European journal of American studies

9-1 | 2014 Spring 2014

Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10164 DOI: 10.4000/ejas.10164 ISSN: 1991-9336

Publisher European Association for American Studies

Electronic reference European journal of American studies, 9-1 | 2014, “Spring 2014” [Online], Online since 02 January 2014, connection on 08 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/10164; DOI: https://doi.org/ 10.4000/ejas.10164

This text was automatically generated on 8 July 2021.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DeMille and Danger: Seven Heuristic Taxonomic Categories of His (Mis)Adventures Anton Karl Kozlovic

Risk, Disappointment and Distraction in Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men James Peacock

‘Twisting herself into all shapes’: blackface minstrelsy and comic performance in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig Elizabeth Boyle

Breaking Away from Progressive History: The Past and Politics in American Studies Ari Helo

The Ideology of Climate Change Denial in the United States Jean-Daniel Collomb

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DeMille and Danger: Seven Heuristic Taxonomic Categories of His Hollywood (Mis)Adventures

Anton Karl Kozlovic

1.0 Introduction

1 Cecil B. DeMille1 (1881-1959), affectionately known as CB, was a seminal cofounder of Hollywood and a progenitor of (Birchard; Cherchi Usai and Codelli; DeMille and Hayne; Edwards; Essoe and Lee; Eyman; Higashi Guide, Culture; Higham; Koury; Louvish; Noerdlinger; Orrison; Ringgold and Bodeen). In 1913, he changed careers from the theatre to the cinema and moved from New York to California to help make a world-class movie centre out of a Californian orange grove that eventually became a worldwide synonym for cinematic success—Hollywood. This unsung “auteur of auteurs” (Vidal 303) was not only a seminal film pioneer who helped institute “the Age of Hollywood” (Paglia 12). DeMille became internationally famous as the American father of the biblical epic with his indelible classics: The Ten Commandments (1923), The King of Kings 91927), Samson and Delilah (1949), and The Ten Commandments (1956). These religious epics sat alongside many of his other notable landmark productions ranging from his silent crime drama The Cheat (1915) to his Oscar-winning circus story The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).

2 During his prodigious filmmaking career that spanned almost five decades (1913-1959) and seventy feature films, the iconic DeMille became the archetypal image of a movie director; especially when wearing puttees, barking orders through a megaphone, and having a chair boy follow him two lock-steps behind his every move. He quickly became an enduring screen legend full of glamour, thrills, and spills, and wherein DeMille himself became the “Golden Age of Hollywood summed up in a single man” (Mitchell 17). His filmmaking passions included the pursuit of sensationalism, authenticity, and realism, which frequently meant that his crew were subjected to real danger, distress and injury, sometimes mortally, due to a lack of special effects and the need for

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spectacular stunts. This practical eventuality was confessed to by DeMille himself (DeMille and Hayne 93) and attested to within numerous critical reviews, autobiographical tomes, and nostalgic crew reminiscences. An introductory survey and taxonomic categorisation of some of these reported DeMillean dangers is thus intrinsically interesting, historically revealing, and a necessary nascent foundation for further investigations into the man, field, and theme, especially one that is frequently under-investigated and not collated in one convenient spot before.

3 Consequently, DeMille’s cinematic oeuvre, critical literature, and associated autobiographical reminiscences from his cast, crew, and commentators were selectively reviewed, categorised, and integrated into the text to enhance narrative coherence (albeit, with a strong reportage flavour), utilising textually-based humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens (Bywater and Sobchack 24-47). This grossly under-utilised methodology is applicable to all genres ranging from science fiction (Telotte 35-38) to literary autobiography (Johnson). It assumes that audiences are cultured, accept the cinema as fine art, and have seen the movies under discussion. Its main pedagogic function is to identify noteworthy incidents and foster critical commentary rooted in primary and secondary sources (e.g., memoirs, autobiographies, film journals); and especially the tracking and interpretation of motifs, symbols, themes and other behind-the-scenes construction secrets, tropes and topoi.

4 Although autobiographical reminiscences and related anecdotal literature are intrinsically subjective and can suffer seriously from errors and distortions by not doubting its witnesses, this bias is ameliorated by reliance on a diverse range of evidential sources, interlocking continuances, and cross-referencing. Nevertheless, autobiographical accounts in particular are intrinsically valuable because they are good sources of direct and intimate information focused on the events of interest, and usually done in more depth, detail, and emotional impact than generalised accounts. But even when the sources are not totally objective, they still add significantly to our bank of knowledge of the kinds of stories that DeMille’s cast, crew, and commentators wanted to tell about him, which itself is invaluable for folkloric studies of this fascinating person, process, and period of Hollywood history.

2. Seven Heuristic Taxonomic Categories of DeMille’s Hollywood (Mis)Adventures

5 The introductory literature review revealed many illustrative exemplars of the DeMillean filmmaking practice-cum-(mis)adventure thematic, which were subsequently sorted into the following seven heuristic taxonomic categories (with some minor degrees of overlap): (1) Unexpected Working Accidents: From Annoying to Dangerous to Deadly; (2) Pain as a By-Product of Production: Expected and Unexpected; (3) Personal Discomfort as a Professional Norm: More Real Than Real?; (4) Professionalism as Expected Risk-Taking: Normalising Danger; (5) Miserliness and Rebellion: Managerial Risk-Taking; (6) The Engineering of “Accidents”: Applied Miserliness?; and (7) Bravely Leading from the Front: DeMille as Macho-Man. The following is a brief explication of each of these categories utilising a copious montage of narrative excerpts and mini stories to illustrate the phenomena.

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2.1 Unexpected Working Accidents: From Annoying to Dangerous to Deadly

6 Accidents occur on film sets for a variety of reasons ranging for the annoying to the dangerous to the deadly. For example, House Peters was playing the role of Ramerrez in The Girl of the Golden West when a “pistol exploded, and he was badly burned on the face and hands” (Katchmer 785). Whilst filming the bullfight scene in Carmen, DeMille explained how the bull caught my matador with his feet badly placed, and the next thing we knew the bullfighter was spinning through the air and landing hard squarely in front of the bull. The bull lowered his head to gore the man to death. We were helpless. But nature, which is benign at times, had helped by giving the bull, out of all the thousands of bulls born in his generation, a pair of horns set unusually wide apart, [sic] Instead of cruelly piercing the prone body of the matador, the horns gently cradled him and lifted him into the air in their embrace; and when the bull recovered from his surprise, the bullfighter had time to land again, far enough away for safety. The camera caught it all. (DeMille and Hayne 132)

7 During filming of The Sign of the Cross, DeMille was screen testing a pack of elephants when they were suddenly alarmed: One of our players, Bob Miles, was caught in the very middle of the stampede. But the female elephant carrying him in her trunk put Bob on the ground and stood over his body and stayed there immovable, shielding Bob with her sturdy bulk and her great legs like trees, until the other crazed pachyderms were corralled and quieted. If that one elephant had not had presence of mind or protective instinct or whatever it was that made her a nonconformist among the herd, nothing could have saved Bob Miles from being trampled to death. (DeMille and Hayne 295)

8 This benign result is especially miraculous considering that the animal trainer from TV’s Tarzan (1966-1969) “was killed when an elephant, startled by a pack of stray dogs, hoisted him in his trunk and flung the man against a building, killing him” (Rovin 162).

9 Whilst filming the Indian uprising story, Unconquered, stunt woman Polly Burson was subjected to other unforseen dangers. As she explained: There’s a scene where we go over a waterfall in a canoe and grab onto a tree limb. It was one of the most unrealistic stunts I’ve ever done. They sent the canoe over a waterfall near McCall, Idaho, on the Snake River, with dummies in it. Then they came back to the studio in California and they put another dummy in the canoe— me. We had to grab a branch and swing under this artificial waterfall onto a ridge. There was a fellow that manually swung the limb out. But nobody thought about how strong or swift the water was, and it just flung him away. They couldn’t stop the rushing water until the dump tank ran dry. When we hit the waterfall, it just caught us. They had a net underneath, and we landed in that. It was a struggle for me to roll off my back and onto my face before I drowned. (Weiner 29)

10 Furthermore, “DeMille used dozens of real fireballs and flaming arrows in the battle scene; eight persons suffered burns and one extra’s hair was burned” (Hanson and Dunkleberger 2648).

11 The spectacular train wreck scene with dangerous animals on the loose within DeMille’s circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth worried the pinned down Charlton Heston. As he recalled: The plan was to have a black panther leap out of the cage and escape through the bent bars. Of course, I was in no position to argue about this because there I was, pinned down to the hilt. So they got the panther, but the animal stayed in the back of the cage, and was disinclined to go anywhere else. “Don’t worry, I’ll just goose him in the ass with an air hose,” said the trainer. “Don’t goose him in the ass with

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an air hose,” I hissed between my teeth. So they did. The panther, seething with rage, jumped right on top of my chest, adding to my already considerable discomfort. I decided it was best to play dead, but let me tell you, panthers have horribly bad breath. Lydia [Heston] was on the scene throughout the filming, gripping a still camera that DeMille’s stillsman had taught her how to use. “I was watching all of this,” Lydia says, “and I was quite terrified.” “You were terrified?” Chuck laughs. “I was terrified!” “Well,” Lydia says, “finally they brought the elephant who was supposed to lift the cage that was pinning him down.” “Ninya was her name. A very good elephant.” “But there was a nail on the ground and it went right through the elephant’s foot. She trumpeted and pounded her feet and—” “There I was...dead again!” he laughs. (Heston and Isbouts 44-45)

12 Heston survived the terrifying ordeal to forge a glorious career for himself and so he could well afford to laugh graciously in retrospect.

13 Other worrying accidents occurred during the filming of The Ten Commandments (1956). Frank Westmore, DeMille’s makeup artist, had prevented a near fatal accident involving ten aging, wingless aeroplanes that were used to generate a hellish desert sandstorm for the film. As he explained: One of the extras, who was carrying a burning torch, tripped in his haste to escape the blast of sand and fell into a little girl marching in front of him. The flaming fuel sloshed out and set her clothing on fire. Luckily I was standing just a few feet from the child. I reached out, jammed my arm inside her costume, and literally tore it off her body. Some of our Egyptian extras were bitten by scorpions blown out of their burrows in the sand, and one man was bitten by an Egyptian cobra. (Westmore and Davidson 159, 162)

14 During the making of the war film, The Captive, death stalked the set and claimed an innocent victim. A detachment of soldiers were supposed to storm a heavily locked door, which had to be splintered with live bullets before being broken down with rifle butts. The door was dutifully shot and splintered and then DeMille ordered that blanks be substituted for the remainder of the scene. Consequently, [t]he soldiers charged the door, battered it with the butts of their guns. Several of the guns discharged their blanks as planned—and then I saw an expression of surprise come over the face of one of the soldiers. He faltered, and then I saw the neat bullet hole in his forehead, and he fell dead at my feet. One of the players had neglected to make the change I had ordered from live ammunition to blank. The muzzle of his gun happened to be pointed squarely at the head of another man. And now that man was dead. It was pure accident of course. No examination of the guns could show which one had killed him, since several of them had discharged their blanks at the same time. No one ever knew, officially, who had carelessly omitted to unload one of the rifles.... (DeMille and Hayne 116-17) [my emphasis]

15 In effect, it was accidental death by de facto firing squad.

2.2 Pain as a By-Product of Production: Expected and Unexpected

16 Occasionally, crew pain was either an expected or unexpected by-product of DeMille’s production desires. For example, whilst filming the ancient Aztec adventure, (1917), John “Jack” Gilbert took screenwriter John Lee Mahin to Inceville (the old Ince studio) and pointed out its Aztec pyramid prop and fully expected pain by-product: “It had been made of wood and covered with paper, upon which sand had been glued for a rocklike appearance. The result was stone-colored sandpaper. Jack said the extras were thrown down the sides of the pyramid and a man stood at the bottom with a bucket of iodine and patched them up” (Fountain and

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Maxim 198). However, serious pain was an unexpected by-product of filming his legal drama, Manslaughter (1922). DeMille’s desire for realism required stuntman Leo Noomis to crash his police motorcycle into the side of a car at about forty-five miles an hour. Unfortunately, in the attempt Noomis “broke six ribs and his pelvis” (Wise and Ware 43).

17 At other times, crew pain was covertly engineered with a tinge of cruelty for additional dramatic effect. For example, whilst filming his Mexican melodrama, Fool’s Paradise (1921), Conrad Nagel nearly lost his life. This DeMillean thriller involved a scene where one of the heroines, , tests the love of her two suitors, a prince (John Davidson) and Arthur Phelps (Conrad Nagel), by throwing her glove into a crocodile pit with four of the hungry-looking reptiles slithering about. The one who retrieved the glove would win her love. Of course, Nagel, as the , was the one to descend and battle the beasts. DeMille had obtained the crocodiles from the Los Angeles zoo. They ranged from seven to ten feet in size. Crocodiles away from their native waters are not particularly savage, but these four had not been fed for several days while at the studio. At rehearsal Nagel lowered himself into the pit and after a brief pause, the crocodiles started toward Nagel. He retreated slowly, brandishing a short spear, but they kept slithering towards him. With his back to the wall, he lunged his wooden spear at the nearest reptile, who snapped it into two pieces. With a shriek he grabbed one of the property vines lining the wall and tried to pull himself out of the pit. His weight was too much for the fragile vine, and he fell flush on his shoulders several feet towards the center of the pit. He jumped to his feet and ran to the opposite side where a rope had been lowered. No sailor ever scaled the side of a ship with more agility as Nagel scaled that wall of stone and concrete. When he reached the top, he sprawled on the floor without speaking or moving for ten minutes. When he did raise himself on an elbow there was deMille grinning at him. He told deMille to get a substitute for the shooting as he wouldn’t go down again for all the picture’s receipts. “Fine,” replied deMille. “You see, I had the cameraman shooting all the time. You acted exactly as a man would naturally under such circumstances. It’s going to be a whale of a scene. I’m sorry you had to do it, but it’s good stuff. (Katchmer 717)

18 Either DeMille was a cunning filmmaker who had tried to get around potentially vigorous actor protestations, or he actively saved face (and his valuable ogre reputation) by his snappy retort when Nagel refused to repeat the scene.

19 Occasionally, crew pain was a by-product of DeMille’s over-zealousness desire for realism that stopped a smidge short of fatal seriousness, as happened to Lina Basquette during the filming of his atheism and reform school drama, (1929). Basquette and George Duryea were trapped in the corner of a building by fierce flames. The fire was chemically treated and controlled by a special, experienced crew. Our hair, clothes, and exposed flesh were smeared with an asbestos coating that fireproofed against actual burning, if not against the unbearable heat. The scene was photographed through a telephoto lens, with De Mille, the cameras, and crew well out of range of the intensity of the heat. Bellowing through his bull horn, C.B. ordered more flames. “My God!” George Duryea gasped, “What’s he trying to do? Roast us alive?”...Duryea was justifiably frightened. His terror seemed to calm me and I was able to quip, “Well, Georgie, they say De Mille eats roasted actors for midnight supper.” I giggled, “Hope he gets indigestion!” “How can you joke at a time like this?” “More flames!” De Mille roared. “Get them brighter!” “The man’s CRAZY!” sobbed Duryea. “Say your prayers, Georgie. Now you know how the hinges of hell feel” “I’m getting out of here, Lina!” “No! George! Stay! You’ll spoil the scene!” “To hell with the scene! Are you coming?” “NO!” (Basquette 132)

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20 Basquette stoically stayed behind because she was trying to curry favour with DeMille. She and Pev Marley, DeMille’s chief cameraman, were secretly engaged and they had kept this secret from DeMille, who supposedly would have been furious if he had found out. She explained: Here was my big chance! De Mille loved gutsiness! The bald-headed-son-of-a-sea- cow would forgive me anything if I pulled off this scene. I heard De Mille shout, “Stay where you are, Lina!” I kept cowering in the corner, improvising action now that my leading man had left me to a fate worse than De Mille’s wrath. The cameras rolled on and on. “Fine! Fine! Keep it up, girl!” The Chief sounded like a cheer leader rooting the home-town’s quarterback to a touchdown. “Marley! Get another camera on this! Get a close-up lens!” A leaping flame struck out at my face. DAMN! This was getting too close! I screamed! But I stayed glued to my corner. “GOOD GIRL! GREAT! Shoot another gust of fire at her! “YELL, GIRL! Throw you [sic] arms up over your head! TERRIFIC! This is SENSATIONAL, eh, Marley? “Yes, Chief, but--” “MORE FLAMES! That’s what I call a TROUPER! WHAT A GIRL! She has GUTS! “Cooked guts,” I thought, but gave the scene all I could. I was scorched as I’d have been from staying too long under a sunlamp. “Okay! That’s it! Take away the fire. CUT! CUT!!” I could barely stagger to my feet. After one step I collapsed against a prop man as he threw a wet blanket over my steaming body. Pev rushed to me. “Sweetheart! Are you all right?” My burns hurt like hell...On close examination, it was found that my eyebrows and lashes had been singed, and blisters had popped up on my forearms. Otherwise I was not permanently damaged. De Mille came up and slapped me on the back. He was actually grinning. “I’m proud of you, Girl!” “Thank you, Mr. De Mille,” I said, with all the modesty I could muster through gritted teeth. De Mille then turned to Pev. “She’s much too good for you, Marley. But you both have my blessing.” (Basquette 132-33)

21 Interestingly, the DeMillean demand for professional poise that was to be obeyed (almost) automatically nearly caused the serious injury of Dorothy “Dottie” Lamour (playing Phyllis the “iron jaw” circus girl), who hangs from her teeth in The Greatest Show on Earth. Over her natural teeth she wore fake teeth which were attached to a wide leather strip. At the end of the strip was a swivel device that hooked onto the rope and she was hauled into the air to perform her twirling stunts without a net. She was coached by circus professional Antoinette Consello, but one day a publicity photographer nearly caused her grief: “That particular photographer had worked with me many times before, and before tripping the shutter, he always reminded me to smile. Now, from force of habit, he called down, “Dottie, smile!” “No!” screamed Antoinette, in a near faint. Had I smiled, every tooth in my head would have come out with the pressure. Slowly, they pulled me up as I froze in a ballet pose” (Lamour and McInnes 184).

22 Sometimes life-long suffered occurred because of unexpected production outcomes, as happened to Ray Milland starring in (1942). As he revealed: “I had black, wiry hair and always worried every morning before going on location how to damp it down. The role . . . demanded curly hair. They gave me women’s permanents with the electric curlers and all that. After seven weeks of shooting, I found my hair coming out by the handfuls. Ever since . . . I used a hairpiece” (Parish and Stanke 255), whilst Milland’s co-star John Wayne suffered a chronic inner-ear problem for years after as a result of working underwater in the film (Davis 101).

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2.3 Personal Discomfort as a Professional Norm: More Real than Real?

23 Given DeMille’s penchant for authenticity, realism, drama, his crews’ discomfort became a professional norm with little room for the weak or the cowardly. For example, Victor Varconi and starred in the factory drama, Triumph (1924), and were subjected to a number of dangers that Varconi eagerly recounted in his autobiography. In a climactic scene Victor was to save Miss Joy from a burning building. It wouldn’t have been too bad if it was your average, run-of-the-mill hotel. Say the Ritz in Paris or the Savoy in London. However, this was a “DeMille” hotel. That meant instead of carrying a girl down thirty steps through light smoke, you had to stumble down at least one hundred through a blazing hell. And DeMille was probably somewhere building more steps while you rehearsed. It was also a “DeMille” fire. No wisps of smoke but enough pollution to blanket . He made the first three steps before slipping. By the sheerest good fortune he managed to grasp the staircase railing with one hand and hang onto Leatrice Joy with the other. If some people on the set didn’t notice the slip, the yelp from the actress indicated she had. Triumph had very nearly turned into “Disaster.” Varconi continued down from the heights and eventually deposited Miss Joy in the arms of a wardrobe woman, his heart pounding mightily. DeMille called him aside, totally unruffled. “That wasn’t bad, Vic. But you almost lost control there at the top of the stairs,” DeMille said. “When we shoot that scene again, you must be careful. You see, Leatrice is expecting.” The Hungarian had heard too much of DeMille’s tricks to fall for this obvious ploy for concerned emoting. He returned to the smouldering staircase, hefted Leatrice onto a healthy Hussar shoulder and once more threaded down the burning pathway. There he was, juggling Leatrice Joy, cursing the boat that brought him to this smoke-filled insane asylum and praying for a breath of fresh air. If only he could live through the first few scenes things might be all right. DeMille loved the scene and never mentioned Leatrice’s condition again. Of course, what Victor had suspected was that DeMille was making up the pregnancy to inject more realism in the scene. But twenty years after Triumph, he went to a party in New York and Leatrice Joy introduced him to a lovely young woman. “I want you to meet the other woman you saved in your dash down the staircase,” she said, “This is my daughter.” (Varconi and Honeck 25-26)

24 Similar actor discomfort occurred during the making of the reincarnation tale, (1925), starring Joseph “Pepi” Schildkraut, who was the human centrepiece of a dramatic train crash scene. It was so dramatic and potentially dangerous that it scared Joseph’s mother into planning premeditated violence against DeMille. Schildkraut reported in his autobiography: It was a night sequence and the accident was staged in the yards of the Southern Pacific Railway. I sat in a compartment of a car looking out the window at the supposedly passing landscape, while in back of me a steam locomotive was to crash through my car, stopping just one foot behind me. It was not a pleasant feeling to sit there and wait for that crash, hoping the engineer would stop in time. He did stop at the prearranged spot, but we had not thought of the hot steam escaping from the engine. It scorched my face and hands. In spite of my pain I did not move, according to the script presumably dead, until de Mille whistled the all-clear signal and I could climb out of the car. A physician and nurses rushed to my aid. Fortunately, I had not been hurt badly. My parents were among the guests who had been invited to watch this spectacular scene. But not until days later was I told about Mother’s reaction. When the locomotive started to move, Mother suddenly picked up a heavy stick of wood and hid it behind her back. Father looked at her stupefied. “What are you doing?” he asked her. “If something happens to Pepi in this scene,” she said quietly, without raising her voice, “I’ll kill that guy.” And she

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pointed to de Mille. No, she was never impressed by his domineering pose. (Schildkraut and Lania 184-85)

25 Another palpable incident of actor discomfort due to DeMille’s need for realism occurred during the making of the castaway tale, (1919). In this cinematic version of James M. Barrie’s famous play The Admirable Crichton, Crichton the butler (played by Thomas Meighan) “kills a leopard with a bow and arrow and brings it back to camp for food. De Mille did not like the look of a stuffed leopard so he used a real one which had been chloroformed. During the scene, there were numerous delays and finally a nervous, cursing Meighan pleaded with De Mille to complete the scene as the leopard was coming back to life” (Bowers 691). Meighan’s discomfort was very understandable because that leopard had been saved from the Selig Zoo and was going to be destroyed “because it had killed a man” (DeMille and Hayne 205). According to DeMille, the limp, drugged body of the leopard that was languidly draped around Meighan’s shoulders “began to talk in his sleep. First cosy sighs and purrings, then low, contented growls, then, as the drama of his dream progressed, more ominous snarls and snorts issued from the head that was muzzling close to Tommy Meighan’s ear. If Male and Female had not been a silent picture, the microphone would have picked up lines that never wrote” (DeMille and Hayne 206).

26 However, Meighan’s discomfort paled in comparison to ’s dilemma within the same film. During the Babylonian flashback scene entitled “The Lion’s Bride,” DeMille decided to use a real, non-drugged lion positioned on top of prostrate Swanson wearing only a backless pearl dress with peacock headdress. Swanson was “terrified” (Swanson 506). To achieve this dramatic pose: “Canvas was laid on her bare back and the front paws of the lion placed on top. The canvas was gradually eased out from under the animal’s paws until they were directly in contact with her flesh. Finally the lion was induced to roar by having whips cracked in its presence” (Wise and Ware 75). As Agnes de Mille reported: “The cameras ground safely from above, and Cecil’s heart swelled with pride as the brave and beautiful young girl, his “Little Fella,” dared expose her flesh to laceration at his bidding” (Martha 57). This was a particularly brave act considering that the same “lion clawed a man to death two weeks after the scene was shot” (Charyn 99). Eventually, the scene became one “of the most famous in the De Mille filmography” (Bowers 691) and ensured Swanson’s screen immortality in both the public and DeMille’s eyes for he had found another gutsy girl that he could honestly admire.

27 His Christian-Roman tale The Sign of the Cross (1932) provided another DeMillean example of animal-related discomfort. As Charles Laughton reported, Miss [Claudette] Colbert was plainly scared during the climactic scenes of the picture. The entire cast had been terrified. After controlling her nervousness as long as possible, she had given up and burst out with: “Gosh, here’s the corner where we turn to face the cameras. I hope my nose doesn’t itch—or the mascara doesn’t melt into my eye—or that darned leopard behind me doesn’t make a move. Why in heaven’s name does Mr. De Mille have to bring in the zoo on scenes like this? If the leopard moves even a little, I know I’m going to scream.” (Singer 138)

2.4 Professionalism as Expected Risk-Taking: Normalising Danger

28 DeMille’s demands for dramatic realism soon evolved into the regular professional need to take extra-ordinary risks on his pictures designed for the paying public’s amusement. For example, in his third version of his western drama, The Squaw Man

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(1918), the stun woman Audrey Scott substituted Eleanor Boardman in a dangerous horse scene. She worked with fellow stunt man George Sowards who was lying in a big mud hole. I was told to jump my horse as close to him as I safely could, then to go on past. As there is little that can be done to change a horse’s course once he leaves the ground, this was a dangerous thing to do. Few horses will jump on a person on the ground, but who knows whether this horse was one of those? I rode the horse up the muddy bog a few times, hoping he would see George lying there. As I started the run I planned to control him by holding to a slow gallop. In the instant before I thought he was ready to jump, I pointed his head away from George, lying there in the mud supposedly unconscious. The horse took off under my guidance and landed about two feet from George’s head. George didn’t flinch—he had tremendous control of his emotions—it must have looked to him lying there, in those eternity-like seconds, as if the horse were coming right on top of him. (Scott 47)

29 Sometimes DeMille’s realism was so realistic that it was horrifying. For example, he decided to use crocodiles in a gruesome scene within The Sign of the Cross (1932) just as he had done earlier in Fool’s Paradise and so he called upon Joe Bonomo, a giant of a stunt man. As Bonomo recounted in his autobiography, [w]hile this picture was shooting he [DeMille] sent for me one day. “Joe, I’ve got to do something my regular stuntmen are backing away from. They just say, ‘Get Bonomo. He’ll try anything.’” Flattered, I assured him I would, but I almost weakened when he told me what “anything” was. I was to play a Christian martyr, be thrown into a pit of hungry crocodiles and be devoured before the eyes of the Roman spectators. Now I ask you! Before I could answer yes or no, he said, “Figure it out, Joe, and make it look good.”...gave me a pat on the back and was gone, leaving me standing there, wishing I was back in Coney Island... [Alligators were eventually chosen] ...Alligators were bigger and looked more ferocious, whether they were or not. “But just remember this was your decision Joe, and if an alligator gets you, the studio won’t be responsible.” And with those comforting words he [DeMille] gave me another pat on the back and was gone again. [T]he cameras were set—we waited until my particular alligator was a little apart from the rest—then two husky Roman soldiers threw me in beside him. As I hit the mud I grabbed him by a front leg—the one away from the side where the cameras were going to shoot the death scene. We wrestled for a moment, and he opened his big lower jaw. I grabbed it with my left hand, held it open and half put my head in his mouth, but from the side away from the cameras. From the camera side it looked as though my head was IN his mouth, then I slammed it shut and held it shut. Had my head actually been in that mouth, I would have been decapitated. I quickly pulled him down on top of me, kicking my legs in the air so it looked as though the ’gator had me down. I kicked my legs violently just once, then stiffened them out suddenly as though he had gobbled off my head—then I slowly relaxed and fell “lifeless.” As the cameras stopped shooting I slowly got up and walked away. I did WHAT?? I lit out of there as though the Devil himself was on my coat- tail! Actually, the death scene was so realistic that for a moment De Mille, the cameramen, and everyone else thought the world had seen the last of Joe Bonomo. De Mille was torn between delight over having captured a sensational scene—what he should wire my family—and what he would tell the newspapers. What publicity it would make! Then, when I came up alive and smiling, I’m sure he was pleased— that is—I’m reasonably sure. (295, 298)

30 Ironically, this alligator scene was so realistic and so frightening that it was cut from the final release version of the film. As Bonomo lamented, “Everyone said it was great footage. As a matter of fact, it was too great. At the preview women fainted at the horrible sight. It was too macabre for public viewing. So one of the greatest alligator-

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gobbles-man scenes in the history of motion pictures, wound up on the cutting room floor” (300). The world of 1930s America could not handle DeMille’s concentrated realist aesthetics.

31 As times changed, moral standards altered and the power of craft unions increased, DeMille had to compromise, especially during the 1950s. However, he did not compromise on dramatic effects, but rather, upon the more ruthlessly enforced safer means of generating his screen tensions. Given his incredible box-office power and personal charisma, many actors were very willing to put themselves in danger for him. For example, Lucille Ball’s agent, Kurt Frings was negotiating for her to play in The Greatest Show on Earth because: “DeMille wanted Lucy for the role of a circus performer whose speciality is sticking her head face-up under the raised hoof of a trained elephant! “I thought she was nuts to even consider the offer. DeMille wouldn’t permit doubles to be used, and she could be killed or seriously injured if anything went wrong,” Kurt Frings said. But Lucy couldn’t be talked out of it” (Harris 154).

32 However, Lucille became pregnant and missed out on the film role (which went to Gloria Grahame) and she went on to find TV fame as the screwball star of I Love Lucy. Her replacement Grahame was just as eager to please DeMille and recalled regarding the elephant scene: “I was petrified. You know there was one retake on the scene. The elephant came so close he left a smudge on my nose” (Hannsberry 182). However, according to John Culhane, “[t]he script called for the trainer to threaten to command the elephant to crush her skull. These are the kinds of risks movie companies are not supposed to take with their actors. De Mille had special effects build a mechanical replica of an elephant’s foot, which could be lowered almost to Miss Grahame’s nose with no danger of mashing it” (261). Whether it was a prop decoy or not, or whether it was used or not, or which screen take was put in the release film, is problematic.

2.5 Miserliness and Rebellion: Managerial Risk-Taking

33 Not only was professional risk-taking expected, but DeMille sometimes demanded too much from his actors when wiser heads should have prevailed. For example, Claudette Colbert starred in the jungle adventure, (1934), which was shot in Hawaii (supposedly a steamy Malaysian jungle) near shark-infested beaches and a nearby jungle full of bugs and spiders, which alone was hell on the cast and crew. As she recalled: ““I had just had an emergency appendectomy before starting that picture, and on the first day I arrived on location—with the nurse from the Good Samaritan Hospital—(DeMille) put me in a swamp up to my shoulders. A real swamp. The nurse yelled, and he said, ‘I’ve waited for her 10 days already,” so in I went. “Two days later I was bedridden with a 104-degree temperature, and I really thought I was going to die” (Quirk 62).

34 Even DeMille physically suffered on occasion because of his own production demands. During the making of his ancient world epic, Cleopatra (1934), he was arguing with his niece, Agnes de Mille, who reported that he “suddenly yelped, “Ouch!” The leopard which lay beside Cleopatra’s bed, drugged on perfume, came to and playfully closed his jaws on Cecil’s calf. The beast was kept so doped we all grew careless. Only the thick leather puttee saved Ce’s leg. Even so, the teeth grazed the skin. Cecil was amused, but the keeper sternly rebuked his charge and hastened to administer another large dose of Arpege” (Speak 265). It was also another good reason for DeMille to keep on wearing

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leather puttee’s even though the fashion faded and there was little practical need to be bothered about bushes, snakes and the long grass of his “primitive” Hollywood days.

35 Potential problems also arose due to DeMille’s thrifty-cum-miserly management practices on location shoots. For example, during the filming of his western tale, (1936), Iron Eyes Cody reported that it was very boring, tedious work which was not made any better by the obligatory wait between snow storms, the rapidly developing food shortage which could not be alleviated due to closed roads, and the subsequent need for rationing. To make matters worse, the favoured French bread was not rationed equitably, which caused anger and resentment amongst the embittered crew. In the meantime, bored actors and crew enjoyed “rock ‘n rye whiskey” and “tepee creeping” whilst grumbling about the shortages, holding powwows, and talking about forming war parties. Cody reported: I got wind of some trouble brewing over the bread issue and, as the more cantankerous of the Indians were making alcohol a permanent high percentage of their bloodstream, thought it wise to lift the rationing. I told [Arthur] Rossen [sic] how I felt over dinner one night. “I know they don’t like it,” he snapped. “DeMille likes the fact that were sitting on our asses even less. You don’t know the hell I’m getting from him.” “We should be filming in a day or two, and the roads will be clear to get more food through. What the hell differences does it make to start giving out more bread now?” “No difference at all. You tell that to DeMille.” (Cody and Perry 203)

36 The rationing stayed and the discontent rose to the point where a food raid was being planned by some disgruntled Indians. Even , the film’s star playing Wild Bill Hickok, colluded with Iron Eyes Cody to go on the food raid, suitably disguised as an Indian. With about twenty accomplices, a tree log was used as a battering ram on the food warehouse and armfuls of culinary delights were quickly snatched away to be greedily consumed in an orgiastic feast at a nearby stream. Fortunately, this event was kept from DeMille’s knowledge (Cody and Perry 203-9).

37 After the raid, things were momentarily better: “But tension among the Indians and cowboy extras persisted, together with a continued flow of rock ‘n rye. The Indians, a little high from downing a few good slugs before mounting their ponies for shooting the wagon train siege, might have actually bopped a few settlers’ heads with war clubs instead of pretending” (Cody and Perry 209). DeMille would not have necessarily minded this because it added gritty realism to his film, for which he did not have to officially pay extra danger money. Perhaps, even, this was the real reason behind DeMille restricting the rations. In fact, many people suspected that DeMille engineered “accidents” as a deliberate policy for financial reasons on top of his usual authenticity and realism desires.

2.6 The Engineering of “Accidents”: Applied Miserliness?

38 Peter Guttmacher reported that former cowboys turned film actors and stuntmen “passed the word that Cecil B. DeMille deliberately staged unexpected accidents to make his movies more racy” (24). A classic case in point was the clashing horse scene in his medieval Christian tale, The Crusades (1935). Although Alfred Hitchcock comfortingly assured that “I have it on very good authority that not a horse was hurt during production of that sequence. The effects were secured by the use of a few horses trained to fall, and skillful editing” (Gottlieb 111), the truth apparently was very different.

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39 According to Diana Serra Cary (223-24), four stuntmen suffered serious injuries, exacerbated by thrashing horses in the moat, which required X-rays and hospitalisation at Cedars of Lebanon, while all the horses were so badly smashed they had to be destroyed on the spot. To add insult to their injury, extra pay for the stuntmen was requested but denied by DeMille, who thought they had bungled a simple scene which he should not have to pay for. Cary also suspected that DeMille deliberately engineered “accidents” by pushing his stunt people so hard it caused exciting spills. Since they were officially unplanned, DeMille did not have to officially pay for them. As she explained, “[b]ut the worst offender, according to the cowboys, and the man for whom there was no budgetary excuse, was Cecil B. De Mille. The cowboys not only disliked him . . . but they distrusted him as well, for sooner or later on every job where the Gower Gulch men worked with De Mille, he seemed to find a subtle way of squeezing free falls out of them” (Cary 218). This miserly image of DeMille contradicted the stunt woman Polly Burson’s claim regarding Unconquered (1947), namely that “DeMille was awful good with his stunt people” (Wiener 29). But given the decade difference between the two films, DeMille may have moderated his excessive adventurism due to potential guilt, union power or financial liability claims.

40 Conversely, there is also a strong suggestion that Hollywood horsemen tried to scam DeMille, or did not always earn DeMille’s respect, or satisfactorily meet his high standards of bravery for as DeMille recalled regarding a chariot scene from The Ten Commandments: a delegation of the Hollywood cowboys came to me to protest that it was too dangerous for them to drive down a fairly steep hill where I wanted to get a shot of them descending into the Red Sea. While they were protesting, my teen-age daughter Cecilia happened to ride over the brow of the hill in question. I called out to her, “Ciddy!” Come here,” and without a second’s hesitation she galloped down the hill in full sight of the fearful cow-punchers. That shamed them into making the scene I wanted. (DeMille and Hayne 234)

2.7 Bravely Leading from the Front: DeMille as Macho-Man

41 DeMille was certainly not above putting himself in dangerous situations to illustrate his point, or demonstrate his leadership, or prove his considerable macho-man bravado (Kozlovic). He was certainly no backseat leader who demanded of his staff more than he was prepared to do himself. Joseph C. Youngerman amusingly reported: “I guess I was the only prop man De Mille ever had who had as much guts as he did. He was about 15 years older than I was, and one time he walked with a gun and a chair into a cage containing 30 lions. I did the same thing, but I didn’t sleep for two nights” (36). During the filming of The Plainsman, DeMille “allowed [Jean] Arthur to practice flicking a pistol from his hand with her twelve-foot (3.6 m) bullwhip. (The actor De Mille was standing in for was a little nervous about it.) Eventually, she got it right . . . and the welts on DeMille’s arm went down” (Guttmacher 58). In fact, his “wrist bore lash marks for days”, but he offered it “as a convenient target” because “I insist upon authenticity” (DeMille and Hayne 320), and so he practised what he preached in his usual macho-man style. Nor did old age weary him in his macho desires. Whilst filming the 1956 version of The Ten Commandments, the mid-seventy-year-old DeMille had to literally lead from the front when he “noticed that Yul Brynner was nervous about driving his chariot in front of the army. “‘Don’t worry—it’s safe, Yul,’ he said. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ And with

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that, DeMille got into the chariot, raced the horses in a circle, and parked the chariot right on the spot where it was supposed to be” (Thomas 197).

42 DeMille’s personal courage ethic also applied to, and was demonstrated by, his non- acting staff on occasion. For example, in Samson and Delilah, Victor Mature had to wrestle a (stunt) lion in accordance with Judges 14:5-6 KJV, but he baulked at the prospect so DeMille procured an old Hollywood lion called Jackie, a “reputedly harmless toothless, film veteran himself” (Lasky Jr. 231). But Mature still complained to DeMille saying: “Look, you bald-headed sonofabitch, I don’t want to be gummed to death either!” (Broccoli and Zec 120-21). So, DeMille ordered his scriptwriter Jesse Lasky, Jr., to tackle the lion for Mature’s benefit, which he dutifully did. When it proved safe: “Vic threw off his robe, flexing his famous muscles, and stepped ahead of me towards Jackie and the cameras. What actor could let a writer steal the scene?” (Lasky Jr. 231).

3. Conclusion

43 It can be concluded from this montage of reported incidents that there will never ever be another Cecil B. DeMille, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas notwithstanding. It is amazing that DeMille managed to survive all the dangers surrounding him, or that he was not sued into oblivion by disgruntled employees, or in some other way come to a sticky end; especially considering Diana S. Cary’s “Kill De Mille!” chapter within The Hollywood Posse concerning aggrieved horsemen who plotted DeMille’s “accidental” demise. The director certainly played a significant and colourful role in creating his own indelible PR image, historical legacy, and other factually-based legends of the never-to-be-repeated Golden Age of Hollywood. No doubt, many more examples of his Hollywood (mis)adventures await to be found and retold to new audiences in this post- Millennial age, including the hopeful resurrection of his “accident film” library that was never to be released (DeMille and Hayne 93). Further research into DeMille studies, the expansion of the above-identified taxonomic categories, behavioural comparisons with other filmmakers (e.g., Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock, ), and further reminiscences about DeMille is warranted, warmly recommended, and already long overdue, as history, art, or entertainment.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Basquette, Lina. Lina: DeMille’s Godless Girl. Fairfax, VA: Denlinger’s Publishers, 1990.

Birchard, Robert S. Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2004.

Bonomo, Joe. The Strongman: A True Life Pictorial Autobiography of the Hercules of the Screen. New York, NY: Bonomo Studios, 1968.

Bowers, Ronald. “Male and Female.” Magill’s Survey of Cinema. Silent Films. Volume 2. Ed. Frank. N. Magill. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Salem P, 1982. 689-92.

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Broccoli, Albert R., and Donald Zec. When the Snow Melts: The Autobiography of Cubby Broccoli. London: Boxtree, 1998.

Bywater, Tim, and Thomas Sobchack. An Introduction to Film Criticism: Major Critical Approaches to Narrative Film. New York: Longman, 1989.

Cary, Diana S. The Hollywood Posse: The Story of a Gallant Band of Horsemen who Made Movie History. : Houghton Mifflin, 1975.

Charyn, Jerome. Movieland: Hollywood and the Great American Dream Culture. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1989.

Cherchi Usai, Paolo, and Lorenzo Codelli, eds. The DeMille Legacy. Pordenone: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto/Edizioni Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1991.

Cody, Iron Eyes, and Collin Perry. Iron Eyes: My Life as a Hollywood Indian. London: Frederick Muller, 1982.

Culhane, John. The American Circus: An Illustrated History. New York: Henry Holt, 1990.

Davis, Ronald L. Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. de Mille, Agnes. Speak to Me, Dance with Me. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

------. Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham. New York: Vintage Books/Random House, 1992.

DeMille, Cecil B., and Donald Hayne, ed. The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. London: W.H. Allen, 1960.

Edwards, Anne. The DeMilles: An American Family. London: Collins, 1988.

Essoe, Gabe, and Raymond Lee, eds. DeMille: The Man and His Pictures. New York: Castle Books, 1970.

Eyman, Scott. Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010.

Fountain, Leatrice G., and John R. Maxim 1985: Dark Star. London: Sidgwick & Jackson.

Gottlieb, Sidney, ed. Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Selected Writings and Interviews. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

Guttmacher, Peter. Legendary Westerns. New York, NY: MetroBooks, 1995.

Hannsberry, Karen B. Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.

Hanson, Patricia K., and Amy Dunkleberger, eds. American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States. Feature films, 1941-1950. Film Entries, M-Z. Berkeley: U of California P, 1999.

Harris, Warren G. Lucy & Desi: The Legendary Love Story of Television’s Most Famous Couple. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Heston, Charlton, and Jean-Pierre Isbouts. Charlton Heston’s Hollywood: 50 Years in American Film. New York: G.T. Publishing, 1998.

Higashi, Sumiko. Cecil B. DeMille: A Guide to References and Resources. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall & Co, 1985.

------. Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Higham, Charles. Cecil B. DeMille. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973.

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Johnson, Coralie C. “The Humanist Approach to Film: My Brilliant Career.” August 20, 2007. http:// wildwoodpress.org/the-humanist-approach-to-film-my-brilliant-career/.

Katchmer, George A. Eighty Stars: Biographies and Filmographies of the Obscure to the Well Known. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991.

Koury, Phil A. Yes, Mr. DeMille. New York: Putnam, 1959.

Kozlovic, Anton K. “Cecil B. DeMille: Hollywood Macho Man and the Theme of Masculinity within His Biblical (and Other) Cinema.” Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 2.2 (2008): 116-138. http://www.jmmsweb.org/issues/volume2/number2/pp116-138.

Lamour, Dorothy, and Dick McInnes. My Side of the Road. London: Robson Books, 1981.

Lasky Jr., Jesse L. Whatever Happened to Hollywood? London: W.H. Allen, 1973.

Louvish, Simon. Cecil B. DeMille: A Life in Art. New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s P, 2008.

Mitchell, Lisa. “Encounter With an Icon: My Magic Summer Working for Cecil B. De Mille.” DGA News 18.3 (1993): 14-17.

Noerdlinger, Henry S. Moses and Egypt: The Documentation to the Motion Picture The Ten Commandments. Los Angeles: U of Southern California P, 1956.

Orrison, Katherine. Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic, The Ten Commandments. Lanham: Vestal P, 1999.

Paglia, Camille. Vamps & Tramps: New Essays. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Parish, James R., and Don E. Stanke. The Debonairs. New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975.

Quirk, Lawrence J. Claudette Colbert: An Illustrated Biography. New York: Crown, 1985.

Ringgold, Gene, and DeWitt Bodeen. The Complete Films of Cecil B. DeMille. Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel P, 1969.

Rovin, Jeff. TV Babylon. New York, NY: Signet, 1987.

Schildkraut, Joseph, and Leo Lania. My Father and I. New York: The Viking P, 1959.

Scott, Audrey. I was a Hollywood Stun Girl. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1969.

Singer, Kurt. The Laughton Story: An Intimate Story of Charles Laughton. Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1954.

Swanson, Gloria. Swanson on Swanson. London: Michael Joseph, 1981.

Telotte, J. P. Science Fiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Thomas, Bob. “Assistant Director/Production Manager: Chico Day.” Directors in Action: Selections from Action: The Official Magazine of The Directors Guild of America. Ed. Bob Thomas. Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1973. 195-99.

Varconi, Victor, and Ed Honeck. It’s Not Enough to be Hungarian. Denver: Graphic Impressions, 1976.

Vidal, Gore. Palimpsest: A Memoir. London: Andre Deutsch, 1995.

Westmore, Frank, and Muriel Davidson. The Westmores of Hollywood. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1976.

Wiener, David J. Burns, Falls, and Crashes: Interviews with Movie Stunt Performers. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1996.

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Wise, Arthur, and Derek Ware. Stunting in the Cinema. London: Constable, 1973.

Youngerman, Joseph C. “Final Cut: The Olden Days According to Youngerman.” DGA Magazine 20.3 (1995): 36.

Filmography

Carmen (1915, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

Cleopatra (1934, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

Fool’s Paradise (1921, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

Four Frightened People (1934, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

Male and Female (1919, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

Manslaughter (1922, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

Reap the Wild Wind (1942, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

Samson and Delilah (1949, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Captive (1915, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Cheat (1915, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Crusades (1935, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Girl of the Golden West (1915, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Godless Girl (1929, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Greatest Show on Earth (1952, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The King of Kings (1927, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Plainsman (1937, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Road to Yesterday (1925, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Sign of the Cross (1932, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Squaw Man (1931, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Ten Commandments (1923, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Ten Commandments (1956, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

The Woman God Forgot (1917, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

Triumph (1924, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

Unconquered (1947, dir. Cecil B. DeMille)

NOTES

1. Many scholars have spelled Cecil’s surname as “De Mille” or “de Mille” or “deMille” (which he employed for personal private use); however, for professional public use, he spelt his surname as “DeMille” (DeMille and Hayne 6). This format will be employed throughout herein unless quoting others, along with “Cecil” and “CB” as appropriate.

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RÉSUMÉS

The legendary producer-director Cecil B. DeMille1 was an unsung auteur, a master of the American cinema, and a seminal cofounder of both Hollywood and Paramount Pictures who was professionally enamoured with the pursuit of sensationalism, authenticity and realism for his crowd-pleasing productions. Whilst pursuing this filmic quest, many of his crew were subjected to real danger, distress and injury, sometimes mortally. Utilising humanist film criticism as the guiding analytical lens, the critical DeMille, autobiographical and related anecdotal literature was selectively reviewed for illustrative instances of this infamous production penchant. Seven heuristic taxonomic categories were identified and explicated herein, namely: (1) Unexpected Working Accidents: From Annoying to Dangerous to Deadly, (2) Pain as a By-Product of Production: Expected and Unexpected, (3) Personal Discomfort as a Professional Norm: More Real Than Real?, (4) Professionalism as Expected Risk-Taking: Normalising Danger, (5) Miserliness and Rebellion: Managerial Risk-Taking, (6) The Engineering of “Accidents”: Applied Miserliness?, and (7) Bravely Leading from the Front: DeMille as Macho-Man. It was concluded from this montage of reported incidents that DeMille played a very colourful part in creating the factually-based legends of this never-to-be-repeated Golden Age of Hollywood. Further research into DeMille studies, the expansion of the above-constructed categories, and other autobiographical reminiscences about Tinsel Town is warmly recommended; whether as history, art or entertainment.

INDEX

Keywords : danger, accidents, Hollywood, Golden Age, humanist film criticism, silent films, cinema history, stunt persons., Jean Arthur, Lucille Ball, James M. Barrie, Lina Basquette, Eleanor Boardman, Joe Bonomo, Polly Burson, Diana Serra Cary, Iron Eyes Cody, Claudette Colbert, Antoinette Consello, Gary Cooper, John Davidson, Agnes de Mille, Cecil B. DeMille, Cecilia “Ciddy” DeMille, George Duryea, Kurt Frings, John “Jack” Gilbert, Gloria Grahame, Charlton and Lydia Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Leatrice Joy, Dorothy “Dottie” Lamour, Jesse Lasky Jr., Charles Laughton, Jeanie Macpherson, John Lee Mahin, Pev Marley, Victor Mature, Thomas Meighan, Bob Miles, Ray Milland, Conrad Nagel, Leo Noomis, House Peters, Arthur Rosson, Joseph “Pepi” Schildkraut, Audrey Scott, George Sowards, Gloria Swanson, Victor Varconi, Frank Westmore, Joseph C. Youngerman

AUTEUR

ANTON KARL KOZLOVIC Screen and Media, School of Humanities, Flinders University (Adelaide, South Australia)

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Risk, Disappointment and Distraction in Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men

James Peacock

1 It is, as Virginia Woolf observes, “very, very dangerous to live even one day” (12), and yet danger reminds us how impossibly, absurdly alive we are. Keith Gessen’s debut novel All the Sad Young Literary Men, published in 2008, is very much concerned with different types of danger, with the risks its main characters take or imagine themselves taking as they attempt to make lives for themselves. As this article goes on to show, some of these risks, like confronting a tank in the occupied West Bank, put the young men in genuine physical danger. Others, like deciding to devote one’s life to writing, present problems which are more to do with impecunity, loneliness and a predisposition to extended periods of paralyzing self-reflection.

2 For some readers, such inwardness is a serious weakness of Gessen’s writing: the reviewer in New York magazine calls the opening chapters of the novel “self-satisfied” and “boringly solipsistic” (“Is This Book Worth Getting?”). Toby Lichtig, writing in The Guardian, is a little more measured but ultimately still expresses frustration.Arguing that semi-autobiographical musing on the life of the aspiring young writer is a trait the author needs to get “out of his system” before writing something with “a little more gravitas,” Lichtig identifies the genre of Gessen’s novel, somewhat dismissively, as “literary lad-lit” (24). , writing in the New York Review of Books, is far more complimentary. While acknowledging that Gessen’s novel lacks the “magic” of the Fitzgerald short story collection from which it derives its “risky yet playful” title, she nonetheless praises the way the author has captured “the narcissistic ennui of privileged youth for whom self-flagellation is an art form” (“Youth!”). In other words, for Oates the solipsism and self-indulgence should be attributed to the characters, not necessarily to their author.

3 What all these reviewers recognize is the centrality of writing as a life choice, viable or otherwise, to Gessen’s debut fiction. All the Sad Young Literary Men is about the consequences of pursuing the literary or intellectual life in an early twenty-first-

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century world increasingly fraught with danger, and one in which literature itself appears to be under threat from forms and media more suited to a culture of immediacy and rapid change. Although Gessen has not yet gained a public profile or a critical reception to match those of some of his contemporaries, for example Benjamin Kunkel and , his first novel can be considered a revealing piece of evidence in the wider context of discussions about literature’s contemporary status precisely because, for better or for worse, its characters spend so much time cogitating on the matter. And Gessen was, after all, one of the founding editors of the periodical n+1, along with Kunkel, Harbach, and Marco Roth. Born of disillusionment with the cultural scene in the United States, n+1 strives to rekindle meaningful debate and place literature and criticism at the center of things once more. In somewhat evangelical terms, A. O. Scott sees the editors of the magazine as trying to “organize a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism, to raise once again the banners of creative enthusiasm and intellectual engagement”; their work is “stirringly immodest” and sees culture “through eyes narrowed by skepticism” (38).

4 As well as this, presumably benign, skepticism, one might cite anxiety as another motivating factor: anxiety that worthy creative forms like the critical essay, the short story and especially, for reasons that shall become clearer, the novel are in danger of ceasing to be forms of activism and instead becoming marginalized, residual, outdated. It is an anxiety revealed in Kunkel’s contribution to the 2011 collection The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. And, with a slightly different emphasis, it is one revealed in Kunkel’s debut novel Indecision (2005), whose protagonist, Dwight Wilmerding, is crippled by postmodern irony and supposedly suffers from a condition known as abulia, or “chronic indecision” (Kunkel 33). His eventual political awakening and social activism constitute, as Adam Kelly observes, “a new kind of sincerity” (“From Syndrome to Sincerity” 54), albeit one the postmodern reader might still treat with a degree of suspicion. The novel Dwight narrates therefore becomes a testament to his sincerity and a model for action; it responds to Gessen’s exhortation in the final lines of n+1’s first number: “it is time to say what you mean.” Saying what you mean and acting in concert with your beliefs is, of course, a risky strategy: it is far easier to relax into a non-committal, ironic stance.

5 All the Sad Young Literary Men demands, then, to be read in the context of the themes outlined in the introductory paragraphs of this article: the dangers of the contemporary world; the extent to which literature and the intellectual life can endure as forms of constructive activity; and whether sincerity and unironic engagement with a culture for so long characterized by knowingness and detachment is even possible. In the reading of the novel that follows, the three key terms of the title—“risk,” “disappointment” and “distraction” are interlinked and their complex implications for Gessen’s sad young literary men (and for novelistic practice more generally) unpacked. For synoptical purposes, one can express Sam, Mark and Keith’s collective dilemma thus: disappointed with the state of contemporary America and with the way their romantic and professional lives have turned out, they are forced to confront the possibility that their immersion in bookish intellectualism has not produced significant action or even meaningful statements about the world, but has only been a form of distraction, a retreat from history and its important events. So they are forced to consider that for all its financial precariousness, the writing life may not be at all risky compared to the “real world.”

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6 Almost inevitably, this dilemma is exaggerated when set against the backdrop of the attacks on The World Trade Center in September 2001. Gessen’s novel is not a “post-9/11” text in the manner of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005) or Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007). It is not concerned, explicitly, with the aftermath of the attacks, even though it frequently refers to them. Like many “post-9/11” texts, however, it poses questions about the ability of writers to tackle big issues—tragedy, violence, history—and asks whether writing is essentially useless, nothing more than a pusillanimous withdrawal. Alison Kelly sums up the paradox of literary reactions to 9/11 as “speechlessness versus loquacity” (52), the burning need to narrate the event versus the post-traumatic inefficacy of representational and linguistic strategies. This is the problem with which Sam, Mark and Keith wrestle throughout: how can their words possibly express the sheer enormity of present events? How can fiction compete with reality? And how can one experience the present while also staying in to write about what is happening ?

7 Such questions have gained peculiar urgency and resonance since 11 September 2001, at least partly because other communication forms—primarily television, but also internet newsfeeds, social networking sites—seemed better able to keep pace and to capture the truly devastating images and stories. Therefore it is tempting to see the recent essay collection The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books as in part a subliminal response to the questions of representational power and immediacy posed by the televised catastrophe. Where does the novel stand in the “instantaneous-opinion marketplace” (Lethem 131)? Is it “unreasonable” to have “some concern about ‘the future of the book’ in the context of a world where more immediate diversions—music, movies, video games—are all readily available in the same portable device” (King 23)? And in a time when real events continually seem to outstrip one’s capacity to fictionalize in startling ways, is it true that “the culture of literature, as opposed to that of commentary, threatens to become a subculture instead, or, better, a counter- culture” (Kunkel 38)? When commentary—in the form of blogs, tweets, participation in reasoned online debates or hysterical ranting—is so quickly available, what place for the “[s]low-moving, slow-reacting, uselessly out of touch in the reaction-time marketplace” novel (Lethem 131)? In texts such as Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost (2007) and Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark (2008) this worry finds its metaphor in the figure of the ageing, impotent writer; what is striking about Gessen’s story is that the sense of impotence has set in at the start of the young men’s careers (if they can be dignified with such a word).

8 Having said that 9/11 has increased the urgency of these questions, it should also be stressed that they are not entirely new, even if the media technologies purportedly threatening the novel are. Philip Roth famously decried the paucity of fictional tools in representing American life in his 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction”: “The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist” (223). As this article goes on to demonstrate, it is vital to recognize the persistence of these ideas because it belies the belief that 9/11 instantiated a radical conceptual break with everything that had preceded it. Instead, a consideration of certain continuities can offer the writer a way out of his or her

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perceived dilemmas: appreciate the impossibility of capturing “the present” (a complex idea in itself, as we shall see); understand that the novel’s lack of immediacy is potentially virtuous, because it allows for a perspective on persistent truths rather than a series of discrete, cataclysmic moments, and then one might just rediscover the exciting risks involved in writing. If All the Sad Young Literary Men can be seen as a coming-of-age tale, then the characters’ maturation consists in learning what these risks, and what the unique strengths of literature, really are.

9 When the reader first meets Sam, one of the three young men, it is clear that he initially sees his decision not to enter the conventional world of work and to stay at home and write “the great Zionist novel” (Gessen 35) precisely in terms of risk: Sam did not have a chance. It had taken courage—not talent, not wit, and certainly not foresight—to refuse a regular job after school, to do nothing but read about Israel and worry and argue while his classmates found work at Fidelity or HyperCapital or joined rock bands or traveled the world. Sam knew he had more courage—they were taller, more attractive, they had better table manners and better skin, but he’d gotten all the balls. It took balls to do what he did because if he failed—and he had failed—he’d end up where he was. He hadn’t accomplished the things of which he’d dreamed, and now he couldn’t even get done the very basic things that most adults did [.] (93)

10 Later in the novel, realizing that things “[haven’t] quite worked out” for him in the States, Sam travels to Jenin in the West Bank “on a journey for the discovery of certain facts. The facts on the ground” (163). His obsession with tank-spotting reveals his belief in military machinery as a material signifier of these “facts on the ground,” and he is even prepared to criticize his Palestinian companions for the tanks’ non-appearance: “This is how you fight the occupation? No wonder the tanks never come—all you guys do is try and pick up girls on the Internet” (192). After this amusingly hypocritical outburst, however, Sam’s confused desires are met: wandering the streets with his Jeninian friends after curfew, he finally gets to experience real risk in the form of “a thing—an enormous, gigantic, hulking metal thing. Perhaps not so gigantic. But bigger than a horse, a lot bigger, and bigger than a pickup truck. A pretty big thing. A tank” (195). Momentarily, paralysis sets in: “The four of them froze. They were out after curfew and the tank could, theoretically, open fire. Those were the rules” (195). But when Mohammed lobs a stone at it, theoretical becomes actual and the friends are forced to run for their lives as the tank “[fires] madly behind them” (196). As it is described in this sequence, the tank is all size and material and fact—in brute contrast to Sam’s abstract intellectualizing about the Middle East situation before his visit (and indeed about his whole life so far). It embodies, mercilessly, the very real risk of being out on the street rather than in his room, writing.

11 Typically for the early part of the novel, the epiphany it inspires is an ironic and bathetic one. Sam informs the reader that he survived, returned to the States and is now “preparing for law school” (196). Thus “the rules” alluded to in the quotation above, the terrifying martial law represented by the tank, accede to altogether less dangerous theoretical law. Sam has been exposed to serious danger, but is lucky enough to have the option of retreating to a safer environment where he “kept up with the news, sipped his beer, and thought about the future” (196). At least he is gracious enough to cite and acknowledge some of the fatalities that occur after he has left Jenin —“a British GIS member” killed by an Israeli sniper and an American shot in the face by “an Israeli armored personnel carrier” (196). And just maybe he has learnt something

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about the Middle East situation and appears to have given up on the great Zionist novel. As a project it was always impeded by, among many other things, including inertia and a preoccupation with sexual relationships overriding all other considerations, the fact that Sam “can’t even read Hebrew” (40).

12 Part of the problem for Sam is the almost imperceptible (at least to him and the other young men) slippage from writing as a passionate engagement with ideas—the ideological history of Zionism, the disparate strands of Russian revolutionary philosophy, debates about American democracy as an engine of liberation and progress (Gessen 124)—to writing as a means of maintaining a sense of personal authenticity. At best this leads to “self-fulfilment or self-realization” (Taylor 29), a living of one’s life “to the fullest” (Michaels 176). At worst, it is simply a means of filling time and gaining some kind of recognition (frequently measured in Google counts). In Walter Benn Michaels’ somewhat schematic terms, such a slippage from ideology to ontology participates in the narrative of widespread critical decline in contemporary postmodernism (176). Benjamin Kunkel, in his analysis of Régis Debray’s “Socialism: A Life Cycle,” identifies a similar drift from a “myth of significant action” performed by novelistic and historical heroes “to a celebrity myth predicated on the apprehension of glamorous being” (“Goodbye” 33); that is, a shift to a spectacular ontology corresponding, Debray insists, with the supersession of the “graphosphere” (the print- dominated era) by the “videosphere.” Attendant on this epochal shift is a change in the apprehension of time. In the graphosphere, Debray sees temporality as linear, as “future-oriented”; in the videosphere, it becomes self-oriented” within a “cult of the present” (Debray 26).

13 Schematic though Debray’s and Michaels’ arguments are, they are nonetheless consonant in many respects with the thinking of other contemporary critics, notably Fredric Jameson, who shares Debray’s concerns about the arrested and fetishized present in the postmodern, hypermediated world. And they are certainly relevant to Gessen’s novel, which depicts aspiring young writers stalked constantly by their own disengagement from current affairs and tormented by the ontological spectacles of pornography and celebrity. Their anxiety about the present, and the consequent elevation in importance of the present, can be summed up with a rather banal but nonetheless significant statement: nothing much is happening to Gessen’s three sad young literary men (apart from Sam’s eventual encounter with the tank). Keith is a Harvard-educated writer living in New York City after a stint in Baltimore, who at one point has “a fellowship at a Washington think tank to write a postmortem on the 2000 election” (Gessen 145) but spends most of his time browsing internet pornography, aimlessly jogging, trawling through memories of his college days, and generally reflecting on sexual experiences missed and achievements unaccumulated. His first- person narration best expresses the inertia and passivity afflicting all three of them: “I kept waiting for someone to tell me what they thought I should do, should be, what particular fate I, in particular, was fated for” (61). Boston-based Sam, as we have seen, is trying to write his great Zionist epic. Mark lives in bleak and dangerous Syracuse, where the papers are full of stories about girls locked in cellar dungeons and plans for America’s biggest mall (Gessen 136). To reinforce the overall atmosphere of weary passivity, Gessen depicts Mark trying to complete a thesis on the Mensheviks, Russian revolutionaries altogether more thoughtful, less obstreperous and ultimately less successful than the better-known Bolsheviks. There are sexual relationships, the occasional party and eventually, as we have seen, the dramatic sequence in Jenin, but

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overall Gessen has imagined three lives which seem to bear out John Lennon’s famous observation that “life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans” (“Beautiful Boy”).

14 But, of course, a lot does happen during the course of this novel, including 9/11, the Monica Lewinsky affair (Gessen 25) and the disputed presidential election of 2000 (31). It is just that there is for these young men an enervating disjunction between historical events and individual lives lived, frequently expressed as the tension between the event and speaking about or writing about the event, and resulting in numerous moments of ghastly narcissism. As Keith rightly says: “There is the event, which simply happens, and the interpretation, which never ends” (25). Far too often, however, Keith, Sam and Mark interpret these events only by appropriating them as allegories of their local obsessions, especially their troubled romantic lives, and therefore trivializing them. When the reader learns that “most of all Mark and Sasha and their friends worried about history and themselves,” the fact that “[t]hey were right about Al-Shifa; they were right about the settlements” feels far less important than their more self- regarding questions: “What would happen to them? Were they good enough, strong enough, smart enough? Were they hard enough, mean enough, did they believe in themselves enough” (5). Such an emphasis on individual authenticity and self-worth in the face of historical events almost inevitably leads to the deliquescence of those events in petty everyday concerns. Reflecting on Bill Clinton’s actions with reference to drunken college debates about “the definition of sex,” Keith says: “We were disgusted by our President but secretly we lamented only that he hadn’t done enough” (26). Monica Lewinsky becomes “another woman in our lives, so silly and so much like us” and the wider political implications of the affair and the possible impeachment process are ignored (26). For Keith at this early stage of the novel, “the great sociorelational problems of our time” are easily reducible to the complex and exciting sex life of his roommate Ferdinand (11).

15 The most extreme example of this allegorical tendency comes when Sam’s “other woman” Arielle (Gessen 52) threatens to tell his girlfriend Talia about his infidelity and in so doing elicits this excruciating piece of free indirect discourse: What a woman! She wanted a final settlement, and if she didn’t have it she would drive him into the sea. It was land for peace—he gave up his moral land, his settlements on the territories of her conscience, allowed her the last word on everything, and she, in theory, would absolve and release and not tell Talia. He could promise her this. That was the thing to do; that was what men did. They promised and promised, and when it emerged that they’d been building settlements and buying arms all the while, they made incredulous faces and promised some more. (53)

16 This passage exemplifies the characters’ shared problem. Having, as Mark observes, spent too much time in libraries (107), they feel sufficiently cut off from the reality of historical events to reduce these events to literary tropes in the pursuit of cleverer and more effective ways of expressing their own ineffectuality and alienation.

17 So while Al Gore’s defeat might well constitute the paradigmatic disappointment of his generation, its shock value does little more than provoke from Keith another meditation on domestic inwardness in a relationship only ever supposed to last “until the next election” (9): “When they called the election back,” he reflects, “we sat there together in disbelief. The diamond dangled on her finger like a fake… I was in shock, I was suddenly aware of my body, how foreign to me it had become, and Jillian’s, as well,

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now pressed awkwardly against mine, and I wondered what would happen to us. We had become a little strange, living together all by ourselves. Jillian had to get up early for classes; I had to stay up late to write” (31). Staying up late to write pre-empts an active or bolshy response to the crisis and becomes another form of paralysis, unalleviated by the fact that paralysis is the very subject of the writing. Even the following pronouncement—“Ultimately these historical parallels were of limited use in figuring out your personal life” (211)—does not condemn the practice of self- allegorization. Rather it seems to condemn the historical events for their inefficacy as allegories of the young men’s personal lives.

18 Their lack of utility stems partly, of course, from the arbitrary and scattergun manner in which Sam, Keith and Mark employ them. To cite but a few examples: Mark, distressed at the number of women who decide “to exercise their virtue” with him after shallow and disastrous sexual relationships with other men, decides that he is like Karl Liebknecht, “the German communist murdered in prison alongside Rosa Luxemburg after their bid for power failed in 1919” (104). Later he reflects on the difficulty of having two potential girlfriends in similarly overweening terms: “If meeting Celeste post-boyfriend was like arriving in in March 1917, hopeful March after the tsar’s abdication... then they were well into anarchic June or even forbidding July” (211). And Sam, perhaps the guiltiest of the three when it comes to allegorizing and trivializing, is bemused by images of Palestinians cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, and muses: “In their ability to fuck up a late lead they were truly the equals of the Boston Red Sox” (56).

19 In at least the first two examples, the allegory seems to position the protagonist simultaneously in the present and the past, mentally in both the here-and-now and the elsewhere. What renders the young men’s historical allegories essentially useless, however, is not simply their arbitrariness, but also the sense that the difference native to all extended metaphors (which is equal in importance to the assumed similarity of the figure), is exaggerated beyond any utility. In this case, for Mark to compare himself with Karl Liebknecht is not honestly to believe in their similarity, but instead to make a desperate bid to locate his banal present experience alongside something of historical importance which he nonetheless instinctively feels to be irreparably distant both chronologically and culturally from the present. When one conceives of history as discrete presents or epochs separated by ruptures, as these young men tend to do, then inevitably such supposed parallels cease to have any validity and one becomes paralyzed by the present.

20 Margaret Morse’s essay “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction” (1998) provides a useful starting point for the theorization of the particular form of paralysis of which Gessen is writing. As Morse says, the novel, along with film and theatre, has traditionally been associated with “split-belief—knowing a representation is not real, but nevertheless momentarily closing off the here-and-now and sinking into another world” (99). The “attenuated fiction effect” of distraction (Morse 99) differs from split-belief in its complexity: “it involves two or more objects and levels of attention and the copresence of two or more different, even contradictory, metapsychological effects” (99). The “here-and-now” and the “elsewhere” are expressed and experienced simultaneously or alternately, rather than the here-and-now being temporarily closed off. Her well- known triumvirate of examples of “somewhat-less-than-real” non-spaces (103) includes the mall, the freeway and television. We might want to add, as another form of what

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she dubs, borrowing from Raymond Williams, “mobile privatisation” (Morse 100) the virtual travel between non-spaces facilitated by the Internet and portrayed in the Google searches and pornographic diversions of the three main characters.

21 Morse’s closing reflections suggest strongly a spatiotemporal logic—a spatialized conception of the individual’s inability to engage with the contemporary moment. Like Fredric Jameson she diagnoses in the postmodern treatment of history an enervating “spatial turn” (Jameson 154) influenced by the rise of the non-space. For example, the characteristic mode of representation dominated by “the segment” (Morse 123), familiar from news coverage in which screens are split, images juxtaposed and a “crawl” permanently rolls along the bottom of the screen, heightens the fiction effect by relaxing audience attention to one dominant image or narrative and demanding involvement with several representational planes at once. Rather than seeing in this a democratizing potential, however, Morse is concerned that it mirrors, or indeed precipitates, a deterioration in our appreciation of history as something that changes, develops and educates (123). In other words, so distracted are we by these segments that we fail to understand the larger historical, political and ideological processes at work. Moreover, such modes of representation speak to “the dominance of one set of values” over another—the exchange value of ideas in the marketplace over the free, discursive exchange of ideas (Morse 121).

22 It is worth observing briefly, in the light of Morse’s ideas, how the non-spaces central to her argument come to dominate the lives and words of the characters. Most revealingly, Sam’s reaction to his first encounter with an Israeli checkpoint in Jenin is to complain about the difficulty of finding a parking space in Cambridge, the fact that “sometimes you have to drive around for an hour” (171). Typically, this observation represents a pitiful inability to see the checkpoint for what it is—a non-space with genuine geopolitical significance, affecting the lives of individuals while influencing global political currents—and a solipsistic tendency to reduce it to an allegory of Sam’s banal existence. Elsewhere, the planned mall in Syracuse becomes a constant presence in Mark’s narrative, an example of twisted capitalist priorities in a town where a psychopath kidnaps young women and hides them in a “dungeon in his backyard” (114). And as I have already noted, the seismic moments of politics and history tend to be witnessed on television, in a distracted state; we are told, for example, that “[o]n the day the World Trade Center was destroyed, Sam watched a lot of television. When television went into a loop, he resorted to the Internet” (Gessen 55). Sam also panics about his shrinking Google count and wrongly interprets it as an ontological statement about his social reality (87). Mark erroneously even regards the horribly monikered “Buck Fuck Bus” porn site as a place where sexual reality occurs, far away from his library-bound existence (107-108).

23 It is precisely because the writing in which Sam, Mark and Keith labor is so hopelessly entangled with these other arenas of distraction that it ceases to operate at the level of split-belief and becomes a mode of distraction itself. It is, in Morse’s terms, a derealized “non-space” between experience and representation (Morse 101), where discourse (that is, the life lived) and story (that is, the narration of that life) coalesce in a way that paralyses the writer, who finds him or herself unable to take risks or effect real change as he or she oscillates between different ontological dimensions. Moreover, the painful self-allegorizing in which these characters indulge—the use of historical events to portray their moribund relationships—coupled with Gessen’s attention to cars, malls,

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television and the Internet, risks rendering his writing as distraction, too. It is so full of temporal disjunctions and representational layers and planes, so consumed with the anxiety of not being quite in the here-and-now, that it could almost be described as a fiction about the fiction effect, a veritable “phantasmagoria of the interior” (Morse 100). The interpolated pictures of Lincoln, Lewinsky and an email in-box—distractions both in the conventional sense and in Morse’s more theoretical sense—only reinforce this view.

24 At the heart of the young men’s anxieties lie questions about the very nature of “the contemporary” and how a writer can hope to access and express it. Their inertia is brought about partly because their desire to engage with contemporary events is inevitably thwarted by the temporal delay between event, thought and representation. In trying to portray contemporary events, in other words, one is neither here nor there, and finds oneself caught in a temporal non-space, always slightly disengaged from the present because one is always lagging behind, trying to write about it. Again, there is nothing particularly new about this dilemma, but it is surely intensified, as has been suggested, by the immediate visual impact of an event like the attacks on the Twin Towers, captured on mobile phone cameras and live TV broadcasts. How can a writer hope to compete with this? How can he or she be edgy, risky or controversial when he or she always arrives on the scene after the calamity has taken place? And how can so- called contemporary writing mean anything ?

25 To offer a rebuttal posed as more questions: what if Keith, Mark and Sam are asking the wrong questions and misidentifying the problems? What if they are obsessed with the wrong kinds of events? And what if they are missing the true potential of All the Sad Young Literary Men and indeed of the novel as a form? To develop answers to these questions, and to edge tentatively toward a partially redemptive reading of a novel which is in many ways flawed and seems strangely unaware of its possibilities, it is useful to call upon an essay that remains one of the most cogent and persuasive formulations of the postmodern and notions of the contemporary: Jean-François Lyotard’s “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism” (1982). Lyotard’s analysis is especially useful because it avoids the enervating spatiotemporal metaphors which, according to Timothy Bewes in his excellent article on Paul Auster, bedevil many discussions of the contemporary in the otherwise compelling work of Jameson, Michaels and, one might add, Margaret Morse.i It therefore offers a way out of the paralysis that afflicts the young men and, perhaps, their author.

26 Central to Lyotard’s argument is “[t]he sublime sentiment, which is also the sentiment of the sublime” (Lyotard 77). A “strong and equivocal emotion” which “carries with it both pleasure and pain” (77), the sublime consists in “a conflict between the faculties of a subject, the faculty to conceive of something and the faculty to ‘present’ something” (77). So the sublime is experienced when “the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept” (78). In a world of cultural “eclecticism” and diversifying tastes (76), a world in which science and industry are no more about the promulgation of certainties than the arts and humanities, one experiences “a kind of flight of reality out of the metaphysical, religious, and political certainties that the mind believed it held” (77). The sublime sentiment emerges in the impossibility of representing a reality that has become plural and elusive. For Lyotard, this “shattering of belief” and the attendant discovery of the “‘lack of reality’ of

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reality” constitute modernity and lead to “the invention of other realities” (77) by means, partly, of experimental cultural forms.

27 But for all his talk of contemporary eclecticism and the influence of capital on taste (cultural value seen in terms of profit), Lyotard is not talking exclusively about a specific historical period, or indeed about the present. In contemplating modernity “in whichever age it appears,” Lyotard strives “to free it from a narrowly historicized interpretation” (77) by suggesting that any work in any age developed “according to the sublime relation between the presentable and the conceivable” (79) participates in the modern. Moreover, postmodernism, far from signifying an epoch succeeding modernism, inheres within modernism; it is that which: “puts forward the unrepresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of goodii forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that which searches for new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable” (81). If one accepts the sublime as Lyotard defines it, then this is a source both of pain—a sense of loss, of intangibility, of being unmoored—and pleasure—in new possibilities, freedom from stultifying norms.

28 So rather than indulging in nostalgia for lost reality or a crisis of confidence in an artist’s ability to portray reality, the present or contemporary events, postmodern artistic practice describes the aspiration to new forms, a process of becoming distinct from “familiar categories” (Lyotard 81). For this reason, writers and other artists “are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done. Hence the fact that work and text have the characters of an event” (Lyotard 81). Importantly, this kind of event is different from the news events obsessed over by Gessen’s characters: it is, as Timothy Bewes says, “irreducible to any moment in time— irreducible, that is to say, to any single historicization” (Bewes 278) and, in Lyotard’s thinking, conceived in paradox. Texts will “always come too late for their author, or, what amounts to the same thing, their being put into work, their realization (mise en oeuvre) always begin too soon” (Lyotard 81).

29 What is crucial here in relation to Gessen’s novel and the anxieties it rehearses, is that the work can never be about historical events as such, only about “the relation between possibility and actuality” (Bewes 278). And by implication the present is something of which one can conceive but cannot represent; like cognition, it “is always notoriously in the place where it’s not,” allowing one to perform everyday actions which would otherwise break down if the individual were to stop and reflect on them. Thus the present, like reality, “is what one sees when one is not looking” (Tabbi 98). Or, in Bewes’ words, “the present does not have any substantial actuality except in retrospect; except, that is to say, in imagination” (278). For Lyotard, the liberating potential of the postmodern text derives from this problematic temporality; it transcends mere commentary and is freed from any obligation to reflect on a particular historical moment precisely because it cannot. What it can do is formulate and apply new methods for the treatment of this impossibility and thus increase its own possibilities. In Jonathan Lethem’s words, it can concentrate on “what it alone can do— subjectivity, language, eccentric unsupported supposition, deep expressionist lying” (Gates and Lethem 131).

30 Gessen’s sad young men indulge, for the most part, in all the pain of the sublime and little of its potential pleasure. This is because they evidently want writing to be

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“political” and that “political” for them exists at the level of theme, content and their temporal proximity (or otherwise) to contemporary political events. Paralysis occurs when the writer realizes that anything he produces might only have significance fifty years in the future and that he cannot compete for immediacy with, say, the visual image or online commentary. There are two difficulties here. First, such a view assumes that “the present” can actually be experienced, measured and recorded, an assumption which Lyotard and Bewes show to be factitious. Thus a spatiotemporal conception of history as a series of presents punctuated with ruptures inevitably leads to paralysis and, moreover, belies the fact that the notion of what the “present” might be is itself ideological and subject to historicization. Yet such a conception is frequently revealed in the young men’s observations. Most troublingly, Sam’s belief that “the Holocaust happened under unique and terrible historical conditions, no longer ours” (Gessen 51) betrays an unwillingness to accept continuities, the danger of repetition or the ways in which a traumas such as the Holocaust inevitably disrupts attempts to represent it.

31 The second problem with these assumptions is precisely the dependence on the belief that the novel can only be political by virtue of its thematic concerns, its immersion in “issues.” Surely, however, literature is most political in terms of language and form, in, to cite Lyotard once more, its own potential as a process, an experiment and an “event.” The tank to which this article has referred might be considered a clumsy attempt to encapsulate a contemporary situation by employing a hulking great symbol of risk, conflict, issues and history. To include this symbolic detail, as well as historical figures such as Clinton, Lewinsky and Gore, is not as risky a strategy as formal adventure and experiment.

32 Yet ultimately the novel does more than simply present a problem. Toward its conclusion it offers glimpses of a less melancholic outlook, one more sensitive to historical continuities and to the formal possibilities of the novel itself as a kind of event. As we shall see it is Keith—unsurprisingly, perhaps, given his likely similarities to the author—who provides the most telling glimpses, the most hopeful hints at a way out of the inertia he and his fellow young men have been suffering. It is he who begins to reveal a modified view of history not as presents and ruptures, but as continuities, and also as something much more imagined and amorphous, in which past, present and possible futures constantly interact to problematize the very notion of the contemporary “moment” and to inform and inspire change. This is something fundamentally different from the trivial allegorizing of one’s experience through the use of historical figures and events. Instead, it exploits the potential of the novel’s idiosyncratic temporality, brought about because a novel takes time to write and therefore cannot react to and comment on contemporary events in an instantaneous way. Rather than seeing this situation of being “too late” as enervating and a cause for anxiety, it is expedient to turn the curious temporal disjunctions it throws up to one’s advantage.

33 Particularly pronounced in All the Sad Young Literary Men is a mode one might call “looking back on looking forward”: in this narrative mode, characters evince a kind of nostalgia for prolepsis which is incessantly challenged both by signals within the narrative of how things really turned out and, more importantly, by the supplementary, though never complete, knowledge afforded the reader after the event. At times, this nostalgia is complexly multi-layered, as in Sam’s reflections on the demise of his writing career: “The living writers of the world were Sam’s enemies,

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Sam’s nemeses. Sam was once a living writer himself, even better than a living writer, a future writer—there’d been a picture of Sam in one of the publisher’s catalogs” (81). To think of himself as “the former future author of a Zionist epic” (97) is tacitly to acknowledge not simply his eventual failure, but also the fact that all feelings, impulses and affects—anticipation, disappointment, resignation—have a temporal aspect and only make sense when one is liberated from a fixation on the mythical present moment.

34 Moreover, as Adam Kelly argues, supposedly defining moments and defining feelings can never be represented as such (“Moments of Decisions” 326). They can only emerge through an oscillation between different possibilities made more unstable by the temporal event of the novel’s writing and, in Kelly’s insightful phrase, the “undecidable and unpredictable futurity of interpretation” (327). This is because any significant event—Gore’s defeat, the arrival of the tank, the end of a romantic relationship— continues to disturb attempts to include it within a linear narrative, to fix it in time. Thus, in Paul Saint-Amour’s words, working through such events requires a sense of “the future anterior, the ‘will have been’ that proleptically crystallizes a view of the past as seen from the vantage of the future” (63). This is precisely the characteristic mode of Gessen’s novel. Time is “spatialized” (Saint-Amour 63), but not in the way Benn Michaels, Debray and to some extent Jameson and Morse conceive it; rather, it is an ethical space transcending simple linearity and allowing protagonist and reader to reflect on temporality itself, and on emotions and impulses evolving in time.

35 Saint-Amour’s evocative image of “shrapnel” scattered across “the past and the future” (63) perfectly describes the power of what is the pivotal scene in the novel, when Keith returns to his family home in Maryland and browses the shelves of his mother’s library: I got up and walked into the little library off the main living room, filled with my mother’s old books on Russian literature, most of them put out by the émigré presses—Ardis, L’Age d’Homme, YMCA-Presse. Like everyone else, she’d been forced into programming, Russians like some poorly dressed gang of programming mercenaries, but her old books from her old life had stayed, and occasionally I would look into them. The arguments no longer made much sense—over and over that Lenin was Stalin, that Brezhnev was Stalin, that if you didn’t think so, you were Stalin—but the type, so clumsy and cheap, not mass produced and thin, like the Soviet books on the shelves, but as if an individual had gone into the DNA of every letter and somehow made it look awkward on the page, each letter in a different way—the type spoke of a world in which publishing these words and getting them to readers was the most important thing imaginable. I did not long for this world; I knew very well how much it cost; and I did not feel rebuked by it. But having been lived in once, by people I knew, and in these books—the world remained. Here was this library, transported from Moscow to Clarksville and finally down I-97 to the water. (154-55)

36 On the one hand, Keith yearns for a time when books mattered this much and when the passion of their production could be felt in the objects themselves. But he is careful to reject facile nostalgia: instead he recognizes certain continuities, political engagements still resonating. Most of all, in considering the materiality of the pages, the awkwardness of the print, he understands that whether or not the content is still relevant (and his mockery of the debates about Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev suggests that it is not), the form, the book as an event, remains powerful.

37 It is Keith’s position of future anteriority, his ability to reflect on the disjunctions between his situation and the situation in which the books were produced, that allows

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him to appreciate both the continuities and the inevitable changes over time. Joyce Carol Oates, in her New York Times review of the novel, is therefore wrong to assert that the literary heritage evoked here is “secondhand” (“Youth!”). Such a word implies once again a view of history as discrete presents. What the library scene begins to reveal, however, is the idea that “everything one does reverberates through the universe eternally, so that there is no end to anything, technically speaking” (Gessen 237). Again, it is Keith who makes this claim, and again it suggests a much more amorphous temporality, one with ethical implications, one which demands a continuing sense of responsibility for one’s actions rather than an egocentric desire to be “in the moment.”

38 It is in light of these reflections that the ostensibly rather queasy optimism of the novel’s final paragraphs can be interpreted. Keith, sitting in a local bar, thinks about his past relationship with Jillian, his present relationship with Gwyn, now pregnant, and the rash promises he has made to himself. He realizes, in the reinvigorated knowledge that nothing is ever truly finished, the futility of wishing “the things that had happened had not actually happened” (Gessen 241). And he remembers how he admonished himself after Jillian’s departure: “No more proceeding on the basis of hope” (241). Yet from this rejection of hope as motivation he proceeds once more to a renewed optimism that inspires him to run home with a look to dissuading Gwyn from visiting the abortion clinic. His reasons for hope encapsulate both the best and the worst of the three sad young men: Because it wasn’t over yet, I thought, remembering my friends at Debate, my gentle social-democratic friends—there was still work to be done. A cabal of liars and hypocrites had stolen the White House, launched a criminal war, bankrupted our treasury, and authorized torture in our prisons. And now it was too late, as I have said—but also, you know, not too late. We had to live. And there were enough of us, I thought, if we just stuck together. We would take back the White House, and the statehouses and city halls and town councils. We’d keep the Congress. And in order to ensure a permanent left majority, Gwyn, we’d have many left-wing babies. My love. (242)

39 On the one hand, this reads like another desperate attempt to make Keith’s ideas “political” by including overtly political content. Indeed, the decision to call this final section “2008” (the year of publication), might be seen as a last-ditch effort on Gessen’s part to bring the content up-to-date. And whether or not Barack Obama’s second term might yet reward some of the idealism and optimism expressed here, might even make it seem prescient, the passage ultimately appears to dodge the bigger question of how literature can reinstate itself as something other than a distraction, how it can be anything other than always-already “too late.”

40 Yet, as I have been arguing, the virtue of the novel ultimately lies in its very inability to keep up with events. When Joyce Carol Oates calls the ending “wonderfully risky” (“Youth!”) she is absolutely right. It takes the profound risk of expressing a hope that is almost certain, in the gap between possibility and actuality, between writing and readerly interpretation, to be proved misplaced. In the end, then, real risk has nothing to do with standing in front of a tank, giving up a steady job, or investing all your energies in self-validation through Google counts. It has everything to do with writing something which, in terms of analysis of contemporary events or predictions of the future, is almost bound to be proved dated, irrelevant or just plain wrong but which also, in terms of enacting its wrongness and allowing readers to reflect on it, creates an ethical space unbound by strict linear history. In such a space (distinct from the closed

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spaces Timothy Bewes perceives in many discussions of the postmodern), where interpretations interact and where the fully temporal nature of human emotions is emphasized, one can be comforted to know that we are all connected by disappointment, that disappointment is instructive and that it can precipitate action, not paralysis.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bewes, Timothy. “Against the Ontology of the Present: Paul Auster’s Cinematographic Fictions.” Twentieth-Century Literature 53.3 (Fall 2007): 273-97. Print.

Debray, Régis. “Socialism: A Life-Cycle.” New Left Review 46 (July-August 2007): 5-28. Print.

Gates, David, and Jonathan Lethem. “A Kind of Vast Fiction.” The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. Ed. Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2011: 121-33. Print.

Gessen, Keith. All the Sad Young Literary Men. London: William Heinemann, 2008. Print.

“Is This Book Worth Getting? A No-Frills Guide to Five Just-Published New Novels.” New York 21 (April 2008), 15 March 2012 . Web.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991. Print.

Kelly, Adam. “From Syndrome to Sincerity: Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision.” Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: the Syndrome Syndrome.” Ed. T. J. Lustig and James Peacock. New York: Routledge, 2013. 53-66. Print.

---. “Moments of Decision in Contemporary American Fiction: Roth, Auster, Eugenides.” Critique 51 (2010): 313-32. Print.

Kelly, Alison. “‘Words Fail Me’: Literary Reaction to 9/11.” 21: A Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction 1 (Autumn-Winter 2008-9): 49-81. Print.

King, Owen. “Not quite as dire as having your spine ripped out, but...” The Late American Novel. 20-24. Print.

Kunkel, Benjamin. “Goodbye to the Graphosphere.” The Late American Novel. 31-39. Print.

---. Indecision. London: Picador, 2005. Print.

Lennon, John. “Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy).” Double Fantasy. Geffen. 1980.

Lichtig, Toby. “Pornography or Palestine? It’s Hard Being a Young Man.” Observer 27 April 2008: 24. Print.

Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Print.

Lyotard, Jean-François. “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?” Trans. Régis Durand. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. 1984. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005: 71-82. Print.

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Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print.

Morse, Margaret. “An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall, and Television.” Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Print.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Youth!” Rev. of All the Sad Young Literary Men, by Keith Gessen. New York Review of Books 55.7 (1 May 2008), 15 March 2012. Web. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21316>

Roth, Philip. “Writing American Fiction.” Commentary 31.3 (March 1961): 223-33. Print.

Saint-Amour, Paul K. “Bombing and the Symptom: Traumatic Earliness and the Nuclear Uncanny.” Diacritics 30.4 (2002): 59–82. Print.

Scott, A. O. “Among the Believers.” New York Times 11 (September 2005): 38. Print.

Tabbi, Joseph. Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.

Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA and London: Press, 1991. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. [1925] London: Grafton, 1992. Print.

NOTES i. It should be noted that Jameson acknowledges postmodernism’s preoccupation with ruptures. It “looks for breaks, for events rather than new worlds, for the telltale instant after which it is no longer the same; for the ‘When-it-all-changed,’ as [William] Gibson puts it, or better still, for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and of the way they change” (ix). Bewes’ point is that Jameson’s use of spatial metaphors creates a kind of tautology or self-circuit in subscribing to the same preoccupations he describes. ii. By “good” Lyotard means conventional, established, predictable.

ABSTRACTS

Keith Gessen’s debut novel is not a “post-9/11” text in the manner of Falling Man or Terrorist. It is not concerned, explicitly, with the aftermath of the attacks. Like many “post-9/11” texts, however, it asks questions about the ability of twenty-first century writers to tackle big issues— tragedy, violence, history. The three main characters—Sam, Mark and Keith—are Ivy League- educated writers with an extensive knowledge of history, but have disengaged from history precisely because they live in books. This article explores the ways in which Gessen seems ironically to make writing the opposite of risk in an increasingly risky world. For these young men it becomes, along with Google searches and internet pornography, a form of distraction. Gessen poses a problem: writing has a responsibility to address historic events

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contemporaneously but increasingly, in competition with the visual image, only has power or purpose when viewed retrospectively as part of an earlier structure of feeling.

AUTHOR

JAMES PEACOCK Keele University

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‘Twisting herself into all shapes’: blackface minstrelsy and comic performance in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig

Elizabeth Boyle

1. Introduction

1 The idea for this article sprang from a seemingly simple question: why are there so many practical jokes played in Harriet Wilson’s novel, Our Nig (1859)? Although the novel—generally recognised as the first to be published in the United States by an African American—centres on the tragic story of a young, mulatto indentured servant mistreated by her Northern mistress, the narrative consistently undermines its mid- nineteenth century sentimental framework by including short comic sketches performed by the supposedly tragic protagonist, who nevertheless ‘was ever at some sly prank’, and would often ‘venture far beyond propriety’ in entertaining herself and those around her (Wilson 38). Are these comic interruptions evidence of narrative inconsistency? Or, is Wilson’s persistent inclusion of the figure of the black comic performer in fact a shrewd exploration of a powerfully resonant theatrical tradition and its manifold racial discourses? And what does it mean for a female African American author writing at the crux of the ‘slavery question’ in the run-up to the Civil War—and near the peak of blackface minstrel popularity—to delve into the complex social meanings behind popular comic performances of blackness? Why these pranks, in this manner, at this time?

2 Exploring these questions means a careful assessment of Wilson and her contemporaries. In doing so, it soon becomes apparent that there are many comedians like Wilson’s protagonist in African American antebellum culture in the decades before the Civil War: jokers, tricksters, conjurers and wits (authors, actors and characters) committed to using a spectacular brand of humour to address the violence of racism

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and slavery, the kind of black humour which has only very recently begun attracting serious scholarship.i Frederick Douglass performed burlesques on the abolitionist stage early in his career and, as Granville Ganter has shown in his recent article, ‘“He Made Us Laugh Some”: Frederick Douglass’s Humor’, a theatrical sense of satire is integral to his later autobiographical work. William Wells Brown drew ‘dark comedy’ from aspects of voodoo and conjure, argues Glenda Carpio, which dramatically ‘signif[ied] on chattel slavery’s transformation of people into objects’ (15-16). The black actor William Henry Lane, known as ‘Juba’ and celebrated in Charles Dickens’s American Notes (1842)as the best popular dancer of the day, knowingly mimicked ‘million[s] of counterfeit Jim Crows’ on the minstrel stage (139). And the racially ambiguous actress Adah Isaacs Menken’s legendary skin-coloured body suit transformed her performances of Mazeppa into a sensational play on racial and gender ideologies (Brooks 164). Taken together, they represent the full heterogeneity of black popular performance culture in this period. In their influential studies of black humour, both Mel Watkins and Carpio have noted that such performances use humour in a similar way, producing laughter by focusing on the ‘theatricality and tenacity of stereotypes’ that underpinned contemporary perceptions of African Americans (Carpio 17). Michael Rogin, moreover, has done a great deal to reveal the long-lasting influence of blackface on broad comedy in early twentieth century ‘talking’ motion pictures like The Jazz Singer (1927) and subsequent traditions of transgressive American comedy. Douglass, Brown, Lane, and Mencken, therefore, create historically significant and potentially radical relationships with the nineteenth century theatrical tradition of blackface minstrelsy, one of the ‘first mass-media forums to claim to represent African Americans for the nation as a whole’ and a major ‘source of racist iconography’—especially, crudely exaggerated images of black bodies including the rolling eyes and enormous painted lips of the happy slave Jim Crow; the long, sexually suggestive coat-tails hanging between the legs of the dandy Zip Coon; or the enormous hips and buttocks of the mammy and jezebel figures (Carpio 23-24). In their writing and their stage performances alike, Juba, Douglass, Menken and others frequently used the body as a spectacular medium through which these racial stereotypes could be brought to life, transmitted and— crucially—resisted.

3 Can Wilson and her narrative pranks be read as part of this group of spectacular comic performers? African American female authors also used humour throughout the nineteenth century, although critics usually either overlook this aspect of their writing or argue that their humour is inevitably more curtailed than male-authored examples: essentially earnest, ‘largely textual’ and ‘neither necessarily politically radical nor performed’ (Carpio 66).ii It has been argued, for example, that ex-slave Harriet Jacobs uses mild ridicule throughout her slave narrative, Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl (1861), in order to highlight the perversity at the heart of Southern slave society, but avoids using the more spectacular forms of body humour like masquerade, burlesque and hyperbole in order to ‘guard against the always potential discursive consumption’ of her body, something to which black women were doubly vulnerable in antebellum society (Carpio 70). Although many critics, like Elizabeth Breau in her groundbreaking article ‘Identifying Satire: Our Nig’ (1993), now agree that Wilson makes more thorough use of satire than Jacobs, and is, moreover, one of only a handful of black authors of any gender to risk making Northern racism rather than Southern slavery her primary subject, others like Carpio still insist that Wilson’s humour, like that of Jacobs, remains limited by considerations of gender. They argue that while Wilson’s satire may boldly

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represent and repudiate the violence of racism (this time, cruelty to a servant rather than a slave), its impact is still limited by the crucial distance that satire creates between reader and the site of violence.iii Wilson’s descriptions of the torture inflicted on her juvenile mulatto protagonist Frado (pejoratively known as ‘Nig’) by her white mistress Mrs Bellmont may be drawn from Wilson’s own true-life experience as an indentured servant in New Hampshire but they are written with deliberate emotional detachment in order to ‘prevent the commodification of her pain’ and deflect readers instead towards the full force of her anger. Rather than a performative humour that inspires laughter, the consensus is that Wilson chose a cold and earnest form of satire that ‘ultimately alienated readers’ (Carpio 70). It is certainly true that Wilson’s novel sank without trace, receiving no attention from the Northern abolitionist or black presses, despite attempts in the novel’s preface to attract both white readers among ‘our good anti-slavery friends at home’ and African American readers, to whom she appeals ‘universally for patronage’ (3).iv And Wilson’s humour threatens to come unstuck in another, more profound way, too: by restricting Frado’s body to a single satirical function (exposing the cruelty of her mistress), she risks enacting ‘in narrative form the silencing to which Mrs Bellmont consistently subjects Frado’ (Carpio 70).

4 Yet Wilson’s humour is not as uniform, nor Frado’s body as guarded as these critics suggest. This article argues that the practical jokes that run throughout Our Nig are evidence of a deliberate and sophisticated comic strategy that exploits the spectacular body’s potential for subversive performance. While initially utilising the crude humour of minstrelsy, Wilson deliberately capitalises on her readers’ laughter in order to deliver a radical message about the ways in which race is constructed and displayed in the antebellum period—both in popular performance culture and in the system of indentured servitude to which Wilson is vigorously opposed. The article demonstrates Wilson’s strategy in three sections: first, it shows how she uses Frado’s comic body to animate and then defamiliarise the Topsy stereotype (familiar to her readers from popular theatrical ‘Tom Shows’) in order to expose the alienation and dispossession at the heart of popular performances of blackness. The article also considers how Wilson uses Frado to reinterpret other popular stereotypes—particularly, the minstrel clowns Jim Crow and Zip Coon and the minstrel trickster Jasper Jack—in order to highlight the violence inherent in racist caricature. The third and final section demonstrates how Wilson turns the joke on her white readers in an extended burlesque of the Bellmont family that ultimately reveals whiteness, like blackness, as a performative identity. Taken as a whole, Wilson’s comic strategy, with its ‘embodied insurgency’, aligns her with the period’s most politically racial African American performers (Brooks 3).

2. Defamiliarising Topsy

5 Wilson’s most overlooked literary skill is her ability as a mimic of white popular culture and the ways in which this culture often spectacularly and systematically objectified black people in the antebellum period. In particular, Wilson imitates the many theatrical blackface ‘Tom Shows’ that flourished throughout the United States after the publication of Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and especially the character of the mischievous slave girl Topsy, which despite its sentimental roots had become an increasingly clownish and one-dimensional role in the hands of professional adapters like George Aiken and H. J. Conway and theatrical impresarios like P. T. Barnum. Re- casting its readership as an audience and frequently creating impromptu theatres from

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its imagined rural landscape, the text references the dramatic tradition of these ‘Tom Shows’ and encourages readers to identify Our Nig’s eight-year-old mulatto protagonist Frado as only the most recent example in a long line of highly conspicuous, grossly excessive Topsy characters. Readers may well have laughed thoughtlessly at the spectacle, just as Conway’s ‘saucy pert negress’ or Aiken’s blackface Topsy, ‘more tangle-haired, and moping and grinning than in the original [novel]’, amused theatre audiences and provided light relief from the more melodramatic scenes of the play (‘Boston Museum—Uncle Tom’s Cabin’; H).

6 However, Wilson’s hyperbolic depictions of Frado/Topsy also exploit this thoughtless laughter, by repurposing it in support of what becomes a radical performance of African American liberation. Topsy’s hyper-visible body is transformed by Frado’s opaque performances. This process of defamiliarisation occurs within Our Nig in a number of ways: first and most importantly, as a mulatto performing a Topsy role, Frado undermines by default the many counterfeit blackface Topsys in public circulation. If, as Saidiya Hartman has argued, ‘the donning of blackface restaged the seizure and possession of the black body for the other’s use and enjoyment’, then Frado’s performance, as the genuine article in racial drag, is an ironic reclamation of that alienated black body by rendering the symbolic power of the blackface mask redundant (31-32). While the same might be said of every black performing in minstrel shows during this period, Frado’s sex and her extreme youth mark her out as an unusual minstrel. Moreover, her exaggerated use of costume, material props and physical gesture allows her to escape the temporal and spatial restrictions placed on the spectacular Topsy figure—what Daphne Brooks calls the ‘tyranny of stillness’ behind images of black women in the New World—and enable her body to move and grow in empowering ways (6).

7 Such a result is a considerable achievement, since alienation and dispossession were at the heart of most ‘Tom Show’ performances of Topsy. Mrs Caroline Fox Howard’s famous rendition of the character in popular stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin during the 1850s and 1860s reputedly ‘delighted’ Stowe herself, but like most other Topsy interpretations, her performance was heavily dependent on representational exploitation, in effect reducing the image of a black woman’s body to ‘infinitely deconstructable “othered” matter’ (Lott 221; duCille 70). Like blackface minstrels, Howard’s European features were only thinly disguised behind the burnt cork and woolly wig she wore on stage and her ersatz black dialect—‘I ’spects I’s de wickedest critter in de world’—barely concealed her cultured Boston accent; the obvious racial deceit of the blackface figure was part of the in-joke, a sly, knowing wink to the audience acknowledging how easily this flimsy performance of ‘otherness’ could be dismantled (Aiken II.4). Moreover, the sheer number of Howard’s performances bound the character to a prescriptive physical routine and invested her with a humiliating sense of timelessness. Howard was twenty-three years old when she first took on the role in 1852, and before she retired thirty-five years later in 1887 she would play the adolescent Topsy over five thousand times. The gross incongruity in age between actress and character on stage was further exaggerated by Howard’s over-sized pinafore costume and her famous ‘dance breakdowns’, which, like many set-pieces within blackface minstrel shows, also ‘fetishize[d] the body in a spectacle that worked against the forward motion of the show, interrupting the flow of action with uproarious spectacles for erotic consumption’ (Lott 223, 140). Therefore, whereas

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Stowe’s literary character demonstrates her ability for moral growth by pledging to better herself on Little Eva’s death, the more spectacular ‘Tom Show’ Topsy figure is permanently dispossessed of both personal history and narrative development.

Figure 1: Caroline Fox Howard as ‘Topsy’ in Uncle Tom's Cabin, c. 1854.

8 Two examples illustrate Wilson’ dramatic process of defamiliarisation. First, Frado’s initial appearance in Our Nig reinforces her similarity to the spectacular ‘Tom Show’ stereotype. Wilson describes her as a ‘wild, frolicky thing’ with ‘long curly black hair and handsome, roguish eyes, sparkling with an exuberance of spirit almost beyond restraint’ (17-18). This exuberance leads to a boisterous confrontation with her stepfather, Seth, during which she pushes him from a chair with ‘a sudden jerk which destroyed Seth’s equilibrium, left him sprawling on the floor, [after] which she escaped though the open door’ (19). The scene’s emphasis on exhibition and physical excess from Frado’s lush hair to the energy of her attack) overtly recalls the slapstick that was a familiar part of Topsy’s routine in ‘Tom Shows’. However, the text undermines this connection to blackface performance by simultaneously emphasising that Frado is not wearing racial drag, but is a genuine mulatto. The realistic portrayal of Frado’s mixed racial heritage, placed so closely to crude blackface action, only serves to frustrate the symbolic power of the blackface mask.

9 The second example of Wilson’s method demonstrates the importance of action, costume and material props, rather than realism, in the defamiliarisation process. Although now a servant on the Bellmonts’ farm, Frado is allowed to periodically attend the local school. Here, a clear link is established between costume, display and racial categorisation. Just as Topsy’s rags clearly identified her as a slave girl to a ‘Tom Show’ audience, so Frado’s rags immediately distinguish her as an indentured servant and therefore a hyper-visible object of racial derision to her quasi-audience of Northern schoolmates: ‘As soon as she appeared, with scanty clothing and bared feet, the

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children assembled...“See that nigger,” shouted one. “Look! Look!” cried another’ (31). However, Wilson uses costume again to imagine ways in which Frado’s subjugated, ‘looked-at’ body can move more freely by embracing what Carla Peterson calls an ‘empowering oddness’ (xi). Frado reappears next season in ‘her winter over-dress’, which includes ‘a cast-off overcoat, once worn by Jack [Bellmont], and a sun-bonnet’ (Wilson 37). This eccentric outfit is accessorised with other strange material props: The teacher’s desk was supplied with drawers, in which were stored his books and other et ceteras of the profession. The children observed Nig very busy there one morning before school, as they flitted in occasionally from their play outside. The master came; called the children to order; opened a drawer to take the book the occasion required; when out poured a volume of smoke. ‘Fire! fire!’ screamed he, at the top of his voice. By this time he had become sufficiently acquainted with the peculiar odor, to know he was imposed upon. The scholars shouted with laughter to see the terror of the dupe, who, feeling abashed at the needless fright, made no very strict investigation, and Nig once more escaped punishment. She had provided herself with cigars, and puffing, puffing away at the crack of the drawer, had filled it with smoke and then closed it tightly to deceive the teacher, and amuse the scholars (38-39).

10 Frado’s body is transformed into a ‘canvass of dissent’ that functions in terms of both race and gender (Brooks 6). The mixed gender signals of her costume (a ladylike bonnet and the boyish overcoat) and her props (especially the phallic cigar, which she handles so expertly) allow Frado to further exploit her fellow pupils’ fascination with her seemingly-misfit body: they are now unsure whether she is a girl or a boy, let alone a black servant or a white schoolmate, and she uses this delightful, confusing opacity to counteract the horrendous transparency of her previous roles. Her androgynous performance also allows her to unmask the gender performances of others too, most notably her school teacher, whose rather brittle masculine authority gives way very easily to melodramatic screams and girlish embarrassment.

11 As such, then, these scenes in Our Nig expose the radical gender dimensions of Wilson’s work and align her more strikingly with Menken and her spectacular bodysuit than with contemporary male performers, since both Frado and Mencken’s bodies are marked and sexualized differently and are therefore able to invoke and critique a different set of discourses. Like Mencken, whose ‘nude’ performances both attracted and repelled contemporary theatre-goers while reliably driving up her ticket sales, Frado’s defamiliarising gender performance is simultaneously disturbing and fascinating to the schoolchildren and brings her substantial profit (although social rather than financial in this case). The knowing exploitation of her own and others’ slippery gender identities draws ‘merriment from the children’ who ‘shielded and countenanced’ her, turning laughter into a social weapon and repelling the bitter racism and physical abuse of the younger Bellmont daughter, Mary: ‘Nig’s retorts were so mirthful…that it was not painful to Nig or pleasurable to Mary. Her jollity was not to be quenched by whipping or scolding’ (Wilson 37-38).

12 These two examples illustrate the variety of ways in which Wilson defamiliarises the comic Topsy stereotype, and the role this process plays in exposing and resisting the alienation at the root of both ‘Tom Shows’ and the system of black indentured servitude itself. Having thus considered the body politics of Our Nig in the light of ‘Tom Shows’, which were a strange hybrid of melodramatic theatre and minstrelsy, let us now explore the novel’s relationship to the mainstream minstrel stage and Wilson’s attack on the violence that lay behind images of blackness in this period.

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3. Violence and laughter

13 In his study of Douglass’s humour, Ganter notes that ‘American ethnic humor is often bound up in a violent sociological struggle for minority recognition and survival’ (542). As Ganter argues, taking a leaf from Joseph Boskin and Joseph Dorinson’s ‘Ethnic Humor: Subversion and Survival’ (1985), in times of racial conflict comedy can be used as both defence and attack as ethnic groups seek to blend in with but also assert their independence from the dominant culture. Likewise, Our Nig, published nine short, turbulent years after the divisive Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and just two years before the outbreak of Civil War, both tries to make its white readers laugh and threatens them. While Wilson’s comic Topsy ‘act’ threatens to blur social and racial categories in troubling ways, her narrative reinterpretation of the more mainstream minstrel characters Jim Crow, Zip Coon and Jasper Jack offers a more aggressive challenge to her white readers. This section explores this dimension of Our Nig. As with the previous examples, Wilson’s text makes links between Frado and these three minstrel characters, provoking laughter, but also a sense of disturbance, at the spectacle of Frado’s pained and painful body. Minstrel stereotypes, of course, functioned by denying African Americans control of their own bodies, emphasising the body as a comic object consumable by white society through ritual performances of pain and humiliation. Freud suggested that humour’s primary function was to relieve repressed anxiety, and so ‘the black mask offered a way to play with the collective [antebellum] fears of a degraded and threatening—and male—Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them’ (Lott 25). However, Wilson again presents Frado’s performances in a ‘knowing’ way, reclaiming symbolic control over these racialised discourses of violence and refracting them back towards the reader. Read in this way, Our Nig becomes an aggressive liberation narrative.

14 Three examples illustrate this pugnacious element of Wilson’s comic strategy. Firstly, she punctuates Frado’s experience as an indentured servant with numerous spectacular brushes with death by drowning or exposure that are both amusing and serious at the same time, a ghoulish litany that culminates in a reckless attempt to climb to the roof of the Bellmonts’ barn: Some repairs having been necessary, a staging had been erected, and was not wholly removed. Availing herself of ladders, [Frado] was mounted in high glee on the top-most board. Mr Bellmont called sternly for her to come down; poor Jane nearly fainted from fear. Mrs B. and Mary did not care if she ‘broke her neck,’ while Jack and the men laughed at her fearlessness (53).

15 The comic framing of this scene is clear from the easy way in which the barn becomes a theatre, complete with ‘staging’ and boards to tread, a ‘gleeful’ black clown and an exuberant white audience, the largest section of which is made up of an appreciative group of farm labourers—young, working-class men similar to the sort that frequented the theatres of lower Manhattan in the 1830s and 1840s to cheer at the early minstrel shows there. The rural narrative setting immediately recalls the rural plantation scenes that regularly formed the backdrop for Jim Crow stage performances. And, like so many crooked-backed, shuffle-dancing minstrel Jim Crows before her, the image of Frado’s dangerously exposed, dancing body is eagerly consumed, digested and imaginatively reduced to a ‘broken neck’, the very thought of which produces various pleasurable sensations in the watching crowd and, by inference, in the reader too. Through the

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action of what Eric Lott calls the ‘pale gaze’, blackness is made the imaginary locus of pain, disfigurement and death (153). Despite the familiar comic framework and the easy laugh it was bound to generate in antebellum audiences, however, the real threat of this scene nevertheless lies in Wilson’s knowing performance of the Jim Crow stereotype and the conscious hyperbole of the spectacle, which defamiliarises Frado’s body and reasserts narrative control over minstrelsy’s racial pathologies.

16 Wilson maintains this tension between laughter and threat elsewhere in the narrative, too, but extends it towards other minstrel types. ‘Occasionally,’ we are told, ‘[Frado] would utter some funny thing for Jack [Bellmont]’s benefit, while she was waiting on the table, provoking a sharp look from his mother, or expulsion from the room’ (53). And, halfway through the novel, Frado provokes a domestic farce that laughingly recalls the comic figure of dandy Zip Coon but conceals more dangerous implications for white readers: Frado seated herself in her mistress’s chair, and was just reaching for a clean dessert plate which was on the table, when her mistress entered. ‘Put that plate down; you shall not have a clean one; eat from mine,’ continued she. Nig hesitated. To eat after James, his wife or Jack would have been pleasant; but to be commanded to do what was disagreeable by her mistress, because it was disagreeable, was trying. Quickly looking about, she took the plate, called Fido to wash it, which he did to the best of his ability; then, wiping her knife and fork on the cloth, she proceeded to eat her dinner. Nig never looked toward her mistress during the process (71).

17 The American entertainer George Washington Dixon created the dandy character of Zip Coon in 1834 to mock the social and political pretensions of free blacks in the North, who were then growing rapidly in number. Frado’s comic pretensions in this scene are similarly rebuked by way of the striking similarity between her and Zip Coon. Social norms are aggressively restored when Frado is beaten by Mrs Bellmont—who threatens to ‘cut her tongue out’—and ridiculed by Jack, who, ‘boiling over with laughter’ at her minstrel-like affectations, throws her a half-dollar coin: ‘There, take that; ’t was worth paying for’ (72). Again, the positions of reader and audience are conflated and their laughter comes at the expense of an easy association between blackness and abjection. Yet the scene itself, which owes much to the visual humour of the minstrel stage with its incongruous tableau of mistress, servant and dog, turns on the crucial irony that Frado has a better understanding of social etiquette than Mrs Bellmont. By ostentatiously cleaning the cutlery and preferring a dog’s hygiene over that of her mistress, she not only demonstrates that she knows her table manners, but she also skilfully inverts the pernicious antebellum ideology that so frequently equated African Americans with animals. Just as Jim Crow’s exaggerated body works to reclaim itself from the pathological ‘pale gaze’ by embracing excess, so, by exaggerating Zip Coon’s usual pathetic pomposity and transforming it into something more lean and mean, more unscripted and unpredictable, Wilson reimagines the way his and other African American bodies are seen in antebellum culture. The ridiculous Zip Coon is pointedly animated, infiltrated and re-appropriated in Our Nig as an image of African American bullish self-assertion.

18 Wilson’s careful balance between laughter and aggression comes dangerously close to collapse in other scenes, however. In these scenes, Frado performs the role of the minstrel trickster, a rare figure typically known as Jasper Jack. By consistently outsmarting his white master, he exemplified antislavery sentiment and was thus a useful model for Wilson. Frado’s comic tussle with Mary on the banks of a stream in

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Chapter Three, for example, leaves the Bellmont girl utterly outsmarted, ‘dripping’ and ‘half crying’ (34). The tussle is carefully re-staged metaphorically in Chapter Five, but in this second scene, Frado’s trickster body is exaggerated and the attack on the ‘white’ body is unmistakable: Among the sheep was a willful leader, who always persisted in being first served, and many times in his fury he had thrown down Nig till, provoked, she resolved to punish him…Just as he leaped for the dish, she suddenly jumped one side, when down he rolled into the river, and swimming across, remained alone until night (54-55).

19 Instead of fixed in spectacular ways, Frado’s body becomes fluid and unpredictable in this scene: ‘she hopped about on her toes, and with laughable grimaces replied, she knew she was quick enough to “give him the slide”’ (55). Her physical gestures betray the threatening doubleness of her act, ‘grimaces’ within the laughter. Moreover, Frado’s tricky body is not the only threat to Bellmont land and property. Although watching farm labourers ‘convulse with laughter’ at Frado’s joke because they are familiar with Jasper Jack and find it easy to respond to Frado as a variation on the theme, they also ‘guess at once [the] object’ of the prank and this knowledge makes their laughter dangerous. Lott has argued that antebellum minstrelsy represented a ‘condensation of working-class and racial impulses’, and the minstrel show was often ‘useful in figuring class struggle’ (208). The farm labourers’ laughter might be interpreted, therefore, as an open acknowledgment and condoning of Frado’s aggression towards her white employers. A double ‘laughing’ threat to the Bellmonts’ power exists here, then, emerging from both racially and socially ‘othered’ groups. These three examples demonstrate the way in which Wilson’s ‘laughing’ comedy of stereotypes operates in relation to the mainstream minstrel stage, using its comic violence to engage the interest of her readership, while simultaneously defamiliarising that violence through exaggeration and a sense of knowingness, eventually reflecting that violence back towards the reader. Let us now turn to the final element of Wilson’s comic strategy, one that strains the goodwill of the reader to breaking point.

4. Burlesquing whiteness

20 Toni Morrison has argued in Playing in the Dark (1992) that the power of whiteness in literature lies in its nameless, invisible status. Reviewing the evidence of classic American texts like Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn, Morrison suggests that ‘if we follow through on the self-reflexive nature of these encounters with Africanism, it falls clear: images of blackness canbe evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable—all of the self-contradictory features of the self. Whiteness alone is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable’ (59). In popular performance culture, too, whiteness remains powerful but ‘veiled’ behind the ever-changing spectacular blackface mask. If Wilson is concerned with disrupting the spectacle of blackness through slippery, opaque performance, she is equally interested in using performance strategies to disrupt the idea of whiteness. In an extension of her comic strategy so far, she seeks to name whiteness in as many humorous, spectacular ways as possible. The Bellmonts, as the most visible white characters in Our Nig, become the primary focus of her efforts and are variously burlesqued as Southern grotesques, circus performers, lunatics, dupes and even, in a satiric twist worthy of Wilson’s savage reputation, as blackface performers themselves.

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The ultimate effect is not only to make whiteness visible through the prism of antebellum popular culture, but also to suggest that whiteness, like blackness, is a performative identity.

21 Wilson’s central burlesque in Our Nig relies heavily on incongruous humour. According to a theory first articulated by Schopenhauer in 1818 and developed by Hazlitt in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819), laughter is produced by incongruity. Hazlitt suggests that ‘the essence of the laughable...is the incongruous, the disconnecting one idea from another, or the jostling of one feeling against another’ (Hazlitt 414). As a consequence, incongruous humour emphasises change rather than consolidation; it ‘allows us to see the world inverted’ and ‘to question the habits of mind that we may fall into as we critique race’ (Carpio 7). It is this dramatic shift in perspective that Wilson is aiming for when she critiques images of whiteness in Our Nig. The narrative of Our Nig pivots on a major geographical incongruity: although Wilson frequently invokes the Southern characters and scenes, the novel’s action is set exclusively in the rural North. This geographical discontinuity is designed to have an unsettling effect on the way Wilson’s Northern white readers saw themselves. Proud white families with strong abolitionist connections like the New Hampshire Hutchinsons and Haywards (a direct model for the Bellmonts in Our Nig) are conflated in Wilson’s narrative with grotesque Southern plantation stereotypes in a series of low burlesques reminiscent of minstrel ‘afterpiece’ pastiches (White xxvi). The ‘real’ Mrs Bellmont may have descended from one of the ‘Pilgrim Mothers’, but in the narrative she is reduced to a ‘she-devil’, indistinguishable during her many melodramatic ‘kitchen scenes’ and punishment ‘performances’ from the wicked plantation mistress type; as the narrative progresses, the sympathetic but weak Mr Bellmont is also revealed to be as complicit in racist violence as any stock plantation master (although perhaps more ridiculous), and at least one of the Bellmont sons is as rakish and casually racist as any Southern stage dandy (White xv; Wilson 17, 66, 44).

22 However, Wilson’s burlesque of whiteness finds its true target in the character of Mary Bellmont. At school, ‘self-willed, domineering’ Mary’s inability to charm her audience means that instead she becomes spectacularly lunatic in the eyes of the other schoolchildren, ‘everyday reported “mad” by some of her companions’ (33). At home, Mary performs her own spectacular burlesque mid-way through the novel by hurling a large carving knife at Frado: ‘[d]odging quickly, it fastened in the ceiling a few inches from where [Frado] stood. There rushed on Mary’s mental vision a picture of bloodshed, in which she was the perpetrator, and the sad consequences of what was so nearly an actual occurrence’ (65). By drawing such a strongly visual, even darkly comic, parallels between Mary’s excessive cruelty, madness and the spectacular circus culture then flourishing in antebellum America, both scenes do a thorough job of ridiculing the empty theatricality of Mary’s social and moral status in the novel and, by extension, the status of all Northern white readers. The moment Wilson’s readers recognise themselves in these burlesques is set up as a moment of incongruous comedy, in which certainties about their own hotly-defended geographical and political positions, including abolitionism, would have been turned upside down, leaving them exposed to the sharp edge of Wilson’s humour. The nameless power of whiteness is most thoroughly debunked, however, on the event of Mary’s death in the closing stages of the novel, when she is reimagined by Frado not as a white angel but as a black devil: ‘she’s dead, Aunt Abby! ... She got into the river again, Aunt Abby, didn’t she; the Jordan

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is a big one to tumble into, any how. S’posen she goes to hell, she’ll be as black as I am. Wouldn’t mistress be mad to see her a nigger!’ (107). It is entirely consistent with Wilson’s larger comic project that such an image should draw so overtly on a performative model of humour. The doubleness of the blackface mask is now reappropriated by Frado in order to expose and name Mary as she truly was—‘as black as I am’. ‘Having no genuine content other than a culturally manufactured one’, whiteness and blackness are optical illusions to Wilson (Babb 16).

5. Conclusion

23 Since Breau’s 1993 article, it has become popular to think of Wilson as a powerful satiric voice. Her passionate attack on racial and religious hypocrisy, her defence of social justice and the rights of indentured servants, even her ties to abolitionism are mediated through her excoriating brand of humour. Although her novel was not widely read at the time, Wilson clearly believed in the efficacy of language to inspire change. In this respect, we are bound to see her in the context of other Northern antebellum writers—Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller; Garrison, Douglass and Stowe—and their belief in free speech and the revolutionary power of the ‘renovated tongue’ (Gilmore 76). Rather than defining Wilson strictly in these rhetorical terms, however, the violent slapstick, cross-dressing and incongruous burlesque in Our Nig bear witness to the transformative influence of performance on her humour, in particular the bodily discourses of contemporary blackface minstrelsy and their ambiguous potential. The decade before the Civil War saw an explosion in black popular performance culture that inevitably permeated contemporary literary works. Like Juba’s dance acts, Douglass and Brown’s abolitionist jokes and plays, or Menken’s drag spectaculars, Wilson’s knowing use of racial stereotypes and her emphasis on slippery, opaque performance offered her new opportunities to communicate in engaging and powerful ways. Reading Our Nig with the knowledge of Wilson’s later career as a spiritualist medium, it is unsurprising that her first and only literary venture was as much about the ‘renovated body’, as the ‘renovated tongue’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aiken, George L. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. A Domestic Drama in Six Acts. New York: Samuel French, 1858. Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive. Dir. Stephen Railton. 13 July 2012

Babb, Valerie. Whiteness Visible: The Meaning of Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Boskin, Joseph and Joseph Dorinson. ‘Ethnic Humor: Subversion and Survival.’ American Quarterly 37.1 (1985): 81-97.

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Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.

Breau, Elizabeth. ‘Identifying Satire: Our Nig.’ Callaloo 16. 2 (1993): 455-65.

Brooks, Daphne A. Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006.

Carpio, Glenda R. Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Dickens, Charles. American Notes [1842]. New York: Penguin, 1972. duCille, Ann. ‘The Occult of True Blackwomanood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies.’ The Second Signs Reader: Feminist Scholarship, 1983-1996. Eds. Ruth Ellen B. Joeres and Barbara Laslett. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 70-108.

Ellis, R. J. Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: A Cultural Biography of a ‘Two-story’ African American Novel. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2003.

Ferguson, Jefferey B. The Sage of Sugar Hill: George Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle, ‘Introduction.’ Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black [1859]. Ed. P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts. 2nd ed. New York: Penguin, 2009. xxv-lv.

Ganter, Granville. ‘“He Made Us Laugh Some”: Frederick Douglass’s Humor.’ African American Review, 37:4 (2003): 535-552.

Gates, ‘Introduction.’ Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black [1859]. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 3rd ed. New York: Vintage, 2002. xi-lv.

Gilmore, Michael T. The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010.

‘H’. ‘Uncle Tom among the Bowery Boys.’ New York Times, July 1853. Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive. Dir. Stephen Railton. 13 July 2012.

Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Hazlitt, William. Selected Essays of William Hazlitt 1778 To 1830. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. Boston and London: Kessinger, 2004.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself [1861]. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

Kreger, Erika M. ‘The Nineteenth Century Female Humorist as ‘Iconoclast in the Temple’: Gail Hamilton and the Myth of Reviewer’s Disapproval of Women’s Comic-Ironic Writings.’ Studies in American Humor 3 (11) (2004): 5–38.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.

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Peterson, Carla L. ‘Foreword: Eccentric Bodies.’ Recovering the Black Female Body: Self- Representations by African American Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Rogin, Michael. Blackface, White Noise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Watkins, Mel. On the Real Side: A History of African American Comedy from Slavery to Chris Rock. New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999.

White, Barbara A. ‘Afterword: New Information on Harriet Wilson and the Bellmont Family.’ Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black [1859]. Ed Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 3rd ed. New York: Vintage, 2002. iii-liv.

Wilson, Harriet E. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black [1859]. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 3rd ed. New York: Vintage, 2002.

‘Boston Museum—Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ Boston Commonwealth, November 1852; reprinted in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 3 December 1852. Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive. Dir. Stephen Railton. 13 July 2012.

‘Mrs Howard as Topsy’. Illustration for ‘Tom Shows.’ J. Franklin Davis. Scribner's Magazine 7.4 (1925): 350-60. Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture: A Multi- Media Archive. Dir. Stephen Railton. 13 July 2012.

NOTES i. As Jeffrey Ferguson suggests, the critical reluctance to study black humour in any depth may be due to the fact that ‘for the most part the American discourse on race has provided a strong- hold for sincerity, melodrama, sentimentalism, and deep seriousness, but it has admitted the spirit of irony and humor only with the greatest of trepidations’ (Ferguson vii). Most recent, full- length studies of African American humour focus primarily on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with only cursory glances at earlier periods. Carpio is an exception, with significant space in her book devoted to Brown and Chesnutt. ii. For more information on women and humour in the nineteenth century, see Kreger. iii. Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and their Friends (1857) published just two years before Our Nig, is another exception, focusing on the white racism experienced by a mixed race couple Philadelphia. Webb’s novel received a cool reception from both contemporary and more recent commentators because ‘we do not find a direct attack on slavery anywhere’ (Bell 42). iv. For more information on the limited circulation of Wilson’s novel, see Ellis, 13-14.

ABSTRACTS

This article argues that the practical jokes running throughout Wilson’s novel Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) are evidence of a deliberate and sophisticated comic strategy

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that exploits the spectacular body’s potential for subversive performance and works against the alienating conditions of social and political marginalisation experienced by African Americans in the antebellum period. Initially utilising the crude humour of minstrelsy, Wilson deliberately capitalised on her readers’ laughter in order to defamiliarise the ‘spectacle’ of blackness in both popular performance culture and indentured servitude. Using movement, costume and material props, Wilson imagines new ways to present her protagonist’s body through the minstrel stereotypes of Topsy, Jim Crow, Zip Coon and Jasper Jack. Wilson then turns the joke on her white readers, ultimately demonstrating that whiteness, like blackness, is a performative identity. Taken as a whole, Wilson’s comic strategy, with its ‘embodied insurgency’, aligns her with the period’s most politically racial African American performers.

INDEX

Keywords: abolition, Adah Isaacs Menken, African American literature, body, Daphne Brooks, defamiliarisation, Eric Lott, Frederick Douglass, Glenda Carpio, Granville Ganter, Harriet Wilson, Hazlitt, humour, indentured servitude, minstrelsy, performance, racial stereotypes, Schopenhauer, Toni Morrison, whiteness, William Henry Lane

AUTHOR

ELIZABETH BOYLE Department of English, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull, HU6 [email protected]

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Breaking Away from Progressive History: The Past and Politics in American Studies

Ari Helo

INTRODUCTION1

1 This article suggests that, contrary to a widely shared view among American scholars, a progressive view of history is neither essential nor helpful to historical research in American studies—or in any other academic field. The idea of progress figures regularly in the notions of history that the highest American officials disseminate to the public. In his Inaugural Address of 2009 President Barack Obama spoke of "the quiet force of progress throughout our history" which he attributed to the "hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism" of the American people. As to the here and now, he added that: "What is demanded is a return to these truths."2 Yet, progress that calls for a return is hardly progress in the sense of a genuine novelty entering the stage of history. Calling for a general revival of values seems more like an appeal to a cyclical view of history.

2 In his Second Inaugural, in 2005, President George W. Bush embraced opinions about history that were even more clear-cut. According to him, "History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty."3Compared to what many professional historians would claim, both presidents appear to have a remarkably assured insight into history. While some historians occasionally embrace these kinds of notions, others shy away from viewing history in progressive terms, let alone from saying that history's direction is set by liberty. Very few would claim that history has a discernible direction. Least of all are professional historians likely to claim that there is one particular extra-human "author" of history, be s/he an author of liberty or of oppression or of something else. The author of history is always a historian.

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3 Where should one turn to find the origins of this presidential image of progressive history that has a "visible direction," but that still demands "a return" every now and then? Even before entering the Oval Office, President-elect Obama was attacked for his unwillingness to encourage any effort to subject the Bush administration to legal investigation. "We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards" Obama stated.4 This classically progressive notion of looking forward rather than backward likewise does not sit well with his call for return. President Kennedy famously spoke about looking forward rather than backward. Thomas Jefferson argued that the Federalist "bigots in religion & government" were men who held that "we are to look backwards instead of forwards for the improvement of the human mind."5 In 1800, when Jefferson was elected third President of the United States, and his Democratic Republicans won the majority in both houses of the Congress, he proclaimed that "We can no longer say that there is nothing new under the sun."6 At least for Jefferson, history did not merely repeat itself.

4 But there is a problem here: this apparently core American preference for being forward-looking easily conflates politics with an intrinsically progressive view of history. If Bush and Obama share a belief in progressive history, how is it that they arrive at such different conclusions about the best policies of the future? In fact, hard- core conservatives are just as "future-oriented" as any self-described progressive, since they yearn for the revival of the olden times tomorrow. The politician's progress is always an attempt to gain control over the future, and there may or may not be ideological determinism involved in this. However useful the idea of progressive history may be to political leaders seeking to enact specific political agendas under the guise of obeying unchanging ideals, the idea is unfit for a historical research. All in all, the general commitment to human progress should be kept distinct from the discipline of history, which seeks knowledge of the past.

5 In what follows, I discuss some elemental aspects of the distinction between forward- looking politics and the backward-looking discipline of history. In doing so I first focus on how a given idea may or may not be seen as developing in the course of time. I then show how fundamentally American political self-understanding evolves from Founding-era ideals. After that I point out some methodological problems inherent in the standard ideal of American Studies as an interdisciplinary field of study. Finally I suggest that if we are to achieve a more articulate understanding of the distinction between politics and history we need to set aside unnecessarily demonized notions of power and politics in the field of cultural studies. The thesis is simple: good historical research cannot arise from an intellectual commitment to progressive history. Let me emphasize at this early point that the scholars whom I attack—Joyce Appleby, Alan Trachtenberg, Gordon Wood, Michael Zuckert, and others—are also among those whom I appreciate most. My disagreements with them are about certain specific points and not about the general value of their works.

IDEAS IN HISTORY

6 Bruce Kuklick's famous 1972 critique of the so-called symbolic school of American Studies—represented by Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and Alan Trachtenberg among others—took impulse from their apparently anachronistic history writing. He called it "presentism" by which he meant "interpreting the past in concepts applicable only to

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the present."7 According to Kuklick, these founders of American Studies too often saw their historical protagonists as anticipating a "coming fashion in thought and feeling." In Smith's Virgin Land (1951), for example, the grand idea of turning the desert into a garden appears "in embryo" in the works of numerous historical figures who were simply not yet ripe to express it fully. Smith appeared to argue that Carlyle anticipated a post-Freudian alienation in his writings, leading Kuklick to ask whether it is plausible to think that this famous writer, sitting at his desk, could really have thought something like "in this piece of writing I want to anticipate a post-Freudian version of alienation."8 The basic mistake, Kuklick contended, was in resorting to an essentially ahistorical view of one or another enduring grand idea as the focal point of American culture.

7 Whether or not Kuklick's critique is fully justified, it is notable that Smith's study definitely serves us well by making it utterly clear that the entry of the conquest of the Wild West into popular culture was concomitant with the conquest itself. As for Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden (1964), Kuklick finds the author making claims such as "The Tempest anticipates the moral geography of the American imagination." Drawing on Kuklick's critique, Howard Segal notes that Leo Marx's actual "historical" claim was that the entire pastoral ideal had turned into empty whining over spilled milk well before the turn of the twentieth century. Segal himself managed to find a number of much later, twentieth-century applications of the idea.9

8 What one should ask about such large-scale interpretations as Smith's or Marx's is whether an idea should be deemed one and the same when its manifestation has altered because (or regardless) of the constantly changing circumstances. This is the central problem in all historically oriented cultural studies.10 Let me next illustrate this problem by using the sacred notion of America's founding as a key example of how well-meaning, progressive ideas are sometimes misused in historical thinking.

9 To briefly return to Presidents Bush and Obama: they agree not only on the view that history speaks to progress but also on the significance of the Founders' legacy. "From the day of our Founding," President Bush asserted, "we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value" and "[a]dvancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation." According to Obama, "Our Founding Fathers .... drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man—a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake."

10 As practically every American president —at least since Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address—has called upon the ideals of the American founding, it is worth asking what series of events they are talking about. In a nutshell, the sacred notion of the founding consists of the founding generation first subscribing, by way of the 1776 Declaration of Independence, to the idea that all men are equal and endowed with the same natural rights and then incorporating that idea into the original Constitution of 1787 through its first ten amendments—ratified in 1791. This American Bill of Rights provided the nation with the assurance that the federal government would never restrict freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, or religious freedom. Hence, we have arrived at the seminal idea of America as a constitutionally, rather than politically, secured free society. This apolitical nature of the founding is its most celebrated aspect, as one may conclude from the fact that politicians so different as Bush and Obama can talk about it in exactly the same way.11

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11 Indeed, even a cursory look at early American history writing conveys an oddly pejorative view of the notion of politics whenever the crucial issues of the founding era are at stake. The political theorist Judith Shklar, for example, once argued that under the Constitution "bargaining replaces the tumult of popular assemblies, as order and freedom are reconciled pre-politically."12 If order and freedom were reconciled pre- politically in the Constitution, how should one understand Thomas Jefferson's efforts to persuade James Madison to incorporate the bill of rights into it or his struggle with Hamilton and Adams over the right interpretation of the document? Were his attempts perhaps post-political in character?

12 On a closer look, Jefferson, the quintessential American high priest of minimal government, tends to appear as elementally indifferent to the very concept of politics. According to the historian Gordon Wood, the "Jeffersonian modern virtue" that "flowed from the citizen's participation in society, not in government" should be distinguished from "participation in politics."13 Jefferson's attitude looks distinctly modern in being antigovernment, if not entirely anti-political—as if "citizen participation in society" has nothing to do with the concept of politics.

13 In Joyce Appleby's legendary revisionist view of the Jeffersonian era, Capitalism and a New Social Order (1984), the forward-looking Jeffersonian liberals aimed at nothing less than a "retreat from politics."14 The Jeffersonian vision of a free market society was to be realized to an extent that exceeded its original advocates' imagination. Those advocates, contrary to their own vision, not only remained slaveholders, but also failed to foresee the problems that their laissez-faire economic beliefs were bound to cause with the rise of monopoly capitalism by the end of the nineteenth century. In the final analysis, as champions of "a white male vision" only, the originators failed to realize that women's political rights comprise a logical element of the vision.15 Appleby's argument is simply that, even if the originators failed, American history realized the vision as it truly was.

14 Is this not close to arguing that there is an implicit American desire to realize the true Jeffersonian spirit and that every significant historical agent has somehow struggled to express it, no matter whether s/he managed to do so? In sum, Appleby can join the team of Henry Nash Smith, Leo Marx, and others, who find their protagonists constantly anticipating a "coming fashion in thought and feeling."16

THE IDEOLOGY OF ETERNAL RETURN

15 There are more clearly ideological ways of arguing that American history is nothing but the gradual manifestation of the founding-era ideals. An illuminating example is Michael Zuckert's reading of the Declaration of Independence. In his interpretation, the whole message of the Declaration is derivable from a Lockean, pre-political notion of the universal rights of man. In effect, Zurckert's reading marginalizes all earlier and later historical developments as irrelevant to the true character of the American social contract that this sacred document allegedly embodies. We are offered a scheme that speaks of political experience but serves mainly to prove how little political history matters.

16 To make sense of this accusation, let me cite Zuckert's intriguing assertion that "the Declaration does not present literal or empirical history, but moral history." This purely conceptual history is grounded on a single truth that "all men are created

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equal."17 As for the origins of this truth, Zuckert draws on the familiar Lockean conception of the state of nature as prior to any imaginable social ordering between men. In delineating the "series of six truths" of the Declaration of Independence as a "kind of minihistorical narrative of the political experience of the human race," he offers us "three phases" of society and "the corresponding truths" in this form18:

Pre-political All men are equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights

Political Governments are instituted to secure these deriving their just powers from rights consent of the governed

Postpolitical If government becomes destructive of those and institute new government ends, there is a right to alter or abolish it

17 Zuckert concludes from this set of truths that "Neither God nor nature has established rule among human beings; they do this for themselves. Human beings, in other words, are not naturally political."19 People are, in essence, human rights possessors and therefore naturally equal. This is why all inequalities between them arise from artificial power structures.

18 The key to Zuckert's "narrative of the political experience of the human race" is not the evident linkage between the different phases of the political experience. Instead, the key is the correct ordering of the three truths: what lends meaning to the second, "political" phase is that it consists of people's common consent to the first, "pre- political" truth that all men are equal. This is why the third truth, about instituting a new government, is categorized not as a political but as a "postpolitical" act. In other words, meaningful change in the Zuckertian "moral history" entails a revolution. Ordinary politics simply vanishes from this ethically charged narrative of the political experience, because any merely political change cannot bring about an essentially postpolitical revolution. Since the original social contract was settled in 1776, the rest of American history automatically loses its significance as anything other than a manifestation of that contract.

19 As for Zuckert's way of ordering the "self-evident truths," one must ask whether the founders got it right. In order to carry out his interpretation of the document Zuckert must criticize its wording. This is how he explicates the weak point: "The 'self-evident' truths about the altering or abolishing of government follow from the truths about the institution and ends of government, and therefore cannot be properly self-evident."20 The error, in Zuckert's view, is that the revolutionaries appeared to equate the Lockean truth of pre-political human equality with the right to alter or abolish any government, mistakenly seeing also the latter as self-evident rather than derivable from the former.

20 Neither the document nor Jefferson's original draft presents its "self-evident" (or "undeniable" as in the original draft) truths as apolitical. Another way to read the document is that governments were instituted to secure the equal rights of men, and that the problem lay in the revolutionaries' disagreement with the British about the means to preserve their rights. The document begins with their expressed wish to explain to "the candid world" their reasons to dissolve the governmental bonds with

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the British and establish their state governments anew. One may argue, therefore, that the revolutionaries' claim for independence was not developed in an apolitical vacuum of extra-historical truths. James Madison, for example, viewed the presumably pre- political state of nature as nothing but sheer anarchy, "where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger" and where "even the stronger individuals are prompted, by the uncertainty of their condition, to submit to government."21

21 In Zuckert's view, the Declaration of Independence provides us with a veritable "big bang" of the universe of politics proper, but only as a consequence of the pre-political human equality. Given that even the right to violent revolution is derivable from the Lockean pre-political phase, the middle category of the "political" cannot but represent a peaceful return to that same pre-political phase of unconditional human equality. Political history—as a sequence of such events as elections, debates, corruption scandals, changes of governments, and the like—is utterly meaningless compared to this grand notion of return. This is why Zuckert's category of politics has nothing to do with what people actually do in politics. It only reiterates their subscription to the first, pre-political Lockean truth. The only genuinely meaningful event that people encounter in the Zuckertian universe of political experience is the Lockean revolution.

22 Given that Zuckert seems to be a strict libertarian, equality for him consists of our essence as rights possessors and of nothing else besides. He argues, for example, that "no person who understands property as Jefferson does would accept a positive right to life." This allegedly Jeffersonian view of property rights is derivable from the first Lockean truth of equality only with the condition that we cannot interfere with each others' essence as property owners. In the final analysis, our fundamental moral obligation is that of non-interference, because "only a negative right to life can pass the test for becoming a right-in-the-proper-sense."22 Deep down, all morally relevant history consists of our continuing commitment to this libertarian truth of governmental non-interference. The obvious historiographical problem in Zuckert's scheme is that all human history prior to the American Revolution is diminished to a mere prehistory of "political experience," because the pre-political truth had not yet been grasped. Yet, any post-Revolutionary event appears equally dependent on this truth, and therefore equally insignificant. As implicated earlier, the "political" phase consists solely of the continuing manifestation of the first, pre-political truth.

23 The most far-reaching ideological implication of all this is that even a shift from the Bush administration to the Obama administration seems a mere change in the personnel of the government whose only task is the continuing manifestation of the great return to the pre-political phase of human equality. By the same token, everyday politics begins to seem as a pathetic struggle for nothing but governmental power, and politicians—who, as if by occupational hazard, tend to suggest new policies—begin to seem nothing but an alienated race of corrupt office seekers occupying the nation's capital. There is no way out of the Zuckertian conception of the politics of return, because nothing else is important enough to rival it. In sum, the fundamental flaw of this conception of politics is that one cannot discern any meaningful difference between the Bush and the Obama administrations' actual policies.

24 The Lockean social contract scheme seems a backward-looking rather than forward- looking standard by which to explain meaningful changes in American history. Nevertheless, it is not regressive but "progressive" historians who tend to view the

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national grand narrative as an increasing manifestation of human equality. On may always construct that narrative upon such events as the emancipation of slaves, women's suffrage, the 1960s civil rights legislation, and Barack Obama's election to the presidency. Or consider Joseph J. Ellis's statement that "it was Lincoln's expansive revision of the original Jeffersonian version of natural rights philosophy that broadened the message to include blacks."23 Such a revision was hardly philosophical. Rather, the principle of human equality became nationalized in the sense that all male Americans were, at least in principle, given equal political rights. The 150 years of racial segregation that followed the Civil War was merely another sad interim, until the 1960s Civil Rights Movement brought about the next return to Locke's pre-political truth about human equality. How could women's struggle for equal suffrage fail to add further proof to this apparently inevitable American progress in manifesting the Lockean truth? In the historian Daniel Rodgers's apt summary, the Lockean-liberal school could nullify any other competing reading of American history by simply "raising the stakes of what counted as meaningful conflict, until every conceivable demonstration of conflict short of Jacobin or Bolshevist revolution vanished in the all- pervasive liberal consensus."24

25 Even progressive historians disagree on whether Theodore Roosevelt's initiatives for nation-wide health insurance should be viewed as a precursor of the health-care and welfare reforms advocated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Responding to this challenge every historian—regardless of his/her own political views—necessarily encounters the question of what truly belongs to the sphere of allegedly "pre-political" human rights. Hence one must also encounter the historically variable notion of progress itself.

HISTORY WRITING TODAY

26 In his recent article, "American History in a Global Age," Johann M. Neem sees the task of national history as "constitutive of one's identity." Needless to say, globalization and identity building are the darling themes of American Studies as well as of Cultural Studies in general. Neem also thinks it evident that the "Founding Fathers thought that the nation must embody universal values."25 But to what extent have Americans managed to clarify the content of these "universal values"? For example, in the Presidential elections of 2000, Al Gore's running mate Joseph Lieberman still asserted that the first Amendment of the Constitution has nothing to do with "the freedom from religion."26

27 Two remarks are in place regarding Neem's attempt to link national history writing to the themes of globalization and identity formation. First, it is interesting that for many historians the long-declared death of the grand narrative does not seem to have anything to do with their commitment to the grand idea of globalization. The problems in adopting globalization as a common denominator of good history writing are similar to those that accompany the American founding. Any such criterion as multiculturalism may have an impact on what appears worth remembering. Do America's founding principles manifest themselves more, say, in the 1950s efforts to desegregate public education than in the policy of Virginia's Prince Edward County of shutting down all public schools in order to stop that process? Certainly, both sides of

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the controversy could rely on traditional notions of what it means to live up to the standards of the American founding.

28 Second, one might question whether the historian's contribution to a person's identity building is an appropriate criterion for serious historical research. Is identity equally important to every individual's self-determination? In theoretical literature the "primary identity" often appears alongside numerous "situational identities."27 It is worth asking, furthermore, whether a person cannot live quite comfortably in a more- or-less inarticulate "middle ground" between his/her everyday "role identities," say, as an American Studies scholar, as a Finnish university teacher, as a party member, as a parent, as a lover, as a coffeeholic, as an Elvis fan, and so forth.

29 Given this background, consider what kinds of tools for genuinely intercultural identity building American history may offer. The famous "Celadon" pamphlet, from 1785, has often been referred to as a summary of the Revolutionary generation's multicultural convictions. It spoke of the future America as divisible into "Nigrania," "Savagenia," "a French, a Spanish, a Dutch, an Irish, an English, &c. yea, a Jewish state here in process of time" in terms of "all of them united in brotherly affection" and thus forming "the most potent empire on the face of earth."28

30 Or consider the criteria by which an American Studies scholar might define constructive identity building. In her 2001 article "Welfare as Identity Politics" Jane Sherron De Hart makes the following argument: In addressing the problem of increasing intergenerational dependence on welfare among Americans, President Ronald Reagan drew on an image of the "welfare queen," but consciously refrained from bringing up the racial aspect of the issue. According to De Hart this was because "We all 'knew' she was black." What De Hart is doing here is criticizing a politician for merely being political. Her point is adequate on a much larger scale: What changed in American thought on welfare from the 1960s to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act was that for most politicians now "culture rather than structure was the problem."29

31 It is yet another question whether De Hart's attempt to contextualize this change in terms of ubiquitous nationalist ideas of ethnic citizenship helps one understand the change. Her argument that the immigration laws at the turn of the twentieth century were intended to "enhance the shared heritage of the national family" is dangerously close to the typical misconception that human equality in any politically relevant sense can be described by family metaphors. Modern democracy is by definition representative. Whole groups of people are still deprived of political equality even in America, beginning with children and the mentally ill. The innocents are excluded from the constituency; all those included remain responsible also for those excluded.

METHODOLOGY AND CONTEXTUALIZATION

32 The most common error in historically oriented American Studies research (as in other such disciplines) is the presumption that sheer common sense helps us in distinguishing valid historical interpretations from invalid ones. Common sense is a poor criterion. Quite commonplace patterns of thought sufficed to justify the Inquisition, the sixteenth-century religious wars, slavery in antebellum America, racial segregation, eugenics, the Holocaust, and the like. For a historian who takes it as self- evident that because of scientific progress our common-sense beliefs are of better

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quality than earlier ones, all this may appear quite unproblematic. Such a historian can always resort to the notion that the future generations will in any case re-write history.

33 But there is a serious flaw in that position. Besides threatening an intellectual bankruptcy such a strategy opens the door for simple political disagreements among scholars. To give an example, when Joyce Appleby defended her view of Jefferson as a forefather of American liberalism against Lance Banning's interpretation of Jefferson as a classic, rather than a liberal republican, she eventually drew on the following maxim: "What remains to be resolved in the scholarly dispute about republicanism in America is whose republicanism we are talking about—that of the founding fathers or ours? And if theirs is ours, which one of ours?"30 This is an open call for turning history into a political dispute. It is much safer to say that neither the founders nor later generations ever had one common opinion about what American republicanism should look like. Serious historical research can never be based on the idea that we study such conceptions as eighteenth-century republicanism for our political purposes, as if history was not, like any other academic field, dedicated to seeking the truth, even if only about the past.

34 We are dealing with the classic issue of contextualization here. In most cases, contextualization is a simple matter of agreeing or disagreeing with previous researchers about the general characteristics of the circumstances in which a given phenomenon occurred. Genuinely innovative interpretations tend to arise when a scholar chooses to characterize the very context anew. This is why such typical accusations that a given scholar has simply omitted "the political context proper" in his/her analysis are much more complicated than they first appear.31 Political discourse is often about the distinctions between what is truly natural and what is only arbitrary for human beings. Contextualization is the core issue of all methodological discretion, closely related to what Kuklick had in mind when talking about how Nash, Marx, and others view "great books as keys to the study of the cultures of which they are a part."32

35 What can be explained about the American past is different from writing sweeping cultural portraits of it. Take for instance Trachtenberg's The Brooklyn Bridge (1965), which has been deemed a classic example of the interdisciplinary approach that American Studies should represent as an academic discipline. Trachtenberg begins his book with a detailed history of the building of the famous bridge in New York City in the late nineteenth century. Then he extends his perspective into a comprehensive study of a huge variety of symbolic uses of the bridge in art, in literature, and in conceptual American history. By the end of the book the bridge can be seen to symbolize almost anything typically American.

36 Can one justify the sort of methodological holism that Trachtenberg embraces? In associating this building project with larger trends of industrialization in the United States and those with even older trends in American thought, he ends up asserting that "American society followed Hamilton's course to manufacturing and capitalism" rather than Jefferson's course to agriculture.33 Are we supposed to conclude that Jefferson was an anti-capitalist thinker or that Hamilton discerned the genuinely meaningful aspects of America's future better than Jefferson? According to the author, Jefferson was also hostile to history, for his utopian model of yeomen's democracy "lay beyond logic: it was a dream of timeless harmony with nature."34 Trachtenberg does not offer an explanation to what exactly "lay beyond logic" in the concept of timeless harmony. Was it not the founders' hope to achieve what all previous political theorists had failed to

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achieve, namely, a form of government that would stand the test of time? Whether Jefferson's intellectual outlook can be characterized as utopian is yet another question. 35

37 Be that as it may, the basic methodological question to be asked about Trachtenberg's book is this: How do his claims about the founders relate to other things that he does prove—say, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and about Crane's later poem about it? His literary analysis of the symbolic uses of the bridge answer entirely different questions about American culture than his case study of the history of American engineering. In fact, all research seeks to answer a specific kind of research question, and the chosen method determines the quality of the answer. The assumption is that at the very moment one takes up a question one has already chosen valid methods and excluded a number of other methods as invalid. Claiming that every method is part of some holistic whole of the methodological apparatus, would be to presume not only that knowledge is holistic, but also that reality must be so. Many philosophers would find such a notion amusing. The reason is that we do not know whether everything is related to everything else in any meaningful sense.

38 This is why history is best understood as an art seeking to explain a particular historical phenomenon in particular circumstances, not in a presumably coherent image of the past. Perhaps the past is not an entity to begin with. Even so, a historically oriented American Studies scholar may make valuable discoveries by crossing and revealing the apparently established categories of thought. The founding generation, for example, could not let go of the idea that the new ordering of society should be natural for human beings. This is precisely why they had to question a number of concepts drawn from the prevalent European model of society of orders as the only natural ordering of human society. Hence, we find Jefferson and Hamilton, for example, constantly politicizing a variety of old concepts and fighting over their new definitions while competing for power.

POWER AND POLITICS

39 Indeed, in order not to mistakenly depoliticize the past in the name of writing progressive rather than regressive history, we should let go of the unnecessarily demonized conception of power itself. Consider how Lawrence Grossberg characterizes one of the central tasks of Cultural Studies as examining "how power operates at different levels and infiltrates [!], contaminates [!] and limits [!] the possibilities that people have of living their lives in humane, dignified, and secure ways."36This demonized image of power stems from a simple failure to see that power relations can always be questioned by politicizing them.37

40 Although power is by definition control over others, one may also view power relations as something that necessarily permeate our everyday life. A friend of mine told me that his recipe for a happy marriage is this: "I do as I am told and I like it." When walking my late dachshund, I used to be in a ceaseless contest for power with him on which route we should take, until I was trained how to be in control of my dear friend. As Dr. Bledsoe, the president of an African-American college in Ellison's Invisible Man, somewhat cynically remarked: "Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it. ... The only ones I even pretend to please are big white folks,

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and even those I control more than they control me."38 Power relations are immanent in human life, and should not be studied as a menace. Neither is there any reason to deem conflict inherently opposed to human sociability.

41 To be sure, our ubiquitous power struggles often lead to street violence, riots, rebellions, and wars. Politics, however, means conflict-solving with methods other than violence. The idea of politics as a public affair, in turn, rests on the view that the public leaves us to solve the conflicts of our private lives in the private sphere. Everything is not politics. Yet we constantly encounter situations in which authorities need to cross the line between the public and the private, as when it is deemed necessary to take children into foster care to protect them from their own parents. Or think of the heated 1970s busing debate about whether the authorities could demand that parents send their children to a far-away school in order to desegregate all schools in the area. In sum, everything is not political, but anything can be politicized.

42 Politicizing an issue means considering the power relations inherent in any societal norms. This is not to say that norms are nothing but power claims. But it does suggest that refusing to view them as power claims leads us to embrace easy conformism rather than critical thinking. By and large, the most well-established norms and patterns of behavior may begin to change only when they are politicized. Rioting often appears to bring such topics as racism and the excesses of global capitalism to the fore, but most often it conveys a lack of imagination of how to politicize an issue in a constructive way. In free democracy, one may always join a party, organize an ad-hoc group or sit- ins, found a journal, and so on.

43 As for our constant wavering between the public and the private spheres, the discussion about the rights of homosexuals is a good example. Homosexuality was politicized several times in the United States until the highest political leadership of the country recently decided to back the equal civil rights of homosexuals and lesbians. Homosexuals themselves first brought the topic to the public eye in the famous 1969 Stonewall Inn riots in New York City. They resisted their treatment as second-class citizens when it came simply to their right of assembly. In the early 1970s the San Francisco city fathers politicized the issue even further. In about a decade the time- honored medical definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder was done away with. 39 As Andrew Sullivan has noted, handling the issue from the viewpoint of equality is not about propagating homosexuality.40 It is about giving due recognition to these people as human beings equal with all others.

44 What exactly was politicized in this process? It was the traditional understanding of normal sexual behavior, not the voting rights of homosexuals. By and large, homosexuals were not customarily hunted down in the "olden times" either. There had been ways of dealing with the issue so as to keep it out of the public eye. Most people were happy to live in ignorance in order to tolerate, a norm embodied in the now so suddenly bygone "don't ask, don't tell" policy of the U.S. armed forces. Entering the public sphere as homosexuals, these people questioned the erstwhile norm that such issues as sexuality and raising children belong to the private sphere only when the household includes a man and a woman. A lot of people became nervous, because their traditional understanding of normal intimate life appeared to be questioned, occasionally ridiculed.

45 It is important to ask what a given historical norm was truly like, even if it appears simply oppressive today. Women's right to vote was once another highly controversial

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subject. It took a lot of conscious lobbying and politicking until women's suffrage finally in 1919 began to manifest that silent force of progress in American history that President Obama speaks about. Or consider on what basis historian William Chafe can characterize the civil rights struggle of the 1960s as "a social movement" that "compelled a political response" from "presidents in Washington D.C."41 Chafe talks of "national politics" as if politics were primarily something for which only the federal government can be held responsible, while the rest of America experiences "social" development. If the 1960s Civil Rights Movement does not count as political, what does?

CONCLUSION

46 Kucklick's central critique was that Nash, Marx, and others appeared too Platonic in their conviction that one could discern a given set of extra-historically important ideas simply developing in history. More recent efforts to posit identity formation, globalization, or some other grand idea as a new standard for good American history writing incur the same methodological problem. Any such standard is apt to turn history into a Manichean endeavor of detaching the good, so-called usable past from the apparently less important past characterized by easy conformism to the standards of the time. Hence, progressive history tends to omit rather than to recognize the significance of such facts as, say, that Jefferson remained a slaveholder for the whole of his life; that Lincoln swore to save the Union whether it demanded freeing all the slaves or freeing none; or that Wilson only reluctantly conceded to women's suffrage as a constitutional right.

47 Is all this to suggest that there is something wrong with the American idea? That depends solely on what one thinks the American idea is. One may promote equal access to education and health care with or without invoking the somewhat indeterminate founding-era ideals. Political action is always pursued from a forward-looking position in the present tense. That was also the position of Hamilton and Jefferson, who fought bitterly over the American future because they both knew that the past cannot be changed. By contrast, history is about explaining the human past as correctly as possible. Let it remain so.

NOTES

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1. The author wishes to thank both Allan Megill and Niina Koskipää for their valuable editorial comments. 2. Barack Obama, Inaugural Speech, Jan 20, 2009, Website Miller Center, University of Virginia, Presidential Speech Archive as visited July 5, 2011 at http://millercenter.org/scripps/archive/ speeches/detail/4463. 3. George W. Bush, Second Inaugural Speech, Jan 20, 2005, in ibid.

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4. Quotation from Paul Krugman's column "Forgive and forget?" in International Herald Tribune, Jan. 17-18, 2009. 5. Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, Jan. 27, 1800 in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson Writings (New York: Library of America), 1984, 1073. 6. Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801, ibid., 1086. 7. Bruce Kuklick "Myth and Symbol in American Studies" (American Quarterly 24, 1972) in Lucy Maddox, ed., Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 77. 8. Kuklick "Myth and Symbol in American Studies," 1999, 78. 9. Howard P. Segal "Commentary" in Maddox (ed.), Locating American Studies, 1999, 87-90. Let me add that I cannot quite understand Segal's accusation, for Marx explicitly refers to various modes of pastoralism of his own day at the very beginning of his book. Neither can I agree with Segal's insinuations that, contrary to the representatives of the symbolic school, such exemplary anthropologists as Victor Turner or Clifford Geertz "have surely done extensive fieldwork before reaching their conclusions." In my opinion Smith and Marx had studied their own, historical and literary material quite skilfully and creatively. (For the quotation, see ibid., 90.) 10. Notably, when Smith's Virgin Land appeared in 1951, it was appraised as a breakthrough in intellectual history, for the discipline of American studies had not yet been invented. 11. On this core notion of the founding myth, see also Ari Helo, Thomas Jefferson's Ethics and the Politics of Human Progress: The Morality of a Slaveholder (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 7-11. 12. Quotation from Judith Shklar, "Montesquieu and the new republicanism," Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. by Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 270 (Emphasis added). 13. Gordon Wood, "The Trials and Tribulations of Thomas Jefferson." in Peter S. Onuf (ed.), Jeffersonian Legacies (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 406. 14. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 33. 15. Joyce Appleby, "Republicanism in Old and New Contexts" in The William and Mary Quarterly 43 (1, 1986), 33; On this set of historiographical problems with Shklar, Wood, and Appleby, see also Helo, Thomas Jefferson's Ethics, 2013, 185-186n. 16. Kuklick, "Myth and Symbol" 1999, 78. 17. Michael P. Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic: Studies in the Foundation of the American Political Tradition (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 18, 23. By clinging to this extra- historical image of the human being Zuckert refutes both the republican thesis that we need a distinctly political notion of man and the communitarian thesis that we need a more socially oriented view of man (Ibid., 21). 18. Ibid., 18. 19. According to Zuckert's logic on this point, one may well ask whether human beings are naturally, say, eating creatures, given that they so often "do" even that "for themselves." 20. Ibid, p. 47. 21. James Madison, The Federalist Number 51, in Clinton Rossiter (ed.), The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 324. 22. Zuckert, Natural Rights Republic, 1996, 79. In fact, President Bush looked back further than to Locke when stating in his Inaugural Address that "When our founders declared a new order of the ages ... they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled." Few historians would be anachronistic enough to claim that the first Lockean truth can be equated with some self-evidently ancient hope. Plato and Aristotle criticized democracy for its very tendency to treat all men as equal, although anyone could see that some men were more virtuous and wiser

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than others. Zuckert is absolutely right that one needs a Locke for this ideology to make it look a historical view in the first place. 23. Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 297. 24. Daniel T. Rodgers, "Republicanism: the Career of a Concept," The Journal of American History 79 (June 1992), 14. 25. Johann N. Neem, "American History in a Global Age," History and Theory 50 (Feb. 2011), 41-70, (For quotations, see 53, 56) 26. "Lieberman Urges 'A Place for Faith'," Richmond Times-Dispatch, Aug. 28, 2000 (emphasis added). 27. See Ting-Toomey's innovative "identity negotiation perspective," in Stella Ting-Toomey, Communicating Across Cultures (New York: The Guilford Press, 1999), passim., esp., 29. 28. Quotations, Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 226n63; The pamphlet is also discussed in Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 175. 29. Jane Sherron De Hart, "Welfare as Identity Politics: Rediscovering Nationalism, Re-viewing the American National Experience, and Recasting the 'Other' in the Post-Cold War United States" in Mark Shackleton and Maarika Toivonen, Roots and Renewal: Writing of Bicentennial Fulbright Professors (Helsinki: Renvall Institute of the University of Helsinki, 2001), 30-44; quotation, 39. 30. Appleby, "Republicanism in Old and New Contexts," 1986, 33. None of this is to claim that history writing could avoid being to some extent political. An illuminating example of fully politicized history writing is Jerome Huyler's Locke in America (1995) with no less a subtitle than The Moral Philosophy of the Founding Era. For Huyler, who has "gotten the whole Locke" and "gotten him right" (ibid., 35) the essential outcome is this: The founders, Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians alike, remained true to the whole Locke, most notably to "Locke’s emphasis on the moral worth of productive labor" (ibid., 18). But in striking contrast to this, the rest of American history amounts to a sad departure from its original moral philosophy. Huyler concludes his book with an obscure 1930s pamphlet, Jefferson: the Forgotten Man, to argue that in the American mixed political economy true "Lockean liberalism ...was never permitted to work" (ibid., 308). 31. It was Zuckert himself who once accused John Pocock of omitting the "political context proper" in analyzing one eighteenth-century political debate. As I have attempted to show here, Zuckert's own explication of what truly counts as a political context may seem problematic as well. See Michael P. Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 175. 32. Kuklick, "Myth and Symbol" 1999, 83. 33. Alan Trachtenberg, Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 14. 34. Ibid., p. 12. (See also ibid, 168.) 35. See for example, Maurizio Valsania, The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson's Dualistic Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). 36. See Lawrence Grossberg's entry on "Cultural Studies" in Wolfgang Donsbach (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication, Vol. 3. (Hoboken, N.J: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 1110-1116 (brackets and exclamation marks added). 37. As for further determinations of power, let me add that power can grow and diminish, but in modern democracy the concept rests on a simple reciprocity principle: that the rulers remain democratically responsible to the ruled. To be sure, our constantly growing impact on the rest of nature cannot grant threatened species any judicial, reciprocal powers as arising from some inborn natural rights. This is why power is a moral issue just as much as merely a judicial one. 38. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man [1947] (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1972), 140.

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39. Paul S.Boyer et al., The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People. Fifth Edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), 913. 40. Andrew Sullivan, "The President of the United States Shifted the Mainstream in One Interview", Newsweek 21.5. 2012. 41. None of this is to argue against Chafe's commitment to study the Civil Rights Movement from the perspective of social history. See William H. Chafe, "From Community Study to National Politics: How Greensboro, North Carolina Provides a Prism for Understanding Race in America in the 1960s," in Ari Helo (ed.), Communities and Connections: Writings in North American Studies (Helsinki: Renvall Institute, 2007), 19-29; quotations, 19.

ABSTRACTS

This article suggests that, contrary to a widely shared view among American scholars, a progressive view of history is neither essential nor helpful to historical research in American studies—or in any other academic field.

INDEX

Keywords: American History, historiography, methodology

AUTHOR

ARI HELO History of Science and Ideas, University of Oulu

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The Ideology of Climate Change Denial in the United States

Jean-Daniel Collomb

1 The ideological underpinning of climate change denial in the United States merits closer scrutiny than it has received to date. American opponents and critics of the scientific consensus over man-made global warming have been much more vocal and influential than their counterparts in continental Europe; in France several scientists and intellectuals1 do take issue with the positions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but they tend to be rather isolated and marginal figures with little or no impact on public policy. By contrast, American climate change deniers have been remarkably successful in confusing public opinion and delaying decisive action. They receive considerable media attention and enjoy access to key Washington power brokers. Therefore, it is worth analyzing the origins of this powerful movement in order to see what really drives climate change denial in the United States. It is very often claimed, with good reason, that climate sceptics are beholden to powerful corporate interests such as those of the Koch brothers.2 Ties between corporations and conservative and libertarian think tanks3 have been well-documented. There is no denying that, in the short term, some industries, such as the coal industry, have a vested interest in averting any government plan to reduce carbon emissions.

2 It is my contention that the emphasis placed on the efforts of the fossil fuel industries to promote their short-term economic self-interests should be complemented by other important factors. First, there is an ideological dimension to the effort to counter climate action: the conservative movement appears to be committed to small government and free enterprise as ideological ends in themselves, irrespective of economic and environmental common sense. From the small- government perspective, therefore, discrediting calls for strong national and international climate action has become a matter of ideological survival. Second, another factor complicates the matter even further for Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and their followers: the defence of the American way of life defined as the dedication to permanently expanding economic prosperity and consumption has now become a highly convenient line of attack for climate change deniers. The American way of life is

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clearly an ideology all the more potent because it is not recognized as such by most Americans. In fact, enjoying a clean environment is high on the average voter’s wish list.4 Embracing high environmental standards out of principle is one thing, however, accepting subsequent far-reaching and significant lifestyle changes in the form of higher gas prices or reduced mobility, for instance, is quite another, a fact acknowledged by both climate change deniers and the Obama administration.

1. BACKGROUND

3 The conservation of natural resources as a federal prerogative emerged during the Progressive era under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909): the US Reclamation Service (1902) and the US Forest Service (1905) became a blueprint for the creation of countless federal conservation agencies throughout the 20th century. The Forest Service, under the mindful direction of Gifford Pinchot, was given the mandate of managing the forest reserves, later renamed national forests, which had been set aside in the early 1890s. These developments constituted a major watershed in the role of the federal government in the management of the public domain. Hitherto, public officials had been eager to privatize the federally held lands as quickly as possible so that various special interest groups could improve and develop the land as they saw fit. Environmental destruction and waste on a large scale had convinced Theodore Roosevelt that the federal government needed to take an active role in managing natural resources.5 If the origins of American conservation date to the late 19th century, the modern environmental movement arose in the late 1960s and early 1970s when American environmentalists ceased to devote all of their attention and efforts to wilderness preservation and began to address quality-of-life issues.6 A flurry of environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act (1963),7 the Clean Water Act (1972),8 the Endangered Species Act (1973),9 the proclamation of an annual Earth Day (1970), as well as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (1972)10 to serve as a long awaited federal environmental watchdog, all bear witness to the public’s growing environmental awareness at the time. Most recently, concerns raised by the scientific community about the issue of global warming have led strong environmentalists such as Bill McKibben and Al Gore to seek new legislation to curtail its negative impacts on the planet. Meanwhile some conservatives such as James Inhofe and Joe Barton have been doing their utmost to counter the myriad of environmental regulations and safety standards passed by Congress during the 1960s and 1970s and future environmental legislation.11

2. A CASE OF LEGAL BRIBERY

4 In the 1970s eager to protect its activities from regulations and above all its profit margins, corporate America began to challenge the growing influence of environmental organizations and other advocacy groups who had been instrumental in ushering in this golden age of environmental legislation.12 Corporate leaders drew their inspiration from the successful tactics of the tobacco industry to thwart any restrictions on their activities: Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway use the term “tobacco strategy” to explain how corporations set up or fund seemingly independent think tanks and hire experts and scientists in order to discredit scientific research and

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evidence likely to justify governmental regulations on their activities.13 Needlessly to say, this constitutes a complete perversion of the scientific process, as the goal results in the fact that no scientifically-based call for environmental or safety regulations go unanswered and doubt is cast on the consensus reached in peer-reviewed scientific research. The climate change denial movement is part and parcel of this larger corporate effort to hinder regulations.14

5 Since the 1990s critics of climate scepticism have been striving to draw the public’s attention to the seamy side of the movement: its incestuous connection with the fossil fuel industries whose overriding objective is, they claim, to forestall government action by confusing public perceptions of the scientific evidence at hand. In The Assault on Reason (2007) former Vice-President Al Gore accused powerful corporations like Exxon Mobil of being determined to skew and pervert the scientific process: Wealthy right-wing ideologues have joined with the most cynical and irresponsible companies in the oil, coal, and mining industries to contribute large sums of money to finance pseudoscientific front groups that specialize in sowing confusion in the public’s mind about global warming. They issue one misleading ‘report’ after another, pretending that there is a significant disagreement in the legitimate scientific community in areas where there is actually a broad-based consensus.15

6 Gore reiterated his critique in even harsher terms four years later in an article in Rolling Stone castigating the Senate for being “controlled lock, stock and barrel by the oil and coal industries,” making any hope of climate action a distant prospect.16 More recently Gore’s assessment has been echoed by the climate scientist Michael E. Mann17 whose book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars questions the scientific integrity of Patrick J. Michaels and Fred Singer, two of the leading experts who attack the theory of man-made global warming: Mann points to the funds Michaels and Singer allegedly received from the energy sector.18

7 Allegations of corporate manoeuvres in an attempt to weaken environmental regulations are documented in the data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics. A peak in campaign contributions from the energy sector occurred in 2009 as Congress was considering passing a cap-and-trade19 bill which would have been a crucial and long-awaited first step towards an American commitment to serious climate action.20 The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), a well-heeled advocacy group representing coal producers, among others, invested massively in the 2008 presidential election.21 Four years later, Republicans received a significantly larger amount of money from the fossil fuel industries than their Democratic colleagues: Barack Obama received $710,277 in 2011-2012 while Mitt Romney’s campaign pocketed $4,763,934 during the same period.22 Needless to say, the contest between those industries and environmental organizations is uneven: in 2011, it is estimated that all oil and gas interests invested $149,169,677 in lobbying23 whilst overall contributions from US environmental organisations amounted to $18,125,119.24 It is also worth noting that fossil fuel money does not just go to elected officials and candidates. Oil and gas companies have been contributing lavish sums of money to conservative and libertarian think tanks for several decades with the two-fold goal of ensuring not only that elected officials and public figures remain sympathetic to the interests of the fossil fuel industries, but that they are provided with the expertise and the scientific evidence they need to be able to counter arguments by the proponents of environmental regulations as well. Hence, the conservative Washington think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation are among

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the biggest recipients of oil and gas money. Peter J. Jacques, Riley E. Dunlap, and Mark Freeman have also demonstrated that corporate interests are funding indirectly anti- environmental expertise by bankrolling conservative think tanks: of 141 environmentally-sceptic books written between 1972 and 2005, only 11 were not linked to corporate-funded conservative think tanks.25 It is therefore undeniable that the climate change denial movement stems from a concerted effort on the part of fossil fuel industries to protect their economic self-interests from government regulation. Yet there appears to be more to the climate change denial movement than the mere defence of economic self-interest.

3. A MATTER OF IDEOLOGICAL SURVIVAL

8 The climate change denial movement in the United States attracts small- government advocates as well as social conservatives and members of the so-called religious Right. The latter have assumed centre stage since the early 1980s, focusing on issues of morality: they have been instrumental in bringing about the so-called culture wars through their positions on a wide range of issues—abortion, same-sex marriage and, more recently, stem cell research. Although conservative activists sometimes find common ground among themselves, social conservatives ought not to be confused with their fiscal counterparts, also known as small-government conservatives, nor with libertarians whose main political aim is to reduce drastically the size and prominence of the federal government and give business a free rein. A few notable exceptions notwithstanding,26 the effort to question the validity of the theory of man-made global warming has been spearheaded largely by the admirers of Barry Goldwater and Jack Kemp rather than the disciples of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. The Heartland Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, all conservative and libertarian think tanks, have also joined the fray in addition to the well-funded advocacy groups Americans for Prosperity and Americans for Tax Reform. Such a broad range of organizations suggests that the climate war is part of the larger campaign launched by fiscal conservatives in the 1970s to counter the environmental movement’s agenda.

9 Small-government advocates usually declare that they value the health of the land and support high environmental standards. They claim to disagree with the environmental community on the means, but not on the ends. They argue, in a counter-intuitive way, that the best way to protect the environment is by maximizing economic freedom and eliminating government. This can be achieved, they suggest, by the consolidation of private property rights which will foster good stewardship since private land owners have more incentives than do government bureaucrats to take care of the land they own.27 Jay Wesley Richards of the Heritage Foundation asserts that “sometimes environmental regulation is in order, but more often than not, there are market-based solutions that work better. For instance, strong private property laws are often the best ways to encourage people to act in environmentally friendly ways. We tend to act less responsibly when we are not directly affected by our actions.”28

10 Far from being a means to an end and a way to achieve the good society, the conservative movement’s commitment to small government and free markets seems to have become an end in itself and almost a secular religion. Over the last few years, no social movement has epitomized this attitude better than the Tea Parties, who came

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into being in the wake of the financial meltdown in 2008. It is undeniable that economic issues are much more central to Tea Party activism than social ones.29 In their Tea Party manifesto Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe express their aversion to government regulations in no uncertain terms: “For us, it is all about the rights of the individual over the collective.”30 The Tea Party movement’s discourse is in keeping with the long- standing American tradition of anti-government rhetoric going back all the way to the Anti-Federalists. It is no wonder that cap and trade quickly became one of their bêtes noires. Armey and Kibbe blasted this climate bill as a sly attempt on the part of the President and his party to “‘Europeanize’ the United States.”31 They give short shrift to the scientific consensus on man-made climate change because the notion that the federal government ought to step in so as to avert an environmental Armageddon threatens to undermine the entire intellectual edifice of the Tea Party movement. In order to grasp the stakes of the climate war, it is useful to consider the words of the prominent environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott: It will not suffice … simply to encourage people individually and voluntarily to build green and drive hybrid. But what’s worse is the implication that that’s all we can do about it, that the ultimate responsibility for dampening the adverse effects of global climate change devolves to each of us as individuals. On the contrary, the only hope we have to temper global climate change is a collective sociocultural response in the form of policy, regulation, treaty, and law.32

11 The contrast between Dick Armey’s rabid fear of government and Callicott’s insistence on the need for a government-sponsored international concerted effort could not be starker.

12 Global warming poses a philosophical challenge to libertarians and small- government conservatives: their world view is premised on the idea that government power should always be held in check lest it destroy individual freedom while the world is faced with a crisis of global proportions that could only be averted by a strong and prolonged government action. The steps necessary to address the challenges posed by global warming would lay waste to the Tea Party’s ironclad faith in the free market as the ultimate problem-solver. As Naomi Oreskes states: “Accepting that by-products of industrial civilization were irreparably damaging the global environment was to accept the reality of market failure. It was to acknowledge the limits of free-market capitalism.”33 Given such circumstances, denial appears to be a more desirable strategy than a devastating reappraisal of one’s deeply held beliefs. In that regard, the climate denial movement clearly emerges as a case of ideological grandstanding. As a matter of fact, a significant number of American corporations, by definition dedicated to free- market economics, have already jumped on the global warming bandwagon. The US Climate Action Partnership, set up by several major corporations in cooperation with various environmental organisations in 2007, is a case in point.34 What is at stake are the intellectual underpinnings of libertarianism and small-government conservatism. Their most zealous proponents are not prepared to surrender without putting up a fight.

13 Michael Gerson, Washington Post columnist and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, has pointed out that the political controversy over man-made global warming is the most recent front in the so-called culture wars.35 Whether correct or not, Gerson’s idea bears testimony to the vehement rhetoric deployed by climate change deniers against their detractors, and vice versa. The climate change denial movement sometimes appears as the extension of Cold War politics by other means.

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Deniers are prone to dismiss the theory of man-made global warming and all the attendant government schemes to mitigate it as a kind of socialist conspiracy hatched by the enemies of economic freedom. Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear is a good example as it casts global warming as a ploy to impose strong government intervention on the American people and suppress free enterprise.36 Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, the most vocal climate change denier in the Upper House, asked Crichton to testify before the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in 2005.37 The idea of a statist conspiracy to stifle entrepreneurship combined with dire warnings about “environmental socialism” also resonates with the guests and anchors of right- wing talk shows like Rush Limbaugh’s and Glenn Beck’s.

14 This being said, climate denial is not confined to popular culture: it has also been advocated by prominent conservative intellectuals. George F. Will, in a 2010 Washington Post column, derided the threat of global warming as a convenient strategy used by big- government liberals like Al Gore and Barack Obama to reinforce what he perceives as the pre-eminence of statism in American life and to drive the last nail in the coffin of economic freedom. He characterises public figures endeavouring to draw the public’s attention to the dangers posed by the warming of the planet as “those trying to stampede the world into a spasm of prophylactic statism.”38 The fear of socialism by stealth, which has been on the conservative fiscal agenda since the end of the Cold War, has been summarized laconically by the conservative lobbyist and zealous climate change denier Steve Milloy: “green is the new red.”39 In a more restrained manner, the influential conservative intellectual Charles Krauthammer offered a variation on the same theme in a 2008 Washington Post article: although he was careful to describe himself as a “global warming agnostic,” he was quick to cast suspicions on the motives behind the effort to avert climate change: “Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but—even better—in the name of Earth itself.”40 The fact that such prominent figures as George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer should have towed—albeit tentatively in Krauthammer’s case—the climate change denial line serves to suggest that this concerted effort cannot be dismissed as a fringe phenomenon.

15 Climate change deniers have been remarkably successful in shaping the position of the Republican Party with regards to global warming. During the 2012 presidential primary contest, each candidate had to pass a number of ideological litmus tests in order to prove his or her conservativeness on key issues like illegal immigration, abortion, and same-sex marriage. Curiously, denying man-made global warming or downplaying its consequences turned out to be one of the requirements foisted on the candidates. Mitt Romney, who eventually became the Republican nominee, remains a case in point. Neela Barnjee, reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has shown that, although Romney had been pro-active on climate policy at the beginning of his term as Governor of Massachusetts (2003-2007), he had no compunction about changing his position when he first decided to run for president in 2008.41 To take but one example, in 2005 he distanced himself from a regional compact known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (ReGGIe) created by New England states with a view to reducing carbon emissions in the region, a move all the more noteworthy as Romney had been instrumental in its initial development. Romney does not deny in his 2010 book No Apology that the Earth is warming but he claims to be uncertain about the extent of human responsibility in the warming and discards cap-and-trade legislation

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as a set of “feel-good policies” which will fail to make a difference, thereby echoing a theme already well-rehearsed in conservative and libertarian circles.42 Did Romney genuinely change his mind on the substantive matters involved in this issue or, is it more likely that his sudden change of heart reflects the difficulty of being an advocate of serious climate action inside the Republican Party? Once again, the climate controversy is just one arena of contention in the multifaceted effort to protect American corporations and business owners from government regulations.

16 Ronald Brownstein has noted over the last few decades, and especially since the triumph of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994, that the Republican Party has become significantly more conservative and more ideologically homogeneous and therefore is less liable to strike compromises than in the decades that followed World War II.43 The growing emphasis on ideological purity in Republican primaries and among activists has made it possible for climate change deniers to wield a disproportionate influence within a party which routinely represents about half of the electorate. Meanwhile, moderate and middle-of-the-road Republicans willing to embrace necessary and desirable regulations on business activities are being sidelined as exemplified by Senator Richard Lugar’s downfall in an Indiana primary after a 30- year term in the Upper House of Congress. Ideological intransigence also prompted Maine Senator Olympia Snowe to not seek a fourth term in 2012. John McCain, who unavailingly had co-sponsored several climate bills in the Senate before winning the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, did not even mention global warming in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The rub for the Republican Party is that although market fundamentalism may play well during some Republican primaries across the country, it is unlikely to be a winner with the larger electorate in the general elections, which Mitt Romney found out in 2012. What may be more appealing to the general public, however, is the opposition to climate legislation in defence of the so-called American way of life.

4. THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE OR THE LAST REFUGE OF A CLIMATE CHANGE DENIER

17 The effort to undermine the credibility of scientific research on man-made global warming has continued since the early 1990s after the IPCC had started calling the alarm. Nevertheless because of mounting scientific evidence44 it is becoming increasingly untenable to deny reality, which has led conservative and libertarian think tanks to modify their tactics. Increasingly, to paraphrase James Hoggan, “nondenier deniers” are replacing “deniers”. These nondenier deniers are “people who put themselves forth as reasonable interpreters of the science, even as allies in the fight to bring climate change to the public’s attention. But then they throw in a variety of arguments that actually undermine the public appetite for action.”45 Libertarian and conservative climate experts increasingly recoil from denying the fact that the planet is warming, but they usually lose no time in qualifying their acceptance with two caveats. First, they assert that the negative repercussions of a global rise in temperatures are being grossly overstated in order to alarm the public and decision-makers into accepting the environmentalist agenda. Second, nondenier deniers argue that actions to mitigate the effects of global warming will be economically destructive and environmentally insignificant. Consider the testimony of Kenneth P. Green of the

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American Enterprise Institute before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming in December 2010: “It is time policymakers recognize that despite the claims of renewable energy and efficiency hucksters, we do not have the technologies needed to significantly curb greenhouse gas emissions without causing massive economic disruption.”46 Green goes on to demand additional deregulation so that the American people will face fewer obstacles as they adapt to the consequences of climate change. The commitment to adaptation rather than mitigation has been repeated endlessly in recent conservative and libertarian publications and statements on global warming.47

18 There is no question that, taken in isolation, various points made by climate change deniers are well taken and ought to be seriously heeded by the proponents of strong climate action. Consider, for example, their repeated claim that a unilateral approach to climate change by the American government would make no real difference, an argument often used to discredit efforts by Congress to impose mandatory reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across the nation. Sallie James argues that cap and trade is a losing proposition because it would have an insignificant impact on the earth’s temperatures while damaging the competitiveness of the American economy.48Derrick Morgan raises similar objections49 about a national putative carbon tax, also warning that such a measure would blunt the benefits currently derived by the American economy from the shale gas boom.50 Moreover, Nicolas Loris and Brett D. Schaefer contend that placing the largest burden of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on developed countries like the United States makes less and less sense as developing countries, such as India or China, will soon overtake the United States as the world’s chief emitters of carbon dioxide.51

19 The fear that strong climate action might reduce American competitiveness with rising giants like China is undoubtedly one of the strongest reasons why the Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Senators Robert Byrd (West Virginia) and Chuck Hagel (Nebraska) issued a resolution blocking the ratification of the Kyoto protocol, invoking the same line of argument. In his scathing indictment of the 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, Steven Groves, of the Heritage Foundation, took exception to the fact that, under the terms of a Kyoto II climate change treaty, the United States would be required to help emerging economies, including China—its main economic rival, improve their environmental standards by sharing American findings in clean energy research.52 Groves reiterates his warning against American naiveté in climate negotiations: Developing nations, including economic giants such as India and China, view climate change as a cash cow…and more. In addition to ‘milking’ developed nations for hundreds of billions of dollars in aid, they’ll receive, absolutely free, clean- energy technology worth untold billions more.53

20 Earlier in 2009 Derek Scissors also dismissed the notion that China would follow in the footsteps of the United States if only America took the lead, as “a climate change fable.”54 Needless to say, the hard-hitting stance of the Chinese delegation at the Copenhagen conference and their disrespectful treatment of President Barack Obama55 appear to have corroborated the warnings issued by the Heritage Foundation’s climate change experts. In the context of the economic difficulties faced by the American economy since 2008 and in light of the strong Chinese economy, it is at the very least problematic to require the United States to engage in serious measures concerning

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climate change action with no certainty that the Chinese will also be required to do their fair share.

21 Of particular concern to climate sceptics has also been the defence of American national sovereignty: they contend that an American commitment to a multilateral approach to the climate crisis would inevitably lead to a major loss of US autonomy. Steven Groves contends that under the terms of a Kyoto-style treaty, the United States would be marginalised and exploited by other nations: A committee (or committees) of international experts—whose members may include representatives from overtly hostile nations—will have the final word on whether the US climate record is up to snuff. … Just as ‘developing world’ nations dominate other UN bodies such as the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, so they will dominate the new international climate bureaucracy and enforcement committees.56

22 Steven Groves further argues the unconstitutionality of the ratification of the Copenhagen treaty by the US Senate.57 Although his judgement about the constitutionality of the potential ratification of the Copenhagen treaty seems unjustified, his concern about the pitfalls of climate multilateralism cannot be discarded in the same light. Were the US Senate to ratify a Kyoto-style treaty, it would have to ensure governmental protection of American interests.

23 Various objections raised by climate change sceptics are well-taken. It is not unreasonable, for example, to demand that emerging economies, and especially the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), not be exonerated from the tremendous efforts necessary to deal with climate change, although the priority of climate change deniers appears to be to find arguments to stall any measure to address climate change. While they are quick to point out the futility of unilateral action on the part of the United States, they are also reluctant to endorse multilateral action. Taken together, these two positions give one the impression that taking no action continues to be the best course of action. The reason for this is that in matters of environmental policy, American fiscal conservatives and libertarians have tended to subjugate land health and high environmental standards to the imperatives of economic growth.

24 Ari Fleischer, then spokesman for the George W. Bush White House, replied to a journalist who asked him in 2001 whether American people ought to make lifestyle adjustments in order to remedy energy challenges, that, to paraphrase George H.W. Bush, the American way of life was not negotiable: That's a big no. The President believes that it's an American way of life, and that it should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country. What we need to do is make certain that we're able to get those resources in an efficient way, in a way that also emphasizes protecting the environment and conservation, into the hands of consumers so they can make the choices that they want to make as they live their lives day to day.58

25 In this case, the American way of life is clearly defined as the unlimited and ever expanding ability of all American citizens to indulge in material consumption. This is an aspect of the debate particularly embraced by climate change deniers because it allows them to stand for the creation of wealth and higher standards of living for the American middle class. Senator James Inhofe wrote that his mission was to protect the average consumer from higher prices and regulations in a 2011 article in Human Events. 59 Three years earlier the well-heeled and highly influential free-market advocacy

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group Americans for Prosperity launched a No Climate Tax Pledge which described cap and trade as “a massive tax hike” and required elected officials who endorse it never to vote in favour of a bill creating a tax addressing global warming.60 Only a few days after Barack Obama won a second term, Republican Congressional leaders signed this pledge. 61

26 Jean Isaac, a sociologist at the Heartland Institute, recently endeavoured to drive the point home by characterising cap and trade as “a huge tax on energy”62 in her book Roosters of the Apocalypse, claiming that the implementation of the environmental movement’s agenda would amount to “economic suicide.”63 She also charges American environmentalists with being hell-bent on curtailing high living standards and American prosperity rather than being genuinely willing to protect the environment.64 This theme also looms very large in Steve Milloy’s Green Hell. As far as Milloy is concerned, defeating the environmental movement’s agenda is not merely a way to protect individual freedom, but also a way to prevent environmentalists from liquidating the American way of life altogether: “If our energy supply were threatened, then all our comforts and conveniences that stem from it—in other words, the American way of life—would be endangered as well.”65 The proponents of small government appear to be unmoved by J. Baird Callicott’s caveat that “the human economy is a subset of ecology.”66 Their position is often predicated on the assumption that economic growth must always come first and that protecting the environment can only be ancillary to growth. Even though there is little doubt that such an approach will lead to a dead end, it does make political sense in the short term: branding themselves as the intransigent advocates of the American way of life allows climate deniers to attack their adversaries from a position of strength.

27 To complicate matters, high-profile advocates of climate action like Al Gore and Barack Obama have sometimes been unclear about the radical social and economic adjustments that addressing the challenges posed by global warming would require. In The Assault on Reason, Al Gore seems to imply that the American dedication to high consumption and economic growth will not need to be called into question, that quite the opposite holds true: The opportunity presented by the climate crisis is not only the opportunity for new and better jobs, new technologies, new opportunities for profit, and a higher quality of life. It gives us an opportunity to experience something that few generations ever have the privilege of knowing: a common purpose compelling enough to lift us above our limitations and motivate us to set aside some of the bickering to which as human beings we are naturally vulnerable.67

28 Barack Obama has also made several declarations to the same effect. Eric Pooley, author of The Climate War, begs to differ. Although he never claims that climate action would wreak economic havoc, he also makes it plain that such a policy would have far- reaching repercussions on the average citizen’s lifestyle, as suggested in his account of congressional debates over cap and trade: “On the day Waxman released his bill, the Senate passed another resolution 89-8, saying that any climate bill must achieve its goals ‘without increasing gasoline or energy prices’—in other words, the Senate was only in favor of a climate bill that didn’t do anything.”68Bill McKibben has also been straightforward about the profound change needed to make a difference:

To reduce the amount of CO2 pouring into the atmosphere means dramatically reducing the amount of fossil fuel being consumed. Which means changing the underpinning of the planet’s entire economy and altering our most ingrained

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personal habits. Even under the best scenarios, this will involve something more like a revolution than a technical fix.69

29 Downplaying the impact of climate action on people’s lives undermines the case made by environmentalists and leaves them open to easy criticism from climate change deniers.

30 The reluctance to present the implications of a serious government policy on global warming in a more straightforward manner has a great deal to do with misgivings about the public’s response. Raising public awareness about global warming is one thing, and it is hard enough, but convincing the public to change its behavior in order to avert global warming is quite another. In his account of the climate wars, Eric Pooley noted that Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s Chief of Staff during his first two years in office, urged the president not to spend political capital on a climate bill because it did not appeal to the public and it would therefore be a nonstarter in the Senate.70 That is partly the reason why President Obama decided to throw his political weight behind healthcare reform rather than cap and trade in his first term. To be sure it would be unfair to state that President Obama did nothing to address the climate crisis. As Michael Grunwald has documented in his account of Barack Obama’s first term, the President allocated a considerable portion of stimulus money to invest in clean and renewable energies.71 The fact remains that the Obama administration shied away from actively supporting the Waxman-Markey Bill because it was afraid of becoming unpopular. This attitude goes a long way towards accounting for the climate change deniers’ emphasis on the putative costs of climate action. It also begs one crucial question: were Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel right in thinking that the public would not have accepted the passage of a cap-and-trade bill?

31 Political scientist James Stimson appears to believe otherwise. Judging from the data collected regarding public attitudes towards environmental regulations, the American people tend to be less disinclined to support serious environmental measures despite their economic repercussions than Rahm Emanuel believes: “The public wanted and still wants environmental improvements, and it wanted it regardless of trade-offs. That’s what the data show. Given a choice between doing more about the environment and anything else, the environment wins.”72 It should be noted that Stimson’s comment is a general one about American attitudes towards environmental policy, and not about global warming per se. Yet, there is no question that his analysis of public opinion in the United States seems to contradict the assumptions underpinning President Obama’s climate strategy. One may wonder whether Stimson’s evidence proves that the public is environmentally-friendly as a matter of principle but would be actually unwilling to live with the actual consequences of strong environmental regulations, or whether Rahm Emanuel was wrong in assuming that American voters would punish legislators for taking tough action in favor of protecting the climate. Whatever the case may be, in 2009 many members of Congress—both Republicans and Democrats—gave credence to Emanuel’s assessment of the state of public opinion. If in fact most Republicans were dead set against the Waxman-Markey Bill, a significant number of Democrats also proved lukewarm about the bill if not downright hostile to it. The 2012 campaign for re-election to the US Senate by Joe Manchin, a Democratic Senator from coal-rich West Virginia, is a case in point. He captured the attention of the commentariat with his campaign ad “Dead Aim” in which he expressed his rejection of climate legislation by shooting at a piece of paper bearing the inscription “cap and trade.”73 Such clear-cut

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stands make the possibility of decisive climate action in the next four years very unlikely.

5. CONCLUSION

32 It is worth bearing in mind that the origins and motives of the American climate change denial movement are highly complex and cannot be merely described as the upshot of an attempt on the part of the energy sector to ward off regulation—although this interpretation sheds light on a large part of the movement. Climate change deniers also illustrate the strong ideological forces that have been shaping Republican politics over the last few decades. The generally accepted scientific explanation for global warming significantly damages the soundness of the ideological pro-market position which the American conservative movement has been embracing since the Reagan era and the end of the Cold War. The central contribution of human activities to the warming of our planet does not destroy the case for a market economy per se; it does, however, put a dent in the validity of the American Right’s faith in the free market as the ultimate solution to all social, economic, and environmental problems. In effect, conceding defeat in the climate war would have devastating repercussions on the intellectual bearings of many conservative officials and activists. So far, for the most part, with a few notable exceptions like former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman and Arizona Senator John McCain, it has been a defeat too hard to swallow. While the scientific case of climate deniers has now been seriously discredited, their economic arguments will certainly continue to carry a lot of weight in American politics in the years to come.

33 Finally, the resilience of the climate change denial movement in the face of mounting scientific evidence also highlights the weaknesses of their proponents’ own ideology. Broadly defined, the ideology of the proponents of strong climate action points to a willingness to adapt to the limitations imposed on modern civilisations by ecosystems and the biosphere. Yet, their reluctance to be more straightforward about the major cultural and behavioural changes that would inevitably stem from more ecologically-sensitive climate policies demonstrates that the implications of the policies they advocate are not completely developed. In addition, their irenic 74perception of the international community and its potential for well-coordinated, effective climate-related action does not bode well for the future. When it comes to laying out international measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, US proponents of strong climate-related action place a disproportionate burden on developed countries like the United States. Although from a historical and moral perspective this approach may seem justified, global warming remains first and foremost a global problem impossible to solve without the full participation of all countries, including developing countries.

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NOTES

1. Claude Allègre, L’imposture climatique ou la fausse écologie (Paris: Plon, 2010). Vincent Courtillot, Nouveau Voyage au centre de la Terre (Paris: Odile Jacob 2011). 2. The lobbying activities of the Koch brother (Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch) who own Koch Industries have received considerable media attention over the last few years. For several decades, they have been funding various free-market and libertarian advocacy groups with a view to shaping the decision-making process. 3. Among the most prominent think tanks involved in the climate change denial movement are the American Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. This list is far from exhaustive. 4. James A. Stimson, Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 45. 5. Craig W. Allin, The Politics of Wilderness Preservation (Fairbanks, AK: The University of Alaska Press, 2008), 3-24. 6. Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993), 117-161.

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7. See the EPA website for the complete text of the Clean Air Act: http://www.epa.gov/air/caa, last updated February 17, 2012. 8. See the EPA website for the complete text of the Clean Water Act: http://www.epa.gov/ lawsregs/laws/cwa.html, last updated April 16, 2013. 9. See the website of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for the complete text of the Endangered Species Act: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/pr/laws/esa/, last updated March 7, 2013. 10. See the EPA website for a summary of the history of the EPA: http://www2.epa.gov/ aboutepa/epa-history, last updated May 1, 2013. 11. It is noteworthy that the land management policies sought by the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation bear an uncanny resemblance to those of the era predating federal conservation: Gifford Pinchot and his followers set out to rationalize the way in which natural resources were exploited through scientifically-based management under federal supervision. Pinchot’s autobiography makes it clear that his goal had been to remedy the havoc wreaked by easy access to property, free enterprise, and unregulated use of natural resources. See Gifford Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1987), 509. Pinchot understood fully well that federal conservation hinged on extensive public ownership and a reversal of the privatizing process initiated by the Founding Fathers. As the bureaucratic apparatus of federal conservation was reinforced extensively in the 1960s and 1970s, Pinchot’s perspective, the anathema of small-government conservatives, remained the order of the day. According to the Heritage Foundation’s conservation experts, environmental regulations are just one aspect of “the insatiable growth of the regulatory state.” What is more, they argue, active public management of natural resources is bound to be self-defeating, inefficient and inferior to the outcomes produced by market mechanisms. See Romina Boccia, Jack Spencer, and Robert Gordon Jr., “Environmental Conservation Based on Individual Liberty and Economic Freedom,” The Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder n°2758 (January 8, 2013): 2, accessed April 4, 2013, http:// www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/01/environmental-conservation-based-on-individual- liberty-and-economic-freedom. Their experts claim that, except for Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks, the federal government would be well-advised to privatize the public domain completely (Ibid., 3). The libertarian Cato Institute has endorsed the same position (Taylor “Environmental Policy,” 463-464). 12. Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 30-32. 13. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 6. 14. Ibid., 169-215. 15. Al Gore, The Assault on Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), Kindle edition, 199. 16. Al Gore, “Climate of Denial,” Rolling Stone, June 22, 2011, accessed April 30, 2013, http:// www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/climate-of-denial-20110622. 17. Mann has been the unfortunate target of vicious ad hominem attacks by climate change deniers who fault him for the “hockey-stick” graph which highlights the abnormal rise in temperatures in the last decades of the 20th century. See for example http:// www.businessinsider.com/michael-mann-describes-life-as-a-target-2013-3, last updated March 27, 2013. 18. Michael E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 3-4. 19. Cap and trade is defined as a market-based plan to reduce carbon emissions in which the government sets a cap to limit emissions and issues pollution credits which companies can buy and sell as they wish, the point being that those that pollute less can sell their extra credits to those that pollute more so that overall emissions do not rise above the cap. Ultimately the

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government imposes fines to companies who do not abide by this framework. Cap and trade was at the heart of the Waxman-Markey Bill that failed in Congress in 2009. 20. “Oil and Gas: Lobbying, 2012,” Center for Responsive Politics, accessed May 2, 2013, http:// www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying.php?cycle=2012&ind=E01. 21. Eric Pooley, The Climate Wars: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth (New York: Hyperion, 2010), 186. 22. “Influence and Lobbying: Oil and Gas,” Center for Responsive Politics, accessed May 2, 2013, http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E01. 23. “Oil and Gas Lobbying, 2012.” 24. “Environment: Lobbying, 2012,” Center for Responsive Politics, accessed May 2, 2013, http:// www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying.php?cycle=2012&ind=Q11. 25. Peter J. Jacques, Riley E. Dunlap and Mark Freeman, “The Organization of Denial: Conservative Think Tanks and Environmental Scepticism,” Environmental Politics 17.3 (June 2008): 360. 26. Nick Wing, “John Shimkus, GOP Rep. Who Denies Climate Change on Religious Grounds, Could Lead House Environmental Policy,” The Huffington Post, November 13, 2010, accessed April 30, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/13/john-shimkus-climate- change_n_782664.html. “An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming,” Cornwall Alliance, accessed April 29, 2013, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/articles/read/an-evangelical- declaration-on-global-warming/. 27. Julie Borowski, “Earth Day Special: Private Property Protects the Environment,” Freedom Works, April 20, 2012, accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.freedomworks.org/blog/jborowski/ private-property-protects-environment. Norton Dunlop, “Federalism and Free Markets: The Right Environmental Agenda,” The Heritage Foundation, March 9, 2006, accessed April 29, 2013, http://www.heritage.org/about/speeches/federalism-and-free-markets-the-right- environmental-agenda. 28. Jay Wesley Richards, “The Economy Hits Home: Energy and the Environment” (Washington: The Heritage Foundation, Undated), 14, accessed April 4, 2013, http:// thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/2009/pdf/EconHitsHome_Environment.pdf. 29. Kate Zernike, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (New York: Times Books, 2010), 37. 30. Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (New York: Harper Collins, 2010), 90-91. 31. Ibid., 95-96. 32. J. Baird Callicott, “From the Land Ethic to the Earth Ethic: Aldo Leopold and the Gaia Hypothesis,” in Gaia in Turmoil: Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in an Age of Crisis, ed. Eileen Crist, H. Bruce Rinker, and Bill McKibben (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 191. 33. Oreskes and Conway, Merchants, 238. 34. See the website of the United States Climate Action Partnership, http://www.us-cap.org/. 35. Michael Gerson, “Climate Change and the Culture War,” The Washington Post, January 17, 2012, accessed April 29, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-and-the- culture-war/2012/01/16/gIQA6qH63P_story.html. 36. Michael Crichton, State of Fear (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). 37. Michael Crichton, “The Role of Science in Environmental Policy-Making,” US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Hearing Statements, October 28, 2005, accessed April 29, 2013, http://epw.senate.gov/hearing_statements.cfm?id=246766. 38. George F. Will, “Global Warming Advocates Ignore the Boulders,” The Washington Post, February 21, 2010, accessed April 30, 2013, http://newstrust.net/stories/853779/toolbar. 39. Steve Milloy, Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing Inc., 2009), 234.

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40. Charles Krauthammer, “Carbon Chastity,” The Washington Post, May 30, 2008, accessed April 30, 2013, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-05-30/opinions/36813249_1_socialism- carbon-chastity-co2into. 41. Neela Barnejee, “Mitt Romney Worked to Combat Climate Change as Governor,” The Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2012, accessed April 29, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jun/13/ nation/la-na-romney-energy-20120613. 42. Mitt Romney, No Apology: Believe in America (New York: Saint Martin’s Griffin, 2010), 243. 43. Ronald Brownstein, The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Divided America (New York: Penguin, 2007), 11-13. 44. Naomi Oreskes, “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science 306 (5702): 1686. 45. James Hoggan, Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2009), 118. 46. Kenneth P. Green, “Not Going Away: America’s Energy Security, Jobs and Climate Challenges,” Statement before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, December 1, 2010, accessed April 29, 2013, http://www.aei.org/speech/energy-and-the- environment/climate-change/not-going-away-americas-energy-security-jobs-and-climate- challenges/. 47. Indur Goklany, “What to Do About Climate Change,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis 609 (February 2008): 3, accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/ pa-609.pdf.Patrick J. Michaels, “Global Warming and Climate Change,” in Cato Handbook for Policymakers, 7th ed.,ed. David Boaz (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2009), 475. Eric A. Posner and Cass R. Sumstein, “Global Warming and Social Justice,” Regulation 31.1 (Spring 2008): 19, accessed April 4, 2013, http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2008/2/ v31n1-3.pdf. 48. Sallie James, “A Harsh Climate for Trade: How Climate Change Proposals Threaten Global Commerce,” Trade Policy Analysis 41 (September 2009): 4, accessed April 4, 2013, http:// www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/tpa-041.pdf. 49. Derrick Morgan, “A Carbon Tax Would Harm US Competitiveness and Low-Income Americans Without Helping the Environment,” The Heritage Foundation, Backgrounder n°2720 (August 21, 2012), 4, accessed July 23, 2013, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/08/a-carbon- tax-would-harm-us-competitiveness-and-low-income-americans-without-helping-the- environment. 50. Ibid., 5. 51. Nicolas Loris and Brett D. Schaefer, “Climate Change: How the United States Should Lead,” The Heritage Foundation, Issue Brief n°3841 (January 24, 2013), accessed April 4, 2013, http:// www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/01/climate-change-how-the-us-should-lead. 52. Steven Groves, “The ‘Kyoto II’ Climate Change Treaty: Implications for American Sovereignty,” The Heritage Foundation, Copenhagen Consequences, Analysis of the 2009 Copenhagen UN Climate Change Conference n°5 (November 17, 2009), 3, accessed July 23, 2013, http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/11/the-kyoto-ii-climate-change-treaty- implications-for-american-sovereignty. 53. Steven Groves, “National Sovereignty May Melt at Climate Conference,” The Heritage Foundation, Commentary (December 4, 2009), accessed July 23, 2013, http://www.heritage.org/ research/commentary/2009/12/national-sovereignty-may-melt-at-climate-conference. 54. Derek Scissors, “China Will Follow the United States: A Climate Change Fable,” The Heritage Foundation, WebMemo n°2327 (March 5, 2009), 1, accessed July 23, 2013, http:// www.heritage.org/research/reports/2009/03/china-will-follow-the-us-a-climate-change-fable. 55. Pooley, Climate, 429-431. 56. Groves, “National Sovereignty”.

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RÉSUMÉS

The concerted effort to discredit the scientific consensus over man-made global warming has been continuing for two decades in the United States, and shows no sign of weakening. It is very often described as an attempt on the part of corporate America, most notably the fossil fuel industries, to hinder governmental regulations on their activities. While emphasising this dimension of the US climate denial movement, this article also aims to show the complexity of the movement, rather than the mere defence of the narrowly-defined and short-term economic interests of the oil and gas industries, by shedding light on two additional factors which have been instrumental in blocking strong climate action. First, climate denial stems from the strong ideological commitment of small-government conservatives and libertarians to laisser-faire and their strong opposition to regulation. Second, in order to disarm their opponents, US climate deniers often rest their case on the defence of the American way of life, defined by high consumption and ever-expanding material prosperity. It is the contention of this article,

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therefore, that the US climate denial movement is best understood as a combination of these three trends.

INDEX

Keywords : climate change, conservatism, consumerism, ecology, environmentalism, free market, global warming, ideology, libertarianism, Republican party, think tanks.

AUTEURS

JEAN-DANIEL COLLOMB Maître de conférences, Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3 (France),jean-daniel.collomb@univ- lyon3.fr

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