, Sumner, and Garden City (Sod-House 41-43, 51- 54). One Nebraskan town, wanting to remove any doubt about precipitation levels in the new West, called itself "Bain'* (Dary 255>. Aside from Boomtown, the novel mentions similar impressive-sounding town names: Summit, Belleplain, Independence, Bristol, and Wheatlands. The results of this practice are still apparent: a glance at a current map of South Dakota reveals scores of town names designed to impress potential emigrants and predominately Eastern investors: Alexandria (current population, 516), Carthage 191 (221), Corsica <619), Eureka (1197), Faith <54S), Gettysburg (1510), Jefferson (527), Mount Vernon 066), Sales (1289), Scotland <968), Summit (267), and, most notably, Winner <3354). This list, moreover, does not include the other boosing setropolisea and guaranteed railheads and county seats that are now grazing land. Albert Seagraves, a hosesteader and newspaper editor, is the narrator of Boomtown. Writing after the town's fall, his goal is to capture “some little portion of a unique social movement--the modern railway settlement of the vast prairie west" (352). As Garland's mouthpiece, he will historicize the development of this prototypical Western boomtown and, in the process, demystify "Westward Expansion." Having arrived early, Seagraves witnessed firsthand Boomtown's progression from ebullient boom to melancholy bust. Thus (in addition to being a journalist), he has a rare ability to communicate its true story, one that is emblematic of the West, since Boomtown "closely resembled any one of a hundred other towns scattered newly upon the prairie from Texas to northern Dakota" (353). In its early days, Boomtown was a "hopelully expectant town" (354), Seagraves writes, "a town of faith" (35b), full of "boom and bustle" (352). This boom and bustle is most prominently showcased by the town newspaper, which was generally one of the first businesses established so that 132 "the little c o m u n l t y [could} sound its own praises" (Dick, Sod-House 43-44). It is edited by Hajor Mullins (whoa Seagraves works for), who tells the principal citizens of the town that "we are all Interested in seeing the town boos" (363) and urges thea to do all they can to augment the town's growth and reputation. The newspaper does its part by printing stories about the "unexampled fertility" of the land around Boomtown and its ease of cultivation (360), about the wonderfully curative powers of the climate and the fresh western breezes, and about the gloriousneas of the setting, comparing the "beautiful" Boomtown sky to that of Naples (361). Believing that boom talk wj.ll result in an actual boom, Mullins is himself a walking advertisement; he repeatedly talks of there not being the "slightest doubt" that the railroad will make Boomtown its headquarters and that within a few years Boomtown will number 50,000 inhabitants. Boomtown, he booms, is "destined to be the greatest city in the valley" (363). His crowning act of boosterism is the printing of a map in his paper that has eight roads coming from all directions merging at the center, which is labelled Boomtown, with surrounding towns either omitted or shown completely outside the path of the roads (361). Garland deftly shows that the practices of Boomtown were mirrored by other boom towns of Dakota and elsewhere. 193 Other towns In the novel slender Boomtown as much as Mullins slanders them, boost their own peculiar advantages for settlers and as territorial capital, and even reprint the Major's "spider map," but instead put their town name in the center. Boomtown's closest and biggest rival, Belleplain, cherishes "peculiarly pleasing and — to Boomtown--delusive hopes of railway junctions, county seats, territorial capitals, and the like, hopes which each town in the valley supposed itself alone, in the slightest degree, justified to hold" <365). By having rival towns claim identical virtues while saying that those virtues were unique to them. Garland makes clear the obvious fraudulence of the claims: a feature of a town was claimed not for any relation to the actual presence of the feature--the soil of Boomtown was obviously no different from that of neighboring Belleplain, and the claims of being a railway center were really only the hopes of such--but for its boom value. To the land speculator it didn't really matter if the land was more fertile than a neighboring land or if the town was going to become the "greatest city in the valley," as long as enough settlers believed it and invested in that belief by emigrating, investing, and paying higher rents and prices for the land. Certainly, a continued real boom would be preferable, but a temporary bubble would still drive up 194 prices, fill the hotels end restaurants, and the very Injection of a large amount of money might indeed create a real boom because that money could be used to entice further growth. Thus, falsified assets that led to a false boom were potentially as "truthful" as a real boom because a real boom might indeed follow. As Wallace Stegner notes, "Politically and economically the West as a boom market depended on vision far more than facta; the facts could be taken care of later" (236>. To help cement Boomtown'a claims that it is the true boom town and destined to be the greatest city in the valley, its leading citizens launch a vast array of projects, generally financed by taxes and bonds approved by town residents and even some farmers who equally want the town to prosper. Ambitious plans are made for building a 510,000 hotel, starting up a brick-making factory, and opening up a 2,000 acre farm (3b8-69), all in an attempt to look like a "booming would-be city" (.385). To gain support for these measures, Boomtown boomers create a feeling of panic by reporting arch-rival Belleplain'a schemes to attract railroad construction and citing the experiences of other towns that "collapsed like a soap-bubble" (381) because they did not attract investment. E. W. Howe, in TheStoryofaCountryTown, writes that the people were often made "miserable by reason of predictions that unless 195 impossible amounts of money were given to certain enterprises, the town would be ruined" (198). The railroads specifically fed on and exploited this fear. Jay Gould once made a speech in the small town of Columbus, Nebraska, threatening the citizens that, unless they approved bonds to support railroad construction, their town would become a ghost town (Dick, Spd^Hpuse 360). Indeed, railroads often built roads for the "sole purpose of extracting bonds from the community" (Dick 362). In the "mania of Western people for voting bonds," Howe explains, aid packages were oftentimes approved that exceeded the cost of the railroads ("Provincial" 91). Between 1876 and 1892, for example, 43 Nebraska counties voted almost five million dollars to railroad companies, "some of which never built a mile of track" (Cochran 132). In their desperation to survive and boom, Boomtown and other towns frequently went beyond these measures and resorted to bald bribery. "Railroads are not in the least sentimental," Kullins points out in Boomtown. "They go to that town which can give them the most money" (380). When Boomtown's rival, Belleplain, wins the railroad battle by grading a road as "a bonus to the railway company,” the Major admits that "we're euchred on this deal" (381). This is the "worst and darkest hour in the history of Boomtown," Seagraves ironically writes, and many Boomtown residents. 196 now thinking their town would not be the graateat city in the valley and thus not a land of rising real estate values, iove to Belleplain (362). But Boomtown bounces back by being selected as the district land office, which means that every settler in a 50-mile radius has to come to Boomtown to file his or her claim and, inevitably, patronize the local shops. The leading citizens of Boomtown ensured this victory by sending representatives to a territorial official and successfully ‘'convincing" him by undisclosed means (presumably, bribery) to name Boomtown the land office. This success leads to an even greater one: the securing of the county seat for Boomtown. These triumphs, together with Hullins's continued "articles and special editions," create "an era of the most astonishing activity" for the town (3S2). Boomtown booms again. But, as Seagraves-Garland make clear, booming is never satisfied. It feeds on itself and eventually feeds on those victimized by it, such as the majority of regular Western settlers. Boomtown, after being selected district land office and county seat, aims its sights at the biggest goal possible: to be named the capital of the Dakota Territory. This attempt leads to even wilder boom schemes and skulduggery: Boomtown sends delegates to Yankton, still the home of the territorial administration, to offer at least £125,000 to induce a favorable decision, while other 197 eager towna do the same (384). The money la wasted, though, because another town la selected. Thla scramble for territorial capital has a direct parallel to actual eventa in Dakota history. The Territorial capital waa going to be moved from Yankton (in present-day South Dakota) becauae it waa too far south, and ao scores of Dakota towna reaorted to any means to be selected the capital. By and large, these meana involved coming up with the highest bid to bribe those making the selection. These towna were fighting for what they saw as a final guarantee of their boom existence, and many of the losers in the contest accused the governor, Nehemiah G. Ordway, of accepting payments in order to influence the decision of the commission; indeed, in the wake of the selection of Biamark as territorial capital, rumors of assassination plots against Governor Ordway became widespread (Schell 211) . Boomtown, though, despite all its successes and its continued rosy talk and boom schemes, soon suffers crippling economic failure. This, again, is prototypical: nearly every new West boomtown experienced similar failure in the late 18BOs, mostly as a result of the inevitable reemergence of the true climatic nature of the region, especially the drought. But railroads and town boomers, who wanted to keep emigration booming because it would keep 198 the demand for real estate and railroad aervicea high, not. only continued to issue flattering reporta about the bleat but alao "rigorously suppressed" any "information that might deter settlers from coming" (Hicks 17). The drouqht was drenched by another propaganda campaign more concerned with vision than facts. In Boomtown, as the drought and other misfortunes occur, the citizens make sure that they utter "no notes of despondency, no word of foreboding” about their town 059). Mullins warns against "growlers" who "can do more harm to a town than a whole newspaper corps in a rival place," and scoffs at the cranks and "constitutional kickers" who fail to give tribute to this "glorious land and climate" (363). He dismisses the drought as just "one dry summer." assures his readers that rain is imminent, and blasts the negative reports in "eastern papers" for obscuring the indubitable fact that "here [in Dakota! was an empire of the best lands Gods' sun ever shone upon, free— absolutely freel to whomever would take the trouble to come and get it" (361; the grammatical errors are perhaps an intentional undercutting of the Major's journalistic skills). Similar suppressions and lies occur in the Boomtown of Jason Edwards. Again, some Eastern papers have hinted at the difficulties of farming life in Dakota, but Judge Balser, along with a group of "bankers [and! land-holders," 199 circulates a "defiant article directed at the Eastern press, denying the poverty of the West" (130); later, this group resumes its practice of sending out "reports of the prosperity of the West" <188-89). Walter Reeves denounces this "set o' boomers [that! flourish at the expense of the real workers of this territory" <126). After hearing of the reports sent East praising the glories of Western life. Reeves exclaims to a townsman: "With seventy per cent, of your farms mortgaged, those men have the nerve to send out a paper like that. I begin to think that you [speculators] are the worst cursed part of our whole nation" <130). but Reeves's voice is buried by the advertising onslaught. Thus, as Garland shows, the real West, with all its difficulties and Injustices, did not get broadcast because influential people who profited from the romantic image of the West prevented it. The Garden Myth had wealthy backers.[4] This mania for good publicity, backed by the railroad's financial and political clout, had the power to make water flow from a rock. When John Wesley Powell, one of the few government officials willing to speak the truth about the West, wrote in his report for the Geological Survey that the Great Plains were a aemiarid region, "western congressmen who were acting at the behest of railroad lobbies" forced Powell to strike out every 200 reference to seniaridity and substitute the word "aemihumidity" (Merk 473). The railroads, like the Catholic Church of the seventeenth century, could force recalcitrant scientists to recant. The boomers in Dakota were even prepared to see farmers go bankrupt rather than risk bad publicity. In response to the crippling drought of 1887-97, the United States government began exploring the possibility of irrigation, but many in Dakota successfully resisted these attempts because “the proposal for Irrigation implied arid conditions" and they wanted to avoid "any adverse publicity" (Schell 34b). Even drought relief measures were killed because many "feared emigration would stop if people in the East ever heard that the [Dakota) frontiersmen were on relief” (Dick, Sod-House 208). Further attempts to expand the Homestead allotment from a quarter section to a half-section (320 acres)--a crucial, though still inadequate, measure because dry farming on the plains required a larger land area--were also successfully delayed by Dakota boomers because one of the criteria for an expanded land unit was a declaration that the land was semiarid, which again meant bad publicity (Schell 349). As Seagraves reflects on the boom--after all the agricultural hardships ultimately led to suffering, disillusionment and de-population despite the continued 201 booming of Mullins end the others — he realizes that it was a fantastic and "incredible** event that had been "sustained and moved by a wide-spread and complex machinery" (3t>6). This "complex machinery * ** which created a humid mentality in an arid environment, was driven by the fundamental misrepresentation that a dry, agriculturally precarious land was really Canaan. By both claiming and "proving" that farming conditions west of the 98th meridian were not much different from those of eastern lands--in fact, stating that farming was outright eaeier--the wishful if not fraudulent boomers of the new West, in their eagerness to attract settlement and a growing tax base, failed to prepare the farmer for the singular conditions of Great Plains agriculture. Because "wet-weather institutions and practices were beinq imposed on a dry-weather country" (297), as Wallace Stegner writes, the West was the scene of "acute political and economic and agricultural blunders" (176). By "encouraging grain farming where it should never have been attempted" (403), Stegner continues, boomers had created Inevitable agricultural catastrophe. Boomers, furthermore, had strapped on the backs of the occasionally willing farmers an immense bond debt. This ''staggering" indebtedness, much of it incurred to finance or entice railroad construction (Hicks 89), hastened the typical farmers' descent into receivership. 202 In Boomtown, Garland reveals the gemination and extent of the catastrophic effects of land booming. When all of the town's efforts failed— as the efforts of so many other boom towns did--mostly because of the intractable resistance of the Great Plains to traditional aqriculture, Boomtown became Busttown. It survived, Seagravea says, but only as an "ordinary western town of two or three thousand Inhabitants," far from the booming metropolis of 50,000 envisioned by Mullins and other boomers (388; the current population of Ordway, South Dakota, the source of Boomtown, is 2,700). Its rival, Belleplain, despite having secured a railway line (though construction may never have begun while the railroad weighed other offers), collapsed completely. The feeling of most farmers and Populist leaders was that the speculator--whether in the form of the railroad, or town boomers (like Major Mullins), or land agents (like Jim Butler and Judge Ba1ser)--were, in the words of one struggling farmer in ALittleNorak, nothing but "a rope and grindstone around the necks of the rest of us, who do the work” (98-99). In JasonEdwarda, Reeves attacks Judge Balser for "smoking calmly" and continuing to send out glowing reports about "the prosperity" of Boomtown while the settlers sweat out the drought and their ever-enlarging mortgages. One farmer comments on the Judge: "Ain't he a 203 daisyt Ain't, he a tulipt While me an' Edwards are worried t' death over the crops, the judge site here, cool aa a toad in a cellar, and harvests hia interest slick's a cat can lick her ear" (111>. "Harvests his interest" is the crucial line, for while these farmers have sweated out their lives trying to harvest crops, the Judge earns his money sitting calmly by, smoking. Indeed, the Judge has become the figure in the boat idling down the river in the poster Jason Edwards gazed at back in Boston; the true figure in the boat is the land apeculator and town boomer not the farmer's family, which represents a symbolic switch and mournful rendering of the fact that the agrarian West had been usurped by the capitalist East. The land speculator and boomer, like the grasshopper plagues that menaced the West in these years, infested Western farming life, leaving, in the wake of their passage, destroyed farms, homes, people, and dreams, as the skyrocketing rates of bankruptcy, tenancy, and depopulation testify. Garland's dominant point in Jason Edwards, Boomtown, and other Populist works is that the new West's "free land" — monopolized and fraudulently boomed — has become the blighted land. 204 3 - "The Return of a Private," "Under the Lion's Paw," and the Monopoly of Money The nonopoly of money added to this blight. It exacerbated the ills caused by the lack of free land and the subsequent depredations by land speculators and land boomers. For not only were farmers forced to take on large debts to buy their "free" land and other necessities (and support various booming schemes that many were convinced were essential in order to maintain and increase the value of the land), these debts were made especially burdensome by a financial system that, like the settlement of the West itself, had to the Populist mind a thorny and largely corrupt history. To understand the monopoly of money. Populists once again looked back in American history with a skeptical eye. Because of the financial emergencies caused by the Civil War, the United States began issuing paper money ("greenbacks"), which resulted in a doubling of the nation's supply of money to roughly two billion dollars by 1B65. When the war was over, though, most bankers and other financiers argued that this emergency measure should come to an end; furthermore, to completely strengthen the dollar, they urged that the United States should drop silver as a basis for its currency and rely strictly on gold (gold monometallism). These financiers, influenced by 205 Britain's gold lonoietallia*, wished to have America adopt what they considered the sound and traditional practice of the gold standard. Gold was real money, the foundation of a sound economic system; greenbacks (and silver) were fake money, the foundation of a slipshod economic system. Gold was "hard money," greenbacks were "soft money." Their arguments were seemingly cemented by the Panic of 1673, which they blamed on the use of unsound silver and paper money. These financial leaders— with support from the Republican Party, which dominated Congress, and over the objections of the newly formed Greenback Party and other agitators for an expanded currency--pushed through two acts that put America on the gold standard I in 1673, silver was officially demonetized, making gold the only basis for United States currency; and in 1879, the specie resumption act (passed in 1675) came into effect, which directed the Treasury Department to redeem all greenbacks in "specie" (which, after 1873, meant just gold coins), a policy designed to send paper money out of circulation. This second measure had a much greater impact than the first because silver had not been widely used for years (silver coins were worth more as a commodity, so were always melted down CNugent 112]); the 1873 demonetization of silver did not significantly reduce the money supply. Only paper money, along with paper credit, would create an expanded 206 and flexible currency, which is why the later cry for silver by William Jennings Bryan, W. H. "Coin" Harvey, and many Rocky Mountain Populists was misleading and a vulgarization of the seriousness of the money issue.£53 The acts of 1873 and 1879 did the Job: despite the passage of minor silver-purchase acts in 1878 (Blsnd- Alliaon) and 1890 (Sherman) to placate the Greenback Movement and other rebellious parties, the amount o± money in circulation declined a full one-half within a decade of the passage of the 1879 specie resumption act (Peffer 119). By 1890 the United States again had roughly two billion dollars in circulation, the same aa at the end of the Civil War. But in that quarter-century between 1865 and 1890, "the population had doubled and the volume of business had probably trebled" (Hicks 88). Given these conditions, the result of a relatively shrinking currency is axiomatic: more people are clamoring for a scarcer good, which, as with any other good, increases its value; money "appreciates." Money appreciation favors the creditor class and puts the debtor class at extreme risk. If a farmer borrows $5,000 in 1880, he or she pays it back in money that gains in value over the years; the dollar in these years appreciated at a pace roughly equal to a 20* to 25* annual interest rate on a non-appreciating dollar (Hicks 90). 207 Adding this lowtr figure to the easiest loan rates a farmer could find--6* for long-term loans plus 4 to 5* commission rates--results in a minimum real interest of 30* for long term loans, such as those for lands and homes.16] Thus, the farmer who borrowed $5,000 in 1680 and signed a ten- year note under these rates, needed to pay 81,617 a year to service the loan, for a total payment of $16,173 (principal and interest) in real dollars. And if the larmer was one of the many who was forced to borrow at higher interest rates--18* was a common long-term rate 5*) , he or she faced a net interest rate of 46*. The total payment for this farmer who borrowed $5,000 in 1880 would be $24,485 (principal and interest). Some farmers, moreover, paid as much as 40* for chattel loans (Hicks 82) and 50* for one-year loans (Peffer 82); the net interest rate in the latter case would then be a crushing 80*. The creditor class thus "harvests" an enormous profit on its original loan. Such a situation led Populists to investigate this phenomenon and accuse this class— mostly Eastern bankers and investors, and their large supporters in both main partiea--of a calculated policy designed to fatten their bankrolls at the expense of Western labor. James B. Weaver, the Populist presidential candidate in 206 1892, declared that "the capitalist and usurer [are] the masters of society <314), and that currency contraction represents "the most stupendous crime of the age" (307). The 1892 Omaha Platform claimed that "the supply of currency is purposely abridged to fatten usurers, bankrupt enterprise, and enslave industry" (Hicks Appendix 440)[71. A contraction of the money supply creates, aside from an appreciating currency, an additional problem: downward pressure on the price of goods (or "deflation," the reverse of Inflation). Lawrence Goodwyn, who has written the most thorough and important study of Populism since John Hicks's landmark study, explains this phenomenon: Letting ten farmers symbolize the entire population, and ten dollars the entire money supply, and ten bushels of wheat the entire production of the economy, it is at once evident that a bushel of wheat would sell for one dollar. Should the population, production, and money supply increase to twenty over a period of, say, two generations, the farmers' return would still be one dollar per bushel. But should population and production double to twenty while the money supply was held at ten--currency contraction--the price of wheat would drop to fifty cents. The farmers of the nation would get no more for twenty bushels of wheat than they had previously received for ten. (13) The "money famine" of post Civil War America, to use William Peffer's apt phrase (128), drove down prices of most agricultural products (while the prices of many non- agricultural products were supported by tariffs [81). Crop prices declined steadily from the early 1870s to the 1890s. In 1871, farmers were paid roughly one dollar for a bushel of wheat., but by the 1890s they received, after all the exactions laposed by various aiddleaen, as little as 35 cents a bushel (Goodwyn 114), at a time when the coat of raising a bushel ranged fron 45 to 67 cents (Hicks 57). Wheat faraers, because of this situation alone, forgetting all the other obstacles they faced, were destined for bankruptcy. Prices for the other major cash crop of the prairie and plains, corn, dropped as well: corn had sold for 45 cents a bushel in 1870, but by the 1890s it had dropped to 26 cents, with many farmers receiving only 10 cents a bushel (Goodwyn 114), which again was much less than the costs incurred for raising corn (approximately 21 cents a bushel CHlcks 573). Hence the recurring complaint, what with appreciation, deflation, tariffs, and middlemen all taking their cuts, of "ten-cent corn and ten-cent interest," and the repeated reports of farmers burning their corn for fuel rather than bringing it to market at a loss. Eric Goldman notes that "apples lay under trees, milk was fed to hogs, corn and cotton were used as fuel" (31), even though people in the cities were undernourished if not starving. Tn the peculiarly constructed American economic system of the time, "the makers of clothes were underfed; the makers of food were underclad," as one Populist critic aptly put it Garland wondered "why children cry far food In the cities while fruits rotted on the vines" Deflation in prices, combined with an appreciating currency, led to financial cataatrophe for the ease of Western farming settlers. Peffer notes that a farmer had to pay off debts with "money which goes up in value while his products go down" (6>; a farmer"s debts, he writes, "are increased lOO per cent, while the value of his products has been diminished on the average nearly 50 per cent" (197). To the farmers of the West, then, the old booming phrase "Golden West" (Jason Edwards sees it in one of his brochures C611) had become a cruel pun: the West was golden all right, financed and exploited by the golden class that prostrated the West with its enforced gold standard. To the farmer of the time, end indeed to most later historians, the monopoly of money was the most crucial and crippling one to the agrarian population. "We are cursed," one Nebraskan farmer writes, "not by the hot winds so much as by the swindling games of the bankers and money loaners" (qtd. in Pollack, PopullBt Hind 34). William Peffer argues that "the money power" is “the giant evil of the time. Honey is the great issue--all others pale into insignificance before this, the father of them" <123). The contraction of the currency and its two major 211 aftereff*cti--»oney appreciation and price def1stion--are, Peffer claiis, "rapidly placing our land in the hand of landlords and Making renters of our farmera" (165). The Desocratic-Populist senator from Nebraska, William V. Allen, angrily proclaims that "through the operation of a shrinking volume of money, which has been caused by Eastern votes and influences for purely selfish purposes, the East has placed its hands on the throat of the West" Hicks 90-91), W. H, "Coin" Harvey, in his best-selling silverite pamphlet, Coin_^a_Financial School <1894), insists that we must "stop this legalized robbery that is transferring the property of the debtors to the possession of the creditors" <223). To some of these reformers, the demonetization of silver in 1873 became the "Crime of '73," a slogan which, next to Bryan's "cross of gold," remains the most remembered one of the entire Populist movement. Lawrence Goodwyn--who stresses that the 1879 act, which retired greenbacks, did the real damage--states that for farmers, caught "between rising interest rates and falling farm prices" <14), the return to gold monometallism constituted "a mass tragedy which eventually led to the Populist revolt" <13). Garland, in the fourth and fifth stories of Hain- Trave1 led_Roads--"The Return of a Private" and "Under the Lion's Paw"--carefully sets up a chronological sequence 212 that showa how the aonopoly of toney created a "data tragedy" that deatroyed the typical farner. "The Return of a Private"--which historian Allan Nevina claims ia the beet atory ever written about the Civil War (113)--ia aet in August 1865, four aontha after Appoaattox. Private Edward Smith (hia name indicates the typicality of hie caae aa does the indefinite article in the story'a title) and a few other soldiers, mostly farmers like Smith, are completing their homeward railroad Journey from New Orleans to La Crosse, Wisconsin. Their blue uniforms are "dusty and grimy," they have no money, are forced to eat their wartime hardtack, and Smith himself is suffering from ague; he is feverish, partially deaf, and "gaunt and pale." Arriving at two in the morning, they find the station deserted and dark: returning soldiers, especially anonymous privates, no longer create a stir (similar to the situation Harold Krebs faces in Hemingway's short atory "Soldier's Home"). The narrator of "Private" notes that there were no bands greeting them at the station, no banks of gayly dressed ladies waving handkerchiefs and shouting "Bravo!" as they came in on the caboose of a freight train into the towns that cheered and blared at them on their way to war. (131) Unable to afford a hotel room, all but one of the soldiers sleep on the station benches before walking to their farms the next day. 213 This grin return--uniIke the presumably triumphant return of the generals and colonels (133)--signals the story's main point: that the war, worthy and even heroic though it may have been, exploited the poor farmers who volunteered to fight in it. Their being shunted in the caboose of a freight train--the symbol of the triumphant northern industrial power they fought for and helped to entrench--indicates that their sacrifice is unnoticed and unrewarded, and foreshadows their lowly position in the economic landscape of post-Civil War America. Howells writes, in his review of Main-Troyelled Roods, that Smith returns home "foot-sore, heart-sore, with no stake in the country he helped to make safe and rich” (lb). These soldier-farmera, furthermore, are returning to farms that are now deeply in debt; and they are aware that "it's going to be mighty hot skirmishin' to find a dollar these days" (132). Smith feels "the inevitable mortgage standing ready with open Jaw to swallow half his earnings" <133). He had been forced to buy the farm "in the usual way . . . paying part, mortgaging the rest" (140), despite feeling that "the word 'mortgage' had a sinister connotation. It was," he felt, "a monster which fed on the flesh of the poor."(91 That "insatiate mortgage" (140), made more rapacious by the rising vslue of money (appreciation) and the falling value of farm products 214 (deflation), darkens hla already grim return. Him progreaaively valueless crops will not keep pace with his progressively valuable debt. He sees "himself as he was, a man in debt after years of life in the Western paradise which he had so hopefully sought to share" (Trai1-Makers 233). As Garland forecasts the family's chances for success in these decades after the Civil War, he remarks that the private's actual combat experiences may be over but that "his daily-running fight with nature and against the injustice of his fellowman, was begun again" <152). Garland here neatly encapsulates the wreckings of the intrinsic ("nature") and extrinsic ("injustice of his fellowmen") forces that devastated the new West. Garland points out, furthermore, that Private Smith's daily-running fight, unlike the one in the Civil War, is "a hopeless battle" (152). Thus, the return from one war is really the beginning of another war: the warring private returns, the warring farmer sets forth, now battling against those forces in the North that he had just nearly given his liie to defend (while many of his friends did). And though he managed to save his life in the battle with the South, he will more than likely lose his farm and livelihood in the battle with the North. The "akirmlshin'" for dollars will prove more lethal than the skirmishing with Rebs. 215 Earlier in the atory, the corrupt and self-seeking Northerners who exploited the soldiers that sade their position possible are lambasted. The narrator notes that "while the millionaire sent his money to England for safe keeping, this man [Private Smith], with his girl-wife and three babies, left them on a mortgaged farm, and went away to fight for an idea" (140). Since Civil War draft laws allowed men to buy out their war service, many rich men, as John Chamberlain points out, "stayed home from the fighting Cand] reaped the benefit" (26>. Thus, while the typical patriotic Western farmer, such as Private Smith, "was fighting to rid America from chattel bondage" (Chamberlain 6), the Eastern commercial and manufacturing interests were creating another form of bondage, or, as Garland calls it elsewhere, "industrial slavery" (Spoil 342), with monopolies serving as the manacles. William Peffer acidly notes that rich men boast of their patriotism in lending a few millions of their ill-gotten gains to the government of their imperiled country at '12 per cent' Interest, when thousands of farmers and wage workers of all sorts and conditions were voluntarily in the army at risk of life and home--all without question as to pay. (122) These new slave-masters, principally by means of their land, money, and transportation monopolies, will make Smith's attempt to clear his land of debt a "hopeless battle." The use of "England" by Garland la a careful one because it was considered the ideological home of the 216 conservative elements of society and of the conservative, nononetallist views of money.1103 Private Ssith and the country had merely exchanged one set of masters (Southern) for another (Northeastern, an outgrowth of England). In "Under the Lion's Paw," which Immediately follows "The Return of a Private" in Mgin^Travelled_Roads--a book. Garland later said, "written to convict the selfish monopolistic liars of the towns" and accuse "the comfortable, the conservative, those who farmed the farmer” (Son 416, 415)--the injustice that Private Smith is about to encounter in 1665 is fully present in the late 1860s, the setting of "Under the Lion's Paw." This atory explains why Smith's battle will be a hopeless one. The personal history of Jim Butler, the nefarious land speculator who rents a farm to the Haskins family, acquires significance in light of the previous story and in light of an understanding of the monopolies of land and money. Butler arrived early in Rock River--the center of Garland's Iowa fiction, as Boomtown is of his Dakota fiction--and was originally a hard-working grocer who "at this period of his life earned all he got" (159). But when he sold a lot of land for four times what he paid for it, "a change came over him. . . . From that time forward he believed in land speculation" (159-60). He realizes that the inflated expectations about the new West caused an increase in land 217 value, and that the coabination of a tide of hopeful immigrants, rising land values, appreciating aoney, and in aany places rising interest rates put land owners and creditors in a doainant position. He attends all the forced sales and aortgages in the county and, as related in "Sim Burns' Wife," soon "owned a dozen faras (which he had taken on aortgages) and . . . had got rich by buying land at govarnaent price and holding for a rise” (122). He sold his grocery and was “aainly occupied now with sitting around town on rainy days aaoking and 'gasain' with the boys,' and fishing and hunting a great deal” (Main 160), auch like Judge Balser in Jason_Edwards. Butler is worth fifty thousand dollars, but now it's clear that, unlike when he was a hard-working grocer, he no longer earns all he gets. As Peffer writes, the profits of the farmers' labor was "absorbed by men who do not work at all" (137).till The farm that Butler rents to the Haskinses, who have just arrived in Iowa after going bankrupt in Kansas, is “the Higley place," which "had fallen into his hands in the usual way. . . . Poor Higley, after working himself nearly to death on it in the attempt to lift the mortgage, had gone off to Dakota, leaving the farm and hia curse to Butler" (1&1>. Butler, despite his protestations that he doesn't want anyone's land and that "all I'm after is the 216 int'rest on My nonty” (160), clearly profits by the high rate of bankruptcies, at least while the immigration boom continues. It allows him to pick up more lands and to keep raising the price for every new renter. If a farmer succeeds on the land and buys it from Butler, Butler can no longer take advantage of the rise in value. But Butler knows most farmers will fail because of money appreciation and price deflation. Thus, two or three years later, after having taken all the current renter's money and labor, he can rent to the next farmer at an even higher rate because the value of land has increased. This increase is caused by the endless stream of customers that Butler and others have created through their propaganda campaigns that boom the great opportunities available in the Golden West. A crucial aside in the story informs the reader that Butler's brother-in-law has been elected to Congress, which gives Butler further control over land and money policies that favor speculators and creditors at the expense of homesteaders and debtors. "Poor Higley," then, is just one in the sequence of Butler's victims, and his fate prefigures Haskins's (as is perhaps hinted by their similar names, each two syllables and each starting with an "H"). Haskins, the latest victim, having gone bankrupt in dusty and grasshopper- ridden Kansas, can't afford to buy Butler's land, which 2 1 9 costs *2,500. So he rents It for *250 a month for three years, with the agreed "privilege of re-renting or buying at the end of the tern" (164). Over those three years, Haskins and his wife, like Hlgley before then, toll like slaves "in the Roman galleys" (166). Haskins works from sunrise to sundown, sinking into bed each night "with a deep groan of relief, too tired to change his grlny, dripping clothing, [and feeling] that he was getting nearer and nearer to a hone of his own." Haskins "thought himself a free man, and that he was working for his wife and babes” <166>, when in fact, like Grant HcLane, he was wallowing around in the manure for somebody else. The Haskinses' three years of labor seemingly pays off: they have raised good crops, fixed up the barn and pig-pen, planted a neat garden, and saved enough money to put a quarter of the value of the farm down and pay the rest over three years. After explaining this to Butler, Butler casually asks, "What did you expect to pay f'r the place?" Haskins replies, "Why, about what you offered it for before." But Butler informs him, "in a careless and decided voice," that the value of the land, by normal appreciation and by the Haskinses' improvements, has more than doubled to *5,500. Haskins, feeling "like a man struck on the head with a sandbag,” argues with Butler, but Butler tells him to take his offer “or--git out" (168). 220 Haakins calls hi* a robber and cones close to killing his with a pitchfork so that this sequence of victimization will end: "You'll never rob another nan, daan yet" Haskins shouts (170). But when he raises the pitchfork he hears his two-year-old daughter laughing near the house and lets the pitchfork fall to the ground. And though Haskins has perhaps been naive in not getting the "privilege" in writing, the essential evil is Butler's, who profits from what Garland, borrowing from Henry George, calls the "unearned increment" in land value. Butler says he can raise the price because "it's the law. . . . Everybody does it" (169). (Allan Nevins notes that "like abominations were committed then all over the Middle West" tllO].) Haskins realizes that "he was under the lion's paw. . . . there was no path out" (169). He decides to buy the land, which now involves paying a thousand dollars down and mortgaging the other $4500 at 10* interest. In the final scene, Haakins grieves while sitting "dumbly on the sunny piles of sheaves*1 (170). This points to a recurring critique in Garland and in Populist writing in general: that even when Nature, the intrinsic force, is beneficent (having produced this pile of sheaves), men and their laws, the extrinsic force, destroy things (Bledsoe xxxiii). The string of bankrupt renters will not likely be broken 221 despite Haskins's purchase, given the high cost of the land, the interest rate cosbined with the appreciation of money, and the dropping value of farm products. Haskins too will probably move away within a few years, leaving his farm and curses to Butler, who will coolly rent to the next hopeful and naive settler. The battle for economic survival is a hopeless one, from start (Private Smith) to finish (Haskins). That "Under the Lion's Paw" articulately and powerfully sums up many of the deepest-seated farmer grievances concerning the monopolies of land and money is evidenced by Its popularity at Populist gatherings. When Garland campaigned for the Populist Party in 1891 and 1692, he often closed with a reading of this story, and at the epochal Omaha Platform, Garland read the story to an appreciative audience (Pizer, Ear1^ Work 95); his old pioneer father, Richard Garland, was in attendance and wept in pride for his son's achievement (Schuppe 655). Garland's friend, James A. Herne, the leading realistic dramatist of the time, also read "Under the Lion's Paw" at Populist gatherings. Garland had converted Herne to George's belief in the evils of land monopoly and the unearned increment and his single-tax solution. Herne joined the Henry George movement and began lecturing at various Single Tax clubs: his dramatic readings of "Under 222 the Lion's Paw" becaia ao popular (Herne, unlike Garland, waa by all accounts an excellent speaker) that when Herne ended hia lecture with a different reading, audiences were disappointed (Edwards 366). This portrait of Butler's exploitation of the Haskins family and of the diseased nature of economic life in the new West has remained Garland's best-known work, the only one that has retained any visibility today (for example, it Is included in the Norton_Anthologyof.American Literature). The few critlCB who discuss Garland's work invariably single out "Under the Lion's Paw" for commendation. Henry Nash Smith, for example, calls it Garland's only fully successful work (246). But nearly every one of these critics reveals a New Critical, formalist bias when discussing "Under the Lion's Paw": the story is a good one, these critics argue, not because of its "mere" historical importance (as Hark Schorer says), but because of its "universal" themes. Claude Simpson's praise of the story is typical: "Under the Lions Paw" la . . . one of Garland's most successful efforts because even in its sullen anger it is artistic, exemplifying with naturalistic vigor not only the immediate problem of unearned increment but the age-old struggle of the little man against the blind and brutal forces of nature and predatory humanity. Here is compressed all the social message of Frank Norris's Octopus. (227) The "immediate," "social" concerns have been transmuted into universal themes; the story, in fact, is good not 223 because of its "sullen anger" but In spite of it. Thomas Bledsoe praises the story not for its sere "sermon on the single tax," but for its artistic rendering of the seasons, its mixing motifs of darkness and light (xxxlil); it is the story's internal, formalist virtues, not its actual message, that interests and attracts Bledsoe. Donald Pizer is most interested in how the story forms a part of the book's "road metaphor," a clearly universal theme about "man's Journey through life"; thus, the story succeeds despite its "Victorian melodrama" at the end (with the appearance of Haskins's child) (Realism 138). Arthur Voss praises the compact narrative structure of "Under the Lion's Paw,” which rescues a story nearly ruined by Garland's overemphasis on how hard the Haskinses work and on the evils of land speculation, and by a conclusion that "smacks of melodrama" (109). Larzer Ziff, to quote one more example, writes that "Under the Lion's Paw" "surpasses its propagandlstic intent because Garland fastens its movement to the rhythm of the wheat crop" (98). Where are you when we need you, Jane Tompkins? All this talk about wheat rhythms, road metaphors, images of darkness and light, narrative structure, etc., is ludicrous, a compact example itself of the blindness of post-World War II New Criticism, as discussed in the Introduction. These critics are completely missing 224 Garland's Main point. They scramble to find "universal thanes" and formalist felicity to justify their liking of a story that is patently and primarily concerned about "immediate social" concerns. Of course, there is an "artistic" shaping of these concerns and the formalist insights of these critics are largely valid, but they are far from being the whole show. The nearly exclusive emphasis on these formalist and "universal" features, and the sniffy disparagement of the subject matter, is critically short-sighted and laughable. Thus, the story, despite being Garland's one relatively well-known one, has yet to have its basic ideological dimenslons--its connection to the vast forces of land speculation and money policy in the new West--explored in any detail. Despite being well known and uniformly praised, it ironically illustrates the woeful misapprehension of Garland's designs and talents. The monopoly of money and the monopoly in land explored in these stories gave rise to what is perhaps the most radical character and uprising ever depicted in American fiction, one that creates an important link to Garland's work. In 1890, Ignatius Donnelly, the Minnesota Populist who wrote and delivered the preamble to the Omaha Platform--one of the greatest pieces of political oratory in American hietory--published an anti-utopian novel. 225 Caeaar^sCglumn. A bestseller in its day though now coapletely forgotten, it is set lOO years in the future and sees not a solution to contemporary ills--as Edward Bellamy's better-known LookingBackword (1887) doea--but a thorough exacerbation of them. Society in Donnelly's novel has been polarized into two equally brutal and intransigent camps, the Plutocracy and the Brotherhood of Destruction, and is on the verge of a holocaust. The commander-in-chief of the Brotherhood of Destruction, Caesar Lomellini, was formerly, it is significant to note, a hard-working farmer In the "newly settled state of Jefferson" (126), an obvious evocation of the originator of noble American agrarianism that has been snuffed out by the Plutocracy. Caesar, after falling into the hands of money lenders and having the profits from his crops swept away by "combinations and trusts," loses his home and farm. He then forms the Brotherhood, one that nearly every other farmer joins. This Jacobinic Brotherhood, Donnelly implies, is what Populism will become if its grievances are not addressed. The farmers of 1988, Donnelly writes, instead of being the "honest yeomanry who had filled, in the old days, the armies of Washington, and Jackson, and Grant, and Sherman," are now the "brutalized descendants" who want to kill "every man who owned anything" (280). Edwin Smith, the patriotic farmer-soldier who did fill the armies of Grant 2 2 6 and Shaman in "A Return of a Private," has becoae, in Caeaar Lomellini, a naaa Murderer. When the Mighty war between the two caapa coees, Saith'a brutal deacendanta kill those who have for a century exploited thee: in New York alone a quarter-million are slaughtered, with the corpsea left to lie "in heaps and layers" (255>. These corpaes are later, under Caeaar'a orders, formed into a gigantic column, with cement poured over them, so that, as Caeaar aaya, it will "stand forever as a monument of this day's glorious workt" (274). A day's work for a farmer, in the brutalized conditions caused by monopolies, has been transformed from the task of harvesting crops to that of harvesting corpsea. In 1865, Private Smith only expressed anger at the Northern power that exploited him while he killed its Southern enemies; in 1988, in the form of Caesar Lomellini, he has dusted off his gun and turned it elsewhere. 4 - AMembergfthe T h i r d H o u a e and the Monopoly of Transportation A_MemberoftheThird_Houae, the middle of three Populist novels published by Garland in 1892 (along with ^®*2 D-Edwards and ASpoilofOffice), investigates the third monopoly that farmed the farmer, namely that of "transportation." This referred to railroad monopolies 2 2 7 »ostly, but also Included grain elevator operators, processing centers, stockyards, and other "middlemen" organizations that got between the wheat on the farmer's field and the bread on the consumer's table. These transportation monopolies had the same deflationary effect that the contraction of the money supply (and the tariff policy) had: they drove down even further the prices the farmers received for their products, making their battle against indebtedness an even more hopeless one. 112) Member articulately illuminates the Populist complaint about the corrupt practices of the railroads and their effects on state and national political life. Arena publisher B. 0. Flower called Hamper "the most graphic picture of the influences of money in corrupting legislation that has ever been penned" (43). Yet it remains Garland's weakest Populist work: the contrast between the good and evil characters is too sweeping; the characters are thinly developed, being merely mouthpieces for various set speeches; and, among other things, the plot clumsily moves from scene to scene (Member was originally written as a play). The characterization of the female lead, Helene Davis, is the best illustration of how far Garland was off the mark in this work: she is nothing more than a simpering, deferent, brainless female who makes Dora ^syid_Cgpperfield appear mature and complicated in 226 comparison: this from an author who was dedicated to bringing rsal and complex women into his work. Thus, the answer to the question incumbent upon literary critics, "But is it any good?*' is no. Its grievous internal, formalist faults wreck it for the literary student. Its only value is as a text that reflects social or political history, as Edmund Wilson deprecatingly put it. 1 will use it for these *'paraphraeable" purposes because it is the only work of Garland's that investigates the monopoly of transportation in any detail, a knowledge of which is crucial to a full understanding of the oppressed condition of the Western farmer, and thus of the characters in Garland's fiction. The novel's title refers to the railroad lobbyists who form a third, and more powerful, house, than the two regular legislative houses. The phrase "third house," and the anger directed against it, was not unique to Garland. A critic in the Forum, claimed (in an 18SO article), for example, that this "third house" makes possible "the rule of a usurping and unscrupulous oligarchy" (Barnard 124, 131). Garland's novel is set in an unspecified capital city, thereby allowing it to serve as a representative of all state legislatures and their control by the railroad lobbyists. These lobbyists, as the narrator of the novel says, are "the unknown lawmakers of the land" (67). 229 Lawrence Davis, known as the "Iron Duke," is the president of the "Consolidated Airline Railway," and, ae the story opens, his railroad is trying to get a charter passed that will give hie company sole control of the "street railways" in this capital city. As Davis knows from past experience with legislatures, the way to obtain favorable legislation is through bribery. Davis's chief lobbyist. Torn Brennan, the subject of the book's title, is known as the "king of the Third House" <72). For several years Brennan has "attended to the work of suppressing unwelcome legislation, and the equally important work of 'inducing' legislation which was desirable" (49). As with all previous legislative efforts, Brennan uses the now- standard practices of bribing legislators, opinion-makers, and even resorting to blackmail to get the railroad's desired legislation through the other two houses. Brennan's boss, Davis, balks a bit at the huge sums this current effort is costing: "I've spent a hundred thousand dollars already," [Davis says], "and now you--you come to me with a scheme to practically buy the whole senate. Can't it be carried some other way?" "I don't know any other way," (Brennan says). "Moral suasion is out of date in legislation." (37) The way legislators are bought by people like Davis and Brennan la well explained in Garland's A_Spoi1_of Office. An older legislator explains to a younger and idealistic legislator named Bradley Talcott how "these 23 0 infernal corporations capture a State** (208) and warns Talcott that these railroads will try to capture his as well. "I'll tell you how it'a done," he says to Talcott. First, “these railroads will send for you, and tell you they've heard of you aa a prominent young lawyer of the State." After that, they tell you that “aa they are in need of an attorney in your county, they'd like very much to have you take charge, etc." There may not be a lot of work required, the railroads say, but "they will be glad" to pay you handsomely. The older legislator then completes the scenario: Well, we'll suppose you take it [the railroad's offer). You go back to Rock LCounty), there is very little buainesa for the railroad, but your salary comes in regularly. You say to yourself that, in case any work comes in which is dishonorable, you'll refuse to take hold of it. But that money comes in nicely. You marry on the expectations of its continuance. You get to depending upon it. You live up to it. You don't find anything which they demand of you really dishonest, and you keep on; but really cases of the railroad against the people do come up, and your sense of justice isn't so acute as it used to be. You manage to argue yourself into doing it. If you don't do it, somebody else will, etc., and so you keep on. (209) In Member, most legislators find that legislative life is "so much easier along conscienceless lines" (71), because the conscienceless are rewarded with money, legislative support, and power. Conscienceless legislators are also usually rewarded with reelection because their campaigns will be financed by railroads, who will also pay to have their opponents, especially reformist ones, slandered. 231 The control of politicians end legislative life by railroads was no Populist paranoia. Railroad corporations of the late nineteenth century were arguably the aost powerful force in the history of American politics and public opinion. Through propaganda campaigns, lobbying, and bribery, they generally "dominated the political situation in every western state" and succeeded in "quietly eliminat [ ing] *' nearly every piece of unfavorable legislation (Hicks 69, 70). Fred Shannon writes that "Kansas was controlled by the Sante Fe, as was Nebraska by the Union and Pacific and the Burlington" 002). In Kansas, where the railroad owned one-fifth of the state's entire acreage, the Republican Party was "largely managed by railroad lawyers who made little attempt to conceal their control of Republican state conventions" (Goodwyn 187). The railroad succeeded in getting their senators elected (such as Senator Allison in Iowa) and subsidized the press in order to "educate" the public about the unfairness of any proposed railroad legislation (Shannon 176). Railroads engaged in the notorious practice of giving free railway passes to influential people-- legislators, railway commissioners, judges, lawyers, assessors, sheriffs, tax officials, newspaper editors, and even governors and minlstera--to gain their support. "The influence gained by this abuse," railroad historian John 232 Stover writes, "saved railroads thousands of dollars in taxes" <123). These give-aways were often supplemented by free distributions of railway stock, generally to congressmen, end by straight-out cash payments. The Central Pacific Railroad spent as much as >9500,000 a year on graft, and the Union Pacific, the benefactors of the first federal land grant, spent 8400,000 between 1686 and 1872 on bribea alone (Hofatadter 170). These and other related statistics, moreover, are unreliable because such payments were for obvious reasons not recorded and discovered only if a mistake was made. As Hicks says: "How much bribery and corruption and intrigue the railroads used to secure the ends they desired will never be known" (70). As Lloyd aaid in his classic exposure of underhanded business practices. Wealth_against_Cgmmonwealth, "the locomotive has more man-power than all the ballot-boxes" <10). We now have “a new system of government," Lloyd said in a 1894 speech, "government by campaign contribution" <"Revolution" 215). In Member, Brennan, Davis, and all the other Third House lobbyists and railroad-bought legislators are opposed by one new and reformist legislator, Wilson Tuttle. With the guidance of a reformer and lecturer named Redbourn--who appears in a similar role in several of Garland's works-- Tuttle has learned that the Third House is, as he says, "a 233 body of corrupt men who stand between the people and legialation" (12) and is soon calling it “a national disgrace" (28). He proposes iegislation opposed to the one Davis and Brennan are pushing for, which includes a bill that would "charge an annual rant for street franchises" and would launch an investigation into "the aethoda of the Consolidated Railway" (15). The novel's central conflict is quickly established: the entrenched, corrupt, wealthy, exploitive railroad corporation, with its powerful lobbying ara, versus the isolated, idealist, reformist legislator, Tuttle. The railroad turns all its guns on Tuttle. Davis warns him that he will lose hia next election if he continues to oppose Consolidated Railway (97). Next, Davis, who knows that newspapers "manufacture public sentiment" (91), buys the leading newspaper editors--just as he bought legislators--in order to manufacture public sentiment against Tuttle's proposal. Tuttle begins to notice that all the newspapers, including ones that formerly supported him and his campaign against the railroad, begin to turn against him and accuse him of having no grounds for hia accusations. Tuttle tells a friend that "this shows the power ol money. I don't mean that these papers were bought outright, but 1 mean that the moment a doubt creeps in, they do the safest thing--condemn 234 the Ran whose friendship is worth the least to them" (111). Finally, the railroad engages in blackmail. The one senator who can stop the Consolidated's legislation fros passing is Senator Ward. But Brennan, through his contacts, knows that Ward is an alcoholic and threatens to expose his if he continues to support Tuttle's legislation. Tuttle, though, overcomes all these railroad forces: Ward, at the sacrifice of hia position and name, publicly accuses both Brennan and Davis of attempting to bribe him, which brings down the whole Third House structure. The lobbying "rats" are routed and a campaign of political purification begins. The once Indomitable and arrogant "Iron Duke" Davis commits suicide and Brennan flees to Canada: "The king of the Third House had been dethroned" (197). Unfortunately, outside the novel the railroad remained enthroned. Nearly every attempt to check its power was futile, as evidenced by the railroad's ability to evade and then overturn the so-called Granger laws (which were similar to Tuttle's proposed legislation in Member) and other legislation. Farming organizations, most notably the Patrons of Husbandry (also called "the Grange"), had challenged the railroad because its members were being compelled to pay ruinous transit costs despite charter arrangements made at the time of the railroad land grants 235 that permitted states to aet paaeenger fares and freight rataa (Stover 129). Railroads could charge ratea aa high as "the traffic would bear" becauae they generally enjoyed local monopolies. "It was the rare western farmer, " John Stover writes, "who had the choice of two rail routes to market" (120). For Dakota farmers, for example, it coat "the same amount to send a bushel of wheat from Fargo to Minneapolis as from Minneapolis to Mew York” (Biilington 726-27), for in the latter situation there were competing lines. Indeed, it cost more to ship grain from some parta of Dakota to Minneapolis than it did to ship it from Chicago to Liverpool (Shannon 301).C131 These high rates, as mentioned, effectively drove down even further the prices the farmers received for their products. William Peffer claims that the cost of transportation on these monopolized railroads eats up "from 60 to 75 percent of the value of the crops" (71); Hicks, writing later and using slightly lower figures, claims that "the farmers of Minnesota and Dakota were accustomed to pay half the value of their wheat" in transportation costs (60), which is the figure contemporary historian Robert Higgs uses (296). Railroads, then, like the money power, exacted a crippling interest on the farmer's sweat and made the farmer's efforts a nearly hopeless battle. The railroad, Frank Norris says in The_0ctopus, is a "gigantic 236 parasite fastening upon the life-blood of an entire cononwealth" (806). An August 1890 editorial in the preesinent Western Populist journal. Farmeral_Al1lance (edited in Lincoln, Nebraska), superbly phrases the depredations of the soney and transportation monopolies: There are three great crops raised in Nebraska. One is a crop of corn, one a crop of freight rates (transportation monopoly], and one a crop of interest (money monopoly]. One is produced by farmers who by sweat and toil farm the land. The other two are produced by men who sit in their offices and behind their bank counters and farm the farmers. (qtd. in Hicks 83) As Member points out, farmers found their politics poisoned by the railroads, an extrinsic force that had already made their chances for finding free land slim. It was not surprising, then, that the typical farmer was soon transformed from a “railroad proponent to railroad antagonist" (Stover 121). The railroad--which had gobbled up one-tenth of America's land area, falsely advertised the West in order to induce emigration, subverted the Homestead Act, bought legialators, judges, and executives-- had become by the late 1680s the moat hated institution in the West. Host farmers had become convinced, as John Hicks writes, that the “railroads were 'crooked' [and] that they existed not to serve the West but to plunder it" (69). Garland's A Heiber of the Third Houae, though, does not ultimately blame the railroad, or its slimy agents such as Tom Brennan, for its misdeeds. Corrupt railroad 237 practical, Garland argues, are aerely another result, not. a cause, of an Inherently flawed economic-political ayeten: "Brennan waa aa much a product of our society, and eapeclally of our government," the narrator writes, "aa the electric railway or the telephone, or the milk truat" <48;. Becauae thia ayatem offered auch atupendoualy valuable prizes, auch aa railway monopoliea, while proclaiming the virtuea of unregulated competition, an ugly "acramble for profit," to uae Henry Demareat Lloyd'a phraae, waa inevitable (Wealth l&l). The aolution, Lloyd aaya, la to apply "the co-operative methoda of the poat-office and public ■chool" ^Wealth 182> to other natural monopoliea, auch aa the railroad. In the 1nveatigation of the Consolidated Airline Railway in Member, the state's Attorney-General, serving aa Garland's mouthpiece, argues along similar lines, namely that a society will always be corrupt if it auctions off its public property to private businesses. "So long as legislators have the power to vote public values into private pockets," he says, "the lobby will continue to exist," and with it all its bribes and extortions (198). He, too, does not blame individual men, such as Iron Duke Davis, because each is "a victim of corruption as well as himself being a corrupting agent" (198). (After being exposed, Davis says, "I wasn't to blame. I was obliged to 238 do what I did. It's the curaad condition of things. . . . II was] forced into bribery by the condition of legislation" 1209, 230].) Garland, then, like Lloyd, believea in the power of institutions to shape society and people; change the institutions, he argues, and you will change society. The blase for corrupt practices lies not in people but in the environment. Garland, through his reformist characters in Member (Radbourn, the Attorney-General, and Tuttle), claims that railroads and other large institutions will continue to be corrupt and corrupting until the money element is taken out of them, until there is no longer a scramble for profit. This is the same position staked out by the Populists. The Omaha Platform argues that since "corruption"--in a large part, rai1road-related--dominates the ballot-box, the legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench," and since "transportation [is] a means of exchange and a public necessity, the government should own and operate the railroads in the interest of the people" (Hicks 439, 443). It was Tuttle's proposal of regulation, though, rather than the Omaha proposal of nationalization, that eventually bore fruit: in 1906, a decade after the death of Populism, Congress passed the Hepburn Act, which made regulated railroads, finally, a reality. 239 But. in the 1860a and '90s, a formidable array of extrinsic force*, doninated by the three aaln Monopoliea, continued to nenace the faraer. The Southern Populiat W. Scott Morgan, provides a cogent and eloquent summary of these forces: They [the agricultural masses} are robbed by an infamous system of finance; they are plundered by transportation companies; they are imposed upon by an unjust system of tariff laws; they are deprived of their lands and other property by an iniquitous system of usury; they are fleeced by the exorbitant exactions of numerous trusts; they are preyed upon by the merchants, imposed upon by the lawyers, misled by the politician and seem to be regarded as the legitimate prey of all other classes. (30) 5 - Despair, Flight, and Rebellion "The farmer is beginning to compare his mortgaged farm with the banker's mansion and his safe," a character says in Garland's A_Spoil_of_0ffice, "and no one can see the end of his thinking" (152). For many, this thinking led to the formation of organizations and political parties, culminated by the People's Party, in an attempt to redress this imbalance between mortgages and mansions; or, aa the Omaha Platform put it, to end governmental injustice that breeds "the two great classes--tramps and millionaires" (Hicks Appendix 440). Walter Prescott Webb expertly sums up the intrinsic and extrinsic ills the farmers suffered from that led then to political action: 2 40 The farwri in tha prairies and the Great Plaina confronted terrible obstacles. They ware far from markets, burned by drought, beaten by hail, withered by hot winds, frozen by blizzards, eaten out by the grasshoppers, exploited by capitaliats, and cozened by politicians. Why should they not turn to radicalism? (503) This turn to political radicalism (the subject of chapter 4) was not the only reaction, though. For many other settlers, the battering by intrinsic and extrinsic forces led to massive despair, which created in its wake madness, suicide, and flight. Despair filled the land primarily because all the sacrifices and hardships involved in settling it were futile. Farmers in Garland's fiction repeatedly voice the idea that they could tolerate their toil if it led to any bettering of their condition. The Haskinses in "Under the Lion's Paw" work as hard aa any other characters in Garland's fiction, yet they work happily and with hope because they feel a reward is awaiting them--namely, ownership of the land they're working on and some sort of financial security. Both Hr. and Hrs. Haskins bore "uncomplainingly the moat terrible burdens," and aa their fields of wheat began to wave in the wind, "new hope . . . sprang up in the heart of Haskins and his wife" (163-G4). The husband falls into bed at the end of each labor-filled day feeling “he was getting nearer and nearer to a home of his own, and pushing the wolf of want a little farther from hia door" (1&&). But when he discovers 241 that the wolf la actually closer rather than farther away — in tha paraon of tha land apeculator, Jla Butlar--Haskina and the atory and in despair, ha slumped speechless, hia head sunk into hia hands. Thia ia a recurring sequence in Garland''a work: high hopea accompanied by hard work, followed not by tha expected reward but by disaater, reaulting in disillusionaent, bitterness, and despair. In "John Boyle's Conclualon," the title character and hia wife, despite yeara of toil, still live in a bare shanty on the bare Dakota plain, with, aa John aaya, a mortgage "hangin' over what little we have got" (63). While looking at hia cropa wither in the drought for the third straight year (with a hailstorm on the way, though he la unaware of it), he voices hia complaint to hia wife, and in doing ao gives voice to the dial1luaionsent and despair of the new West farmers who expected at the very leaat, baaed on the gaudy brochures they read, a fair recompense for their labor: "Here we've worked, me an' you, ever since we waa ten yeara old and under. I ain't no drinker. You ain't ben very extravagant on calicoes. We hain't lived nothin' extry. . . . [And] here's you an' me at our time of life alone an' poor aa Job's turkey--^ust_where w e b e g u n . Worse'n thatt We're poor an' wore out. (64, 63, emphasis added) Feelings of failure and purposelessness fill Garland's work and overwhelm hia charactere. In "Sim Burns's Wife," Sim Burna, like John Boyle, is embittered because all hia 2 42 “suffering and toiling Cwere] to no purpose"; he "didn't see why he should have so little after so much hard work" (PrairieFolks 121). In “A Common Case," a character remarks that even though "this is Amerlca"--where, in the Horatio Alger formula, hard work supposedly has an axiomatic pay off--"fifty per cent of these farms tare] mortgaged, in spite of the labors of every member of the family, and the most frugal living" (192), A character in "A Stop-Over in Tyre" (collected in Wayside_Courtahipa, 1697) learns that farming life is "nothing but work, work, and mud the whole year round," and the worst part is that it has no end, goal, or reward, nothing but "goin' round and round in a circle, and never getting out" (119). Garland linked his own family to this circle of "fruitless labor" (PrairieFolks 130) when he dedicated his first book. Moin_Travelled-Roads, to the "silent heroism" of his parents, whose "half-century pilgrimage on the main- travelled road of life has brought them only toll and deprivation." Garland's once-buoyant, self-reliant pioneers, in short, feel like helpless subjects of massive forces beyond their control: Sim Burns's life, the narrator says, "was mainly regulated from without." Great Plains farmers, historian Robert HcHath writes, "found themselves buffeted by forces beyond their control and their dreams turned to 243 nightmares" <99). Something else we* in control of their live*, nocking their effort* and shaping their live* into unhappiness. The creation of these powerless characters sake* Garland one of the first American literary naturalists, a* several critics have pointed out.C14] In his early reading days at the Boston Public Library, Garland had excitingly read, anong others, Herbert Spencer and John Fiske, two of the leading expositors of so-called Social Darwinism. He had also seen these ideas put into literature, both by European critical theorists such as Hippolyte Taine (whose History_of_£ngliah Literature C187U, Garland outlined on the walls of his Dakota shanty during one long winter), and by European fictionallsts such as Emile Zola; Garland most probably read Zola's La_Terre (1888), in which these naturalistic themes are given a rural setting (Ahnebrink 234). Garland found that naturalist theory--in its assertion, as one recent critic puts it, that people "are determined by forces beyond themselves" (Mitchell xii)--provided a powerful and accurate method of representing the bewildered and defeated farmers acroas the prairie and plains in the 1880s and 'SOa. This naturalistic mood is given classic articulation in Jaaon_Edwards. In the novel, Walter Reevea, like Garland himself, has observed firsthand the Intense 244 suffering of the Dakota settlers and feels the force of Nature's forgetfulness of nan. She neither loves nor hates. Her stores have no regard for life. Her selling calns do not recognize death. Sonetines her stores coincide with death, soeetiees her cales run parallel to sen's desires. She knows not, and cares nothing. (1S2) The characters in this novel respond to this naturalistic despair and helplessness in various ways: some go insane, soee coeeit suicide, sone flee back East; Jason hieself (like Garland's own eother) suffers a stroke and is paralyzed. To John Boyle of drought - and sortgage-ridden Dakota "it seeaed as if all had conspired against his. God, Han, and Nature had assaulted his as if by preconcerted plan" (62). The "pitiless" wind and the "socking, sinister" land make hia ahanty look "like a little skiff on the ocean" (72). He too is personally rendered Insignificant and fragile by the natural and econosic environsent: all the "stupendous forces of nature, so blind and so unalterable," the narrator writes, had united to "crush out such an infinitesisal sote aa this *an" (62). Boyle concludes that "Everything'a agin ua" (63). This thinking, aa in Jason Edwards, leada to the sase varieties of escape: John cossits suicide, his wife goes sad, and a younger couple, the Alilngs, flee back East. Such reactlons--suicide, sadness, flight--are present throughout Garland's work and in the work of other new West writers.115] Bailey, in 245 Garland's "The Land of the Straddle-Bug,” a ahort novel set In Dakota, feels equally overwhelsed and helpless. In the sldst of a brutal winter blizzard, he begins to feel that people are serely "insects battling, breading, dying" (316). Grant McLane of “Up the Coulee" feels equally diminished and, as he says, "helpless" (87). He complains that he or any farmer is no more than "a fly in a pan of molasses. There ain't any escape for him. The more he tears around the more liable he is to rip his legs off* (87). Private Smith in "The Return of a Private," engaged in his "hopeless battle," is also likened to a fly, in a phrase reminiscent of Kafka: "He crawled along like some minute wingless variety of fly" (138). From hearty yeoman to fly. This change in self- concept was perhaps the most painful and galling. Farmers had felt that they were free, independent, and self- sufficient pioneers, the last bastion of an essential ingredient in the American character and, as Jefferson had argued, in the American political system. The harassed urban industrial worker, cramped Eastern farmer, and feudalized E uropean peasant had presumably gone to the American West to become landowners, "lords," but the West, and all America, was fast becoming the home of "modern feudalism," as the Southern Populist leader Tom Watson put it in 1893 (26). An angry farmer wrote to the Farmers' 246 A 1 1 iange that "we can no longer send halp to tha tananta of Ireland bacauaa we are in tha aaae condition*; we have been reduced fro* freeholders to a claaa of cringing ranters" Jeffersonian proportions had become “a harassed businessman at the mercy of supply and demand . . . His ability to provide a living for his family came to depend on forces largely beyond his control" C48). The farmer, V. L. Parrington writes, was now "in the grip of a complex middleman organization that gouged him at every turn" (261). Henry Steele Commager in his vast intellectual history of the period. The AmericanHind (1950), notes that "By 1900 one third of all American farmers were tenants, and the fear that Jefferson's 'chosen people of God' would end up as peasants seemed not unfounded" (52). From yeoman to fly, from chosen people to peasants: the economic and psychological fallout was complete. Instead of "yeoman," the character1stic phrase used to describe farmers in Garland's fiction revolves around notions of captivity and entrapment, if not enslavement. Farming is called “slavery" in Son (180), a farmer refers 247 to herself as a "convict" in "Straddla-Bug" (224), Haskins in "Under tha Lion'a Paw" ia likaned to a "alava in the Roman gallaya" (166), far«era ara entrapped in a ayataa of "induatrial alavery" (Spoil 342); the exaaplea in Garland"a work and the vaat Populiat literature ara endleaa. The Populiat governor of Kansas, Lorenzo Levelling, declared, for example, that "the working aen and woaen of this counfry, aany of thea, are aiaply today in the ahacklaa of induatrial alavery" (Speech 6 >. The true atory of the aettleaent of the new golden West, then, despite the hopes of Evans, Greeley, and all the frank and fraudulent expositors of the Agrarian Myth, can be defined aa the transforaation of the aelf-concept of the typical faraer froa that of yeoaan to slave. This linking of faraing (and other aanual labor) with slavery, furtheraore, provided a powerful rhetorical and political tool for the Populists: by linking their fight for justice and freedoa againat various enslaving aonopolies with the earlier fight againat chattel alavery. Populism became a moral crusade that, despite the power and contempt of their reactionary opponents, would ultimately triumph. The Populist revolt was the new Civil War, and the new elavaholding enemies were, as "The Return of a Private" argues, the Northeast induatrial and political syateaa. In Jeaon_Edwards, Reeves tells the title 248 character that "you're a soldier fighting a greater and fiercer battle than the Wilderness” (211). "The republican party took the black sen off the auction block of the slave power," Henry Desareat Lloyd writes, "but it has put the white san on the auction block of the Money power, to be sold to the lowest bidder under the iron hamser of Monopoly” ("Revolution” 219). If Populists took over control of the governatnt, Lloyd continues, "the abolition of Monopoly will as surely follow as tha abolition of slavery followed the entrance of Abrahaa Lincoln into the white house in 1881” ("Revolution" 220). Lloyd, in an adroit paraphrase of Lincoln, links the cause of this new Populist war with the previous abolitionist one: "A people half deMOcratic and half plutocratic cannot persanently endure" (Wealth 173). Garland saw the transforaation of yaoaan to slave and the resultant onset of a second Civil War in his own family and in the West in general. By the tiMe Garland returned to Dakota in 1BBB, everyone he met felt defeated. The buoyant pioneer farming spirit of Just a few years earlier--when "every man who could sell had gone west or was going” (234), oftentimes chanting the old pioneer songs "Sunset Regions" and “Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm”--waa replaced by "sullen rebellion against government and against God." Two of Garland's family's 249 neighbor* had gone insane, several had fled fro* debt collectors, and "the song of eaigration aeeaed but bitter nockery now" (309). Garland's father suffered a siailar disillusionment, which also serves aa a barometer of the dramatic change of feeling on the prairie and plains. He, like hia brother- in-law David and the millions who streamed into the new West after the Civil War, was a hopeful and independent pioneer. Yet he was equally brought down by endless and fruitless labor, desiccating droughts and dust storms, punishing blizzards, and economic exploitation. These massive intrinsic and extrinsic forces made farming the land a "hopeless battle," even more so than the actual warfare he engaged in during the Civil War. He finally succumbed to feelings of "bitter revolt" and "impotent fury," proclaiming that "nature was, at the moment, an enemy" (128). Hia disi 1luaionment and retreat from rugged individualism led him to Join the Grange and then the Populist party. Garland's father, like millions of other Populists, Joined up to fight a civil war for the second time in his lifetime in order to destroy an "industrial slavery" that had enchained both urban and rural workers. That the conditions of new West farming life could lead a man like Garland's father to political rebellion, from independent to cooperative action, had huge 2 5 0 significance in hia ton's eyas: Tha old pioneer had always been ao patriotic, ao confident, ao sanguine of hia country's future. He had cose a long way froa the buoyant faith of '6 6 , and the change in hia was typical of the change in the West — in Aaerica--and it produced in ae a sense of disaay, of rebellious bitterness. Why should our great new land fall into this slough of discouragement? Richard Garland's eventual surrender and retreat froa Dakota back to Wisconsin is equally wrought with significance. It signalled, in Garland's aournfully precise phrasing, the "surrender of [ay father's! faith in the Golden West" and that his pioneering had "ended in a sense of failure on a barren soil" (Son 463). And for the nation. Garland writes, "it meant that a certain phase of American pioneering had ended. . . . In the years between 1865 and 1892 the nation had swiftly passed through the buoyant era of free land settlement, and now the day of reckoning had come" (Son 439). The sunset trail--for both Garland's father and the nation--was replaced by the back trail, westering was replaced by eaatering. The West was no longer a place to escape to but from. The city became the safety valve for the impoverished rural millions. The Promised Land was the plagued land. Prairie schooners, pointing east now, streamed back across the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, many bearing what became a notorious sign: "In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted." To the Jason Edwardses of the world. Garland was saying, "Beware 251 of the so-called Golden West. It la a land of deceit and exploitation, of pltileaa natural (intrinsic) and huaan (extrinsic) locusts, eager to rob you of your purse and dreams. Stay where you are." But for those Jason Edwardses who had already been lured to and exploited in the West, Garland had another goal, namely to "rouse" them up and "preach discontent" discovered that their rural slavery was not entirely a natural or inevitable condition, but in large part a mushroom phenomenon, a "wide-spread and complex machinery" created by "the injustice of their fellow men," rebellion was born. Notes 1. Garland, who seemed to know, at times fairly well, every major literary and political figure of the time, had an especially close relationship with Henry George. In his 1879 book Prggress_and_Poyerty, which sold in the millions, George proposes a "single tax" on the increase in land values (and an elimination of all other taxes), if not outright public ownership of land, as the solution for the contradictions and ills of American industrial capitalism (principally, the extreme poverty in the midst of progress, which George called "the great enigma of our times" [103 and that provides the book's title). "The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth," George writes, "is inequality in the ownership of land” (295). Garland first read Progress^ and_poverty in 1884 and first heard George speak in Boston in December 1886 (the source, perhaps, for the description of George's speech in Jason Edwards). Garland soon began attending the George-inspired 252 Boston Anti-Povsrty Society, which latar bacaaa the Boston Singls Tax League; in Noveaber 1888 Garland becaae president of this organization. When he lived in New York, Garland visited George's hoie frequently, and he campaigned for George during hia New York City mayoral race in 1897; when George died during that campaign. Garland was chosen to handle the funeral arrangements. Garland, despite leaving radical politics in the mid-1690s, carried the flame for George all his life: he served as toastmaster of the 25th anniversary celebration of the publication of Progregg_and_Egyer£Y in January 1905, spoke at George's tomb at a 30-year memorial service in September 1927, and still employed the phrase "single-tax" in his otherwise apolitical and at times reactionary works. 2. The argument that hard times alone caused Populism, which is roughly the thesis of Populism's first complete historian, John Hicks, is questioned by two recent students of the movement, Lawrence Goodwyn and Robert McMath. They argue that a protest culture and organizational structure must also be in place in order to harness the anger caused by hard times--! will discuss this somewhat in chapter 4. 3. For a thorough discussion of the various frauds that transformed the Homestead Act into a hoax, see the articles by Paul Gates and Everett Dick and Roy M. Robbins's book Qur_I*anded_Heritage, especially Part III; this Part is appropriately titled "The Corporation Triumphs." One land agent in Dakota, for example, reported that 75* of all the land entries made under the Homestead Act "were for speculative purposes and not for homes or for cultivation" (245). 4. In jason_gdwards, Garland points out that the ugly realities of Eastern urban life also get suppressed. Reeves, on one of his walks through the tenement district of Boston, is appalled by one "horribly ugly, graceless, badly-1lghted alley" and realizes that in Boston "such a street [was! almost typical. Boston was predominately of this general character, as he well knew. The real Boston does not get Itself photographed and sent about the country" (91). Garland, like his contemporary Jacob Riis, was Intent on showing how the other half--urban and rural-- 1 ives. 5. Goodwyn argues that the emphasis on silver destroyed "what little public understanding had materialized on American banking practices" (19) and that it completely missed the point of the Greenback movement and its heirs in the Alliance and Populist movements, many of whom 25 3 understood the prise isportance of having paper currency. To these people, "the cry for silver was an utter delusion" that "bordered on sadneas" because "silver, like gold, was but another prop in a hard-aoney currency" (21). A character in Ignatius Donnelly's apocalyptic novel Caesar's Column (1890) says that "the adoration of gold and silver is a superstition of which the bankers are the high priest -a ■ and sankind the victims" (106); when a new state la create at the end of the novel, paper soney is used exclusively and charging interest on soney is outlawed. 6 . These interest and cosslssion rates cose fros Allan Bogue, who is probably the soat frequently cited authority on this subject. Bogue'a thesis, though, that the average land sortgage company was in fact a non-exploitative institution is used by sany revisionist historians, such aa Kofstadter, to prove that Populist cosplaints (in this and other areas) were largely unfounded and ignorant. Bogue argues that rate-fixing and -hiking were largely Impossible in the cospetitive land sortgage business, as revealed by the drop in sortgage rates fros 16-17* in the early 1670s to 6-9* in the aid-'60s. The narrowness of the loan coapaniea' sargin is shown, furthersore, by the descent into receivership by sost of thes in the 1890a (23). Bogue's argusent, though, is laaentably incomplete. For example, he never discusses the existence of an appreciating currency--iteelf justification for zero Interest rates, since a profitable Interest is already built into the contracting currency syatea-~nor that other loan companies were charging such higher rates (Bogue'a esphasis in his article is on one loan cospany in Kansas). If sany of the poor, misunderstood land mortgage companies went under in the 1690s it was because they were battened onto and attempted to profit fros an exploitive currency system that favored creditors like thes at the expense of debtors. Even a conservative, anti-Popul1 st contemporary, Frank B. Tracy, lambastes these "dishonest usurers" who forced the farmer to pay "as much interest a month as the money-lender was paying a year for the same soney" (243). The loan companies' ropes were tied around the necks of farmers, and when the farmers went down (as 90* of them did in parts of Bogue's wonderful Kansas world of free markets), they dragged down the loan parasites with them. 7. These accusations concerning money contraction occasionally Involved Anglophobia and Shylock-style anti- Semitism: Mary Ellen Lease, for example, accused Grover Cleveland, a stalwart gold-bug, of being an "agent of Jewish bankers and British gold" (qtd. in Hofatadter, Age 79); a character in Ignatius Donnelly's novel Caesar's 254 Column says that "tha real government ia now a cotarle of banker*. Mostly Israel1 tea" and that "the world la to-day Semitized" (97, 38); Weaver made the common accusation that an Englishman named Ernest Seyd came to America in 1873 with 8500,000 in order to bribe Congress into passing the act demonetizing silver (321); "Coin" Harvey believes that a conspiracy of mostly English money lenders and "Rothschilds" secretly demonetized silver in 1873, and the result is that "we have put our head in the mouth of the English lion" (230), a thesis that is novelized in his A T a l e o f _Two_Nat ions (1894). (For more on the Populist belief in this "Anglo-American Gold Trust," see Hofstadter, Age 74-75.) 8 . Tariffs, the source of another large Populist complaint, were suspiciously applied: most manufactured products (such as clothing, hardware, and machinery) were protected by high tariffs, while most agricultural products had no price protection whatsoever. Farmers were forced to compete with overseas crops and hence had to keep lowering their prices, which augmented the price deflation caused by the contracting currency. Like greenbacks, tariffs had been a Civil War measure (the Morrill Tariff Act of 1861), but unlike greenbacks they were maintained through the end of the century (Faulkner 13). In fact, in the 1690s two additional acta, the McKinley Act of 1690 and the Dingley Act of 1897, raised tariff duties even higher. These tariffs continued to protect the domestic market of manufactured goods but did not apply to moat agricultural products. Farmers, therefore, when they went to town to purchase farm equipment or clothing were forced to pay top prices for tariff-protected goods, but when they tried to sell any of their products they were forced to compete in a world market. E. W. Howe writes that “there is no protection for the people of Kansas and Nebraska, who buy protected articles and sell their wheat and beef and corn in the open markets of the world” ("Provincial" 96). To the farmer, American tariff policy, like the currency, was a conscious act by manufacturers to construct an economic environment that favored them at the expense of others. While the Eastern financial community singularly profited by the cessation of one war-time measure (greenbacks), the manufacturing community singularly profited by the extension of another war-time measure (tariffs). The tariff, John Chamberlain writes, “was simply another flagrant example of using the government as fulcrum for a predacious wrench" (13). With a protected market, the manufacturer could establish prices "not in accordance with coat of production but in accordance with 255 the aiount of protection he was able to secure" (Hicks 60). 9. Thia quote, beginning with "the word 'aortgage' had . • . , *' coaea froa page 229 of Trail.-Hakera_0 f_the_H4 dd.le which, aa already mentioned, ia a thinly diagulaed biography of Garland'* father. "The Return of a Private" la alao a thinly diagulaed fictional rendering of hia father'a return froa war, ao I have conflated the two texta here. The one other reference to Trai1-Makere in this diacuaaion of "Return of a Private" will be identified. 10. England waa the firat Western nation to adopt an excluaive gold atandard, in acta paaeed in 1798 and 1816. Following that decision, England, being the leading creditor nation in the world, began Inducing other nations to do the same: Germany in 1871, America in 1873 and '79, and aoon moat of the rest of Europe. V. L. Parrington notea that the English Bullion Report of 1611 had convinced American financiers of “the intrinelc-value theory of money" and that thereafter became "followers of the classic English school" (267, 268). 11. Butler's transformation from a hard-working grocer to an exploitive speculator mirrors that of old Dryfooa in Howella's A_Hazard_o£_New_Fortunes (1690). As Robert Shulman points out, Dryfooa in hia earlier days was a contented Indiana farmer, but when he begins marketing the natural gas discovered on his farm he, as Shulman says, took a bite of the "ainful apple" of "poat-Civil War finance capitalism" (253). He loses hia literal and figurative contact with the earth. "Hia career," Shulman argues, in words that equally apply to Butler, "is an allegory of the America that has cut its ties with the land, has engaged in an unholy exploitation of its natural resources, and has made big money from speculation instead of productive labor" (254). A character in Frank Norris's The_Pit (1903) remarks that the lure of a large payoff to be had in speculation in the wheat market has "absolutely and hopelessly wrecked and ruined" untold young men who have forever "lost the taste, the very capacity for legitimate business" (130-31). The wheat-obsessed decline of Curtis Jadwin, which dominates the second half of this novel, illustrates the wrecking power of speculative mania. 12. ‘'Transportation" included any factor that upset a fair exchange, or transaction, between what the Populists called "producers"--farmers and urban industrial workera--and the consumers of that product. Trusts and monopolies of all kinds were included in this Populist indictment. When a 25 6 former in Jesgn_Edwards complains about the "sugar trusts . . . bonnin' sugar s' high yeh can't touch it with ten-foot pole, an' coal kings reg'latin' the price o' coal come winter** (105), these abuses are meant to be approximate equals with the more obvious transportation abuses of railroads in that they unnaturally inflate the price of essentials and make it harder for the average person to survive. This control of a nation's necessities for private rather than public use was widely remarked upon and excoriated. Lloyd Bryce, in an 1889 North American^Keview article, claimed that Anenca is in "the shadow . . . of an unbridled plutocracy," whose ’'octopus grip" enables it to control "the price of the bread that we eat, the price of sugar that sweetens our cup, the price of oil that lights us on our way, the price of the very coffins in which we are finally buried" (353). Frank Norris's short story "A Deal in Wheat" indicts another transportation abuse carried out by the Chicago wheat pit (and by implication other financial markets), whose traders attempt to control the quantity and hence the price of crops for profit and sporting reasons, which entraps the typical farmers and consumers in "the cogs and wheels of a great and terrible engine" (25). Norris writes: The farmer--he who raised the wheat — wo a ruined upon one hand: the working-man— he who consumed--was ruined upon the other. But between the two, the great operators, who never saw the wheat they traded in. bought and sold the world's food, gambled in the nourishment of entire nations, practiced their tricks, their chicanery and oblique shifty “deals." (26). 13. Hany historians, especially those desirous of downplayinq the Populist grievance, riqhtly point out that overall railroad rates dropped durlnq these years— Hofstadter, predictably, quotes from historian Theodore Saloutos's assertion that "available figures show conclusively that the rates dropped drastically dunnq the last half of the nineteenth century" (Age 5d). And since most railroads went bankrupt in the 1830s, it seemo clear that railroads were not the fat capitalists Populists painted them as. But as with the case with revisionist views of lending practices in the new West (see note 6 ), this is a woefully incomplete argument. Robert Higgs persuasively argues that, while railroad rates did drop, this statistic is misleading in an era of price deflation--what is needed, he writes, are the relative prices of transportation. Rates dropped an average 10-15* from 1667 to 1896. Higgs concedes, but this was approximately the rate of deflation: 257 thus railroad rates were "approximately horizontal" during these years (291). Higgs further points out that the prices farmers received for their products dropped from 30 to 50X during these years; thus railroad rates rose relatively and were "a genuine source of farm distress" (296). These railroad rates* Higgs adds, absorbed "as much aa half the crops'' value" at market (296). Mark Aldrich elaborates on Higgs's argument, noting that while real railroad rates declined in the 18&Os and '70s, they increased sharply from 1880 to 1897, even in a period of deflation (429). The correlation between this rise and the rise of the Alliance and Populiat movements, Aldrich maintains, is no coincidence. The bankruptcy of railroads is also no proof of non- predatory pricing. Fred Shannon points out that most railroads absurdly overcapitalized themselves, selling &30u million in stocks and bonds for a railroad that was worth as little as a million dollars (301). This and other mistakes, not low prices, led to the railroad's wobbly financial position. As Richard Siotkin argues, railroads "had managed the business of capitalization, subcontractlnq, and management in a manner at once so dishonest and so inept that they had 'discredited' themselves both literally and figuratively" (6 ). Thus, as with the bankrupt loan companies, the farmer did not shed many tears for the poor railroad corporations. 14. Robert Spiller, for example, argues that "American naturalism found its first unqualified statement and illustration" in Garland's fiction (150); Oscar Cargill notes that "the first important American to show in hie writing any influence of Naturalism was Hamlin Garland" (though Cargill says Garland is not a pure naturalist) (82); Charles Walcutt claims that Garland's work exhibits "inchoate naturalism" (6 6 ); H. Wayne Morgan writes that MainrTrayelled_Kgads bears "the seeds of a Naturalism others developed” (85) and that Jason_Edwards, with its evocation of Boston slum life and downtrodden Irish immigrants, "anticipated Stephen Crane's Maggie," which was published a year later (92); Lars Ahnebrink also cites Jason Edwards as proto-nature 1iat, claiming that it is "perhaps Garland's closest approach to naturalism" (83), and throughout argues for Garland's direct impact on later naturalists, specifically Crane and Norris. 15. Wills Gather's early fiction, such as that collected in The TrolJL Garden (1905), for example, is filled with people who commit suicide or go Insane out of frustration with Middle Border life; the overriding theme of these stories, furthermore, is that of escape from the social, cultural. and economic confinements of the wide-open Weat. In O. E. Rolvaaq'a Giants in the Earth, the two leading characters. Per and Beret Hansa, both come close to committing euica.de, and Beret haa bouta of insanity. Aa the narrator notea, theae reactions to years of endless toil, pestilence, and famine were typical: "Many took their own lives; asylum after asylum was filled" (424>. Rolvaaq'a characters, like Garland's, feel a naturalistic despair and impotence--they believe that they are "like chips on a current" <330 and that "there's a Destiny that rules us all" (41b>. CHAPTER IV "This Spreading Radicalism": A_Spoil of Office and the Creation of Populism A_Sppil of Office, Hamlin Garland's longest and best Populist novel, captures as no other American work of fiction does the tremendous growth and difficulties of the post-Civil War agrarian uprisings in the West. Set in the years 1677 to late 1664, it traces the crest and decline of the Grange movement and the beginnings of the Farmers' Alliance, parent of the Populiat Party. The difficult path toward Populism is embodied in the protagonist, Bradley Talcott, who develops from an ignorant Iowa farmhand into a United States Congressman and Alliance supporter: the other main character, Ida Wilbur, embodies a similar development from that of a young and somewhat naive Grange lecturer into an impassioned feminist and Alliance organizer. By the end of the novel. Bradley and Ida, like the agrarian West they live in, are dedicated to, and symbolize, are transformed: they become Populists.[11 Despite the novel's importance, though, it remains forgotten and unknown. The most recent study of the novel by Eberhard Alsen is a quarter century old and 259 260 characteristically handicapped by a New Critical biae againat "mere" historical importance. As with the critical reaction to "Under the Lion's Paw" (discussed in chapter 3) and the rest of Garland's Populist writings, this bias instantly misdirects the critic: Spoil's emphasis on political and historical issues is overlooked because the critic is uninterested in political and historical issues. Alsen, instead, bases his defense of Spoil on the grounds that it "illustrates Garland's development as a writer" (335). He claims that Garland's revision of the novel an 1697 shows a writer moving away from purely Populist concerns to more "general and humanitarian" ones (326;. This defense is wrong-headed in at least two ways. First, what's being "developed" in the 1897 edition is a retreat from politics and an embrace of some sort of vague, "traditional" aesthetics that absolutely shipwrecks Garland's vision and work; Garland, furthermore, is fleeing not only radicalism but what he knows, and that pulls the plug on his ability to create compelling fiction. Second, Alsen completely ignores the maior issue at hand, namely Populism and Garland's take on it. Alsen might as well be talking about the rhythms of wheat or the metaphor of the road for all the attention he pays to the novel's dominant eublect.121 261 Other critics of the novel, even sharp and sympathetic ones, suffer from a similar problem. Donald Pizer claims that "despite the excellence of A Spoil of_Office as contemporary social history, it is undoubtedly a failure as a novel" the late 1920s, surprisingly makes the same art versus politics distinction, calling Spoil “a social tract rather than a work of art** (296). Garland himself repudiated the novel aa nothing more than "a partisan plea for a stertorous People's Party" (Roadside 1 6 V) and refused to reprint it in the 1922 Border edition of his works (Alsen 327) . To be sure, some of these strictures are valid and cannot be ignored. Spoil is far from perfect. Perhaps the most grievous drawback is that in this frankly political novel, the politics are oftentimes poorly explained. The scenes set in the political capitals of Des Moines and Washington, for example, contain some quotable speeches on political corruption, but never go much beyond that. Bradley's legislative experiences are rarely described, his legislative proposals never given in any detail, and his conservative opponents and their arguments never fully introduced. Bradley merely enunciates vague reformist notions. He once tells Ida, for example, that "1 want to succeed in order that I may teach the new doctrine of 262 rights. I want to carry into the party I have joined the real democracy" (246). What he means by "the doctrine of rights" and "the real democracy" ia never made very clear, and worse, hia efforts to bring theee things into politics are completely unexplored. These crucial sections suffer, in short, from sheer vagueness. I agree with the standard explanation for thiB failing, namely that Garland in these scenes ia writing about things he doesn't know that well. Thus, he cannot bring to them--as he does to the scenes involving Iowa farm life and the Grange activities--any specificity, any deep- seated, clear knowledge. In the Des Moines and Washington sections he is an outsider; all he can do is repeat his reformist notions and his disgust with political corruption. A comparison of these sections with, say, Henry Adams's novel Democracy (1660) and, to a lesser extent. Twain and Warner's The 6 ilded_Age <1671;, illustrates Garland's lack of familiarity with the details of political life. Garland, unlike Mrs. Madeleine Lee in * does not "get to the heart of politics" (174) and, in fact, barely makes the attempt. Pizer gives a characteristically succinct and accurate analysis of this failure: LGarland'sl description of Bradley's career in Rock River has a firmness and a reality of detail characteristic of his best fiction. Once he left this older material for scenes of contemporary political 2 6 3 life, studied but for a few weeks and "too such . . . written on the train," there is a noticeable break fros the writing of autobiographical conviction--always important in Garland--to that of superficial reporting. (Early_Wprk 105) A conteiporary reviewer in the AtlanticMonthly sounded the same note: Spoil “begins to grow bad," the anonymous reviewer argues, “at the exact point where the author's knowledge of his subject begins to grow less” : in the political scenes, "denunciation takes the place of delineation" (“New Figures" 643). Garland's 1695 novel. Rose of Dutcher^s_Cool1y, offers a clear illustration of this problem. The first half of the book, describing Nose's youth in Wisconsin, is perhaps Garland's supreme fictional achievement, rivalling that of hie best short stories in Main^Trayel1ed Roads and Prairie Folks; but the second half of Rose, set in Chicago and concentrating on Rose's involvement with professional men and women there, deteriorates badly. The only good scene in the second half of the book is. significantly, the one concerning the visit Rose and her future husband make to Rose's farm and father in Wisconsin. Garland's apparent inability to write about eubiects separate from his "autobiographical convictions,” moreover, explains his consistently abysmal Rocky Mountain romances, from which he was saved only when he returned to autobiography proper with A_Son_of_the Middle Border (1917), his supreme 264 nonfIctional achievement.. Carl Van Doren writes that Son proves that Garland was "at hie best when he most nearly autobiographical" (84). A second major drawback in Spoil involves the characterization of Ida and of her and Bradley's romance. Ida, though given many fine things to say, remains a flat character. She is simply a speech-giver and inspirer for Bradley, possessing no life of her own. Nearly nothing is known about her past, what she thinks or feels in between her political appearances, if she feels anything human, such as loneliness, excitement, doubt, despair, sexual excitement, and so forth. Bradley's bloodless response to her is equally, to my mind, artificial. He instantly romanticizes and idealizes her, referring to her in his mind as "Her" and "She." Indeed, because of this obsession, his entire political awakening and activities can be plausibly read as mere tools to attract Ida. His interest in attending a political meeting late in the novel, for example, is sparked not by an awakened political consciousness but by the hope of seeing his love (334). His other political actions--embrace of feminism, conversion to the A11 lance--can be equally reduced to courting maneuvers (especially in the 1BS7 edition of the novel). In short, Ida (and to a lesser extent Bradley) and their romance are completely wooden and mechanical. The 26b romanceF furthermore, threatens to chase off the stage the entire political argument, which, given the woodenness of this romance, ia the only thing that sustains the second half of the novel. This again foreshadows Garlands's post- 1698 Rocky Mountain romances, in which political events--a miners' war, Indian uprisings, conservation atruggies-- become mere "background" for the cooing of the starry eyed lovebirds. These failurea--occas1ona1ly vague and wooden politicizing, and completely vague and wooden romancing-- have led most critics, as noted, to label the book an artistic failure. These failures, though, are hardly the whole case: much mitigating evidence is ignored. but as the obsession with Garland's decline has blinded most critics to his real achievements, so the obsession with the failings of Spoil have blinded critics to its virtues. Worse, the obsession with formalist features has curtailed any investigation into the novel's unique and complex dialogue with Populism. The fact that Spoil illustrates and analyzes, aa no other novel I know, central episodes and intellectual movements in American life, specifically the birth and ideological core of the Populist movement, that it beautifully captures the tenor of Western life in these years, especially the social activities of the Grange, and that it offers a prescient blueprint for the coming success and failure of 2fcb the Populist Party has yet to be even acknowledged nuch less explored or understood. The New Critic has rejected these "contextual" setters entirely: art is separate fron politics. Spoil is insistingly political, ergo Spoil is unartistic and not deserving of such attention. If such a critic, like Pizer, concedes the novel's ability to capture "contemporary social history," he or she shows no interest in investigating that dimension. On the other hand, today's cultural or new historicist critic accepts Spoil completely, chock-full as it is of "paraphrasabie” material on several major episodes in social and political history, and does not bother himself or herself with “sere" formalist "flaws." A recent study of feminist issues in nineteenth-century American fiction by Barbara Bardes and Suzanne Gossett, for example, cites Ida Wilbur of Spoil at length in a discussion of women's political activity at the end of the century and the response or resistance they received. Ida and Spoil are good, Bardes and Gossett proclaim, because they show a woman bravely and powerfully engaging in political action and because Bradley acce pts and supports her so well; Henry James's TheBostonians is bad because Verena Tarrant is forced to abandon her involvement in the women's rights movement and because she is stunted by her man, Basil Ransom. Garland, the authors 267 gladly pronounce, "takes up the major arguaents against woaen'a suffrage and woman suffragists"--such as the ones enunciated in TheBostonians--"and refutes them" (176). I, to repeat the points made in the Introduction, believe a middle position, in which both textual and contextual matters are weighed, is the wisest critical path to take. To my mind, it is just as silly to ignore or downplay mere "contemporary social history," especially when that is the writer's main subject, as it is to ignore or downplay non-paraphrasable matters just because the critic is interested only in that contemporary social history. Larzer Ziff talking about rhythms of wheat and Arthur Voss complaining about Garland's getting too worked about land speculators are today obviously ludicrous critical statements; it is to contemporary criticism's credit that such complacent dismissal of political issues is so obviously wrong-headed. What is not sufficiently clear today is that the activity of critics like bardes and Gossett, who thumb through "texts" to find illustrations for a feminist history, is equally ludicrous. To compare the relationship of Basil and Verena with that of Bradley and Ida solely on the grounds of which is more liberal (or reactionary) than the other is interesting perhaps but certainly not, for the literary critic, the whole show. Bardes and Gossett, rushing to find "simple social morals" and "political hiatory aa reflected in literary texts," to uae Edmund Wilson's words again, are doomed to be "hopelessly confused." They completely ignore or cannot perceive complicating evidence in their discussion of The Bootonian?. James, for example, clearly and inaiatingly undercuts Basil's actions and thoughts; the novel's last sentence, in which Verena's tear-filled future with Basil is foretold, is about aa explicit aa James gets. The parallel undercutting of Olive's attempt to control Verena contributes to the book's predominant theme--one that runa through nearly all of James's work, aa well as Hawthorne'a--of the evils of human possession. Indeed, The §9®lr9hiaQ® an updated Blithedale Romance in that the reformer mentality, with its ironic authoritarianism, is examined and critiqued. Other elements in the book complicate the simple social morals that Bardes and Gossett arrive at, such as the novel's functioning as an allegory of the Civil War, with abolitionism having become feminism, and the sheer sexual tug-of-war between the Southerner Basil and the New Englander Olive. To have to insist on the importance of "internal" features like these is to the discredit of contemporary criticism. By no means is James solely interested in the feminist issues contained in his book, and by no means is Garland solely interested in the formalist features of his book: thus, the New Critic who 269 inaists the novel's aesthetic, textual. Internal, or "universal” features are all, and the new hiatorlciat who insiata the text's external, political, or historical features are all are both doomed to aieperceive crucial features of the book in front of them. In Spoil, the New Critic complacently rejects the political features out of hand, while the new hiatorlciat complacently accepts these features as grist for its mill. Thus, as a middle-poaltion critic, I must present a conditional defense of Spoil. Its aesthetic flaws are real and important. But, unlike Member, they do not dominate the book, especially the first half, and are certainly counter-weighted by the book's aesthetic virtues. Spoil contains some of Garland's beat writing and the early episodes--such as the description of Bradley's school experiences, his dalliance with Nettie Russell, his relationship with Judge Brown and his wife — have a fullness and freshness to impress any non-political reader. The aesthetic flaws are also counterweighted by the book's historical importance. Spoil ia not only a faithful mirror held up to the birth and growth of Populism--being the only mirror makes it additionally important--but is also a perceptive and prescient analysis of the movement's strengths and weaknesses, its coming success and failure. These virtues make it a valuable and at times crucial book 270 for thoae readers and critics who believe a book's social- political and aesthetic features cannot be separated. 1 “ Spoil and "True Populism" Spoil marks out a successive series of Populiatic transformations that Bradley, Ida, and the West as a whole must undergo in order to become true Populists. To become true Populists, people in the West have to sever traditional ideas and attachments: the first Populiatic transformation involves overcoming the largely individualistic, competitive nature of agrarian life in order to create a farmers' union. Atomization and competition have to be replaced by consolidation and cooperation, otherwise the farmer will remain the prey of the extrinsic forces in the country--financial institutions, railroads, land companies, manufactur1 nq interests--that have been consolidatinq and cooperating apace. "The farmer must learn that to help himself, he must help others," Ida says. "That," she adds, "is the great lesson of modern society" (150). "It seems to me," another character remarks, "that everybody is looking out for himself except the farmer" <20). According to historian Samuel P. Hays, the only possible response for farmers and other beleaguered groups to the explosion of industrial growth in the late nineteenth century was to 271 “organize or pariah" (48). As Garland demonstrates In Spoil, the Grange provides the new West farmer the beat vehicle for this organization. The next Populiatic transformation that Garland seta forth in Spoil concerns the farmers becoming personally involved in the hurly-burly of politics. Garland argues that political power has to be transferred from the city and town, its traditional home in the West, to the farm: otherwise, the farmers will never solve or gain redress for their intrinsic and extrinsic ills. The farmer, V. L. Parrington writes, had provided "the rope for his own hanging" by, in part, supporting and taking "pride in the county seat towns that lived off his earnings" and by sending "city lawyers to represent him in legislatures and in Congress" (262). Thus, the Grange, despite its importance and influence, has to be jettisoned because it is a non-political organization. When this organized Western farmer enters politics, he has to clear another hurdle, awaken to another painful reality, namely that politics is predominately corrupt and that the chances for enacting reformist leqislation are extremely small. This is the next Populiatic transformation that Garland sets forth m Spoil. Politicians, Bradley learns during his experiences in state and national politics, are eager to become mere "spoils of 272 office" and sell their legislative votes to the highest bidder. The organized, impassioned energy of the farmers could be instantly evaporated by extra-legialative means, as seen in the circumventing and overturning of the Granger railroad legislation. The solution to this pervasively corrupt situation, Bradley is told, is to "stay right in the lump, and help leaven it" (25B), though both he and the West soon arrive at a better answer: namely, to form a completely new party that will circumvent politics-as- usual. Included in this crucial step toward developing an independent political party is the difficult and painful realization that the Republican Party, for the Western farmer, could no longer be automatically revered, trusted, or supported. Garland argues that the longstanding, intensely emotional attachment to the party of abolition and union has to be severed because the Republican party has become in the post-war years the party of Eastern finance capitalism; it is now the farmers' oppressor rather than their ally. Agrarian dissenters in Spoil, subsequently, move away from the party, at first labelling themselves "Granger-Republicans,” "New Democrats," and "Independents," and later as Alliancemen and Populists. The final important Populiatic transformation that Garland marks out for Bradley, Ida, and the West involves 273 the recognition that the interests of the farmer are and ■uat be linked to the interests of other exploited groups. By limiting political thought and action to purely farming concerns, and within that group concentrating on the problems of Western (and Southern) white males, any dissenting movement is doomed to marginality and failure. The Western farmers learn that they cannot stand alone. Garland illustrates this transformation by marking out Bradley's gradual awareness, with the help of Ida's example and urging, that the problems of the Western farmer are in many ways similar to those facing urban industrial workers, blacks, and women. The agrarian movement, Ida tells Bradley, "must include more or fail" (151). In the lS70s and '80s, millions of farmers made the transformation from atomized, politically naive, single- minded farmers to Populists. In the 1890 election, the Alliance engineered a political earthquake that left the country tumbling. The summer campaigning became, as one contemporary observer wrote, "that wonderful picnicking, speech-making Alliance summer of 1890" (Tracy 243). The fall elections themselves "took on the quality of a social and political revolution" (Faulkner 114). In Kansas, for example, the Alliance seized control of the lower house of the state legislature, elected five United States congressmen and one senator (William Peffer), and came 274 within a few thousand votes of capturing the governorship (in '92, the Alliance-Populist candidate, Lorenzo Lewelling, did win). In Nebraska, Alliance-led independents captured both state legislative houses and a congressional seat; and in South Dakota, the Alliance gained control of the state legislature and were thus able to secure a United States Senate seat (Hicks 179-81; Billington 739). Nationally, the Alliance claimed that up to 50 elected congressmen were loyal to its principles, as were several governors (Divine 597; Billington 739). That huge discontent was brewing and bubbling over became apparent even to the Republican Party, which, in this midterm no-confidence vote, lost 78 seats and its Majority control in the House. It was, as one historian remarks, "the most emphatic defeat for the Republicans since the party was born" (Merrill 146). The following year, B. O. Flower, the editor of Arena, a radical Boston monthly journal, asked Garland to write a serial novel that would "deal with this revolt of the farmers" (Son 422). Garland, who had Just published his first book, the short story collection Main^Travelled Roads, Jumped at the opportunity. Financed by Flower, Garland travelled West to gather more information and fresh details about the farmer's revolt. Recalling this trip two decades later, he writes that 275 I took part in Keatings of rebellious farmers in bare- walled Kansas school houses [the source of a late scene in Spoil}, and watched protesting processions of weather-worn Nebraska Populists as they filed through the shadeless cities of their sun-baked plain. 1 attended barbecues on drab and dusty fair grounds, meeting many of the beat known leaders in the field. (Son 423) Writing hurriedly on trains and in hotels. Garland sent the first installment of his novel, entitled A__Spoil_of_Gf f ice, to Flower in time for the January 1892 issue of Arena. The rest of the novel appeared in the next five issues of the monthly magazine, and the book was published by the Arena Press in September 1692, just as an even bigger political earthquake, the 1692 presidential election, was rumbling. In Spoil, Garland provides both a dramatic rendering of an ongoing and explosive movement as well as a cautionary tale, one that the Populists ultimately failed to heed. By defining "true Populism" as multi-dimensional and broad-based. Garland foretold the disaster of 1896 when the party, tied to one issue (silver) and one segment of the population (white male farmers), spent all its force in one decisive loss to the Republican Party. For a moment, though, in the mid-1680s and early 1890s, the "mighty forces (stirring} in the deeps of American society" (Spoil 156)--the angry Western and Southern farmers, women's groups on the farms and in the city, blacks, urban industrial workers and their leaders, Edward Bellamy's Nationalists, the followers of radical figures such as 276 William Denorant Lloyd and Eugene Debs, and other rebellious groups--had found a home with the Populist Party, and with it immense political power. Finally, it seemed, the consolidated forces oppressing them could be challenged and made to give ground by an equally consolidated and cooperating force. These groups would organize and not perish* Populism represented, as the Southern Populist leader Tom Watson said in 1692. "the contest of the common people against the allied money powers of the world" (Editorial 46). In Populism-- literally, the People's Party— the money trust had met the people trust. Bradley, in a speech at an Alliance meeting late in the novel, at a time when he himself is cautiously moving toward the Alliance camp, says that "It seems a hopeless thing to fight the old organizations, with all their power and money. It can be done, but it can be done only by union among all the poor of every class" (373). In its embrace of the poor of all classes. Garland shows that the Populist movement had taken on a religious force, offering to the outcasts of society, as Christ did, their first real chance for hope. Ida, speaking specifically of the despairing Western farmers wracked by intrinsic and extrinsic depredations, says that "this movement has come into their lives like a new religion. It is a new religion--the religion of humanity" 075). She 277 eees herself as a John the Baptist who "must go forth and utter the word--the word of the Lord" (374, 1697 edition). And In the inpending birth of her and Bradley's child announced on the last page of the novel (in the 1697 edition), a birth that seems nearly immaculate given the comradely, non-passionate nature of their relationship, she takes on the role of Madonna, the child being, as Donald Pizer has interestingly claimed, the Populist Party (Early Work 106). In sum, Populism was a "Pentecost of Politics," as both contemporaries and later historians labelled it (Clanton 166-67; Faulkner 114-15): one observer said that farmers had "heard the word and could preach the Gospel of Populism" (qtd. in billington 739). But Populism would die on the Cross of Gold of William Jennings Bryan, who failed to heed Garland's own New Testament metaphors. Spoil, then, is a novel of hope, caution, and disillusionment, features imminent in the book itself and in historical hi ndsight. 2 - The Grange The opening scene of the novel, set in 1677, depicts what had become a remarkable phenomenon of 1870s Western life: the annual Grange picnics. The Grange (its official name was the Patrons of Husbandry) had been founded in 1867 as primarily a social and educational organization for all 278 American farmer*. By the mid-1870s, the Grange had over 800,000 members in 20,000 local Granges, mostly in the West. The Grange picnic in Spoil has been sponsored by three Granges located in and near Rock County, Iowa, the setting of all of Garland's Iowa fiction (several recurring Iowa characters appear in Spoil, such as Milton Jennings, Radbourn, Osmond Deering, William Bacon, and the grocer Roble). Overflowing wagons of women and men, the latter wearing the Grange regalia of “apron, sash, and pouch of white, orange, buff and red" (3), converge on an open-air meeting place, where a mostly festive round of music, singing, socializing, courting, eating, and speech-making occurs until dusk. Already, the first step in the Western farmer's Populiatic transformation has been effected by the Grange. Farmers now feel linked by common interests and needs because of this "first great movement of the farmer in history," as one speaker puts it (8). A banner displayed at the picnic encapsulates this transformation: "United We Stand, Divided We Fall" (7). Ida, speaking at the picnic, declares that "this is the greatest movement of the farmer in the history of the world. . . . I see in it the rise of the idea of union” (13). But Ida, speaking for the official Grange philosophy, warns the farmers to "keep politics out of it, or it will destroy you" (13). Political anger, though, could not 279 always be kept out. Thla anger is apparent In many of the physical details of the picnic Itself. The Grangers' regalia of ribbons, sashes, and batons, the organizing "marshals" charging around on their horses, the blaring bands, the long processions, the flags and banners, all suggest a martial atmosphere that undercuts the "merry shouts" (3) on the surface. Other banners that the Grangers display at the picnic--"Justice Is our Plea," "Equal Rights to All, Special Privileges to None" (7)--also attest to this political anger. This group of farmers was, in reality, a grim "army of reapers" <5), as the narrator remarks, seeking social and political union. The farmers "only needed an organizer," the narrator later says, "to become a dangerous force" (S6>. Some economic fighting has already occurred--Granger attacks on the railroad and other middlemen organizations, for example, are noted and approved by the farmers attending the picnic (9, 22-23)-- but such activity remains peripheral. In this opening section of Spoil, then. Garland depicts the Grange at its most potent and at the same time vulnerable moment. Xn 1877, it is a massively transiorming social, educational, and, in part, economic force. It has, indeed, worked to combat oppressive institutions, specifically the railroad, and has initiated and won several economic battles by establishing cooperative buying 260 and production ventures, and by opening ita own connercial Institut Iona. By pooling their orders and buying directly fro* aanufacturers, for example. Grangers had saved considerable money on reapers, threshers, wagons, sewing machines, and other equipment (Dick 311; Billington 729); reapers which had cost S275, for example, were purchased by the Grangers for $175 (Dick 311). Grangers also founded their own grain elevators (Garland's father ran one for a year in Osage, Iowa), packing plants, flour sills, banks. Insurance companies, and other small businesses in an attempt to supplant the monopolies in those fields (Billington 729). In addition, they established 1ibraries--Garland himself enjoyed his first contact with books through the local Grange library (Diary 7)--and agricultural colleges and departments of agriculture (Dick 310; HcHath 61>. Vet, as Garland makes clear, the Grange's reluctance to enter politics in any systematic way foreshadowed its demise. At the picnic, young Milton Jennings voices the growing frustration with the Grange. "I'm for war," Jennings proclaims. I'm for a fight in the interests of the farmer. Not merely a defensive warfare but an offensive warfare. How? By the ballot. Mr. President, 1 know you don't agree with me. I know it's a rule of the Order to keep politics out of it, but I don't know of a better place to discuss the interests of the farmer. It's a mistake. We've got to unite at the ballot box; what's the use of our order if we don't? We must be 281 represented at the State legislature, and we can't do that unless we make the grange a political factor. (10) Until farmers became politicized, Jennings and other Grangers argue, they would remain impotent. The Iowa Grangers' latent political power is revealed when the local Republican nominating convention once again rushes through a slate of candidates from the large local towns and, therefore, loyal to town interests. The Republican farmers had always grumbled about this state of affairs, but that grumbling had produced nothing because local politics had always been the "case of perfect organization ton the part of the townl against disorganization and mutual distrust (on the part of the farmer!" (80). But the Grange has created organization and feelings of brotherhood amonq the farmers (the Grangers oftentimes address each other as "Brother" and "Sister"): thus they have the wherewithal to create their own "Granger ticket" <93>. Declaring that "we're on the war path" (88), the Grangers put forth farmers for all the key offices, such as county treasurer and sheriff. The Grangers then circulate a campaign sheet entitled "A New Deal: Reform in County Politics," announcing the formation of a "people's ticket" (88), an obvious foreshadowing of Populism itself. The "revolt of the farmers" was on, the narrator remarks, and soon "the new deal was the talk of the county" (86-89). 282 The second Populiatic transformation la dawning: having achieved historic union, the farmers are now proceeding to political action, all because of the organizing work of the Grange. Garland's narrator repeatedly makes clear that “it waa the grange that had nade this revolt possible. . . . It had brought the farmers together, and made them acquainted with their own men, their own leaders" <89). This new-found political power squashes, at least temporarily, the inevitable Republican resistance. The established Republican leadership in the towns denounces this insurgent Granger ticket and declares that “no man with corns on his hands and hayseed in his hair can be elected to office in the county" <95). The Republicans then attempt to sabotage the election by disrupting Granger campaign activities (during his own political speech on behalf of the Grangers, Bradley hurls a Republican heckler over a wagon, which makes Bradley's reputation) and spreading false reports on election day about Granger candidates withdrawing from the race. But it is all to no avail: the leading Granger candidates win and the farmers are "wild with excitement." They know that for the first time in the history of the county, the farmers had asserted themselves. . . . there had come a feeling of solidarity. They perceived, for a moment at least, their community of interests and their power to preserve themselves against the combined forces of the political pensioners of the small towns. (120-21) 263 But like other Granger victories, this victory by the Iowa Grangers is short-lived. Garland makes clear that the lack of any large-scale, cohesive political structure damns the Grange, and will damn any other rebellious group, to, at best, minor and temporary successes. The Grange energy soon fades, and Bradley, Ida, and others lose interest in it and the idea of agrarian organizations. Bradley tells Ida, at a later meeting between the two, that the Grange “seems to be going down." Ida agrees, remarking that “the farmers can't seem to hold together. Strange, ain't it? Other trades and occupations have their organizations and stand by each other, but the farmer can't seem to feel his kinship." The farmer will “suffer greater hardships," she adds, “before he learns his lesson" (149>. The farmers' "strange" inability to remain organized illustrates their incomplete Populism. In the rest of the novel, by tracing Bradley and Ida's largely separate development and involvement in other reformist issues. Garland marks out the path to the creation of complete Populism and to the Populist movement itself. 3 - The Politicized Farmer Bradley Talcott, because of the Grange movement and the inspiring example of Ida, vows to improve himself. He enrolls in the local seminary (a post-high school 284 institution)* even though he is nearly 30 years old* joins the debating club there, and soon begins studying law. His dormant powers, like the West's, begin to grow. Despite being ridiculed at school because of his poor-fitting clothes* chapped hands, and generally unpolished manner, he soon succeeds, academically and socially. Again the parallel with the West as a whole is manifest: the Western farmer was equally ridiculed for being a "hayseed" when he first entered politics, but his doggishness and latent political intelligence soon brought him respect and success. Through a classmate* Radbourn* Bradley is introduced to Judge Brown, who invites Bradley to study with him. Brown* a Democrat* has long been tired of and frustrated by the Republican political machine. He views Bradley as someone who, despite his reflex Republicanism* can bring new life to Iowa politics. Brown is attracted by Bradley's support of a lowered tariff if not free trade Ca traditionally Democratic position), his anti-railroad sentiments* and his shared distaste for the Republican machine, not to mention his campaigning on behalf of the Granger ticket. Brown decides to nominate Bradley for state legislator for Rock County on an Independent ticket to run against a party-line Republican. 285 In the ensuing nominating and election battle, Bradley and his supporters encounter a central difficulty, namely that of overcoming party loyalty, which in the North and West was to the Republican Party and in the South was to the Democratic Party. This was the largest obstacle that the Populists and moat other reformers faced in post-Civil War America. The Republican Party could do nearly anything (or nothing) and yet retain office because no Northern or Western voter would switch to the Democratic Party, the party identified with slavery, secession, and war. If the faithful wavered, the Republicans could merely "wave the bloody shirt," as the contemporary expression went, and the horrible vision of the war that the Democrats plunged the nation into would rush back, as would party and sectional loyalty. The narrator of Spoil, in an extended passage, explains the Republicanism of the West: The West had always been Republican. Its States had come into the Union as Republican States. It met the aolid South with a solid North-west year after year, and it firmly believed that the salvation of the nation's life depended on its fidelity to the war traditions and on the principle of protection to American industries. Its orators waved the bloody shirt to keep the party together . . . Iowa and Kansas and Nebraska were Stalwarts of the Stalwart. Kansas was the battle ground of the old Abolition and Free Soil forces, and their traditions kept alive a love and reverence for the Republican party long after its real leaders had passed away, and long after it had ceased to be the party of the people. Iowa was hopelessly Republican, also. A strong force in the Rebellion, dominated by New England thought, its industries predominately agricultural, it 286 held rigidly to its Republicanism, and trained its young Men to believe that, while "all Democrats were not thieves, all thieves were Democrats." (156-59) The Republicans, like the Democrats, engaged in what the Populist historian Lawrence Goodwyn calls "sectional politics" (17). Each party, he writes, "maintained an inventory of oratorical fire to rekindle the embers of the sectional and racial patriotism that had flamed during the war" <9). Even a switch to an independent ticket by a Western voter, such as Bradley and his supporters attempt to bring about in Spoil, was equated with betrayal because the Republican Party would lose power. The Kansas Alliance, for example, was constantly berated for being part of a Southern organization and accused of constituting a sort of Rebel fifth column. The Topeka Daily Capital, a stalwart Republican newspaper, claimed that the Kansas Alliance was "officered by rebel brigadiers" (qtd. in Goodwyn 189). The Populist governor of Kansas, Lorenzo D. Lewelling, responding to this strategy of attack, complained that "sectional hatred has . . . been kept alive by the old powers" in order to maintain blind party loyalty and pre-empt dissenting political movements (52), The Southern Populist leader, Tom Watson, was equally aware of the cynical uses of "sectional politics": in an 1692 editorial he noted that both main parties "know that if they can but revive sectionalism they can retain their 287 power over the people" (4€>) . By the late 1870s, however, agrarian reformers were gradually, though not completely, moving away from the Party, as Garland demonstrates in Spoil. Bradley, as mentioned, runs for the state legislature as an independent (he's also called a "Free Trade Republican" C182J), with clear Democratic support. He hopes to capture, as one supporter says, “the granger vote, the temperance vote, the young man's vote, and the Independent vote" (1SS>. But persuading Republican voters to forego party loyalty is no easy task. While campaigning, Bradley runs squarely into this party loyalty problem. He realizes that he had now a greater work before him than he had ever undertaken before. He had now to go to his old friends and neighbors in a new light, practically as a Democrat. He had to face audiences mainly hostile to his ideas, and defend opinions which he knew not only cut athwart the Judgment of the farmers of the county, but squarely across their prejudices. <190) Nonetheless, Bradley triumphs because of his support from the groups mentioned above. Sectional politics. Garland tentatively argues at this point in the novel, can be overcome if a political movement establishes a wide political coalition. This coalition is additionally widened by the support Bradley receives from a failed independent reform group of the past, "the old greenbackers," who “came out of their temporary retirement, and helped Bradley's cause simply 266 because he was young and a dissenter" (134). Though an Eastern organization with aupport frost snail businessmen and labor leaders, the Greenback Party's biggest appeal was in the West, An the Grangers fought the railroads and other nonopoliatic middleman forces, Greenbackera, as their name indicates, fought for the re-institution of greenbacks in order to expand the money supply. This was of course a vital issue to the debt-ridden West (as 1 explained in chapter 3), where farmers were suffering from huge indebtedness and declining crop prices. In the 1676 Congressional elections, the party (then known as the Greenback Labor Party) polled over a million votes and won 15 Congressional seats. But with the 1873 Resumption Act, which resumed specie payment for greenbacks and thus revealed the party's impotence, the Greenbackera began to crumble. Still the Greenback Party performed an essential radicalizing function by its sophisticated critique of the currency issue and other issues, and by its steps towards forming a larger coalition among farmers, industrial labor, and women (its 1660 platform, for example, called for female suffrage and equal pay for equal work). The core Ideology of Populism, as Goodwyn argues, had been created by the Grange and Greenback movements: "greenback antimonopolism" became the heart of Populist thought. The 2 6 9 narrator of Spoil notes that the Greenbackera "were a power, for Host of then were deeply read on the tariff and on the railroad problem; in fact, were all round radicals and fluent speakers" (194). With Bradley'a victory, then. Garland has established the ideological heart of true Populism: as a Granger, Bradley advocates organization and antimonopolism; as a Greenbacker, Bradley advocates independent politics, currency reform, and coalition expansion. This presages the actual formation and success of the Farmers' Alliance and Populism. In Spoil, the Grangers, Greenbackera, free traders, anti-monopol iats, and other dissenters have cotne together to defeat the mammoth Republican machine. Crucial Populiatic transformations have now occurred: the farmer has become organized, has vigorously entered politics, has begun to question the sacred Republican Party and move toward Independent political action, has constructed its core ideology, and has reached out to other similarly beleaguered groups. Bradley moves further along the path to independent politics when he sees how the Grand Old Party actually operates, both in Des Moines and, after being elected United States Congressman, in Washington D.C. In both capitals, political "czars" (278), generally Republican, are far more interested in maintaining office and expanding 230 their party's power than they are in passing any remedial legislation, especially if that legislation upsets its money source, which by and large resides in Eastern industrial and financial institutions. The Democrats that Bradley encounters are equally corrupt and self-seeking. Bradley discovers that "legislation" really takes place--aa He»ber_of the_Thlrd_House also shows — in the lobbying centers and in the private committee rooms of these capitals. (Committees, at that time and through the Progressive era, were completely controlled by the congressional leadership.) Cargill, a cynical ex legislator in Des Moines, tells the still-naive Bradley-- who, to repeat, is symbolic of the still-naive West, trusting its Republican leaders--that the state's real legislating occurs in the city's two main hotels, where legislators and lobbyists meet (213). "There is no question of principle" in the legislators's action, he continues. "They simply say No. 1 first, party next, and principle last of all. . . . The whole damned thing is a botch, in my opinion" (214, 215). Another legislative veteran named Smith tells Bradley that he was as naive as Bradley when he first came to the capital, but by the time he left office he knew "the whole gang to be thieves." "Legislators in America," Smith says, "think it's a Christian virtue to break into the government treasury" 291 <254>. Teatiiiony like thia and hia own experience Make Bradley, within a Month of being in Dea Moines, "sickened and depreaaed1' <253). He aoon loathes hia fellow legislators and begina to "despair of humankind and to doubt the atability of the republic" <253). Bradley tella hia mentor and political manager. Judge Brown, that "I'm ready to reaign and go home, and never get into politics again. The whole thing is rotten to the bottom" (257). Perauaded to run for Congreaa. Bradley finds legislative life in the nation's capital no better. It too ia overrun by lobbyista and politiciana eager to become "spoils of office" <371) and "lend" their support to billa "as if it were something that could be loaned like a horse" (299). In Washington. Bradley's old classmate Radbourn, now a reform-minded Journalist, fills the role that Cargill and Smith filled in Des Moines, namely that of tour guide through the capital's corrupt circles of hell. He explains the power of the Speaker of the House, especially his right to appoint committees, the subsequent need to "cultivate" the Speaker's favor, and the virtual impossibility of Introducing any reformist measures <278 ff.). Again, Bradley is depressed by it all: "his heart Cwasl sick of the whole life of the farcical legislature, with its flood of corrupt bills" <307). He is especially disillusioned 292 because "he had the Western man's intensity of feeling for Washington. To him it was the center of American life, because he supposed the laws were made there" (2&S). The key word of course is "supposed," and he quickly learns how wrong and naive he is. Like Madeleine Lee in Democracy, Bradley is so disillusioned by his experience in Washington that he wants nothing more to do with politics. Lee says at the end of the novel and of her initiation into national politics that “democracy"--a word that has become completely ironic by that point in the book--**has shaken my nerves to pieces" (1B2), and she flees D.C. in order to take a trip to Europe. Bradley is equally shaken and prepares to return to his private life in Iowa. Both characters resemble Hawthorne's Voung Goodman Brown in that their discovery of evil has embittered them to the point of misanthropy, at least concerning politicians. The novel's very title, as Joseph McCullough points out, reinforces this pessimism: politics is an inherent scramble for spoils by corrupt spoilsmen (62). Bradley, then, by learning that in the "destructive atmosphere" of politics, the "scramble for office" dominates <240, 221), has taken another step toward what Garland defines as true Populism. He has learned that politics is almost completely corrupt and that a new political party and practice are essential. He sees that 293 one piece of reformist advice he received, to "stay right in the lump, and help leaven it" (aa quoted earlier), is as naive and futile aa the Grange's decision to stay out of politics. Bradley now recognizes that all reform efforts are hopeleas if one works within the regular two-party structure, aa his failed attempts to initiate legislation on woman's suffrage and tariff reduction illustrate. Bradley's mounting frustration with state and national politics mirrors the frustration of nearly all Gilded Age reformers. In the years before the Alliance "earthquake" of 1890, it was nearly impossible to pass any reformist legislation. With the two dominant parties able to summon massive voter loyalty by solely offering vague connections to the past, especially the Civil War, it was in their interest to avoid any specific reference to current Issues, especially divisive ones. (In these years 67% of the electorate voted a straight ticket and 10* almost always did so [Marcus SI). The parties therefore offered, amid accelerating and troublesome social change, links to a seemingly more stable past. As Robert Marcus explains, the two parties "fulfilled some of the need for order, even if this psychological advantage came at the cost of any meaningful attempt to control the world of early industrialism" (11). Lawrence Goodwyn claims that the "national political environment" in these years "had proven 294 essentially impervious to new economic ideas" (179). The parties advanced stable, low-negative candidates and platforms that brought out the party regulars, not flashy, * controversial ones that would threaten that loyalty (and financial support). Hence, the "colorlessnesa" of Gilded Age political leaders and their "failure to confront significant issues," which is often remarked upon (Marcus 91) . The 1888 presidential election between the Republican Benjamin Harrison and the Democrat Grover Cleveland--the last election prior to the Alliance-Populist earthquake--is illustrative of the reactionary torpor of Gilded Age politics. Both men and their parties held similarly conservative positions on all the leading issues of the day: tariff (high), civil service reform (curb), currency (contracted, gold-based), trusts (unregulated), economic philosophy (laissez faire). H. U. Faulkner writes that "a voter with an intelligent interest in (these) questions . would have found it difficult to choose between Cleveland and Harrison on the basis of any of these issues, since both candidates worked heroically to avoid explicit reference to them" (95). Zn The _Areric«n_ Commonwea1th, a widely read book published in that election year. Lord (James) Bryce claimed that in America "there was no politics in politics" (qtd. in Cochran 166). 2S5 The solution to this contentless politics, this steadfast refusal of both parties to heed reformers, such less psss reform legislation, is obvious, one that brings Bradley, Ida, and the West to what is perhaps the most important Populistic transformation: the formation of a new party. No longer would they remain in blind loyalty to the Republican Party nor be blinded by “sectional politics." They now understand, in what is a crucial development both in the novel and in post-Clvil War reform history, that “the bloody shirt is an anachronism" <162). 4 - The Birth of Populism Ida Wilbur has also been moving toward a new political position, though at a faster pace than Bradley. In the “spreading radicalism" (163) of the early to mid~lS80s, her former beliefs in a non-political Grange strike her as suddenly antiquated and naive. Like Bradley, and like the West as a whole, her political views mature. And in her occasional meetings with and letters to Bradley, she passes on these more advanced political positions to him. While he has learned of the need to both enter and mistrust politics (especially Republicanism), and is moving toward either some sort of Independent political position or a complete abdication of politics, Ida has leaped to an understanding of how to create a vibrant independent • 2 9 b political party. She realizea that in order for a reform party to succeed, it *ust--as the Granger, Greenbacker, Granger-Republican, Independent-Republican, and new Democratic movements did not successfully do--widen its base, form a coalition of Interests, somewhat as the Iowa Grangers temporarily did earlier in the novel. Agrarian movements, Ida tells Bradley, "must include more or fall" (151). Subsequently, Ida introduces, and later converts, Bradley to a new political movement that does include more- -the Farmers' Alliance. Founded in 1880, the Alliance attempted to create a "solidarity of all productive interests," as the narrator of Spoil says (121). Though not officially a third party-- that would come in 1891 with the formation of the People's Party (Populist Party), which became the Alliance's political form— the Alliance supported and sponsored independent candidates and Democratic and Republican ones committed to its policies. These policies, agreed upon and formalized at Alliance conventions throughout the decade, reflected a combination of the Granger and Greenbacker ideology of organization, antimonopolism, and currency expansion, along with a solidarity with industrial labor. Heretofore defeated by "sectional politics," the Populist's 1892 St. Louis Conference proclaimed the "consummation of a perfect union of hearts and hands of all sections of our 297 conon country. The men who wore the gray and the men who wore the blue meet here to extinguish the last smoldering embers of civil war** (Hicks Appendix 439). Populism's presidential ticket of that year symbolized that union: its Presidential candidate was a Yankee general (James B. Weaver) and its vlce-Presldential candidate a Confederate major (James G. Field). As one Populist leader, Leonidas Polk, proclaimed, "there shall be no Mason and Dixon line on the Alliance maps of the future" (qtd. in Goodwyn 93). In Spoil, Garland argues that other unions, aside from that of North and South, are essential. Populism must also create a union between men and woman, urban workers and rural ones, and whites and blacks; true Populism must eliminate, if it is to succeed, sectional, gender, labor, and racial divisions. "We draw no line of color, creed, or sex," Garland wrote in a January 1891 Arena article. "We mean all men" ("New Declaration" ISO), by which ol course he meant all men and women. The St. Louis convention platform twice proclaimed the "union and independence" of its Alliance-Populist members: that is, union of "the intelligent working people and producers of the United States," men and women, white and black. North and South, and independence from polrtics-as-uaual by way of independent political action. As Alan Trachtenberg has argued. Populism represented "a challenge to the culture of 298 conventional politics"; it "scorned the very notion of 'party' and loyalty" <177, 178). The faioue Western Populist Jeremiah “Sockless Jerry" Sispaon declared that sectional politics was dead: "The old Democratic scarecrow of Negro rule has lost its potency in the South as the bloody shirt has lost its Influence in the North" Cqtd. in Clanton 72). In Populism, as Lawrence Goodwyn claims, "a new culture of politics was being born" <104). This new culture of politics was consciously and painstakingly created by the Alliance. The Alliance "schoolhouse" replaces the Grange picnic as the dominant political feature on the rolling prairies and flat plains. As the narrator of Spoil notes, "the schools and debating clubs and newspapers were preparing the whole country for a political revolution. Radicals everywhere were being educated" (181). Indeed, in the 1880s hundreds of Populist newspapers were started up, a national press association was formed (the National Reform Press Association), pamphlets and books were circulated, a lecturing system was established (over 40,000 lecturers participated, including Garland himself [Goodwyn xi; Garland, Son 4271), secret meetings were held as well as Grange-like camp meetings, all dedicated to spreading the new Populistic ideology of greenback antimonopolism and "union and independence." This educational activity created, as Goodwyn writes, "the 299 Populiatic premise of thinking in structural terms" Cxvii). Ida, as part of her campaign of "preaching union and education" <152), maintains that the non-Populisticaily educated "farmer lacks comparative ideas" (150), and thus cannot truly understand his or her plight nor the causes of it. The farmer "don't know how poor he is," Ida says (150). But once he does, once he begins "to compare his mortgaged farm with the banker's mansion and his sate" <152)--which the Alliance educational system helps bring about--then "let the politicians and their masters, the money-changers, beware!" <150). The Alliance educational system succeeded in creating tremendous following throughout the West: by the late 1880a, after a dip in membership in the early years of the decade, membership soared to nearly a million (with three million more in the South [Woodward 1361), and in 1690 Alliance organizers were reporting that a thousand new members were joining a week (Hicks 103). At the end of Spoil, the Alliance is still in its quiescent early-to-mid 1880s phase, but Ida is aware of its political force, its imminent explosion. She writes to Bradley that 1 have joined the Farmers' Alliance. I begin to believe that another great wave of thought is about to sweep over the farmers. The spiplt of the grange did not die. It has passed on into this new organization. The difference is going to be that this new alliance of the farmers will be deeper in thought and broader in 300 sympathy. . . . Thia order will become political. (304) In a speech at an Alliance gathering in Kanaaa, she again emphasizes the expanded base of the Alliance as compared to I the Grange. “If this movement is higher and deeper and broader than the grange was," she declares, “it is because its sympathies are broader. With me, it is no longer a question of legislating for the farmer; it is a question of the abolition of industrial slavery" (345). In that Alliance gathering, which both Ida and Bradley attend (as well as Jerry Simpson, “the Sockless Sage of Medicine Lodge" C34&)), Garland further emphasizes the important differences between it and the Grange picnic described at the beginning of the novel. Thia Alliance picnic is no picnic: Instead of gaily dressed people laughing, flirting, singing, and feasting, the Alliance gathering is filled with grim, dusty, hungry farmers dressed in drab, ill-fitting clothes. Thia "long procession of revolting farmers" has. Garland makes clear, “no bands to lead them; no fluttering of gay flags; no cheers from the bystanders. . . . There was no smart carriages, no touch of gay paint, no glittering new harnesses" (337-3B). The banners the farmers display also show that the movement has deepened, become more desperate and specific in ita complaints and demands. At the Grange picnic, the banners stressed unity and proclaimed a vague 301 assertion of justice and equal rights. At the Alliance gathering the banners read "No More Fourteen-Cent Corn." "Let Us Legislate for the Poor. Not for the Bankers." "If We Don't Own the Railways, the Railways Will Own Us," and. In a clear Jacksonian echo, "Abolish the National Banks” (33B-39). Even the songs are different: at the Grange picnic of the late lS70s, the farsers sing songs such as "John Brown," "Hail, Columbia" <5) and, on the way home, "Auld Lang Syne" and "We'll Meet Beyond the River" (23); at the Alliance gathering of the mid-1880a, new songs have been created for the new movement, such as "Join the Alliance Step," "Get off the Fence, Brother," and “We're Marching Along" (343). Though impressed by what he sees at the Alliance gathering, Bradley, because of his depressing legislative experience in Dee Moines and Washington D.C., does not have "very much hope in revolt" (352). Bradley, like many farmers in the West at the time, has still not gotten oif the fence. But after Ida's urging and after attending another Alliance meeting at a Kansas schoolhouse, Bradley la converted. (His and Ida's growing love also leads him to join the Alliance.) He now believes, like Ida, even to the point of echoing her phrases, that the Alliance is "the Grange movement broadened, deepened, and made more desperate and wide-reaching by changing conditions" (340). 302 It represents, Bradley cays, "the beginning of the greatest reform movement in history" (3€>3, 1B97 edition). The Alliance haa a chance of being that because of ita coalition of intereeta, ita more mature view of politics, ita "union and Independence." Aa Ida, Bradley, and other Alliance membera now understand, the Granger struggle against the railroad, grain elevator operators, and other oppressive, monopolistic forces, aa well as later struggles such as that against the protective tariff, were mostly sideshows of a vaster cleavage in American society between capital and labor. To limit the fight between one group (farmers) and one institution (railroads, mostly) was a near guarantee of peripheral status. Farmer-specific legislation, in short, has to be replaced by class legislation. Garland argues. A "solidarity of all productive interests" needs to be forged, an understanding that there is, as the narrator of Spoil remarks, "limitless robbery of the poor, in both city and country" (376). The most prominent and perhaps moat important union is between rural farmers and urban industrial employees. William Peffer argues that “the farmer and the wage worker are travelling the same road. . . . they are both confronted with a merciless power which has brought disaster upon them both alike" (55). The Alliance attempt to Join hands with the urban producer is 303 reflected In Its various platforms, in which, as previously noted, sympathetic references to struggling urban workers are frequently made. Specifically, the Alliance calls for shorter working hours, safer working conditions, limiting immigration (a cardinal labor demand of these years), and the recognition of unions. Chester Destler argues that throughout these years there was a "cross-fertilization between eastern and western, urban and rural movements" <15). Indeed, the Knights of Labor joined forces with the Alliance in the mid 1880s, at a time when the Knights' membership had peaked to 700,000. In the 1890 election triumphs the Knights claimed a shared victory, and at the 1892 St. Louis Populist convention, industrial labor--much of it by then moving to the American Federation of Laboi-- represented 25* of the delegates (Grob 93-95). Bradley's own increased understanding of class solidarity, of the need to rise above solely rural concerns, is evident in his changed views of blacks. He sees them in large numbers for the first time in his life when he goes to Washington D.C., and though interested in observing them aa a sociological phenomenon, he casually refers to them as "darkies" and believes that, though they are "so grimly ugly of face," they are "apparently so good natured and light hearted" (274). When blacks don't smilingly and meekly perform their appointed functions as 304 clerks and waiters, Bradley ia annoyed: one non-deferring desk clerk is referred to aa an "insolent little darky" (146), while a railway porter goes too far the other way, displaying "oppressive courtesy" <269). Yet, Bradley begins to question these reflex stereotypes and labels; he begins to see blacks as suffering people and not just as ugly darkies who carry luggage and bring hi* his food. He is initiated into this broader view even before he arrives at Washington. Checking into a hotel in Des Moines, an odd thing occurs. The "darky" takes Bradley's luggage and escorts hia to the elevator, but instead of getting in with Bradley, he begins running up the stairs, so fast that he ia at the elevator when it opens on the upper floor. Later, Bradley is struck by this: "His mind went back to the fact that the boy was not allowed to ride in the elevator. He wondered if this touch of southern feeling would ever get farther north. For the first time in his life he had met the question of caste" (206). From this note of sympathy for another suffering group of people, Garland takes Bradley to the Populistic step of true caste-consciouaness. Bradley, like the Alliance as a whole, awakens to the shared suffering of blacks and begins to share political action. The agrarian population realizes, as the narrator of Spoil says, that "poverty has 305 few distinctions among ita victiis, The negro stood close beside his white brother in adversity, and there was a certain relation and resemblance in their stiffened walk, poor clothing, and dumb, imploring, empty hands" (343), The Negro's desperate situation matches that of the drought- and mortgage-ridden farmer. Garland argues » In that both groups are denied minimal comfort and security. He also links the suffering of blacks with that of urban industrial workers, coupling "the home of the workingman and the hut of the poor negro" (369). Late in the novel, Bradley specifically assails stereotypes about blacks that he himself believed in earlier: "We hear a great deal about the indolence and shiftlessness of the negro,** he aaya to Ida, "but I have never met a people more pathetically eager to earn a living than these same negroes" (379). This white-black coalition was a crucial issue in Populist politics, especially in the South. Since the black population in the West was small (over 90% of African-Amerleans lived in the South at this time), Bradley's sympathy remains largely speculative. It was in the South that a significant union could occur: over a million black farmers had formed the Colored Farmers' National Alliance, a parallel organization to the Southern Alliance, which did not admit black members* Many Southerners, including Tom Watson, argued for a formal 306 consolidation of the two groups, and for several years the view of one Texas Populist, that the whites should unite with blacks because the blacks "are in the ditch just like we are" (qtd. in Woodward, Jim Crow 61), was largely dominant. The Southern Alliance, at least through 1892, was "conspicuously friendly" to the Colored Alliance (Goldaan 39). In 1888, for example, the Southern Alliance "encouraged the state bodies to open their cooperative exchanges to members of the Colored Alliance, and most states did" (McMath 94), and other black-white contacts clearly indicated that "something more than southern politics as usual" was occurring (HcMath 173). In all, many Southern Populists "sought something that no American party has achieved before or since: a political coalition of the poor whites and the poor blacks of the South" (Goldman 39). Thus, in the early 1890a, a coalition of Western and Southern black and white farmers, along with urban industrial laborers, appeared to be imminent. Bradley undergoes another and similar transformation in his views of women, which again corresponds to the West's changing views as it takes the path to true Populism. As with his earlier stereotypical views of blacks, Bradley, "in the thoughtless way of the average man, . . . had ignored or Idealized women as they appealed to his eye." "The woman question had not engaged his 307 attention," ha "had not thought of woman aa having any activa part In living," and ha had failad to place them anywhere in the ''social economy" (144). But Ida's words and the example of her life convert him. She, as she does with other issues, "was destined to again set a stake in Bradley's mental horizon" (144); Bradley, the narrator notes, "was transformed by her influence" <367, 1837 ed). He attends a lecture that Ida gives at Iowa City, where he's studying at the University of Iowa law school. In this lecture, which is entitled "The Real Woman-question," Ida articulates an economic-based feminism similar to that of contemporary feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (who was born the same year as Garland). Ida argues that “the woman question is not a political one merely, it is an economic one. . . . The real question is woman's dependence upon man as the bread-winner. So long as that dependence exists, there will be weakness" (143). A woman must receive "equal pay for equal work," she continues, and she "must be able to earn her own living in an honorable way at a moment's notice. Then she will be a free woman even If she never leaves the kitchen" (144). Ida's own personality and career offer further feminist lessons for Bradley and others. She is an articulate, powerful public speaker, whose words and style of delivery create a sensation. Bradley, when he first 308 sees her at the Grange picnic, ia awed by "her powerful diction and her iaperaonal emotion" (14). Her "eaay dignity,*' "grave and dignified Manner," and “clear, penetrating contralto” voice have already made her famoua (12). Her apeech at the picnic createa a “aplendld atillneaa," and when she'a done "all were deeply stirred," and many cried (15). At another apeech, her oratorical skills prompt one woaan in the audience to remark: “Shows what a woman can do if y' give 'er a chance" (349).[3] Bradley is soon converted. He begins trying to make himself worthy of Ida and nearly always defers to her superior judgment and intelligence. He has gone from assessing women based on their sbllity to attract his eye — and aside from that not thinking of them at all--to establishing an intellectual, nearly brother-sister relationship with Ida, even when they are married. He is now repulsed by the fleshy exchanges he sees in the legislative halls. He becomes politically active, going so far as to introduce suffrage legislation at the Iowa state house. The speech he gives in support of that legislation makes the galleries cheer (though the other legislators “tabled the matter as usual" [2bO}>. Furthermore, after their marriage when Ida insists on separating from him so that she can continue her work for the Alliance and promote his “re-election by the people's party" (384), Bradley 309 concede* even though he nearly cries at the prospect of being without her. Bradley, in the last line of the book, tells Ida, "All that I aa I owe to you" <375, 1897 ad.). By helping to create class-, race-, and now gender- consciousness in Bradley, she has created a true Populist. The Alliance, as with urban industrial labor and with Afrlean-Aaericans, atteapted to forge a link with the women's movement of the tine. Many of its leading platforms demanded suffrage and prohibition (a vital women- driven movement at the time), and its organizational structure specifically included women, from the lowest to near the highest positions (women of course could not run for political office, which was the ultimate Alliance- Populist goal). Garland himself tried to recruit women in the Single Tax clubs he belonged to, saying that "we have so long excluded women and so long said, 'You shall not participate in these things,' that they need special encouragement" (qtd. in Kaye ISO-51). At the Alliance gathering described late in the novel, Ida declares that “no other political movement in hietory--not even the anti slavery cause--appealed to the women like this movement here in Kansas" (352). The Kansas Populist Mary Elizabeth Lease, who apparently served as the historical basis for Ida (see note 3), said that "Ours is a grand and holy mission . . . to place the mothers of this nation on an 3 1 0 equality with the father*" (qtd. In HcMath 126). William Peffer declared that one of the moat Important effecta of the Alliance waa that "men and women are at laat mad* equal In public affairs," which served to educate "the rural mind to the belief that women are aa necessary In public affairB as they are In private affairs" (152-53). Indeed, of the one million Northern Alliance members In 1690, approximately one-fourth were women (HcMath 126). By the early 1690s, the coalition was In place. Unlike previous reform movements, the Alliance had sunk roots in rich, varied, and deep soil: ita rapid and healthy growth was inevitable. Ida sums up the composition, demands, and power of this new coalition in her speech at the Alliance gathering in Kansas. "Justice is our plea," she says. "Justice to the coal-miners, justice to the mechanics, justice to women, and justice to the negro" (345). She later adds to this coalition the Chinese and Irish and "everybody that to-day ia hedged in by class prejudices, or by the walls of caste" (347). Thia broad- based coalition. Garland and others hope, will stop the extrinsic forces, the "money powers," as Watson says, from exploiting "the common people." "No more national banks," Ida says in this apeech, no more special privileges to issue money baaed on the nation's indebtedness. . . . no more land grants to railways; . . . no more monopolies of the city streets; no more charters given to railway kings and telephone 311 magnates. . . . no aore luaber kings, coal kings, and oil kings — wa propose to dethrone thea all. (346) As in the years before the Aaerican Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Civil War--hiatorical parallels endlessly cited by late-nineteenth century urban and rural reforiers— the Alliance-Populist aoveaent believed that the 1880s and early '90s ware a tiae of iaalnent revolution, that liberation was around the corner. "Great forces are aoving," Garland wrote in an 1892 article about Alliance Congreaaaen. "There seems approaching a great periodic popular upheaval similar to that of '61" ("Alliance Wedge" 437>. What made the French Revolution poaaible--a coalition of agrarians, the aiddle class, and aany sections of the upper class — wouId make the A11iance-Popul1st revolution possible. But this time the resulting liberation would be a complete one, of men and women, whites and blacks, laborers and farmers. North and South. In Spoil, Bradley (as previously quoted) declares that the Alliance represents "the beginning of the greatest reform movement in history" (363, 1897 ed.). 5 - The Death of Populism By the end of the next decade. Populism was all but dead, having become nearly a farce. After its strong but not decisive victories in 1892, it met its "Waterloo" in 1896, as C. Vann Woodward puts it (Tom_Wat.son 294), by 312 fusing with Bryan and the Deaocratic Party. In 1900, it fused and lost with the Democrats again, and in 1904 and 1908 it ran independent campaigns: ita presidential candidate in both of those years was Tos Watson, who polled 117,000 in 1904 and 29,000 votes in 1908. Shortly after that latter showing, the party dissolved. Garland himself, like many others, had Left the party after the 1892 election and viewed Bryan and silverism, as did many "true Populists," as a bastardization of the Movement. What went wrong? Much of the cause lay in things the Populists could do little about. Their opponents--the Republican Party in the North, the Democratic Party in the South--resorted to "sectional politics'* and out-and-out bribery, fraud, and intimidation to quell the Populist revolt. Northern and Western employers routinely threatened to lay off, or cut the wages of, employees who strayed from the Republican ticket (hence the repeated Populist demand for the secret ballot). In the 1890 election in Nebraska, up to 20,000 fraudulent votea were cast to defeat Populist candidates (Woodward, TowWatson 198). Things were worse in the South, where the regular Democratic Party employed repeat voting, bribery, ballot- box stuffing, voting of minors, cash payment to voters, and other tactics to ensure their victory. Blacks who attempted to vote for Alliance-Populist candidates. 313 furthermore, were threatened and even kllled--up to 15 were murdered In Georgia alone during the 1892 election (Woodward, Jom_Watagn 237>. The union with induetrial labor waa equally fraught with difficultlea that Populieta could do little about. Samuel Gompera, the leader of the American Federation of Labor, had little intereat In broad-baaed reform or independent political action. He downplayed or apurned alliances with blacka, women, immigrants, Eugene Debs's American Railway Union and Socialist Party, and of course the Popullats, and had no intereat in issues such as currency expansion, tariff reduction, land reform, and trust-busting. His sole concern waa obtaining the immediate, labor-specific goals of shorter hours, higher pay, and job control (Grob 134). He and the rank-and-file in the national trade unions were interested in “collective bargaining rather than social reform** (Grob 100). They had not learned the "Populiatic premise of thinking in structural terms," in part, aa Goodwyn argues, because labor lacked an “educational equivalent" of the Alliance (309). Thus, in the 1892 election the Populists failed to capture urban labor support: the Populist ticket did not win more than 5Jt of the vote in any state north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi.C41 314 The Populists, then--glven their opponents' tactics and power, and the unwillingness of labor to join hands with thes--were perhaps doomed to an early death. Still, faults within the Populist camp itself contributed to this death. Populism failed to be truly Populistic, as Garland defines it in Spoil. Populism reverted to its pre-Alliance form, becoming a one class (farmer), one race (white), one gender (male) movement, and it paid the conaequencea. It did not Include more and subsequently--aa Ida had predicted--failed. The 1692 election, oftentimes seen as Populism's high-water mark, in fact revealed its severe structural flaws, its non-Popul1stic character. The three main bases of its coalition--labor, blacks, and women (aside from the central base of white male rural farmers in the South and Weet>--were all tottering. The Populistic philosophy of union and independence, enunciated in Spoil and in the Populist platforms, remained unrealized. Southern white Populists turned their backs on their natural allies, the Southern black farmers. They never formally allied themselves with the National Colored Farmers' Alliance, and after 1692 became increasingly resistant. Even before then, while many Southern Populists did indeed exhibit unprecedented racial tolerance, many others viewed a biracial alliance with skepticism if not repugnance. (The exact mood between white Populists and 315 the Colored Alliance ia inpossible to determine because of the lack of historical docunents concerning the Colored Alliance CHcKath 92, 172-73].) One cause of division was that the Colored Alliance was nearly exclusively composed of fars laborers and sharecroppers, while many in the white Southern alliance were land owners; thus, the two groups differed on some key issues: for example, the Colored Alliance "endorsed Henry George's Single Tax plan and was less than enthusiastic about the subtreasury," which was a central demand for the white alliance (McMath 174). But the dominant issue involved race, and with the Populist and Populist-Democratic defeats of 1692, '94, and '96, white Populists became progressively disillusioned, bitter, and racist. The regular Democratic Party had succeeded in convincing the electorate that Populism meant a return to Reconstruction-like black and Republican rule. One Methodist preacher, for example, claimed that an Alliance-Populist victory would result in "negro supremacy," "mongrel ism,“ and the "destruction of the Saxon womanhood of our wives and daughters" (qtd. in Woodward, T 9 ? _ . 226). Watson claimed that all a politician had to do was yell "Negro rule!" and any Southerner on the verge of joining Populism would rush back to the Democratic fold ("Negro Question" 541). The Southern Populists grew to believe that this threat would forever keep the regular 316 Democrats in power, ao they began endoraing black dlafranchiaeaent aa a way to eliminate the racial element and keep the economic iaeue to the forefront (McHath 174). In the twiated politics of the South, diafranchiaement waa an attempt to facilitate, not retard, liberal legialatlon. Watson explained how thia Populiat-led diafranchiaement campaign was in fact well-intentioned: "The white people dare not revolt ao long aa they can be intimidated by the fear of the negro vote," he wrote. But once the "bugaboo of negro domination" was removed, "every white man would act according to hia own conscience and judgment in deciding how he shall vote" (qtd. in Woodward, Tom^Watsgo 371) . But thia ia the kind view of Southern Populism, which waa, or soon became, more motivated by the fear of Negro (and Northern) rule than by Populistic Ideology. Watson's caae ia illustrative and perhaps symptomatic. In the new century, thia former leading light of Southern Populism ran for President aa an avowed white supremacist and published incredibly vile defenses of Southern lynching. He wrote, for example, that blacka "simply have no comprehension of virtue, honesty, truth, gratitude and principle. . . . In the South, we have to lynch him occasionally, and flog him, now and then, to keep him from blaspheming the Almighty, by his conduct, on account of hia smell and hia color" (qtd. 317 In Woodward, iQM.Watson 432). Populism reversed field on feminist issues as well. Even the deservedly vaunted Omaha Platform, which is the most frequently cited and important Populist document, containing as it does the moat articulate and detailed enunciation of Populism's demands and ideology, silently elided the suffrage plank. This change waa noticed by some. Mary Elizabeth Lease's daughter, Louisa, hectored the Omaha delegates for thia action in a dramatic apeech during the convention's opening ceremoniea. She closed her speech with these words: "The motto of the Alliance is 'Equal rights to all and special privileges to none,' but you are not true to that motto if you do not give woman her rights" (qtd. in Clanton 83>. The Populist Party, henceforth, became a much more male-dominated party, unlike during its earlier Alliance years (HcMath 127). The 1898 Populist-Democratic platform continued to ignore the suffrage issue and soon women were searching for another political home. Garland's own changing views of feminism are revealed in the alterations he made to Spoil when he republished it in 1897. These changes, much like the changes in Tom Watson on race, reflect Populism's collapse on this issue during these years. In the 1897 edition. Garland severely weakened Ida's feminism as part of his project to make his 316 novel More "general” and "huKanitarlan," aa Alaen approvingly writea. Ida's softened feainiai (which la not diacuaaed by Alaen), reflecta Garland's "development” toward “traditional” Male and female rolea, a development that will dominate him dreary Rocky Mountain fiction of the following two decadee. In the 1892 edition, for example, Ida upbraids Bradley for hia political and intellectual inconsistency, telling him that such inconsistency ia often blamed on women (358). The absence of this exchange in the 1897 edition, completely misdirecte the significance of a later passage (present in both editions) when she admits to her own inconsistency and says, "Now that^s like a woman, isn't it?” (358 in the 1892 edition, 352 in the 1897 edition). In the 1892 edition, the playful self- deprecation is clear; in the 1897 edition, Ida seems to be adopting anti-women stereotypes. In another scene, the 1897 edition stresses Ida's growing dependence on Bradley's aid in dealing with practical issues. When an Alliance organizer does not meet them at a train station, they are unsure what to do because neither one of them knows how to reach the schoolhouae where the Alliance meeting is to occur. In both editions, Bradley tries to find a way to get to the schoolhouae and Ida welcomes this help. But in the 1892 edition, her response to Bradley's help is limited to "resign ting] 319 harstlf to [Bradley's] custody" <360). Five years later, Garland saw this scene as a great opportunity to plug in soae ‘'essential female" characteristics, as part of his plan to sake Bradley and Ida's relationship, and the book, ‘‘■ora general and huaanitarian." In the 1B97 edition. Garland has Ida aelt in the face of thia situation, adding the following illuminating and dreadful sentence: "In the cold and darkness she lost something of her imperiousness, and yielded heraelf to [Bradley's] guidance with a delicious return to woman's weakness in the face of practical material details" <353). In the 1697 edition, furthermore, Ida becomes pregnant at the end of the novel, thus reinforcing her more "womanly" character. When she tells Bradley of her pregnancy, "her voice grew tremulous . . . and a look of singular beauty came into her face." Bradley then encircles her "like a shield" within hia arm and puts her on his knee (375>. Ida is now a trembling, beautiful, pregnant, defenseless, and child-like woman. Once again Garland has undercut her "manly" independence and "imperiouaneaa." All of this la completely absent in both the magazine and book version of 1892, and, to repeat, reflects Populism's own abdication of feminism. For the Populist Party, the resistance to the involvement of blacks and women was mostly the result of 320 Southern pressure. The South would not tolerate blacks and women in the Populist coalition. When Mary Lease travelled and lectured through the South, for example, one Southerner said that "the sight of a woman travelling around the country making political speeches . . . [was! simply disgusting** South. But the Northern Populists, desperate for union with the South, signed on to these positions in hopes that a sectional alliance alone (along with the still hoped-for alliance with industrial labor) would bring victory. What followed, however, was no alliance of any kind and no victory. Southern Populism, generally argued to be more significant and radical than Northern Populism (such, for example, is Lawrence Goodwyn'e position), clearly wrecked the chances for any true Populistlc "union and independence." Its racism prevented union with blacks, its sexism prevented union with women, and its sectionalism prevented union with the North (Clanton passim). Despite the North's caving in on the black and feminist bases of the coalition, the South remained outside the Populist camp; it would not, in any large degree, leave the Democratic Party. In 1892, no Southern state, aside from Alabama, gave the Populiat Presidential ticket more than 321 23* of the vote (North Dakota and Kansas, by contrast, both gave 48X of their vote to Weaver). The North was willing to leave the Republican Party; the South was not willing to leave the Deaocratic Party. The final Populiatic transformation that Garland sets forth in Spoil--forming a new party--had been equally lost. Thus, in part by 1892 and in toto by 1896, Populism was once again a by-and-large rural movement, addressing nearly exclusively the needs of white male Western (and Southern) farmers, though even these two groups could not work together. Instead of the true Populism advocated by Garland in Spoil, the false Populism of Bryan and others had taken over. The 1896 fusion with the Democratic Party signalled Populism's failure to create a new party, and its emphasis on silver signalled the loss of its core ideology. The New Deal coalition had slipped away, as had any hopes of real and lasting success. Ida's prediction, that the movement must include more or fail, had been realized: it included less and indeed failed. The Party, aside from a few years in the late 1880s and early 1890s, did not rise, as Garland's narrator in Spoil had urged, "to the perception of the solidarity of all productive interests" (121). Thus, the "most significant mass democratic movement in American history tup to that tlmel" was dead (Clanton xiv). 322 If the Populiets could gain any aolace It lay in the fact that aany of their demands, and aoee of their radical Ideology, returned to the public arena in the early part of next century.[53 In the Progreaaive Era, the direct election of aenatora, the Auatralian (aecret) ballot, the ahortening of the work day for urban laborers, the Municipal control of public utilities, the initiative and referendum, a graduated income tax, antitrust legislation, railroad regulation, the reclamation of public lands and conaervationiam, the Federal Reserve System that created a more flexible currency, and the establiahment of postal savings banks--all central A11iance-Populist demands of the 1880s and '90s--caae into effect. A few yeara later woman's suffrage became law, and in the New Deal of the 1930s an expanded currency, recognition of unions and the right to strike, job creation plans, social welfare for "tramps," and other legislation took effect. Richard Hofstadter, though no fan of Populiam, concedes that the "Populists had the satisfaction of seeing plank after plank of their platforms made law by the parties whose leaders had once dismissed them as lunatics" (Age 109). Ray Billington writes that "one by one the principles of the 'Omaha Platform' were accepted, until farmers' demands that seemed radical in the 1890'a appeared conservative in the 1940's“ (744). Hary Lease, looking back from the 323 perspective of 1914, noted with "gratification*' that "ay work In the good old Populist days was not in vain. The Progressive party has adopted our platform, clause by clause, plank by plank. . . . The seed we sowed in Kansas did not fall on barren ground" (qtd. in Hicks 421). Ida Wilbur and the West finally reaped a successful, though slowly maturing, crop, one that "true Populism," as defined by Garland in A_Spoil_pf_Qffice, was destined to enjoy. Notes 1. The connection between Bradley's and Ida's personal growth and the growth of the West, which 1 make several times in this chapter, was first made by Donald Pizer in hia invaluable work Ha*lin_Garland'a_Early Work_and_ Ca reer (1960). Pizer writes that Bradley's and Ida's "growing political awareness symbolizeta] the growth of Western political thought" (105). 2. There are three editions of Spoil: the magazine version published in Arena in the first half of 1892; the first book edition published later that year by the Arena Press; and a second book edition published in 1897 by D. Appleton and Company. The Arena book edition expands upon the magazine version, largely in the form of embellished or completely new descriptions of places and people, the substitution of dialogue for paraphrased conversations, and innumerable minor changes in wording. Nothing vital is added to or deleted from the magazine version, though, as far as 1 can determine. But the 1897 book edition, as Eberhard Alsen has pointed out, contains significant changes in the last three chapters (the first 29 chapters of both book editions are identical). In these last three chapters. Garland pruned Ida's political apeeches, resulting in a reduction of a total of ten pages from the 1892 edition. This pruning de-politicizea and de- radicalizes the text. Garland, by that point (with Populism nearly dead), was apparently trying to rescue Spoil from being a purely Populist document into one marked by "more general and humanitarian" concerns, as Alsen says 324 (326). Alsen concludes that the 1897 edition Is "such superior to the original version*' (327). 1 reach the opposite conclusion. Garland has, in my opinion, denuded the book in his mistaken belief, one that will dominate his fictional practice for the following two decades, that politics necessarily weaken one's art. As he later wrote of SppjL^, "the controversial side of my book killed it. I included too many political arguments" 3. Ida was apparently based on the famous agrarian leader, Mary Elizabeth Lease, who, with Annie Diggs, was the most renowned Alliance-Populist woman lecturer. Her speeches were reportedly electrifying, and in one of them she uttered the legendary battle cry, "What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more Hell." Garland met Lease several times and campaigned with her in Iowa in 1691 and '92 (Pizer, "Garland in the Standard" 412-13). Garland, though, never claimed that Ida was based on Lease— that claim was first made, as far as I can tell, by V. L. Parrington in his 1930 book XD® BeginningagfCritical Reallam in_America (296). 4. American Populism represents, then, as Norman Pollack has provocatively argued, an exception to the standard experience in other industrialized nations, where the radical urban proletariat is often handicapped by a reactionary agrarian population. In America, "the agrarians were more radical than the working class as a whole," Pollack maintains 5. Some historians, such as Robert McNath and Gene Clanton, argue that Progreasivism was marked by a philosophy of accommodation to capitaliam--much like the trade unionism 325 of Goapart and tha A.F. of L.— and that, it was only in Populiaa that a true challenge to finance capitaliaa was made. See, for exaaple, HcHeth'a auaaing up on pp. 209-11. CONCLUSION Garland wrote three or four very good books, several good short stories, and aone interesting essays, but he also wrote a lot of trash that deserves to stay in the dump heap. He is not a great writer. Of the Aaerican writers of his tise (people whose writing prise occurred roughly from 1890 to 1920), I rank sany above his: Crane, Norris, Dreiser, London, Wharton, Cather, and perhaps a few others (Freeman, Chopin, Jewett, Chestnutt, Herrick, Phillips). Garland himself, late in life, clearly admitted his limitations: "1 have no illusions concerning my achievements, *' he wrote. "Measured by those of my friends, . . . I make a poor showing" (Memorial 7). In his diary a few months before his death he wrote that he now believed that there was “nothing that is great and little that is admirable in my work. Here and there are worthwhile paragraphs, perhaps pages, but as a whole my career is mediocre. . . . 1 can no longer delude myself into self- satisfaction" (107). He did not write enough that was good and wrote too much that was bad. His whole literary production from 1895 (after Rose of_E>utcher^a_Cooliy> to 1917 (the publication of Son_of_the_Mlddle_Bgrder) is 326 327 nearly a waste: the biography of Grant (1693), the 12 Rocky Mountain roaancea written fro* 1696 to 1916, and the two books on psychic phenomena are all embarrassing and virtually unreadable (I certainly did not read them all). As Zona Gale perceptively writes, with Garland's Rocky Mountain fiction "the futility of going after material was never better shown" (854). He did suffer a decline in these two decades, totally unable to create anything meaningful, nearly wholly intent on making money from his books, slipping into the most obscene reactionaryism. The man who should be known as the Stowe of Populism, who brought unique anger and vividness to his agrarian protest fiction of the 1880s and '90s, eventually saw the masses as dirty and drunken mobs, saw money as a "civilizing power" (Roadside 164; the title of his 1907 novel, Honey_Magic, is not ironic), believed that only the shiftless were poor, voted for Coolidge in 1924 and Hoover in 1932, and, in a crushing irony pointed out H. Wayne Morgan, lived his last decade in Hollywood on the unearned increment of some real estate holdings in the Southwest (101). In 1930, the first full year of the Depression, Garland writes that the "poor are almost obsolete" (Roadside 63); a year later he states that he is "in league with the capitalistic forces of society" ^ 207). Garland's report on the aftermath of the 328 1892 Homestead Strike, "Honeataad and Ita Perilous Trades,'* is one of the aost searing accounts of the intieidation and squalor of labor; in the Rocky Mountain novel Hesper (1903), he sees strikers as “Pikers" aisled by deaagogic union organizers, who are by-and-large iaaigrants and drunks (the teraa are interchangeable), not pure-blood Spartan Yankees. In the glorious high country, he proudly notes, "I forgot all ay social aiasions, all my sordid, savage years" (Roadside 184). He also descended into nativisa, especially concerning the massive influx of Eastern European Jews to America in the first decades of the twentieth century. In a June 1917 diary entry he charmingly writes that "I don't like these squat little greasy types . . . they nauseate me. . . . They are like insects and worms" (252) and cleverly refers to New York as "Jew York" (255). These anti-Semitic beliefs led him to support the Ku Klux Klan (Diary 254) and applaud Henry Ford's Jew-balting newspaper, the Dearbornlndependent (255-56). By the time he was writing his high country romances. Garland had absorbed the idea— which the Russian Formalists at the time were enunciating and that the second generation of New Critics would later enshrine--that art and politics were separate activities, that indeed the latter was detrimental to the former. Looking back on his writing 3 2 9 career, he plots the progreea of hie art according to how far it aacenda away fro* aoclal and political concerns. He aaya that he and other reforaiat writera of the lS90a were "thorough-going cranks" and that he waa a “dreadful theorlat" in those early yeara CSon 431, 381>. He then notea, with approval, that within hi* “the artiat began to check the preacher'* (418>. Indeed, he claims that he waa alwaya more of an artiat than a reformer, that even in hia early work in the late 1860a and early '90a he wasn't such a horrible reformer: "I waa, after all, more concerned with literary than with aocial problema" <381). Theae new beliefa about art cauaed Garland to depreciate Arana-editor B. 0. Flower, the man who firat publiehed Garland's work, suggested the idea of Main; Travelled^Roada and A_Spoilof_0ffice, and wrote scores of editorials praising Garland. David Dickaaon justifiably claims that “to the Arena must go the credit for starting Garland on hia literary career" (150-51). Writing a quarter of a century later, however. Garland maintains that Flower was a mere reformer and that the truly artistic editor of the time waa Richard Watson Gilder of Century magazine. Gilder, who “most clearly epitomized the suppressing tone of the literary eatabliahment, ** according to Larzer Ziff (128-29), ia seen by Garland as “second only to Howells in all that had to do with the judgment of 3 30 fiction. Flower'a interest were ethical. Gilder'a esthetic, and after all ay ideas were essentially literary. Hy refers notions were subordinate to sy desire to take honors as a novelist" (Son 412). In his high country phase. Garland even judged Main-Travelled_Roads, by far his best collection of short fiction and the one that has Managed to keep his literary body afloat, to be nothing but a "drab little voiuse" 1917, to "avoid the fault of Mixing My fiction with ay polealcs" By the 1910s and '20s, Garland had becoae the symbol of both literary and political reactionaryism. He could not recognize hie literary sons, such as Dreiser and Lewis, both of whom spoke highly of Garland. Indeed, Garland went so far as to attack their works as indecent and overly dark. He tacitly agreed to the suppression of TheGenius and scorned Lewis's Maln_Street as false and unconvincing; in a letter to Henry Seidel Canby, Garland urged him to take a stand against Lewis and writers like him for "their belittling of the descendants of the old frontier" Schorer, Sinclair 269). Lewis struck back at Garland in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, calling Garland a "genial and insignificant lecturer" who is "alarmed by all of the younger writers who are so lacking in taste as to suggest that men and women do not always love in accordance 331 with the prayer-book, and that cotton people aoietiiet use language which would be inappropriate at a woman's literary club on Main Street" (308). Mencken frequently poked fun at Garland and all he represented, calling hia a "rustic Puritan" (498} and clalaing that Garland's “talents were very meagre, and'*--in reference to Garland's unwillingness to support Dreiser's TheGenius— "he was shabby and devious as a man" (498). The progressive regreaeiveneas of Garland's thought is also evident in his changing views of women and feminism. In hie early works he displays a generally clear-eyed and sympathetic view of women; indeed, at times Garland is one of the most radical male feminist writers of the time. But his female characters soon deteriorate into the most archaic and idealized creatures imaginable; his Rocky Mountain heroines are blushing beauties who learn the value of grace and manners and who totally defer to their manly men of the high country. Elsie Brisbane in TheCaptainof the _Gray:Horse Troop (1902) begins as a strong and independent painter who "uttered defiantly" that she would "not allow any duty to circumscribe my art" (294); she puts off Captain Curtis's love entreaties, saying, "I can't live your life. My friends, my art, mean too much to me" (372). She would have stayed that way in the Ida Wilbur (of the 1692 edition) and Rose Dutcher days of Garland's fiction, 332 but. in the poet-1895 days Elsie soon recognizes her womanly role: she learns that the Captain is her real "protector," as she wistfully says, aarries his, and dedicates herself to his career. She never paints again. In these later works women are essential nurses, as the narrator of Money Magic claims (45), and the male heroes are Rocky Mountain knights with public school moral codes: in Captain, for example, after a man utters "oaths" in the presence of the Captain's sister, the Captain says that "you must respect the presence of my sister, or I'll gag you" (36). All the male and female heroes come from or defer to the "civilized" East; indeed, by the 1910 novel Cavanaghx ForeetRanger they are pure-blood, native English. This deference to Eastern and English values again illustrates how far Garland has fallen. The man who had early in his career flailed the economic and ideologic exploitation of the East, and its English roots, has become an Anglophile; in a 1930 diary entry he professes his "growing love for England" (256). Walt Whitman said in 1888 that Garland “seems started all right: is dead set for real things," but noted that many writers start equally well but "are arrested--develop no further--or go back, retreat" (Traubel 437). By the time Garland's friend Henry Blake Fuller wrote his fictional jibe at Garland in 1901, the retreat was in full 33 3 force. In the short, story "Ths Downfall of Abner Joyce" (collected In Under_the_Skylights), Abner (Garland) starts out as an leportant and radical rural writer, who in his first book, ThisWaaryWorId, "pleaded for the farmer" (4), advocates the "Readjusted Tax" (6), and speaks darkly of "the Honey Power" (12). But "the glamour of success and of association with the successful" soon dazzles him (139). "Yes," the narrator writes, "Abner had made his compromise with the world. He had conformed. He had reached an understanding with the children of Mammon. He--a great, original genius--had become just like other people. His downfall was complete" (139). This, then, is the spectacular and mournful decline, so presciently forecast by Whitman and so eerily captured by Fuller, that nearly every critic notes when discussing Garland. But though this "decline thesis" is undoubtedly accurate in many ways, it is also clear that many of the indictments of Garland are not as convincing as they might seem. Garland still had sympathy for the poor and the struggling farmer well after 1900. In the preface to Other Main-Travelled_Ro«da (1910), Garland wrote that "though conditions [in the West) have changed somewhat since that time Clate 16B0aJ, yet for the hired man and the renter farm life in the West is still a stern round of drudgery" (vii). And in his four-volume autobiographical sequence. 334 published between 1917 and 1928, he returns to the subject of ninetaanth-century farming life in the great West, and, if anything, is more fierce, embittered, and radical in his descriptions and judgment. Even in the 1930s, when Garland was in his 70s, he continued to write well and interestingly about his past and his literary life: Roadside_Me*tinge (1930), the first and best of his four- volume literary reminiscences, remains a crucial and compelling account of significant people and episodes in late nineteenth-century American literary history. Even his diary, which undoubtedly contains loathsome things (such as the anti-Semitism quoted earlier), remains a compelling account of hia later years, which were made dark ones by continued financial Insecurity, the divorces of his two daughters, the growing invalidism of his wife, and the increasing conviction that he and his contemporaries are no longer relevant and have little to live for. As Pizer notes in his introduction to Garland's diaries, these entries "suggest an Integrity and depth to [Garland's] character not always acknowledged by recent literary history" < xl ) . Garland's literary talents, then, survived much longer than the beginning of his supposed "decline." Still, he could not and would not write grim Middle Border fiction-- undoubtedly his metiez after 1895 or so. Farming 335 conditions had changed after the turn of the century: crop prices rose, lend value increased, foreclosures sharply declined, the weather inproved, agricultural practices and Machinery were updated (Howry 3). In his Preface to the IS22 edition of Main-Travelled_Roads, which was expanded to include eleven stories. Garland wrote that though farn life is still lonely in plsces and that young rural people still stream to the cities, in general "life on the farms of Iowa and Wiaconsin--even on the farms of Dakota--haa gained in beauty and security . . . Groves and lawns, better roads, the rural free delivery, the telephone, and the motorcar have done much to bring the farmer into a frame of mind where he is contented with hia lot" (xi>. Garland knew that to continue to write drab fiction about the Middle Border, as most of his later critics wished that he had, would have been an exercise in obsolescence. As far back as 1894, furthermore, he declared, in letters to the Chicago publisher Herbert S. Stone, that he had said all he had to say about the Middle Border and wished to move on to other subject matter. Discussing the collection of essays Stone was publishing that year, Crumbling_Idols, Garland wrote that he was "ready to send out purely literary books hereafter. I shall not repeat either my economic writing or this literary and art reform. Having said my say I shall proceed on ftoJ other things. . . . This will close 336 Rty controvtrilal work for the present" (qtd. in Flanagan 452, 456). A final and crucial reason for leaving hia early subject *atter--for hia "decline’*--waa that theae worka did indeed aell poorly. For a aan trying to aupport hia parenta and rescue thea fro* a life of back- and spirit- breaking Hiddle Border farming, and then later support a family of his own, money was an issue more important than moat later critics like to think it waa. Garland turned to romantic fiction, he later said, "in order that my wife and children might be fed and sheltered and clothed" (Friendly 397). For hia great collection of stories, Hain-Travelled Rosds, Garland earned about 6200 a year in royalties; for hia great novel, RoeeofDutcherIsCool1 y, he received a 6300 advance and no royalties. But for TheEagle^sHeart (1900), his second Rocky Mountain romance, he earned 64,500 (Miller 311); with TheCaptoinof theGray;Horae he hit the big time, selling 100,000 copies and the movie rights, and garnering praise from reviewers. Including President Theodore Roosevelt (McCullough 97; Morgan 99). Aa Charles Miller writes, Garland's "romantic writings paid dividends which hia earlier realistic works denied him" (312) The Dreiser and Lewis situations are also more complicated than they seem. It must be remembered that Garland did admire SisterCarrle and that he readily agreed 337 to write a blurb for it when Dreiser Managed to get the book republiahed in 1907, a time when Dreiser waa completely unknown (Swanberg 113-17). Garland, furthermore, welcomed Dreiaer to Chicago in 1913 and let him stay at the club he had founded, the Cliff Dwellers, for two weeks (similar to the generosity he showed Stephen Crane in the early 1890s). Garland's uneasiness with The QSDiuf waa the result of his belief that Dreiaer had improperly advertised it, not that it waa Indelicate (Swanberg 206). The Main_Street case is even more complicated. Garland indeed disliked it when he first read it, but he nonetheless had the objectivity to recognize its merit, going so far as to join the other two members of the Pulitzer Prize committee he was on to award it that year's prize, and personally writing Lewis a congratulatory letter. When that unanimoua decision was overturned (the Prize was given to Wharton's Age of lnnocence instead), the three-man jury made a public protest, which included printing an open letter in The _ New_ Repubi ig on 22 June 1921 (Schorer, Sinclair 299). Furthermore, Garland later revised his opinion of the book: on a trip to the Middle West in 1923, he found the dreary life there a confirmation of Lewis's book. Garland wrote in his journal that his "resentment of Lewis's MginStreet is somewhat softened" (Schorer 269). 338 But. granting that a deterioration or "decline” occurred— and I certainly do--I Maintain that concentrating on this phase of Garland"a work and life has led to a neglect of hia earlier invaluable work and to the belief that everything Garland produced after 1895 ia bilge. Critics either cannot appreciate, or aiaply haven't read, hia brilliant autobiographical sequence that in aany ways ia equal to if not superior to his pre-1895 writing. Jay Martin, for example, in his frequently cited Harveataof Qb9 D9 ®i_Aaerican_Literaturejt_1865-1914 (1967), censures the autobiographies for being a celebration of the West and for "keeping alive the ayth Cof the West!" (131). It is hard to lsagine a sore complete misreading than thia. These autobiographies, combined with his earlier work, constitute a unique and at times brilliantly written record of an immense phase of American life; our aelf-knowledge is impoverished by Garland's obscuration* He provides crucial primary information whose recovery--llke that of a family diary or box of old photographa--ia essential. 1 believe that a sort of Viking Portable Garland would hold moat of what needs to be read and preserved (supplemented by a good edition of Rooeof_Dutgher^sCpol1y, which is too long to fit into a portable). 1 would include the six 1891 Main; Travelled_Rgada stories (c. 100 pages), several other stories from other collections (c. 100 pages), a good 339 •election froi Son (c. 150 pages), important paasagea from tha other three personal autobiographies (c. 150 pages), brief selections from hia four literary raminiacencea, concentrating on Rgsdalde_Kestings (c • 100 pagea), varioua eaaaya and reportage including some from Crumblingldola underrated Indian fiction (c. 50 pagea). Thia atill leaves out aome other valuable and accomplished works, such aa A Spoil_gf_0ffice, ALittleNorak, and "The Land of the Straddle-bug. '* Garland deserves to be rediscovered: hia beat writing ia aharp and powerful, wonderfully readable and intereating, driven by earnest passion, illustrative aa no other fiction is of central concerns of American aociety. Garland ia not Dreiser, but he ia not F. Marion Crawford. 1 completely agree with the eetimate of Jamea Nagel: "If it would be overzealoua to attempt to place [Garland! in the first tier of American writers, it ia equally unjust to dismiss hia work altogether" <1). At thia point though, with the received opinion about Garland's "decline," if not hie constant mediocrity or literary prostitution, still firmly in place and with the canon reformers and new historiciata hot on other trails (oftentimes for harebrained purposes), the chancea for a Garland revival remain feeble. 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