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Copyright by David Wayne Bates 2010 Copyright by David Wayne Bates 2010 The Dissertation Committee for David Wayne Bates Certifies that this is the Approved Version of the Following Dissertation: Scogan’s Choice: Vachel Lindsay’s Short Fiction, Poetry and Prose Committee: _____________________________ Jeffrey Meikle, Supervisor _____________________________ Janet Davis _____________________________ Stephen Marshall _____________________________ Mark Smith _____________________________ Jennifer M. Wilks Scogan’s Choice: Vachel Lindsay’s Short Fiction, Poetry, and Prose By David Wayne Bates B.A.; B.A.; M.A.; M.A.T Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2010 Dedication For my parents, Wayne and Rose Bates, my brothers Frank and Bill, and my son Charles Scogan’s Choice: Vachel Lindsay’s Short Fiction, Poetry, and Prose Publication No. _________ David Wayne Bates, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2010 Supervisor: Jeffrey Meikle Virtually all commentators on the work of Vachel Lindsay have seen his poetry and prose as primarily artistic and for the most part indecipherable. I have tried to show that Lindsay intended to address social construction in America. He tried to use his art to change America, first and foremost, but also the world. And the changes he wanted to enact revolved around the issues of race, religion, feminism, and temperance. Lindsay wanted to alter the racial hierarchy in American to promote a more inclusive perspective. But not to make it all inclusive. And one of the prime v motivations for Lindsay’s interest in race was to change his own status within the hierarchy. There was an American Indian branch to his family tree. Consequently, Indians became prime candidates for social inclusion in his poetry and prose. The Springfield race riots of 1908 represented a formative experience for Lindsay and helped propel him to a discussion of race. Lindsay claimed Springfield, Illinois as home, and the injustice and brutality of the riots shamed him and clashed with his perspective of civilized and religious advancement. In writing “The Congo,” The Art of the Moving Picture, and The Golden Book of Springfield, Lindsay saw himself as promoting racial equality and harmony. However, he intentionally promoted harmony and order at the expense of equality. I conclude my dissertation with an observation from the sociologist Herbert Marcuse to the effect that saving oneself at the expense of others is hardly a heroic act. vi Table of Contents Chapter 1 Introduction …………………………………………….…….1 Chapter 2 A Harmless Drudge: Vachel Lindsay And his Art of the Moving Picture…………………………….…40 Chapter 3 Black Face-paint Lies Disguised as Typeface: Tactics of Poetic Expression……………………………………132 Chapter 4 Part One: The Rhetoric of Indifference and the Tactics of Delay: Vachel Lindsay’s “Crisis”………………………………………203 Chapter 4 Part Two: Tell All the Truth but Tell it Slant………………………………227 Chapter 5 The Language Speaks the Man……………………………..299 Bibliography……………………………………………………………317 Vita……………………………………………………………………..349 vii “Americans learned to define freedom as feeling free, escaping from difficult choices by embracing stereotypes, rather than struggling to act and think as free people.” Robert Sklar.1 “Race, in these (scientific) usages, pretends to be an objective term of classification, when in fact it is a dangerous trope.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr.2 Chapter I Introduction Listening to the recordings of Vachel Lindsay reciting his poetry is like watching the thuganomics of WWE wrestling—a Dave Batista flying double suplex—the practiced dramaturgy of my grandfather, Jesus (pronounced Hey-Seus), before he passed away.3 Lindsay’s droning emphasis, the way he stretched the vowels and consonants in the recordings of his rhymes, seems contrived, but not so very different than the famously popular vocalizations of the singer Bert Williams in his songs “The Phrenologist Coon” (1901), or “My Little Zulu Babe” (1901), recordings which also survived. This should come as no surprise. Lindsay used the rhythms of the popular songs of his day as the 1 I. F. Stone. The Truman Era. Introduction by Robert Sklar. (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), ix. 2 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,” Race: Writing and Difference. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5. 3 WWE refers to World Wrestling Entertainment, and Dave Batista is one of the more popular heavy weight wrestling actors working the circuit. 1 basis of his poetry. Race, context, culture, class, the new emphasis on visual pastiche, and the-reluctance-to-believe all cause many of those of the twenty-first century to see the recorded events of an earlier century, hearing the same words, but with little recognition that those words no longer mean the same thing. This helps explain my incredulity when faced with the fact that grandfather never missed a bout; he saw the theatre in the ring as a morality play, reading signs for portents invisible to me. The fact that Batista is a Spanish name should have been a clue. Were it not for the fact that he was my grandfather and that I know he never spoke a word of English, in a land that demanded that token of linguistic loyalty, I might question the probity of Dave Batista’s flying assaults on blonde haired masculinity. Towards the end I know grandfather used to act out, a five foot three inch, eighty-five pound, octogenarian, with fists of fury. And some might have seen him as addled or “insane” for viewing wrestling as anything other than a pay for view charade, and then acting on that charade. But I know my uncles never saw it that way, nor my aunts. Unlike my grandfather, the American poet, Vachel Lindsay, had little interest in wrestling, but he did write a long poem about boxing: “John L. Sullivan, the Boston Strong Boy.”4 I doubt anyone ever understood the poem. Unlike other twentieth century poets who still claim name recognition in the twenty first century, most of Lindsay’s poetry and prose never received scholarly interpretation or critique. So, a poem entitled “John L. Sullivan” must have been about boxing, just as my grandfather’s interest in wrestling reflected only his classical interest in the Greco Roman style. In a three page 4 Vachel Lindsay, Collected Poems (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), 93-95. 2 easy to grasp packet, Lindsay’s poem demonstrated the style and message he used in all his major works. In the poem, Lindsay referenced: “Judge,” “Puck” (political magazines), “The Gibson Girl,” “Tennyson’s Elaine,” “Louisa Alcott,” “New Orleans,” “Boston,” “John L. Sullivan,” “Jake Kilrain,” “Nick Carter” (fictional private detective, circa 1889), “Elsie Books” (Christian fiction, circa 1889), “St Nicholas Magazine” (literature for children, circa 1889), “E. P. Roe” (religious novelist, died 1888), “Rogers groups” (popular statuary, circa 1889), “Howells,” “Blaine,” “Maine,” “Barnum,” “Ingersoll,” “Satan, Judas, Thomas Paine,” “Robert Elsmere” (title of religious novel), “Phillips Brooks” (Episcopal clergyman), “Boston Brahmins,” “Mark Twain,” “Pop Anson” (Chicago Cubs baseball player, circa 1889), “Tammany,” “Cain,” “Wilson,” “Roosevelt,” “Stanley” (African explorer), “Emin” (Emin Pasha), “Van Bibber Davis” (comic soldier of fortune), “John J. Ingalls” (politician), the “Cronin murder” (Irish nationalists murdered Cronin), “Louvain” (district in Belgium, reference to World War I), “Lorraine,” “League of Nations,” and the “London Bridge” (falling down). So, we have a poem for the ages, easy to interpret and understand, devoted to boxing.5 One of the problems writing from a popular culture perspective is that the shelf life of a statement is severely constrained, though, as we’ll see, Lindsay was able to turn that constraint to an advantage, repeatedly. Despite the title, the poem has virtually nothing to do with John L. Sullivan or boxing. Sullivan simply stood as a metaphor for conflict and war, the events leading up 5 W. C. Heinz edited a book entitled The Fireside Book of Boxing (1961) where he includes Lindsay’s “John L. Sullivan” as an example of literature devoted to boxing. W. C. Heinz, Editor. The Fireside Book of Boxing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961). 3 to World War I. And every noun, name, or action served as a symbol for how the world had arrived at a state of war, a necessary and transformative condition for the creation of a new world order. The poem was about the process of social revolution. All of Lindsay’s major works were about revolution, conservative revolution, a return to the theocratic order of Lindsay’s youth. But I very much doubt anyone has ever understood either the poem, specifically or his work generally, that way. There are two broad categories of scholarship on the subject of Vachel Lindsay and his work. The two branches can be broken into foreign and domestic scholars, more properly European and American scholars. Balz Engler, Marc Chenetier, and Ann Massa would comprise the best of the European contingent. Over the last forty years these three authors have been more prolific than anyone else in terms of pages devoted to Lindsay. Significantly, both Marc Chenetier and Ann Massa were recent past presidents of the European American Studies Association. I am unaware of any recent American past president of the American Studies Association who has devoted even an extended article to the subject of Vachel Lindsay. Balz Engler correctly argues that Ann Massa’s Fieldworker for the American Dream (1970) was the first “major reassessment of Lindsay’s work.”6 Engler and Chenetier take a postmodernist perspective of Lindsay’s poetry, which is notable, for most American scholars approach Lindsay as a modernist. An exception to that would be Myron Lounsbury, past Chairman of American Studies at the University of 6 Balz Engler, Poetry and Community (Tubingen: Stauffenburg, 1990), 105.
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