The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts REIMAGINING THE FREE MARKET: AMERICAN LITERATURE AND ECONOMICS FROM THE PROGRESSIVE ERA THROUGH THE GREAT DEPRESSION A Dissertation in English by Peter Collins © 2011 Peter Collins Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2011 ii The dissertation of Peter Collins was reviewed and approved* by the following: Robin Schulze Professor of English Head of the Department of English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Deborah Clarke Professor of English at Arizona State University Janet Lyon Associate Professor of English, Women's Studies, and Science, Technology, and Society Christopher Reed Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture Adam Rome Associate Professor of History *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii Abstract This dissertation examines the role that U.S. literature played between 1880 and the start of World War II in challenging and rethinking free market ideology. The post-Civil War period saw ever larger businesses and cooperatives begin to dominate the U.S. economy, while economic depressions and frequent labor strikes shook people‘s faith in the free market system. By the late nineteenth century these problems had led to a rich and vital debate over America‘s economic future, a debate that played out not only in politics and judicial proceedings but in social and cultural milieus as well. While most research on literature and economics during this period has concentrated on the expression of revolutionary and socialist ideology, this dissertation examines those writers whose views were reformist, rather than revolutionary. In so doing, it argues that the Progressive Era and the Great Depression were historical periods in which liberalism turned inward, confronting and attempting to solve the problems inherent in its orthodoxy. The texts examined cover a range of literary fields, including late nineteenth-century utopian fiction (Edward Bellamy‘s Looking Backward and some novelistic responses to it), naturalism (the work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser), and modernism (John Dos Passos‘s U.S.A. trilogy in particular). In analyzing these texts, this dissertation draws connections between literary works often separated by disciplinary boundaries, demonstrating their responses to the shared exigency of economic crisis. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 The Free Market in Turmoil Chapter 1 18 A Utopia of Abundance: Edward Bellamy and the Free Market Chapter 2 60 The Irrational Consumer: Economics and Agency in Gilman, Loos, and Cozzens Chapter 3 102 Natural Fortunes: Chance, Fitness, and the Individual in Literary Naturalism Chapter 4 149 The New Deal and the ―middle-class liberal‖: Labor, Consumption, and Capital in Dos Passos‘s U.S.A. Conclusion 192 Economics and Literature Works Cited 196 1 Introduction: The Free Market in Turmoil A useful definition of modernism posits that the literary movement arose from Enlightenment ideology facing its own failures—the failure to extend human rights to women, dark-skinned people, and other minority groups, the failure of imperialist nations to respect the rights of colonized peoples, and the failure of the liberal economic policies that first took form in the works of thinkers like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith. While the policies informed by such thinkers may have driven industry in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by the last decades of the nineteenth century they had led to frequent economic depressions, labor strikes, poor working conditions, unpopular monopolies, and substantial gaps in wealth. As a result, economic reformists of the Progressive Era began to challenge the once dominant ideology of the free market, and to suggest alternative ways to organize the economy. This project examines the role that U.S. literature played between the 1880s and the 1930s in challenging and rethinking free market ideology. The tremendous economic instability that marked the post-Civil War period inspired thinkers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to address economic questions. Among these were numerous literary writers, who used both fiction and non-fiction works to comment on economic topics. Edward Bellamy was prepared to write a wide-ranging economic critique in his utopian novel Looking Backward in part by the journalism he did in the 1870s. Charlotte Perkins Gilman not only wrote Women and Economics, she also incorporated economic ideas into her fiction. Frank Norris researched the Mussel Slough tragedy prior to writing The Octopus, and Theodore Dreiser was interested enough in communism to visit the Soviet Union. John Dos Passos wrote articles about economics for the New Republic while working on U.S.A. By exploring the ways in which 2 literature developed as a response to a period when the free market was undergoing severe challenges, this project sheds light both on literature from this period and on how people conceptualized and sought to influence economic change. The range of texts explored is unusually broad for a critical work whose primary methodology is literary exegesis, ranging from late nineteenth-century utopian literature to naturalism to modernism, but while the works discussed come from a wide range of literary styles and traditions, they share a common bond in their ambivalence toward the free market. These works neither reject the utopian promise of the free market outright, nor do they ignore the problems that arise out of an insufficiently or improperly regulated market. Furthermore, these texts do economic work by confronting economic issues directly. While much modernist literature attempts a critical distance from the commodified, materialistic nature of the modern world, this project concentrates on those works that delve into the specifics of capitalism. Of course, more typically modernist works like T. S. Eliot‘s poem ―The Wasteland,‖ or Gertrude Stein‘s novel The Making of Americans also do a form of economic work. Fredric Jameson, for instance, famously argues that the ―make it new‖ aesthetic of modernism‘s more avant-garde works represents a rebellion against the stultifying normativity of consumer culture. This rebellion is then absorbed by capitalism, which repackages it as a commodified object in its own right.1 However, while such texts may represent interesting and important interventions in economic ideology, they typically do so in a manner that avoids openly debating the merits of different forms of economic organization. By avoiding these works and instead analyzing works which do debate economic issues explicitly, this project reclaims an area of economic discourse now more commonly associated with the conservatism of writers like Ayn Rand than with progressivism. To study and write about, for instance, the stock market or department stores, is 3 not necessarily to embrace or acquiesce to the status quo. Many of the writers discussed in this project found support for their views in such a direct study of the object of their critique. Though firmly rooted in history, the analyses in this project initially grew out of my sense that the United States is again, as it was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, at an economic crossroads. No longer forced to compete with Communism, it has become an economic system for the few, not for the many. Thus this project is, in part, an effort to reclaim the ability to question what has too often become unassailable in free market ideology. At its most basic, to question both what the free market is and what it could be. The two questions that lurk behind this inquiry, then, are first, how did people conceive of and understand the changes in capitalism that they lived through? And second, what does literature have to do with this moment of crisis and change? The first question can have no single, monolithic answer. However, there are a series of economic issues that arise repeatedly in literary texts from this period. At the most basic level, Progressive Era writers devoted considerable energy to answering the questions, what is a free market and how does it operate? These questions are deceptively complex. Avoiding government regulation had always been a cornerstone of free market economics, but since the complete absence of government oversight had never been achieved, what level of freedom defined the free market remained an arguable point. In addition, the term free market implied that the market would free people, but concerns about economic slavery remained powerful. While Adam Smith claimed that a free market would guarantee people‘s ―natural liberty‖ and result in ordered economic progress, this view became increasingly difficult to uphold as the actual economy suffered multiple recessions and depressions. These questions gave rise to others. Some people saw, in the increased wealth that had accompanied industrialization, the possibility of 4 tremendous abundance. This posed both practical questions, as theorists debated how to handle the overproduction crises of the nineteenth century, and ethical questions. While the apparent inevitability of poverty had justified its existence, as the supply of goods increased and it began to look possible that everyone‘s basic needs could be met, the continued existence of poverty amidst plenty posed a significant moral dilemma for those who had more than enough. Finally, as it became clear that the tenets of classical liberalism did not actually ensure the freedom they promised, many writers began to wonder how the good parts of it—specifically individualism, self-regulation, and freedom from government tyranny—could be saved. While some people were willing to jettison these tenets in favor of the communal good, others saw liberalism as valuable, even if it had not always lived up to its promises. In various ways, these issues percolate throughout the works discussed in this project. Some authors are more concerned with one issue than with the others, but they share a common concern with questioning the merits of maintaining a free market at a time when its future was uncertain.