U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 11, Autumn 2007

The Horrors of Maine: Space, Place and Regionalism in Stephen King’s Pet Sematary

Rebecca Janicker
© Rebecca Janicker. All Rights Reserved

‘Honey, it’s just a pet cemetery’, he said.

Stephen King, Pet Sematary (1988)[1]

Work on regionalist writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman has long emphasised the use of a specified geographical location and a deep authorial, emotional connection to its physical environment, customs and idiosyncrasies.[2] This article seeks to explore these ideas more fully by examining a rather different text, Stephen King’s modern horror tale Pet Sematary, within a regionalist framework, arguing that the intricate blending of real-life locations with a detailed fictional geography is important to the success of the work. It supplies a degree of authenticity conducive to sustaining a convincing supernatural narrative.

Regionalist writing

Regionalist writing has often been examined through the lens of gender: Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse have specifically identified it as a women-centred genre.[3] Other theorists have seen it rather as a style incorporating authentic geographic locations with a focus on ‘local-colour’ through the use of vernacular and other distinctive attributes. Indeed, Richard Brodhead has de-emphasised the tradition of regionalist literature being seen as a product of female writers and has instead described it more broadly as a literature that fashions ‘an alternative stable, if imaginary, geographic-cultural space’.[4] For example, Sarah Orne Jewett’s works feature characters from rural New England communities ensconced firmly in the countryside which surrounds them, drawing on their ‘idiosyncratic mannerisms, dialect, social customs and homespun moral dramas’.[5] This gives a voice to the local people, venerating their disappearing way of life and allowing American readers to indulge in a nostalgic longing for a simpler time.[6] Such writing, sometimes seen as a peculiarity set apart from the mainstream of American literature, has been used to understand changes in sociological circumstances in a post-Civil War United States, struggling to make the shift from rural, agrarian living to industrialisation and increased urbanisation.

These definitions share a concern for the ways in which regionalist fiction builds up the identity of a rural area such as New England by utilising local geography and landmarks, embracing local values and establishing local ideas about identity. In her work on New England post-bellum regionalist writers, such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sandra Zagarell has highlighted a number of elements that make up this style. These include contrasting the rural regional community with the developing ‘modern’ world beyond it [7] – especially through the practice of juxtaposing urban-dwellers with locals in order to make more explicit the particular characteristics of the latter.[8]

Given these observations, it can readily be argued that Stephen King’s Pet Sematary is an example of regionalist literature. The novel includes a recognisable topography of King’s native Maine, incorporating authentic towns and a developed geography consistent with the known New England landscape. It provides specific details of climate and scenery, weaving them into the story in order to set the scene of a localised tale. Incorporating dialect and regional characteristics further helps to build up a cast of authentic characters. Yet the work ultimately draws on these features to transform the region into a site of supernatural horror:

King’s Maine is a place of terrifying loneliness where nature seems antagonistic to human habitation and where men and women often feel the same degree of estrangement from one another as they do toward the supernatural creatures who threaten their lives.[9]

These regional features are contrasted in the course of the narrative with those of the urban Mid-Western lifestyle that the novel’s protagonist, Dr Louis Creed, previously shared with his family in Chicago.

A sizeable portion of the novel is thus devoted to the development of a regionalised environment. The novel begins with an account of the Creeds’ relocation to rural Maine. Having designated the fictional town of Ludlow as their new home, King makes it seem more real by placing it amidst real Maine towns such as Orrington and Bangor and geographical features such as the Penobscot River (King, pp. 18, 31). The Creeds’ new Ludlow home is situated within a regionalised arena of on-going territorial conflict, described as

a big old New England colonial […] all of it surrounded by a luxuriant sprawl of lawn […] there would be no development in the foreseeable future. The remains of the Micmac Indian tribe had laid claim to nearly 8, 000 acres in Ludlow […] and the complicated litigation […] might stretch into the next century (King, p. 4).

This detailing thus places the idea of a specific regional space, complete with historical detailing and contemporary legal wrangling, in the mind of the reader.

Having begun by establishing the physical surroundings, King then proceeds to build up a social milieu consistent with expectations about rustic New Englanders. A prominent feature of regional writing is the use of picturesque vernacular, which lends an identifiably-local flavour, effectively exoticising those who speak it.[10] Indeed, much is made of the way in which the Creeds respond to the dialect of their new neighbours, Jud and Norma Crandall, contrasting sharply as it does with the urban, Chicago accents to which they have previously been accustomed. Whole chunks of dialogue are written out in a New England vernacular, which is labelled by Louis Creed as a ‘Downeast accent’, and ‘as exotic to their Midwestern ears as a foreign language’ (King, pp. 9, 11). Later in the novel, particular words are observed to have been ‘pronounced in the best Yankee tradition’ whilst a telephone operator is observed to have ‘translated Yankee into American’ in order to understand Jud Crandall (King, pp. 156, 357).

This further helps to create a specifically local feel for the novel. Another feature of this focus on speech is how Crandall relates the history of the wilderness surrounding the Creed’s new home in the manner of a participant in oral history tradition (King, pp. 108, 125 and 180). He tells the curious Louis that the one-time Micmac burial ground beyond the local children’s ‘pet cemetery’ near their homes has the power to resurrect corpses. Shortly after this, unable to cope with the prospect of daughter Ellie’s grief when their cat, Church, is hit and killed by a truck on the busy road nearby, Louis buries the pet in the eponymous cemetery. It does indeed return to life, but in repellent form. Jud’s speeches about the burial ground, made at various points throughout the novel, thus also relate to the kind of writing featured in other regionalist literature.

Moving on from this, the portrayal of locals through language is bolstered by the inclusion of regional character traits. In building up a definitively ‘local’ cast of characters, King endows some of them with typically insular qualities such as resentment of outsiders – another hallmark of regionalist writing. Burton Hatlen has observed the influence of Maine on much of King’s early work, arguing that the ‘local-color […] quaint, downeast stereotype’ [11] is much in evidence; however, there are also many better-rounded, more believable characters who are ‘hard, self-destructive’ and possessive of the ‘stubborn independence’ considered typical of Maine people.[12] Hatlen notes the mass summer exodus of holiday-makers from suburban areas along the east coast seeking the rural tranquillity that the Pine Tree State has to offer.[13] In arguing that there are two sides to Maine – the pastoral ideal sought by tourists and the physical and spiritual darkness represented by the forests – Hatlen examines the impact of living close to such a nature and has further specified the potential for insularity and morbid introspectiveness within residents’ characters.[14] Such tendencies are evident in the novel. Having enlightened Creed about the revivification powers inherent within the ground beyond the pet cemetery, Crandall sends a note to warn him against speaking of it,

people round here don’t like to talk about it, and they don’t like people they consider to be ‘outsiders’ to know about it […] because they sort of believe in those superstitions and they think that any ‘outsider’ who knows that they do must be laughing at them (King, pp. 159-160).

An insular atmosphere of ‘local people’ guarding their community secrets to the exclusion of strangers is thus maintained. Hatlen goes so far as to argue that ‘the physical isolation of those backroads houses and the cultural isolation created by centuries-old taboos against any sort of opening up to strangers make the fate of the outsider in Maine especially bitter’.[15] Such insularity in rural enclaves has long been observed as an exemplar of regionalist writing.[16] With these notions firmly in place, the idea of rural New England communities closely guarding their secret knowledge about the ancient land surrounding them is an increasingly-plausible one.

As noted above, regionalist works have often highlighted the nature of rural characters by contrasting them with their urban counterparts. One way of doing this is portraying the tendency of the latter group to exploit nature for their own ends.[17] Insofar as Creed is quick to take advantage of the mysterious powers of the burial ground, it can be argued that this is a feature of this work, too. Representing, as Creed does, the scientifically-minded urbanite, his readiness to use ancient natural powers inherent in the land to ‘play God’ juxtaposes him with Ludlow-native Jud Crandall: despite being bereaved mid-way through the novel, Crandall resists the temptation to use the Micmac ground to have his beloved wife restored to him.

Furthermore, Pet Sematary is littered with references to regional institutions. The B&M railroad mentioned is also included, as is the Boston and Albany (B&A) line which was created in 1870 from the mergers of four Massachusetts and eastern New York State based companies (King, pp. 316, 397). These railroads are long-standing local transport services that symbolise New England living and industry and have long been part of that landscape. Also mentioned is New England Major League baseball team the Boston Red Sox, and the local A&P grocery store, part of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, founded in 1859 and serving nine states along the United States eastern seaboard to the present day. In the same way that Magistrale argues that King uses ‘the well-known brand names of corporate America’ to subvert reality, I would argue that these references to companies help to destabilise the reader’s experience of a real New England which includes these features.[18] All these elements work together to shore up ideas about this novel having stemmed from the pen of an author with an authentic knowledge of the region.

Developing King’s theme of dislocation from the familiar, Pet Sematary makes much of the unknown, potentially malevolent, nature of the wilderness in which this young family suddenly finds itself: rural space is continually, and sharply, contrasted with urban and civilised space. Along with this comes notions of bad space; allusions both to ancient evil and the taint of human sin lingering in the landscape abound, suggesting that there exist fundamentally evil places in New England into which it would be better for people not to venture. In this novel, bad space is epitomised by the old burial ground, known to have been used by the Micmacs, which is separated from the pet cemetery by the deadfall. The vegetation near the Micmac ground is shown to be corrupt and unwholesome because there is something intrinsically evil about the wilderness surrounding it; with King specifically using luminescence to suggest putrefaction, further developing the idea that the very landscape is alive and somehow actively malicious towards those humans who inhabit it. In describing ‘the dense, dark, botanical aura’ Samuel Schuman notes that the vegetation surrounding the cemetery contributes heavily to the ominous atmosphere which so repels Rachel Creed. This suggests the presence of a bad place near their home from the start.[19] However, it is important to note that, although the tainted wilderness space beyond the pet cemetery is referred to as an Indian burial-ground, Crandall asserts that,

The Micmacs knew that place, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they made it what it was. The Micmacs weren’t always here […] And now they are gone again […] But the place will stay no matter who’s here, Louis. It isn’t as though someone owned it, and could take its secret when they moved on. It’s an evil, curdled place, and I had no business taking you up there to bury that cat(King, p.307).

The supernatural powers of the place, combined with Louis’s eventual sighting of the Wendigo (ancient spirit of the North Country in Native American mythology), serve to confirm Crandall’s assertions that the ground is (and always has been) bad, irrespective of who has used it over the centuries.

The pet cemetery itself quickly sparks a quarrel between Louis and Rachel about the nature of death. It is clear that she literally cannot tolerate the thought of losing her loved ones – a phobia attributed to the traumatic experience of her sister, Zelda, dying alone in Rachel’s presence from spinal meningitis when they were children. So, when Church dies, Creed uses the information Crandall gave him about the Micmac ground to resurrect the pet without telling the rest of the family. Taking the corpse for the burial proves an unwholesome, deplorable act and descriptions of the ‘crackling underbrush’ and ‘gloom cast by the trees’ evoke imagery suggestive of bad wilderness space (King, pp. 141, 144). Later reports, and Louis’s sighting, of a Wendigo in the region serve to heighten the sense of the land being irretrievably tainted.

The Maine of Pet Sematary initially appears to offer a rural idyll; the view from the hill behind the Creed’s new home provides a window into a regional past:

It was the river-valley they were looking into, of course; the Penobscot where loggers had once floated their timber from the north-east down to Bangor and Derry […] The river flowed wide and peacefully, as if in its own deep dream […] ‘Gorgeous is the right word’, Louis said finally (King, pp. 31-32).

This vision is in keeping with the image of the verdant, unspoiled national landscape, noted to be so influential in American literature by Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. Regionalist works have long been linked to this pastoral literary tradition; creating oppositions between the realms of rural and urban, nature and civilisation.[20] The wilderness beyond the house can thus be contrasted with it in terms of bad space, and a suggestion is made early on of its unwholesome aspect. Cultural geographer Yi-fu Tuan, in Landscapes of Fear, argues that rural space has long been associated with violence and death.[21] This can directly be linked to American Gothic in terms of the harshness of the frontier experience, which will be explored in greater detail further on in this article. Life on the frontier meant that extremes of temperature, difficult terrain and wild animals all posed a serious threat to those who endured it. Leo Marx describes the duality of the American landscape thus,

In a sense, America was both Eden and a howling desert; the actual conditions of life in the New World did lend plausibility to both images […] The infinite resources of the virgin land really did make credible […] the ancient dream of an abundant and harmonious life for all. Yet, at the same time, the savages, the limitless space, and the violent climate of the country did threaten to engulf the new civilization.[22]

From the outset, America was a land which inspired ambivalent feelings in pioneers hopeful of attaining paradise, as ‘Anticipations of a second Eden quickly shattered against the reality of North America’.[23] The clash between the potential and the reality of the landscape thus allows for both the pastoral ideal and the old fear of the untamed land to plausibly co-exist in the same physical space in this tale.

Magistrale cites this as one of King’s major focuses; he builds up such an extensive history of evil in one location that all the events accrue to form ‘a living organism sustaining itself on historical and renewable incidents of human cruelty and violent behaviour’.[24] He links this idea to the works of Hawthorne, and the Puritanical notion of omni-present evil, suffusing inexorably through communities as a result of their intrinsically evil human constituents. Specifically, he sees Pet Sematary as displaying ‘a Puritan conception of the American frontier and forest’.[25] It can certainly be seen that King endeavours to evoke an atmosphere of life in a hostile, rural atmosphere. Magistrale notes that Pet Sematary neatly encapsulates such factors as the cold climate, long winters and relative isolation that must be faced in this part of the world, particularly those ‘elements of life in a cold climate, and the specificity of place that set his readers firmly in a rural Maine world’.[26] He describes ‘the cruel and callous elements King affiliates with Maine’s unsympathetic natural geography and climate.[27] The novel’s topography draws on local vegetation and scenery, e.g. hills, wild woodland, hard and stony soil, to illustrate the contrast between civilised life in Chicago, represented by the fact that this city remains the home of the remainder of their family, and life in the countryside. There are many references to wilderness, including much detailing of the indigenous flora and fauna. Magistrale argues that the Maine wilderness in this novel can be contrasted with Thoreau’s view of the New England woods as a reflection of the purity of the soul, and instead likened to Hawthorne’s rather darker Puritanical vision of the wilderness symbolising the spiritual darkness of humanity in its propensity to sin.[28] In this novel, the wilderness essentially mirrors the human potential for falling into moral darkness; the Creed family’s move from civilisation to a precarious existence on the edge of a wilderness mirrors their fall from security to a horrific void. This shows how a ‘bad space’ can be used to symbolise the fragility of human existence in such an environment. With regard to the cold local climate, Louis Creed is shown to be continually preoccupied with heating their new home, stoking up the fire, the cost of fuel-consumption and ensuring that the house is well-insulated (King, pp. 4, 125, 129, 204). Interestingly, it is a wintry local blizzard that prevents Rachel Creed from uniting with her husband, thus precipitating the ultimate tragedy of the novel: Louis’s decision to re-inter their dead son Gage in the burial ground after he meets the same fate as Church.

Once again, a regionalist framework can be applied to the work of King. This article argues that it could even be said to parody more conventional regionalist writing: Far from being a nostalgic ‘pocket of the past’, like the communities celebrated in works by writers like Jewett, the rural communities of Pet Sematary work to subvert the pastoral ideal so prevalent in the genre. Having delineated the multitude of ways in which King denotes authentic regional space in their texts, it can be seen that his portrayal of regionalist space is used to inform wider concepts of bad space. Because this novel belongs to the fantastic horror genre, this allows it also to explore unrealistic space. The ways in which this fiction moves from the credible to the incredible, with real space giving way to unreal, is the focus of the next section.

American Gothic

Allan Lloyd-Smith describes American Gothic as a literary style with deep roots, capable of expressing the unique American condition in terms of the wilderness and the city rather than the decaying monasteries that typify European Gothic.[29] He has identified a range of themes in classic American Gothic texts, including the shadow of the Puritan inheritance and a lingering dread of the land itself, embodied by the frontier experience and conflicts with Native Americans. The Gothic inevitably stems from these haunting American themes. This can clearly be linked back to Freud’s ‘The ‘Uncanny” (1919), which defines the eponymous concept as being comprised of repressed past events.[30] With this mind, many of the horrors portrayed within tales of American Gothic can clearly be seen to have a firm grounding in a history including slavery, the wilderness, genocide and violence, all potentially constituting the kind of repressed past events that Freud suggested might become an uncanny source of horror.

Of particular relevance here are the themes of the frontier and the Puritan legacy in the American experience. As discussed earlier, Pet Sematary shows how fears of the wilderness continue to the present day. The regionalised nature of this novel is compounded by reference to Puritan attitudes towards the landscape of New England itself. The lingering heritage of a society obsessed with the fundamental depravity of the human will and introspection on the nature of sin led to themes of psychological distortion in the works of early Gothic authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne.[31] The American frontier experience made its impact on the Gothic genre through the use of the wilderness as labyrinth; replacing the castles of European Gothic with an alternative ‘maze’ more relevant to American history and culture. Thus, American Gothic came to focus on the perceived malevolence inherent within the very landscape: ‘its emptiness, its implacability […] its vast, lonely and possibly hostile space that […] resists any rational explanation’.[32] A Freudian interpretation might suggest that the land is uncanny because its extensive virgin territory provides a blank canvas which essentially acts as ‘a discursive field of return and reiteration’.[33]

Eric Savoy has argued that uncanny fiction is fundamentally concerned with ‘The failure of repression and forgetting – a failure upon which the entire tradition of the gothic in America is predicated’.[34] In this framework of horror fiction, the actual horror stems from feelings of familiarity with phenomena so awful that attempts have been made to quash them – attempts that eventually fail and result in the later re-enactment of those horrors, whether they are within the life of an individual, a family, a community or an entire nation. Lloyd-Smith argues that ‘If the uncanny and terror, then, are produced by the intimation of the Real […] horror comparably […] is occasioned by the incursion of the Real’.[35] In the Freudian account, merely being reminded of distasteful events is a source of the uncanny; for Lloyd-Smith, then, experiencing (or rather re-experiencing) these events is the point at which horror truly comes into play. This is the area of interest for this work: it is precisely when those regional pressure-points are stimulated, when ancient fears re-assert themselves in some tangible form, that the truly horrific is encountered.

Of particular interest in Pet Sematary is the way in which King takes the reader from this manifestly real location, fashioned as a result of his regionalist detailing, to the incredible realm symbolised by the resurrection-powers of the burial ground. For it is when Church the cat comes from the grave to the house that the novel first crosses the border into incredible horror – his uncanny reappearance is a literal return of that which Creed believed (in his heart of hearts) to be buried. This is precisely how such works of fantasy function. By using a plausible setting to get the reader fully engrossed in the narrative and interested in the fate of the characters, they will be more willing to accept the supernatural realm the writer is so keen to establish. Further to this, Ben Indick has noted that King uses a firm scientific base to establish credibility for his horror fiction – the exact opposite of fantasy works like The Turn of the Screw, which rely on ambiguity for suspense.[36]

In Pet Sematary, King introduces a world exactly like the known contemporary America, ensconcing the reader in that familiar setting before developing the supernatural theme. By creating a regionalised story, King makes his novel’s shift into supernatural fantasy much more potent. Having been drawn into such a realistic environment, the reader inevitably finds the horrific events that follow much more plausible. In setting up Louis Creed as a ‘regular Joe’ with whom the average reader can readily identify, King exploits his reaction to the untimely death of the family pet to create uncertainty in his audience. We follow the aftermath of Church’s death through Louis’s eyes; in a dream-like state he follows Jud Crandall over the deadfall separating the pet cemetery from the wilderness beyond (King, pp. 136-137). The process of taking the cat to the burial ground and interring it there is hazy and surreal – the boundary between real and unreal is distorted in the same way that it is later, when the reader is obliged to finally accept that corpses buried in the Micmac ground can somehow be restored to life. Jesse W. Nash has made the case for Pet Sematary as a ‘postmodern gothic’ work on the basis that it is clearly linked to the Gothic tradition, yet significantly influenced by late twentieth-century popular culture.[37] He argues that King’s readiness to make serious use of the supernatural stems from a popular distrust of science, and that this reliance on paranormal phenomena finally renders the novel irrelevant as a tool for addressing real problems in a real America.[38]

However, as has been argued in this work, the Gothic mode has always served to reveal genuine fears – why should postmodern gothic differ? Nash concludes that the novel is concerned with fear of the return of the dead, which here acts as a substitute for our archaic fear of death in the form of a defence mechanism. This is because the modern reader feels unable to cope with the primitive fear of death more directly.[39] Yet in Pet Sematary fears relating to death are a strong theme running throughout the narrative, and this observation is difficult to reconcile with Nash’s argument. King may well have taken these fears to the next level, but this work argues that the basic fear is still clearly addressed.

So, why use fantastic horror? Bernard J. Gallagher suggests that these apparently-irrelevant events actually mask a deeper meaning, insofar as they ‘protect the individual from the internal conflicts which he finds disruptive’.[40] In this way, people are able to confront their worst fears whilst simultaneously keeping them at a safe distance. Supernatural fiction thus works by permitting the reader to go from ‘credible’ to ‘incredible’ in order to confront fundamental fears. Whilst they may not be entirely believable, this article has argued that the use of detailed regionalist writing helps to place the reader firmly within the narrative. The move from realistic to unrealistic space, characteristic of works of the fantastic, helps to explore fundamental fears. In the next section, attention will thus be turned to how the genre lays bare the author’s disquiet about regional territory.

Regionalist horror

In Pet Sematary, King employs a union of regionalist and fantastic horror writing to communicate or act out fears about what has already happened, and what may yet happen, within familiar terrain. This regionalist horror fiction then allows him to address anxieties about an emotionally-powerful subject: the condition of his native space. Many of the fears explored in the novel are universal, insofar as they deal with themes of the consequences of ‘playing God’, explored by Mary Ferguson Pharr’s ‘A Dream of a New Life: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary as a Variant of Frankenstein‘, [41] and fear of death, as in Natalie Schroeder’s ”Oz the Gweat and Tewwible’ and ‘The Other Side’: The Theme of Death in Pet Sematary and Jitterbug Perfume‘.[42] For Magistrale, integral to King’s fiction is the way in which it ‘can be traced directly to King’s sociopolitical perspective on contemporary America’.[43] He maintains that King uses his fiction to express his concerns over the state of modern American life, for example, the continuing need for humans to treat one another with dignity and respect and to be vigilant in defending their society against the chaos that could ensue from escalating social fragmentation.[44] In Stephen King: The Art of Darkness, Douglas E. Winter draws on a 1984 interview with King himself, who stated that Pet Sematary ‘is a book about what happens when you attempt miracles without informing them with any real sense of soul […] you destroy everything’.[45] This novel is then a manifestation of the author’s fear of the damage people do to their own lives when they are ill-prepared to take responsibility for their actions, as well as attendant fears about the danger of self-deception. Creed is convinced that he can circumvent the ultimate horror: Death. The family unit’s inability to deal with the possibility of death, made clear from an early stage in the novel, makes this tale truly a Gothic one. For Rachel Creed, the hideous, veiled manner in which her sister lived and died ‘in the back bedroom like a dirty secret’ is a repressed truth – one which she has long denied and allowed to eat away at her entire family’s ability to cope with such fundamental realities (King, p. 223). When first Church, then Gage, are re-animated and brought back to terrorise those they loved in life, the detestable nature of their new existence is representative of the return of that repressed horror which was Zelda’s unspeakable demise. This destructive secret is revisited upon the fragile family, destroying their sanity and taking their healthy, human lives. 

For King, a fear about the disintegration of the human condition itself takes the foreground. He takes a broadly humanitarian view, struggling to express his fear for all people in an ever-changing society. Pet Sematary embodies his fear that the family itself is a fragile entity – it is fundamentally ill-equipped to confront the defining truths of its own existence, namely the mortality of its members. This is a truly Gothic theme, as it is bound up with notions of an inability to face up to unpleasant realities which cannot forever be denied. As the Creed family crumbles under its lack of insight, so too will the nation perish if it fails to deal with the skeletons in its closet.

However, the novel also deals more specifically with regional fears, for instance those concerning the condition termed ‘cabin fever’. This is comprised of age-old neuroses about what living in isolation, far from the humanising effects of civilisation, might do to those who constantly endure it. Moreover, ancient fears about the hostility of the land, going back in time beyond the inhabitation by the Indian tribes indigenous to Maine, are resurfacing. Here, the old American fear of the land itself coalesces with fears about death in the form of the Wendigo. These fears go back to an early preoccupation of American Gothic fiction, the legacy of those precarious colonies of pioneers, tentatively eking out an existence in fundamentally hostile environment. All those fears about what might be lurking out in the untamed, and perhaps unknowable, wilderness are embodied by the Wendigo, which represents Nature at its most insidious – destructive and malevolent. Earlier in this work it was seen that the insularity of rural communities was shown to be a feature of regionalist fiction – here, one of the major themes of King’s novel is the close guarding of secrets. From the secrets that Louis keeps from Rachel to the secrets concealed within the wilderness beyond their house, notions of the ‘hidden’ and what might ensue when whatever is hidden is finally revealed run throughout the tale. It is a clear suggestion in both this novel that the surfacing of knowledge may be dangerous, a key Gothic concept. All of this is combined in Pet Sematary with a modern-day version of the Frankenstein story – often explored by critics of this novel – insofar as this young doctor has the chance to cheat death and thus achieve what others of his profession can only dream of doing. Only for him this dream quickly becomes a nightmare. In this way, King’s fears about the fragility of the American family combine with fears about what may be lurking in wild regional space – a horrifying, slumbering entity, manifested by the Wendigo, unwittingly empowered by foolish humans who prove to be their own undoing.

Writing on the Puritan dichotomy of good versus evil/dark versus light which appears time and again in American literature, Philip A. Shreffler notes that Nathaniel Hawthorne ’employed this Puritan notion to deepen our understanding of the principles of dark and light that exist in every human heart quite independent of any external God or devil’ and that he ‘did not believe in these Puritan interpretations of nature, but he did use them symbolically in his investigation of man’s moral constitution’.[46] In other words, Hawthorne’s fiction drew on the Puritanical New England mindset to create a New England of dark woods and haunted spaces. Harking back to Hawthorne’s focus on using the New England forests as a mirror to the darkness inherent within man’s soul – as a metaphor for original sin – Magistrale’s essay, ‘Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited’ argues that King’s work represents a modern appropriation of this practice.[47] A leap can readily be made from the preoccupation with humanity’s proximity to spiritual darkness in King’s works to the broader American Gothic fascination with horrors buried in an untamed landscape. Pet Sematary, then, shows how fears of the wilderness, grounded historically in the New England topography, still have resonance in contemporary American society. The Gothic nature of the horror employed in the novel allows these regional fears to be communicated.

Conclusion

For Stephen King, fantastic horror writing is a means of imparting feelings of foreboding about what is going on beneath the surface of his homeland. His work echoes wider cultural concerns about changes in American society such as urbanisation and social fragmentation, as well as lingering fears about humanity’s relationship to the wilderness harking back to the very birth of the nation. However, these fears can also be narrowed down to reflect his own personal concerns about decay and corruption inherent within his native New England. This article holds that Pet Sematary, as an exampleof regionalist horror writing, is able to unite two disparate literary styles to form a new kind of narrative. Fantastic horror fiction works by exploring what might have been; like an urban legend, this tale is compellingly close to, yet clearly removed from, everyday life in New England. Hauntingly familiar, at the same time utterly unknown, Pet Sematary constitutes a strikingly-credible regionalist horror tale.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Stephen King, Pet Sematary (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1988), p. 49. All further references are included within the body of the text.

[2] Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer, ‘Introduction’, in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, ed. By Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1997), pp. 1-16 (p. 4).

[3] Sandra A. Zagarell, ‘Troubling Regionalism: Rural Life and the Cosmopolitan Eye in Jewett’s Deephaven‘, American Literary History, 10.4 (1998), 639-663 (p. 640).

[4] Ibid., p. 641.

[5] Louis A. Renza, ‘A White Heron’ and the Question of Minor Literature (London and Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984),p. 44.

[6] Ibid., p.55.

[7] Zagarell, p. 643.

[8] Renza, p. 47.

[9] Tony Magistrale, Landscape of Fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic (Madison, WI: The Popular Press, 1988),p. 18.

[10] Zagarell, p. 650.

[11] Burton Hatlen, ‘Beyond the Kittery Bridge: Stephen King’s Maine’, in Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, ed. By Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller (New York, NY: New American Library, 1984), pp. 45-60(p. 56).

[12] Ibid., p. 57.

[13] Ibid., p. 47.

[14] Ibid., p. 49.

[15] Ibid., p. 51.

[16] Cynthia J. Davis, ‘Making the Strange(r) Familiar: Sarah Orne Jewett’s ‘The Foreigner” in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing, ed. By Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1997), pp. 88-108 (pp. 88-89).

[17] Renza, p. 51.

[18] Magistrale, 1988, p. 54.

[19] Samuel Schuman, ‘Taking Stephen King Seriously: Reflections on a Decade of Best-Sellers’, in The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares, ed. By Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), pp. 107-114 (p. 111).

[20] Renza, pp. 117-118.

[21] Tuan, Yi-fu, Landscapes of Fear (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 139.

[22] Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 43-44.

[23] Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT and London: Yale Nota Bene, 2001, 1967), p. 25.

[24] Magistrale, 1988, p. 109.

[25] Tony Magistrale, The Moral Voyages of Stephen King (Mercer Island, WA: Starmont House, 1989), p. iii.

[26] Tony Magistrale, ‘Stephen King’s Pet Sematary: Hawthorne’s Woods Revisited’, in The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares, ed. By Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), pp. 126-134 (p. 133).

[27] Magistrale, 1989, p. 13.

[28] Magistrale, 1987, pp. 127-128.

[29] Allan Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (New York, NY and London: Continuum, 2004), p. 4.

[30] Sigmund Freud, ‘The ‘Uncanny” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17 (1917-1919), trans. By James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 217-256 (p. 241).

[31] Lloyd-Smith, p. 71.

[32] Ibid., p. 93.

[33] Eric Savoy, ‘The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic’, in American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, ed. By Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1998), pp. 3-19 (p. 6).

[34] Ibid., p. 4.

[35] Lloyd-Smith, p. 144.

[36] Ben P. Indick, ‘King and the Literary Tradition of Horror and the Supernatural’, in Fear Itself: The Horror Fiction of Stephen King, ed. byTim Underwood and Chuck Miller (San Francisco, CA and Columbia, PA: Underwood-Miller, 1982), pp. 153-167 (pp. 163-164).

[37] Jesse W. Nash, ‘Postmodern Gothic: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary‘, The Journal of Popular Culture, 30.4 (1997), 151-160 (p. 152).

[38] Ibid., pp. 153-154.

[39] Ibid., p. 159.

[40] Bernard J. Gallagher, ‘Reading Between the Lines: Stephen King and Allegory’, in The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares, ed. By Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), pp. 37-48 (p. 39).

[41] Mary Ferguson Pharr, ‘A Dream of a New Life: Stephen King’s Pet Sematary as a Variant of Frankenstein‘, in The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares, ed. By Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), pp. 115-125.

[42] Natalie Schroeder, ”Oz the Gweat and Tewwible’ and ‘The Other Side’: The Theme of Death in Pet Sematary and Jitterbug Perfume”, in The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares, ed. By Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), pp. 135-141.

[43] Magistrale, 1988, p. 14.

[44] Ibid., p. 28.

[45] Douglas E. Winter, Stephen King: The Art of Darkness (New York, NY: New American Library, 1984), p. 151.

[46] Philip A. Shreffler, ‘H. P. Lovecraft and an American Literary Tradition’, in Literature of the Occult: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. By Peter B. Messent (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1981), pp. 156-170 (pp. 157, 164).

[47] Magistrale, 1987, pp. 127-128.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 11, Autumn 2007

‘Speaking of Survival and of Ordinary Things’: The Emergence of an Urban Philosophy in the 1960s New York Writing of Jane Jacobs and Maeve Brennan

Madeleine Lyes
© Madeleine Lyes. All Rights Reserved

It must have seemed like they came out of nowhere. Jane Jacobs and Maeve Brennan both rose to prominence in nineteen-sixties New York in a way that eschewed all traditional paths. Jacobs published The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, instantly stirring up what had been the comfortably stagnant pool of urban theory and criticism following the last great wave of development from the Chicago School in the 1930s, and she did it with no formal training in urban planning, architecture or the social sciences, and no reputation other than that as a small-scale neighbourhood activist and magazine sub-editor to precede her. Maeve Brennan was a blow-in; an Irish-born and Irish-educated woman who began her long writing career at the New Yorker writing seven-line book reviews and who rose through the ranks of anonymous ‘Talk of the Town’ writers to become one of the very few to create a unique and distinguishing persona from within the City Section of the magazine.

I have found no evidence that they ever personally interacted, and in many ways, these two women shared little in common. Jacobs was a happily-married, family woman; her interactions with the city were invariably linked to the practical challenges of creating a decent home for her children and her community, while Brennan was a woman almost without community. Always living out of hotel rooms, and embodying in a multitude of ways the urban archetype of the flâneur, Brennan had a turbulent romantic life and little or no grounding influences within the city. The two women lived very different lives. However, Jacobs’ theories were extensively debated within the pages of the New Yorker, most famously in Lewis Mumford’s rebuttal of Death and Life in December 1962, and it is likely that Brennan was aware of her work. In turn, the chances of Jacobs being aware of Brennan and her city writings are quite high as Jacobs regularly referred to much city-focused New Yorker journalism in her books. Regardless of whether the women had any concrete interaction, however, it is plain that their work, which shared a mutual interest in the everyday concrete realities of nineteen-sixties Manhattan, was in a dialogue of its own. One an activist and planning enthusiast, the other a budding author and newly minted member of the New York literary intelligentsia, their methods of engagement with the city were nevertheless strikingly similar, and their ideological interaction gave strength to a growing national interest in re-conceptualising urban space.

The practice of urban studies as we understand it today had not yet taken hold at the time of publication for Jacobs’ Death and Life and the majority of Brennan’s city-themed columns for the New Yorker. In the aftermath of the great wave of urban expansion and theoretical investigation by the Chicago School during the 1920s and 1930s, the ground-breaking work of Louis Wirth, Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and others remained relatively unchallenged, the precepts they envisaged for city living quickly becoming embedded at various levels in academic thought, city planning and national government. Their work treated the city as a laboratory, expanding scientific principles and data analysis from ecological disciplines in order to study the urban landscape as a habitat. Both their empiricist methods and their use of mapping techniques helped develop a particular type of urban sociology that prioritised environmental and structural factors over the psychological or cultural aspects of city living.

These principles, later embodied in the work of urban patriarch Lewis Mumford (who, incidentally, would later maintain a long and heated debate with Jane Jacobs regarding her theories on urban planning), were applied with particular zeal by state governments and local authorities in the 1950s post-war era of prosperity and expansion. The shift towards suburban living, which would see during the 1960s a 28.2% rise in population for the metropolitan rings around a city rather than at its core, was in many ways the perfect testing ground for the theories and observations of the Chicago School of urban thought.[1] Fascination with all things urban took hold once again during this time, as the 1976 edition of Charles Glaab and Theodore Brown’s A History of Urban America explains:

In the period after World War II, the city, as in the late nineteenth century, became a preoccupation of scholars and popular writers, and data accumulated. Congress passed laws regarding cities, and their provisions and effects were reasonably clear. Statistics of housing, urban renewal, and urban crime were carefully gathered. The number of people killed and the amount of property destroyed in another series of urban riots were counted up. But the ideological and political concerns of our own time warped reflections on most matters.[2]

Both the quantitative bent of this research and the ideological reflections it inspired are represented in Jacobs’ work, although the position Death and Life adopted was so different from any earlier work that the clamour which received its arrival – both positive and negative – must have been anticipated. This was the era of suburban, or ‘white’ flight, with cities across America becoming more racially polarised as the middle classes left the metropolis for the haven of suburbia. Consequently, the cities became seen as the home of the urban poor and were demonised as dangerous and poverty-stricken, these distinctions playing out almost inevitably along racial lines. During this period, constructive government strategies for urban improvement focused fiscal attention not only on the disintegrating inner cities but also on undeveloped rural communities, with the aim of encouraging people to leave cities altogether, thus, presumably, avoiding the entire problem.[3] In this light, Jacobs’ advocation – as a white, educated middle-class woman – of the East Village as a safe and viable space in which to raise a family was somewhat revolutionary. It would not be until the end of the decade that Jacobs’ text would begin to assume the privileged intellectual and academic space her predecessors occupied. With the burgeoning field of urban studies making itself felt in universities across the United States in the 1960s, Jacobs’ work found an audience that would take her ideas forward into the twenty-first century.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities opens in typically blunt Jacobs fashion. ‘This book is an attack’, she says, ‘on current city planning and rebuilding […] My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hair-splitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding’.[4] Later in the text, Jacobs goes on to criticize in particular ‘the Great Blight of Dullness’ that she sees not only in the formulaic planning decisions being made at the time but that had held the discipline of urban planning and theory in stasis for decades. She levels criticisms at many of her predecessors and contemporaries – luminaries such as Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford and Daniel Burnham – and at the City Beautiful and Garden City projects which promised a utopian future for the city but which were, in her words, ‘guided by principles derived from the behaviours and appearance of towns, suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs, and imaginary dream cities – from anything but cities themselves’ (Jacobs, p. 6). Jacobs saw her work as grounded in the everyday life of the city, reflecting the Lefebvrian belief that insight into the workings of society and its ills is best found through the scrutiny of mundane events most people take for granted. She castigated those planners and theorists whose visions of cities were ‘so orderly, so visible, so easy to understand’, and whose designs reflected a city like ‘a wonderful, mechanical toy’ (Jacobs, p. 23). Jacobs’ city was the city of the streets; sidewalks were, for her, the most vital organs of any metropolis. Her book examined the everyday urban scenes around her, all her theories culled from her observations of what she called the ‘daily ballet’ of the sidewalk outside her home in the East Village (Jacobs, p. 54). Her fight was with the then-prevailing and still devastatingly influential assumption in city planning that the streamlining of urban streets leads to increased order and prosperity, with the ‘craft of city taxidermy’, as she described it, dictating a harmony and regularity of function and style imposed by authoritarian planning legislation (Jacobs, p. 25).

Jacobs gives myriad contemporary examples of city districts where such homogeneity of vision and execution had led to the steady downfall of community and social order, showing that, even when amply funded, the meticulously planned, overly controlling and streamlined design ideas left once thriving neighbourhoods stilted, unused and inevitably falling into decay. In her approach, she privileged the uniqueness of urban existence, ascribing it to the all-pervasive presence of strangers and detailing exhaustively the ways in which interaction between friendly strangers within the city determines its character and climate. Although Jacobs is known for her insights into the economies of cities, her work also focused on the sensibilities of urban life: the effects of the urban landscape on not just the economic capabilities of city dwellers but also on their mental and emotional make-up, and their interactions with one another. For Jacobs, the economic strength of a city is indisputably linked to the interpersonal vitality of its citizens. In Death and Life, she drew a picture of the city as a nexus of millions of nebulous yet essential relationships between strangers and almost-strangers, a balance of privacy and trust which could not be institutionally cultivated and without which the urban fabric falls apart. Her evocation of this nexus relied on the idea that urban citizens would, given the correct conditions, foster a sense of safety and community on the streets by simply observing them, keeping eyes on the street and thereby contributing to an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves. This system – which Jacobs saw functioning in her own city neighbourhood – is notable for its reliance on the visual senses, on the harnessing of that particularly urban phenomenon of grand-scale people-watching, which perhaps are, after all, the ultimate natural resource of city life. This exploitation of the potential of observational practice is also one of the many ways in which Jacobs work is parallel to that of fellow New Yorker, writer Maeve Brennan.

Maeve Brennan wrote for the New Yorker magazine from 1954 to 1981. Born in 1917 in Ireland, she moved with her family to Washington in 1934 when her father was made Ireland’s first ambassador to the United States. Deciding against the traditional path of marriage and family, she moved alone to New York and began her career as a writer with Harper’s Bazaar, soon moving on to the New Yorker magazine where she began penning articles for the ‘Talk of the Town’ city section. Each article submitted by Brennan was published under the somewhat arch pseudonym of ‘the Long-Winded Lady’, and her column, which took the form of an epistolary narrative, was introduced each time with a variation on the same phrase: ‘We have received another communication from our friend the long-winded lady’. A two- or three-page letter would follow, describing the observations of the ‘lady’ as she sat in a Manhattan restaurant or bar and watched the city move around her. With such an introduction, and in such a particular literary setting, a certain type of narrative could have been expected from Brennan.

The New Yorker, while a publication of undeniable literary and artistic merit with a tradition of patronage for some of America’s greatest authors, was a magazine aimed towards the well-heeled New York elite, of ‘smug, gilt-edged readers’, as described by George Douglas in his review of Mary Corey’s book on the New Yorker, The World Through a Monocle.[5] Corey’s book, a survey of the magazine’s readership, staff and marketing strategies throughout the last century, concentrates its analysis on the increasing influence of advertising revenues on the content of the magazine, but it can also be seen that the New Yorker worked hard to provide the type of content its readership expected. Throughout its history, the magazine produced articles and stories for and about its Manhattan society which dealt with the subject of making a place for oneself in the city, articles which helped to reinforce the wealthy urban citizen’s need to believe himself or herself at home in the metropolis. This home was necessarily one of privilege and safety, where interaction with the chaotic carnival of street life was carefully regulated and conceived around consumption, spectacle and prestige. Maeve Brennan’s articles were well designed to fit the particular requirements of the magazine’s ‘Talk of the Town’ section, albeit on a superficial level. The comfortable persona of the ‘Long-Winded Lady’ acted as filter for any potentially disturbing observations about city life, for example. However, these observations also contain within them a vision of urban living that unsettled any glamorous surface description and posited a model of urban living that was the antithesis of the homely comfort of the typical City Section piece.

Like Jacobs, Brennan negotiated her interaction with the city through observation. She would position herself in the midst of urban life and write about the parks, landmark buildings and public transport of the city, describing her own sense of connection to these spaces. This was not the passive occupation it seems, however. In the foreword to an edition of her collected works, Brennan stresses that the Long-Winded Lady was ‘never a sightseer, never an explorer’.[6] Instead, her observations of city life were a type of connection, a skein of trust and acknowledgement that has much in common with Jacobs’ own strategies. ‘When she looks about her’, says Brennan, talking of the Long-Winded Lady, ‘it is not the strange or exotic ways of people that interest her, but the ordinary ways, when something that is familiar to her shows’ (Brennan, p. 3). These ‘moments of recognition’, as she describes them, are not those of the typical detached and disinterested auteur sitting aloof in order to diagnose the anatomy of urban existence; Brennan did not ‘cast a cold eye on life, on death’, but rather saw her observations, the elements of city life and city people that appealed to her as parts of herself, evidence of a wider connectivity with the urban fabric.[7] For Brennan, those moments of recognition were a claim of kinship with the city and part of a greater project of self-location within the metropolitan miasma.

Though not a planner, an architect or an urban sociologist, Brennan’s city writings reflect her deep engagement with both the artistic and practical realities of urban life. Reflecting the immense upheaval ongoing in the United States and more particularly in New York City during the 1960s, her portrayal of the city is hyper-aware of the transience and instability of the urban fabric, evoking a picture of a concrete city crumbling before her eyes. She criticises sharply the unthinking demolition and replacement of myriad Manhattan buildings, concentrating on the effects this constantly shifting landscape has on the mindset of the city dweller. She saw the ‘Office Space giants’ making vast incursions downtown, replacing the small, family-run businesses she recognised as the ‘home fires’ of the city. Describing one such incident, she reports,

I had bad news tonight at Le Steak de Paris, where I had dinner. ‘The building is coming down’ – and the little restaurant is to be swept away, just like that, after more than twenty-six years of hardy life. Those words ‘The building is coming down’ occur so often in New York conversations, and they have such finality, and are so unanswerable, that once they have been said there is nothing more to say. There is no appealing the decisions of the ogre called Office Space that stalks the city and will not be appeased (Brennan, p. 157).

Brennan was, in her own way, as conscious as Jacobs of the desperate struggle for control of the city’s streets ongoing throughout the decade. I would argue, in fact, that in some ways Brennan was able to comprehend the stakes of that struggle in a more profound way than Jacobs. Perhaps because of her higher level of vulnerability, her more open artistic vision, Brennan saw ramifications for the gutting of downtown New York that Jacobs never fathomed. Unencumbered by Jacobs’ focus on the project of rehabilitation for the city, by her need to be optimistic and constructive in the face of mounting destruction, Brennan’s vision of urban transience touches on despair and instability in a way that would next be picked up by the urban postmoderns. ‘The city was tottering around me’, she says, ‘the floor beneath my feet already shivering beneath the wreckers boots… All my life, I suppose, I’ll be scurrying out of buildings just ahead of the wreckers’ (Brennan, p. 190). Her city seemed temporary, unreliable, unreal: ‘there are times when the whole area seems to be a gigantic storehouse of stage flats and stage props that are being stacked together as economically as possible until something more sturdy can be built, something that will last’ (Brennan, p. 224).

Traditional concepts of ‘something that will last’ in the United States revolve around the home, often a long-standing homestead (be it colonial mansion, log cabin or ranch) within which each new generation could locate an identity and negotiate a conception of self closely linked to the ever-reliable walls of the family home. Jacobs and Brennan both operated, however, in a space where traditional strategies of stable home-making were becoming obsolete. New York was a city in flux, and while their work within that city sought to criticise the ways in which that flux is manifested on street-level, neither of them suggested that the rapidly changing nature of the city was destructive in and of itself. In this, and in many other ways, both women were positioned in epistemological opposition to much of the urban theory and criticism prominent at the time. On issues such as spatial planning, the function of strangers and the importance of privacy in the city, Jacobs and Brennan swam hard against the tide. Stanley Milgram, writing for Science in 1970 on the psychological experience of living in cities, argues that:

The ultimate adaptation to an over-loaded social environment is to totally disregard the needs, interests, and demands of those whom one does not define as relevant to the satisfaction of personal needs, and to develop highly efficient perceptual means of determining whether an individual falls into the category of friend or stranger […] The disparity in the treatment of friends and strangers ought to be greater in cities than in towns; the time allotment and willingness to become involved with those who have no personal claim on one’s time is likely to be less in cities than in towns.[8]

This seems common wisdom; it is surely in line with the thoughts of other great urban philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Georg Simmel, both of whom warned against the deleterious effects the city may have on a man’s soul or psychology (depending on the era). Milgram positioned the urban dweller as self-isolating in an effort towards pre-emptive protection against ‘overload’, a term which he derived from systems-analysis and which has since entered common parlance.[9] His conception of the interpersonal dynamic between relative strangers within the urban milieu as uncomfortable and ideally avoided was in direct opposition to Jacobs’ evocation of the nexus of mutual courtesies proven all-important in her experience of city life in the East Village. Her daily ballet on the sidewalks has been criticised as an overly-idealistic rendering of urban living, a sort of Disneyfied fantasy wherein all members of the urban community rely on each other for support and trust each other implicitly. But Jacobs was very careful to point out the ways in which the protections and controls of street life made possible by the networks of urban citizens she described were unconscious and unplanned, resulting not from close bonds between each member of the community but from a recognition of mutual benefit derived from practices requiring little individual effort. As she described it,

the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity (Jacobs, p. 7).

By linking the core of her theory of urban success to notions of enjoyment and entertainment, and to a comprehensive, liveable lifestyle which takes into account the basic attributes of human nature – our love of people-watching – Jacobs rooted her vision for the city in the assumption that city-dwellers must look primarily to cities to supply their social and psychological needs. It is this type of principle which came to mark a shift in urban theory post-Chicago School, a move from a conception of the city as a place that must be negotiated so as to obtain maximum benefit at minimal psychological cost to a recognition that there could be something uniquely beneficial to be derived from the chaotic and confusing space of the metropolis.

Like Jacobs, Brennan refused to advocate withdrawal from city space for self-protection, her writing quietly undermining the image of the metropolis promulgated by the New Yorker as a place one enters purely to consume and be seen to be doing so. Again, this places her work in opposition to contemporary visions of urban experience. In his 1967 piece, ‘The Social Psychology of Privacy’, Barry Schwartz spoke of the everyday realities of city life and contended that ‘the possibility of withdrawal into well-equipped worlds which are inaccessible to others is that which makes intense group affiliations bearable’.[10] This paradigm sets up an opposition between freely accessible (and therefore threatening) urban space and ‘well-equipped worlds’ (meaning homes) towards which the urban citizen can retreat. Though the privileging of private space has many historical correlatives, from the vine gardens of Egypt to the enclosed patios of Rome, and the deconstruction of such spaces has become ever more prevalent since the advent of the spatial turn in critical theory. The urge toward retreat as a societal phenomenon reached one zenith in 1950s America when the expansion of the metropolitan centres coincided with a new prosperity, rendering cities simultaneously compelling and, for most, easily escapable. Brennan, however, wasn’t interested in escaping New York, rather she based her representation of the ideal urban experience in a conception of the city as home in and of itself, as shown in her impassioned précis of New York city living:

It is in daily life, looking around for restaurants and shops and for a place to live, that we find our way about the city. And it is necessary to find one’s own way in New York. New York City is not hospitable. She is very big and she has no heart […] New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from here, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse, but because the city holds us and we don’t know why (Brennan, p. 142).

This quote is somewhat tonally out of character with much of Brennan’s output. On the whole, her pieces for the New Yorker conveyed their message through the use of subtle, wry humour, rather than the direct assertive style shown here. This excerpt is noteworthy, however, in that it contains many of the key elements of her own urban philosophy: ‘We are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better’, she says; ‘it is in daily life that we find our way about the city’, and ‘the city holds us, and we don’t know why’. These lines identify as important the refutation of nostalgia; a commitment to the public spaces and everyday life of the city; and finally, a strategy for urban living, for finding a place for oneself in the city, that sidesteps a plethora of conventional strategies including the struggle to keep a natal home, to return to what once seemed secure, to hermetically seal oneself inside a womb-like residence and base one’s sense of reality upon that unchanging environment in perpetuity. In opposition to this concept, Brennan suggests through her work a style of homemaking within the modern city dependent not on housing but on what she calls ‘ordinary things’, upon moments of recognition between people and places which can happen anywhere. This evocation of the ordinary, of that moment when, in her words, ‘something that is familiar’ is shown, identifies a new variety of ‘ordinary’, and a new conception of ‘familiar’ that provide the urban citizen with the comfort and reassurance he or she needs without a reliance on an outmoded definition of home (Brennan, p. 3).

William Yancey, writing in 1971 about strategies for improvement in the design of large-scale public housing projects for what he called the ‘lower classes’, agreed that architecture does have an effect on the manner in which people negotiate their lives, and finally advising that in planning such projects for the future, ‘[d]esigners should minimize space that belongs to no one’.[11] Yancey was speaking here of the public spaces between individual dwellings which he believed should be parcelled up into smaller sections to be owned unequivocally by one set of residents or another. He shares a similarity of viewpoint with Jane Jacobs here, who was also opposed to great swathes of open space in the city with no discernable function or claimant. ‘Open space for what? … For muggings? For bleak vacuums between buildings?’.[12] Where Jacobs and Yancey would have diverged, of course, is in the idea of ‘designers’ working to plan any kind of public space at all.

Nonetheless, the idea of ‘space that belongs to no one’ taps into some of the most crucial questions facing urban theorists both during the 1960s and today. Compounded within it are a raft of questions relating to the liveability of cities, to the ownership of space, and to the issue of place-based identity-formation and the resulting notions of responsibility and affiliation that come along with it. Space that belongs to no one, unclaimed and unmarked, has been thoroughly debunked as a concept by the work of the spatial theorists working since the 1980s. Edward Soja, for example, pointed out early on that space could no longer be seen as ‘the dead, the fixed, the undialectical’, but was instead both a social product and a shaping force in social life.[13] Both Jacobs and Brennan acknowledged this fact in their work by expressing concern about the kind of city space that was controlled and allotted from above, whether that be by the ostensibly well-meaning local and state governments, supported by the institution of architectural planning, or by the increasingly powerful corporations with their ability to manipulate the concrete fabric of the city.

It cannot be said, however, that Brennan and Jacobs would have advocated the polar opposite of Yancey’s suggestion, namely the creation of a space owned by everybody. Both recognised the intrinsic territoriality of the human animal and detailed this in their work: Jacobs, when she describes the incursion of a ‘wild kid from the suburbs’ disrupting her daily ballet; and Brennan, in her atomisation of human relationships under the influence of such territorial impulses (Jacobs, p. 25). In truth, then, what was sought in this new conception of urban living is neither a space that belongs to no one or a space that belongs to all, but a vision of the urban as used space, a city which is not simply for entertainment, pleasure, consumption and enterprise, but also a space for individuals in society to feel at home in its most expansive sense – to feel a sense of belonging, responsibility and inclusion. A re-envisioning of the Roman polis is suggested, wherein individuals ‘in their capacity as citizens, participate in an ongoing process of conscious collective self-determination’ – perhaps with a twentieth-century addendum guaranteeing the right to abdicate participation entirely.[14] More particularly, the urban space envisioned by Brennan and Jacobs was a malleable space, one which could be altered and re-designed at will by those who occupied it, not just those who designed it from on high.

Working within the paradigms of their time, Jane Jacobs and Maeve Brennan, in their different ways, both created visions of a very different future. Jacobs made herself an advocate of change, criticising those planners who would seek to create rigid, frozen projects within a city she prized most for its vitality, and levelling disdain at groups like the Housers, who sought to develop self-contained, introverted neighbourhoods as agents of social change. Brennan, too, accepted and embraced the reality of urban flux in her writing. Her strategies of home-making within the city were based not on bricks and mortar but on the moments of recognition between people, and she boldly advocated a plan for self-location away from the increasingly unreliable walls of a city homestead and towards the kinship between ordinary strangers on the street. Against the tide of cultural representations of frightened women intimidated by city life, and repudiating traditional conceptions of the dangers of urban existence for women and the admonitions of generations advising them to seek the security of home in the face of the jungle-like space of the metropolis, Jane Jacobs and Maeve Brennan made themselves comfortable in chaos.

Elizabeth Wilson, in The Sphinx and the City, a study of women in the metropolis in literature and culture, points out that there are women who find the vast amorphousness of the city not threatening but reassuring, in her words almost ‘womblike’. Both Jacobs and Brennan used their understanding of this amorphousness in provocative ways.[15] Their examinations of nineteen-sixties New York and their particular focus on the unstable nature of the changing urban fabric, advocated an experience of the city that rejected traditional policy and planning norms in order to posit a model for urban living in which each citizen is urged to accept the inevitability and homeliness of chaos. As we ourselves engage with twenty-first century concerns regarding the changing definition of home, we are also forced to grapple with the increasing diversity of the megalopolis and the forces of globalisation which compel us to re-assess the place-based identity formation strategies devised by preceding generations. The provocative visions of urban life espoused by Jane Jacobs and Maeve Brennan stand as testimony to the unending possibilities offered by the city to those who search its streets for answers.

Clinton Institute for American Studies, University College Dublin

Notes

[1] Charles N. Glaab, and A. Theodore Brown, A History of Urban America, 2nd edn. (New York & London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 293.

[2] Ibid., p. 291.

[3] Zane L. Miller, The Urbanization of Modern America: A Brief History (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973) p. 204.

[4] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of the Great American Cities (New York: Random House, Inc., 1961), p. 3. All further references are included within the body of the text.

[5] George Douglas, ‘Review of The World Through A Monocle: The New Yorker at Midcentury by Mary F. Corey’, The Journal of American History, 87.2 (2000), 738-739.

[6] Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (New York: Mariner Books, 1998), p. 2. All further references are included within the body of the text.

[7] William Butler Yeats, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, in Last Poems and Plays (New York: Macmillan, 1940).

[8] Stanley Milgram, ‘The Experience of Living in Cities: A Psychological Analysis’, in Urbanman: The Psychology of Urban Survival, ed. by John Helmer and Neil A. Eddington (New York: The Free Press, 1973), p. 4.

[9] Ibid., p. 2.

[10] Barry Schwartz, ‘The Social Psychology of Privacy’, in Urbanman: The Psychology of Urban Survival, ed. by John Helmer and Neil A. Eddington (New York: The Free Press, 1973), p. 136.

[11] William L. Yancey, ‘Architecture, Interaction, and Social Control: The Case of a Large-Scale Public Housing Project’, Environment and Behaviour, 3.1 (March 1971), 3-21 (p. 19).

[12] Jacobs quoted by Ed Zotti, ‘Eyes on Jane Jacobs’, in Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs, ed. by Max Allen(Ontario: The Ginger Press, 1997) p. 62.

[13] Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London & New York: Verso, 1989), p. 4.

[14] Jeff Weintraub, ‘Varieties and Vicissitudes of Public Space’, in Metropolis: Centre and Symbol of Our Times, ed. by Philip Kasinitz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) p. 291.

[15] Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (London: Virago Press, 1991) p. 158.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 11, Autumn 2007

The Hollywood Front: The Battle Over Race in American Cinema during World War II

Jenny Woodley
© Jenny Woodley. All Rights Reserved

America’s involvement in the Second World War raised many questions about what the country was fighting for and what this meant for its own people. President Roosevelt spoke of fighting for the Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Some Americans, however, believed the fight for such freedoms began at home. The image of America as a true democracy fighting tyranny did not ring entirely true for African Americans who still faced discrimination, segregation and a denial of full rights. Race, already a highly divisive issue in America, became increasingly important during the war. In fact, debate raged amongst African Americans about what part they should or could play in a war waged by a country which refused to accept them as full citizens. The question of what stake they had in society, and what society would offer them in return for their contributions, came to the fore.

The war had repercussions for all sections of American life, including the film industry. The government wanted Hollywood to use its films to spread the Allied message and to sooth black unrest. African Americans saw an opportunity for fairer and more positive depictions of the race in films. Thus, Hollywood became drawn into the government’s propaganda efforts and into the debate about race. With a war against Fascism raging overseas and a fight about equality simmering at home, during the early years of the 1940s the battle over what it meant to be black in America intensified.

African Americans have a long history of military service. From the American War of Independence through the Civil War to the conflicts of the twentieth-century, black men have fought and died for America. For many, this sacrifice was held up as proof of loyalty to the country and as a claim for equal citizenship. These claims, however, were usually ignored or betrayed. The experience of World War One, in particular, had left many feeling bitter and sceptical. Black contributions to the war effort had not been rewarded with greater rights, but rather with increased hostility and racial violence. America’s involvement in the Second World War thus presented a dilemma for black leaders: should they actively support the Allied effort in the hope of being rewarded with gains in civil rights or should they refuse to fight for a country which did not treat them as equals? Most African Americans reconciled these issues by supporting the ‘Double Victory’ campaign. A slogan coined by the Pittsburgh Courier, ‘Double Victory’ was a call for victory abroad and at home. It reflected the realisation of many blacks that the war provided an opportunity to press for improvements in race relations in America. The government needed their contributions to the war effort and in return they would demand changes at home. The majority of the black press and organisations such as the NAACP and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters supported the campaign. In addition, many blacks shared an ideological belief in a war against Fascism and its racist dogma.

In the years before America entered the War, it had begun a programme of rearmament and military expansion. African American leaders wanted to ensure that blacks were included in these plans. In 1939 the Committee for the Participation of Negroes in National Defense was founded in Washington D.C., at the instigation of the Pittsburgh Courier and headed by historian Rayford W. Logan. Their campaign was based around claims for equal rights, as a Committee appeal demonstrates: ‘The War Department and the Navy Department plans for the coming war DEGRADE you. They would make war without you if they could. They would challenge your right to citizenship’.[1] Further pressure was placed on the government by a number of leading African American organisations. Walter White, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and T. Arnold Hill, acting secretary of the National Urban League, met with President Roosevelt in September 1940. They asked that African Americans, including black officers, been given equal opportunities and be allowed to serve in all branches, including the Army Air Corps, that black women be allowed to serve as nurses, and that ‘existing units of the Army and units to be established should be required to accept and select officers and enlisted personnel without regard to race’.[2]

Roosevelt agreed to consider their suggestions. However, the statement on military policy which he signed and released to the press on 9 October incorporated very few of them. It did promise the use of African Americans in the Army ‘on the basis of the proportion of the Negro population of the country’ and in ‘each major branch of the service, combatant as well as non-combatant’. However, there were significant restrictions. Black officers would only be assigned to all-black units and, more significantly, a general policy of segregation was to be maintained because it had ‘proved satisfactory over a long period of years’ and any changes ‘would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparation for national defense’.[3] African Americans were angered by this continued discrimination and further concessions were offered, including the promotion of the first black general and the appointment of William Hastie as civilian aide to the Secretary of War.

Despite the promise that African Americans would be admitted to the Army on the basis of their proportion of the population (about ten percent) there was considerable reluctance amongst the forces to sign up the requisite numbers. Furthermore, black troops continued to be relegated to fulfilling supply roles wherever possible. This discrimination, alongside rigid segregation within the training camps and on the battlefields, caused deep resentment amongst many African Americans. As one angry soldier asked, ‘How can we be trained to protect America, which is called a free nation, when all around us rears the ugly head of segregation?’ Another expressed black awareness of the moral contradiction at the heart of their involvement in the war: ‘the cross-section of the Negro soldiers’ opinion here is that we had just as soon fight and die here for our rights as to do it on some foreign battlefield’.[4] Morale was extremely low amongst African American troops. This disillusionment with their exclusion from the war effort was seen in other areas of American life. There were protests about the exclusion of black workers from the war industries. A. Philip Randolph, with the support of other African American organisations, called for 10,000 African Americans to ‘March on Washington’ to ‘demand the right to work and fight for our country’.[5] Randolph succeeded in persuading Roosevelt to issue an Executive Order to end employment discrimination in defence industries, although the simultaneous demand for an end to discrimination in the armed forces was again ignored.

The government was aware of this disillusionment amongst many black Americans. A poll taken by a government agency produced ‘formidable evidence of the degree to which racial grievances have kept Negroes from an all-out participation in the war effort’.[6] Fearing the potentially damaging effects, it used its recently established propaganda tool, the Office of War Information (OWI), to try and limit the resentment. OWI, as with many other government agencies at the time, had a somewhat confusing bureaucratic history. It had its beginnings in the Office of Government Reports which was formed in 1939 and headed by Lowell Mellett. A number of other government propaganda and information agencies existed at this time and to simplify the situation the Office of Facts and Figures was established in 1941, with Archibald McLeish in charge. Mellett became coordinator of government films and in April 1942 he set up the Hollywood office, headed by Nelson Poynter, to liaise with the film industry on the West Coast. When the Office of War Information was created in June 1942, with radio presenter Elmer Davis at its head, Mellett’s film liaison office became the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP). The BMP’s responsibilities included releasing government shorts and Poynter’s office continued to be the main point of contact with Hollywood. The Executive Order establishing OWI stated the agency was:

to formulate and carry out, through the use of press, radio, motion picture, and other facilities, information programs designed to facilitate the development of an informed and intelligent understanding, at home and abroad, of the status and progress of the war effort and of the war policies, activities, and aims of the Government.[7]

As the creation of Mellett’s Bureau indicates, considerable emphasis was placed on the role films could play in this process. President Roosevelt called the motion picture ‘one of our most effective media in informing and entertaining our citizens’ and declared that it could make a ‘very useful contribution’ to the war effort.[8]

The Bureau of Motion Pictures attempted to persuade the film industry to use its movies to help win the war. After initial meetings with Hollywood executives Poynter assembled the ‘Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry’, a handbook which outlined OWI’s attitude towards the war and explained how films were expected to reflect this. It asked filmmakers to consider several questions, including:

Will this picture help win the war?; What war information problem does it seek to clarify, dramatize or interpret?; Does it merely use the war as the basis for a profitable picture, contributing nothing of real significance to the war effort?; Does the picture tell the truth or will the young people of today have reason to say they were misled by propaganda?[9]

OWI acted in an advisory role, with most studios passing their scripts to Poynter’s office before they went into production. Poynter could then ask the studios to change aspects of the film he and his staff found unsuitable or he could offer suggestions for how it could help ‘win the war’. It was a case of persuasion rather than coercion, as OWI had no powers to force Hollywood to comply. Hollywood resented outside interference and was wary of being accused of making propaganda films. However, OWI’s links to the censors and overseas distribution agencies gave it some leverage. This, combined with a degree of patriotic and ideological belief in the war amongst studio executives and screenwriters, allowed OWI some influence on the films of the period.

One aspect with which OWI became increasingly concerned was the portrayal of African Americans in films. A study by the Bureau of Motion Pictures in 1943 of the depiction of blacks in wartime movies concluded that ‘in general, Negroes are presented as basically different from other people, as taking no relevant part in the life of the nation, as offering nothing, contributing nothing, expecting nothing’. African Americans appeared in twenty-three percent of the films released in 1942 and early 1943 and were shown as ‘clearly inferior’ in eighty-two percent of them.[10] The government realised that racial discrimination belied the claims of American democracy which the war was championing and that the negative images of blacks in movies were damaging to morale and therefore potentially damaging to the war effort. In March 1942 the Office of Facts and Figures called a conference of influential African Americans to develop ‘an information program which will deal with the wartime problem of Negro citizens’. Invited guests included representatives of the NAACP and the National Urban League, editors of black newspapers and church leaders. The attendees told the organisers that ‘they did not believe they could build any morale among their followers until the government took some definitive and important corrective action about the mistreatment of the Negro throughout the whole war effort’.[11] This was clearly beyond the scope of the government’s propaganda agencies, whose remit was more practical. Although there many liberals in its ranks who sympathised with the black cause, according to historian Allan Winkler, Elmer Davis tempered their ‘hopeful visions of the war’ with the ‘more utilitarian notions of the policy makers’.[12] This utilitarian approach was reflected in the desire to stress national unity and repress (racial) difference. Thus, OWI, with the assistance of Hollywood, tried to minimize the impact of race in the movies. The easiest way to do this was ‘writing-out’, in other words, ‘simply eliminating a potentially troublesome character’. It was better to have no black faces at all than to have ones which could offend and therefore damage morale. On the whole, Hollywood was happy to oblige: membership in the black actors’ union fell by fifty percent during the war, suggesting that opportunities for work were much reduced.[13] Some African American characters did appear and these were subject to considerable scrutiny, not only from the Bureau but also from black organisations and newspapers.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was one group which was concerned about both African American involvement in the war and the portrayal of black people in motion pictures. The organisation, along with many other African Americans, realised that America’s involvement in a war against the doctrines of racial and ethnic superiority provided a unique opportunity to illustrate that the country was not fulfilling its promises at home. This realisation was also applied to the issue of motion picture representation: the NAACP seized the opportunity to demand an end to stereotypical black characters in Hollywood films, a battle it had been waging ever since the release of Birth of a Nation in 1915. The NAACP demanded first that blacks be admitted into the armed services and then that this contribution be recognised by America and represented through positive images in the media. The NAACP also called for more newsreel footage of black servicemen to be screened to civilian audiences. The hope was that white Americans could have no argument about giving black people the vote and a full stake in society if they had seen, both on the battlefield with their own eyes and on cinema screens back at home, African Americans fighting and dying for their (shared) country.

Walter White, the NAACP’s Executive Secretary, was the driving force behind this new campaign. In 1942 he made two trips to Hollywood. With the support of one time Presidential candidate and 20th Century Fox executive, Wendell Willkie, he was able to meet with studio heads, producers, directors and writers. He told a meeting of such influential persons that, ‘Restriction of Negroes to roles with rolling eyes, [and] chattering teeth […] or to portrayals of none-too-bright servants perpetuates a stereotype which is doing the Negro infinite harm’. He explained that ‘showing him always as a mentally inferior creature, lacking in ambition, is one of the reasons for the denial to the Negro of opportunities and for low morale’.[14] He managed to elicit promises from a number of studios that in future ‘Negroes be used in motion pictures in the same manner in which they occupy positions in life’.[15]

The NAACP, in much the same way as the Bureau of Motion Pictures, could hope only to persuade Hollywood to change its depiction of the race. It appealed to filmmakers’ sense of morals and duty, placing special emphasis on the role their films could have in helping the Allied war effort. Speaking before the Writers’ Congress in LA, White told the assembled scriptwriters, ‘now is the time for the creative artists of this nation to show the […] conquered countries that we in America do believe in and intend to practice the principles for which we are fighting this war’.[16] The NAACP monitored the results of its appeal, reviewing all films which included black characters or racial content. It published its appraisals in its monthly magazine, The Crisis, and filed press reports praising those it approved of and criticizing those it felt were detrimental to the race and the cause. White used all his contacts in Hollywood to try and exert as much pressure as possible, writing letters of protest whenever a questionable racial depiction was so much as hinted at. Assistant Secretary Roy Wilkins had recommended that the NAACP ‘be as helpful as possible’ to the Office of Facts and Figures (OWI’s predecessor) in ‘working out a procedure that will be mutually helpful to the country and to our race; for after all, we want to win this war’.[17] ‘[T]his war’, while clearly referring to the Second World War, could also be taken to mean the war over race which was being waged in America at the same time. The NAACP saw how the two were interlinked: the war against Fascism abroad opened up new fronts in the war against racism at home. One of these fronts was Hollywood and African Americans tried to make the most of the influence that the war was having on the film industry. As well as dealing directly with the studios, the NAACP liaised with the Office of War Information. White and his colleagues regularly wrote to Lowell Mellett’s office to complain of those films which would ‘do enormous injury to morale’.[18] In this way, they tried to harness any influence the government agencies had in order to further their own agenda in Hollywood.

A number of films were made during the war years which featured African Americans in a variety of settings, however, of most interest in this context are those which showed blacks in uniform. These films went to the heart of the debate about black involvement in the war and can be seen as a direct response to calls for films which would improve black morale. Three Hollywood-produced films, all made in 1943, provide examples of how the studios tackled the issue of African American contributions to the war: Crash Dive (20th Century Fox), Bataan (MGM) and Sahara (Columbia). Crash Dive featured an African American on a submarine who ‘joined his mates in their raid on the Germans, and ended the movie […] receiving a Navy Cross [and] an etiquette-breaking handshake from a white officer’. [19] Walter White, perhaps optimistically, believed that the film was a result of his and Willkie’s lobbying of the film industry, writing ‘that if nothing else comes out of our two trips to Hollywood the time and money were well spent. […] I believe the film is going to do a lot of good’. [20]

In Bataan, the small patrol bravely holding up the Japanese advancement in the Philippines included a black character, Wesley Epps. Again, Walter White was able to exert some influence on the racial content of the film. The studio heeded his demands that the black soldier remain in the picture, after rumours had reached him that the character was to be dropped. Epps, played by Kenneth Spencer, dies as heroic a death as any of his white comrades. It was certainly a breakthrough role, an image of a black man dying for his country. Nevertheless, some of the old stereotypes remained. Epps is training to be a preacher and is the one called upon to pray over the bodies. In most of his scenes he is humming and with his upper torso exposed (admittedly it is hot in the Pacific, but Epps is the only character who is half naked and the inference of the ‘savage’ black man in the jungle is hard to ignore). These factors, combined with a relative lack of dialogue, subtly serve to make the character less developed and dignified than the others. Nevertheless, the NAACP praised it and White gave a quote to be used in the film’s publicity. He used the opportunity to stress once again the higher purpose of the war and its application at home: ‘[It] gives those at home a needed brutal picture of what war really is; and shows how superfluous racial and religious prejudice are when common danger is faced. May we learn, too, how dangerous and divisive prejudices are before we lose here the liberty fighting men died for on Bataan’.[21]

In Sahara, moreover, Rex Ingram, an African American actor, plays a British Sudanese Sergeant who joins Humphrey Bogart’s rag-tag patrol laying siege to the Germans in the desert. The only racism Sergeant Tambul faces is from the Nazi prisoner, thus equating racism exclusively with Nazism. He is a valuable member of the crew because he can direct them to a waterhole and is respected by the rest of the men. His death is one of the most dramatic and heroic: he chases and kills the escaping German prisoner before being shot himself. He is filmed running through a hail of bullets and as he finally collapses to the ground he raises his thumb to his comrades. Such an image of black heroism was unusual for the films of the period. However, it is worth noting that Tambul was an African-British not an African American character. Therefore it was saluting Africa’s role in the war rather than a comment on African American sacrifices. Nevertheless, the NAACP was induced to commend Columbia Pictures for Ingram’s role, declaring it the ‘outstanding contribution’ toward the objective of improving roles for blacks.[22] It is interesting that the NAACP praised all three of these films. What they have in common is a heroic black character who represented a break from the stereotype of the comic or servant figure. They were examples of loyal black citizens who made great sacrifices for the Allied cause. Furthermore, they provided a showcase for talented black actors such as Rex Ingram and Kenneth Spencer.

In contrast, Canada Lee’s role as Joe Spencer in Lifeboat (1944, Twentieth Century Fox), was a disappointment to the NAACP. Joe was a steward (a historically accurate portrayal as this was the only position blacks were allowed to fill in the Navy in the first years of the war) amongst a group of survivors drifting on a lifeboat after their ship is sunk by the Nazis. An NAACP staff member reported:

the role was a sop, a weak gesture. Absolutely the best that can be said is that it represents some slight departure from the harsher techniques of the conventional stereotypes… [Joe] spoke generally only when spoken to, behaving generally after the manner of a steerage passenger rather than an equally beset participant in a grim struggle for survival.[23]

For the NAACP simply having a black face in the film was not enough. They had to be an integral part of the action and represent the best elements of the black war effort.

Lifeboat, despite its flaws, appears to have been a genuine attempt to include a black character in a realistic way. (Wilkins received an angry reply to his letter of protest from Jason Joy at Fox, defending the studio’s use of African American characters.) An example of a production which could not even claim this limited ambition was Warner Brother’s cartoon short Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs. Offensive on many levels, the most disheartening aspect of this cartoon, released in 1943, was the caricature of the seven dwarfs as black soldiers. African American soldiers who were being asked to fight for their country must have been sickened and angered when they looked back home and found themselves portrayed as Sleepy, Dopey and Grumpy. As an NAACP reviewer wrote, ‘the segregation and indignities to which colored soldiers are subjected is in itself damaging to national unity. That they should also be held up for derision by theater-goers is inexcusable’.[24] The cartoon served as a reminder that the black soldier, like the rest of his race, was still vulnerable to ridicule and humiliation.

The government only had limited influence on the studios and films such as Coal Black suggested that Hollywood had not fully embraced the calls for racial sensitivity. Office of War Information officials realised that if they wanted a propaganda film doing properly they had better do it themselves. The result was 1944’s The Negro Soldier, a documentary about black contributions to American wars. Using a mixture of newsreel footage, reconstructions and staged scenes, the film provided a unique picture of blacks in American wars, from the Revolution through the Civil War and the First World War up to the present conflict. It was the first time that black men and women in uniform had appeared on the screen in such numbers. They were shown in training, on the battlefield, with airplanes and on ships. Originally produced as a training film to improve racial harmony within the services, pressure from black organisations led to it being distributed in public theatres. Langston Hughes called it ‘the most remarkable Negro film ever flashed on an American screen’.[25] Walter White said it was ‘an extraordinary documentary picture which will do much to stimulate the morale of American Negroes and to educate white Americans regarding Negroes’.[26] The Negro Soldier unquestionably provided the most positive depictions of African Americans during the War. Its positive message was embraced by most of the servicemen who watched its preview. The majority of the audience (which was composed of 439 black and 510 white soldiers) praised the film. Only 3 percent of blacks felt it was untrue and only 4 percent of whites agreed. The black soldiers ‘thought that the film over-glamorized the treatment they received in the Army and their role in it’, while the whites thought that ‘it exaggerated the importance of the Negro soldier, showed too close contact between Negroes and whites, and suggested too ideal a picture of Negro treatment by the whites’.[27]

The black soldiers who felt that The Negro Soldier ‘over-glamorized’ their treatment in the Army were correct. The film showed a racially harmonious armed service, based on the doctrine of separate but equal, in which African Americans were given the same level of training and opportunities as their white contemporaries. However, the reality was a collection of marginalised black units which faced prejudice from Army officials, were given inadequate training and restricted opportunities for promotion, and for the most part were limited, at least until 1944, to service or labour duties. Crash Dive, Sahara and Bataan painted a similarly unrealistic picture, showing the war as an arena where men of all races fought and died alongside one another. In reality segregation meant that units were divided along racial lines. In 1943 there was no possibility of Hollywood featuring all black units in its productions because it knew that such films would not sell. If there were to be any black faces in war films, as OWI and African Americans demanded, then they would have to appear in historically inaccurate inter-racial groups. Equally unrealistic was the fact that these groups were pictures of racial harmony. There were no examples of the overt racism which clearly existed in the Army. It would not be until 1949’s Home of the Brave that the impact of racial discrimination on black soldiers would be openly discussed. In this way, Hollywood, with the encouragement of OWI, tried to play down race as an issue. OWI adopted what Deputy Director George Barnes described as ‘a direct and powerful Negro propaganda effort as distinct from a crusade for Negro rights’.[28] None of the black characters in these films demanded anything from their country in return for their sacrifices. There was no mention of a ‘Double Victory’, no calls for fairer treatment of troops or equality back home.

For a brief moment the aims of the NAACP, the government and Hollywood coincided. The NAACP wanted improvements in the racial situation and greater opportunities in all areas of American life, from the army through to the film industry. The government wanted black morale to be bolstered in order to strengthen the war effort. Hollywood was motivated by profit and therefore was happy to produce films with nominal references to Allied war aims if it eased distribution and to include images of heroic (white or black) Americans if they were popular with audiences. The result was a handful of films which imparted ideological arguments against the intolerance of the Axis and included black actors in more dignified roles as integrated servicemen. Perhaps more significantly, the discourse around race in America widened as African Americans became more vocal in their demands for a greater stake in society and fairer representations of the race in the media. However, in the end it became clear that the aims of the NAACP, the government and Hollywood were essentially incongruous. The NAACP wanted real change for African Americans, whereas the Office of War Information wanted to change the image, not the reality, and Hollywood was only interested in the image if it would sell. Walter White and his organisation saw improved representations as part of a wider struggle for full equality. It was only one part of their battle. They believed that if white America’s perception of blacks could be altered then they might be more willing to accept greater civil rights and were never going to be silenced by marginally improved roles for a handful of black actors.

Whilst the NAACP was pleased with some of the changes enacted by the film industry it was ultimately disappointed by a missed opportunity to make substantive and lasting changes to how blacks were portrayed. A Columbia University study conducted in 1945 found that of one hundred black appearances in wartime films, seventy-five perpetuated old stereotypes, thirteen were neutral, and only twelve were positive.[29] In the post-War years there were some improvements in roles for black actors, with films such as Intruder in the Dust (1949) and No Way Out (1950) dealing explicitly with racial issues and including more fully developed and dignified characters. These developments were partly a result of the pressure that the African Americans were able to exert on Hollywood during the war. It is, however, depressing to note that Hollywood continues the practice of ‘writing-out’ when it comes to the contribution of blacks in the Second World War. Clint Eastwood’s recent film, Flags of our Fathers (2006), about the raising of the flag on Iowa Jima does not include any black faces, despite the fact that almost nine hundred African Americans took part in the battle. Black veterans said that whilst saddened and angered by this latest omission, after sixty years of being written out of war films they were not surprised.[30]

It would be misleading, however, to conclude on such a negative note, because this period proved to be an important point in the continuing formation of race consciousness. In the context of a war against Fascism and intolerance the question of race pushed its way to the forefront of American consciousness during and after the War. African Americans returning from Europe and the Pacific became increasingly unwilling to accept the discrimination which awaited them. The fight over race in films was one example in a larger battle over the meaning of what it meant to be black in America, a battle which within a decade had exploded into a full blown war for civil rights.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Neil A. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War (London: Paul Elek, 1976), p. 22.

[2] Ibid., p. 23.

[3] Ibid., p. 23.

[4] Richard Dalfiume, Desegregation of the United States Armed Forces. Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969), p. 74.

[5] Wynn, p. 43.

[6] Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, ‘Blacks, Loyalty and Motion-Picture Propaganda in World War II’, Journal of American History, 73.2 (1986), 383-406 (p. 385).

[7] Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: the Office of War Information, 1942-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 34.

[8] Ibid., p. 57.

[9] Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (London: I.B. Tauris and Co., 1987), p. 66.

[10] Ibid., p. 179.

[11] Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Library of Congress [NAACP LC] Part II A, Box 461.

[12] Winkler, p. 36.

[13] Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, pp.179-180.

[14] Press Release, 27 July 1942. NAACP LC: Part II A Box 275.

[15] Letter from E.J. Mannix, to Office of Darryl Zanuck, 21 July 1942. NAACP LC: Part II A Box 275.

[16] Clipping from Daily News, 30 September 1943. NAACP: Part II A Box 277.

[17] Memorandum from Roy Wilkins to Walter White, 23 March 1942. NAACP LC: Part II A Box 461.

[18] Walter White to Lowell Mellet, 17 August 1942. NAACP LC: Part II A Box 277.

[19] Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 76.

[20] Walter White to Wendell Willkie 17 April 1943. NAACP LC: Part II A Box 275.

[21] NAACP LC: Part II A Box 275.

[22] Press release, 1 February 1944. NAACP LC: Part II A Box 275.

[23] Quoted in letter Roy Wilkins to William Goetz, 17 February 1944. NAACP LC: Part II A Box 275.

[24] Memorandum by Julia Baxter (16 April). Quoted in letter Walter White to Harry Warner, 28 April 1943. NAACP LC: Part II A Box 275.

[25] ‘Here’s a Film Everyone Should See, Writes Defender Columnist’, Chicago Defender, 26 February 1944.

[26] Report of Secretary for May 1944 Meeting of Board of Directors. NAACP LC: Part II A Box 144.

[27] Wynn, p. 30.

[28] Koppes and Black, ‘Blacks, Loyalty and Motion-Picture Propaganda in World War II’, p. 389.

[29] Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, p. 184.

[30] ‘Where have all the black soldiers gone?’, Dan Glaister, The Guardian, 21 October 2006.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 11, Autumn 2007

The Problem of Liverpool in the Nineteenth-Century American Literary Imagination

Thomas Fitzpatrick Wright
© Thomas Fitzpatrick Wright. All Rights Reserved

The problem of the traveller landing at Liverpool is, why England is England?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (1856)[1]

This article outlines what can be called ‘the problem of Liverpool’ in American nineteenth-century travel writing. Throughout that period, the port of Liverpool was the site of initial encounter between the American traveller and the Old World. Transatlantic shipping routes dictated that the vast majority of Americans on eastward voyages were obliged to the enter England through the Mersey. For this reason, arrival at Liverpool was one of the fundamental shared experiences of American travel, and invariably serves as a preface and preamble to narratives of travel in England. In The Education of Henry Adams, for example, the author, describing the typical American voyage to England, catalogues ‘the succession of emotions’ that travellers were to experience upon arrival:

The ocean […] a furious gale in the Mersey […] the drearier picture of a Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi coffee-room in November murk [,..] Millions of Americans have felt this succession of emotions.[2]

Accounts describing these reactions represent one of the more ubiquitous – and overlooked – themes in American travel writing of the period. Like Adams, it was through Liverpool that most American writers glimpsed the Old World. And, to many, it was a problematic glimpse.

The following discussion represents exploratory notes towards a further investigation of this theme. It begins by sketching the historical conditions of nineteenth-century Liverpool and introducing the genre of American travel writing on England. Drawing upon the city’s place within this genre, and in particular the extended attention it receives in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, the article considers the principal responses of American travellers to the city. Finally, using Adams’s formulation of the ‘succession of emotions’, the article evaluates the use to which three particular narrative responses were put in the travel writing of the period, namely, surprise at an encounter with modernity; shock at urban poverty; and the resonance of slavery.

Liverpool was one of the nineteenth-century’s great sites of global exchange, one of what Mary Louise Pratt has termed ‘contact zones’, that is: ‘social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other’.[3] All great ports, it might be said, inhabit liminal positions in the cultural geography of nations. However, nineteenth-century Liverpool sat in particularly ambivalent relation to its home country and to the continent: an emblem of transition, its back turned to England, facing West towards the Americas and beyond.

The port was, in the words of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘the gateway between the Old World and the New’, and has always been seen to have a unique relationship with the United States.[4] Trade links with colonial British America generated such solidarity that 1770s Liverpool has been characterized as ‘more than half in sympathy with the rebel cause’.[5] During the first half of the nineteenth-century, the port increasingly became the embarkation point for European emigrants who converged at the port in order to commence their voyages to the New World. Of the estimated 40 million emigrants to the United States between 1790 and 1890, almost one quarter, or 9 million, sailed from Liverpool.[6] At the height of the Irish potato crop failure of 1845-46, nearly 1000 ships a year carrying Irish emigrants left the port for the United States. In this way, the docks of Liverpool should be considered alongside Ellis Island as a central part of the narrative of nineteenth-century American immigration.

However, the human traffic through the Liverpool of the period was two-way. The city was simultaneously the exit and entryway for emigrants to and travellers from the United States. As the century progressed, certain factors – the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars; advances in intercontinental shipping; the strengthening of the United States economy in particular – conspired to open the possibility of European travel to a growing sector of well-heeled society. So, while millions flowed west in search of the promise of America, an embryonic transatlantic travel industry developed, funnelling affluent Americans on European tours.

Travelling directly to England from the United States, the majority of ships would run along the southern coast of Ireland, north to the Welsh shore, past Holyhead, and directly into Liverpool harbour. This was the route by which Herman Melville travelled in 1839, Frederick Douglass in 1845, Frederick Law Olmsted in 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1852; Margaret Fuller in 1855; and Henry James in 1868.

Thanks to de Tocqueville and Dickens, accounts of European travel to the United States during the period represent an established highlight of nineteenth-century cultural history. But the literary significance of the reverse journey is arguably just as great. Travel writing on Europe was one of the major American genres of the century. Works such as Bayard Taylor’s Views Afoot, which ran into twenty editions during the decade 1846-56, and Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869)were amongst the most successful books of the age. The phenomenon had reached such a fever pitch by 1875 that magazine editor Moses Sweetser was moved to rail against the ‘affliction of cacoëthes scribendi‘ or the ‘irresistible urge to write’ amongst ‘the thousands of our people who visit Europe every summer’.[7] Travel historian Alison Lockwood has declared that ‘the nineteenth-century ‘invasion’ of Britain by Americans became one of the best recorded such phenomena in history’.[8] For American men and women of letters, both the voyage to England and the publication of their ‘England book’ represented obligatory career milestones and rites-of-passage. As William Stowe’s recent survey of this material reminds us, of those at the heart of what we now consider the literary canon of the period, ‘all but Whitman, Thoreau and Dickinson went to Europe, and most wrote about it’.[9]

A cursory list of the most well-known texts would include Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon of 1819; James Fenimore Cooper’s Gleanings in Europe of 1837; Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands of 1854; William Wells Brown’s The American Fugitive in Europe of 1855; Emerson’s English Traits of 1856; and Margaret Fuller’s At Home and Abroad of 1856. It was a genre that could be seen to culminate in Henry James’s English Hours of 1905, William Dean Howell’s Seven English Cities of 1909 and Henry Adams’s The Education, published in 1918.

These and countless other forgotten books of English travel invariably begin their journey through the Old World at Liverpool. Moreover, the city is also central in American literary history for the significant periods of time spent there by both Hawthorne and Melville. The former served as United States Consul in Liverpool from 1853 to 1857, during which time, despite publishing little, he maintained copious journals, posthumously released as the English Notebooks. He was later to write directly about the city in his 1856 travel collection Our Old Home in two key essays, ‘Consular Experiences’ and ‘Outside Glimpses of English Poverty’. Melville sailed as a cabin boy to Liverpool aged 20 in 1839, offering a fictionalised account of this early voyage in his 1849 novel Redburn. He returned to the city in 1856, spending several days together with Hawthorne at Southport, and again for a final time in 1857.

Christopher Mulvey has described the moment of European arrival in American travel writing as ‘a lifetime’s stimulation compressed into one moment’.[10] Approaching in 1818, Washington Irving remarked how ‘[n]one but those who have experienced it can form an idea of the delicious throngs of sensations which rush into an American’s heart when he first comes in sight of Europe’.[11] Similarly, Stowe remarked that ‘An American, particularly a New Englander, can never approach the old country without a kind of thrill and pulsation of kindred’.[12] For a few this moment of arrival came via the Continent as was the case, for example, with Cooper in 1825 when, approaching the cliffs of Dover from Calais, he paused to reflect how they ‘had the character of a magnificent gateway to a great nation’.[13] For the vast majority who landed at Liverpool arrival was more problematic, registered in terms of a series of shocks and associations.

Modernity

The first shock for the American traveller was at the newness of the port. Liverpool was, in British terms, a pre-eminently modern city. Receiving no mention in the Domesday book and maintaining a population of less than five hundred until the 1560s, the city only began to flourish through the increase in Atlantic trade from the mid-seventeenth century.[14] To the overseas traveller it represented a spectacle of volatile modernity. Its maritime infrastructure was incomparably cutting-edge, its civic building enormous in scale. In the 1820s, the modernity of Liverpool achieved an even greater international resonance when it became the terminal of the world’s first intercity passenger locomotive service. It was a city at the vanguard of English urban development, and a barometer of economic and social change.

The surprise for American travellers was that aspects of this modernity often made it indistinguishable from, for example, Philadelphia or New York. In his study of transatlantic tourism, James Buzard has maintained that, for the American traveller, ‘Europe’ essentially signified ‘a repository of qualities not found at home’.[15] In its relative youth and its commercial character Liverpool decisively failed the ‘Englishness test’. Stowe’s dismissal of the city upon her arrival as a ‘real New Yorkish place’ was typical of the repeated assertions of its American character. Olmsted complained how ‘there was hardly anything to distinguish it from America’.[16] Horace Greeley went further, declaring: ‘I can hardly believe that I have crossed the ocean’.[17] American travel texts register their disappointment with Liverpool in terms of its possession of American qualities: the freshness of the infrastructure; the lack of prominent antiquity; the dominance of the commercial realm; and the variety of the population. In fact, in reference to the last of these, American writers often depicted Liverpool in terms that emphasised admiration for what they characterised as its uncannily ‘American’ diversity. For example, Stowe’s evocation of the diversity of the Mersey of the 1850s is almost Whitmanic: ‘We are in a forest of ships of all nations; their masts bristling like the tall pines in Maine; their many coloured flags streaming like the forest leaves in autumn’.[18]

The first element of the problem of Liverpool was its aesthetic and cultural similarity to what had been left behind: the discovery of a somewhere so apparently ‘American’ on the far side of the Atlantic.

Poverty

The second surprise for American travellers was the spectacle of Liverpool’s chronic deprivation. This was a city of vast inequalities, almost without parallel. The city had become one of the foremost commercial centres of the Atlantic world, and at its peak following the abolition of the East India Company’s monopoly in 1833 it is estimated that 40% of world trade was passing through its docks. Vast fortunes were acquired in the city, but the unplanned nature of this growth meant that, by the 1840s, parts of the city had become the largest and densest urban slum in Europe, with an average age at death of seventeen.[19] This scale of urban poverty and degradation was a new and particularly English phenomenon. It had been observed in Manchester by Friedrich Engels in 1844, but it was at its most pronounced in Liverpool. In 1880 a city report concluded that, of a population of 600 000, 10% were officially ‘destitute’.[20] For Americans travellers, this panorama of destitution on the threshold of England appears to have been deeply unexpected.

To many, it represented a moral and aesthetic affront. Margaret Fuller expressed amazement in 1856 at her first encounter with ‘the squalid and shameless beggars of Liverpool’.[21] Hawthorne in 1853 considered it ‘a monstrosity unknown on our side of the Atlantic’. Olmsted was ‘astonished […] to observe with what an unmingled stream of poverty the streets were swollen […] you can see nothing like such a dead mass of poverty in the worst quarter of our worst city’.[22] This shock at the encounter with urban poverty is one of the most consistent features of American travel writing on England of the period. It was a theme touched on again and again, from Irving, Greeley and Stowe to Oliver Wendell Holmes. It even formed part of William Wells Brown’s commentary which otherwise emphatically avoided direct criticism of Britain. Consequently, condemnation of what the existence of poverty revealed about English society emerged as one of the central themes of transatlantic commentary.

It provides the backdrop to Emerson’s English Traits and Fuller’s At Home and Abroad, in which both authors reached parallel conclusions regarding the inevitability of some form of revolutionary upheaval. In At Home and Abroad, Fuller argues that ‘it is impossible’ to

take a near view of the treasures created by English genius without a prayer, daily more fervent, that the needful changes in the condition of this people may be effected by peaceful revolution […] For myself, much as I pitied the poor, abandoned, hopeless wretches that swarm in the roads and streets of England I pity far more the English noble, with this difficult problem before him, and such need of a speedy solution […] poverty in England has terrors of which I never dreamed at home.[23]

In English Traits, Emerson observed of the country that ‘pauperism incrusts and clogs the state’, concluding his gnomic survey of the national scene with the negative observation that ‘England subsists by antagonisms and contradictions’.[24] In the richest nation on earth, the most glaring of these contradictions were abundantly on display upon arrival at Liverpool. If the first way American travellers used the city in their writing was as an unexpected symbol of British modernity, the second was as a symbol of English inequality. Expressions of shock at the social conditions of the city often form part of a larger critique of the unequal conditions of nineteenth century England.

The Legacy of Slave Trade

These were, of course, not the only Atlantic crossings with which Liverpool was associated. As its visitors knew, it was a city whose conspicuous architectural grandeur was predicated on its eighteenth-century role as the commercial vertex of the Atlantic slave trade triangle. In the terms of the recently-established ‘Transatlantic Slavery’ gallery at Merseyside Maritime Museum, Liverpool represented ‘the slaving capital of the Atlantic world’.[25] At the height of its activity, in the decade 1783-1793, more than 300 000 African slaves were transported across the Atlantic on Liverpool vessels.[26] As such, it was one of the centres of gravity of what Paul Gilroy has termed the ‘Black Atlantic’, rich in murky historical resonance. Negotiation with this legacy represents a third feature of travel accounts of the city.

By the time of much of the material under review, it had successfully evolved into a more legitimate commercial port. Nonetheless, the name ‘Liverpool’ represented both the destination on most American ocean tickets, and common shorthand for British slave guilt. As one might expect, a number of travellers directly invoked this past. Yale physician Benjamin Silliman, for example, was moved to pronounce upon arrival at the still-active slave-port in 1805 that ‘Liverpool is deep, very deep in the guilt of the slave trade. It is now pursued with more eagerness than ever’. ‘Our country’, he was moved to reflect, ‘so nobly jealous of its own liberties, stands disgraced in the eyes of man’.[27] Interestingly, there were also those, such as Irving and Stowe, who invoked the city’s more recent role in British abolitionism. In particular, frequent mention was made of Liverpool’s William Roscoe, whose American anti-slavery lecture tours had earned him transatlantic fame. Irving went as far as to declare that ‘the man of letters who speaks of Liverpool, speaks of it as the residence of Roscoe’.[28]

Overall, however, there was much less reference to this aspect of the city’s past than might be expected. Even in Stowe’s travel books, or those of former slave William Wells Brown, little mention is made of Liverpool’s appalling legacy. Some perhaps avoided discussions of Liverpool’s slave associations for reasons of decorum. Another factor lay in the eagerness of the American abolitionist enterprise to avoid alienating British opinion. However, it also appears that in certain cases the negative feelings one might have anticipated in American travel books were in fact displaced onto wider critiques of English poverty and workers’ conditions of the kind discussed above. If slaverywas the glaring American ‘contradiction’ of the early nineteenth-century, then urban poverty, as seen at Liverpool, was widely taken to hold the same place for the British, above even monarchism .

This ‘slavery versus pauperism’ discourse is one of the undercurrents of antebellum American travel writing on England. It was stimulated in part by Cooper, whose 1837 essay entitled ‘The Poor’ had maintained that ‘the comparison between the condition of the common English house-servant, and that of the American slave, is altogether in favour of the latter’.[29] In the same way, Samuel Prime recorded in 1855 that ‘Virginia negroes were better dressed for church’ than what he called ‘the white slaves of Europe’.[30] Faced with routine condemnation by everyday Englishmen over the persistence of the ‘peculiar institution’, the American traveller could, as Paul Giles has suggested, easily construct

figurative analogies between different types of slavery, juxtaposing the racial discrimination familiar to him from nineteenth-century America with the social and economic slavery he [saw] around him in England.[31]

To some travellers, it was clear that British critiques of the persistence of Southern slavery in the United States disregarded the comparable conditions of the English poor. Liverpool, in this analysis, had merely shifted from the exploitation of African slaves under mercantilism to the exploitation of its own destitute populace under the emerging system of industrial capitalism. The problem of Liverpool was thus also the abrupt realisation of British hypocrisy.

Hawthorne and Melville

Most Americans left Liverpool as soon as they could – for Chester, for the Lakes, for York, or for London. However, the city of Liverpool itself held a special significance for the two writers who engaged with it most extensively, namely Hawthorne and Melville. 

When his English Notebooks were posthumously published in the 1870s, a review in the Atlantic Monthly suggested that ‘for a man with such powers of observation as Hawthorne, and such taste for using them, the post of American Consul in a large commercial city like Liverpool must have had some decided attractions’.[32] Chief among these, it seems, was the opportunity to stretch literary muscles, for the city seems to have occasioned new forms of writing in Hawthorne. First, the range of human contact offered to him in his official capacity allowed him, in ‘Consular Experiences’, to range wryly over transatlantic affairs, developing the autobiographical style of his Scarlet Letter preface. Second, as Nina Baym has suggested, in ‘Outside Glimpses of English Poverty’ he ‘experiments not unsuccessfully with the voice of the socially-aware Victorian narrator’[33]:

I often […] went designedly astray among precincts that reminded me of some of Dickens’s grimiest pages. There I caught glimpses of a people and a mode of life that were comparatively new to my observation, a sort of sombre phantasmagoric spectacle, exceedingly undelightful to behold, yet involving a singular interest and even fascination in its ugliness.[34]

Whilst his notebooks register little more than disgust at urban squalor, ‘Outside Glimpses’ translates this into moral outrage: ‘one day or another, safe as they deem themselves, and safe as the hereditary temper of the people really tends to make them, the gentlemen of England will be compelled to face this problem’.[35]

In this way, whilst no fiction was written there, his Liverpool material collected in the English Notebooks was successfully re-used, most obviously in Our Old Home. Also significant is that Liverpool passages that described ‘the multitudinous and continual motion of all this kind of life, the people are as numerous as maggots in cheese’ [36] were to feed directly into Hawthorne’s descriptions of the urban squalor of Rome in The Marble Faun, which waspublished some five years after leaving England:

Hilda’s present expedition led her into what was – physically, at least – the foulest and ugliest part of Rome […] where thousands of Jews are crowded within a narrow compass, and lead a close, unclean, and multitudinous life, resembling that of maggots when they over-populate a decaying cheese.[37]

Similarly, passages on Liverpool filth were worked up for publication, both in ‘Outside Glimpses’:

Dirt, one would fancy, is plenty enough all over the world, being the symbolic accompaniment of the foul incrustation which began to settle over and bedim all earthly things as soon as Eve had bitten the apple,[38]

and, again, in The Marble Faun:

Dirt was everywhere, strewing the narrow streets, and incrusting the tall shabbiness of the edifices, from the foundations to the roofs; it lay upon the thresholds, and looked out of the windows, and assumed the guise of human life in the children that seemed to be engendered out of it.[39]

These passages suggest the extent to which Hawthorne’s response to the poverty and urban depravation of Liverpool was essentially metaphysical. Whilst not devoid of economic critique, his obsession lies with the metaphorical resonance of grime itself.

Moreover, the exchange of material between the two cities – Liverpool and Rome – suggests the curious extent to which Old World locations were in a sense conceptually interchangeable for Hawthorne. Liverpool, it might be said, operates as a metonym for Europe. In the preface to The Marble Faun, he had famously declared how ‘no author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong’. The ‘gloomy wrongs’ of Europe, its inequalities and decadence, were usefully embodied by the existence of urban filth as experienced at Liverpool, and one could observe that Hawthorne drew upon this experience to write more generally about the moral condition of Europe.

Unlike Hawthorne, Melville’s treatment of Liverpool was fictional, using the city as the squalid and corrupt arena for the coming-of-age of his callow hero in Redburn. But like Hawthorne, his time in Liverpool has proved fertile ground for biographical critics. A standard line has been that his experience of the ills of the city in 1839 was in some measure responsible for what F.O. Matthiessen termed ‘the latent economic factor in tragedy that remained part of [his] vision at every subsequent stage of his writing’.[40] And it is true that Melville’s treatment of the city offers a more directly economic critique than that of Hawthorne.

The Hogarthian poverty of the populace at Liverpool makes an immediate mockery of Redburn’s idealised expectations of England. The novel’s most powerful scene sees him stumble across a starving woman with children in a cellar:

I crawled up into the street, and looking down upon them again, almost repented that I had brought them any food; for it would only tend to prolong their misery […] I felt an almost irresistible impulse to do them the last mercy, of in some way putting an end to their horrible, lives; and I should almost have done so, I think, had I not been deterred by thoughts of the law. For I well knew that the law, which would let them perish of themselves without giving them one cup of water, would spend a thousand pounds, if necessary, in convicting him who should so much as offer to relieve them from their miserable existence.[41]

Tellingly, this passage, one of the most strident in all of Melville, immediately follows a similarly-charged chapter describing German emigrants for the US, huddled and singing on the docks prior to departure. Confronted with this image Melville’s narrator launches into a hymn to the promise of the New World. The implication is clear. In Redburn, Liverpool, despite surface similarities to the New World, comes to represent the ‘anti-America’, a neat symbol for the hardships and exploitation that generations had crossed the Atlantic to avoid.

It could also be suggested that the complexity of the international economy as experienced at Liverpool contributes to salient themes of what we would now call ‘globalisation’ in Melville’s fiction. In a bleakly ironic touch, Redburn features the protagonist preparing for his imminent arrival at Liverpool by reading Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, just as he is about to encounter certain horrific undersides of the free market. Themes and ironies such as these concerning the global economy resound throughout Melville, from Typee onwards. Of particular relevance to his experience of Liverpool, one might say, are the twinned transatlantic diptych tales such as ‘The Paradise of Bachelors’ and ‘The Tartarus of Maids’, which juxtapose the decadence of London society with the (almost Liverpudlian) horrors of emerging New England industry. The piece represents a domestication of the gothic horrors of Redburn’s Liverpool into an American setting. It also represents an oblique commentary on the global system of commodity-exchange upon which Liverpool’s existence was based.

This article makes no claims for the representative nature of the travellers under discussion. Moreover, it has not intended to claim centrality for Liverpool – as either experience, theme or symbol – within American literary culture of the period. Inevitably, the majority of visitors disposed of their impressions of the city within a few pages. The era’s most popular conventional travel book, Bayard Taylor’s Views Afoot (1846), is characteristic in this regard. Once ashore, Taylor hurries through customs, and ‘before the twilight had wholly faded’ is ‘again tossing on the rough waves of the Irish Sea’, headed for Dublin. ‘Of Liverpool’, Taylor nonchalantly asserts, ‘we saw little’.[42]

Taking the genre as a whole, however, the effect is cumulative, and the city establishes a ubiquity matched only, perhaps, by London, York or Chester. And it elicits a remarkable consistency of response. As Christopher Mulvey has observed, for the American traveller, ‘Liverpool could be a severe trial to the romantic sensibility’.[43] This lies at the heart of the problem of Liverpool: arrival invariably represents a process of disillusion. Not even what James called ‘the latent preparedness of the American mind’ for the ‘features of English life’ seems to have equipped travellers for the problem of Liverpool.[44]

Part of this can be ascribed to what I have termed the liminal status of the port. It served as the ‘contact zone’ between England’s former colony and the British imperial centre. In the term used by both Frederick Douglass and James, it was ‘the threshold of England’: at once England and not England, Old World and yet outpost of modernity.[45] The problem of Liverpool was the dilemma of how this mystifying port should be interpreted – how to reconcile its modernity with an idealised image of the Old World; how to respond to the apparent hypocrisies of English industrial ‘progress’. And in all the ambivalent self-recognition it offered to the American visitor, it was the problem of comprehending the implications of Liverpool as portent of industrial modernity. The city was, as anthropologist Victor Turner has written of the liminal state, ‘a kind of institutional capsule or pocket containing the germ of future social developments, of societal change’.[46]

Wolfson College, Cambridge

Notes

[1] Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits [1856], ed. by Philip Nicoloff and Robert Burkholder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), p.

[2] Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, ed. by Donald Hall (New York: Houghton Miffin, 2000) p. 72.

[3] Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), p. iv.

[4] Nathaniel Hawthorne, Our Old Home (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1863), p. 3.

[5] Howard Channon, Portrait of Liverpool (London: Robert Hale & Company, 1976), p. 37.

[6] These and following statistics, Ibid, pp. 57-60.

[7] Quoted in William W. Stowe, Going Abroad : European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 7.

[8] Alison Lockwood, Passionate Pilgrims: American Travellers in Great Britain 1800-1914 (Cornwall Books: New York, 1981), p. 12.

[9] Stowe, Going Abroad, p. 4.

[10] Christopher Mulvey, Anglo-American Landscapes: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 45.

[11] Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent [1819] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 18.

[12] Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Vol. 1 [1854] (Boston: Phillips & Sampson Publishers, 1854), p. 35.

[13] James Fennimore Cooper, Gleanings in Europe: England [1841] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 16.

[14] Channon, pp.21-30; Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), pp. 246-7.

[15] James Buzard, The Beaten Track, European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’: 1800-1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 145.

[16] Frederic Law Olmsted, Walks And Talks of an American Farmer in England (Amherst, MA: Library of American Landscape History, 2002), p. 31.

[17] Horace Greeley, Glances at Europe: in a series of letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, Switzerland, &c., during the summer of 1851 (New York: Dewitt & Davenport, 1851), p. 19.

[18] Stowe, Sunny Memories, p. 23.

[19] Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 13.

[20] Channon, pp. 57-60.

[21] Margaret Fuller, At Home And Abroad: Or, Things And Thoughts In America And Europe, ed. by Arthur B. Fuller (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, 1856), p. 23.

[22] Olmsted, p. 31.

[23] Fuller, p. 23.

[24] Emerson, pp. 299, 98.

[25] Transatlantic Slavery, ed. by Tony Tibbles (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1994), p. iv.

[26] Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440-1870 (London: Picador, 1997), p. 247.

[27] Benjamin Silliman, A Journal Of Travels In England, Holland And Scotland, And Of Two Passages Over The Atlantic, In The Years 1805 And 1806 (New York: D. & G. Bruce, 1810), p. 12.

[28] Irving, p.16.

[29] Cooper, p. 34.

[30] Samuel Irenaeus Prime, Travels in Europe and the East (New York: Harper, 1855), p. 24.

[31] Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 179.

[32] G.S. Hillard, ‘The English Notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne’, Atlantic Monthly, September 1870.

[33] Nina Baym, The Shape of Hawthorne’s Career (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 167.

[34] Hawthorne, Our Old Home, p. 198.

[35] Ibid., p. 213.

[36] Nathaniel Hawthorne, The English Notebooks,ed. by Thomas Woodson and Bill Ellis (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1997), p. 126.

[37] Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, ed. by Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 187.

[38] Hawthorne, Our Old Home, p. 213.

[39] Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, p. 186.

[40] F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, 3rd edn., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 400.

[41] Herman Melville, Redburn, Or His First Voyage [1849] (New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 12.

[42] Melville, p. 10.

[43] Mulvey, p. 34.

[44] Henry James, ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’, in The Tales of Henry James (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1984), p. 12.

[45] Henry James, English hours (London : William Heinemann, 1905), p. 23; Frederick Douglass, My Bondage And My Freedom (New York, Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), p. 302.

[46] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 44.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 12, Spring 2008

Political Party Machines, Corrupt Elections in the 1930s and the Press: A Cautionary Tale of Kansas City

John Matlin
© John Matlin. All Rights Reserved

According to David Colburn and George Pozzetta, the best evidence of the manifest power of an American 1930s political party machine was its ability to win elections, ‘a fact of undisputed historical record’.[1] If a machine could not control the electorate within its constituency, it would not survive. Therefore, to ensure victory, numerous corrupt election practices, some dating back to the nineteenth century, became the norm for machines in city, county and state elections. The cavalier attitude adopted by many machines in relation to elections was, possibly, rooted in both the founding of America and its Constitution. Although the founders complained in the Declaration of Independence of the lack of right to representation, Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution limited itself to legislating that ‘the times, places and manner of holding elections…shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof’. The 15th, 19th, 24th, and 26th Amendments to the Constitution provided that rights to vote would not be denied in given circumstances but the laws and processes of elections themselves came within the purview of the states.

Rule by majority is a tenet of democratic societies, yet there was nothing in the Constitution itself to confirm the principle of ‘one man, one vote’, leaving a gap for machine politicians to exploit. At his trial in 1871, Boss Tweed of infamous Tammany Hall said: ‘The fact is New York politics were always dishonest. There never was a time when you couldn’t buy the Board of Aldermen’.[2] Tweed gave a detailed account of corrupt election practices, including ballot box stuffing which, he said, ‘could not have been more brazen’.[3] At least the nineteenth century tactic of ‘cooping’, ‘where citizens were often press-ganged off the streets by political campaigners and forced to vote several times, whilst bribed with drinks and given new clothes to disguise their identities’ had disappeared from Missouri politics by the 1930s.[4]

Successful but unscrupulous machines dominated the local executive, legislative and judicial branches of their city governments, often leaving the press as the sole source of opposition. On average, there were twelve local newspapers serving Kansas City and Jackson County in the 1930s. This article comments on the reporting of elections by some of the local press during the decade. In doing so, it will briefly detail some Progressive reforms of election laws and their effect in machine-controlled cities and, in doing so, highlight the actions of two notorious 1930s machine bosses at election time. It will detail the varied, fraudulent and unlawful tactics used by the Kansas City Democratic Party machine to dominate elections locally, some of which witnessed excessive violence uncontrolled by the local authorities. The article will cite the manifold election laws available by 1930 to city and state authorities, laws designed to prevent corrupt election practices. It will note their successful use by federal judicial authorities against the Kansas City machine operatives when city, county and state judicial authorities failed to act. It will suggest reasons why the local press was ineffectual in preventing machine election wrongdoings and seek to explain why Kansas City voters may well have been complacent about such ineffectiveness.

The press was well represented in 1930s Kansas City. The reportage of five of the local newspapers is reviewed here. Four of them, The Kansas City American, The Kansas City Call, The Independence Examiner and The Missouri Democrat collectively accounted for less than ten per cent of weekly newspaper circulation. Moving from the smallest in sales to the largest in circulation terms, The American was a newspaper for the black Democrat community. It rarely covered local, white politics and was uncritical of the Democratic machine and its boss, Tom Pendergast. The Call was another newspaper for the black community which, too, made scant reference to politics. It had a Republican bias. The Examiner was a mildly pro-Democratic, daily newspaper serving the town of Independence, then some ten miles from Kansas City. (It is now a suburb). The Examiner generally followed principles of fair and balanced reporting, although it was both partisan and Democrat. It had a heavy slant on politics and was a strong advocate of clean elections. The Democrat was entirely partisan, both in its reporting and editorials. For this newspaper, the Democrats could do no wrong and the Republicans no right. The Democrat was overwhelmingly pro-Pendergast and was possibly financed and, indeed, owned by him.

The fifth newspaper to be reviewed, The Kansas City Star, enjoyed a national reputation for fair and balanced reporting. It was pro-Republican but nowhere near as partisan as The Democrat. The Star, whose circulation usually exceeded 250,000 copies daily and accounted for approximately 90% of newspaper sales in the Kansas City area, was respected for its encouragement and support of clean elections.

In the late nineteenth century, Progressives commenced their campaign seeking to nullify corrupt electoral practices by democratizing and reforming government. Changes, such as appointments of election boards were advocated. Election boards were agencies, administered by the state, for the conduct of state elections and the conduct of county election boards. Another significant Progressive reform was the direct primary. Primaries, namely the nomination of candidates for office by the vote of party members, were sought to replace the system whereby only a small proportion of voters attended local caucuses or precinct meetings that sent delegates to county, state or national conventions. In theory, the old system allowed seasoned leaders to sift candidates but, in practice, political professionals dominated the selection process.

Missouri adopted both election board and primary election laws in 1907. The election board law’s effectiveness became limited as a result of machine control. It had been hoped that the direct primary election law would give party members a greater say in the selection process. Regrettably, another ‘law’, that of unintended consequences, soon applied. Raymond Wolfinger observed: ‘The elections most important to organization politicians were obscure primaries held on ward level. Issue-oriented “amateurs” seldom made sufficient strength in those elections’.[5] Edward Banfield and James Wilson agreed that the votes most crucial to a machine were those cast in primaries. ‘In primaries, the machine does not ask the voter to forsake normal party allegiance. Turnout is lower than in general elections, so the votes to be controlled are fewer’.[6] Through the primary system, not only were machine bosses able to choose their slate of candidates lawfully but they would also be assured of easy victories in the primaries themselves. By the 1930s, machine control was solid. A June, 1932, editorial in The Examiner summed up the position:

Candidates in the August primary for US Congress are generally unknown to the average voter. The Kansas City slate vote will probably be sufficient to elect thirteen Democratic candidates. In Jackson County, the only interest lies in votes for state officials. Here the vote is already practically determined.[7]

The voters of any state which adopted primary election laws had the opportunity to vote on four occasions biennially. At the beginning of an election year, primary elections would be held for city and county offices. The election proper would be held in the spring. In August or September, another primary election would be held for state and national office with the election proper in November. Both city and county elections were of paramount important to a machine. A loss in these elections would signify to the local populace a severe reduction of that machine’s power and the boss’s influence. State and national elections were not as important for the machine, although they demonstrated the organization’s ability to elect party candidates, according to the boss a greater standing in the national party.

Some city bosses were visible, especially at election time. Frank Hague, mayor of Jersey City for thirty years between 1917 and 1947, took four basic steps in almost every one of the eight mayoral elections he fought. First, he would announce both his candidacy and the ticket slate at a New Year’s Day reception, thus gaining more publicity than normal in the local press. Second, he would announce a reduction in the local property tax, presumably a popular move in the earlier elections he contested but, probably, thereafter, both a predictable and cynical gambit. Third, he would ‘tune up’ the Democratic organization for the campaign. Ward and precinct leaders would be encouraged to increase their personnel, as voters received regular, personal approaches and offers of help from the Hague organization. Fourth, a central theme would be presented by Hague to both the organization and the public which would be followed through with civic and religious celebrations, for example an ‘Americanization Day’ parade. Endorsements would be received from local newspapers such as The Jersey Journal and The Hudson Dispatch, habitually accompanied by favourable editorials. There would be frequent canvasses of voters and, at the end of the campaign, nightly rallies.

Other bosses, such as Pendergast, adopted a low profile at election time, leaving publicity to others. Unlike Hague, who welcomed the hustings as a sign of personal power, Pendergast shunned the limelight. He ceased to stand for election in Kansas City after 1922, when he signalled his political availability solely as Chairman of the Kansas City Democratic Party Committee. Yet even Pendergast, on occasion, took a leaf out of Hague’s book. In the 1934 City election, The Star reported in January that ‘Pendergast opened the City campaign with a forecast of overwhelming victory in an appearance that was contrary to custom’.[8]

Regardless of their public election stance, bosses like Pendergast and Hague would not leave the outcome of a city or county election to the whims of electors. It was far too important for the maintenance of machine business to leave such matters to democracy. If a machine was not in power, it would not be able to carry out the myriad transactions it needed to fuel its business, as well as making profits for its major stakeholders.

F. A. Hermens suggested probable tactics when he wrote: ‘Wire pullers of machines sometimes use subtle methods to achieve their aims. A frequent device of machine control is election tampering. Subtle is preferred to crude’.[9] Harold Gosnell was far more direct: ‘Frauds in American elections, particularly primaries, are committed with the help or collusion of election boards’.[10] Gosnell’s reference to election boards was insufficient. He should also have been critical of election judges, who were members of the local machine, chosen to referee disputes and disagreements at polling stations and whose impartiality was invariably doubtful.

In his study of political corruption in America, George Benson took the view that corrupt machine politics became ‘the dominant pattern of government for American cities after the last quarter of the nineteenth century’.[9] Benson’s study of election fraud led him to believe that most frauds occurred in areas of one-party dominance, especially in the poorest wards and precincts, and that party primaries, more than general elections, were the ‘principal stage on which tricks and dodges of election fraud were worked’.[10] Such a paradigm fitted well with both the Pendergast and Hague machines. By the 1930s, voting frauds appeared to have become systemic, in that their practice was probably widespread throughout American cities dominated by machines. The similarity in the nature of election frauds, as practised in both Kansas City and Jersey City, are unlikely to have been coincidental. Some frauds were brutal, others sophisticated, but all broke election law.

The nature of voting frauds interacted within three main headings: administration, conduct of campaigns and money. Fraud in the administration of elections and voter registration was multifaceted. It could take the form of bullying, with threats to businessmen concerning their workplaces or future tax investigations, to ensure their support. Civil disorder and intimidation was used by machine operatives with threatened or actual violence outside polling stations.

The 1934 City election witnessed an outbreak of violence, unprecedented even for Kansas City politics. A level of violence was anticipated by The Star in February, 1934: ‘Election officials estimate that 75,000 persons would register today, breaking all records. The New Youth Movement was on the job early. No clashes were reported’. However, The Star reported subsequently that the Citizens Movement (the re-named National Youth Movement) had requested President Roosevelt to intervene in the city election to insure its honesty and to have 500 national guardsmen sent to Kansas City ‘to respond to intimidation, beatings and kidnapping’.

Presumably, Roosevelt denied the request (if indeed it was passed to him) because he assumed the federal government had no authority or jurisdiction in such matters. In any event, he was preoccupied with other problems. As for the Kansas City authorities, it is reasonable to assume they were unduly influenced by the Democratic organization into deciding to take no action. The Star continued the story in March, 1934, reporting that Johnny Lazia, a leader of organized crime and a Pendergast lieutenant, was heading a private army to terrorize and intimidate supporters of the Citizens Movement. Neither the federal nor the Kansas City authorities intervened.

The 1934 violence reached its height on Election Day. In a three page story on 27th March, 1934, The Star reported that a ‘negro Democratic precinct captain’ had been shot by polling station raiders and that another Democratic captain had been wounded. Also, a Star reporter, Justin Bowerstock, was physically attacked in a major breakdown of law and order. The Examiner reported in similar fashion. By the following day, The Star headlined that four victims had been shot dead in the election and that two 16^th Ward Democratic leaders would be arrested. The Democrat’s preposterous spin on the course of events was that ‘the attempted assassination of the city’s good name was an attempt to destroy the Democratic Party’.[11] The resignation of Director of Police Eugene Reppert on 29^th March, 1934, indicated the comprehensive failure, and possibly unwillingness, of the Kansas City Police Department to cope with the scale of the crisis.

Any expectation that Kansas City elections would be peaceful after the events of 1934 were spoiled two years later, when in September, 1936, The Star reported that fist fights and disturbances broke out on the second day of registration in Kansas City. If nothing else, the volatility of elections in Kansas City in the Pendergast era, coupled with physical intimidation, cannot be doubted. The situation was exacerbated by the Kansas City Police Department’s failure to act to end the violence.

Intimidation was not limited to physical violence. Money in elections has proved a thorn in America’s political side for decades. Today in America, there is routine circumvention of campaign finance laws through mechanisms such as Political Action Committees. In the 1930s, there was no campaign finance legislation. Machine operatives were free to seek or extort contributions from local businessmen. In addition, the Pendergast machine required ‘voluntary’ contributions from persons whose jobs with the city depended on the boss’s patronage, in order to finance elections. In a front page story in February, 1934, The Star reported how ‘the Democratic organization has directed a levy against almost 4,000 City Hall and courthouse job holders to produce a campaign chest in excess of $100,000’. The article set out scales of contributions payable by city employees, including a levy of 10% of salaries from those earning more than $3,600 per annum. The machine characterised the contributions as ‘voluntary’. Certainly, any employee who refused to pay the levy ran a serious risk of losing his or her job. It is likely that contributions of this nature were exacted every two years during the 1930s to fund the Pendergast political campaign chest.

Illegal voting methods included ‘ghosting’, where names appeared on the electoral roll, even though such persons were ineligible to vote. Such practices did not go unnoticed. In the 1934 Kansas City election, the National Youth Movement used cameras to record ‘ghosts’, according to a Star story. There was also ‘repeating’, ‘personation’ and ‘endless chain’, i.e., voters would falsely register themselves to vote, or vote more than once through the use of false names and impersonation of others, or were bribed to vote more than once. The scale of such offences in Kansas City prompted media castigation. In a February, 1934, editorial, The Star alleged:

Registration is out of proportion to previous registrations and there will be large numbers of strike-offs. This is not the time for wholesale challenges that have constituted abuses in the past. Vigilance is needed so every qualified Kansas City voter can vote.

A few days later, The Star reported that more than 88,000 votes were struck off by the Election Board, following a supplemental registration of 95,000. The numbers involved were staggering, indicating the zeal of machine operatives to prove their worth to their superiors by registering large numbers of voters, regardless of legality.

No adverse mention was made in The Star’s February, 1934, editorial of the part played by the Democratic machine, presumably because there was inadequate evidence, often the case in The Star’s reporting. However, writing on the election proper, The Star alleged in a headline story that an Election Board inquiry heard evidence that voters were being paid by Democratic machine operatives as they left polling stations. Money may not only have greased the vote but also have assisted Nelsonian views by Election Board officials, as voting offences were ignored. The Star reported on 13th March, 1934: ‘The police witnessed what was happening and did nothing’. Summing up the election in July, 1934, The Star alleged that more ballots were counted than voters registered, ‘the rankest kind of election illegality’.

Illegal conspiracies occurred when election judges would collude with machine operatives to alter ballot papers, or to indulge in ‘ballot-box stuffing’, namely adding pre-marked ballots to completed ballot papers, or in false counting of votes and false certification of results. Maurice Milligan, U.S. District Attorney for West Missouri, writing about the 1936 state and national elections, told of an eye witness account of ‘the receiving election judge lifting ballots from the box and slipping them unseen to an associate who, in secrecy, changed them to suit the known wishes of the Pendergast machine’. As mentioned below, the outrages of the 1936 elections led to prosecutions of Pendergast’s people.

Fraudulent practices, better known as ‘dirty tricks’, were rife in the conduct of election campaigns in the 1930s. The dirty tricks included espionage and sabotage, the former exemplified by diversion of mail, the latter in planting awkward questions and causing disorder at public meetings. Machines indulged in ‘voter misinformation’, including blackening candidates’ reputations with believable lies. In the 1930 City election, the Republican City Committee took a full page advertisement in The Call in March, 1930, saying that the Democrats had spread lies about Republican candidates, for example that the candidate for mayor was president of a failed Improvement Association.[12] In November, 1930 in the run up to the 1930 state election, Kansas City Republican Mayor Beach, alleged, without any supporting evidence, that city administrators had used intimidation tactics so that Ready Mixed Concrete, a Pendergast corporation, would receive city building contracts. These exchanges may have been greeted with glee in the editors’ suites but they did nothing to further the cause of electoral reform.

Newspaper commentary surrounding claims and counter claims relating to election frauds was widespread throughout the 1930s, commensurate with the high levels of abuse. Naturally, partisanship played its part. In November, 1930, The Democrat reported on efforts by the Republicans to disqualify Democratic voter registrations in the Congressional election: ‘The blunder of the campaign was the Republican affidavits hitting hundreds of legitimate voters. Instantly, the Democratic machine took up the fraud cry, crushing the Republicans’. The Democrat took up the story of election fraud again in the 1932 City election. In May it reported of public comment by Republican Governor Caulfield that the Kansas City primary election would be stolen. The Democrat editorial stated: ‘For twenty years, Republicans have been crying fraud but the evidence is that the crooked work has been done by Republicans’.

The false registration scandal continued through 1936. In an editorial that September, The Star asserted, ‘on the face of total registrations for Kansas City, numbers are suspiciously high, some 50% of the population’. Sometimes, the press itself issued warnings, as when The Star wrote in August, 1932: ‘Missouri voters will find trouble in the primary because of numbers on the ballot. If names not voted are not crossed out, the ballots will be invalid for the office concerned’.

The essential problem with all such newspaper allegations was their factual content. Nothing was provable in law. Securing evidence for a successful prosecution would have been problematic when potential witnesses could have been bribed or intimidated. Thus newspaper allegations were ineffectual. Ultimately, it took a federal grand jury in 1937 and 1938 to turn matters around and convict the guilty.

As indicated above, between 1930 and 1939, the Kansas City press printed numerous stories and editorials about election fraud and reform. In a March, 1930, editorial, The Examiner called for the use of voting machines ‘to make it harder to steal elections’. In October, 1930, The Call offered a reward of $100 for evidence proving fraud in the State election.

During the 1932 city election, independent campaigner Rabbi Samuel Mayerberg’s accusations of city mismanagement and election fraud were aired in the local newspapers. The press continued to report on fraud in the 1934 elections, as demonstrated in The Star’s editorial in July, 1934, which asserted that The Civil Research Institution study of the city election found that more ballots were counted than voters registered. Concern about election fraud in Missouri spread eastwards. It was aired in The New York Times, which reported in May, 1936, that ‘Works Progress Administration politics in Missouri, dominated by the Pendergast machine, have reached the point where persons are denied relief unless they permit their ballots to be marked by Democratic politicians’.[13]

Given that the practice of election fraud was widespread throughout Kansas City, it might seem surprising that no substantial steps were taken by the enforcement authorities before 1936 to challenge the wrongdoings. In October, 1936, The Citizens League of Kansas City demanded that Governor Guy Park take action to clean up vote conditions in Kansas City. This seems to have been the limit of citizen action and nothing resulted from the demand. In 1936, The Star commenced a strong but misdirected campaign against fraudulent election practices of the Democratic machine.

The thrust of The Star’s complaints related to fraudulent registration practices and intimidation. The problem was summarised in a Star editorial of August, 1936, which asserted that ‘many political workers were in fear of losing their jobs if they became known as protesters’. In the run up to the 1936 state election, The Star increased its reportage. On 4th September, 1936, it asked: ‘What action does Stark propose to take on election frauds, given the degree of dishonesty?’ Shortly before election day, The Star reported that Kansas City was approaching the election with thousands of ghosts on the book lists:

The circuit court, designed to safeguard citizens’ right to vote, has been invaded by the system and legitimate voters are outnumbered by ghosts. The fraud system is thoroughly organized by the Democratic machine.

While examples of The Star’s campaign, occasionally supported by The Examiner, have already been mentioned, The Democrat, The American and The Call failed to comment upon the flagrant breaches of election law. Moreover, the effectiveness of The Star’s campaign has to be questioned. Despite its weekly and sometimes daily complaints of fraud against the Pendergast machine, nothing was done by the local political or state legal authorities to end the fraudulent practices until the federal grand jury probes commenced in December, 1936. The involvement of federal authorities is testament to the scale of electoral problems in Kansas City and Jackson County, the need for outside powers to deal with them and the failure of city, county and state authorities to act.

Bearing in mind that The Star’s editors and proprietors would have been well connected in Kansas City, perhaps the answer to the delay in taking legal action to curb machine fraudulent election practice lay in the very nature of the campaign conducted by the Star, one in which the complaints were so repetitive. The many stories and editorials were usually based on generalities, not hard fact. Possibly, The Star proprietors may have been concerned about the damage that might be caused to the newspaper’s business in Kansas City by an ineffective prosecution, not merely in falls in circulation but by advertiser withdrawals. Either way, The Star cannot validly claim credit for the actions of the federal grand jury in 1937 and 1938 in its evidential findings which led to successful prosecutions against members of the Pendergast machine.

Effectively, the legal authorities in both Kansas City and the state capitol ignored what was happening in Kansas City elections until after the 1936 state and national elections. The delay cannot have been caused through insufficient legal provisions to enable prosecutions. By 1929, the state of Missouri had a comprehensive set of election laws on its statute books, sufficient to prevent most, if not all, of the voter frauds and abuses perpetrated by the Democratic machine. The many election laws available to prosecutors under Chapter 61 of the Missouri Statutes included:

Article 4, Section 10239: Making fraudulent returns—penalty:

Any judge, clerk or teller of any primary election held by any political party in this state, who shall make or return a fraudulent statement of the result of such election shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanour.

Article 5, Section 10269: Who entitled to vote:

No person shall be entitled to vote at any primary unless a qualified elector of the precinct and duly registered therein, if registration thereat be required by law, and known to affiliate with the political party named at the head of the ticket.

Article 7: Section 10333: Voter guilty of misdemeanour—when—penalty:

Any person having in his possession any official ballot, except in the performance of his legal duty as an election official, and except in the act of exercising his individual voting privilege shall upon conviction be adjudged guilty of a felony and punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary not less than two years and not more than five years.

Article 14: Section 10473-10475: Who deemed guilty of bribery:

S. 10473: The following persons shall be deemed guilty of bribery at elections and shall be punishable accordingly: First—to give, lend or to agree to give or lend…any money or valuable consideration to or for any voter…to vote or refrain from voting…at any election. Second—every person who shall…give…any office, place or employment to any person…for voting or refraining from voting at any election. Third—gifts , loans, etc to induce the election of a person to public office.

Article 14: Section 10476: Use of threats or violence:

Use of, or threat to make use of violence, etc to compel or induce persons to vote orimpede or prevent voting is prohibited.

Article 14: Section 10480: Personation of another:

Any person shall, for all purposes of this article, be deemed guilty of the offence of personation, who at any election…applies for a ballot in the name of some other person, whether that name be that of a person living or dead, or of a fictitious person, or who having voted once at any election, applies at the same election for a ballot in his own name or any other name, and any person committing the offence or aiding and abetting, etc shall be guilty of a felony.

Article 15: Section 10526: Illegal registrations.

No person shall register in any election precinct other than the one in which he or she resides at the time of registration.

In addition, prosecutors could avail themselves of the provisions of Chapter 30 of the Missouri Statutes:

Article 7: Section 4243: Conspiracy.

If two or more persons shall agree, conspire, combine or confederate: First, to commit any offence; or second, falsely or maliciously to indict another for any offence, or procure another to be charged or arrested for any offence; or, third, falsely or maliciously to move or maintain any suit; or, fourth, to cheat and defraud any person of any money or property, by means which are themselves criminal; or, fifth, to cheat and defraud any person of any money or property by any means which, if executed, would amount to a cheat, or to obtaining money or property by false pretences; or sixth, to commit any act injurious to the public health or public morals, or for the perversion or obstruction of justice, or the due administration of the laws—they shall be guilty of a misdemeanour.

Article 7: Section 4244: What shall constitute conspiracy in certain cases.

No agreement, except to commit a felony upon the person of another, or to commit arson or burglary, shall be deemed a conspiracy, unless some act besides such agreement shall be done to affect the object thereof, by one or more of the parties to such agreement.

Article 7: Section 4431:

Any person or firm, or any person who is an officer or representative of any corporation, who shall conspire or enter into any form of collusion or combination with any other person or firm or with any other person who is an officer or representative of any corporation, for the purpose of restricting bids or limiting the number of bidders on any contract for the construction of a state highway, or levee or drainage ditch, or public building shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and on conviction shall be punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for not more than five years and not less than two years, etc.

These provisions were available to both state and local prosecutors during the 1930s, yet no prosecutions of note were commenced until 1937, when the federal grand jury brought thirty nine indictments of election fraud against 278 Kansas City Democratic machine defendants, of whom 259 were convicted. The facts of the prosecutions are available both in primary source material contained in contemporaneous press reports and in the 1948 hindsight account of US District Attorney Maurice Milligan.[14] Given the reputation of The Star for fair and balanced reporting, even though partisan and Republican, their press reports are probably accurate.

However, whilst the factual account by Milligan may well be truthful, one cannot ignore his bias against both Pendergast and his organization. For example, in writing about the 1934 elections, Milligan asserted that ‘Pendergast would not be satisfied until he had his own Senator in Washington’, implying that Pendergast wanted a puppet, Harry Truman, as a US Senator. Milligan had an axe to grind.[15] His brother, Jacob, was defeated by Truman in the 1934 US Senate primary election. Truman was not Pendergast’s first choice for this office. Pendergast’s three prior choices for the U. S. Senate turned down the offer for various reasons. As such, Milligan cannot cite Truman’s selection per se as evidence of Pendergast’s ‘ownership’ of a US Senator. Moreover, Truman’s record in Washington gives the lie to Milligan’s assertion that he was Pendergast’s puppet.

Nevertheless, Milligan’s views on the importance of an honest vote were clear: ‘I state one of my deepest convictions that when you corrupt my neighbour’s ballot, you corrupt mine. When you destroy the right of free men to cast an honest vote, you strike at the heart of democracy’.[16] Such sentiments help to explain the zeal with which the prosecutions of Pendergast’s people were conducted by Milligan.

The story of the federal grand jury investigation broke in the press in December, 1936, when The Star reported that ‘Federal Judge Reeves has ordered a new federal grand jury to investigate alleged fraud in the Kansas City vote in November’. The following day, The Examiner’s editorial called for punishment of those involved in crooked elections, as well as asking for an exposure of those election laws which were weak. Strangely, The Star went quiet on the story, whilst The Democrat responded with stories of Republican wrongdoings. It stated, for example, in December, 1936, Kansas City employees had been threatened with job losses unless they voted for Alf Landon, the presidential nominee. This was an unlikely and biased assertion. The vast majority of Kansas City employees owed their jobs to Democratic machine patronage and would hardly have voted Republican.

Once the election fraud trials started, The Star reported regularly whilst The Democrat and The Examiner ignored the prosecutions, no doubt because of their embarrassing content. Occasionally, the reporting was dramatic, such as the story of 2nd February, 1938, when Judge Reeves, sentencing seven people in the tenth fraud trial, described an electoral reign of terror in Kansas City. The Star’s editorial the following day was illuminating:

In sentencing yesterday, Judge Reeves pointed to conditions which honest citizens would not tolerate. Also, fear on the part of businessmen that their plants would be damaged, tax assessments raised, espionage, threatening phone calls and other harassment all deprived citizens of rights.

The best The Democrat could say in a weak editorial response days later was that Reeves had imposed ‘a cruel and unusual punishment’ because he had been told privately of the reign of terror in Kansas City and that the judge himself was intimidated. This assertion flies in the face of the evidence given in court against machine defendants.

Whilst many lower level officials of the Pendergast organization were prosecuted, higher-ups were caught too. For example, Frances Ryan, a 12th ward captain, was sentenced to three years gaol. As The Star reported on 15th November, 1938, ‘[Mrs Ryan] was an arch-conspirator and dominated the precinct’. Most defendants were fined. Pendergast’s reaction was to ensure the Democratic organization paid all fines and court fees for the defendants and to place on salary those incarcerated during their prison terms, at enormous cost to the organization. The damage to the Democratic machine had been done. Although the Democrats won the 1938 elections, by 1940 Pendergast had been jailed for federal income tax evasion, the Democratic organization was in disarray and election reform provisions relating to voter registration were on the Missouri statute book.

The Star first called for election reform in earnest in June, 1936, seeking a new permanent registration law. The suggestion was echoed by The Examiner and The Call. Throughout, both The Democrat and The American remained silent on election reform. However, it was not until 1938 that state reform looked feasible. A Star editorial in January, 1938, stated: ‘The most important business before Kansas City is honest elections. The state controlled Election Board is returning the ballot to citizens’. Shortly thereafter, the state Congress set up machinery for new registration laws, requiring formal applications by potential voters if they wished to register. As The Star wrote in its editorial of 25th July, 1938, ‘Governor Stark kept his pledge for honest elections in Missouri. The governor did not appoint an Election Board to suit the local Democratic organization’.

Apart from personality issues and the day-to-day infighting of elections, the local Kansas City press hardly reported at all on local policy issues affecting Kansas Citizens. The new Kansas City Charter received adequate press attention in 1925 but very little reportage thereafter as to its workings. Henry McElroy, the Kansas City town manager, generally received favourable press throughout his term of employment, except in relation to his connection with Pendergast. McElroy was often praised, wrongly as it turned out, for his management abilities.

Likewise, there was very little publicity, if at all, surrounding the various city departments, whose directors reported to McElroy. Occasionally, there might be an adverse story about, for example, the Parks and Recreation Department because it related to personal use made of a public utility by a councilman. Most reporting of local policy issues related to Kansas City Police Department and the home rule versus state rule debate.

The lack of stories about policy for Kansas City could only have resulted from either the press being disinterested, or that Kansas City policies were little different to those of other cities and that Kansas City departments were managed well. In such event, the voters of Kansas City were well served by public officials, notwithstanding the uncertainty surrounding the validity of the elections of the political masters, but arguably not well served by the press. 

Given the breadth of election laws available to prosecutors before 1937 and given that the campaign of The Star concerning election fraud commenced in earnest in 1936, it is difficult to explain the reluctance of the authorities at state level to challenge the might of the Pendergast machine. Those at city level who were in a position to prosecute Pendergast officers may be excused because they owed their jobs and livelihoods to Pendergast. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that those at city level who might have had the power to effect change did not bite the hand that fed them. Such an excuse is not available to those at state level. Possibly, the failure is attributable to cowardice, to a fear of intimidation and physical reprisal if the machine was challenged, as well as the withdrawal of Pendergast patronage to Congressional members from Kansas City and Jackson County. More likely it was a combination of two factors. First, it was the failure of political will, meaning ‘the commitment to which those in a position of leading others are determined to devote energy, efforts and resources to fight corruption’.[17] Second, perhaps many Kansas City and Jackson County voters were not bothered about damage to their franchise. They were far more concerned about the services provided by the machine which might be impaired if the machine was not in power. Whatever the case, the Pendergast organization found a way to dominate elections systematically and unlawfully in Kansas City for a decade or more.

University of Birmingham

Notes

[1] David R. Colburn and George E. Pozzetta, ‘Bosses and Machines: Changing Interpretations in American History’, The History Teacher, 9:3 (May, 1976), 445-463 (p. 446).

[2] Fred J. Cook, American Political Bosses and Machines (New York: Franklin Watts Inc, 1993), p. 12.

[3] Ibid., p. 13.

[4] ‘Fresh clues could solve the mystery of Poe’s death’, The Observer, 21 October, 2007, p. 42.

[5] Raymond Wolfinger, ‘Why Political Machines Have Not Withered Away and Other Revisionist Thoughts’, The Journal of Politics, 34:2 (May, 1972), 365-398 (p. 367).

[6] Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, City Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 117.

[7] ‘The Primary Ballots’. The Independence Examiner 4th June, 1932, p. 4. Courtesy of Special Collections at University of Missouri, Columbia.

[8] ‘We’ll Win Again’. The Kansas City Star. 27th January, 1934, p. 1. Courtesy of Special Collections at University of Missouri, Columbia.

[9] F. A. Hermens, ‘Exit The Boss’, The Review of Politics, 2:4 (October, 1940), 385-404 (p. 389).

[10] Harold F. Gosnell, ‘The Political Party versus the Political Machine’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 169, ‘The Crisis of Democracy’, (September, 1933), 21-28 (p. 25).

[9] George C. S. Benson, Political Corruption in America (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath & Co, 1978), p. 109.

[10] Ibid., p. 33.

[11] ‘The Democratic Victory’. The Missouri Democrat. 30th March, 1934, p. 4. Courtesy of Special Collections at University of Missouri, Columbia.

[12] ‘Exposing Lies’. The Kansas City Call. 21st March, 1930, p. 3. Courtesy of Special Collections at University of Missouri, Columbia.

[13] ‘Urges a Clean-Up of Missouri WPA’. The New York Times. 23rd May, 1936, p. 4. Courtesy of Special Collections at University of Missouri, Columbia.

[14] Maurice Milligan, Missouri Waltz (New York: Charles Schreibner’s Sons, 1948).

[15] Ibid., p. 150.

[16] Op. cit., p. 239.

[17] Speech made by Miria R. K. Matembe, Ugandan Minister of State for Ethics and Integrity, on 29 May, 1993. Available at URL: www.wcoomd.org/ie/en/topics_issues.customsmodernizationintegrity [accessed 5th May, 2004].

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 12, Spring 2008

Savage Desert, American Garden: Citrus Labels and the Selling of California, 1877-1929

Henry Knight
© Henry Knight. All Rights Reserved

In 1877, a year after the railroad reached Southern California, the first shipment of California oranges left the Los Angeles groves of William Wolfskill, bound for St. Louis, Missouri. The box-ends were branded ‘Wolfskill California Oranges’, ensuring that the geographical origins of the fruit were emphasised from the very beginning of their exportation to the Midwest and East. During the 1880s, the innovations of irrigation and refrigerated cars combined with new railroads, massive in-migration and land development to turn California into, in Douglas Sackman’s words, an ‘orange empire’.[1] By 1900, this empire had surpassed Florida as the United States’ leading producer of fruit, while, as one historian explains, ‘the orange crop had passed the cash returns from gold’ found in California.[2] From virtually none a few decades earlier, the average American in 1914 ate over 40 oranges per year, and orange juice had become part of the standard American breakfast. By then some thirty thousand railroad carloads—approximately twelve million orange crates—valued at $20 million, were steaming east from the Golden State each year. Adorning these crates were, in the words of Kevin Starr, ‘the inventive labels’ whose ‘selling of California along with oranges as an image in the national imagination’ are the focus of this article.[3]

The primary goal of the lithographers who produced the labels—and of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange, who employed them to do it—was to sell the fruit to far-off consumers. Naturally, the labels were designed to be eye-catching and attractive, and different methods of achieving this effect evolved over the seventy years the labels were in production. As Gordon T. McClelland and Jay T. Last have explained, naturalistic imagery depicting ‘flowers, birds, animals, historical themes, and scenic views’ was followed, into the 1920s, by ‘an increased emphasis on product advertising’, with the orange sold as an important part of a healthy American lifestyle.[4] This shift makes the labels fascinating sources in the history of advertising, charting the changing nature of the industry. My interest here, however, lies more in certain consistencies in the images: in particular, how they reflected and shaped popular conceptions of landscape, race and gender in California.

These consistencies, I argue, were three-fold. Firstly, in terms of the production of the labels, which was done almost entirely in printing houses in San Francisco and Los Angeles. While, as John Salkin and Laurie Gordon have noted, label art is usually anonymous, and specific dating of labels can be problematic, California’s citrus labels can be attributed, to a large extent, to the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange.[5] The Exchange, a cooperative of growers begun in 1893 which later became Sunkist, incorporated, by 1913, sixty per cent of California’s massive citrus crop, and ‘influence[d] strongly the types of labels its members used’.[6] As one historian of the Exchange has found, within Sunkist ‘it was clearly seen that [their] advertising program should feature California rather than the Exchange oranges only’.[7] The labels became one part of the manifold processes of state promotion, in which railroad companies, land developers, chambers of commerce, regional expositions, and the citrus industry, fashioned a new identity for California, in order to attract settlers, investors and tourists to the West Coast.[8]

The image of a garden redeemed from the desert was a central component to this selling of California, and, especially, southern California. As a 1902 book of California Souvenir Views proclaimed, ‘the ‘great American desert’, of our childhood days…is gradually disappearing from the map, as flourishing orchards and vineyards and gardens spring up where formerly was naught but sand and cactus’. The ‘last and heaviest blow at this mythical desert—a desert only because it has lacked water—was the passage of the national irrigation bill, which will transform a large portion of this great expanse into a section of dense and productive population’.[9] As the writer demonstrated, irrigation played a vital role not only in the development of southern California, but also in how it was promoted. Indeed, throughout the late nineteenth century, as Donald Pisani has shown, growers in California cited irrigation as a key component in their visions of a new society of small family farms, which would displace the large-scale wheat barons and ranchos of the 1860s and 1870s. Irrigation, Pisani writes, was envisaged as a ‘tool of social and economic reform, a tool by which the arid West could be made to conform to the familiar, traditional patterns of land tenure ‘back home’ [in New England and the Midwest]’.[10] This approach reflected, also, the fundamental anxieties many Americans held about the western desert, which, in contrast to a ‘traditional’ American landscape of small farms, appeared disturbingly un-American. Thus, in 1890, travel writer William M. Thayer proclaimed the ‘almost incredible progress of the New West’ which had ‘ever so speedily transformed’ the ”Great American Desert”, a ”wilderness and solitary place’…[which had stretched] over its vast territory in painful desolation’.[11]

California citrus labels contributed to these notions of a transformation from a wilderness into, in Thayer’s words, a ‘populous and thriving country’ by depicting landscapes replete with productive, homely farms. As Starr notes of the labels, ‘literally hundreds of these designs, seen daily by millions in the grocery stores of America, involved an idealised California landscape’.[12] 1920 Santiago Orange Growers Association label SweeTreat, of Orange County, which included a glimpse of an expansive orchard, epitomised how the labels represented an enticement to settlers as well as a poster for fruit: LABEL 1.[13] Salkin and Gordon have explained why the labels became an important part of state promotion:

Labels were designed not only to identify the fruit grower’s name and location, but to associate his brand with a romantic image of California living. Citrus growers needed more railroad lines, water for irrigation, and consumer recognition, and these developments were contingent upon a steady flow of new settlers to the sparsely populated southern portion of the state. Labels, they reasoned, were a convenient and functional form of publicity.[14]

The significance of the labels, therefore, lies in the fact that they sold California even as they sold its fruit.

LABEL 1

This is intimately connected to the second consistency in the label imagery: the depictions of California’s landscape. As Sackman has written, the labels frequently showed California as a ‘resplendent garden’: ‘as [consumers] reached for oranges, [they] would see pictures of idyllic, sun-drenched groves beneath purple mountains’.[15] Heart’s Delight, a 1920 label selling San Jose apricots of the Richmond Chase Company, typified these images of a farming frontier offering both nature and order: LABEL 2.[16]

LABEL 2

Similarly, Rose Brand Oranges, a 1910 Redlands Orange Growers Association label, depicted a dozen small farms dotted across a wide landscape of orchards, with large oranges filling in the foreground.[17] Such visual images, as Sheri Bernstein has argued, ‘played an enormous role in shaping popular conceptions of the state’.[18]

Notably, from 1877 into the 1920s, the label landscapes remained strikingly unchanged, despite the fact that California’s actual landscape was drastically transformed by an ‘orange empire’ dominated by agribusiness. Richard Steven Street, in his epic history of California farm-workers, writes how, by the second decade of the twentieth century, ‘the Southern California citrus industry extended through a vast, crescent-shaped, frost-free belt stretching from Santa Barbara through portions of Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernadino, and Riverside counties’. The industry, moreover, combined ‘the most advanced marketing techniques [and pioneering] standardized packing procedures’ with ‘irrigation and pest control practices’ and a scientific field department to place itself ‘in the forefront of modern corporate agriculture’.[19] Yet such developments, which underpinned the success of California citrus, found few places in the industry’s labels, except for those like Flyer and Hewes Transcontinental Brand, which featured railroads surging across the state.[20] Instead, label designers tended to focus on citrus gardens untouched by the ‘industrialised’ aspects of modern agriculture. As Salkin and Gordon note, ‘certain subjects continued to be favourites. Women, Indians, Mexican themes…and orchard scenes were used in large numbers for the entire period’.[21] ‘Orchard scenes’, in fact, featured in nearly one-in-six of the 210 labels I have examined: these pristine, controlled landscapes boasting small farmhouses and row upon row of blooming citrus trees—as in the labels Home Brand and 1930’s Evergreen, of the Central Lemon Association in Villa Park.[22] The latter image suggested an intimate relationship between California and its fruit by placing enlarged lemons before an inviting lemon grove: LABEL 3.[23]

LABEL 3

Designed in part to attract settlers to California, such images were, of course, extremely sanitised: they represent not mirrors but edited portraits of the state. In one sense, their California was mythic, with the realities of agribusiness subsumed in depictions of an agrarian society in which settlers could achieve prosperous independence. Settlers who came to California to engage in citrus growing and ‘gentleman farming’, Charles F. Lummis boasted in Land of Sunshine magazine, ‘find it not only the most independent but the most satisfying home-life in the world’.[24] This ‘home-life’, promoters suggested, meant the state offered an alternative to an increasingly urban-industrial East Coast. California was cast as a garden which combined modern affluence with anti-modern desires for self-reliance. Settlers in California, it appeared, could have their own home and, with it, a blooming garden, as in Bungalow label, which showed a woman relaxing in the front garden of a house: LABEL 4.[25]

LABEL 4

This suburban idyll was reproduced in a rural setting in numerous other labels, such as Valley View, which depicted a large farmhouse set in a rolling landscape of orchards.[26] The Suburban brand of J. J. McIndoo-Lindsay growers of Tulare County placed a young woman with a parasol walking down a wide driveway between an orange grove and a large bungalow: LABEL 5.[27] Sunny Cove, meanwhile, provided another confluence of modern, spacious farmhouse and verdant garden: LABEL 6.[28] The path leading between the trees, directly down the centre of the image, implicitly invited the viewer (the consumer) to enter the grove—and, at the same time, to buy into the dominant vision of California’s emerging citrus empire.

LABEL 5

LABEL 6

But this vision highlights a third major consistency in the labels: the absence of workers. As Don Mitchell has discussed in his study of California agriculture and its representations, The Lie of the Land, such images offered ‘a culmination of the American Dream—perhaps not a shining city on a hill, but a prosperous, rural, Jeffersonian…ideal’. Yet ‘a sense of visible work is nearly completely absent in this view’.[29] The landscapes of the labels thus offer a kind of paradox: a tended and productive garden, without any gardeners. The work of harvesting was palpably being done (the citrus fruits within the crates were proof enough of this) yet only two percent of the labels showed field workers actually doing it. Partly because of this, the labels have been dismissed by some scholars as ultra-romantic images, indicative only of the kind of illusory boosterism that later attracted the Joad family to Depression Era California in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.[30] Historian Gilbert G. Gonzalez, for example, stated that citrus labels are ‘romantic and nostalgic…[but] beneath the appealing veneer is the reality: the citrus industry depended on the poorly paid labour of minorities—Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans, and women’.[31] Another scholar, writing about Carey McWilliams, argued that McWilliams ‘peeled back the giddy and gaudy orange crate label of official state history’ in his writing on the state’s ‘factories in the fields’.[32]

It is apparent, however, that few scholars have engaged with the images in an analytical way, attempting to evaluate the myths and prejudices which underpinned the ‘picturesque labels [created] for use on the tens of millions of citrus crates…shipped every year’.[33] Notably, what many of these appraisals of the ‘giddy and gaudy’ labels apparently fail to consider is that ethnic and racial minorities, and women, were far from excluded from the labels. On the contrary, ethnic and racial minorities, as well as Spanish mission imagery, featured in nearly one in every five of the labels examined. This is a striking figure given that, as Roland Marchand has found, on a national scale ‘ethnic and racial minorities found virtually no employment in [American] advertisements’ of the time.[34] Native Americans, Latin Americans, and, to a much lesser extent, Asians and African Americans were evidently deemed an acceptable, even desirable, subject for Sunkist. But their inclusion did not indicate any underlying celebration of racial heterogeneity or equality in California. Rather, as this paper argues, the labels’ representations of race, gender, and landscape implicitly reinforced the hierarchies which underwrote California’s citrus industry.

Of the industry, labour historian Cletus Daniel writes:

Chinese workers (and the Mexican, Filipino, and other non-white labourers who would succeed them in the state’s fields and orchards) were, employers insisted, naturally suited to agricultural work by reason of their relatively small physical stature, ability to tolerate hot weather, native stoicism, and innate lack of ambition.[35]

The latter charge is particularly crucial here. According to nineteenth century thought, articulated by Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 frontier thesis, the Anglo-American, or white, man in the West was enterprising and ambitious, masterful in his encounter with the wilderness. It was ‘to the frontier [that] the American intellect owes its striking characteristics’, including ‘that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness’, ‘that masterful grasp of material things’, ‘that restless, nervous energy’, and ‘that dominant individualism’.[36] In an extension of this mythology, Anglo-Americans in the labels were shown enjoying their civilised California, as in Windermere label of McNally Ranch growers of La Mirada, which depicted a white couple driving an open-air roadster through a sunny grove: LABEL 7.[37]

LABEL 7

Non-whites, by contrast, while often perceived as picturesque, were widely considered lazy and inferior, undeserving of the benefits of the garden. A typical point of view was expressed by a travel writer who, in 1900, stated that the Mexican Californios were ‘too lazy to produce more than just enough for their mere subsistence’.[38] Thus, in the labels, they were never shown in the state’s citrus groves—as workers or players. The Mexican vaqueros of San Fernando Rey label of the Fernando Fruit Growers Association, for instance, rode through a cacti-and palm-filled wilderness, beside the ruins of a mission: LABEL 8.[39] In romanticising California’s Latin past, such labels can be seen as orientalist images, reflecting Anglo constructions of a ‘foreign’ other.[40] In that sense, they undoubtedly reveal more about the pride and prejudices of Anglo-Americans in California—the ‘veneer’ as Gonzalez aptly puts it—than they do about the realities of citrus agriculture in the state. Yet the two, the veneer and the reality, are closely related. The separations based on race which appeared in the images, existed also in an industry predicated on the labour of powerless social groups, typically ethnic and racial minorities, and women. In that sense, the labels represent skewed exaggerations of social reality, rather than complete illusions.

LABEL 8

In selling California, the labels sold also the dominant racial ideologies of white America. In some cases, this translated into explicit attempts to designate racial superiority. Deluxe was one of the rare labels to feature African Americans. A stylised waiter appeared in the series across the decades, with only the setting and the colour of his uniform changing. In 1918, for Covina Heights Groves Inc., he was serving a white couple in a restaurant: LABEL 9.[41] In 1925, for El Bar-Dor Citrus Inc., he was serving a slightly-younger, trendier white couple in a speakeasy: [42] LABEL 10. By 1930, for Valencia Heights Orchards Inc., he stood by the window to a large orchard, still holding a plate of the state’s fruit: LABEL 11.[43] While the first two labels highlighted the possibility for healthful leisure for Anglo-Americans in California, the third obliquely linked the produce of the garden behind the glass to a system of docile, non-white servitude. At a time when African Americans struggled to obtain any skilled jobs in California and were subjected to de facto segregation in cities like Los Angeles, labels like Deluxe would have played their part in reinforcing assumptions about the inferiority and otherness of African Americans.

Even so, the waiter in Deluxe was an exception among the labels, in the sense that he was being productive (albeit in a servile capacity). More common were two other figures: the isolated Native American and the Latin American entertainer. Of the former, Old Crow label of the Monrovia Mutual Association combined the ‘noble savage’ imagery with that of the vanishing race.[44] Notably, the old man was placed in the desert; indeed, the exact same figure appeared in another label for the Pacific Packing Company, named after California’s Mojave Desert: LABEL 12.[45]

LABEL 9

LABEL 10

LABEL 11

LABEL 12

Thus, just as growers attributed innate qualities to ethnic and racial minorities in their employ, label designers repeatedly associated non-whites with a separate environment from whites. In numerous cases, the labels featured a division between the citrus grove and the desert—one which reflected Turner’s notion of the frontier being a ‘meeting place between savagery and civilisation’.[46] While white men and women could be seen thriving in the state’s garden, non-whites seemed to inhabit an entirely different, arid California. The division featured explicitly in a cartoon in a promotional pamphlet distributed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, entitled Irrigation and Its Results. Intricately drawn, the cartoon’s landscape was divided down the middle by a lamppost: on the left of which stood a Native American warrior and girl, and a cowboy smoking a cigarette, beside a cactus; on the right, were a white woman and little girl, walking together, and another white woman, fanning herself in a rocking chair. The whites, in a garden flourishing with flowers and trees, relaxed beneath a banner saying ‘Irrigation’: IMAGE 13.[47] The cartoon effectively separated California’s past from its present, with the recent invention of the lamppost a telling symbol of the schism. The technological and human progress manifest in the state’s irrigation, it implied, was the catalyst for civilisation: the ‘results’ being a gardened landscape enjoyed by Anglo-Americans (notably, women and children), instead of a ‘primitive’ desert inhabited only by Native Americans and cowboys.

IMAGE 13

This transformation from savage desert to civilised garden can be seen in a selection of the labels. Consider Boydston Bros. grapefruit label Indian Belle, which presented, in its foreground, a romantic Old West image: on a rocky outcrop, a Native American warrior holding aloft a maiden: LABEL 14.[48] The couple stared into each other’s eyes as if unaware of anything else in the world. Perhaps, then, they were unaware of what had happened to the land behind them. The desert rocks under their feet were dwarfed by what dominated the image and drew the consumer’s eye away: the long, inviting (and fixed) rows of a citrus grove. Apart from a few farmhouses visible in the distance, it showed a land devoid of construction: the ‘free’ land of Turner’s frontier, developed by Anglo-American enterprise into a productive garden. The juxtaposition of the Native Americans with the ordered citrus farm, of ‘savagery’ with ‘civilisation’, was repeated in other labels, such as Indian Hill Citrus Union’s Indian Hill brand, which featured a stereotypical Great Plains warrior standing guard outside an orange grove and homestead: LABEL 15.[49] The inclusion of Native Americans and other non-whites supported the orientalisation of California which both exoticised the state’s ethnic minorities and endorsed popular notions of Anglo-American Progress.

Turner’s conception of social evolution remains significant here. The West, Turner explained in his frontier thesis, was the ‘really American’ part of America. At the frontier which, Turner noted, officially no longer existed, there had emerged an exceptional and enterprising American. The transformation of ‘primitive’ wilderness into cultivated farm land reflected a ‘progress from savage conditions’, part of an evolutionary journey which produced the unique national character.[50] The significance of this ideology to the selling of California as a socially, and racially, evolved state was unmistakable. As a writer for the promotional magazine The Californian stated, ‘Here on the bosom of the broad Pacific, the typical pioneer, the explorer, the scientist and the progressive American must stop because they can go no further’.[51] Yet this culmination of American continental expansion had a Spanish and Mexican past, and the descendants of those periods still lived there. As a result, there developed a schism in the promotional vision, delineating between a romantic but primitive Spanish California of old and a modern, progressive, and white, American state. In the process, Mexicans and Native Americans living in California were effectively stripped of any agency, despite their labour in constructing and harvesting the state’s fields.

LABEL 14

LABEL 15

The Mexican vaquero in the Sydmer Ross Association’s Manzanita label, for instance, rode through a California landscape devoid of citrus—a desert setting which placed him firmly in the state’s ‘savage’ past: LABEL 16.[52] The inclusion of the desert in such depictions is significant not least because the desert had long been associated with waste and savagery by Americans. In 1846, for example, Edwin Bryant, a Kentucky newspaperman who traveled to California, expressed in his journal the widespread assumption that aridity made the vast prairies of the West uninhabitable for civilised man.[53] Throughout the nineteenth century, in fact, American expansionists looking west shared, in historian Henry Nash Smith’s words, the ‘prevalent belief that civilisation depended upon agriculture’.[54] The desert, then, could only be inhabited by migratory tribesmen, who, by definition of their nomadic existence, were considered incapable of being integrated into an American society built upon the republican virtues of land ownership. Thus, the Great American Desert, Washington Irving had prophesied in Astoria, would become home to ‘new and mongrel races…ejected from the bosom of society into the wilderness’.[55] With the efforts of certain travel writers, the image of the Southwestern desert changed somewhat in the early twentieth century. As scholar Anne Farrar Hyde has written, promoters like George Wharton James began selling tourists on the ‘strange, wonderful, and beautiful’ things the desert offered. Yet, as Hyde notes, ‘even with the innumerable descriptions of the impressive beauty and profusion of life in the desert, its reputation as a barren waste did not…fade away’.[56]

LABEL 16

This reputation gives an added resonance to the selling of California as a transformed American Garden. Railroad promoter Charles Nordhoff, for example, reported his delight in 1882 to find ‘many thousands of acres of land under irrigation, planted to orchards…which land formerly was thought sterile and worthless’.[57] Such opinions were commonplace: as one California orchard owner explained in 1893, ‘but for irrigation much of our best fruit lands necessarily would be still a desert waste’.[58] Placing non-whites in the desert in the labels, then, was to plainly associate them with waste and savagery, with the antitheses of American civilisation. And the alignment of non-white peoples with ‘primitive’ landscape, conscious or not, implicitly reinforced their subservient positions in California society. As Don Mitchell states, ‘landscapes solidify social relations, making them seem natural and enduring’.[59] The ‘natural and enduring’ place for Native Americans and Latin Americans in California, according to the labels, was in the desert, and, thus, the past.

Moreover, the conversion of waste land into fruitful productivity reflected in such beliefs, and in the labels, fitted in neatly with the utilitarian rhetoric which dominated the conservation movement during the Progressive Era. While John Muir, who, as a staunch preservationist, lauded nature in its untouched forms and fought in vain against the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in northern California by what he called the ‘devotees of ravaging commercialism’, advocates of utilitarian conservation saw nature as a set of resources to be used prudently and efficiently by man.[60] President Theodore Roosevelt, speaking at a major conference on conservation at the White House in 1908, argued that ‘the rise of peoples from savagery to civilisation’ had impelled a ‘steadily increasing growth of the amount demanded by…man from the actual resources of the country’. Nature could no longer be simply conquered, as it was palpably exhaustible: ‘the limit of unsettled land is in sight’, he announced, ‘and indeed but little land fitted for agriculture now remains unoccupied save what can be reclaimed by irrigation and drainage’. Thus, Roosevelt spoke of the vital importance of the ‘class of resources’, including soil, forests and waterways, which

can not only be used in such manner as to leave them undiminished for our children, but can actually be improved by wise use…Everyone knows that a really good farmer leaves his farm more valuable at the end of his life than it was when he first took hold of it…In dealing with soil and its products man can improve on nature by compelling the resources to renew and even reconstruct themselves in such manner as to serve increasingly beneficial uses.[61]

The ethos of the ‘efficient use’ brand of conservation, with its ideas of ‘renew[ing]’ and ‘reconstruct[ing]’ the land to the benefit of Americans, was invoked by California promoters in their efforts to sell the state. As a magazine writer describing the 1893 California Midwinter Fair wrote, visitors would ‘wander along the pleasant pathways of the park, which, but a few years ago, was a wild waste of sand dunes and hillocks clad with scrub-oak’ and, in doing so, ‘be[come] conscious of the great future possibilities of this Western State’.[62] Furthermore, as Sackman has demonstrated, the citrus grove reclaimed from the desert became, in the hands of state boosters, not only the sight of American progress and fruitful production, but also the setting for healthful activity, amusement and relaxation.[63] The California garden offered an outdoors lifestyle unavailable in the urbanised East, as enjoyed by the young women riding a train through an orchard in Limited label of G. R. Hand & Company: LABEL 17.[64] Elsewhere, California Citrus Union’s Tropical Queen depicted a young girl taking pleasure in picking oranges from a tree: LABEL 18.[65] While, elsewhere, the girl in Collins Fruit Company’s Orchard Queen label meditated before a vast citrus grove (one of the few labels to show fruit-pickers at work in the orchards): LABEL 19.[66]

LABEL 17

LABEL 18

LABEL 19

Orchard Queen, in particular, indicated a gendered construction whereby the state’s verdant landscape was conjoined with white womanhood—suggested by the words of the writer for the Californian, for whom the state was the ‘bosom of the Pacific’. The girl in Orchard Queen clutched a bough of oranges and flowers to her loins, her healthfulness and youthfulness also, seemingly, fruits of the garden. Such imagery came at a time of mounting nativist fears about the large numbers of southern and eastern Europeans entering the country. Furthermore, a declining birth rate, combined with the expansion of urban living, led to anxieties about the ‘over-civilisation’ and weakening of a so-called traditional American race.[67] The labels’ depictions of a garden untainted by cities or immigrants, except for enterprising white pioneers, would have sought to assuage such fears. The link between California’s natural fecundity and that of its active, healthful womanhood conveyed ideas about the rejuvenation of Anglo-American society. As Charles Dudley Warner espoused of southern California’s future, the state would produce not only ‘the best fruit in the world’ but also ‘people as beautiful as their fruit’.[68]

The depictions of non-white women in the labels, however, contrasted starkly with this fertile imagery. In the former, the desert and the missions of eighteenth century Spanish California became the standard backdrop. Rose & Hall’s Indian Princess label, for example, had a Native American girl standing beside a cactus in a shadowy desert: LABEL 20.[69] The vision of a primitive past was even more explicit in the Piru Citrus Association’s Weaver label, which showed, through a crumbling gateway, a Native American woman weaving a basket in the Painted Desert: LABEL 21.[70] The Latin woman of the Spence Fruit Company’s Foothill brand, meanwhile, held aloft an orange while sitting on the walls of a ruined mission, flanked by spiky desert flora: LABEL 22.[71] Her pose and attire were more exotic than those of the chaste women depicted in Tropical Queen and Orchard Queen. The figure of the un-civilised Latin woman appeared again in La Paloma, which showed a Spanish woman dancing between cacti in the middle of the desert: LABEL 23.[72]

LABEL 20

LABEL 21

LABEL 22

LABEL 23

This eroticisation of California’s Latin women was a prominent undercurrent in state promotion. Describing Santa Barbara’s Rose Carnival of 1895, for example, a writer for one promotional magazine promised ‘visions of the dark-eyed daughters of sunny Castile, or the sweet senoritas of Southern California, [who] with witchery of glance and gliding grace of movement… dance before your enchanted fancy’.[73] But, as labels like La Paloma attested, such dancing, while alluring, did not belong in the ‘civilised’ realm of modern California. Instead, the woman was placed in the ‘other’ setting of the desert. These depictions of Latin women as sensual foreigners enabled promoters to ignore the vital role they played in California’s garden. As Gonzales has written, at peak season approximately 27,000 employees laboured in packinghouses across the state, 65% of which were women. For Mexican and other women, it was generally the only employment other than domestic work available to them, and, thus, they performed the arthritic task of packing the fruit into boxes which would be advertised with labels like La Paloma.[74]

Mexican men were also stereotyped in the labels. Though he was not in the desert, the Mexican man in the Arlington Heights Fruit Company’s Troubadour label stood in the grounds of a Spanish mission with ‘A.D. 1774’ engraved in its stone: LABEL 24.[75] Far behind him, a train steamed past an orange grove and packinghouse, leaving plumes of smoke in its wake. The man appeared lazy and uninvolved, smoking leisurely, his pose effeminate, especially contrasted with the brute force and purpose exhibited by the steam engine. Significantly, his head was turned away from the train, while his hand rested on the mission, as if he belonged there, part of the ancient structure: the A.D. 1774 engraving applying to him as much as the building. He was visibly separated from the scene of ‘modern’ California, symbolised by the railroad and the citrus grove (incidentally, the two industries responsible for the production and dissemination of the label).

LABEL 24

Such imagery helped to explain away the predominance, by the 1920s, of Mexicans, and other ethnic and racial minorities, as unskilled, landless labourers in California agriculture. Visual representations of ‘the lazy Mexican’, like that in Troubadour, segued with long-held notions that an innately unproductive man was unworthy of land ownership and, therefore, deserved the status of migratory labourer. Thus, although explicit representations of non-white labour were avoided in the labels, such images could still implicitly support the racial ideologies evoked by citrus growers. Namely: that what had existed in California before the influx of Anglo-Americans and the development of the citrus empire—the Franciscan missions and the pre-irrigation desert—while romantic, were irrevocably primitive and inferior. Disseminating images of Native Americans and Mexicans in ‘unproven’ land became an oblique way for growers to further legitimise their dominance of the state, and of those peoples.

Similarly, California’s citrus garden became a signifier of Anglo-American Progress. The Tulare County Times could thus declare in 1890 that irrigation districts bolstered ‘the fundamental principle of American civilisation, the sovereignty of the people…The irrigation districts of California will ever be the home of a free, independent, people, true Americans, brave and patriotic in all their instincts’.[76] In reality, the development of California’s citrus empire involved, in Pisani’s words, ‘the rise of agribusiness’ and the ‘decline of the family farm ideal’: a combination of ‘farm mechanisation, the soaring price of land and water, and other trends [which] could not be reversed’ meant that, by 1929, California agriculture was dominated by large-scale capitalist growers who employed a growing mass of impoverished migratory labourers.[77] Unsurprisingly, citrus labels had no place for these realities. Instead, the labels opted for visual celebration of the ‘free, independent’ society envisaged by proponents of the state as ‘American Garden’. The label Perfection of the Klink Citrus Association, for example, showed a ‘perfected’ domain of independent, productive citrus farms: LABEL 25.[77]

LABEL 25

The significance of this idealised landscape was evident in a 1914 Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce pamphlet:

Southern California, the modern Garden of Eden, minus the serpent and blossoming as the rose, was once thought arid and useless desert—was, in fact, part of what was known as the Great American Desert. The transformation has not been wrought through a miracle but by the thought and hard work of California citizens…[who] have…brought water upon dry land …and now that…their full orange crops are in, their success is attributed to God Almighty. It is due to Him…for God created not only the California country and climate, but the California citizen.[78]

Citrus labels, in spite of being ‘giddy and gaudy’ on first inspection, provide invaluable insight into how such notions of the ‘California citizen’ whose ‘thought and hard work’ had transformed the desert into a ‘modern Garden of Eden’, masked a ruthlessly ethnocentric set of ideas. How, in reality, the people whose labour in the garden made the transformation and prosperity possible (the thousands of migratory farm-workers including ethnic and racial minorities, and women) were devolved of any credit or recognition—and instead placed in a landscape widely considered to be ‘arid and useless’.

University of Sussex

Notes

[1] Douglas Sackman, Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), p. 7.

[2] George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Chicago, IL: Quadrangle Books, 1951), p. 4.

[3] Kevin Starr, Inventing the Dream: California Through the Progressive Era (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 162.

[4] Gordon T. McClelland and Jay T. Last, California Orange Box Labels: An Illustrated History (Beverley Hills, CA: Hillcrest Press, 1985), p. 6.

[5] I have, where possible, included the label dates, using McClelland and Last, California Orange Box Labels.

[6] Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 499; John Salkin and Laurie Gordon, Orange Crate Art: The Story of the Labels that Launched a Golden Era (New York: Warner Books, 1976), p. 8.

[7] Rahno Mabel MacCurdy, The History of the California Fruit Growers Exchange (Los Angeles, CA: G. Rice and Sons, 1925), p. 59.

[8] For an overview on the promotion of California in this period, see Richard Orsi, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1880-1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 322-345; Henry Knight, ‘Savage Desert, American Garden: Popular Imagery and the Selling of California, 1876-1929’ (unpublished M.Phil. diss., University of Sussex, Brighton, 2007).

[9] California Souvenir Views (Los Angeles, CA: B.R. Baumgardt and Co., 1902).

[10] Donald Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 255.

[11] William M. Thayer, Marvels of the New West: A Vivid Portrayal of the Stupendous Marvels In the Vast Wonderland West of the Missouri River, Six Books in One Volume Comprising of Marvels of Nature, Marvels of Race, Marvels of Enterprise, Marvels of Mining, Marvels of Stock-Raising, and Marvels of Agriculture (Norwich, CT: The Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1890), p. 403.

[12] Starr, Inventing the Dream, p. 163.

[13] Courtesy of the Orange Public Library Local History Collection.

[14] Salkin and Gordon, ‘”Eat Me and Grow Young!” Orange Crate Art in the Golden State’, California Historical Quarterly, 56:1 (1977). 52-70 (p. 53).

[15] Sackman, Orange Empire, p. 87.

[16] Courtesy of the California Room Collection, San Jose Public Library.

[17] See Stephanie Barron, Sheri Bernstein and Ilene Susan Fort, Made in California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p. 78.

[18] Ibid, p. 78.

[19] Street, Beasts of the Field, p. 499.

[20] See McClelland, California Orange Box Labels, p. 74.

[21] Salkin and Gordon, ”Eat Me and Grow Young!”, p. 67.

[22] For Home brand, see McClelland, California Orange Box Labels, p. 8.

[23] Courtesy of the Orange Public Library Local History Collection.

[24] Charles F. Lummis, ‘In the Lion’s Den’, Land of Sunshine, 3:3 (August, 1895), p. 134.

[26] See Gary Kurutz and K. D. Kurutz, California Calls You: The Art of Promoting the Golden State, 1870-1940 (Sausalito, C A: Windgate Press, 2000).

[27] Courtesy of UCLA Special Collections Archive.

[29] Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 14.

[30] John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Monarch Notes, 1988).

[31] Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Labour and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 1.

[32] Dean Steward and Jeannine Gendar (eds), Fool’s Paradise: A Carey McWilliams Reader (Santa Clara, CA: Santa Clara University, 2001), p. xix.

[33] Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 181. An exception is Sackman, Orange Empire, pp. 23-44.

[34] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way For Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 17.

[35] Cletus Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farm-workers, 1870-1941 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 63.

[36] Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History [1893] (New York: Ungar, 1963), p. 17.

[37] Courtesy of UCLA Special Collections Archive.

[38] Charles Franklin Carter, The Missions of Nueva California: An Historical Sketch (San Francisco, CA: The Whitaker and Ray Co., 1900), p. 98.

[39] Courtesy of UCLA Special Collections Archive.

[40] Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (London: Penguin Books, 1995).

[41] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[42] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[43] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[44] See Salkin and Gordon, Orange Crate Art.

[45] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[46] Turner, The Significance of the Frontier, p. 3.

[47] Harry Ellington Brook, The County and City of Los Angeles in Southern California: Issued for distribution at the World’s Columbian Exposition by the County Board of Supervisors (Los Angeles, CA: Times-Mirror Co., 1893). Reproduced Courtesy of UCLA Special Collections Archive.

[48] Courtesy of UCLA Special Collections Archive.

[49] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[50] Turner, The Significance of the Frontier, p. 4.

[51] E. F. Spence, ‘Los Angeles’, The Californian, 1:1 (October 1891), 1-7 (p. 3).

[52] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[53] Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (New York: Knopf, 1957), p. 204.

[54] Ibid, p. 204.

[55] Washington Irving, Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprise beyond the Rocky Mountains, Vol. II (Philadelphia, 1836), p. 232.

[56] Anne Farrar Hyde, An American Vision: Far Western Landscape and National Culture, 1820-1920 (New York: New York University Press, 1990), p. 220.

[57] Charles Nordhoff, California for Health, Pleasure, and Residence: A Book for Travellers and Settlers (New York: Harper and Bros., 1882), p. 98.

[58] Quoted in Steinberg, Down to Earth, p. 178.

[59] Mitchell, The Lie of the Land, p. 28.

[60] Quote from John Muir, ‘The Hetch Hetchy Valley’, Sierra Club Bulletin, 6 (January 1908), p. 220; Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985), p. 108.

[61] Theodore Roosevelt, ‘Opening Address by the President’, Proceedings of a Conference of Governors in the White House, ed. Newton C. Blanchard (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), p. 6.

[62] J. J. Pratfield, ‘The California Exposition’, The Californian, 3:5 (December 1893), p. 150.

[63] Sackman, Orange Empire, pp. 87-92.

[64] Courtesy of UCLA Special Collections Archive.

[65] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[66] Courtesy of UCLA Special Collections Archive.

[67] See John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925 (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1988), pp. 147-157.

[68] Charles Dudley Warner, ‘Race and Climate’, Land of Sunshine, 4:3 (Feb 1896), 103-105 (p. 104).

[69] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[70] Courtesy of UCLA Special Collections Archive.

[71] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[72] Courtesy of Gordon McClelland and Hillcrest Press.

[73] Juliette Estelle Mathis, ‘The Roses of Santa Barbara’, Land of Sunshine 3:2 (July 1895), 72-75 (p. 72).

[74] Gilbert Gonzales, Labour and Community: Mexican Citrus Worker Villages in a Southern California County, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 33.

[76] Tulare County Times, September 18, 1890, quoted in Donald Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness: The Irrigation Crusade in California and the West, 1850-1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 255.

[77] Pisani, From the Family Farm to Agribusiness, p. 452.

[78] Orange Culture in Southern California: From Seed to Consumer (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, 1914), p. 10.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 12, Spring 2008

‘Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror’? Don DeLillo’s Mao II, Falling Man, and Making Art from Terror

Robin Whear
© Robin Whear. All Rights Reserved

There is a book within DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) that is everything the novel itself is not: a manuscript that, awaiting an editor, appears to predict the attacks of September 11th, 2001. It is, DeLillo writes,

a rushed project, timely, newsworthy, even visionary, at least in the publisher’s planned catalog copy—a book detailing a series of interlocking global forces that appeared to converge at an explosive point in time and space that might be said to represent the locus of Boston, New York and Washington on a late-summer morning early in the 21st century.[1]

In this minor facet of the novel, DeLillo acknowledges what many commentators have remarked about his unique qualifications for writing a literary response to 9/11. In The American Prospect, Laura Frost declared that ‘no living American writer seems as qualified to deliver the Great American 9/11 Novel’, while Toby Litt wrote in The Guardian that, ‘even as news of those attacks was received, DeLillo’s was the name that came to mind’.[2] Indeed, the event seemed culmination of themes that had pervaded DeLillo’s fiction for 25 years. As long ago as his 1977 novel Players, DeLillo had written of terrorist attack on the New York Stock Exchange implicating workers from the World Trade Centre. More pertinently still, Mao II (1991) offers a model of the complex relationship between American capital and global fundamentalist terrorism.[3] In the wake of the 9/11, it has been hailed as a prescient, even visionary, text that can assist our understanding of terrorism in postmodern times.[4]

If the presence of this unnamed but legendary text in Falling Man is an ironic reference to DeLillo’s previous work, it is also an acknowledgement that DeLillo’s fictional response to 9/11 is not what many had expected, or had hoped for. There is no great effort, usually characteristic of DeLillo’s work, to contextualise the event, to chart the political, social and historical factors that brought it about. In a sense, perhaps, he had already written that novel, Mao II, some ten years before the attacks.

There is a further self-reference in the figure of the Falling Man. The novel’s title will remind us of Richard Drew’s Associated Press photograph of a white-shirted man falling from the towers, an image that was largely removed from circulation the day after the attacks. The Falling Man of the novel, though, is an artist who, supported by a harness, stages falls that recall the infamous photograph. In the novel, crowds gather around his impromptu performances, and witnesses react with fascination and repulsion—many are ‘outraged at the spectacle’ (33). An academic discussion panel casts the Falling Man ‘as Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror’ (220). The metaphor could hardly be clearer: in writing his response to 9/11, can DeLillo steer clear of exhibitionism, of appropriating the deaths of strangers for the purposes of fiction? The Falling Man stands, in part, as a symbol for the pitfalls of making art from terror.

In this paper I will argue that while DeLillo strenuously avoids indulging in anything that might have him accused of ‘Heartless Exhibitionism’, Falling Man is not a novel that can genuinely be said to chronicle a new ‘Age of Terror’. The logic of DeLillo’s approach, I believe, has its roots back in Mao II’s declaration that ‘what terrorists gain, novelists lose’.[5] It is best understood, therefore, as an attempt to offer what DeLillo terms a ‘counter-narrative’ to terror, one that frames the event in terms of the myriad personal stories that it created. To this end, DeLillo takes up the taboo figure of the ‘Falling Man’, representative of many stories that have seldom been celebrated in public discourse, to stand as both an emblem of this ‘counternarrative’ and as an archetype of the fall from grace that New York suffered on 9/11.

It is the protagonist of Mao II, the reclusive author Bill Grey, who posits a ‘curious knot’ binding novelists and terrorists:

In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence…Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have that territory. They made raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.[6]

‘News of disaster is the only narrative people need’, he adds, and this narrative of terror is sustained by acts of spectacular televisual violence that resist incorporation into what DeLillo terms the ‘blur and glut’ of the postmodern mediascape. For Grey, the spectacle of terroristic violence has erased the possibility of art that might impact upon a cultural consciousness: ‘Beckett is the last major writer to shape the way we think and see’, he laments, adding, ‘[a]fter him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings’.[7]

DeLillo returned to these ideas in an essay entitled ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, written soon after the attacks. In it he declared that the world is divided between two forces: on the one hand the modern democratic and technological movement, on the other a ‘global theocratic state…so obsolete it must depend on suicidal fervour to gain its aims’. DeLillo characterises these movements, respectively, as the forces of the future and past. Throughout the 1990s, he writes, the logic of cyber-capital dominated discourse, but this all changed on 9/11. Now the balance of power has shifted from the forces of the future to those of the past, and ‘the world narrative belongs to terrorists’.[8]

The novelist’s responsibility, DeLillo goes on, is ‘to create the counternarrative…to give memory, tenderness and meaning to all that howling space’.[9] The task is problematic, though, because of the nature of 9/11 as an event. It has ‘no purchase on the mercies of analogy and simile’, he says, resisting ‘every basis for comparison’. In acknowledging that 9/11 was, in Jean Baudrillard’s words, ‘irreducible, singular’, DeLillo’s essay begs the question: how does the fiction writer respond to 9/11 without simply perpetuating the narrative of terror upon which his story is based?[10] When he admits that ‘[i]t sounded exactly like what it was—a tall tower collapsing’, we might wonder what sort of literary account of 9/11 avoids being completely overshadowed by the event itself.[11]

DeLillo’s response is to foreground the effect that the attacks have had on American domestic life:

This catastrophic event changes the way we think and act, moment to moment, week to week, for unknown weeks and months to come, and steely years. Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage.[12]

We might say that the DeLillo’s attention thus return him to a previous strategy of charting the lives of individuals caught up in real events, as in his novel Libra, which deals with the Kennedy assassination.[13]

Accordingly, the characters of Falling Man are people for whom, as DeLillo wrote in ‘Ruins’, ‘the event has changed the grain of the most routine moment’. The novel begins in the moments after the collapse of one of the towers, with protagonist Keith Neudecker having escaped with minor injuries. Dazed in the aftermath of the attack, he heads to his estranged wife, Lianne, who takes him in. The couple resume some halting form of domestic life with their young son Justin who, deeply affected having seen the first plane hit the towers, spends the novel searching the sky for an airborne terrorist whose name he phonetically approximates as ‘Bill Lawton’. In the main the narrative is shared between Lianne and Keith, but it is punctuated by three sections that follow the path of Hammad, a fictional terrorist, as he takes part in the plot against the World Trade Centre. The stories merge at the close of the novel, as Hammad’s hijacked plane collides with the tower where Keith works. Aside from these three sections, the entire novel details the efforts of its characters to regain some form of normalcy after their traumatic experiences.

In the daily lives DeLillo depicts, fear is never far the surface. Lianne tells of her fear at ‘[u]nattended packages…or the menace of lunch in a paper bag, or the subway at rush hour, down there, in sealed boxes’ (127). Even when three years have passed, she ‘stayed away from the subway, still, and never stopped noticing the concrete bulwarks outside train stations and other possible targets’ (235). Meanwhile, every time Keith boards a flight, ‘he glanced at faces on both sides of the aisle, trying to spot the man or men who might be a danger to them all’ (198).

Formally, the novel enacts the splintered identity and sense of dislocation of the survivors with deliberately vague pronoun references that compel the reader to search for his or her footing during the first few sentences of each section. The frequent shifts in focalisation between Keith, Lianne and Hammad thus have a destabilising effect. The narrative is also temporally fragmented, enacting the rupture of reality experienced by the novel’s victims. It jumps forward and back in time, starting in the ash-filled streets at Ground Zero but ending in the towers themselves as the attack begins. Against this alienating backdrop, DeLillo foregrounds the physic necessity of self-narration. The resumption of Keith’s family life proves to be short-lived, as enters an affair with fellow survivor Florence after returning to her the briefcase he had picked up during his confused escape. Together Keith and Florence embark on a mutual healing process that centres largely on the act of narrating their experiences of the attacks. Keith realises that, like him, Florence has been unable to speak in detail about her experiences escaping the tower, but that ‘[s]he wanted to tell him everything’ (55).

Scenes between the Keith and Florence have a counterpoint in Lianne’s work with a group of Alzheimer patients, whose increasing difficulties with self-expression mirror that of the survivors. In Lianne’s session, the group find some comfort in their halting attempts at self-narration and find that they, too, want to write ‘about the planes’ (51). Lianne, meanwhile, is taken by the necessity of ritually honouring every narrative from the attacks:

She read the newspaper profiles of the dead, every one that was printed. Not to read them, every one, was an offense, a violation of responsibility and trust. But she also read them because she had to, out of some need she did not try to interpret. (106)

The novel is populated, then, with human stories of tragedy that await narration, a central part of DeLillo’s notion of a ‘counternarrative’ to terror. In his invocation of the Falling Man photograph, DeLillo draws upon a multitude of stories that were, at least in America, largely excluded from public discourse. USA Today estimated that 200 people fell from the towers on 9/11.[14] They have been commonly known as the ‘jumpers’, though official sources have been reticent to use the term. ‘A ‘jumper’ is somebody who goes to the office in the morning knowing that they will commit suicide’ said a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office, ‘these people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out’.[15] In ‘Ruins’, DeLillo first sought to break the taboo and rehabilitate this story as a redemptive image of the attacks:

People falling from the towers hand in hand. This is part of the counternarrative, hands and spirits joining, human beauty in the crush of meshed steel. [16]

For DeLillo, then, inherent in the act of jumping from the towers was a riposte to the attack, a act of self-determination, perhaps, that opposed the narrative of terror with one of ‘human beauty’.

Richard Drew’s photograph was not the only depiction of the ‘jumpers’ which fell foul of censorship. Eric Fischl’s statue ‘Tumbling Woman’, displayed at the Rockefeller Centre to commemorate the first anniversary of the attacks, portrayed a naked female figure falling headfirst through space. It was removed from view after a week because of complaints from the public. Fischl’s intentions in the piece, and the controversy that it caused might help us understand why the Associated Press image of the ‘Falling Man’ was so taboo. Slavoj Žižek has said that the media coverage of 9/11 was marked by what he calls a ‘derealization’ of the horror:

While the number of victims—3000—is repeated all the time, it is surprising how little of the actual carnage we see—no dismembered bodies, no blood, no desperate faces of dying people.[17]

Fischl had a similar response, saying that, ‘removing the body from the experience means we can’t empathise’.[18] It is perhaps in part this return of the body, of visible human suffering, to 9/11 that made Richard Drew’s image so taboo, and why DeLillo might chose to invoke the image to court empathy from his readers. In The Spirit of Terrorism, Jean Baudrillard argued that the symbolic impact of 9/11 came from the introduction of radical sacrifice (the suicide of the bombers) into a system which works upon the ideal of zero deaths and ‘has erased [death] from its own culture’.[19] At the same time as the depiction of the ‘jumpers’ returns the body to the event, it thus mirrors the act of suicide that were central to the symbolic logic of the attack.

In one vital way, the Falling Man of the novel differs from that of the Associated Press photograph. Lianne discovers after the death of the artist that the performance pieces ‘were not designed to be recorded by a photographer’ (220), and that the artist ‘had no comments to make to the media on any subject’ (222). This development from an infamous media image to an artist who eschews media exposure is indicative of DeLillo’s approach in the novel. Normally so central to DeLillo’s work, the media are largely absent from Falling Man, despite the clear impact that television and the Internet has had on shaping the public perception of 9/11. Indeed, in his attempts to break from the central narrative of the attacks, he goes as far as to expunge every reference to the ‘World Trade Centre’ and ‘9/11’ in his novel, instead using the simple, more everyday phrases ‘the towers’ and ‘the planes’. Though many theorists have argued the inseparability of the event from its mediation (Baudrillard called it an ‘image-event’, while Žižek described the attack as ‘a fantasmatic screen apparition’ that ‘entered our reality’), DeLillo experienced it differently.[20] In ‘Ruins’, he wrote that ‘the raw event was one thing, the coverage another’. Perhaps, as a resident of Brooklyn with family near to the World Trade Centre complex, it was DeLillo’s proximity to the attacks that allowed him to separate coverage and event. The model of postmodern terrorism that DeLillo offered in Mao II, moreover, showed that coverage of spectacular terrorism in Western media is inseparable from the notion of terrorism as a world narrative. It is therefore unsurprising that, in attempting to craft a ‘counternarrative’, DeLillo turned away from the media coverage to depict the survivors’ stories more directly.

The invention of a performance artist that refuses mediation allows DeLillo to draw upon the image of the ‘Falling Man’ as both an archetype and an emblem of the attacks. Lianne ‘thought it could be the name of a trump card in a tarot deck, Falling Man, name in gothic type, the figure twisting down in a stormy night sky’. In her adaptation of a half-remembered haiku (‘even in New York…I long for New York’, 34) Lianne mourns a lost New York that disappeared on 9/11. The city they are left with, thinks Keith is indelibly affected by its past: ‘The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river’ (25). DeLillo takes up the figure of the Falling Man as a symbol of his characters’ fall from a supposed prelapsarian state, a state to which the they long to return.

If the disappearance of the media is a surprise in a DeLillo novel, he also dispenses with much of the philosophising on terror that so marked Mao II. While that novel considered the notion that postmodern terrorism is indicative of, in Baudrillard’s terms, ‘triumphant globalization battling against itself’, any such political or historical context is largely suppressed in Falling Man.[21] Martin does express a reading of the attacks that might be seen as critical of American power, but his opinions are largely rendered in summary. We are told, for instance, that ‘He spoke about lost lands, failed states, foreign intervention, money, empire, oil, the narcissistic heart of the West’ (113). Martin is, notably, the only European in the novel, and admits links with left-wing terrorist groups in the 1970s. Lianne and Nina harbour vague suspicions that he may have been involved in violence or even murder and we learn that he goes under an assumed name. All of this works to marginalise Martin’s voice and cloud any notion that his concerns, which appear similar to those over the body of DeLillo’s work, in fact carry any authorial seal of approval.

There is perhaps a political reality behind DeLillo’s decision to draw on such readings only fleetingly. We might remember the outcry against those who suggested American foreign policy might have been implicated in 9/11. DeLillo’s re-imagining of the Kennedy assassination came a full twenty-five years after the event, but even then he was accused of ‘bad citizenship’ by George Wills in The Washington Post because of Libra’s scepticism of the official explanation. Falling Man is a novel distracted by delicacy of its material, and all too keenly aware of the potential to cause great offence. Even with all its care, the novel has caused one reviewer to balk at the idea of America’s ‘wry metaphysician’ dealing with the nation’s largest collective wound. The parallels DeLillo draws between Keith and Hammad, victim and perpetrator of the attacks, was said to ‘open up DeLillo to accusations of moral relativism and insufficient outrage about mass murder’.[22]

This identification, however, is a central piece of DeLillo’s effort to create a ‘counternarrative’ to terror. In these ambiguous portraits DeLillo seems directly to contradict the glib dichotomy between ‘past and future’ that he put forward in ‘Ruins’. Hammad and the small organisation of which he is part display very much the same familiarity with Western technology that we might expect of the 9/11 bombers. They are keenly aware of the state technology that might threaten their security, with Hammad worrying about ‘photo reconnaissance that takes a picture of a dung beetle from one hundred kilometres up’ (81). Hammad’s integration into Western society, though, seems to go further than the pragmatic use of Western technology against its subjects. When we learn that ‘They had simulator software. They played flight-simulator games on their computer’, the contradiction is all the more notable because Hammad had just only pondered whether ‘a man [has] to kill himself in order to accomplish something in the world’ (174).

Indeed, the combination of his integration into American life and fundamentalist Islamism, Hammad appears to embody something akin to what Sayyid Qutb described as a ‘hideous schizophrenia’. He experiences the benefits of an affluent Western lifestyle; ‘He had his Visa card, his frequent-flyer number. He had the use of the Mitsubishi’ (171). He displays an incongruous desire to ingratiate himself with one of the few ordinary Americans he meets—the supermarket check-out girl: she ‘rolls the soup can over the scanner and he thinks of something funny he can say, saying it internally first to get the word order right’ (178). Though he revels in his anonymity and the secrets it hides, bodily pleasures are never completely expunged from his mind. Thus he feels a certain gratification on receiving a smile from the check-out girl, and a girlfriend has him ‘feeling like a footballer running across a field after scoring a goal, all-world, his arms flung wide’ (82). Though Hammad is a purely fictional character, DeLillo depicts Mohamed Atta as the organising ‘genius’ of the group. Atta, or Amir as he is more commonly known, rebukes him for his too-Western lifestyle and girlfriend, asking, ‘What is the difference between you and all the others, outside our space?’ (83).

Indeed, the novel works not only to complicate our notion of the terrorist’s relation to the West, but also to depict similarities between Hammad and Keith. There is, for instance, an ironic point of contact between Hammad’s religious observance and Keith’s poker game, an obsession that he enjoyed through a weekly game with friends before the attacks, and which eventually grows to such proportions as to threaten his domestic life. The game is commonly described as providing Keith with a structure of rules and self-denial within which he feels comfortable. In their regular meetings before the attacks, Keith and his friends take pleasure in ritually purifying their experience, first by restricting their competition to a single set of rules: ‘The banning of certain games started as a joke in the name of tradition and self-discipline’ (96). Gradually, though, the group begin arbitrarily to outlaw anything superfluous to the game—first certain drinks, then topic of conversation, then food altogether. With two members of the group killed and one badly injured in the attacks, Keith suffers from the withdrawal of this weekly ritual. He feels the need for ‘an offsetting discipline, a form of controlled behaviour, voluntary, that kept him from shambling into the house hating everybody’ (143). In this respect, Keith responds to order and arbitrary self-discipline in a similar way to Hammad, who is brought into line by Atta and largely succeeds in keeping his vanity at bay: ‘The beard would look better if he trimmed it. But there were rules now and he was determined to follow them. His life had structure. Things were clearly defined’ (83). Keith’s remembrance of his card game is set in dramatic and militaristic terms that could just as easily apply to Hammad and his group in their plot against the World Trade Centre: They used intuition and cold-war risk analysis. They used cunning and blind luck. They waited for the prescient moment (97). Equally, ‘the needless utterance of a few archaic words’ (99) that introduces each new round of five-card stud could stand as an ironic reference to Hammad’s five prayers of the day.

There is a further parallel drawn between the two men in the homo-social alliances they rely on. As Nina once said of Keith:

There’s a certain man, an archetype, he’s a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women…The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. (59)

Hammad, meanwhile, recalls an imperative that binds together his group together: ‘[s]hed everything but the men you are with. Become each other’s running blood’ (83). Keith’s obsession with poker eventually leads to his withdrawal from domestic life with Lianne as he spends increasingly lengthy periods playing the professional circuit away from home. In the aggression he feels towards fellow players, we see the most overt identification between the two men. ‘Make them bleed’, Keith thinks, ‘[m]ake them spill their precious losers’ blood’ (230).

In summary, then, we might say that DeLillo retracts from an attempt to chronicle the new ‘Age of Terror’ because, while he was uniquely placed to write about the attacks, he was also uniquely hamstrung. Few writers can match his creativity and authority on the themes of terror, consumerism, global capital, technology, paranoia and media saturation, concerns that dominate global discourse in the wake of September 11th. The nature of the event, however, made his talents as much a curse as a blessing. Partly, perhaps, that is because DeLillo, as a native New Yorker, is too close to the sense of loss and confusion to approach the subject with his usual distance, and keenly aware of the potential insensitivity of doing so. There is more to DeLillo’s strategy, though, than an acknowledgement of the sensitivity of his material. In a sense there is no space to bring his particular study of paranoia, of underlying currents and causes, to bear on this subject. The darkest fears of DeLillo’s fiction became true, and the writer must realign himself accordingly. As Nina says in Falling Man, ‘[e]ight years ago they planted a bomb in one of the towers. Nobody said what’s next. This was next. The time to be afraid is when there’s no reason to be afraid’ (10). Furthermore, there is a sense that to depict the event as the confluence of perceptible global currents is in some way dishonest. If the manuscript in Falling Man that supposedly predicted the attacks is an ironic reference to the reception Mao II, it also serves another purpose. Its publisher describes it was ‘so demanding, so incredibly tedious…deeply and enormously boring’ (138-9). Its ‘statistical tables, corporate reports…facts, maps and schedules’ are an implicit acknowledgement by DeLillo that, in its great global complexity, the geopolitical and historical truth of September 11th cannot be glibly reduced into a novelistic account of perceptible and predictable forces leading up to that day. To cut the event from the shock, from its singularity, is to change its nature. Lianne, upon first seeing the Falling Man about to jump, finds herself hoping that she is witnessing ‘an absurdist drama that provokes onlookers to share a comic understanding of what is irrational in the great schemes of being or in the next small footstep’ (163). In DeLillo’s conception, the events of September 11th will, at least for now, resist complete understanding, and in response he keeps the irrational and unknowable nature of the event at the centre of his novel.

So DeLillo turns his attention to the domestic, in an attempt to craft a counter to the world narrative of terror. In the figure of the ‘Falling Man’, DeLillo does obliquely tackle one of the few themes of 9/11 that has remained taboo. The ‘Falling Man’ figure serves a series of purposes in the text: to foreground the inherent dangers in making art from terror; to allegorise the fall from a prelapsarian New York; and stand for the absurd, fractured condition of those struggling to realign themselves after the shock of the attack. In an image that was, for many, the most disturbing of all recorded that day, DeLillo thus finds a redemptive icon, a ‘falling angel’ (218) upon which to build his response.

University of Sheffield

Notes

[1] Don DeLillo, Falling Man (London: Picador, 2007), p. 139. Subsequent references to this edition are included within the body of the text.

[2] Laura Frost, ‘Falling Man’s Precarious Balance’, The American Prospect, 11 May 2007 http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=falling_mans_precarious_balance [accessed 17 February 2008]; Toby Litt, ‘The Trembling Air’, The Guardian, 26 May, 2007 http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,,2088344,00.html [accessed 17 February 2008].

[3] Don DeLillo, Players (London: Vintage, 1977); Mao II (London: Vintage, 1992).

[4] See, for example, John Carlos Rowe, ‘Mao II and the War on Terrorism’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103 (2004), 21-43.

[5] DeLillo, Mao II, p. 157.

[6] Ibid., p. 41.

[7] Ibid., p. 157.

[8] Don DeLillo, ‘In the Ruins of the Future’, The Guardian, 22 December 2001 http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,623732,00.html [accessed 27 March 2008] (para. 2 of 81).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002).

[11] DeLillo, ‘Ruins’ (para. 35 of 81).

[12] Ibid. (para. 3 of 81).

[13] Don DeLillo, Libra (New York: Viking, 1988).

[14] Dennis Cauchon and Martha Moore, ‘Desperation Forced a Horrific Decision’, USA Today http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/2002-09-02-jumper_x.htm [accessed 17 March 2008].

[15] Ibid.

[16] DeLillo, ‘Ruins’ (para. 67 of 81).

[17] Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), p. 13.

[18] Mark Vallen, ‘Eric Fischl and the ‘Death of Painting’, 20 April 2006 http://www.art-for-a-change.com/blog/2006/04/eric-fischl-and-death-of-painting.html [accessed 27 March 2008].

[19] Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 15.

[20] Ibid., p. 27; Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, p. 16.

[21] Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, p. 11.

[22] Sam Anderson, ‘Code Red’, New York Magazine, 7 May 2007, <http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/31521/> [accessed 27 March 2008].

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 12, Spring 2008

‘Identities and Encounters’: A Report of the British Association for American Studies Postgraduate Conference, University of Manchester 2007

Jennie Chapman and Josephine Metcalf
© Jennie Chapman and Josephine Metcalf. All Rights Reserved

On the 17th of November 2007, the University of Manchester welcomed delegates from Bangor to Edinburgh, Sussex to Northumbria, as well as Germany, the Czech Republic and the USA to the 5th official annual postgraduate conference of the British Association for American Studies.

The conference appealed to a broad range of postgraduate interests. In all, over eighty people attended to participate in nine panels convened around the diverse themes of American History of the 1930s; Memory and Testimony—Historical Fiction or Fictional History?; Women in America—Twentieth Century Case Studies; Documenting America—Recording War, Travel and Communities; Postmodern Fiction—The Techniques of Vonnegut and Pynchon; Visual Representations of Ethnicity; American Politics from the Second World War to the Cold War; Religion in Twentieth Century Literature; and Representations of New York from the 1990s to the Present.

We felt very privileged to welcome Professor Lizabeth Cohen as the day’s plenary speaker. As a multi-award winning historian at Harvard, who has been appointed as this year’s Harmsworth Professor at the prestigious Rothermere Institute at Oxford, Professor Cohen is one of the most eminent scholars of American urban history working in the field today. Her insightful plenary talk—‘Do powerful white men need gendered biographies? The case of city builder Ed Logue’—was a perfect close to a fascinating day.

We feel compelled to highlight that the funding kindly donated by the US Embassy provided the chance for four high school pupils and their teacher to attend the day’s proceedings. American Studies obviously competes with a whole host of other cutting-edge subjects for the attention of UCAS applicants. We welcomed these sixth form students and hope the conference will encourage them of the wonderful opportunities available in the field of American Studies at university level.

We are thrilled that a selection of the best presentations was invited to publish their papers in the Spring 2008 issue of the BAAS postgraduate journal, US Studies Online. We hope that these will reflect the very high standard that was witnessed in all the panels, as well as the diverse extent of topics available. These publications include:

Robin Whear’s ‘“Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror?” Don DeLillo’s Mao II, Falling Man and Making Art from Terror’. Robin is a second year PhD student in the English Literature department of the University of Sheffield. His subject area is postmodern realism, terror and capitalism. This paper examines Don DeLillo’s rendering of the World Trade Centre attacks these two novels.

Henry Knight’s ‘Savage Desert, American Garden: Citrus Labels and the Selling of California, 1877-1929’. Henry is in the process of completing an MPhil in American History at the University of Sussex. He is shortly due to commence his PhD, a comparative study of the promotional imagery used to sell California and Florida in the period 1865-1929, from which his unusual and captivating paper sprung.

John Matlin’s ‘Missouri Muckrakers? The Press, Corruption and the Senator for Pendergast’. John is a former solicitor who returned to study American Studies as a mature student at Brunel University. He is now in his second year of a PhD at the University of Birmingham, and the editorial assistant of the Journal of American Studies. His paper focused on the spectrum of reporting by five local Kansas City newspapers of the 1934 election contests for the vacant Missouri Seat in the US Senate which led to Harry Truman’s victory.

We would like to thank all those who participated in making the day such a wonderful success—not merely those who gave papers but those who attended and sparked some thought-provoking discussions. In particular we would also like to thank the British Association for American Studies, the US Embassy, and the University of Manchester SAGE programme for the financial support which made the conference possible. We look forward to attending the same event at the University of Exeter in November 2008.

University of Manchester

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 13, Autumn 2008

Working through the Double-Bind: Frederick Douglass’s Intellectual and Literary Legacy, 1841-1855

Calvin Schermerhorn
© Calvin Schermerhorn. All Rights Reserved

In his struggles to articulate credible and authentic arguments against African American slavery and the supposed racial inferiority of people of African descent, Frederick Douglass confronted theories of race that potentially undermined his message. Douglass’s early successes on the abolitionist stage gave rise to charges that he was too eloquent to be a slave. In the popular imagination, slaves were ineloquent or at least artless articulators of their native landscapes. Douglass’s friends cautioned him against unsettling his audience’s expectations. ‘”Better [to] have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not”‘, he recalled one adviser counseling, ‘”’tis not best that you seem too learned”‘.[1] It was not a particular audience’s expectations but the sources of those expectations that posed the greatest challenge. When he published an autobiography in part to counter charges of fraud, Douglass faced critics who interpreted his eloquence as the result of white paternity. The charge was more insidious than suspicions that he was an imposter. Confronting racial ideas, he emphasised a legacy of black literacy, which passed—like the condition of slavery—through his mother, and in remaking her image and with it his personal intellectual and moral inheritance, he sought to undermine the intellectual foundations of scientific and romantic racism.

Being an eloquent fugitive slave in a society that imagined slaves as—at best—injured, exploited and benighted human chattel, rendered suspect an orator claiming to have reliable first hand knowledge of slavery. Frederick Law Olmstead, for instance, ‘considered fugitive slaves “suspicious” traveling correspondents’ and therefore unreliable witnesses to the realities of the American South.[2] Douglass responded to questions of his authenticity in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself (hereafter Narrative) in which he revealed the names of his former owners. The unintended consequences of what became a classic of American literature were that even sympathetic critics claimed his was an achievement reflective of eloquence inherited from his anonymous white father. Douglass, it seemed, could not escape from a web of suspicion reinforced by racial thinking that attributed his thoughtful utterances to white paternity and at the same time questioned the premises on which he made his remarks, both as a fugitive slave and as an agent of a broadly unpopular abolitionist movement.

When his critics used the fact of his enslavement to question his authenticity—then used his white paternity to downplay his achievements—he responded by upsetting the racial categories in which his critics attempted to place him. In particular he responded to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s wildly popular characterizations of African Americans, framed in racial terms, which had in-part caused audiences to expect former slaves to speak in a ‘plantation manner’. Douglass used his first lyceum-style speaking engagement to refute his critics’ theories of the ethological limitations of black Americans. In his second autobiography, he revealed his African American mother as his true literary benefactor.

Douglass’s oratory was improvisational and spontaneous rather than studied and prepared, and the speaking style that drew such suspicion combined formal modes of address with the aural literacy he mastered in slavery. His physical appearance complemented his eloquence. Abolitionist editor Nathaniel P. Rogers described him in 1841 as ‘a commanding person—over six feet…in height, and of most manly proportions’. Rogers continued, ‘As a speaker, he has few equals…He has wit, argument, sarcasm, and pathos…His voice is highly melodious and rich, and his enunciation quite elegant’.[3] Douglass was not unique in his physical characteristics and raw vocal abilities, but his education as a Maryland slave included mimicry as well as ‘wit, argument, sarcasm, and pathos’. A biographer explains: ‘copying sounds, a fundamental mode of learning, was one of the very few available to a slave’.[4] For Douglass, the basis of his aural literacy was using his memory of events, and he deployed it using formal conventions, including rules of cadence, tone, and gesture, of which he made an informal study and to which audiences would recognise and respond.

Public orators of the day favoured earnest argument and erudition over wit, sarcasm, mimicry, and pathos. In contrast, however, Douglass had learned dissimulation or the ‘put on’ from being subject to the arbitrary power of those who claimed to own him. He had learned sarcasm from the humour of the slave quarter, where enslaved people derided slaveholders’ self-serving reasons for maintaining slavery, including that slavery had religious sanction.[5] His pathos emanated from the permanent pain of family separation, which he graphically illustrated for his audiences. Having lost over a dozen relatives to slave traders, Douglass could evoke the pain that slaveholders’ destruction of family ties had brought about.[6]

He later recalled that his New England friends encouraged him to conform to audience’s racial expectations rather than to present himself in his own voice. He acquitted them of mixed motives but recalled, ‘I must speak just the word that seemed to me the word to be spoken by me’, and hinted why he received the speaking advise that he did. ‘I was generally introduced as a ‘chattel‘—a ‘thing‘—a piece of southern ‘property‘—the chairman assuring the audience that it could speak’.[7] He quickly outgrew the role of the ‘thing‘ or southern curiosity that spoke. Douglass adopted the ‘plantation manner’ solely when mimicking slaveholders and caricaturing ministers. If he did not take their speaking cues, Douglass did adopt the Garrisonian abolitionists’ communications strategies, and during his first few years as an agitator he faithfully adhered to Garrison’s ideology of ‘moral suasion’.[8] Douglass was able to plug his self-taught rhetoric into an organization that had a ready-made use for it.[9] He benefited from the publicity, even if his sponsors did not encourage his oratorical development.

Douglass sounded different to most of his colleagues because his rhetoric took the accepted practice of mobilizing stock classical, literary, and biblical allusions and embellished them with colloquial scenes that provoked laughter and pathos.[10] In an age when colleges trained young men in the arts of public speaking—a good citizen was also, ideally, a good public speaker—rhetoric was highly regarded.[11] In addition to a self-taught repertoire of letters, Douglass mobilised a repertoire of experiences, using biblical passages, for instance, to punctuate images of slave life. His cadence and pitch were familiar to his audiences. Physically, he addressed his audience in the same manner as other speakers. Douglass did not stammer, cower, or use malapropisms. Garrison, who regularly introduced him, presented Douglass as a mere victim of slavery, and Douglass showed them instead a slave turned man, which prefigured the central narrative arc of his autobiography.

Douglass used mimicry as a powerful rhetorical device throughout his early speaking career. Mimicking southern preachers played to the conceits of audience members who saw their southern countrymen as naïve rustics. Laughter from the audience also encouraged a speaker who faced a potentially hostile audience. It dissipated tension built up by his earnest denunciations, disarming those who were hostile to the appearance of a black man on the public stage. In February 1842, before a packed Representatives Hall in Boston, Douglass gave an address typical of that strategy. The ‘ample Hall was crowded to overflowing’, according to one report, ‘like a court-house at a capital trial, and with an auditory of a kind not often found at an anti-slavery meeting’.[12] Lit by candles or gas lamps, the hall had no spotlight or lectern on the speaker’s podium. The rarely-quiet crowd’s presence meant that the speaker’s voice had to fill the hall without straining and loosing its pitch and cadence. Douglass’s appearance, wrote one witness, ‘has the port, and countenance, and heroic “assurance,” and almost the stature of the Roman Coriolanus,—and we could but rejoice in enthusiasm of spirit, as he presented himself to the gaze of the unwonted assembly’.[13]

Rather than take his place on the podium immediately, Douglass was introduced in a provocative manner. Garrison appeared on the speaker’s podium and ‘announced him, in his peculiarly arousing manner, as “a thing from the South!”‘ read one report. ‘The idea seemed to fire the noble fugitive with the indignation of outraged nature’, and ‘his eyes flashed as he spoke in tones of appalling earnestness and significancy [sic]’.[14] The reporter’s description of a ‘noble fugitive’ reveals how a white audience member would view a black slave orator, as a ‘noble fugitive’ would also connote the ‘noble savage’—one whose essential nature had been fundamentally undisturbed by the civilization he was just about to criticise. That sympathetic racist categorization is what would make Uncle Tom a tragic character a decade later: his African nobility—an artifact of the innocence of his ‘race’—manifested itself as perfect servility when combined with its perfect Christianity. Similar assessments of non-white peoples as natural innocents were not unfamiliar to readers of James Fennimore Cooper, for instance.[15] Douglass was routinely introduced as a slave, which drew attention to his appearance and invited white audiences to view him through the prism of their racial understandings. Few in the audience had ever seen a slave, let alone a slave orator, and black Americans rarely addressed whites from a place of superiority. Popular Anglo-American racial sensibilities of the time attributed characteristics to ancestry, and they were rapidly gaining literary and scientific underpinnings. A black speaker therefore would be a curiosity. Even in abolitionist circles, Edmund Quincy was fond of telling racist jokes and Wendell Phillips confided privately that he was uncomfortable rooming with a black man.[16]

Addressing himself to an audience with those expectations and assumptions, Douglass was effective because he was surprising and engaging. ‘I appear before the immense assembly this evening as a thief and a robber’, he began; ‘I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them’.[17] His humour disarmed the hostile crowd and pointed up the seriousness of the subject upon which he was to speak. It was a risky strategy since he was attempting to persuade and not merely to entertain. Not seeking to inhabit a racial stereotype, he used the ironic comment to introduce a speech in which his explanations rapidly turned into an argument. Rhetorically, the thing or slave identified himself as the rightful or moral owner of the same ‘thing’ that was stolen from its legal owner. Recalling scenes from his childhood of his master’s religious conversion, Douglass thrilled the crowd by deriding the apparent hypocrisy involved in a Methodist revival. Inverting the ‘plantation manner’ of cowering and bending to the slaveholder’s will, he invited the audience to look through the eyes of an enslaved child and to ridicule the world of slaveholding Christianity that they saw. The ‘matter and manner in which religious instruction is conveyed to the slaves by ministers was believed to be excellent’, a reporter noted; ‘It was certainly very laughable’.[18] The reporters’ notes trail off after the first few lines of the speech. Douglass’s speech captivated him, and he noted the effects of the speaker’s remarks instead of the remarks themselves.

Douglass’s success prompted his sponsors to warn him of the hazards of his particular style and delivery. Garrison had advised him that he appeared too ‘learned’. He warned Douglass, ‘”people won’t believe you were ever a slave, Frederick”‘. More and more, Douglass’s eloquence was becoming a double bind. If he adopted the ‘plantation manner’, he would consent to be cast as nothing more than a theatrical exhibit; if he sounded too ‘learned’ he ran the risk of being discredited as an impostor. By the spring of 1844, Douglass later recalled, he regularly heard comments doubting his past.[19] Douglass bristled at the criticisms.

In part to prove his critics wrong, Douglass published his Narrative, which risked his security. Publication of the details of his life as a slave posed the danger of recapture, so his friends encouraged him to leave the country. He hesitated since the book brought new controversy—and a new source of income. Having largely succeeded before an American audience, Douglass refined his oratory and reauthorised the Narrative across the Atlantic.

In Ireland and Great Britain, he showed great versatility as an orator, and through republication of the Narrative, shrewdness as an author. Summarizing his Irish and British tour, Alan Rice and Michael Crawford contend, ‘he came to Britain’ in the summer of 1845 ‘as raw material of a great black figure; he would leave in April 1847 a finished and independent man’.[20] If his 1838 escape from Maryland to Massachusetts brought him practical independence from slavery, his 1845-47 tour brought him financial independence from abolitionist organizations.

Douglass reinvented his public image in part by emphasizing his white paternity in the 1846 Dublin edition (and subsequent Irish and English editions) of Narrative. He kept prefatory endorsements by Garrison and Wendell Phillips, but he prefaced their endorsements with a statement of his own, which included ‘a desire to increase my stock of information, and my opportunities for self-improvement, by a visit to the land of my paternal ancestors’.[21] Fionnguala Sweeney contends that ‘the preface is important both as autobiographical and ideological commentary on Douglass’s changing status within abolitionism and his increasing awareness of the risks and opportunities of engagement with the society and politics of the Atlantic world’.[22] By prefacing his own narrative, Douglass put a new frame on the second Irish edition (and subsequent editions) that announced his authorial control. Moreover, he implicated Britain and Ireland in his arguments and struggles by connecting his father’s ancestry to the legacy of slavery in British North America. Sweeney contends, further, that ‘Ireland was central to the realization of [his literary and ideological] independence: not just as a refuge from re-enslavement and a safe platform from which to attack the US’s “peculiar institution,” but as an imaginary space which marked and important step in the development of his writing and of a distinctive narrative persona which escaped the racial confines US and the ideological control of the transatlantic abolitionist movement’.[23] At each opportunity, Douglass seized control of his message and refashioned his public persona for the Irish and British stage.[24]

Unlike in the U.S., Douglass was not utterly dependent upon abolitionist societies for sponsorship, support, or protection. Sweeney contends that, ‘his popularity in Ireland, amongst women in particular, meant that he was never without accommodation, an audience or an income’.[25] He expanded the range of subjects on which he spoke and began reading from texts to supplement his extemporaneous remarks.[26] Douglass authorised British editions of the Narrative and through its sales and speaking fees he raised enough money to purchase his legal freedom in the United States. ‘Ironically perhaps’, Sweeney argues, ‘the Narrative, which detailed the violation and abuse of labour and economic as well as human rights, projected Douglass out of the social category of skilled labourer, or ideological and financial dependant of abolitionism, and into a higher social and economic niche as a man of letters’.[27] He refined his communications skills by changing his message to suit his audiences’ interests. Before a Roman Catholic temperance audience in Ireland, for instance, he declared ‘if we could make the world sober, we would have no slavery. Mankind has been drunk…All great reforms go together‘.[28] The British and Irish stage allowed Douglass the freedom to expand his personal narrative and reflect upon his primary education. That would also become important in his later literary reinventions.

In an 1846 speech, Douglass elaborated on the incident that marked the apparent beginning of his interest in reading. Before a Belfast audience composed mostly of women, he recalled, ‘I remember the first time I ever heard the Bible read, and I tell you the truth when I tell you, that from that time I trace my first desire to learn to read’. Douglass set the scene, recalling, ‘my master had gone out one Sunday night, the children had gone to bed, I had crawled under the centre table and had fallen asleep, when my mistress commenced to read the Bible aloud, so loud that she waked me—she waked me to sleep no more’! [29] The holy reveille Sophia Auld sounded was a reading of first chapter of the Book of Job. Not constrained by the rough-and-tumble world of American abolitionist venues, Douglass could soften his tone and describe moments of domestic tranquility and sentimentality, even if they were bracketed by the threatening presence of a ‘master’ who tried to thwart Douglass’s education by preventing his master’s wife from reading to him further.

The female Belfast audience was sympathetic, but Douglass’s depiction nevertheless emphasised his acquisition of literacy as a function of white middle class domesticity. In presenting this version of his literary heritage, Douglass unwittingly endorsed his critics’ racial views of his literacy. The autobiographical sketch to which the Belfast audience responded would actually cause problems for Douglass’s broader message against racial slavery back in the United States. While Douglass connected his education with religious mystery, critics on the other side of the Atlantic who read his Narrative chose to emphasise Douglass’s white paternity as the source of his literary achievements.

That left Douglass open to the criticism that his white paternity and formative years in a white domestic environment were responsible for his eloquence, which was the inverse of criticisms that he was never a slave because he refused to act like one. It completed the double-bind. In a review for the New York Tribune, perhaps the leading United States newspaper, Margaret Fuller categorised Douglass’s achievement according to racial categories then in wide use. His Narrative, she wrote, ‘is an excellent piece of writing, and on that score to be prized as a specimen of the powers of the Black Race, which Prejudice persists in disputing’.[30] Fuller, leading female intellectual, former editor of the transcendentalist journal the Dial and literary critic for the New York Tribune, reviewed Narrative as a work of literature produced by a man of both African and European ancestry. While praising Douglass as ‘an excellent speaker’, she aligned his rhetorical style with his writing strategy. In Narrative, she maintained, ‘he has put into the story of his life the thoughts, the feelings and the adventures that have been so affecting through the living voice; nor are they less so from the printed page’. She noticed that the text resembled the author’s speaking style, but she devoted most of the review to discussing Douglass’s achievements as a man of mixed race. Fuller contended that if the ‘African Race’ could be ‘assimilated’ with people of European ancestry, the resulting race ‘would give to genius a development, and to the energies of character a balance and harmony beyond what has been seen heretofore in the history of the world’. Fuller’s praise amounted to crediting Douglass’s white paternity with his erudition and his African ancestry with his ‘energies of character’.[31]

Fuller’s review of Douglass’s Narrative reflected ‘romantic racialism’, which ‘simply endorsed the “child” stereotype of the most sentimental school of proslavery paternalists and plantation romancers and then rejected slavery itself because it took unfair advantage of the [African or African American’s] innocence and good nature’.[32] Fuller was neither an abolitionist nor an antislavery activist, but she did maintain a close friendship with author and antislavery activist Lydia Marie Child, sometime editor of the New York National Anti-Slavery Standard. Child was perhaps the first author to develop the literary device later termed the ‘tragic mulatto’ in her 1842 short story ‘The Quadroons’.[33] The ‘tragic mulatto’ faced an internal struggle between competing racially-determined attributes, which gave rise to personal pathologies. While as-yet not fully developed, Fuller represented a northern white middle class audience who shared that orientation, and she believed that racial inheritance determined physical and spiritual attributes and, therefore, talents.[34] Whatever problems Fuller’s criticism posed in the U.S., Douglass decided to self-consciously play up his African heritage in Ireland. His initial strategy of highlighting his Anglo-American paternity had been less successful than he had anticipated. Instead, he took pains to emphasise his blackness. To his friend Francis Jackson, Douglass wrote, ‘I am hardly black enough for British taste, but by keeping my hair as wooly as possible I make out to pass for at least half a Negro at any rate’.[35]

Douglass returned, in 1847, to an organizational role that he had outgrown and the perils of being viewed in terms of a biracial author with colliding backgrounds. In Great Britain he had been received as an American emissary, but when he returned Douglass did not want to play the ‘slave turned man’ for Garrison and an increasingly fractious Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass inaugurated his own newspaper in Rochester, New York, and stirred up controversy through independent public speaking. After the passage of the Compromise of 1850, he began a period of intense political activities in which he modified his communications strategy in order to reach as broad an audience as possible. Although political and social currents were not favourable to the antislavery or abolitionist causes, Douglass’s family fortunes rose as a result of his success as an editor. In 1850 the U.S. Census listed his household wealth at $6,000 (about £60,000 or $120,000 today).[36]

In early 1850s, when the antislavery movement was faced with having to decide how to resist implementation of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1851, Douglass became more earnest in his denunciations of slavery and decided that merely arguing in behalf of slaves’ humanity was no longer a viable option. That move also freed him from having to use his autobiography as the main means of conveying his sense of the injustice of slavery. His Narrative was not published in the United States after 1849. It remained out of print on both sides of the Atlantic between 1852 and 1960.[37] Douglass expanded his denunciations to include his erstwhile sponsors during a time of increasing tensions within the antislavery movement and throughout the country. According to Lisa Brawley, ‘thus Douglass broke with Garrison in 1851 and began to advocate a notion of political abolitionism that both took up the antislavery legal theory of [abolitionists] Gerrit Smith and William Goodell, and extended their thinking in central ways’.[38] As his thinking evolved, his editorial career blossomed, and his oratory matured; however, issues of ‘race’ took on a greater urgency.

As new legal measures strengthened and extended slavery in the United States, new currents in social thought legitimated older forms of racism. The political crises of the 1850s were inauspicious for Douglass’s cause, and the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly and the rise of the American School of Ethnography in the first half of the decade of the 1850s gave new literary force and scientific underpinnings to racial attitudes which tended to undermine Douglass’s authenticity and message. The American School of Ethnography gave racism the imprimatur of scientific investigation, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin ‘was the classic expression of romantic racialism’.[39] Stowe began the work with by characterizing slavery in explicitly racial terms, arguing that African American slaves were descendents of ‘an exotic race, whose ancestors, born beneath a tropic sun’, who ‘brought with them, and perpetuated to their descendents, a character so essentially unlike the hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race, for many years to have won from it only misunderstanding and contempt’.[40] Stowe’s racial denominations appeased her mostly white, middle class, and female audience’s racial conceits and dramatically reinforced the kinds of thinking that made Douglass’s white paternity and black maternity a double bind in terms of how he represented himself to his audiences. He did not reject the book because of the way it reflected popular racial prejudices. He ‘appreciated’ it, argues Gregg D. Crane, however, ‘despite its colonization theme, for the way its searing images galvanised antislavery feeling in the North’.[41] Stowe’s racial premises resulted in a racially bifurcated final solution: people of African descent should somehow be removed to Africa.

In 1854, two years after Uncle Tom’s Cabin‘s meteoric success as a novel, the attitudes it help to popularise received scientific endorsement in a compendium titled, The Types of Mankind. Edited by George R. Glidden and Josiah C. Nott, who claimed to practice ‘niggerology’, the book contained an essay by Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz applying his natural theory that human beings were distributed all over the world in ‘zoological provinces’, just like crocodiles and finches, which proffered scientific support for inherent differences among people with different skin colours. It also had the effect of endorsing Stowe’s racial denominations using scientific theory rather than gothic imagery.[42] In Stowe’s fiction, the farther Uncle Tom travels south the more degraded the morals and the landscape of American society; in Agassiz’s view, different climates produced different types of human beings and Africans were a separate race. ‘Stowe’s gothic settings provide a backdrop’, according to Brawley, ‘for the more virulent theories of racial difference for which climatic differences marked not romanticised difference but innate inferiority. Scientific racisms began to assert that the Anglo-Saxon and African were wholly different species’.[43]

While Douglass worked on an autobiographical response to Stowe’s fiction, he directly confronted the scientific racism supported by Agassiz and proslavery apologists like Nott.[44] Douglass’s 1854 commencement week address at Western Reserve College in Ohio, ‘Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’, answered critics who attributed to African Americans inherently inferior racial characteristics. Ironically, the speech in which he most earnestly refuted racist claims concerning natural abilities was also the one in which he jettisoned all traces of the humour and improvisation that had served him so well on the abolitionist stage in the 1840s. He left no room for parody, pathos, or spontaneity; no ironic positioning of himself to his audience. Douglass argued that ‘scientific’ arguments for the ‘positive good’ school of proslavery apologetics were the result of faulty reasoning and immoral science. The African American as an American shared both a past and a future with his white neighbour, Douglass concluded, and the sooner that inevitable conclusion were accepted, the sooner necessary—and sweeping—social reform could take place.[45]

Douglass’s ‘Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’ and the revision of his Narrative into My Bondage and My Freedom (1855; henceforth Bondage and Freedom) were both intended, in part, to refute the scientific racism of the American School of Ethnography and, in a similar vein, his critics’ assessments of his literary skills.[46] Bondage and Freedom recast his mother as a literate protector of her young son. Harriet Bailey, a field slave, reappears as a devoted protector of her young son, in contrast to the ghostly presence who visited her son only fleetingly and at night in Narrative. Stowe had actually used the pathos of Douglass’s relationship with his mother in her fiction.

In rewriting the character of his mother, Douglass revised both his own and Stowe’s adaptation of Harriet Bailey from the Narrative. In doing so, ‘Douglass manipulated the sentimental conventions’, of literature, Sarah Meer argues, ‘to forge an anti-slavery argument that did not require a white mediator, or expressions of surprise that black people cold feel familial love as passionately as did white’.[47] In her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, (1854) Stowe seized upon Douglass’s characterizations of his mother in Narrative and elaborated its significance in terms of how slavery constrained motherhood. She denounced slavery in Maryland for what it did to mothers, who—according to Douglass—were hired out at a distance from their children in order to blunt any affection between mother and child. After sketching the relationship of Harriet Bailey and her son, Stowe implored her audience, ‘Now, we ask the highest-born lady in England or America, who is a mother, whether this does not show that this poor field-labourer had in her bosom, beneath her dirt and rags, a true mother’s heart’? [48] That powerful evocation of sentimental motherhood struck the right literary notes for Douglass, but he was wary of treating a slave mother—his mother—as merely an example of injured humanity. He had good reason to be suspicious of what such a characterization might imply.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, each slave who shows industry and the drive to escape, George and Eliza Harris, in particular, have Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins. Stowe had based George Harris’s character on Douglass.[49] Stowe’s fiction and the American School of Ethnology’s racial typology were two sides of the same coin, so Douglass had to be careful when adapting Stowe’s sentimental style, which constructed people like Douglass as a collision between an ‘exotic race’, which by the theory of ‘zoological provinces’ was inherently bereft of critical abilities yet possessed a childlike nobility of character on account of African climate, and the ‘hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon’, which bore the burdens of civilization because of its strategic northern geography. In adapting Stowe’s style to events in his own life, Douglass had to refute the racial underpinnings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as he had in his ‘Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’, yet do so artfully. In other words, to be effective in countering Stowe’s contentions, he had to texture a portrait of his mother while at the same time reversing the racial categories that made her a submissive victim of slavery and her son a virtual orphan.

Douglass accomplished that by rewriting his mother as an erudite, compassionate, and inspirational teacher and parent, endowing her with the qualities his critics imputed to his white paternity. The 1855 autobiography re-narrates his life as a slave, expanding details of the Narrative and giving arguments and denunciations. In his Narrative, Douglass recalled how he took his mother’s death. ‘Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care’, he wrote in 1845, ‘I received tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger’.[50] Rhetorically, the sentimental bond of religious learning he had attributed in an 1846 speech in Belfast to Sophia Auld, wife of his second owner, had taken the place of his mother’s. Not only did he owe his eloquence to white paternity, in that reading of his formative experience, but he owed his literary beginnings to a surrogate white mother. In Bondage and Freedom, by contrast, Harriet Bailey appears as a beloved mother and Douglass laments being barred from attending to her in her final hours. ‘It has been a life-long, standing grief to me’, he wrote, ‘that I knew so little of my mother; and that I was so early separated from her. The counsels of her love must have been beneficial to me. The side view of her face is imaged on my memory, and I take few steps in life, without feeling her presence; but the image is mute, and I have no striking words of her’s treasured up’.[51] Douglass’s words evoke a sentimental bond hardly hinted at ten years earlier. He channels Stowe’s sentimental lament but does not leave his mother as a helpless victim—an Aunt Chloe.

In Bondage and Freedom, Douglass’s revision of Harriet Bailey and her relationship to her child were counterarguments to assessments by Stowe, Fuller, and other critics. In solemn tones, he ‘fondly and proudly’ credited his mother with ‘an earnest love of knowledge’, and marveled that ‘a “field hand” should learn to read, in any slave state’, was ‘remarkable’. ‘The achievement of my mother’, he continued, ‘considering the place, was very extraordinary; and, in view of that fact, I am quite willing, and even happy, to attribute any love of letters I possess, and for which I have got—despite of prejudices—only too much credit, not to my admitted Anglo-Saxon paternity, but to the native genius of my sable, unprotected, and uncultivated mother—a woman, who belonged to a race whose mental endowment it is, at present, fashionable to hold in disparagement and contempt’.[52] That was Douglass’s most strident response to Fuller, Stowe, and the ‘science’ of race to which they lent legitimacy through literary expression.

Douglass countered Stowe where she was most persuasive. Instead of the author’s muscular masculinity in the foreground of his criticisms, he places a dark-skinned and vulnerable woman, whom he has endowed with exceptional critical powers. In doing so, he grips the audience emotionally, which is evocative of Stowe’s style, while he refutes popular racial assumptions. That passage reflects a broader literary strategy in which Harriet Bailey’s literary attainment points beyond her relationship with her son. Meer contends that ‘the narrative shift from the 1845 autobiography was not wholeheartedly sentimental, nor did it only confirm Stowe’s domestic ideal…he negotiated the expectations of the white Northern readers who had bought Uncle Tom’s Cabin in such droves, but he also pointed to experiences and relationships for which the sentimental idiom could provide “no adequate expression”‘.[53] Those experiences and relationships point to a larger slave community, which confounded the northern middle class domestic ideal, reflected in Stowe’s fiction, of a nuclear family.

Meer’s reading of Bondage and Freedom in that regard is also supported by evidence that Douglass may not have been merely fabricating a new literary persona for his mother. Harriet Lucretia Anthony, granddaughter of Aaron Anthony, Douglass’s first owner, annotated a copy of Bondage and Freedom, which survives. In the margin beside the passage above, Harriet Anthony wrote, ‘many of my father’s [i.e. Andrew Anthony’s] slaves could read. They were proud of the fact that they could read the bible‘.[54] She was unimpressed with Douglass’s contention that his mother was literate. The claim bears investigation.

Among Douglass’s enslaved relatives on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, reading probably meant an aural understanding of the Bible. His early exposure to literacy may have been part of a family tradition. Neither Douglass nor Harriet Anthony elaborated on the context in which slaves read or whether there was a consensus among slaveholders on whether reading was a dangerous activity. Harriet Anthony’s understanding of the reading habits of slaves on her father’s estate emphasised one particular text. Bible-reading in the context of a slave community was probably different than Douglass’s encounters with Sophia Auld’s solitary Bible reading (Auld read aloud when her husband was absent). Douglass’s mother would probably have read the Bible as a communal exercise and may have been catechised before an antebellum generation saw how some black preachers like Nat Turner used biblical literacy for revolutionary ends. An extended kinship network centered on the Edward Lloyd plantation had grown up largely intact since the late seventeenth century, and the Bailey family had been on the Eastern Shore at least since the early eighteenth century.[55] The fact that the Baileys were an established family may have resulted in reading practices that became intergenerational traditions or respect for literacy that reflected an enthusiasm for sacred texts. Scholars have speculated that Douglass may have had Muslim ancestors, which may account for patterns of literacy that survived the transition from Islamic texts to the Christian Bible—and the Middle Passage.[56] Growing up in a family with aural literacy many generations deep may have even partially prepared Frederick Douglass for his speaking career.

Douglass worked himself out of the double-bind of being cast as a prototypical ‘tragic mulatto’ by recasting his African-descended mother as his true literary benefactor. That answer to critics who attributed his intelligence and eloquence to white paternity complemented his denunciations of scientific racism from reason, history, and ‘ethnology’. In the 1850s, confronting racial categories grew more urgent since both popular fiction and new science reinforced and expanded categories imputing inherent inferiorities to blacks. Stowe’s influential style, and the ideas to which it gave expression, raised the stakes for Douglass’s legitimacy. Douglass’s literary refutation was hardly overwhelming, but the memory of his mother and her community evoked the deeper family and kinship ties that he had left behind and the aural literacy that his ancestors shared. Confronted with doubts about his authenticity and then suspicions of the ancestral sources of his denunciations of slavery and imputed African inferiority, Douglass used his autobiographical writings as an enduring form of refutation, taking the idiom of sentimental imagery that had been used so effectively to cement prejudice and replacing an anonymous white father with his articulate black mother.

Arizona State University

Notes

[1] Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855), p. 362.

[2] Lisa Brawley, ‘Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and the Fugitive Tourist Industry’, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 30.1 (Autumn 1996), 98-128 (p. 98).

[3] Herald of Freedom 3 December 1841, cited in Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 24.

[4] William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 17.

[5] Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), introduction.

[6] McFeely, p. 31.

[7] Douglass, Bondage and Freedom, pp. 360-1.

[8] David Grimsted, American Mobbing: 1828-1861 (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 34; see n. 49.

[9] Grimsted, pp. 34, 35; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978), p. 29; Leonard L. Richards, Gentlemen of Property and Standing (New York & London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 49-54, 161-163.

[10] Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Douglass: Autobiographies (New York: Library of America), pp. 1083-1094.

[11] Joseph F. Kett, ‘A Class Act: Collegiate Competition in American Society’, in A Faithful Mirror: Reflections on the College Board and Education in America, ed. by Michael C. Johanek (New York: College Board, 2001), pp. 117-118.

[12] The Liberator, 18 February 1842; the report of Douglass’s speech in Representatives Hall was reprinted from the Concord, New Hampshire Herald of Freedom, 11 February 1842. That report was taken from the Lynn Record. Since I use the text of the article reprinted in The Liberator, I shall use that citation lest it was unfaithfully reprinted from the other two newspapers.

[13] The Liberator, 18 February 1842. The reference to a Roman hero is as obscure today as was common then: ‘Coriolanus, Gnaeus Marcius…was probably the eponymous hero or god of the Volscian town Corioli, from the capture of which he was reputed to have won his cognomen‘ (N. G. L. Hammond, ed., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 290-291).

[14] The Liberator, 18 February 1842.

[15] Gaile McGregor, The Noble Savage in the New World Garden (New York: Popular Press, 1988), p. 166, passim.

[16] McFeely, p. 94.

[17] Herald of Freedom, 11 February 1842; cited in Gregory Lampe, Frederick Douglass: Freedom’s Voice, 1818-1845 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), pp. 103-4.

[18] The Liberator, ibid.

[19] Douglass, Bondage and Freedom, p. 362.

[20] Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford, ‘Triumphant Exile: Frederick Douglass in Britain, 1845-1847’, in Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass & Transatlantic Reform, ed. by Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1999), p. 3.

[21] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself, 3rd English Ed. (Wortley: Joseph Baker, 1846); Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia.

[22] Fionnghuala Sweeney, ‘”The Republic of Letters”: Frederick Douglass, Ireland, and the Irish Narratives’, Éire-Ireland 36.1-2 (2001), 123-139 (p. 50).

[23] Sweeney, ‘”The Republic of Letters”‘, p. 65.

[24] Patricia Ferreira, ‘Frederick Douglass in Ireland: the Dublin Edition of his Narrative’, New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 5.1 (Spring / Earrach 2001), 53-67 (p. 56); McFeeley, pp. 121, 130, 145.

[25] Fionnghuala Sweeney, ‘Domestic Institutions: Transatlantic Gender Politics and Economic Power in Frederick Douglass’ Variant Narratives’, Slavery & Abolition 23.3 (December 2002), 59-72 (p. 62).

[26] Douglass used Theodore Dwight Weld’s American Slavery As It Is, Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti–Slavery Society, 1839) in his 22 May 1846 address at Finsbury Chapel, London. See Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series I., Vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp.269, 270, 279.

[27] Sweeney, ‘Domestic Institutions’, p. 60.

[28] Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series I., Vol. 1, p. 58.

[29] Ibid., p. 127.

[30] New York Tribune, 10 June 1845; cited in Blassingame, ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series II., Vol. 1, p. 175.

[31] New York Tribune, 10 June 1845; cited in ibid., p. 175.

[32] George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 102.

[33] Lydia Marie Child, ‘The Quadroons’ (1842), The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women’s Writings, ed. by Glynis Carr. Available at URL: <http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/gcarr/19cUSWW/LB/Q.html> [accessed 2nd November, 2008].

[34] Joan von Mehren, Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 116-9; Belle Gale Chevigny, The Woman and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writings (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1994), p. 340.

[35] Douglass to Jackson, Royal Hotel, Dundee, Scotland, 29 January, 1846; Boston Antislavery Collection, MsA.1.2 v16, 13, cited in Sweeney, ‘Domestic Institutions’, p. 62.

[36] Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1850), M432, 1,009 rolls. Census Place: Rochester Ward 7, Monroe, New York; Roll: M432_531; Page: 318; Image: 188. Available at URL: <www.ancestry.com> [accessed 28th January, 2007].

[37] The final British publication was in 1852. Narrative was not published again until the Belknap Press of Harvard University published it in the John Harvard series in 1960.

[38] Brawley, p. 102.

[39] Fredrickson, p. 110.

[40] Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Minister’s Wooing, Oldtown Folks (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 9.

[41] Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 57.

[42] Fredrickson, p. 137; Brawley, pp. 103-104. Agassiz had been a proponent of the idea at least since his arrival in the U.S. from Switzerland 1846, but the idea that Africans were a separate species received increased attention in the 1850s when defenders of American slavery searched for new ways to defend it as a positive good. On Agassiz and Nott, see Drew Gilpin Faust, A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840-1860 (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 122-126, 180.

[43] Brawley, p. 103.

[44] Frederick Douglass’s ‘The Heroic Slave’ (1853) was also influenced by Stowe’s style; see Richard Yarborough, ‘Race, Violence, and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave”‘, in Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, ed. by Anne Jones and Susan Donaldson (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1997), pp. 159-84. For an assessment of ‘The Heroic Slave’ and Douglass’s view of nationalism, see Ivy G. Wilson, ‘On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and “The Heroic Slave”‘ PMLA 121.2 (March 2006), 453–468.

[45] Frederick Douglass, ‘Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered’ (Rochester: Lee, Mann & Co., 1854).

[46] See Michael A. Chaney, ‘Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as Auto(bio)ethnography’, African American Review 35.3 (2001), 391-408.

[47] Sarah Meer, ‘Sentimentality and the Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass’ My Bondage and My Freedom‘, in The Uses of Autobiography: Feminist Perspectives on the Past and Present, ed. by Julia Swindells (London and Bristol, PA: Taylor and Francis, 1995) p. 95.

[48] Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston, MA: Jewett, 1854), p. 24.

[49] ‘With regard to the intelligence of George, and his teaching himself to read and write, there is a most interesting and affecting parallel to it in the “Life of Frederick Douglass”—a book which can be recommended to anyone who has a curiosity to trace the workings of an intelligent and active mind through all the squalid misery, degradation and oppression, of slavery’. Ibid.

[50] Douglass, Narrative, p. 25

[51] Douglass, Bondage and Freedom, p. 57.

[52] Ibid., p. 58.

[53] Meer, pp. 94, 95.

[54] That annotation appears on page fifty-eight of Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855, New York edition), Mary A. Doder Collection, MSA SC 564 Maryland State Archives, Annapolis. Emphasis in the original.

[55] Douglass’s great-great grandfather Baly was born around 1701 and was still alive in 1781; see Gates, p. 1049.

[56] For an expanded discussion of this topic, see Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 76-81; and Michael A. Gomez, ‘Muslims in Early America’, Journal of Southern History 40.4 (1994), 671-710.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 13, Autumn 2008

Inter-ethnic Encounters in Late-Twentieth Century Urban America: Portrayals of Italian American Ethnicity in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing

Francesca De Lucia
© Francesca De Lucia. All Rights Reserved

The aim of this article is to investigate how Spike Lee, as an African American film director, interprets the evolution of Italian Americans as an ethnic group in the late twentieth century, a group that holds an ambivalent status in the racial hierarchy of the United States, having been historically considered an inferior ‘brand’ of whiteness in the past but presently being absorbed into a broader white mainstream. In particular, Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989) (and his subsequent Jungle Fever (1991)) focuses not only on the racial aspect of modern Italian American identity, but also on a portrayal of the decadence of the key Italian American values in a world removed from immigrant origins. I will place a particular emphasis on Lee’s representation of Italian American discourses of race, as well as on the way in which Italian American characters interact with African Americans. Indeed, Lee emphasizes not only the theme of interethnic conflict, placing in the background of Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever two notorious hate crimes of the late 1980s (which will be subsequently described in more depth), but also more ambivalent and potentially more positive exchanges. The key element emerging from Lee’s representation of late twentieth-century Italian American identity is a sense of continuity in between Italian American and African American communities. This is rooted in a common experience of marginality in impoverished inner city neighbourhoods as well as in echoes of cultural similarities, which are also based on a geographic and historical link between Southern Italy and certain parts of Africa.

While Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever were generally praised by critics, Lee’ African American and Italian American detractors have claimed that Lee portrays their respective groups in very reductive or derogatory terms. Hence, for instance, Amiri Baraka argues that Do the Right Thing depicts unilateral black characters and trivializes the racial violence that prompted vicious hate crimes in the 1980s, such as the Howard Beach and Bensonhurst murders ( Interestingly, Baraka ignores the Italian American identity of the Frangioni family, considering them as part of a dominant white bourgeoisie). On the other hand, the Italian American academic Angelo Mazzocco has sharply attacked the treatment of characters of Italian descent in Jungle Fever as being composed of a string of negative stereotypes that contrast with an idealized view of African Americans. Both these interpretations appear flawed, however, since Baraka misreads the ambivalent white identity of the Frangioni family and Mazzocco neglects to observe that, while the black characters of Jungle Fever are indeed more established and productive than the Italian American ones, they are often portrayed in a rather harsh light, as shallow and hypocritical individuals. As will be subsequently elaborated, ethnic stereotypes of various forms are indeed brought up in Lee’s films, but they underpin a deeper discourse on interethnic relationships, whether based on clashing or more harmonious interaction. It is significant for various reasons that, in both Do the Right Thing and Jungle Fever, the Caucasian characters staged by Lee are of Italian descent; not only because Italian Americans have held a peculiar position within the racial hierarchy of the United States, as becomes evident through a brief analysis of their history, but also because as a group they have interacted and often clashed with blacks while cohabiting in the same inner-city neighbourhoods. In fact, as a prominent and successful black director, Lee has been identified as a ‘cultural mulatto’ by Trey Ellis and James C. McKelly. Ellis defines this category as consisting of African American individuals who have grown and have been educated in predominantly white social environments. Ellis observes that:

Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world…[Cultural mulattoes] no longer need to deny or suppress any part of our complicated and sometimes contradictory cultural baggage to please either white people or black.[1]

This situation is reflected in much of Lee’s work that deals with interracial relations. It is relevant to observe that Lee grew up in a predominantly Italian American neighbourhood of Brooklyn, which is one of the various factors that might have prompted him to focus on members of this specific group as a foil for his African American characters.

I will focus on Do the Right Thing, which offers a more complex treatment of relations between African Americans and Italian Americans than Jungle Fever. In order to analyze Italian American ethnicity in Do the Right Thing, I will borrow from the definition of contemporary ethnicity established by Michael Fischer, according to whom ethnicity is not transmitted mechanically from one generation to the other, but rather, that is fluid and that can take various different forms, being re-elaborated through time. He also points out that ethnicity is closely linked to memory, and therefore can re-emerge in uncontrolled and sometimes startling ways. Hence Fischer writes that:

[E]thinicity is something reinvented and reinterpreted in each generation by each individual and that it is often something quite puzzling to the individual, something over which he or she lacks control. Ethnicity is not something that is simply passed on from on from generation to generation, taught and learned, it is something dynamic, often unsuccessfully repressed or avoided.[2]

In this context, Do the Right Thing presents disparate aspects of Italian American identity by evoking characters of Italian descent belonging to different generations. Lee’s Italian American characters struggle to find a position in America’s increasingly hybrid society. As they distance themselves from immigrant origins, and come into contact with less-established coloured groups, they create new versions of the ethnic self. As I will subsequently discuss in greater detail, in Do the Right Thing Italian American ethnicity is expressed in multiple different ways by the triad of male characters constituting the Frangioni family. Moreover, the possibility of the development of a new form of ethnicity bridging Italian American and African American cultures is suggested by the somewhat symmetrical figures of Pino (John Turturro) and Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), being eventually unrealized because of these two characters’ aggression and lack of expressive means.

Before elaborating a close analysis of Do the Right Thing I will presently go on to determine the historical and cultural background of this film describing the evolution of Italian American ethnicity and the development of the interaction between Italian and African American communities.

The Racial Shift in Italian American History

When Italians first began to settle in the United States in the context of the mass migration from Eastern and Southern Europe that took place between 1880 and 1920, they were one of the groups to undergo the harshest forms of discrimination. Indeed, they were labelled as being unassimilable, lazy and crime-prone and, within the social Darwinist trend of the early twentieth century, their whiteness was put into question, as they were considered inferior to groups of Northern European descent. As observed by Salvatore LaGumina:

An examination of anti-Italianism in American history is instructive because it reveals that Italian in America were subject to some of the most scurrilous campaigns ever directed against any immigrant group…Italians earned a low score of acceptability, not only when compared to immigrants from North western Europe, but even when evaluated against other latecomers of the post-Civil War migration.[3]

However, at the same time, it is significant to observe that Italian immigrants were considered not so much as non-white, but as belonging to an inferior brand of whites, which put them in a favoured position in comparison to that of groups of non-European descent and in particular African Americans. Moreover, the perception of race in the United States would alter progressively with the outbreak of the Second World War. Discrimination against white ethnics became less acceptable as Americans wished to distance themselves from the ideology of Nazi Germany. Furthermore, the outbreak of conflict also favoured a stronger cohesion within American society in the context of a joint and uniform war effort. Military service and work in industrial war plants also led to uprooting from immigrant ghettoes and to intermingling of individuals of disparate backgrounds. In the specific case of Italian Americans, implication in a conflict against Fascist Italy also meant a stronger identification with the United States. More generally, the Second World War also marked the shift to a conflict between whites and blacks, rather than Anglos and European newcomers, especially as racial tensions began to emerge in this period, as signalled by the riots that exploded frequently in military training camps or defence industries. The social and political issues that arose around with African Americans in the war years, and which eventually led to the creation of the civil rights movement, contributed to the identification of previously racialised European ethnics such as Italians as simply ‘whites’.

The changes brought forth by the war led the situation that Richard D. Alba as defined as the ‘twilight of ethnicity’:

The approach of this twilight may seem deceiving, for when Italians and some other ethnic groups are observed in the aggregate, their features still appear prominent…Properly analyzed, the evidence on behalf of the looming ethnic twilight among Italians appears overwhelming. Despite the widely accepted image of an intense, family-centred Italian American culture, the group’s cultural distinctiveness has paled to a feebler version of its former self.[4]

To a certain extent, Americans of Italian descent have undergone a process of strong integration in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first, and are fairly prominent in many areas of the nation’s society, in particular politics and the entertainment industry.

At the same time, along with the other Southern and Eastern European groups, Italian Americans have retained a position of partial marginality, especially in terms of cultural representations. Even though the aggressive forms of nativism of the early twentieth century are no longer acceptable since the Second World War, Italian Americans continue to be stereotyped as crime-prone and violent, as the image of the Mafioso remains to the present day one of the most frequent popular portrayals of the group, exemplified by novels, films and television series such as The Godfather, Prizzi’s Honour and The Sopranos. Moreover, the stronger emphasis on racial conflicts and the introduction of coloured groups in traditional immigrant quarters has drawn attention to the alleged bigotry of the descendants of the 1880-1920 immigrants. This situation is summarized thus by Joseph M. Comforti:

For a long time the ‘typical’ white racist had been a ‘redneck’, a poor White Anglo Saxon Protestant living in the rural South. While the southern redneck had not wholly disappeared as a stereotypical racist, the old stereotype had been supplanted by a new stereotype, the ‘ethnic’, a white person living in the urban North whose ancestry was manifest and readily identified through the spelling of his or her name.[5]

Certain incidents of the 1970s and the 1980s, such as hate crimes against blacks that took place in predominantly Italian American neighbourhoods meant that this new form of ethnic stereotype touched Italian Americans more directly.

The Relationship between African Americans and Italian Americans

While in the early twentieth century a nativist perspective considered Italian immigrants racially inferior because of their Southern European background, in more recent years Italian Americans (and to a lesser extent, other Southern and Eastern European groups) became labelled as narrow-minded and aggressive racists.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Italian Americans were not the only group that was accused of racism against minorities of colour, but the clashes that developed between Italian and African American communities were rendered more evident because of a few notorious incidents. Tensions involving blacks and Italian Americans had already began to emerge in the pre-war decades, as exemplified most clearly by the riots related to Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, which broke out for instance in New York and Chicago in October of that year, as indicated in Italian Americans by Luciano J. Iorizzo and Salvatore Mondello . However, on this occasion the political object of the contention obscured any deeper underlying discrepancy that might have existed between the two groups. On the other hand, in the later part of the twentieth century, the cohabitation of Americans of Italian and African descent in metropolitan areas, especially in Greater New York, led to various episodes of friction and intolerance, the most violent of which are the Howard Beach and Bensonhurst hate crimes that took place respectively in 1986 and 1989. Both incidents involved young black men who were viciously attacked and killed after they had entered predominantly Italian American neighbourhoods.

The causes of this prolonged situation of conflict are manifold, and, as suggested by Comforti, they can be located in the complex shifts of ethnic hierarchies as well as the changing pattern of settlement of different groups within urban regions. Moreover, the expression of prejudice against blacks may be seen as part of the assimilation process itself: ‘[Italian Americans] were expected by those ethnic groups who came before them to assimilate, become American, and in a racist society that includes learning who it is appropriate to hate’.[6] Nevertheless, in the collective imagination the main reason for this new form of racial clash was attributed almost exclusively to innate bigotry on the part of Italian Americans. The relationship between Italian Americans and African Americans is, however, more complex and not limited to brutal confrontation. Its cultural representation as staged in Lee’s Do the Right Thing offers an illustration of the late twentieth-century perception of Italian American identity, suspended between assimilation and a lingering sense of marginalization.

The echoes of the Howard Beach and Bensonhurst murders are clearly present in Lee’s films with Italian American themes: the former incident served as the inspiration for Do the Right Thing and is mentioned directly in the key scene of the film, during the attack of Sal’s pizzeria. At the same time, the use of Italian American characters allows Lee to broaden the ethnic spectrum of his work, focussing not only on New York’s marginalized black community but also on the predicament of a white minority in an increasingly hybridized and multiracial social context. He thus concentrates on the characteristics of the Brooklyn Italian community in the late 1980s and early 1990s. According to Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, this group of Italian Americans had the peculiar characteristic of atavistic attachment to the immigrant enclave, and consequently did not participate in the white ethnic diaspora of the post-war years:

I often think that one important difference between Italian Americans in neighbourhoods like Bensonhurst and Italian Americans elsewhere is that others moved on—to upstate New York, to Pennsylvania, to the Midwest. Though they settled in communities of fellow Italians, they moved on. Bensonhurst Italian Americans seem to have felt that one move, over the ocean, was enough…Bensonhurst was for many of these people the summa of expectations.[7]

Thomas Ferraro has also pointed out that Lee has grasped accurately the malaise of those groups of Italian Americans who did not assimilate and adapt to a suburban middle-class lifestyle:

By the 1970s Italian Americans in the outer belts of the inner cities were starting to feel abandoned—by the economy heading South, by race-based legislation and by the ambitious among them becoming educated and leaving blue-collar enclaves behind…feeling desperate,[they] latched onto the combination of territorial pride and[emphasis in the original] white righteousness at work in certain strands of new ethnic consciousness…It was in this ugly mix of frustrated longing that Michael Griffith[the victim of the Howard Beach killing], Yusuf Hawkins and their friends in the mid-to-late 1980s walked. Perhaps no artist or thinker not born in it has taken this aspect of Italian America more seriously than the contemporary film maker Spike Lee.[8]

Hence in Do the Right Thing Lee focalizes on a particular brand of Italian American identity that emerged in the late twentieth century, related to the part of the group who did not succeed in taking part in the process of upwards mobility and diaspora to the suburbs that occurred in the post-war decades and consequently had to cohabit with less-established, non-white groups. In Do the Right Thing, Lee explores this part of the crisis experienced by part of Italian America.

The Deconstruction of Italian American Identity in Do the Right Thing

As incarnated by the Frangioni family and by Pino in particular, the portrayal of Italian Americans in Do the Right Thing may appear at first reductive and demeaning, but it is in fact more complex. Indeed, the film juxtaposes the stereotype of the Italian American racist with some of the most rooted clichés concerning non-white groups, as Mookie (played by Spike Lee) exemplifies the traits of laziness, irresponsibility and lack of ambition stereotypically attributed to African American men; most of the other black or Latino characters display a tendency to idleness and violence, since productive activities are left to the Frangionis or to the newly arrived Korean shopkeeper, who will defend himself by claiming a black identity in broken English after the vandalism of Sal’s pizzeria (possibly thus referring indirectly to the existence of African American violence on Korean businesses in the context of racial riots).

Nevertheless, Lee’s description of ethnic clashes as well as of the redefinition of Italian American identity is not limited to the combination of different sorts of stereotypes. Indeed, Lee’s role as ‘cultural mulatto’ and as a kind of go-between mediating between the culture of African American and that of whites is reflected significantly in the character he plays, since Mookie functions has a sort of mediator between his Italian American employers and the clients of the pizzeria, who are almost exclusively members of coloured minorities. This is already a signal of the film’s ambivalent view towards issues related to the clashes or dialogue between different ethnic groups. Moreover, the familial triangle formed by the three Frangioni men reflects the protean new ethnicity defined by Fischer. Hence, the father figure remains attached to the echoes of a mythical immigrant-era past, whereas Pino expresses an inarticulate form of Italian American ethnicity oscillating in between adherence to white supremacism and the emergence of a buried Mediterranean identity which would point out to a sense of commonality with the African Americans Brooklynites whom he claims to despise. Finally, the younger brother Vito’s ethnicity is coded in terms of a sense of familial oppression as he is unable to escape from Pino’s domination.

The representation of Italian Americans in Do the Right Thing invokes several of the group’s founding myths, suggesting nevertheless that they are losing meaning within a community in crisis. The first crucial Italian American trope that Lee introduces early on is that of the family, as the pizzeria that will be a pivotal location of the narrative is ran by Sal (Danny Aiello) and his two sons. This could imply that, according to the myth popularized by The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972), the Frangionis have achieved success in the United States by merging the traditional archaic familial structure and American business techniques. At one point, Sal himself extols the advantages of family enterprises, but like most of his other boasts this seems illusory. Since the Frangionis’ first appearance, it is indicated that they have lost the cohesiveness and mutual solidarity of the immigrant familial structure, retaining only its more negative aspects such as hierarchical and stifling intergenerational relationships. This is visible in Pino’s open resentment of his work and his constant bullying of his younger brother Vito (Richard Edson). Moreover, as pointed out by Susan Fraiman in her article: ‘Geometries of Race: Eve Sedgwick, Spike Lee, Charlayne Hunter-Gault’ (Feminist Studies, Vol. 20, 1994), the familiar structure is extremely essentialised, cutting out female figures and in particular the presence of a mother. With the exception of Sal’s conversation with Mookie’s sister Jade, members of the Frangioni family interact only with other male characters, whether within the family unit or in the wider community. Thus it only in the subsequent Jungle Fever that Lee will investigate the predicament of an Italian American female character.

The legendary image of Italian American familial model as an anti-assimilationist instrument of power is invoked derisively by some of the black characters, who accuse Sal of imagining he is Don Corleone. However, while Lee deconstructs a focal element of Italian American mythology, he puts great emphasis on the motif of the family within the economy of his narrative: Mookie’s disrupted family unit is symmetrical to that constituted by Sal and his sons. As he focuses on the dysfunctional relationships between the Frangionis, Lee parallels the rejection of a positive Italian American cliché with the tendency to familial disaggregation attributed to non-white minorities (Mookie has produced a child out of wedlock and seems little inclined to support financially his girlfriend and son or spend much time with them). The film indirectly dismisses the suggestion, advanced for instance by Richard Gambino, that the main source of conflict between Italian Americans and blacks or Hispanics arises from a discrepancy between family-based and street-oriented mentalities. The theme of the family assumes a bleaker overtone as Sal, who seems little aware of his strained relations both with his children and the wider community, claims that he considers Mookie as a son. Since Mookie is clearly in a subordinate position, Sal is inadvertently invoking the model of the ‘paternalist’ plantation where slaves were supposedly incorporated into the familial structure. In Lee’s perspective, the racial condition of Italian Americans remains hazy, but in this case they are included in America’s traditional white ruling class. This position of superiority is reinforced by Sal’s role as an entrepreneurial figure. As pointed out by James C. McKelly:

In Mookie’s world, Sal, the eponymous owner of the pizzeria, represents the ‘discursive universe’ of American capitalism. He is the embodiment of the white patriarchy to which Mookie must be accountable if he is to be granted a continuing position, trifling as it may seem, in the dominant economic order. As such, Sal functions symbolically as the sole arbiter of the private sector’s social responsibility.[9]

At the same time, however, the narrative underlines Sal’s position of isolation in the neighbourhood. The role of Italian ethnics in rapidly mutating urban environments is also questioned in other ways, which still emphasize the idea of the decadence of New York’s Italian community. According to the model suggested by De Marco Torgovnick, Sal embodies well the typical inhabitant of Bensonhurst because he resists change, even though in this case it would not involve relocating to a more prosperous area, but rather moving his business within an imaginary ethnic border. It is significant that Pino, who so intensely dislikes the atmosphere of the pizzeria, does not yearn to escape beyond the stifling limits of the ethnic ghetto (to ‘cross Ocean Parkway’, in De Marco Torgovnick’s metaphor). Rather, he expresses the desire to retreat further within the remaining Italian American enclave of Bensonhurst, as he feels the increasing presence of coloured minorities in Bedford-Stuyvesant as a threat. Sal and to an even greater extent Pino, who unlike his father denies the possibility of peaceful interracial contacts, contradict the paradigm of the immigrant who is capable of breaking free from roots and adapting to new environments. Thus Lee emphasizes the idea of the community’s stagnation. Moreover, the character of Sal refers to yet another Italian American myth which has lost meaning, when he is shown contemplating the ruins of his pizzeria and exclaiming that he has built it all with his own hands. This scene alludes to the notion of ‘making America’ as well as to the construction activities of Italian immigrants, which are no longer seen in a context of triumph or destructive self-sacrifice. In more general terms, the visual symbols of the decay of Italian ethnic identity are the fading photographs of Italian American celebrities on Sal’s ‘Wall of Fame’, which will become a major object of contention in the film. They are supposed to be tokens of ethnic pride as well as of American success, as indicated by W. T. Mitchell:

The wall is important to Sal not because it displays famous Italians but because they are famous Americans[emphasis in the original] who have made it possible for Italians to think themselves as Americans, fully-fledged members of the public sphere. The wall is important to Buggin’ Out because it signifies exclusion from the public sphere.[10]

However, because of their faded and bland quality, the photographs are chiefly an iconic representation of Sal’s attachment to a revolved era, an idea that is enhanced by Pino’s preference for African American stars. The notion of the decay of Italian American culture is indicated more indirectly through other visual symbols: hence, for instance, a fresco representing the ruins of the Coliseum serves as the background to the scene where Mookie verbally confronts Pino. This may be interpreted as a reference to the persistence of a nostalgic looking back to a now historically remote era of Italian glory, associated with the notion of the ‘buried Caesars’ elaborated by Robert Viscusi as a form of the Italian Americans’ suppressed identification with the legacy of ancient Rome. However, since the imperial monument is actually partially collapsed, it also hints metaphorically at the crumbling of Italian identity in the United States.

As Lee develops the representation of the crisis of working-class Italian American individuals within dissolving traditional ethnic networks, he also questions the shifting racial status of the group. The three Italian personae of Do the Right Thing apparently all correspond to a greater or lesser extent to the stereotype of the white ethnic proletarian as the new racist designated by Comforti. Moreover, they also embody a form of Italian American cliché that emerged in the 1980s, being no longer associated with the combination of threat and admiration inspired by the gangster figure, but rather with the features of vulgarity and narrow-mindedness as well as bigotry. The character of Pino as played by John Turturro adheres most closely to this cliché, both for his frequent expression of prejudice against blacks and his appearance, since for most of the film he sports an undershirt and a thick golden chain. However Lee alludes to the dubious racial label given to Italians in the earlier phase of their history, which makes Pino’s white supremacist perspective ironic. This emerges clearly in Mookie’s only attempt to communicate with him, as he points out to Pino some of the potentially Negroid physical characteristics of Southern Italians and invokes the notion of Southern Italy’s contiguity with Africa. But rather than allowing the possibility of a dialogue between representatives of two groups, the scene serves to underline Pino’s lack of articulation, because he tries to justify his appreciation of African American sportsmen and entertainment figures by claiming that they are not really black. Pino’s complete misunderstanding of his ethnic and racial identity is reiterated in a more subtle way when he warns his brother not to become too close to Mookie, remembering that he is ‘Vito Frangioni and not Vito Muhammad’. Whereas Mookie protests that he has no interest in adopting a Muslim identity, Pino is apparently completely oblivious of Southern Italy’s historical prolonged close contact with the Arab world, which includes the medieval colonization of Sicily, and means that Italian Americans have a more direct link with Islam than African Americans.

Pino’s extremely reduced self-perception is also reiterated in association with a sexual dimension. It has already been observed in this article that in Do the Right Thing the Italian American characters are relegated to a homosocial dimension of interaction. Pino displays the visual signs of a stereotyped Southern Italian arrogant masculinity, but he is surrounded by a sense of sexual ambiguity, rendered explicitly in the scene where he roughhouses Vito in the recess of the pizzeria. Here, his jealousy for Mookie’s friendliness towards Vito as well as his physical attitude towards his younger brother suggests the possibility that Pino might be a repressed homosexual (an idea reinforced by the fact that this scene occurs in closet).

More generally, in constructing the character of Pino, Lee seems to be adhering to Reed’s idea that the hostility of whites of immigrant descent against blacks is caused by the idea that the latter group, whose minority status is physically evident, serves as a symbolic reminder of the past of ethnic marginalization that the descendants of European immigrants tend to repress:

To permit[the descendants of immigrants] to be ‘white’, to liberate themselves from what they regard as the shackles of ethnicity, there has to be ‘blackness’…[Blacks] remind people who are ‘passing’ for Anglos of their immigrant grandfathers…[They]’re like walking examples or emblems of ethnicity.[11]

At the same time, in the economy of the film’s narrative, Pino is placed in a position of symmetry with Buggin’ Out. While these two characters appear to identify in a militant and aggressive ways with their respective ethnic identities, paradoxically they both implicitly hint at the possibility of a more positive intermingling of Brooklyn’s African American and Italian American communities. Indeed, Pino’s admiration for black celebrities and the reminiscence of his remote connection with Africa as an individual of Southern Italian descent are symmetrical to the fact that Buggin’ Out is played by an actor with a hybrid Southern Italian and African American background and the very Neapolitan-sounding name of Giancarlo Esposito. As noted by Pasquale Verdicchio, ‘Esposito’s invisible Italian American side provides a balance to Pino’s suppressed or invisible blackness’.[12] In this context, Buggin’ Out’s complaint concerning the lack of photographs of African Americans on Sal’s ‘wall of fame’ may be interpreted as a clumsy subconscious attempt to create a bridge between the two communities which come together in the pizzeria.

Hence, throughout Do the Right Thing, Lee emphasizes in various ways the ambivalence of the status of Italian Americans within the racial hierarchy of American society, as well as underlining the sense of instability experienced by the members of decaying Italian American communities towards the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, he also alludes at the potential development of a new, hybrid form of ethnic identity based on the interwoven cultures of different minorities, undergoing the process of reinvention suggested by Fischer, but which however struggles to assert itself.

Conclusion

Overall, Lee succeeds in capturing the multicultural mosaic of modern metropolitan America, in which descendants of the 1880-1920 migration wave such as Italian Americans must learn to coexist with the longer-established but more marginalized African Americans or with newly arrived non-European immigrants. Do the Right Thing emphasizes racial clashes and the alleged bigotry of Italian Americans, but also hints at common experiences and the possibility of productive intercultural dialogue. As suggested by Ferraro, Lee’s film displays ‘[an] intuitively brilliant deployment of interethnic [emphasis in the original] common ground: if not quite a universal catholicity still a dyed-in-the-wool Brooklyn urbanity, Italo-African American at the least and perhaps more’. [13] In this way, Lee indirectly refers to a sense of continuity between cultures that might appear to clash. In broader terms, Lee constructs a vivid representation of the society of the inner cities of the United States at the end of the twentieth century, chronicling the rapid evolution of the notions of ethnic and racial identity.

St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Notes

[1] Trey Ellis, ‘The New Black Aesthetic’, Callaloo, 38 (1989), 233-243 (p. 235).

[2] Michael Fischer, ‘Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Art’, in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, (Berkeley: California University Press, 1986), pp. 194-233 (p. 195).

[3] Salvatore LaGumina, ‘Introduction’, in WOP!: A Documentary History of Anti-Italian Discrimination in the United States, ed. by Salvatore LaGumina (San Francisco, CA: Straight Arrow, 1973), pp. 9-19 (p. 11).

[4] Richard D. Alba, ‘The Twilight of Ethnicity Amongst Americans of European Descent: The Case of Italians’, in Ethnicity and Race in the U.S.A., ed. by Richard D. Alba (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), pp. 134-158 (p.152).

[5] Joseph Comforti, ‘WASP in the Woodpile revisited: Italian American-African American Conflict’, in Shades of Black and White: Conflict and Collaboration between Two Communities. Selected Essays from the 30^th Annual Conference of the American Italian Historical Association, ed. by Dan Ashyk, Fred Gardaphé and Anthony Tamburri (New York: AIHA, 1999) pp. 62-97 (p. 62).

[6] Ibid, p. 75.

[7] Marianna De Marco Torgovnick, Crossing Ocean Parkway: Readings by an Italian American Daughter (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), p. 8.

[8] Thomas J. Ferraro, Feeling Italian: The Art of Ethnicity in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 164.

[9] James C. McKelly, ‘The Double Truth, Ruth: Do the Right Thing and the Culture of Ambiguity‘, African American Review 32.2 (1998), 215-227 (p. 220).

[10] W.T. Mitchell, ‘The Violence of Public Art’, in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, ed. By Mark A. Reid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) pp. 107-128 (p. 110).

[11] Ishmael Reed, ‘Is Ethnicity Obsolete?’ in The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. by Werner Sollors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 226-236 (p. 228).

[12] Pasquale Verdicchio, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora, (Madison, NJ: Dickinson University Press, 1997), p. 109.

[13] Ferraro, p. 166.