Life in the Suicide Belt: Intersections of Death and Agency in America’S Gilded Age, 1870-1910
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LIFE IN THE SUICIDE BELT: INTERSECTIONS OF DEATH AND AGENCY IN AMERICA’S GILDED AGE, 1870-1910 By: TJ Kalin Honors Work in History For History 497 Advised by Dr. Heath Carter College of Arts and Sciences Valparaiso University Spring 2019 I have neither given or received, nor have I tolerated others' use of unauthorized aid. TJ Kalin April 22, 2019 2 Contents Part I: The Suicide Belt…………………………………………………………………………4 The Suicide Belt; Cultural History and American Suicide; Realist Cultural History Part II: The Exploding Cigar…………………………………………………………………23 Lingg in the Anarchist Press; Lingg in the Mainstream Press; The Logic of Anarchism; A Modal Logic of Industrial Society Part II: The Lake, Love, and Liquor…………………………………………………………42 Women as Cause; Modern Love; Feminism, Reform, and Urban Vice; Fashion is Suicide Part IV: The Moloch of Modern Commercialism……………………………………………67 Ownership of the Means of Self Destruction; Against the Middle- Class Dialectic; A Tempting Inducement; National Suicide; The Progressives Approach Suicide Conclusion: The Return of the Suicide Belt……………………………………………..……91 Suicide and the Modern Consciousness, Suicide in a New Gilded Age Appendices……………………………………………………………………………………….99 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….109 3 Part I: The Suicide Belt ––––––––––– In 1872 the humor section of the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar reprinted the suicide note of a man whose father married his stepdaughter, leading to his father becoming his son-in-law and his step-daughter becoming his ‘mother.’ When the man had a child it was “my father’s brother- in-law and my uncle, for he was the brother of my step-mother” and later the father’s child with the step-daughter became “my brother and at the same time my grandson.” Harper’s called it a “justifiable suicide.”1 In 1878 Catherine Punch, a sixteen-year-old German immigrant, had Christmas dinner in the New York House of Refuge, a reform school on Randall's Island New York. The following morning, Catherine was ordered to help clean up the mess left in the kitchen. Catherine cleaned the kitchen but refused to do any more work that day, to which the Chief Matron ordered her to her room. In the evening the Matron found Catherine’s body hanging from a door frame in her room. Two weeks later a nationwide tabloid, The National Police Gazette ran an illustration dramatizing the moment the matron found Catherine’s body (Appendix A).2 On the evening of May 19th, 1897 a man was seen walking around the wealthy Prairie Avenue neighborhood in Chicago, an environment of “affluence…presenting [perhaps] striking contrast to his own life environments.” The man approached the residence of George Pullman and walked around the estate, looking at the home, the grounds, and the stables “as though a 1 “A Justifiable Suicide,” Harper’s Bazaar, August 17, 1872. 2 “A Young Magdalen’s Suicide,” The National Police Gazette, January 11, 1879. 4 menial in such an establishment were, by him, to be envied.” The man approached the Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument on Pullman’s property, stopped, and then moved into the monument’s shadow cast by the street lamps. There he pulled out a pistol, held it to his right temple and fired. The next day a graphic depiction of the moment of the man’s death appeared in the Chicago Tribune (Appendix B).3 The Suicide Belt Why did late nineteenth-century Americans have a penchant for these sensationalist depictions of suicide? What compelled these newspapers to print such graphic images as well as reprinting suicide notes? Newspapers in the era regularly ran headlines on ‘sensational’ and ‘mysterious’ suicides that included these graphic drawings and notes, accompanied with wild speculation on the victim's family background, sexual history, intention, financial position, and fashion tastes. Tied into Americans' appetite for sensationalist suicide coverage was growing anxiety over a perceived proliferation of suicide in American cities. "Suicide Mania Strikes Gotham," "Suicide as a Mania," "Mania for Suicide" ran in the headlines to describe instances when five to ten people committed suicide in a short period of time. Articles would describe how the "suicidal mania became epidemic," as if there was consistent, concrete mania for suicide in society that broke free from time to time. Some newspapers would simply title a section that reported on individual suicides in different cities and states as "Suicide Mania." Even though these suicides occurred in disparate regions, the suicides were reported as a single phenomenon. Suicide ‘parties’ and ‘clubs’ came into use to describe group suicides.4 3 “Dies at Pullman’s Gate,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 20, 1897. 4 “Suicide Mania Strikes Gotham,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 4, 1898; “Suicide as a Mania,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 24, 1900; “Mania For Suicide,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 2nd, 1897; “The 5 In descriptions of acts of suicide, phrases such as "blow their brains out" or "put a bullet in the brain" become commonplace. This marked a divergence from the primarily religious language used to describe suicide. Prior to the mid-nineteenth century the primary term for suicide was ‘self-murder.' Self-murder came into widespread use to condemn suicide as a sin after most European states decriminalized suicide in the eighteenth century. With the Gilded Age, Americans moved away from the religious language of suicide toward the language of insanity and sensationalism.5 Americans accentuated their sensationalism by adopting non-English phrases for suicide. One telling example is nineteenth-century Americans' fascination with the Japanese phrase Hara- Kiri (), "belly cutting." Hara-kiri is a form of ceremonial suicide typically practiced by dishonored samurai or high ranking politicians after losses in battle or political failures. Hara-kiri involved individuals disemboweling themselves with a long sword. Nineteenth-century Americans took a morbid, orientalist interest in the term. Detailed, in-depth analyses and descriptions of hara-kiri appeared in American newspapers throughout the Gilded Age. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, American newspapers printed graphic descriptions of episodes of hara-kiri among retreating Japanese troops, one article claiming that a mass suicide by captured sailors "thrilled the Nation" of Japan. When the Japanese tragedy "The Martyr," which included a scene in which a man commits hara-kiri ran in New York in 1907, a review of Suicide Mania,” Daily Inter-Ocean, December 16, 1878; “The Suicide Mania,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 20, 1883; “A Suicide Surprise Party,” The National Police Gazette, October 7, 1882; Suicide clubs were generally seen as a European import into the US and were evoked in American media to legitimize nativist and later eugenicist rhetoric, see Kathleen M Brian, “Mythological Pedagogies, or Suicide Clubs as Eugenic Alibi” in Kathleen Brian and James Trent, eds., Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity (Oxford University Press 2017): 235-259. 5 Andreas Bähr, “Between ‘Self Murder’ and ‘Suicide’: The Modern Etymology of Self Killing,” Journal of Social History Vol.46, No.3 (Spring 2013): 620-632. 6 the play described the scene as "more hideous in realism than any which Caucasian drama presumes to exhibit" labeling it a ‘hideous thrill.' American medical journals even ran in-depth reports on hara-kiri. For example, a paper read before the Pennsylvania Academy of Surgery in 1898 recounted the hara-kiri of a Japanese military officer, as witnessed by a British diplomat. The paper included extensive detail on the cultural context of hara-kiri as well as drawings of the impact the sword made on the officer's intestines with photos of the officer's body.6 As an object of exotic, morbid curiosity, Hara-kiri became part of the vocabulary American newspapers and periodicals used to describe suicides by disemboweling or simply suicides which used knives. When actor Rankin Duval, who appeared in the Broadway musical "The Darling of the Gods" from 1903-04, stabbed himself just below the heart with a knife, the headline in the Chicago Tribune read “Actor Hara-Kiri Victim.” Another article in the Tribune described a deserted husband who cut his throat as a ‘hara-kiri.’ It was also used in political rhetoric. A report on the Illinois state legislature described the Democratic minority at the time as committing ‘hara-kiri’ for slowing down the passage of several bills. In 1897 the Chicago city council “committed hara-kiri” after votes on several ordinances were shelved until local elections that year concluded.7 The merging of Hara-kiri into Americans’ vocabulary was only one example of numerous places where Americans perceived suicide in increasingly sensationalist terms. Deeply 6 “Self Murder,” Baltimore Underwriter, March 1, 1871; “Hara-Kiri as Practiced in Japan,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, August 23, 1896; “Suicide of Japs Thrills Nation,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, July 3, 1904; Franklin Fyles, “Hara-Kiri is Revealed in Calcium to New York,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, November 3, 1907; Richard Harte, "A Case of Hara-Kiri Which Terminated in Recovery," Annals of Surgery, Vol.27, No.6 (1898): 745-752, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1426842/. 7 “Actor Hara Kiri Victim,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, December 14, 1906; "'Too Old' Says Girl Wife; Drink Then Hara-Kiri," The Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1919; “Will They Commit Hara-Kiri!” The Chicago Daily Tribune, January 15, 1898; “Last of Old Council,” The Daily Inter Ocean, April 13, 1897. 7 intertwined into this sensationalist atmosphere was a connection between suicide and the rapid urbanization of American cities in the Gilded Age. Fueled by industrialization and immigration, American urban centers grew exponentially in the years following the Civil War. Chicago grew from a city of one-hundred-thousand in 1860 to a city of over two million by 1910; New York City’s population tripled in the same period.