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ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION, EXPANSIVE PROTESTANTISM, and GLOBALIZATION in the NINETEENTH CENTURY Jenna S

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ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION, EXPANSIVE PROTESTANTISM, and GLOBALIZATION in the NINETEENTH CENTURY Jenna S MAKING A WORLD FOR AMERICA: ELECTRIC COMMUNICATION, EXPANSIVE PROTESTANTISM, AND GLOBALIZATION IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Jenna Supp-Montgomerie A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Ph.D. in the Department of Religious Studies. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Randall Styers Jason Bivins Lawrence Grossberg Christian Lundberg Laurie Maffly-Kipp Grant Wacker ©2013 Jenna Supp-Montgomerie ALL RIGHTS RESERVED iv ABSTRACT JENNA SUPP-MONTGOMERIE: Making a World for America: Electric Communication, Expansive Protestantism, and Globalization in the Nineteenth Century (Under the direction of Randall Styers) On August 12, 1858, the Atlantic Telegraph Cable was laid across the ocean from the west coast of Ireland to Newfoundland, Canada. Claims that distance had been annihilated, peace was imminent, and the world would unite through this new medium for intercontinental communication took America by storm. These promises of unity were particularly strange because the cable failed after only twenty-three days, colonial conflict rocked the world, and the Civil War loomed. This study explores this early form of globalization in America at the advent of the first opportunity for Americans to communicate with Europe in a matter of hours rather than weeks. The “world” is not a given or natural entity. Americans in the mid-nineteenth century produced a modern global imaginary: a constellation of symbols, meanings, practices, and material objects that was structured and sustained in dynamic form by practices of variable affective investment that shaped how Americans conceived of and lived in the world. This study demonstrates how global imaginaries come into being through processes of declaration and deferral, how affective investment structured and sustained this imaginary in a particular formation organized around failure, and how expansive Protestantism contributed to the forms of globalization that now dominate American culture. iii The cultural practices and products of the imaginary of a world united by communication technology made use of expansive American Protestantism in the storehouse of images, symbols, and vocabularies they drew on, in the eschatological logics that produced a perfected world that was both already arriving and yet to come, and in the ways that religion marshaled social investment to sustain these impossible dreams for total global unity. This dissertation makes use of archival research of nineteenth century religious and political writing from the Oneida Community (a utopian community in New York), the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (then the primary engine of American international mission), and public texts on the telegraph in the burgeoning national discourse of the time. iv To Katrin Tiitsman, through whom I came to wonder at all that the Atlantic Ocean has carried. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest gratitude goes to my dissertation advisor and mentor, Randall Styers. Thank you for always giving the best advice, gently indicating the richest directions for research, extending what I thought myself capable of, and ensuring that this academic life was filled with humor and excellent company. For a decade I have relied on your guidance and challenge to arrive here. Because of your generosity, this moment has offered more than I ever imagined possible. I am especially grateful to my committee members—Jason Bivins, Lawrence Grossberg, Christian Lundberg, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, and Grant Wacker—who have been unstinting sources of insight and support. I remain profoundly thankful to have studied with such smart and generous scholars who, in their work and their being, have modeled the kind of care, thoughtfulness, and discernment that marks the very best of scholarship. Thank you to Sarah Sharma who first opened the door to this topic and insisted that I trust my voice and to Todd Ochoa who showed me how to escape closure by saying yes. My research was aided by helpful curators and librarians, including Tony Wonderly, curator at the Oneida Community Mansion House; the librarians of the Oneida Community Collection at the Syracuse University Library; and Robert Dalton, librarian at UNC. My very deep thanks to Bill Burns, who not only has created an exceptionally rich collection of materials and artifacts related to the Atlantic cables and has made many of these materials available online but also graciously opened his home to me and spent hours guiding me through his impressive archive. vi Financial support generously provided by the Royster Society of Fellows and the Perry Family Research Fund. I have been very fortunate to be the recipient of insightful feedback from the UNC American Religions Colloquium, particularly Brandon Bayne, Kate Bowler, Shannon Harvey, and Shannon Schorey; the Social Science Research Council Religion and International Affairs Dissertation Workshop, particularly Scott Appleby, Letitia Campbell, Ebrahim Moosa, and Danilyn Rutherford; the UNC Religious Studies Writing Group; and colleagues in rhetoric at UNC. I am especially thankful for the insight of Alia Wegner who graced drafts with her perception, encouragement, and the breadth of knowledge of a true intellectual. I hold infinite gratitude for Andrew Aghapour who pushed this work far beyond where I could have taken it on my own, generously wandered down rabbit holes with me and then led me out again, and remains a deeply valued conversation partner, co-conspirator, and friend. Mary-Jane Rubenstein has the extraordinary talent of offering exactly the advice a work needs (especially this one); I am deeply grateful for her wisdom, acuity, and generous friendship. I could never have written this without J Bekham, Brandi Denison, Annie Hardison-Moody, Matthew Hotham, Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst, and Tehseen Thaver. I am profoundly grateful to my mother, Katrin Tiitsman, who painstakingly and with infinite patience edited this dissertation over and over again. You taught me how to read, how to write, and, perhaps most importantly, how to learn with curiosity and wonder. You are my model of courage and fortitude. And to David, my life partner, my writing partner, and my best friend. You are the smartest and kindest reader I know. Thank you for always knowing how to fix what I write in ways that help me find my vii voice. Writing side-by-side with you has enriched this academic life far beyond what I ever dreamed it could be. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………….………..1 Imaginaries and Imagination……………………………………………..12 Declaration, Deferral, and Investment…………………………………...16 Religion in Modernity……………………………………………………19 Global Sociality………………………………………………………….23 Methods……………………………………………………………….….25 Organization…………………………………………………..……….…27 II. DECLARATION: THE ONEIDA COMMUNITY ANNOUNCES THE END OF DISTANCE AND THE END OF WAR………………………………………………….….31 Proximate Utopia………………………………………………………...38 The Religious Logic of an Accessible Impossibility…………………….45 The Birth of Unity through Communication Technology……………….59 The Future in the Present………………………………………………...72 Theoretical Implications for Modern Global Imaginaries……………….74 III. DEFERRAL: AN AMERICAN MISSIONARY IMAGINARY………..77 Deferral, Desire, and Promise……………………………………………89 The New World…………………………………………………………..90 The End of the World as We Know It………………………………….113 viii Conclusion: Deferral, Desire, and Demanding Promise………………..131 IV. THE GREAT FIZZLE: THE ROLE OF FAILURE AND INVESTMENT IN SUSTAINING IMPOSSIBLE IMAGINARIES………………………………………………………...138 The Great Fizzle………………………………………………………...143 The Priority of Connection……………………………………………..147 The Failures of the Cable: Signs of Progress…………………………...154 Generative Failure………………………………………………………163 The Affective Formation around Failure……………………………….173 Conclusion……………………………………………………………...186 V. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………189 The Impossibility of Being Protestant, Modern, American, or Global…193 The Echo in the Internet………………….……………………………..198 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………204 ix CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In the 2005 national bestseller hailing the blessings of globalization, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Friedman declares that the world in which we live is “shrinking…from a size small to a size tiny and flattening the playing field at the same time.” The cause of this radical shift in geography is, he insists, “the creation of a global fiber-optic network that has made us all next-door neighbors.”1 Friedman claims that this shrinking planet, united by the space-collapsing majesty of communication technology, is the newest element in the “the era of Globalization 3.0.” But as this study will demonstrate, there is nothing new about a global imaginary that posits unity as the direct result of communication technology. One hundred and fifty years before Friedman’s exuberant claims, many Americans were declaring a world united by a much earlier technology of communication: the telegraph. On August 12, 1858, the Atlantic Telegraph Cable was successfully laid across the ocean from the west coast of Ireland to Newfoundland, Canada. Claims that the world would unite through this new medium for intercontinental communication took America by storm. In a telegram sent on the cable, President Buchanan declared that the Atlantic 1 Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005), 10. Telegraph
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