U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 13, Autumn 2008

The Prophet in Detroit: Fard Muhammad and the Origins of the Nation of Islam

Dawn-Marie Gibson
© Dawn-Marie Gibson. All Rights Reserved

The Nation of Islam (NOI) has been the subject of few scholarly critiques. Published works on the NOI rely heavily on secondary source material and often focus exclusively on Malcolm X or Louis Farrakhan. Moreover, the NOI’s founder, Fard Muhammad, has received little scholarly attention in exiting studies of the NOI. This article seeks to begin to address this deficit.

Fard Muhammad founded the NOI in Detroit in July 1930.[1] His Islamic doctrine borrowed from the Black Nationalist tradition of Marcus Garvey and the pseudo Islamic teachings of Noble Drew Ali. Fard attracted a following of nearly 8,000 in Detroit by 1933. However, at the height of his success, Fard abandoned the NOI, disappearing from Detroit and leaving his followers without a successor. Fard’s NOI has become the longest surviving Islamic cult in the African American community. Fard’s influence on the development of the NOI has been significant, despite the fact that virtually nothing is known or documented about him. Following his mysterious disappearance from Detroit, numerous theories about the true identity and affiliations of the NOI’s founder have been formed. The recent declassification of the FBI’s extensive files on Fard Muhammad and the NOI has reignited debate over the identity of the NOI’s founder. This article will provide an analysis and examination of existing schools of thought on the identity and affiliations of Fard Muhammad and challenge elements of each of the arguments set forth. It will also outline the eclectic philosophy of the NOI’s founder and examine the formative years of his cult, something that has been neglected by scholars.

The Schools of Thought

In 1963 a Nigerian scholar, Essien-Udom, began conducting extensive research on the NOI in Chicago and New York. Essien-Udom’s book, Black Nationalism: A search for Identity in America (1964) posited the first informed theory on the identity and affiliations of Fard Muhammad. Essien-Udom conducted a plethora of both formal and informal interviews with the NOI’s then leader, Elijah Muhammad, and his followers. The interviews that Essien-Udom carried out with NOI converts and Elijah Muhammad enabled him to gain insight into the eclectic religious philosophy of the cult, something that had long eluded outsiders. The fact that Essien-Udom was able to secure interviews with Elijah Muhammad is significant, given that Muhammad traditionally delegated such chores to his National Minister, Malcolm X.[2]

The eclectic amalgam of Black Nationalism and pseudo Islam that the NOI taught convinced Essien-Udom that the NOI’s founder had married the Black Nationalist tradition of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) with the quasi-Islamic teachings of North America’s first Islamic cult, the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) in order to manufacture his own ‘home-cooked’ ideology. The high-regard in which Elijah Muhammad held both Garvey and Ali apparently aided Essien-Udom’s conclusions. In one of many interviews with Elijah Muhammad, he quoted the Islamic leader as having stated that:

I have always had a very high opinion of both the late Noble Drew Ali and Marcus Garvey and admired their courage in helping our people…The followers of Noble drew Ali and Marcus Garvey should now follow me and co-operate with us in our work because we are only trying to finish up what those before us started.[3]

Interview generated research further convinced the Nigerian scholar that the NOI had emerged as a splinter group of the MSTA and that Fard had likely been one of the many members of the MSTA to launch a succession bid when its leader, Noble Drew Ali, died in mysterious circumstances in July 1929.[4]

No published history of the MSTA exists, and with the exception of Arthur Fauset’s, ‘Black Gods of the Metropolis‘ (1974), a study of several sects, including the MSTA, little is known about the cult. In his study of African American Christian and Islamic sects in North America, Fauset provides a short account of the MSTA’s birth and the character of its leader. According to Fauset, Noble Drew Ali was born Timothy Drew in 1886 in North Carolina. He founded the MSTA in Newark in 1913 as something of an ‘Islamic’ alternative to the spate of Christian sects in Chicago and other Northern states. Ali opened the headquarters of the MSTA in 1925 in Chicago, where he had gathered a significant following. He taught that salvation for African Americans lay in the discovery of their own national origin and encouraged his converts to attach the term ‘el’ or ‘bey’ to the surnames. Fauset notes that Ali taught from a Koran, consisting of sixty-four pages, that his followers were forbidden to read. His leadership in the MSTA was contested in 1929 when one of his followers, Claude Green, launched a bid to overthrow him. Green is reported to have died on 15 March 1929. Ali was arrested on suspicion of Green’s death but released soon after without charge. Ali died just weeks after his incarceration. The cause of Ali’s death was disputed amongst his followers, with some believing that their leader’s death was the result of injuries he sustained in prison.[5] The MSTA was gripped by power struggles in the immediate aftermath of Ali’s death, with several or more members claiming to be the re-incarnation of Ali.

Essien-Udom’s belief that the NOI grew out of a faction of the MSTA is well founded. The FBI’s extensive surveillance file on Fard Muhammad contains at least one reference to Fard’s activities in the MSTA. An informant at the time was noted as having stated that a man, known to Ali’s converts as Fard, had been ‘…instrumental in having many members leave the MSTA and affiliate themselves with a group which he referred to as the Muslims’.[6] Fard Muhammad was incarcerated at San Quentin penitentiary in June 1926 for dabbling in narcotics and released in May 1929.[7] If Essien-Udom is correct, Fard would have entered the MSTA just weeks before Ali’s death; in time to make himself known to cult members as a follower of Ali.

Essien-Udom’s theory is one of the most plausible schools of thought on the identity and affiliations of the NOI’s founder. Despite the fact that Essien-Udom lacked enough evidence at the time to prove his theory, many researchers have supported his conclusions. A much less plausible theory on Fard Muhammad’s identity and affiliations was suggested by Howard Brotz, author of The Black Jews of Harlem (1964). Brotz’s suggestion that Arnold Josiah Ford of the UNIA and active member of the Black Jews of Harlem, also known as the Commandment Keepers, and Fard Muhammad are ‘one and the same’ is severely flawed.[8] Robert A. Hill’s extensive papers on Marcus Garvey and the UNIA reveal that Arnold Josiah Ford was born in Barbados in 1877 and served as a ‘composer, musician, linguist and theologian’ in the UNIA.[9] Ford had regular disputes with Garvey, in large part, due to Garvey’s apparent favouritism for West Indian members in the UNIA and his refusal to accept Islam as the official religion of the UNIA.[10] Disillusioned with the UNIA and the Black Jews of Harlem, Ford repatriated to Ethiopia where he died in 1935.[11]

Garvey’s alleged favouritism towards West Indian members of the UNIA is something that has been noted by numerous scholars, including Nicholas Patsides, who argues that tensions between West Indian immigrants and African Americans spiralled in the 1920s as a result of Garvey’s economic philosophy:

Despite the relocation of the Universal Negro Improvement Association to New York City, Garvey continued to speak predominantly to West Indians at home and abroad, since he shared their colonial mentality and understood their migrant ideology—the search for economic gain abroad in order to multiply options back home. Garvey scholars have argued that black Americans benefited from Garvey rhetoric as much as West Indian migrants, but tensions between the two communities suggest that black Americans did not think so. Garveyism served to accentuate economic rivalries as black Americans suspected that migrants wanted to transfer their material success back home—indeed, Garvey openly encouraged as much.[12]

Brotz’s theory appears to have been informed solely by rumours that Fard had used the alias ‘Ford’ during the 1920s, he was known for example in Detroit as Professor Ford Muhammad. The research contained in Hill’s papers, however, prove Brotz’s theory incorrect.

Marcus Garvey is a controversial and contentious figure the history of pan-Africanism. Garvey’s UNIA was a successor movement to the nineteenth century back-to-Africa crusades. Garvey established the headquarters of the UNIA in New York in 1916 where he became a popular ‘race leader’ with the African American proletariat. Garvey argued in favour of establishing a ‘New Faith’, that was in essence Christian, minus its European connotations. In a speech at Liberty Hall in New York City in August 1929, Garvey outlined his belief that African Americans should establish their own faith:

‘God tells us to worship a God in our own image’, said he. ‘We are Black and to be in our image God must be black. Our people have been lynched and burned in the South because we have been worshipping a false God. But what can you expect when you have adopted the idolism of another race? We must create a God of our own and give this new religion to the Negroes of the World’.[13]

Garvey’s deportation in 1927 effectively crippled the UNIA and it soon fell into disarray. However, Garvey’s Black Nationalist philosophy continued to penetrate the African American community for decades after his deportation, offering the inspiration behind several Black Nationalist groups, including the NOI.

Scholarly research on the NOI in the late 1990s benefited from the declassification of FBI surveillance files on the cult and its leaders. The FBI files provided researchers with an abundance of new material to explore on the origins of the NOI, its maturity and the nature of its internal politics. The declassification of the FBI’s extensive file on Fard Muhammad provided a fresh insight into the actual identity and arcane character of the NOI’s founder. Fresh research saw a number of researchers, including The Washington Post, staff writer, Karl Evanzz, congregate around FBI sources, to support notions that Fard Muhammad was a fraudulent profiteer.

The FBI proved eager to find information that could prove Fard to have been a racketeer in the hope of discrediting the religious philosophy of the NOI:

If any further record of, or information concerning Ford is located, it should be thoroughly and imaginatively pursued to its logistical conclusion from all available records and / or possible witnesses. Any information developed concerning the actual origins or identity of W.D. Fard will tend to disprove the philosophy of the NOI and can lead to a better understanding of that organization by agents investigating the NOI.[14]

The documentation that the FBI released on Fard Muhammad reveal him to be a charlatan who willingly abandoned his wife and infant child in pursuit of a financially profitable career in cults and narcotics. The FBI had arrest records for him in 1918, 1926 and 1933.[15] The fact that Fard provided false accounts of his background, age and race when interviewed by local police departments in Los Angeles and Detroit exacerbated the FBI’s difficulties in tracing his origins. Tracing Fard Muhammad’s actual origins, history and, location after 1933 proved to be a financially taxing task for the FBI and they twice abandoned the investigation.[16] The bureau failed, despite extensive efforts, to locate an authentic birth certificate for Fard. In the absence of authentic legal documents, bureau agents began to conduct numerous interviews with those individuals who had wrote to Fard during his time at San Quentin Penitentiary, including his former common law wife, Hazel Barton. Barton was interviewed by the FBI on numerous occasions throughout 1957. Whilst investigative officers failed to point out discrepancies in her account at the time, the frequent inconsistencies in Barton’s narrative seriously injure the credibility of her status as a then highly prized witness. When she was first contacted by the FBI, for example, she made a point of stating that Fard had ‘sent her considerable amounts of money from time to time’; she then relinquished her statement to read that ‘when Ford did write he said that he had no money to send’.[17]

Barton emerges from the pages of the FBI’s reports as a woman uncertain of her former husband’s true identity. She relayed to the FBI, for example, that she had met Fard or ‘Ford’, as he was known to her, in 1919 whilst he was running a café on 347 South Flower Street in Los Angeles. Soon after meeting, Hazel began an affair with Ford and gave birth to his son Wallace Max Ford in 1920.[18] She described Fard as ‘male, white New Zealander, exact age unknown’.[19] Hazel’s suspicion that Fard had been born in New Zealand rested, solely, on the fact that she had known him to receive and write letters addressed to and from New Zealand.[20] In his much publicised book, The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (1999) Karl Evanzz took Barton’s account at face value, relaying to his readers, in spite of substantiation, that Fard was born in New Zealand on 25 February 1893.[21] Evanzz, however, fails to provide his readers with a reference for the source of his revelation. In correspondence with Evanzz, he commented that Fard had told his wife he was born in New Zealand and that he had calculated Fard’s date of birth from police photographs he obtained from San Francisco.[22] Evanzz went on to claim that, furthermore Elijah Muhammad had once stated that Fard had been born in 1893.[23]

That Fard told his wife he was born in New Zealand is a misnomer. Barton told the FBI in 1957 that she suspected Fard to have been born there because he received letters from the country. Furthermore Fard Muhammad was known to have repeatedly provided police departments with false accounts of his date of birth, therefore San Francisco police photographs with Fard’s, alleged, date of birth are more than likely inaccurate. That Elijah Muhammad claimed Fard to have been born in 1893 is highly unlikely. Elijah Muhammad maintained throughout his forty year reign the NOI that Fard had been born in 1877 and the FBI largely accepted this date.[24] Furthermore, the Department for Internal Affairs in New Zealand have no record of Fard’s birth, death, or that of his alleged parents, Beatrice and Zared Ford.[25]

The last notable school of thought on Fard Muhammad’s identity and affiliations was suggested by Karl Evanzz. Evanzz’s belief that Fard Muhammad used the alias of George Farr whilst in the UNIA is well founded.[26] That Fard was a disciple of Garvey is widely suspected and in this regard Evanzz’s theory is not new. In the numerous interviews that informants carried out with UNIA members, George Farr appears to have been one of the most recalcitrant; his views echoing in detail those of Fard. Interviews and photographs compiled in Robert A. Hill’s extensive papers on Marcus Garvey and the UNIA demonstrate a close similarity in the physical appearance, outlook and affiliations of Farr and Fard.[27] One informant noted that although ‘Farr…claimed to be negro, his manner of talk, which had a little accent—’not the southern accent that is common to all negroes, but the accent similar to that of an American educated Hindu’.[28]

Evanzz could have, possibly, vindicated his theory, had he included in his research a search for authentic photographs of George Farr. Evanzz, however, seems to have overlooked the photographs compiled in Hill’s extensive papers, one of which reveals a remarkable similarity in Farr’s and Fard’s appearance.[29] Fard Muhammad’s true identity may forever elude researchers. The fact that he provided several different accounts of his lineage, all of which the FBI failed to confirm, makes tracing his actual identity and the extent of his affiliations in the U.S. difficult. It is widely suspected that although Fard was neither of African descent nor indigenous to the U.S, he did establish close liaisons with African American political and religious movements, including the UNIA and the MSTA. The various schools of thought presented, whilst invariably flawed, help shed light on the ideologies and religious encounters that likely shaped Fard’s philosophy and the development of the NOI.

The Formative Years of the Nation of Islam

Fard Muhammad’s NOI was the product of historical terror. Its birth in the early 1930s would have been inconceivable without the extensive course of systematic brutality that characterises, the enslaved history of the African American experience. In fact, the NOI’s birth owes little to the presence and influence of orthodox Islam in the United States.[30] The fact that the early Black Islamic sects in the Northern States were doctrinally far removed from their orthodox counterparts evidences the extent to which the Muslim population had failed to penetrate the African American community. Fard Muhammad appropriated and repackaged the traditions of the UNIA and the MSTA in order to manufacture a separatist doctrine that catered to the exclusive needs of the African American migrant community in Detroit. Fard’s NOI emerged in a national context of mass migration, religious dislocation and economic devastation.

The mass migration of African Americans to Northern cities during the inter-war years transplanted an essentially rural, deeply religious and ill-educated populace into the industrial reality of the Northern states. Detroit’s racial caste system matured alongside the steady influx of African Americans and consolidated the separate socio-economic worlds of African Americans and their white counterparts in what became central city ghettoes. During the first African American migration between 1910 and 1930, over one million African Americans moved to the North, largely in pursuit of economic opportunities and a life free from the South’s stringent partition of society along racial lines.[31] Life, however, in the so-called ‘promised land’ proved no better; in fact, in many cases it was worse: African American migrants from the South encountered equally entrenched racial segregation in the Northern cities and the promise of economic affluence that had attracted them was largely thwarted by the ensuing economic depression. The caste-like system that already existed in Northern cities, including Detroit, matured alongside the steady influx of migrants in search of jobs. Between 1910 and 1920 the Black population of Detroit increased from 6,000 to 41,000 and in Chicago from 44,000 to 109,000.[32] The swelling of Detroit’s Black population increased competition for low wage industrial jobs and intensified the stratification of the city’s ethnic communities.

The Great Migration uprooted men and women from kinship networks and institutions that had historically acted as ‘refuges’ from racism. In his seminal work, The Negro Church (1964), E. Franklin Frazier argued that the biggest casualty of the migration had been the separation of migrants from the Southern Black Church:

In the cold impersonal environment of the city, the institutions and associations which had provided security and support for the Negro in the rural environment could not be resurrected…The most important crisis in the life of the Negro migrant was produced by the absence of the church which had been the centre of his social life and a refuge from a hostile white world.[33]

Historians of Black America uniformly support Frazier’s contention that the Black Church traditionally acted as a ‘refuge’ in what was a ‘hostile white world’. Once in the North, migrants realised only too quickly that the same church structure that existed in the South was absent and the environment not conducive for the establishment of such a formation. In the absence of the church, a plethora of sects and Black Nationalistic cults emerged throughout the North, catering to the needs of the migrant community. The most potent of these groups became Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and Noble Drew Ali’s MSTA.

The economic depression crushed the aspirations of migrants throughout the North. The absence of meaningful employment in Northern Cities, including Detroit, forced migrants onto receipt of welfare. In a series of oral history interviews, published in Legacy Magazine, many former migrants spoke of the fundamental problems created by the lack of employment in Detroit in the 1930s:

Well, ’29 and up to ’35, ’36, was rough. There wasn’t anything like jobs. You didn’t even have to worry about trying to find a job because there weren’t any jobs to be found. The best thing you could do was go down there to the post office and get those applications, fill them out, and that was it. You had to wait and some people got lucky and got hired at times. So, during that time, I was more or less just hustling…during those years none of us had any money. We just hustled as best as we could, and somehow we got through it all.[34]

It was into this moment of religious and social crisis that Fard Muhammad arrived. Fard Muhammad is believed to have illegally immigrated into the United States in or around 1913.[35] He exhibited a rather shrewd understanding of the temper of the African American migrant community despite the fact that he was not of African descent. Fard introduced himself to the people of Detroit in July 1930 as a peddler. He soon worked his way into the homes of the local residents with relative ease, testing out his Islamic philosophy on the few individuals with whom he had managed to establish a confident relationship. In a short period of time his loyal customers began to invite their friends to their homes to hear the peddler teach them about their ‘natural’ religion and identity.[36] Interest in the peddler’s teachings grew so much so that the homes of the locals became too small to house all those who wanted to hear him. Despite the fact that many of his customers were in receipt of welfare, they managed to collectively finance the hire of small halls to host their ‘meetings’.[37] The peddler slowly began to introduce seditious features of his doctrine and implemented a hierarchy that enabled him to steadily withdraw from the NOI. In less than two years Fard built and structured a cult that amassed a following of nearly eight thousand. However, his stay in Detroit was cut short when he was arrested by the Detroit Police Department in May 1933 and ordered to leave the city.[38]

Little is known about the origins of Fard Muhammad or his whereabouts after 1933. Erdman Beynon, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, conducted the only contemporaneous study of the NOI during Fard’s tenure in Detroit. Beynon attended a small number of NOI meetings gathering research that he would later publish in 1938 and suggested that Fard intentionally marketed himself as a peddler to the locals in Detroit in order to gain access to a wide-spread audience, selling them commodities that he purported to have came from foreign lands:

He came first to our houses selling raincoats, and then afterwards silks. In this way he could get into the people’s houses, for every woman was eager to see the nice things the peddlers had for sale. He told us that the silks he carried were the same that our people used in their home country and that he had come from there. So we all asked him to tell us about our own country…[39]

Fard quickly gained his way into the homes of the local residents in the Paradise Valley vicinity of Detroit. As he steadily gained the trust of his customers, he began to criticise the black church and white Americans as purveyors of false religion. Fard’s criticism of whites gained momentum as his audience grew in size.[40] The peddler began to teach his customers about a new religion, which he called Islam. He based his teachings initially on the Bible and later the Koran, although it is doubtful that his adherents would have ever seen or read the Koran that he purportedly taught from. According to Louis Lomax, Fard based his teachings on the Bible because ‘it was the only religious literature known to the Negro’.[41]

The fact that many of Fard’s curious listeners were in receipt of welfare relief seems to have worked to his advantage. It is doubtful that many of his customers would have had sufficient time to entertain his teachings, had they been engaged in meaningful employment. As Beynon reminds his readers:

The Prophet’s message was characterized by his ability to utilize to the fullest measure the environment of his followers. Their physical and economic difficulties alike were used to illustrate the new teachings.[42]

The peddler borrowed and synthesised Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalist ethos with Noble Drew Ali’s pseudo Islam in order to concoct a doctrine that put African Americans at the top of the social ladder and whites at the bottom. The fact that Fard’s philosophy was rooted in ideologies that were already familiar to his audience aided his success.

Fard’s listeners soon began to invite their neighbours and friends to their homes to hear Fard teach. According to Beynon, the economic plight of the migrant community in Detroit did not prevent them from collectively gathering the finances to pay for the hire of a hall in Detroit to hold their meetings.[43] Fard taught his customers that their ‘Natural’ Religion was Islam and not Christianity and that their names symbolized the remnants of slavery.[44] Fard argued strongly and convincingly that Christianity was an alien religion that had been imposed on their ancestors in order to foster self-abasement in them and make them better slaves. Fard soon began to introduce himself as a Prophet and a redeemer, Beynon, for example, recorded that Fard began to tell his followers that he had come from Mecca:

My Name is W.D. Fard and I came from the Holy City of Mecca. More about myself I will not tell you yet, for the time has not yet come. I am your brother. You have not seen me in my royal robes.[45]

The eclectic theology of Black Nationalism and pseudo Islam that Fard espoused so convincingly imply that he was an active follower, or at the very least a devout disciple, of both Marcus Garvey’s UNIA and Noble Drew Ali’s MSTA. Fard Muhammad, evidently, became intimately aware of the socioeconomic and political obstacles preventing the upward mobility of African Americans in the North. Whether due to a desire to liberate African Americans from their Duboisian ‘Double Consciousness’, or to create a market for his own philosophy, Fard began to distribute what he referred to as ‘original names’ for his followers, which he allegedly charged ten dollars for.

They became so ashamed of their old slave names that they considered that they could suffer no greater insult than to be addressed by the old name. They sought to live in conformity with the Law of Islam as revealed to them by the prophet, so that they would be worthy of their original names. Gluttony, drunkenness, idleness, and extra-marital sex relations, except with ministers of Islam, were prohibited completely. They bathed at least twice a day and kept their houses scrupulously clean, so that they might put away all marks of slavery from which the restoration of the original had set them free.[46]

As to whether Fard profited financially from his ministry is heavily contested. In 1963 a journalist working for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner penned a derisive attack on Fard, arguing that he was a petty criminal who ‘passed himself off as the Saviour’ and profited financially from his teachings.[47] Fard’s successor, Elijah Muhammad, argued vigorously that the NOI’s founder had not received any money from teaching his followers:

We did not pay Mr. Fard any money to teach us and there are many who will verify this statement who are yet alive. We could hardly pay the rent of a hall in those days. Sometimes they (The believers) would give Him (Master Fard Muhammad) gifts such as topcoats, overcoats, ties, shirts, or a few packages of hander kerchiefs—but money was so scarce in those days that we just did not have any. Just about everyone who believes was on the ‘Relief’ in Detroit including myself.[48]

According to Beynon, Fard’s organisation was initially known as the Allah Temple of Islam until he later renamed it the Nation of Islam.[48] The inspiration behind the cult’s name is not noted by Beynon and the FBI failed to account for when exactly Fard renamed the cult.[49]

Fard’s religious and social philosophy was deeply rooted in the UNIA’s Black Nationalist ethos. The Peddler’s teachings, however, proved to be an altogether fanatic version of anything that either Garvey or Ali taught. Beynon, for example, noted in his study, that Fard taught his followers that Caucasians were ‘white devils’. Fard’s NOI was and remains a deeply conservative organisation, something that it, no doubt, inherited from the UNIA. Fard Muhammad’s NOI was essentially an apolitical organisation. It advocated that its converts cut off contact with ‘undesirable others’ in order to insulate themselves from unnecessary racist encounters. NOI converts formed their own closed society in Detroit in the 1930s and eschewed participation in the American political process. Fard’s followers were instructed to refuse induction into the armed forces and forbidden to exercise their right to vote.[50]

As Fard’s cult grew in size, it took on an increasingly bureaucratic structure. Fard began to delegate the responsibility for the daily affairs of the NOI to a number of ‘supreme captains’ that he allowed his followers to elect. Fard also established a parochial school ‘The University of Islam’ for parents in the NOI to send their children to and the Fruit of Islam (FOI), a paramilitary division of the cult, designed to defend its members.[51] The peddler’s ability to establish a working bureaucratic structure for his organisation was no doubt an important factor in its survival after 1933.

Within three years the prophet not only began the movement but organized it so well that he himself was able to recede into the background, appearing almost never to his followers during the final months of his stay in Detroit. This was undoubtedly an important factor in the cult’s survival after the prophet’s departure.[52]

The peddler’s secretive cult was unveiled to the wider community in Detroit on 21 November 1932 when one of its, alleged, members, Robert Harris, sacrificed his room mate, John H. Smith.[53] The arrest brought Fard and his sinister cult to the attention of the police department and the wider community in Detroit. According to Beynon, rumours of NOI members engaging in acts of sacrificial murder had circulated prior to 1932. The arrest of one of Fard’s members initiated what was to become a long and expensive investigation into the NOI.

In the final months of his residence in Detroit, Fard appeared less and less to his followers, arguably preparing them for his eventual exodus from the cult. Following Fard’s exit from Detroit, his Supreme Minister, Elijah Karriem (later known as Elijah Muhammad) took over control of the NOI. However, the NOI underwent a series of internal power struggles after 1934, forcing Elijah Muhammad to transfer the NOI’s headquarters from Detroit to Chicago. The transformation of the NOI from a small cult in 1933 into a mass movement in 1960 was the result of Elijah’s leadership. Elijah Muhammad portrayed Fard as a Christ-like figure following his sudden exit from Detroit:

He (Mr. W. F. Muhammad, God in person) chose to suffer 3 years to show his love for his people, who have suffered over 300 years at the hands of a people who by nature are evil and wicked and have no good in them. He was persecuted, sent to jail in 1932, and ordered out of Detroit, on May 26, 1933. He came to Chicago in the same year and was arrested almost immediately on his arrival and placed behind bars. He submitted himself with all humbleness to his persecutors. Each time he was arrested, he sent for me so that I might see and learn the price of Truth for us, the so-called American Negroes…He was well able to save himself from such suffering, but how else was the scripture to be fulfilled? We followed in his footsteps, suffering the same persecution[54]

Fard Muhammad remains something of an enigmatic figure in the NOI’s historical trajectory. That Fard had been successful in his endeavour to build his own religious empire in Detroit is beyond doubt. Fard’s success in Detroit was largely due to the fact that his religious philosophy was now entirely new to the migrant community. The fact that the peddler rooted his doctrine in ideologies and religious principles that were already well known aided his success. Fard’s willingness to gradually delegate full control of the NOI to his subordinates suggests that he had begun to plan his exit prior to 1933 and had hoped that the NOI would survive his exit. Fard Muhammad remains something of a God-like figure in the NOI. The fact that little is documented about Fard, even within the NOI’s own literature, contributes to the aura of mystery that surrounds him. The high regard in which NOI converts regard Fard and his unorthodox teachings has long proven an obstacle to Louis Farrakhan’s numerous attempts to dilute and annul Fard’s racist teachings. Fard’s ideology caters to and exploits the history of race relations in the U.S. The socio-economic gap that has always existed between white America and Black America provides room in which ideologies such as the NOI’s can take root.

University of Ulster

Notes

[1] Jabril Muhammad, Inner Views of the Heart, Mind and Soul of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan (Chicago: FCN Publishing Co, 2006), p. 7.

[2] Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Penguin, 1965), p. 370.

[3] E. U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for Identity in America (New York: Dell Publishing, 1964), p. 55.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Arthur Fauset, Black Gods of the Metropolis: Negro Religious Cults of the Urban North (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974), p. 44.

[6] Letter to Chicago. RE: Wallace Dodd Fard. 105-3642. P. 517 (FBI File: Fard, Wallace D / Reference Number: CG 25-20607).

[7] Records. Los Angeles Police Department: Wallace Ford. 5 March 1965. Reference Number: 100-43165-6 (FBI File: Fard, Wallace D).

[8] Howard Brotz, The Black Jews of Harlem (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), pp. 11-12.

[9] Robert A. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol 11, August 1919-August 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 398.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Nicholas Patsides, ‘Allies, Constituents or Myopic Investors: Marcus Garvey and Black Americans’, Journal of American Studies 41. 2, (2007), 279-305 (p. 279).

[13] Editor, ‘Garvey Preaches Faith in Black God’, The New York Times, 4 August 1929, p. 8.

[14] Office Memorandum: To: Director, FBI (105-63642) From: SAC, Chicago (100-33683) Subject: Wallace Fard, February 3rd 1958. p3 (FBI File: Fard, Wallace, D).

[15] Records Los Angeles Police Department: Wallei Ford, Los Angeles Police Department Number 16447. March 5th, 1965. (FBI File, Fard, Wallace, D).

[16] See Records from Washington Field Office, 1957. (FBI File: Fard, Wallace, D).

[17] Los Angeles Division. Reference Number: 105-48505, pp. 3-4 (FBI File: Fard, Wallace D).

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, p. 3.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Karl Evanzz, The Messenger: The rise and fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Vintage Books, 1999) p. 400.

[22] Correspondence with Mr. Karl Evanzz, 6 May 2006.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Interview with Askia Muhammad, 13 January 2008.

[25] Correspondence with New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs, June 2006.

[26] Evanzz, p. 402.

[27] Hill, pp.223-224.

[28] Robert A. Hill, The Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association papers, Vol IV, 1 September 1921-22 September 1922 (University of California Press, 1985) pp. 233-234.

[29] Hill, The Marcus Garvey Papers, vol 11, p. 398.

[30] Nuri Tinaz, ‘Conversion of African Americans to Islam: A Sociological Analysis of the Nation of Islam and Associated Groups (Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2001), p. 3.

[31] Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude Jr., eds, African American Religious Thought: An Anthology (London: John Knox Press, 2003), p. 534.

[32] Hans A. Baer and Merrill Singer, African-American Religion in the Twentieth Century: Varieties of Protest and Accommodation (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992), p. 45.

[33] E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), p. 48.

[34] Timuel D. Black, ‘Voices from the Black Belt Brings to Life Mid-Century Black Chicago’, Legacy Magazine (Fall 2006), pp. 80-81.

[35] To: SAC, Detroit, From: SAC, Chicago. RE: W.D Fard. P. 2 (FBI File: Fard, Wallace. D).

[36] The NOI maintain that Islam is the ‘natural’ religion of all people of African descent.

[37] Erdmann Beynon, ‘The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit’, The American Journal of Sociology (May 1938), 894-907 (p. 896).

[38] See Chicago File (FBI File: Fard, Wallace D).

[39] Beynon, p. 895.

[40] Ibid.

[41] Louis Lomax, When the Word is Given: A Report on Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and the Black Muslims (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1963), p. 42.

[42] Beynon, p. 900.

[43] Ibid, p. 902.

[44] Ibid, p. 896.

[45] Ibid, p. 902.

[46] Ed Montgomery, ‘Muslim Founder, White Masquerader’, Los Angeles Herald Examiner, 23 July, 1963, p. A2.

[47] Elijah Muhammad, ‘Beware of Phony Claims’, Muhammad Speaks, 16 August 1963, p. 1.

[48] Early records from the Chicago Field office reveal that the NOI was initially known to the FBI as the Allah Temple of Islam.

[49] No record exists to show as to when exactly the NOI was renamed.

[50] NOI converts continue to eschew service in the U.S. Armed forces.

[51] Beynon, p. 905.

[52] Ibid, p. 902.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman in America (Atlanta: MEMPS Publications, 1965), p. 24.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 13, Autumn 2008

‘Producing the Highest Standard of Manhood’: Masculinity and the City Beautiful Movement in Progressive Era Denver, 1893-1920

Brendon G. George
© Brendon G. George. All Rights Reserved

Eager to establish Denver as one of the United States’ most beautiful cities at the turn of the twentieth century, Denver’s municipal government adopted the goals and ideals of the City Beautiful movement to alter both the physical landscape of the city as well as the very character of the citizens who called Denver home. Early in the city’s beautification process, the Denver Real Estate Exchange Committee on Public Improvements produced a pamphlet criticising the city and its residents for failing to erect a monument celebrating the true history of Denver. At the time, the city’s landscape contained several monuments, but the designers of these pieces were of German-American and Scottish-American heritage and the Commission used this fact to contend that the pieces failed to represent the soul of Denver, a soul based on the heroism of Anglo-American masculine exploits in conquering the dangerous lands of the west.[1] Desperate to rectify this deficiency of the urban landscape, in 1906 the city government commissioned the internationally renowned sculptor Frederick MacMonnies to design a monument true to the city’s heritage.

The decision to commission MacMonnies was not a difficult one for the committee. MacMonnies first gained recognition while working in the studio of Augustus Saint-Gaudens in New York from 1880-1884, and then moved to Paris to study at the École de Beaux-Arts, twice winning the Prix d’Atelier, the highest award for foreign students, as well as receiving an honourable mention at the Salon of 1889. He then returned to the United States and by 1900 won commissions in Boston, New York, Brooklyn and Washington D.C.[2] For his piece in Denver, he drew inspiration from the popularly supported civilizing narrative of ‘the frontier’, designing the Pioneer Monument as a fountain base supporting sculptural groups representing various characters from the history of the frontier and a central column adorned at the top by a horse-mounted Native American with outstretched arms in an offering of peace.[3] The citizens of Denver objected to the inclusion of a Native American in a monument intended to celebrate the heroic exploits of the white men who made life in Denver possible. Adding to the reluctance to accept such a design was the still-fresh memory of the bitter conflicts that took place between the white settlers and the Native Americans in the previous decades.[4]

MacMonnies defended his design in a public letter, stating that because the monument was designed as a fountain, the base, not the Native American, functioned as the crowning piece.[5] The intent of the monument’s design was to depict the stages of settlement, with the Native American and horse as the most primitive stage followed, in succession, by sculptural groups celebrating the heroic deeds of the pioneers, hunters, miners, and mothers of the frontier, and finally the fountain, connected to the urban ground on which the monument stood. The piece served as a reminder of the belief that white civilization on the frontier culminated in cities such as Denver, San Francisco and Seattle. In his letter, MacMonnies even stated that, ‘the greatest enemy of civilization known to history, the redskin’ was ‘inseparable from the noble achievements of the pioneers who made Colorado…’.[6] Despite such rhetoric on his part, Denver citizens’ understanding of the Pioneer Monument was even more strongly one of white heroics overcoming the savagery of the Native Americans. In the end, MacMonnies acquiesced to the demands of the Real Estate Exchange Committee and the public, his final design featuring a likeness of the famed explorer Kit Carson mounted on a horse, pushing westward and taking with him the idea of white civilization. The representation of Carson in the monument served two important purposes: to credit the historical personages who had become mythological in the history of the frontier and to celebrate specifically the ‘white man’s domination of the native peoples and their land’.[7] In using a laudatory visual imagery, the monument communicated a celebration of the masculine exploits—exploring, hunting, mining—as the exploits which prepared the frontier for the eventual civilisation. Denver’s Pioneer Monument stood tall as a tribute to the men and their masculine exploits as necessary components in the civilising of the West.[8]

Denver’s Pioneer Monument was only one of many alterations to the aesthetic landscape of the city during the process of beautification under City Beautiful, but the clash over the monument represents the complexities of the movement in Denver, complexities that make City Beautiful on the frontier unique to the rest of the country. City Beautiful in Denver had an express goal of altering the built landscape so as to distance the city from the image of the rough and tumble frontier. But, Denver’s story of the City Beautiful movement is more complicated than a simple narrative of the transition from frontier town to urban centre; it is also about the regulation of the morality of the citizens of Denver. One way in which the movement accomplished this was through bringing about a shift in masculinity in the recently incorporated areas of the American West. Due to a host of anxieties stretching from immigration to the feminisation of the workplace, white, middle-class men at the turn-of-the-century feared for their manhood and had consequently adopted the ‘strenuous life doctrine’ of Theodore Roosevelt to quell their anxieties. In doing so, men had engaged with a dominant discourse of masculinity that championed the American West as the region where the activities of the ‘strenuous life doctrine’—hunting, fishing, camping—were best performed, and through which men could most fully guard against fears of feminisation in urban life.[9] Located in the heart of the American West, however, Denver nevertheless challenged both Roosevelt’s ‘strenuous life doctrine’ and the myth of the American West as the preserve of the ideal male who had shed the enervating shackles of urban life.

At the heart of the City Beautiful movement there existed an intense desire to enact reform through alterations to the urban environment. Across the country, advocates of City Beautiful adopted architecture and the creation of public leisure spaces as the two foci of the movement. Concerning public leisure spaces and public monuments, Alan Trachtenberg and others, drawing on the writing of some of the nineteenth century’s most prolific urban designers and architects (chiefly Frederick Law Olmstead and Daniel Burnham), have analysed these spaces as sites of disciplinary regulation of the immigrant and working-classes; sites intended to articulate white, middle-class norms that crystallise into a normative discourse within the urban environment.[10] Hence the silencing of Native American contributions to Denver’s history by removing the original mounted figure from the city’s proposed monument, and the supervision of ‘rowdy’, working-class frontiers-people by disciplined ‘mothers’ immortalised on the monument’s second tier. Such racialised and class-based readings of these spaces flatten out the experience of the white middle and upper-classes, holding them static and unaffected by the creation of public leisure spaces. In this essay, I propose a consideration of the relationship between urban planning and gender through connecting City Beautiful and the regulation of masculinity as it affected white middle and upper-class men in Denver. Probing how the turn-of-the-century discourse of masculinity shifted in conjunction with the alterations of City Beautiful, I argue that, by the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, the dominant discourse privileged a compassionate masculinity over the previously dominant ‘primitive masculinity’ and that these leisure sites, which in Denver consisted of both urban and extra-urban sites, proved instrumental in communicating and articulating this shift in the discourse of masculinity.[11]

Given that few historians of City Beautiful have followed the advice of Joan W. Scott in using gender as ‘a useful category of historical analysis’, much of the extant literature examines only the planners, politicians, and outcomes of the movement.[12] Though this approach has created a very male-centric narrative of City Beautiful, such analysis fails to recognize the role of gender, and masculinity in particular, in directing the actions undertaken by the participants as well as the relationship of the movement to the discourse of masculinity. The gendered analyses that do exist examine only the feminine in the movement, arguing that the origins of City Beautiful extend to the works and ideology of various women’s clubs throughout the country and reducing the masculine in City Beautiful to an adoption of the previously laid feminine groundwork to fit the various business and economic interests of the male city officials.[13] Nevertheless, a compassionate discourse of masculinity remains key to understanding the city. Women were only allowed to control male behaviour because their targets were working-class men and non-whites (i.e. all those who were ill-disciplined). Their middle class husbands were still dominant, but they did not remain impervious to the process of moral reform. With this in mind, I shall now turn to the City Beautiful movement in Denver.

The City Beautiful movement in Denver grew out of an initial push for reform that began in the 1890s. With the granting of suffrage by the state’s legislature in 1893, Denver’s middle and upper-class female citizens involved themselves in cleaning the city, both figuratively and literally.[14] Among the many civic societies that developed with the express goal of beautifying Denver, the Civic Federation of Denver, the Women’s Club of Denver and the Civic Improvement Society led the movement.[15] These societies desired an equal effort from both private citizens in their actions as well as the municipal government. While agitating for cleaner streets, the Civic Improvement Society influenced both private citizens and the municipal government to increase their efforts in providing street cleaning services.[16] The ideals of the civic clubs fit within Bonj Szczygiel’s description of the early ideology for reform through City Beautiful. The methods of these reform clubs rested in:

(1) a shared belief in personal responsibility of all citizens, (2) a belief in the importance of collective action and cooperation, (3) embrace of small projects that could be easily implemented, (4) a belief in the essential responsibility of the governmental body to aid in matters of social welfare, and (5) a middle-class, elitist attitude of desiring to shape citizen behaviour through environmental modification.[17]

As hard as these clubs worked for change throughout the city, a lack of unification among the groups rendered their efforts futile, leaving Denver in desperate need of a leader capable of mediating between the city’s factions.[18] The man who eventually led City Beautiful from its nascent days as a disjointed civic improvement effort into a large-scale endeavour directed by the municipal government was Denver’s three-term mayor, Robert W. Speer.

Speer, a Pennsylvanian by birth, arrived in Denver in 1878 suffering from tuberculosis. Speer was not alone in his relocation, as many men in the East looked longingly to the West as a masculine ‘hospital’ capable of curing physical ailments with its dry, crisp climate, which acted as a salve to maladies.[19] Eager to repay the city that helped him restore his health, in 1880 Speer involved himself in municipal activities in Denver. Beginning his career as a city clerk, Speer then served as postmaster, held two non-consecutive tenures as a member of the fire and police board, a tenure as a member of the board of public works and in 1904 he won the first of his three mayoral elections.[20] In 1907 Speer gave a lucid description of his vision of reform to the councilmen and businessmen of Denver, proclaiming, ‘city government should be progressive along conservative lines—push needed improvements and add the ornamental at the lowest possible cost. Refuse to be puritanical, or used in spasms of reform, yet earnestly strive for a betterment year by year along all moral lines’.[21] Echoing Theodore Roosevelt, Speer adopted moral reform as a central platform of political actions and worked to legitimate the concern with moral reform as an acceptable cause for men.[22] Throughout the country during the early decades of the twentieth century, men became fearful of the outcome of allowing women to guide morality and in response they directly involved themselves with the moulding of the moral character.[23] Speer squarely placed his municipal government in the (previously female) reform camp while still maintaining masculine qualities: fiscal restraint when at all possible and the desire to transform the morality of the city’s residents so that it accorded with the morality of the middle and upper-classes.[24]

Speer clearly believed the urban environment in Denver provided the necessary conditions for his reform projects to take hold. In a speech given at the National Paint, Oil and Varnish Association’s national gathering in Denver, Speer hailed the city as the crowning achievement of civilization and praised the developments made by the citizens of Denver in their quest to beautify the city. Contrasting the city’s companionable atmosphere with the Victorian idea of manliness, which limited social interaction between men, Speer told the Association, ‘there is something about the city life which attracts and holds. Men want to live where they can find comradeship in their joys and in their sorrows…The life, pleasures, comforts, and opportunities act as magnets in drawing men and women to towns and cities’.[25] The new prescriptions for masculinity in an urban environment required men to interact and move beyond the reserved and individualistic manliness prescription of their fathers. In finding an outlet for the performance of compassionate masculinity amongst each other, camaraderie became common within the city and a common occurrence among men. As part of the beautification process, the city government created new public spaces such as the Denver Public Library, the Museum of Natural History, and the Denver Civic Center, all spaces open to both men and women.[26] These spaces drew men away from their masculine sphere, thrusting them visibly into the urban landscape in a manner that facilitated the regulation of their masculinity and the moulding of the masculine character into the compassionate man of the twentieth century.

Denver’s Civic Center is one example of a City Beautiful project with strong connotations of the new masculinity. Arguments for the building of the Civic Center were coded in a masculine language that extolled the importance of a Civic Center as a necessary alteration to downtown Denver’s street layout. Before the building of the Civic Center, the streets of Denver’s central business district diagonally abutted the gridiron platting of the residential section and the Art Commission of Denver argued for a professionally designed space to harmonize the discordant relationship of the two sections. The argument in favour addressed the concerns of Denver’s businessmen, assuring them that only one-eighth of the acquired property held value to business interests and the outcome of the creation of the Civic Center would be a space that would draw potential customers to the downtown area, thereby increasing business activity. Additionally, the Commission reminded the citizens of Denver that they had a civic duty (a reference to their masculinity) to support the city in its endeavours because Denver was on the precipice of becoming ‘one of the country’s most beautiful and prominent cities’.[27] Public buildings and spaces such as city halls and town squares have long held importance for municipal governments in the United States because of the civic pride they inspire in the citizens.[28] The architects of Denver’s City Beautiful, like those in many other cities throughout the country, felt the need to create a public space that would elicit the pride necessary to ensure that the city did become the ‘Paris of America’.[29] The Civic Center aided in the process of beautifying Denver as well as altering notions of masculinity.

Although the addition of a Civic Center to Denver’s central business district was viewed as a necessary step in the beautification of the city, the process of this urban landscape alteration led to a public space where the new masculinity was visibly present. Geographers have long considered the city as a masculine space because of the city/nature dichotomy that historically assigned to nature a femininity and to the city a masculinity. The acts of planning and manipulating the urban environment have long held a masculine connotation. Such a coding comes from the supposed rationality visible in the male-dominated design of urban spaces.[30] Building a Civic Center to harmonize the discordant platting of downtown Denver represented a masculine manipulation of the environment, but Denver’s Civic Center acted as more than a simple tribute to masculine alterations. As the crowning achievement of City Beautiful, the Civic Center provided a public space in the city where husbands and fathers freely and without regard to the perceptions of others spent recreational time with their wives and children. During the summer, the grounds of the Civic Center played host to weekly free concerts, a Denver tradition begun during the early years of Speer’s mayoralty, and in the winter the Civic Auditorium continued to host musical events for the citizens of Denver.[31] The creation of a public space that reduced the need for men to perform the testosterone-driven masculinity of the strenuous-life resulted in men spending more recreational time with wives and children in public leisure spaces, placing the compassionate masculinity prominently in the urban environment. The last three decades of the nineteenth century ushered in a new marriage relationship between suburban men and women. A masculinity with domestic overtones developed, one lauding the virtues of men who actively participated in the family as involved fathers to their children and companionate husbands to their wives.[32] The suburban domestic masculinity laid the groundwork for the eventual evolution of compassionate masculinity as the zenith of masculinity in the city.

Denver’s Civic Center was not the only landscape alteration to have an effect in the regulation of masculinity. By the end of the second decade of the twentieth century, urban park settings had become available to both the general population of Denver as well as the class-conscious. Wellshire Park, a residential development in southern Denver advertised its residential offerings by depicting life in the development as a western Garden of Eden:

In your fondest dreams you have often pictured the home you would build some day. It was up on the rolling hills. Standing on your veranda you had an unobstructed view of the mountains and the nearby city. This dream home was in a beautiful location. The streets were winding, the parkings were wide and planted with flowers and trees. There you saw the ideal conditions and environment in which you longed to raise your family and meet your friends.[33]

Men learned that in an environment such as Wellshire Park, a place providing the perfect combination of urban amenities and nature, they could best perform their masculine duties as fathers. The children of the families who lived in the park were guaranteed to meet parental scrutiny and fathers could rest assured that their children would find friends of the highest moral standards.[34] Not only did the park provide men with the best social environment in which to raise their children, it also provided areas catering to their recreational needs. The main draw of the residence was the golf course and club, proclaimed to be of a quality reminiscent of the most exquisite golf clubs of the country.[35] Where as strenuous-life recreational activities for men rested on the ability to prove masculinity through manly exploits, the melding of the urban and the natural worlds gave men an avenue to perform masculinity in a more refined and less demonstrably ‘primitive’ atmosphere. A game such as golf actually allowed men to engage their wives in their leisure activities, as early accounts of golf depict men and women playing the game together.[36]

Speer’s most important contribution to Denver’s city beautification efforts came in the form of the park system that greatly increased in size during his mayoralty. Speer recognized the importance of incorporating nature into the urban environment, as open spaces greatly added to the quality of life of all citizens, regardless of class. Due to Denver’s proximity to the Rocky Mountains, certain civic groups within the city pushed for the creation of a mountain park system. These forces saw their wished fulfilled in the winter of 1910-1911 when the municipal government formed a committee composed of members of the Chamber of Commerce, the Real Estate Exchange, and the Motor Club to begin planning the park system. After several years of planning by the commission, the public voted in 1912 to amend the city charter to allow the city to assess a one-half mill property tax to finance the park system. Mayor Speer did not run for re-election in 1912, but his successor continued the plan and in August 1913 Denver opened two mountain parks, Lookout and Genesee, which lay twelve and sixteen miles beyond the city limits respectively.[37] These parks, maintained by the city of Denver and readily accessible to the residents of the city, further combined the urban and natural environment. If the city parks and the suburban residential developments placed nature in the city, the mountain parks extended the city and all the luxuries of urban life to the natural environment.

Denver did much to ensure that it perpetuated its image as the ideal setting for providing urban amenities with easy access to the natural environment. The Tourist Bureau of the City and County of Denver published a pamphlet depicting men and women enjoying the prepared mountain settings immediately outside Denver. The city built and maintained a developed roadway system into and through the mountain parks as well as producing maps of the highways leading out of Denver and into the park system. The Tourism Bureau printed a depiction of the Lariat Trail captioned, ‘Showing the mighty Rockies lassoed by the Mountain Boulevard’.[38] This language evoked not only imagery of conquering nature, but also a specific masculine conquering by using the term ‘lassoed’. Such a term would surely carry a masculine connotation in Denver due to the city’s connection with the American West and the idealized masculine activities performed by the independent cowboy on the frontier. Any man reading the pamphlet would also have found depictions containing only men celebrating masculine activities such as fishing or reaching the summit of a mountain.[39] The ultimate outcome of the mountain park system though was not a return to the frontier as the land of primitive masculinity performed in solitude, instead these parks opened the potential for the frontier as a heterosocial environment in which men and women enjoyed the company of each other. Both men and women interacted in activities of mutual enjoyment such as picnicking in the park or walking along prepared trails.[40] The mountain parks retained their masculine connotation by allowing men the opportunity to engage in either the masculinity common to the strenuous life in solitude or the compassionate masculinity that extolled the virtues of wifely companionship in public settings.

The creation of the mountain park system also reinforced the movement’s concern with moulding the morality of men along class lines. The control of the populace who enjoyed the offerings of the mountain parks became a useful tool in the discourse of morality by reformers in the city. As the number of citizens who chose to enjoy the mountain air and scenery increased, so too did the number of patrons who fit within ‘the rowdy element who endanger life by their reckless driving, and destruction of property, in their utter disregard for the rights of others’.[41] The editors of the Morrison Monitor called for the press of the country to join them in their demands for stronger policing protection throughout the parks because failure to do so would allow ‘the brawls, thefts, drunken, reckless chauffeurs and disorderly occupants of vehicles’ to drive away ‘the better class of citizens and pleasure seekers to other and safer localities’.[42] Although the park system was created as a public space for the enjoyment of all citizens of Denver and the surrounding communities, the enjoyment of the parks demanded men act in accordance with the characteristics of the men of the highest moral standards.

Previously, the American West had been a home to the rowdy element that engaged in drunkenness on a regular basis, but with the creation of a park system administered by the City of Denver, portions of the natural environment became the reserve of the well-mannered citizens who chose to enjoy the natural environment with their families.[43] Through City Beautiful, men of the highest classes found a stage away from the city that supported their masculine domesticity by protecting the family environment while at the same time linking the natural environment with a specific sense of morality. Even Mayor Speer recognized the importance of equating nature with moral character long before the completion of the mountain park system when he suggested that an observation pavilion in the city’s Congress Park should have views of the mountains to the west, a view of nature that would inspire ‘men and women to greater and nobler deeds in life’.[44]

Just as the mountain park system played a role in constructing the new masculinity, so too did parks within the city. The rise of urban parks in Denver during the Progressive Era occurred in conjunction with a similar trend throughout the country. During this time the burgeoning ‘play movement’ that had at its core a desire to steer all classes of the ‘American public between the drab restraints of urban industrialism and the wonton revelry of commercial amusements’ began to take shape.[45] Although the play movement targeted all classes of the population, the express goals centred on the creation of a suitable environment for children to learn recreational activities that did not involve the traditional entertainment of adults. The movement also had a more tacit goal of influencing all demographic cohorts to engage in ‘childsplay’ more regularly.[46] The urban park system of Denver provided fathers an arena to perform their own physical masculinity as well as encouraging fathers to actively engage their children in recreational activities, further supporting the compassionate masculinity of men.

The development of the parks often involved the construction of sporting facilities. In one particular park, the city placed a playground along with two tennis courts, a one-eighth mile cinder track and a fully outfitted gymnasium. Other parks contained tennis courts, baseball diamonds, basketball courts, cinder tracks, winter ice-skating rinks and public showers.[47] These sporting facilities were important to the city and those desiring to reinforce the masculinity of the residents, since strong bodies meant strong moral characters. For men adopting the idea of ‘compassionate masculinity’, a strong physical body was the most basic building block in the process of building a strong moral character. As early as 1880, religious men of the East Coast adopted ‘muscular Christianity’, a belief that physical activity within religion would combat the enervating affects of physical asceticism and allow for the building of strong moral character.[48] This belief worked its way into the developing compassionate masculinity. Men held the physical activities of the strenuous-life, characterized as ‘primitive masculinity’ by E. Anthony Rotundo, as necessary components in the performance of the compassionate masculinity. Wives even found popular literature encouraging them to facilitate their husband’s involvement in the activities of the primitive masculinity so that when the men returned to their roles as husbands and fathers they would have the highest moral character.[49] Rather than holding these two forms of masculinity as conflicting, City Beautiful helped to usher in a compassionate masculinity that accepted primitive masculinity as a necessary component for the full and perfected performance of a compassionate and civilised masculinity.

Although the directors of City Beautiful were excited about the transformation of the city into a cultured oasis, not all middle-class men shared in their enthusiasm for the transformations taking place because of the threat these changes posed to conceptualizations of their own masculinity, conceptualizations based on the traditional strenuous life doctrine. City Beautiful responded to these concerns by equating the city with the image of the body, referring to the importance of preventing deformities in the city rather than overcoming them.[50] The white male body, when perfectly chiselled and sculpted to the prescribed physical specifications, represented the zenith of masculinity. Serving a prominent role in the dominant discourse of the last quarter of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, the white male body reconciled the more primitive aspects of masculinity—competition and physical virility—with civilization as represented by the white race.[51] The perfected body proved to be the height of white males’ performance of their gender. The city, now synonymous with the masculine male body, achieved perfection through physical alterations just as the masculine body achieved perfection through physical exercise. Not only did men perform masculinity in the city, they equated the development and ultimate goals of the city with the same goals that they held for their own bodies.

The metaphor of the city as a white masculine body also informed the building of specific monuments. One such monument was the city’s water engineering system. In 1907, Speer began corresponding with various men in St. Louis inquiring about the necessity of hiring a hydraulic engineer to appraise portions of an existing water system the City of Denver was considering for purchase. Denver’s men offered a concern that the water engineering system, as a pulic monument intended to perfect the city, should be constructed by men from Denver, men who had benefited from the city’s parks in perfecting their own bodies. One resident wrote to Speer, demanding the job of appraiser not be given to a ‘foreigner’ from the East. According to the writer, Mr. Haynes, Denver already contained plenty of men, either plumbers or contractors, more than capable of providing appraisal services for the city.[52] To consider hiring an engineer from outside was an affront to the integrity of the men of Denver who were more than capable of participating in the perfecting of the city. The author further illuminated his belief that the men of Denver were more qualified because they would not rely upon clerks or assistants and would be taxpayers.[53]

Haynes’s fear of inviting a ‘foreigner’ to Denver to participate in the beautification of the city represented the need for men to narrowly define masculinity on the basis of geographic origin. In fact, within Denver at this time, masculinity was constructed at the nexus of class, race, and gender. White men of the middle and upper-classes tied their masculinity into their hegemonic position at the apex of the masculine hierarchy. By narrowly constructing masculinity, white men protected their hegemony from men who did not fit within the defined strictures of the gender.[54] In a similar manner, Haynes participated in the dominant discourse, narrowly defining his concept of masculinity as involving a regional identity. A man from the East could not display the perfect performance of masculinity in Denver because he lacked the character of the West. Even Speer believed this to be true, asserting ‘And while it is true that much of the territory is barren, or covered with mountains, it is being rapidly developed and each year is sending forth increased streams of wealth, and producing the highest standard of manhood’.[55] Whether or not the American West exhibited any noticeable effect on masculine character, it still held mythological powers in the minds of citizens across the country. Denver’s men understood themselves to be a more perfect embodiment of masculinity because they bore the marks of western livelihood but were also capable of transforming into men of the city. As Speer claimed, ‘Our citizens are composed of men of energy and action, who came here to better conditions—the drone and the satisfied have not yet gotten this far west’.[56]

The highest standard of manhood produced in Denver regulated the actions of men in morally transgressive activities. Speer’s position as mayor and his broker-style approach to political actions placed him in a precarious position that would not allow him to directly police such activities in the city.[57] Rather, he implored Denverites to take it upon themselves to become active in policing the city’s illicit activities. The practice of prostitution received little attention from Speer, but plenty of men in the community willing to take a stand against the sale of sexual services assumed the role of moral reformer. In an address to the Methodist Brotherhood in Fort Collins, Denverite W.W. Winne pleaded with the group to take a stand against prostitution, an abominable practice he referred to as ‘slavery of the body’.[58] Mr. Winne’s argument rested in the belief that prostitution negatively affected both the prostitute and the men paying for services. Not only did Winne argue for a stronger morality from the men involved in the purchase of such services, he represented the new masculinity of the city by calling upon others to take up the crusade against a social ill. Speer even believed that the truest evidence of a city’s prosperity could be found only in the welfare of those who lived and worked within the city.[59] To add to the welfare of citizens, masculine prescriptions demanded that men not count their own wealth, but instead give back to the city both money and service.

Like much of the country during the early decades of the twentieth century, Denver and the state of Colorado faced growing demands from prohibitionists intent on eradicating the saloon from the urban landscape. An article in the Akron Weekly Press called for citizens to vote against the sale of alcohol because the saloon did not offer a corresponding addition to the prosperity of the city. Though not a resident of Denver County, the author believed Denver served all citizens of Colorado and therefore he had a right to participate in the forming of morality in Denver. He asked readers to consider the economic benefits of outlawing houses of drunkenness and disorder: money would instead be spent in ‘legitimate channels of trade’ and tax money would not be spent on the care of the poor and infirm, two groups he believed were largely in their conditions because of the saloon.[60] Just as the fight against prostitution, the effort to end the operation of saloons also evinced men adopting the morality of compassionate masculinity and attempting to accord their own actions with the desire of Speer and the City Beautiful directors for a new, compassionate man in Denver.[61]

The interplay between City Beautiful and the masculinity in Denver demonstrates the role or urban planning in the regulation of gender. Previous studies of City Beautiful and urban planning have analysed the role of planning in moral reform along class lines, but such readings fail to address the relationship between planning and the regulation of gender, especially for men of the middle- and upper-classes. In Denver, the city’s planners and proponents of City Beautiful melded the natural environment and the park settings with the built landscape in order to create public leisure spaces that became sites of meaning and coflict within the ongoing regulation of masculinity. Through the discursive production of compassionate masculinity, the movement undermined the hegemony of strenuous-life masculinity as the dominant regulatory fiction. In undermining the hegemony of the strenuous-life doctrine, City Beautiful in Denver also did much to complicate the mythology of the American West as a male-dominated playground for men to guard against fears of a feminising urban life. As men began to spend more time with women in heterosocial spaces in their recreational activities, they jettisoned the strenuous-life doctrine as the only acceptable set of prescriptions for the performance of masculinity and in the process Denver’s men performed a masculinity representative of the now cosmopolitan character of the city and in turn, visibly placed this urban centre on the landscape of the American West.

University of Manchester

Notes

[1] Denver Real Estate Exchange Committee on Public Improvements (n.d.), Pioneer Monument Manuscript Collection, Western History and Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library. (Hereafter, PMMC).

[2] Janice Conner and Joel Rosenkranz, Rediscoveries in American Sculpture: Studio Works, 1893-1939 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), pp. 2, 130; Wayne Craven, Sculpture in America (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1968), p. 421.

[3] John S. Flowers to MacMonnies, Public Letter, (n.d), Box 1, PMMC.

[4] Ibid.

[5] MacMonnies to Flowers, Public Letter, 17 May, 1907, Box 1, PMMC.

[6] MacMonnies to Flowers, Public Letter, 17 May, 1907, Box 1, PMMC.

[7] Carol McMichael Reese, ‘The Politician and the City: Urban Form and City Beautiful Rhetoric in Progressive Era Denver’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas, 1992), p. 405.

[8] Denver was not the only western city to build tribute to its history through the erection of sculpted monuments praising masculinity. San Francisco built a monument celebrating the industrial history of the city by depicting five men working a drill press. Melissa Dabakias writes of the symbolism of the monument in San Francisco, an important visual signal relaying the necessity of the white worker in the discourse of civilization of the frontier. See Melissa Dabakias, ‘Douglas Tilden’s Mechanics Fountain: Labor and the “Crisis of Masculinity” in the 1890s’, American Quarterly 47:2 (1995), 204-235 (pp. 204-212).

[9] Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 170-215; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 135-136; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), pp. 226-269.

[10] Alan Tractenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), pp. 101-112; Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, pp. 189-198.

[11] I borrow the term ‘primitive masculinity’ from E. Anthony Rotundo. See Rotundo, Manhood in America, pp. 227-232, 287.

[12] Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890: A History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Institute of Planners (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); Richard Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

[13] Bonj Szczygiel, ‘”City Beautiful” Revisited: An Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Civic Improvement Efforts’, The Journal of Urban History, 20:2 (2003); Alice Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 13-41.

[14] J.R. Le Rossignol, ‘Women’s Suffrage and Municipal Politics’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 18 (Nov., 1901), 157-169 (pp. 162-166).

[15] William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 171-173.

[16] Wilson, p. 172.

[17] Szczygiel, p. 113.

[18] Lyle W. Dorsett, The Queen City: A History of Denver, Volume One in the Western Urban History Series (Boulder, CO.: Pruett Publishing Co., 1977), pp. 110-162; Reese, p. 250.

[19] Some of Denver’s more entrepreneurial residents, as well as various religious organizations, operated houses catering to the health needs of relocated Easterners well into the twentieth century. For an example, see Robert Autobee, If You Strike with a Barnum: A History of a Denver Neighborhood, (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 1992).

[20] ‘The Story of Mayor Speer: Master Builder Who Brought Denver From Provincial to Metropolitan State, Started as $8 a Week Clerk- One of Foremost Municipal Authorities in World’, Denver Municipal Facts, May 1918.

[21] Robert W. Speer, Address of Mayor Robert W. Speer, to Councilmen and Business Men, Delivered January Seven, Nineteen Hundred Seven, at a Testimonial Banquet Tendered by the Business Men of Denver (Denver, 1907), p. 4.

[22] Arnoldo Testi, ‘The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity’, The Journal of American History, 81: 4 (1995), 1509-1533 (p. 1524).

[23] Gail Bederman, ‘”The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough”: The Men and Religion Forward Movement of 1911-1912 and the Masculinization of Middle-Class Protestantism’, American Quarterly, 41: 3 (1989), 432-465 (pp. 432-436).

[24] See Maureen A. Flanagan, ‘Gender and Urban Political Reform: The City Club and the Women’s City Club of Chicago in the Progressive Era’, American Historical Review, 95: 4 (1990), 1032-1050, for an analysis of the differences in political reform between men and women.

[25] Denver Municipal Facts (n.d.) Folio 1, Box 1, PMMC.

[26] Speer, Address of Mayor Robert W. Speer, p. 5.

[27] Denver Art Commission of the City of Denver, Proposed Civic Center (Denver: 1908); See Wilson, City Beautiful, pp. 234-253, for a concise history of Denver’s Civic Center.

[28] Mary P. Ryan, ‘”A Laudable Pride in the Whole of Us”: City Halls and Civic Materialism’, American Historical Review, 105:4 (2000), 1131-1170 (pp. 1131-1132).

[29] In his address, Speer told his audience, ‘Denver can be made either one of the pleasing, ordinary cities of the county, or she can be made in fact, not in words, the Paris of American’. See Speer, Address of Mayor Robert W. Speer, p. 23.

[30]Mona Domosh and Joni Seager, Putting Women in Place: Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World, (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), pp. 69-71.

[31] Speer, Address of Mayor Robert W. Speer, pp. 5-6.

[32] Margaret Marsh, ‘Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870-1915’, American Quarterly, 40:2 (1988), 165-186 (pp. 165-166).

[33] Really Live at Wellshire Park (Denver: Ollinger Corp., (n.d), p. 2.

[34] Really Live at Wellshire Park, p. 6.

[35] Really Live at Wellshire Park, p. 4-5.

[36] Marsh, ‘Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity’, p. 178.

[37] Reese, pp. 450-451.

[38] One Day in Denver’s New Mountain Parks, (Denver: City and County of Denver, 1916).

[39] One Day in Denver’s New Mountain Parks.

[40] One Day in Denver’s New Mountain Parks.

[41] Colorado Transcript, 11 June, 1914. Though the article appears in the Colorado Transcript, the editors of the Morrison Monitor authored it.

[42] Ibid.

[43] See Elliot West, The Saloon on the Rocky Mountain Frontier, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 18-24, for a discussion of the rowdy behaviour in frontier drinking establishments.

[44] Speer, Address of Mayor Robert W. Speer, p. 22.

[45] David Glassberg, ‘Restoring a ‘Forgotten Childhood’: American Play and Progressive Era’s Elizabethan Past’, American Quarterly 32:4 (1980), 351-368 (p. 352).

[46] Glassberg, pp. 356-357.

[47] Speer, Address of Mayor Robert. W. Speer, pp. 5-6.

[48] Clifford Putney, Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 11-19.

[49] Rotundo, American Manhood, pp. 222-224.

[50] Reese, pp. 22-23.

[51] Alice M. Shukaloa, ‘Communing with the Gods: Bodybuilding, Masculinity, and U.S. Imperialism, 1875-1900’, (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Texas, 2005), p. 6.

[52][Haynes] to Speer, Personal correspondence, Box 1, Robert W. Speer Papers, Western History and Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library.

[53] Ibid.

[54] Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, pp. 16-23.

[55] Denver Municipal Facts (n.d.) Folio 1, Box 1, PMMC.

[56] Denver Municipal Facts (n.d.) Folio 1, Box 1, PMMC.

[57] Reese, pp. 158-160.

[58] Fort Collins Weekly Courier (Fort Collins, Colorado), 20 December, 1912.

[59] Reese, p. 275.

[60] ‘Why Colorado Should Vote Out the Saloon’, Akron Weekly Press, 25 October, 1912.

[61] In 1915 the city of Denver outlawed both prostitution and the sale of alcohol after much agitation from the community for the municipal government to take a stand against these practices. See Reese, p. 160, footnote 8.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 13, Autumn 2008

Gender Representation in U.S. Contemporary Science Fiction Films: The Cyborg Hero

Rocío Carrasco Carrasco
© Rocío Carrasco Carrasco. All Rights Reserved

The figure of the cyborg encloses many different and contradictory aspects and, therefore, its analysis becomes a difficult task. The cyborg was introduced to the academic community as a critical concept by Donna Haraway in 1985 with her ‘Cyborg Manifesto’. From this moment onwards, emerging theory has dealt with this complex idea within different fields of knowledge and has stressed different aspects. In addition, popular culture provides us with many different manifestations of the cyborg. This figure acts as space where anxieties over technology and gender identity can be confronted and, therefore, it has become a cultural icon. Indeed, it is synonymous with our ‘millennial threshold’.[1] For this reason, we need to narrow the focus and delimit the analysis of this contradictory figure. In this present work, I will deal with the cinematic version of it, specifically with the male-cyborg, which is considered here as the amalgamation man-machine that appears as a dominant character in recent Science-Fiction (SF) cinema. This man-machine coupling offers many possibilities of representation beyond the popularised image of the hypermasculine hybrid.

According to this broad definition, the male cyborg is a character that is so intimately linked to the machine that the differentiation from it becomes troublesome. This amalgamation man-machine complicates traditional dualistic thinking and challenges established models of representation. In this sense, it is interesting to refer to Claudia Springer’s definition of cyborg as opposed to robot: ‘while robots represent the acclaim and fear evoked by industrial age machines for their ability to function independently of humans, cyborgs incorporate rather than exclude humans, and in so doing erase the distinction previously assumed to distinguish humanity from technology’.[2] It should be noted, however, that the definition of the cyborg offered here is a simplistic one, yet quite useful for the purpose of this analysis. This intertwining of organism and machine includes both the hypermasculine action hero (those instances of man-machine coupling that result in an aggressive, over-muscled body fused with potent technology) and the virtual hero, a male character that goes beyond ‘physical’ frontiers and enters computer- generated spaces.

With this in mind, I will concentrate on some representative examples of man-machine hybrids that evoke a confusion of boundaries between humanity and technology and that have opened debates about how gender is, or should be, represented in such contexts. Since gender provides the division into masculine and feminine traits defined in every culture in different ways, it becomes more than useful to analyse how it is represented in popular texts that reflect our relationship with technology. Discourses of technology have always been linked to the masculine sphere because of their implied control over the natural world, and masculinity has been consistently defined in terms of technological competence. In this sense, women’s recent closeness to technology has meant a challenge for patriarchal notions. Indeed, the relationship between gender and technology has been broadly theorised in recent decades, especially by feminist scholars.

In spite of the broad definition of the male cyborg offered here, key works dealing with the cybernetic organism will be employed for the analysis of popular SF films. I will make use of Haraway’s consideration of the cyborg as a liberating figure—exposed in her influential essay, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ (1985). Moreover, the hypermasculine version of the cyborg analysed by Tasker and Jeffords (1993, 1994), and the one described by cyberpunk SF texts will be also taken into account.[3] Donna Haraway suggests that the figure of the cyborg has offered a preoccupation for overcoming gender differences in technological societies. She uses, then, the image of the cyborg for social purposes and affirms that ‘by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs’ (Haraway, p. 150). In its figure, the boundaries between body and technology are socially inscribed. By the late twentieth century, in U.S. scientific culture three boundaries have been dissolved: that between human beings and animals; that between animal-human (organism) and machine; and that between physical and non-physical (Haraway, p. 151-3). It is precisely this dissolution of boundaries what leads to a positive image of the cyborg identity as its condition transgresses gender dualism that privileges man over woman. In this sense, she argues, the technological world frees women’s representations from patriarchal domination and thus her last remark, ‘I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ (Haraway, p. 181). This liberating figure Haraway proposes has gradually acquired notoriety in academic circles and in popular film culture. As a result, there are many discourses dealing with the interface between human identity and machines and how gender is represented in those bodies.

However, in line with those theoreticians that have contested Haraway’s implications about the cyborg being a post-gender metaphor (notably, Anne Balsamo, Jason Haslam and Francisco Collado), it is contended here that male cyborgs represented in a number of influential SF films of the late twentieth century are ironically based upon traditional gender conventions.[4] Specifically, if we consider films like The Terminator (1984) or Robocop (1987), released in the conservative 1980s, we find hypermasculine, destructive and violent male cyborg figures whose ‘armoured bodies’ reinforce patriarchal values in a time when gender dualistic thinking was being attacked.[5] It is precisely their exaggerated bodies and behaviour that has favoured these cyborgs’ consideration as gender ironies. Around the mid-to-end period of the 1990s, however, we find a proliferation of softer images of the male cyborg, inspired by the cyberpunk texts of the early 1980s. It is interesting to note that the iconography that marked the emergence of the cinematic cyborg in the 1980s changed as the SF films gave way to the so-called ‘cyberthrillers’, which were less concerned with the body itself.[6] Thus, 1990s movies like Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic (1995) or the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix (1999) provide us with male androgynous-looking cyborgs placed in computer-generated spaces and quite unable to distinguish reality from fiction. If we took Haraway’s theories into account, these posthuman bodies would be ideal for the liberation of traditional gender constraints. But as happens with hypermasculine cyborgs, hybrids appearing in virtual reality films of the end of the twentieth century reinforce traditional gender patterns. They do so in a number of ways and ultimately, especially in the case of the male cyborg protagonist of The Matrix, follow the path of the mythical hero that Joseph Campbell already established in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1973).[7]

In the Wachowskis’ film, the mythical hero Neo follows a series of stages that shape not only his behaviour but also the film’s overall structure. The film adopts several elements and devices from popular culture, mythology and biblical sources. Specifically, the action of the film is shaped by traditional heroic features, which often privilege men over women and imply, consequently, male dominance. In this sense, The Matrix still adheres to strict gender codes. However, Neo’s role as a ‘virtual’ hero seeks to undermine these codes by using the possibilities of the virtual world to re-write the stereotypical structures of ‘maleness’. While it is true that virtual women have been the subject of critical attention in the work of several feminist scholars, the lack of critical analysis of the virtual male hero in popular productions like The Matrix is apparent. The complex relationship of these virtual male heroes to gender issues deserves more critical consideration, especially since they have come to embody an idea of a ‘new’ type of hero for many people, while clearly also perpetuating gender stereotypes.

Cyborg representation in popular culture and especially in SF cinema ranges from ‘machine-based military model’ to ‘genetically tailored human simulation’. [8] Clynes and Kline already used this term in 1960 to refer to a ‘self-regulating man-machine system’ capable of surviving hostile non-earth environments.[9] Especially after the release in 1977 of Star Wars, a proliferation of cyborgs made from human and manufactured material pervaded the screen. This type of cyborg has also been denominated ‘mechanical cyborg’, due to its techno-human amalgamation.[10] The Terminator (1984), Blade Runner (1982), Robocop (1987), Hardware (1990), Eve of Destruction (1991), Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991), RoboCop 2 (1990) and Total Recall (1990), to name just a few, are cases in point. A generalised tendency of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s was to associate cyborg imagery with violence. Claudia Springer argues when referring to films like The Terminator or Robocop that what separates cyborgs from humans is the cyborg’s greater capacity for violence, combined with enormous physical prowess. Thus, ‘[i]nstead of representing cyborgs as intellectual wizards whose bodies have withered away and been replaced by computer terminals, popular culture gives us muscular hulks distinguished by their superior fighting skills’.[11]

Fear of technology, a recurrent topic in earlier SF films like Metropolis (1926), is suggested in these later films by massive bodies that overpower human characters.[12] This fear—clearly evoked by male cyborgs like the Terminator—nevertheless lessen with time up to the point where it disappears and the interface with technology produces a pleasurable experience instead, as it will be argued later in this article when dealing with virtual heroes. The gradual erosion of the fear evoked by armoured cyborgs is also perceived in the Terminator series. Thus, the destructive Terminator that is sent from the future with the programmed mission to kill Sarah Connor in the 1984 film becomes a protective figure in charge of defending the heroine from the ‘real monster’, the frightening T1000 in Terminator: Judgment Day (1991). The change of roles from villain to hero that Schwarzenegger enacts in the series accounts for the normalisation of technology within U.S. society, not forgetting that by the release of the second film, Schwarzenegger was an actor consolidated enough within the industry as to demand the role of the ‘good’ protagonist. Schwarzenegger again took the role of protagonist in the last film of the series, Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3 (2003). By the time this last film was released, the traditional fear of technology was an over-exploited topic and, consequently, another ‘fear’ had to be added to the menacing cyborg character: the condition of woman. The inclusion of the woman cyborg seems to reflect the current crisis of masculinity in the U.S and the perceived threat to men from the increasing power of women within society, a topic that will be also explored at this time by means of the confused identity of those male characters appearing in virtual reality films, as I will show later. Indeed, the ‘humanisation’ of the cyborg is more evident in films that suggest an intimate relationship between human-identity and machine.

Hypermasculine hybrid beings of the 1980s and early 1990s owe part of their image to comic book superheroes and suggest the terrible consequences of human technological progress. Apart from this, they have also been interpreted as embodiments of the political ideology of the times. The 1980s were characterised by a return to the kind of morality that had dominated U.S. culture before the social upheavals provoked by feminism and protests by other ‘marginalised’ groups that took place in the 1960s. Ronald Reagan, elected president in 1981 and re-elected in 1984, became the symbol of this decade, characterised by a turn to the right. Susan Jeffords in Hard Bodies. Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1994) argues that this president ‘became the premiere masculine archetype for the 1980s, embodying both national and individual images of manliness that came to underlie the nation’s identity during his eight years in office’.[13] His foreign policy was driven by five beliefs rooted in America’s past. First, he considered the Soviet Union and its Communism as the source of every world trouble. Secondly, he believed that an American military supremacy would finish with the Soviet threat and, thus, he encouraged an immense investment in defence forces and systems. Third, Reagan considered the need for a more interventionist, militarised foreign policy with the aim of making Americans feel good about their supremacy over the world. Fourth, he believed in the privatisation of managed economies. The last force is what was known as ‘Reagan doctrine’, by which the U.S. announced in 1985 its support of any anti-Communist movement in the world.[14] Reagan’s foreign policy caused many reactionary responses due to its emphasis on military expansion and its insistence on gaining total arms control over the world. It also provoked the emergence of many international debates over the U.S.’s use of nuclear weapons, as a result of Regan’s insistence on achieving nuclear supremacy.

All these historical facts, together with the social concerns and anxieties at that time were, consequently, reflected in many cultural products and especially in visual media. Among the most outstanding social and popular issues of the mid-1980s, we could point out the gradual spread of drug traffic and the awareness of AIDS, the latter normally associated with homosexuality and male drug consumers and causing a general panic. Apart from this, the social and political situation in the U.S. worsened with the appearance of many opponents to Reagan’s conservatism, mainly women, people of colour and homosexuals, who mobilised against his policies. International affairs also affected U.S. consciousness, especially terrorism, religious tensions, hunger and famine. However, Reagan was popular, in part because he made Americans feel good about themselves, in spite of all the decade’s perceived threats.

If we consider gender and its representation on screen during this decade, we can see a backlash against feminist precepts, as noted by many critics. Susan Faludi points out that in many films of the 1980s it is ‘as if Hollywood has taken the feminist films and run the reels backwards’.[15] In these films, women return to the home, their new quest being to achieve traditional marriage and to escape the workplace, something they had been fighting to enter not so long before. This backlash in the movies was supported by a powerful political force that campaigned against feminism and also against the Equal Rights Amendment, the Gay Liberation Movement and abortion demands. This movement attempted to stop the feminist tenets as they thought they were going too far and had misplaced their initial aims. In short, the 1980s backlash in cinema meant a return to traditional roles, embracing what Faludi calls ‘the Pygmalion tradition’, and thus, during this period, we see men redefining women, and reclaiming them as their possessions and property.[16] This return to traditional roles can be clearly seen in action films that show violence and in which men are seen as superior figures, and women, consequently, are reduced to a secondary position, as happens in films like Predator (1987), Die Hard (1988), Robocop (1987), and Lethal Weapon (1987), among others. In them we see that independent women are silenced by being pushed off-screen.[17]

The 1980s ‘Reagan Revolution’, then, with its conservatism and militarism, influenced the representation of masculinity in many films of the decade. Healthy white male figures with hard bodies came to represent the country’s solution for all its internal and external conflicts. These films presented the U.S. cinema-going public with an image of masculinity that accurately epitomised the political agenda of the Reagan Era. This highly popularised portrayal of the masculine ideal, linked to hard bodies and endless activity, offered visual pleasure to mass-audiences and also helped the construction of the U.S. popular culture at the time.[18]

A clear example of this is Schwarzenegger’s character in the Terminator series. The warrior cyborg figure of the Termiator contributes to the shape of popular masculinity in the Reagan era. It evokes notions of power and supremacy, thanks both to its close link with technology and to its exaggerated masculinity. In this sense, the ‘ungendered’ ideal proposed by Haraway is far from reachable. Instead, this figure can be equated with Klaus Theweleit’s description of the fascist male soldier as an invincible armoured fighting machine.[19] In fact, several critics, among them Springer or Foster, have analysed cyborg imagery in line with Theweleit’s psychological analysis of the fascist male soldier or ‘FreiKorps‘. The Terminator’s change from a bad cyborg in the first movie to a good one in the second and third responds, as suggested earlier, to the normalisation of technology in everyday American life. The previous fear of technology had lessened with time, but nevertheless a residual fear of technology is present in the whole Terminator series and this conflict is reflected in the conflicted cyborg imagery. For, as embodiments of the popular vision of masculinity, these muscular cyborgs can be said to disguise and/or calm the male fears towards AIDS and others threats of the body. By offering a strong healthy body on screen, the sense of wellbeing that the Reagan philosophy sought to promote among Americans is precariously assured. It is at this point where critics like Yvonne Tasker and Barbara Creed have highlighted what they consider to be an hysterical over-compensation for a real masculinity in crisis.

It is clear that the violence and the extraordinary physique of the Terminator cyborg body and its contemporaries have been interpreted in different ways. Some critics believe that a mockery and humiliation of the male condition can be achieved by means of a visual exaggeration and, as Tasker argues, ‘critics have seen stars like Stallone and Schwarzenegger as “performing the masculine”, drawing attention to masculinity and the male body by acting out an excessive caricature of cultural expectations’.[20] I agree with Tasker’s statement in the sense that this over-muscled body on screen stands for a utopian ideal that does not correspond to the actual realisation of average men in U.S. daily life. Accordingly, Andrew Britton, in his influential essay ‘Blissing Out’, assumes that Reaganite entertainment is ‘the quintessence of entertainment: it creates the pleasurable obviousness of feelings that it tells us are untenable’.[21] The irony consists, then, in the consideration of this ‘non-frequent’ body as a mark for a masculinity that does not correspond to the majority of U.S. citizens. Extending this argument to films like The Terminator or Terminator 2, the cyborg body would amount to an irony, since its physical human side is intended to imitate ‘real’ men and become undistinguishable from them. Therefore the Terminator’s ‘racial’ definition according to his enemy Kyle Reese in The Terminator also becomes ironic: ‘they look human. Sweat, bad breath, everything. Very hard to spot’. Indeed, only dogs can recognise the Terminator’s non-human condition.

This contraposition between ideal and actual masculinity has been explored by many critics. For example, Kenneth MacKinnon’s Representing Men: Maleness and Masculinity in the Media (2003) analyses male representation in different media, assuming that there is a gulf between masculinity as it is experienced in society and that form of masculinity called ‘hegemonic’. This can easily be seen in these cyborg films showing hypermasculine man-machine amalgamations. Yet, MacKinnon argues, this hegemonic or ideal masculinity is not above history and social change but it is altered in the same way society is. Thus, ‘[w]hile some aspects remain, the ideal as a whole may be reshaped to meet different social needs in relation to gender’ and consequently, a wide variety of masculinity can be found represented in movies, television, advertising and mediated sports.[22] To this argument it must be added the fact that the definition of cyborg (understood as a man-machine amalgamation) also varies, like masculinity, depending on time, context and environment. Thus, as this article shows, the hypermasculine version of the cyborg that appears in the Reagan era gives way to virtual cyborgs placed in contexts where technology does not represent such an imminent threat. As suggested above, the changing nature of the cyborg can be appreciated if we follow the trajectory of the Terminator character.

In addition, other films of the 1980s offer a completely different vision of the cyborg figure. For example, in Steven Lisberger’s Tron (1982) the goal of the main character, Kevin Flynn, is to escape from a computer-generated space in which he has been trapped. Although armoured and scared of the technological world in which he is placed, his cyborg condition is different from the hypermasculine Terminator and anticipates the prevalent cyborg figure of virtual reality films. These virtual characters have positive, intimate relationships with technology and eventually discover their artificial nature, which deeply affects their personality. This dehumanisation of the male body and the consequent identity crisis become key motifs in many subsequent SF films.

Hypermasculine and idealised cyborg bodies seem to provoke illusions and fantasies on the part of the spectator, who subjects them to what may be termed a ‘voyeuristic gaze’. These bodies can, therefore, be analysed using film theory that approaches the body as an erotic object. Steve Neale, for example, explores male characters as objects of the look, proposing thus new interpretations of the male image in the visual media. Masculinity is studied in relation to notions of spectacle and passivity. Therefore, spectacular masculinity, where the male body becomes the passive object of the spectator’s voyeuristic gaze, in fact rebels against Hollywood’s long-held ideological structures, which traditionally associate maleness with activity and femaleness with passivity. Technical devices such as the fragmentation of the on-screen male body by means of close-ups or other camera movements allow for the enjoyment of these stylised male bodies. This pleasure in looking, Neale argues, endows the male spectator with a ‘narcissistic identification’ with the powerful body on screen, involving ‘fantasies of power, omnipotence, mastery and control’.[23] All this implies, according to Neale, a homosexual connotation between male spectator and the male figure, which is, nevertheless, repressed by patriarchal society.

Moreover, the appearance on screen of hypermasculine bodies as spectacle has been considered by some critics as a ‘feminisation’ of the male body, an instance of how traditional Hollywood norms dictate that the object of the gaze must be a female figure.[24] Richard Dyer’s ‘Don’t Look Now: The Male Pin-Up’ (1982) explores the conditions under which the eroticisation of the male body becomes acceptable, and the conditions under which women are allowed to look. He believes that different codes of looking are used to reaffirm gender roles and he explores the ways to achieve this. He is especially interested in Nancy M. Henley’s Body Politics, particularly in her discussion of eye contact. Images of men aimed at women, star portraits, pin-ups or paintings of men, he claims, are in a particularly interesting relation to these eye-contact patterns.[25] Men as spectacle, Dyer argues, violate conventional codes of looking, which can be illustrated by three instabilities of the male pin-up. The first is the contradiction on the part of the male model between the fact of being looked at and his attempt to deny it. The second is the violation on his part of the association: object of the look/passivity and subject/activity. The male image, although an object, is associated with activity and action. Even when he is posing and relaxed, his muscles are emphasised and he still promises activity. The last violation arises from his impossibility of becoming the phallus, which has always been considered a symbol of male power. The penis has always provided an association with the phallus and power, as only men possess it, but his point is that the penis cannot achieve all the power suggested by the phallus. That is the reason which explains the excessive quality of the male bodies, emphasising muscles and phallic symbols, which attempt to represent the ‘phallic mystique’, something difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.[26]

Both Dyer’s and Neale’s pioneering articles have contributed to new interpretations of the male image on screen, anticipating many current debates about masculinity in the visual media. Yet, their theories are generalised in the sense that they do not make any kind of distinction among spectators, as if all of them shared the same race, colour and sexual preference. Moreover, they do not take into account contemporary historical and cultural facts which, I consider, are of great importance for any analysis of masculinity on screen. In fact, images of manhood develop with time and are affected by contemporary socio-cultural anxieties.

In contrast, Amanda Fernbach’s cross-disciplinary study of the fetishisation of masculinity in SF films engages with psychoanalytic, cultural and social discourses. Fernbach’s theory about fetishism is applicable to society’s contemporary behaviour. Socio-cultural anxieties at the turn of the 21^st century are suggested in the depiction of a fetishised masculinity. Thus, her account of the representation of idealised masculinity at times of cultural crisis takes into account U.S. context of postmodernity and is thus more useful for the present analysis of the cyborg hero than either Dyer or Neale’s approach. Fernbach considers two main models by which masculinity is fetishised: the hypermasculine cyborg and the console cowboy. Despite their differences, both are creations of fetishistic fantasies. The start of Terminator 2, Fernbach contends, shows us a world—2029 Los Angeles—where straight white masculinity is no longer at the centre of things, but is on the margins. Thus:

Ordinary masculinity lacks, and the technological Terminator represent a fetishized, idealized masculinity that is a desirable alternative. In Terminator 2, the Terminator represents an idealized phallic masculinity heavily dependent upon technofetishes to ward off the anxieties of the male spectator faced with the prospect of a future vision of castrated masculinity.[27]

Despite this fantasy of fetishisation, the fear of lack and castration still remains, since the Terminator’s body is constantly being wounded and revealing his artificial nature. At these moments ‘the Terminator’s performance of masculinity resists and destabilises dominant patriarchal and heterosexist positioning that would claim masculinity as self-evident and natural’.[28] At this point it can be affirmed that the hypermasculine cyborg deconstructs traditional masculinity through performative excess.

All these different readings of the hypermasculine cyborg suggest the complexity of this figure and the great amount of theoretical debates it arouses concerning gender. In general terms, those theories are most successful that suggest that the Terminator’s extraordinary techno-body reflects the incredulity of its excessive masculinity, which is considered as something abstract and unreachable. The Terminator’s cyborg body epitomises the mood of the times and echoes contemporary fears about cultural changes, especially those affecting gender. However, Fernbach’s analysis ignores much of the specific cultural and economic context behind the examples of fetishism. The body of the virtual cyborg hero does something different by blurring the lines between genders.

Yet, and taking into account the broad definition of the cyborg proposed here, the hypermasculine cyborg is only one among the many possibilities for man-machine amalgamations during the1980s. If we consider films like Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) or Tron (1982), the depiction of the male cyborg is, as suggested before, of a very different nature. The image they propose anticipates, in my view, the posthuman aesthetic present in uncountable films of the mid-to-end 1990s where cyborgs usually appear in virtual realities. According to Springer, ‘rampaging muscle-bound cyborgs were replaced by slim young men and women jacked into cyberspace, inspired by “console cowboys” in cyberpunk fiction of the 1980s’.[29] Hence, Johnny Mnemonic (1995), Hackers (1995), Virtuosity (1995), The 13th Floor (1999), Strange Days (1997), Dark City (1998), eXistenZ (1999), The Matrix (1999), The Lawnmower Man (1992), Nirvana (1997) and The Cell (2000), among many others, are set in virtually created spaces and share many aspects and devices when representing this dehumanised cyborg body. In my view, these films consciously alter the traditional limits between genders, a motif that is copied from written cyberpunk texts of the1980s. Indeed, and as happened with cyberpunk, virtual heroes are normally depicted as less physically impressive than previous embodiments of the cyborg.

The inability to distinguish any border between genders is suggested in contemporary SF films by ‘new heroes’, placed in cyberspace and unable to cope with a reality that transcends rational boundaries. The novelty of this male cyborg resides precisely in his androgynous appearance and in the relationship between a physical body and its virtual existence, a recurrent motif in contemporary SF. Some researchers on this topic have argued that gender and other aspects of social identity are considered irrelevant in those virtual worlds. Sadie Plant, specialist on cyberfeminism in the UK, for instance, argues that virtual worlds ‘undermine both the world-view and the material reality of two thousands years of patriarchal control’, probably in reference to the differing representations of a body where sexual differences are not so sharply marked.[30] This complete rupture with traditional male appearance has led to their consideration as feminised characters, reinforced by the fact that the virtual space they enter is normally associated to the feminine or ‘matrix’. Thus Fernbach affirms, when dealing with the fetishisation of masculinity in cyberspace, that ‘unlike the stereotypical figure of the male cyborg, these console cowboys are feminized by the technoprosthetics that enable them to enter cyberspace, also referred to, of course, as the matrix’. Console cowboys entering this space would, consequently, show feminine traits as ‘the feminized technospace of the matrix is sexualized in cyberpunk’.[31] In the same way, many contemporary SF films depicting these created worlds often show androgynous characters following those behaviours traditionally considered as ‘female’. This idealised ‘heterotopia’ has been a basic reading of cyberpunk.[32] However, this ‘genderless’ utopia is, in my view, partly paralysed in the visual media and, consequently, the total rupture with traditional visual and behavioural gender codes does not take place in virtual reality films.

The Matrix, main object of study here, offers virtual characters placed in this supposed idealised space for gender representation. Its male protagonist, Neo, presents an androgynous look and body. Neo perfectly embodies this androgynous appearance not only because of his more neutral body but also because his complex personality identifies him rather with those characters delineated in works in which the status of the self is problematised. Neo’s sense of self, like the world in which he is placed, is considered unstable, plural and fragmented. This plurality of the self also implies a plurality of traits ending up in the fluidity of gender features. In fact, Neo’s representation on screen is visually different from that of other invincible male heroes. His shaved face and his slim body show his lack of prominent male features. Challenging Plant’s argument, the notion of the body as site of gender difference is here contested, since the typical muscular body is replaced by those androgynous features. Moreover, we learn that characters can be trained to defeat the enemy just by downloading specific computer programmes into their memories. Indeed, many of the qualities that Neo displays are based on these programmes which are genderless in that they can be inserted into any female cyborg’s memory as well as that of a male. Not only an ambiguous physical appearance characterises this apparently new hero, but also his constant doubts and fears make of him a different male type. Furthermore, the loss of boundaries does not only take place within his body but also in his mind, as he is sometimes unable to distinguish whether he is awake or asleep. All these elements imply that cyberspace favours the depiction of more fluid gender traits.

Yet the constant emphasis on the blurring of frontiers within The Matrix causes the hero’s feeling of insecurity and loss. Neo, in same way as many other posthuman bodies placed in virtual realities, are scared to loose his body and, consequently, his identity. This is a consequence for the interface of humans with computer technology, since it ‘involves transforming the self into something entirely new, combining technological with human identity’.[33] This transgressive worldview is partly resolved, according to Collado, by means of ironic overtones as he contends in his article ‘Fear of the Flesh, Fear of the Borg’ (2002):

the Wachowski brothers make use of a variety of cultural references, frequently following cyberpunk features, in order to stress the human fear of the machine but, fortunately for many viewers, some of those motifs and references introduce an overall adventuresque, ironic and apparently optimistic view that clearly contrasts with the film’s apocalyptic and highly transgressive view.[34]

However, the lost of the self and the human interface with technology is normally considered a pleasurable experience in virtual reality films, a comfort that users of computing technology associate with the comforting security of the mother’s womb (not to forget that the word ‘matrix’ means originally both mother and womb). The act of connecting the body to computing technology is also considered in popular texts as a sexual act, a metaphor for orgasm. Springer argues at this point that ‘[i]nstead of losing our consciousness and experiencing bodily pleasures, cyborg imagery in popular culture invites us to experience sexuality by losing our bodies and becoming pure consciousness’.[35] In this sense, the previous fear of technology decreases with the interface man-computing technology but, at the same time, provokes an anxiety on the hero. This ambiguous relationship towards technology is one of the film’s main topics. While technology is normalised through the cinematic cyborg (suggesting in some sequences the pleasure of the interface), it is still the source of his problems and insecurities.

In spite of all this innovation in terms of cyborg visual representation, most SF films depicting virtual worlds usually place the male hero—here considered as cyborg—at the same level as the traditional one whose mission was to free humanity from a bleak fate. In films like The Matrix or Johnny Mnemonic, we still find in the masculine character a sense of leadership, control and success, which was present in heroes of ancient mythology, folk tales and literature. There are two basic readings of the cyberpunk literature: on the one hand, as an idealised and innovative text opposed to traditional narratives and, on the other, as a discourse that reproduces old and oppressing values. It is also the case, however, that the conventional heroic behaviour found in many virtual reality films, inherited in part from cyberpunk written literature, does not necessarily have to be shown by means of the typical hero’s body, but, instead, it is found working in androgynous and even feminised bodies. As Collado and Salvador contend in their analysis of the limits of cyberpunk:

Cyberpunk radically sticks to some of the basic ingredients of the postmodernist understanding of the world: within its bleak landscapes, protagonists frequently appear as parodied copies of the old American motif of the solitary hero who comes to face the problem a community has, fights and defeats the existing danger, and then goes back to his lonely life.[36]

Thus, The Matrix follows the heroic pattern described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell established a quest structure for folk tales, myths and religious fables in which the hero must overcome three stages in order to succeed: departure, initiation and return. The Matrix is one more example of Campbell’s mythical quest, and Neo embodies, at least partially, some of the conditions of the traditional hero. He is a hero of his own time, and his adventure quest in the film consists in crossing the threshold from one world to another, after which he becomes a useful social being. His behaviour is heroic as long as having the chance to choose his own destiny, he decides to have the red pill that will allow him to enter ‘wonderland’. Neo is at all times the key for plot development in the film, and as such, perpetuates traditional dualistic thinking. He is even represented in the film as an image of Jesus Christ—he is told so at one point in the film—in so far as he is the one who has been elected to save humanity.

Neo overcomes, then, the three Campbellian mythical stages—departure, initiation and return—that become the structural basis of the film. Traditional gender positions are, in this case, but mere patterns to be followed and imitated by the characters. Specifically, Neo needs to imitate the traditional hero structure to be considered as such, since the created world he is inserted in is but mere appearance and bound to be dissolved. In these places where everything is fluid, the need of rescuing traditional gender pattern seems to be logical. Once more, the film shows that gender becomes a cultural performance and, therefore, Neo faithfully follows the ‘monomyth’ which is, according to Campbell, a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: “separation-initiation-return”.[37]

The mythical hero’s departure stage, with all the incidents it implies, can be compared with Neo’s behaviour at the beginning of the film, since he encounters inexplicable forces right from the beginning of his appearance on screen (his computer is able to anticipate the knock on the door and encourages him to follow a white rabbit). He is, likewise, literally called to adventure, yet in a very contemporary manner; that is, by means of a mobile phone that enables his communication with the father-figure of Morpheus. The achievement of ‘supernatural aid’ is embodied by Morpheus, a tutelary figure who guides the hero in hid adventure and offers him the key to discover ‘the truth’. The crossing of the first threshold that is suggested in the film in a sequence where the female protagonist—Trinity—leads Neo to the door where he will meet his spiritual mentor. The entrance to the ‘zone of magnified power’ in the film evokes the ‘uncanny’ described in many gothic tales. This can be observed in the depiction of a spacious castle-like flat with a big main door and old-fashionable furniture. The setting in a stormy night and Morpheus’s look—a tall strong Afro-American man dressed in a black leather coat—reinforce this suggestion of danger and the mysterious. Morpheus represents the above mentioned guardian and it is not until Neo assures that he wants to start the ‘mythical journey’ that he gives permission to Neo and both cross the door that will lead the protagonist to the starting point of his mythical journey.

Neo’s entry to the real world is similar to the events of the stage that Campbell calls ‘the belly of the whale’ [38]. The womb image is symbolised by the capsule in which Neo has been inserted all his life, after literally being swallowed into the unknown, represented this time by the world of the machines. He trespasses the first threshold and is literally reborn in another world, in a sequence that evokes to perfection the ‘belly of the whale’. In The Matrix Neo, like the mythical hero, defeats the ogres (the agents) after having overcome a series of trials and adventures. ‘The road of trials’ is the first incident Campbell describes in this unfamiliar world, and is represented in the film by Neo’s training, once inserted into load programs—the fighting and the jumping ones—which remind us of the ‘fluid, ambiguous forms’ of the ‘dream landscape’.

The superiority of women in the film—shown partly by Trinity’s strength—resembles Campbell’s consideration of women as goddesses. We observe, therefore, how Trinity saves Neo from his enemies on one occasion and ‘resurrects’ him by kissing him. Moreover, the presence of the Oracle—normally implying a superior being—is also embodied in the film by a woman, whose visionary powers are out of question. Neo, like the mythical hero, suffers the apotheosis when he is almost to die. The ultimate boon is symbolised in the film by Neo’s final destruction of his main opponent, Agent Smith. When he has finished his mission, he returns to the virtual world where he belongs in order to show people the knowledge he has acquired in his quest. This corresponds to what Campbell calls ‘the magic flight’, by which the hero, triumphant in his task, returns to his world ‘supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron’. Thus he crosses definitely the ‘return threshold’ with the aim to show people a world without borders or boundaries.[39] Campbell’s ideas can be read successfully, then, into the Matrix trilogy. The protagonist of The Matrix follows quite faithfully the mythical pattern proposed by Campbell, with the only slight changes that the insertion of contemporary values and images allows. Yet, as it has been suggested above, The Matrix goes beyond Campbell’s mythical patterns –which uphold gender stereotypes- by including a virtual hero that blurs the limits between male and female.

Commenting on the traditional quest story, Margery Hourihan claims that the hero’s dominance of the events in a narration reinforces accepted views of the way the world is: ‘[the hero] embodies the privileged terms of the interconnected dualisms which have shaped Western thought and values’.[40] Thus, this character must be white and the symbol of an elite, namely a prince, king, leader or representative of his people; unquestionably male and inscribing dominance over the opposite sex, considered as different and dangerous; young and implying adolescent relationships, especially towards women, standing for the power of reason and the strength of human intellectual energy; and finally a man of action proper, namely his skill, courage, dominance and determination. The features ascribed to this hero are present in almost every story following the quest pattern. Neo follows as well this heroic type since he is a white, young, and upper-class male who works as a computer programmer, and who shows, at least occasionally, the features of a man of action.

Neo is at all times the example of a mythical hero. He does not only follow Campbell’s typology of the traditional hero, but he is also associated with other prototypes of masculinity in critical formalist works like the heroes in fairy tales that Vladimir Propp analyses in The Morphology of the Folk Tale (1928), or the hero of romance in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957). Moreover, this reproduction of the discourses of white male supremacy is but another inheritance of cyberpunk literature.

In fulfilling these traditional behavioural models, Neo cannot evolve completely into a different type of hero, and no significant evolution in the assignment of innovative elements dealing with the hero’s task can be registered in the Waschowski’s film. The insertion of traditional motifs may suggest, at some points, a contradiction, if we take into account the film’s portrayal of the latest technological motifs as well as the constant inclusion of postmodern issues. The contradiction is also perceived in the film’s inclusion of the hypermasculine father figure of Morpheus, a character that is considered as a semi-god and whose instructions are essential for the hero’s accomplishment of his task.

The novelty of The Matrix resides, therefore, not in Neo’s adventure and final task but in his androgynous look, in his sometimes cowardly behaviour and in the fact that he collaborates with powerful women characters like Trinity. This is reinforced by the technological and innovative setting in which he appears and by his condition as a cyborg. Virtual spaces in contemporary SF films offer, then, a clash between an innovative representation of masculinity by means of an external androgynous body and the perpetuation of traditional values taking place precisely in these contemporary bodies and worlds. Springer argues that ‘the construction of masculinity as cyborg requires its simultaneous deconstruction’. She contends that the paradoxical desire to preserve masculine subjectivity in the figure of the cyborg requires the destruction of the male body and its replacement with electronic parts; either physically, using hardware, or psychologically, using software. Yet, by escaping from its close identification with the male body, masculine subjectivity has been reconstituted, suggesting an essential masculinity that transcends bodily presence. Thus, ‘[i]n a world without human bodies technological things will be gendered and there will be patriarchy’.[41]

After this analysis of some significant male cyborgs appearing in recent SF cinema, it can be affirmed that the innovative and liberating figure proposed by Haraway in her famous ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ is not achieved in these texts. Male cyborgs are still powerful figures that epitomise the anxieties of the times. Thus in films like the Terminator series, where the border man-machine becomes problematic, the superior physicality of the male cyborg can be read as an ironic reaffirmation of gender boundaries. Even in films where many boundaries have been dissolved, like those between reality and fiction, between machine and man, and even those between hero and cyborg (the latter traditionally associated to the villain), we find virtual heroes with androgynous appearances that still follow the traditional path left by mythical heroes. As suggested here, Neo embodies the so-called new hero while at the same time perpetuates traditional gender stereotypes, a paradox that makes us think about the meaning of the very concept ‘new hero’. Clearly different from violent male cyborgs such as the popular Terminator, cyborgs appearing in contemporary virtual reality films do not disassociate themselves completely from conventional patterns of representation however, but instead old norms are inscribed in new digital spaces and disguised under posthuman aesthetics. Thus, while the definition of the cyborg varies according to the times and the current technological improvements, gender dualism still remains and gender positions are perpetuated in these images.

Universidad de Huelva

Notes

[1] Adam I. Bostic, ‘Automata. Seeing Cyborg Through the Eyes of Popular Culture, Computer-Generated Imagery, and Contemporary Theory’, Leonardo 31 (1998), 357-61, p. 358.

[2] Claudia Springer, ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’, in Patrick D. Hopkins ed, Sex/ Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender, and Technology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), pp. 485-500 (p. 486).

[3] Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth century’ (1985), in Simians, Cyborg, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) pp. 149-181. Hereafter references made within the body of the text; Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (London: Routledge, 1993); Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

[4] For discussions of the interface between gender and technology in popular movies, see Jason Haslam, ‘Coded Discourse: Romancing the (Electronic) Shadow in The Matrix’, College Literature 32.3 (2005), 92-115; Anne Balsamo, ‘Reading Cyborg Writing Feminism’ in Gill Kirkup et al, eds, The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 148-59; and Francisco Collado, ‘Fear of the Flesh, Fear of the Borg: Narratives of Bodily Transgression in Contemporary U.S. Culture’, in Ramón Plo and María Jesús Martínez Alfaro, eds, Beyond Borders: Re-defining Generic and Ontological Borders (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 2002), pp. 67-79.

[5] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), chapter 5.

[6] Christine Cornea, Science Fiction Cinema: Between Fantasy and Reality (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p. 129. As Bukatman accurately notes, the real advent of cyberpunk (with the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984) was preceded by at least three films that had an important impact upon the cyberpunk aesthetics: Blade Runner, Tron and Videodrome, all released in 1982 (Bukatman, p. 137). These films recreate a context of visual pastiche and their characters share many aspects and devices when representing their dehumanised body. Still, they rely on popular visions of the body at work in the 1980s. Tron, for instance, is considered to be one of the first SF films dealing with cyberspace and where ‘the disembodiment of cyberspace meets the hyperbolically embodied figure of the athlete’ (Bukatman, p. 303).

[7] Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973).

[8] David Tomas, ‘Feedback and Cybernetic: Reimaging the Body in an Age of the Cyborg’, in Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds, Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/ Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (London: Sage, 1995), pp. 21-43 (pp. 21, 36, 36).

[9] Clynes, Manfred E. and Nathan S. Kline, ‘Cyborgs and Space’ [1960]. In C.H. Gray ed, The Cyborg Handbook (London: Routledge, 1995), pp 29-34 (p. 30).

[10] Jennifer Gonzalez, ‘Envisioning Cyborg Bodies: Note from Current Research’, in Gill Kirkup et al, eds, The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 58-73 (p. 57).

[11] Springer, ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’, pp. 492, 493.

[12] Ibid., p. 493. Fear of technological development is not new in SF films but it is a topic inherited from Romantic writings where we found the tension between human-machine embodied by creatures like the monster created by doctor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or the creature Olympia in E.T.A Hoffmann’s Der Sandman (1816).

[13] Jeffords, p. 11.

[14] Mary Beth Norton et al, A People and a Nation: A History of the United States (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1991), pp. 592-4.

[15] Susan Faludi, ‘Fatal and Foetal Visions: The Backlash in the Movies’, in Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women (London: Vintage, 1991), pp. 140-70 (p. 156).

[16] Ibid., p. 167.

[17] Ibid., p. 169.

[18] Jeffords, p. 12.

[19] Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 212.

[20] Tasker, p. 78. Roger Horrocks deals with male images and stereotypes in a section of his book Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies and Realities (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). When analysing the rich body of images about men that are provided in recent years by the figure of Schwarzenegger films, he refers to his physique, which reflects ‘the considerable amount of narcissism about the male musculature in our culture’ (Horrocks, p. 160). However such a body, he will later continue, ‘can be seen both as a massive penis, but can also be construed as quasi-female’ if we consider the bodybuilding enlarging of pectorals and narrowing of hips (Horrocks, p. 160).

[21] Andrew Britton, ‘Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment’, Movie 31/32 (1986), 1-36, p. 7. In this sense it is interesting to refer to Judith Butler’s affirmation that ‘sex’ is a socially constructed category and forcibly materialised through time (Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits on ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 2). Her argument is that ‘the regulatory norms of “sex” work in a performative fashion to constitute the materiality of bodies and, more specifically, to materialise the body’s sex, to materialise sexual difference in the service of the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative’ (Butler, Bodies That Matter, p. 2). In this sense, the category of gender, very much like that of sex in Butler’s analysis, becomes a cultural performance, that is, the effect of a set of contested power relations based on ‘such defining institutions’ as phallogocentrism and compulsory heterosexuality (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. viii). Butler proposes in this work a performative theory of gender that disrupts the categories between bodies, sex, gender and sexuality.

[22] Kenneth MacKinnon, Representing Men: Maleness and Masculinity in the Media (New York: Arnold, 2003), p. 115.

[23] Steve Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema’, in John Caughie et al, eds, The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 277-287 (p. 279).

[24] Ibid., p. 286.

[25] Richard Dyer, ‘Don’t Look Now: The Male Pin-Up’, in John Caughie et al, eds, The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 265-76 (p. 267).

[26] Ibid., pp. 270, 275.

[27] Amanda Fernbach, ‘The Fetishization of Masculinity in Science Fiction: The Cyborg and the Console Cowboy’, Science Fiction Studies 27 (2000), 234-55 (p. 137).

[28] Ibid., p. 238.

[29] Claudia Springer, ‘Psycho-Cybernetics on the 1990s’, in Annette Kuhn, ed, Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 203-18 (p. 204).

[30] Sadie Plant, ‘On the Matrix: Cyberfeminist Simulations’, in Gill Kirkup et al, eds, The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 265-75 (p. 265).

[31] Fernbach, p. 244.

[32] Foucault used this term in 1967 to refer to places and spaces that are formed in the very founding of society, ‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’. Foucault, Michel. ‘On Other Spaces’. Diacritics 16 (1986), pp. 22-27.

[33] Springer, ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’, p. 486.

[34] Collado, ‘Fear of the Flesh’, p. 14.

[35] Springer, ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’, p. 487.

[36] Francisco Collado and Sergio Salvador, ‘Post-Human: The Cultural Limits of “Cyberpunk”‘, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies 19 (1998), 21-37 (p. 25).

[37] Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), p.30.

[38] Ibid., pp. 90-92.

[39] Ibid, pp. 219-29.

[40] Margery Hourihan, Deconstructing the Hero: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 58.

[41] Springer, ‘The Pleasure of the Interface’, p. 494.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 14, Spring 2009

‘Rambo America’ Resisted: Intertextual Politics in Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986) and Platoon (1986)

Nicholas Witham
© Nicholas Witham. All Rights Reserved

During the 1980s, the films of the Rambo trilogy told the incredible story of John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone), a heroic yet hard-done-by Vietnam veteran. In First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), local law enforcers persecuted a disorientated and vagrant Rambo at home until he exacted revenge; in Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985) he returned to Vietnam to rescue a group of long-forgotten American Prisoners of War; finally, in Rambo III (Peter MacDonald, 1988) the enduring hero travelled to Afghanistan to fight with mujahideen against the menace of Soviet Communism. These films formed the core constituents of a Hollywood cycle that also included Uncommon Valor (Ted Kotcheff, 1983), Missing in Action (Joseph Zito, 1984) and Top Gun (Tony Scott, 1986).

All are obvious examples of 1980s ‘high concept’ filmmaking in which the heroicised display of the masculine body was a key aesthetic signature.[1] As Susan Jeffords has pointed out, the ‘hard bodies’ of the films’ stars (Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Tom Cruise) came to stand as ’emblems’ for the foreign policy of President Ronald Reagan who, throughout the 1980s, sought to diminish the effects of ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ on American foreign policy by publicly promoting a revisionist history that understood the Vietnam War in apologetically mythical terms. John Rambo’s mission to rescue American prisoners of war abandoned by their government in First Blood: Part II, for example, coincided with this effort, working to displace feelings of guilt about the war and to portray the American military as the victims of weak-willed civilian policymakers. In the worldview of these films, such an assertion of victimhood meant that America could avoid having to ‘say sorry’ for Vietnam.[2]

However, Richard Slotkin has shown that the history of U.S. policy in Southeast Asia was not necessarily the most significant ‘political referent’ in the films, which spoke primarily to the period’s immediate diplomatic concern of promoting strong and ideologically principled policies of counter-insurgency in Central America.[3] The attempt to reinterpret the war as a ‘noble cause’ aimed to rehabilitate America’s reputation in world politics, a rehabilitation necessary in order to legitimate the administration’s diplomatic filibustering in Nicaragua and El Salvador, two of the most significant fronts of inter-systemic conflict during the Late Cold War.[4] Taken collectively, this cycle of films is richly symbolic of the key foreign policy preoccupations of the Reagan-era American Right, with John Rambo appearing as the archetypal hero of Late Cold War ideology. It is therefore possible to identify a mythology of ‘Rambo America’ that was created in this conjuncture and which consisted of an inherently racist, hyper-masculine, militarist and overwhelmingly anti-communist approach to America’s role in world politics.

In 1986, a year after the release of First Blood: Part II, Oliver Stone directed Salvador and Platoon. In an interview early in 1987, Stone discussed the political point he was trying to make with the films, stating: ‘I’m sick of these revisionist filmmakers and politicians who want to re-fight the Vietnam War. Why don’t they understand that we never could have won it?’ He described the films as ‘antidotes to Top Gun and Rambo, antidotes to Reagan’s wars against Libya, Grenada, and Nicaragua’, because they intentionally sought to show that ‘we are all victims of this ridiculous Cold War ideology.’[5] For Stone, then, the films’ engagement with the politics of ‘Rambo America’ was twofold. First, they engaged with the intertextual politics of Hollywood’s representation of U.S. foreign policy. Second, and because of this intertextual engagement, that they operated in resistance to the dominant political ideology of the period by using their depiction of American intervention in El Salvador and Vietnam to resist the imperialist foreign policy of the Reagan administration. Through a combined method of close textual analysis and intellectual-historical contextualisation, this article argues against much previous Stone scholarship by demonstrating the legitimacy of these assertions, linking the presentation of U.S. foreign policy in Salvador and Platoon to the key concerns of the Reagan-era American Left. The films are therefore highlighted as key examples of a tendency in some of the period’s popular culture towards a highly politicised and fundamentally intertextual anti-imperialism.

Salvador tells the story of American photojournalist Richard Boyle (James Woods), who travels to El Salvador during the 1980 American presidential election. The film’s narrative forms something of a doomed imperial romance. Boyle initially arrives in El Salvador with the primary intentions of surfing, scoring pot and rekindling a love affair with an ex-girlfriend; investigative journalism is of secondary importance. However, as the narrative unfolds, he becomes more and more aware of the negative impact of U.S. involvement in the Central American state, and ends the film embracing a highly-charged form of anti-imperialism premised on hard experience and empathy.

Platoon takes as its structure the narrative of a single company of soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War, narrowing this focus to single out protagonist Private Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen). Taylor narrates the story from his first landing in jungle near the Cambodian border in September 1967 through to his departure from the war due to injury a year later. Again, the protagonist’s developing awareness of the negative impact of U.S. intervention in the Third World is vital to the film’s story. Taylor, initially intent on ‘finding himself’ whilst fighting in the jungle, begins to realise that the conflict is a tragic consequence of Cold War ideology.

A British independent production company, Hemdale Films, provided funding for both Salvador and Platoon. The company saw itself as consistently dedicated to resisting mainstream opinions of which type of filmmaking was deemed acceptable.[6] Their philosophy was applied to the decision to fund Stone’s films, which were ‘in danger of never happening’, because the director had been refused funding by the major Hollywood studios.[7] Stone’s screenplays were reportedly rejected because their subject matter was too politically radical, and therefore not economically viable.[8] This was a view Hemdale rejected primarily because they saw potential box office success, but also because the company was ‘against big names and happy endings’, and were unafraid to make an audience feel uncomfortable by openly criticising U.S. foreign policy in the manner that Stone’s films tried to do.[9] Hemdale consequently provided a budget of $4.5 million for Salvador and $5.5 million for Platoon.[10] In this sense, then, the films were made outside of the Hollywood system: funding from a British production company that actively sought to challenge prevailing stereotypes about which movies should or should not be made allowed Stone to position himself as a maverick, challenging the political and industry status quo.

However, in another vitally important way, the production context provided by Hemdale meant that Salvador and Platoon sat very much inside the conventions of Hollywood cinema. This is clear in a 1987 comment made by John Daly, the company’s founder and head, when he described the audience the company was targeting: ‘our product is still mainstream; we just aim for an older audience than the studios.’[11] Hemdale was not in the business of funding avant-garde political films that defied mainstream convention altogether, and the company aimed to fill the gap between such filmmaking and big studio productions. There was, therefore, a close fit between the outlook of the company and Stone: whilst the director was keen to break with mainstream political convention, he did not want to completely alienate mainstream audiences. Neither avant-garde nor rigidly conventional, Salvador and Platoon therefore stood both outside and inside the Hollywood mainstream.

Hemdale’s funding of the films also shows that the films should be considered together, as connected elements in Stone’s attempt at a sweeping critique of Cold War foreign policy. The company originally only bought the option for Platoon, and the decision to fund Salvador was taken later; its production intended to fill a gap and to keep Stone on board whilst Hemdale struggled to piece together enough money for Platoon‘s production.[12] However, for everyone involved, the subject matter of the two was clearly connected. In 1987, Daly asserted that Salvador was intended as ‘a contemporary update of the situation shown in Platoon‘, and that the two were meant to be viewed as ‘bookends of the same experience’, an argument that Stone was also making at the time.[13]

These clear connections between the two films have not been acknowledged in previous Stone scholarship. This is almost certainly because, whilst Salvador only had very limited release in New York and Los Angeles and had to make most of its small profit in the video market, Platoon was an immense success, both at the box office, where it made $250 million in its first year, and at the 1986 Academy Awards ceremony, where it won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Editing and Best Sound. This success has obscured the fact that Platoon was essentially only one half of a critique of U.S. foreign policy intentionally spread across two films. Most scholarship on Salvador and Platoon has also ignored or openly rejected Stone’s attempt to position the films in relation to the phenomenon of ‘Rambo America’. Often, they are not considered in relation to their specific historical and political context, but as superficial ‘primers’ for Stone’s later and more controversial work, such as JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994).[14] Critics who do concern themselves with the politics of Salvador and Platoon, with very few exceptions, are harshly critical of the notion that the films provide any measure of sustainable critique of U.S. diplomacy. For example, in her influential book Tangled Memories, Marita Sturken argues that Platoon allows viewers to feel that ‘they too have undergone the trauma of the Vietnam War by experiencing its cinematic representation’.[15] She categorises Platoon as one of a number of Vietnam ‘docudramas’ that seek, through a retelling of the history of the war, to provide ‘therapeutic relief for collective guilt’. For Sturken, then, and she makes this point quite explicitly, the film is no better than the Rambo series.[16]

This type of reading has invariably represented an attack from the Left on Salvador and Platoon‘s perceived conservatism, rather than a celebration from the Right.[17] But why have both films been portrayed so negatively? Stone is often seen to have exaggerated or simplified both the history and politics of U.S. intervention in El Salvador and Vietnam. He is also accused of an inherently racist and sexist approach to storytelling. Both films privilege the voices of white, male protagonists, marginalising women and those of other ethnicities, and have therefore been characterised as ‘unthinkingly Eurocentric’.[18] This has resulted in a tone of criticism that suggests that Stone’s films are simply not ‘Left’ enough. Whilst certain elements of this criticism cannot be ignored, it seems necessary to point out that they do not necessarily prevent Stone’s films from providing anti-imperialist critique of U.S. foreign policy. The battles of any oppositional political tendency are always fought on a multiplicity of terrains, and the Left engages the politics of issues such as race, gender and foreign policy in a variety of often-contradictory ways. It is therefore important not to write off the potential of Salvador and Platoon to offer an anti-imperialist critique simply because they do not conform to a conception of what the perfect ‘Left cultural text’ should be. By avoiding such a tone of criticism in favour of a close interrogation of the intertextual political discourses at work in the films, this paper offers a reconceptualisation of Salvador and Platoon as intellectual-political cinematic texts with close links to the discourses of anti-imperialism established by the Reagan-era American Left.

Throughout the 1980s, various Left wing intellectuals and protest groups sought to make significant negative comparisons between U.S. intervention in Central America and the war in Vietnam. Van Gosse, a participant in and historian of the post-60s American Left, has shown that various movements sought to resist the Reaganite attempt to ‘re-fight’ the Vietnam War in the Western hemisphere, and that their essential struggle could be pithily summarised by a popular slogan of the time: ‘El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam’.[19] This sentiment gathered around a broad Left resistance to the right wing notion that something called the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ was having a negative effect on American power in the world-system. ‘Vietnam Syndrome’, broadly defined, related to the psychological effects of U.S. defeat in Vietnam. These effects, it was argued, had produced in the American psyche a belief that the human and material price of the war should be avoided in the future, and that the U.S. should recognise the limits of its power by refraining from non-essential military intervention anywhere in the world.[20] The phrase entered the popular imagination when Ronald Reagan used it in a speech during the 1980 presidential election. He argued that ‘for too long, (America) has lived with the “Vietnam Syndrome” ‘ – the result of a reaction to the war that fostered feelings of guilt and diplomatic timidity. It was, Reagan contended, time to combat the effects of the syndrome, and recognise that America’s intervention in Vietnam was a ‘noble cause’.[21] Reagan also linked this criticism to U.S. interests in Central America, where he argued that ‘Cuban and Soviet-trained terrorists’ were importing civil war because American diplomacy had not been forceful in the wake of Vietnam.[22] Reagan’s exaggerated rhetoric demonstrates the distinct link between the reassessment of the history of the Vietnam War and the Right’s desire to intervene in the politics of Central America’s ongoing social revolutions.

This was a project that the films of the Rambo trilogy explicitly endorsed. When, in First Blood: Part II, Colonel Trautman (Richard Crenna) approaches an imprisoned John Rambo to recruit him to find American prisoners of war in the Vietnamese jungle, Rambo asks him, ‘Sir, do we get to win this time?’ To this Trautman replies, ‘This time it’s up to you’. Later, the colonel describes the film’s hard-bodied protagonist as ‘a pure fighting machine with only a desire to win a war someone else lost’. When Rambo finds the POWs, he quickly discovers that the evil at the heart of their continuing imprisonment is of Russian origin: control over the camp lies in the hands of the ridiculously caricatured Soviet Colonel Podovsky. Of course, Rambo is able to triumph against Podovsky and rescue the prisoners, in spite of attempts by weak-willed civilian commander Marshall Murdock to stop him from doing so.

The film’s portrayal of American involvement in Vietnam as a ‘noble cause’ is therefore almost comically revisionist, and rabidly anti-communist. In a 1987 essay entitled ‘Ronald Reagan and the Politics of History’, radical historian Mike Wallace characterised the use of such representational strategies by the President and by various elements of American popular culture as a type of ‘historical revanchism’. He argued that the Right, in its attempt to rewrite American intervention in Vietnam, was waging a ‘symbolic war on the terrain of history’ that sought to reconstruct the conservative approaches to the history of American foreign policy that were ‘dismantled’ by the New Left during the 1960s and 1970s.[23] This process was taking place, Wallace believed, so that the administration could destroy ‘that annoying cluster of public memories impeding their filibustering in Central America’.[24] He therefore argued that various popular and public history projects were needed ‘to ensure that the Vietnam Syndrome enjoys a long and hearty life’.[25]

This was a sentiment that tied in with the work of another historian closely associated with the Left, Gabriel Kolko. In 1985, he published Anatomy of a War which argued that Vietnam was the centrally important event in twentieth-century American history. For Kolko, Vietnam was so important because it proved that the U.S. had ‘set for itself inherently unobtainable political objectives’ in the Third World.[26] This further exposed ‘the ultimate constraints on (American) power in the modern era.’[27] In Kolko’s analysis, the U.S. had not lost the war. Rather, the Vietnamese Communists had won it, and had therefore revealed the frailty of Cold War ideology and the imperial policies it was used to justify. However, in a vital move in the book’s conclusion, Kolko suggested that policy-makers in Washington had not yet learnt the historical lessons of Vietnam, a fact he believed should be clear to anyone with knowledge of the Reagan administration’s attitudes towards Central America.[28] The chances for ‘profound social change’ in the world system would therefore depend on whether or not American foreign policy was constrained by the effects of defeat in Vietnam.[29] For those on the Left in the Reagan era then, and especially those who directly opposed American involvement in Central America, the effects of the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ were viewed positively as anti-imperialist world-political developments that the movement’s struggle should promote and maintain.

This was a struggle that Oliver Stone would directly engage in Salvador. In a speech in 1994, the director described his visit to El Salvador and Honduras to research the film:

When I saw American soldiers in the streets…I asked if any of them remembered Vietnam. These were younger people, but there in green uniforms, just like I was in Vietnam a few years before. And they really didn’t. They were embarrassed to draw any parallels to our behaviour in Central America. I honestly feel they knew nothing about Vietnam.[30]

Indeed, Stone had recreated this experience almost identically in a scene that occurs in Salvador. During a party at the U.S. embassy, the camera interrupts a conversation between Richard Boyle’s travelling companion Dr. Rock (James Belushi) and a young American soldier. Rock asks, ‘Vietnam, you know, Vietnam. Are we going to invade here or what?’ The soldier gives Rock a blank look, and then replies, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was kind of young during all that’. The references to Vietnam continue during an angry encounter between Boyle, CIA agent Jack Morgan (Colby Chester) and U.S. Army Colonel Hyde (Will MacMillan). Boyle directly compares American involvement in El Salvador with previous examples of imperialism in the Third World: ‘Don’t tell me about the sanctity of military intelligence’, he says, ‘Not after Chile, not after Vietnam.’ Later in the conversation, he adds, ‘Is that why you guys are here, some kind of post-Vietnam experience? You need a re-run or something? I don’t want to see another Vietnam’.

Salvador‘s final reference to Vietnam comes immediately after this scene. Stone cuts away from Boyle’s speech to the lobby of a hotel in San Salvador containing a large group of American soldiers who have just arrived in the country, some of whom are being interviewed by TV journalist Pauline Axelrod (Valerie Wildman). She elicits the same response from two soldiers (‘We have orders not to speak to the press’), before she reaches their commander, Colonel Hawn. She asks if the soldiers’ arrival signals, ‘a build-up of U.S. troops here in El Salvador’. To this, Hawn replies, ‘These are not combat troops; they are trainers, officially authorised by Congress. I have no further comment.’ Whilst Vietnam is not directly referenced, the immediate transition between Boyle’s angry denunciation of Hyde and Morgan’s need for a ‘re-run’ of the war in Southeast Asia and this scene inextricably links the two. Hawn’s assertion that the soldiers are ‘trainers’ rather than combat troops clearly echoes similar assertions made in the years before the ‘Americanisation’ of the Vietnam War, until which point all American military personnel in Vietnam were classified as ‘advisors’. The film therefore makes clear that intervention in El Salvador is an extension of the American imperial project, in which the lies and propaganda used to justify involvement in Vietnam are simply recycled by the powers that be, in an attempt to legitimate the latest bid for inter-systemic hegemony.[31]

In all of these examples then, Stone uses the spectre of Vietnam to make anti-imperialist statements that seek to draw negative links between American involvement in El Salvador and previous intervention in Southeast Asia. The young soldier’s ignorance of the history of U.S. imperialism, and Colonel Hawn’s recycling of the superficial justifications for American power projection, imply that the lessons of Vietnam have gone unlearned. Furthermore, Boyle’s speech makes it clear that Hyde and Morgan are not ignoring or forgetting the lessons of Vietnam, but are tragically misunderstanding them. Stone can therefore be seen to be arguing against ‘Rambo America’s’ attempt to recast the Vietnam War as a ‘noble cause’, and in so doing to cancel out the effects of the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’. Instead, much like Mike Wallace, Gabriel Kolko and others on the Left at the time, the director portrays the ‘Syndrome’ as a constructive factor in American foreign policy-making, one whose influence should be maintained.

Whilst the Reagan-era Left seldom referred to the Rambo trilogy more than in passing, it regularly confronted many of the specific problems embodied in the concept of ‘Rambo America’. It was vital for those on the Left to resist, as one writer in Radical America put it, the ‘reheroicization’ of the Vietnam War.[32] It was necessary to regard American imperialism in the Reagan era as an inherently gendered project, that relied on a version of machismo entrenched in the political cultures of both North and Central America.[33] The imperial project was also argued to be problematic from a racial perspective, because the ‘official national hatreds’ used to justify military intervention encouraged the ‘bonding of collective national Selves’ against an Other that was often coded racially as well as politically.[34] Finally, as Noam Chomsky put it in 1982, it was vital for the Left to understand that issues such as nuclear armament and imperial domination of the Third World were explicitly linked by a militaristic logic that ‘maintained the Cold War system of confrontation for the mutual advantage’ of the superpowers.[35]

Oliver Stone used Salvador and Platoon to make several explicit intertextual references to the type of filmmaking exemplified by the Rambo trilogy, and in doing so, proffered a similar message to his contemporaries on the Left. In Platoon, critique of ‘Rambo America’ is located in the characterisation of Sergeant Bob Barnes (Tom Berenger). Barnes is representative of the brutal side of the conflict, and is implicitly linked to characters such as John Rambo through his physical appearance. Everything about Barnes’s visual coding bears similarity to the stereotypical ‘hard body’ action hero: his physique is muscular and highly toned, he bears the masculinised scars of previous injuries (most notably on his face), and he is regularly depicted in a highly aestheticised manner, covered in sweat and only partially clothed.

Rather than detecting in this visual signification the seeds of an inherently conservative aestheticisation of the Vietnam War, as Marita Sturken has done, I prefer to read it as a subtle yet powerful intertextual critique of the politics of ‘Rambo America’. [36] This reading is based on Barnes’s characterisation throughout the film, and on his centrality in its narrative arc. In terms of characterisation, it is clear that much of Barnes’s behaviour is linked to the racism of the American imperial project. He is introduced to the viewer on patrol in the jungle during a scene in which he observes a dead Vietnamese soldier and calmly states, ‘That’s a good Gook. Good and dead’. This comment echoes General Philip Sheridan’s regularly quoted comment of 1869: ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian’. In doing so, the remark links Barnes’s racism to the origins of American imperialism in the history of westward expansion.[37] This type of bigotry is again clear when Barnes murders a number of innocent civilians during a My Lai-like slaughter committed by the platoon. His lack of respect for the lives of the Vietnamese ‘Other’ can only be compared to that of John Rambo, who shoots ‘Gooks’ on sight, also assuming that the only good Vietnamese are those that have been on the receiving end of his AK-47.

In his conflict with Sergeant Elias (Willem Dafoe), Barnes also shows a mistrust of military authority that echoes the revisionist tendencies of ‘Rambo America’. He describes his rival as ‘a water-walker, like them politicians in Washington trying to fight this war with one hand tied around their balls’. Stone therefore aligns Barnes’s crude understanding of the war with those elements in Reagan-era politics and culture who sought to apologise for Vietnam by blaming defeat on liberal politicians in Washington. This is echoed later in the film after Barnes has murdered Elias. In a famous line, he tells Chris, ‘I am reality…there’s the way it ought to be, and there’s the way it is’. Barnes’s Vietnam is the ‘real’ Vietnam, shorn of any respect for abstract notions such as human rights, and overwhelming in its brutality and racism. Of course, this also happened to be the view of Vietnam encouraged by ‘Rambo America’, whose central protagonists were ‘soldiers of fortune’ who worked in opposition to the authority of timid civilian command structures, and ‘went it alone’ in order to secure the symbolic victories so badly needed to recuperate the American imperial project.

The key distinction between Platoon and such films, one mobilised to brilliant political effect, is that Stone, unlike the Reagan Doctrine’s official cinematic spokesmen, does not portray the war as a ‘noble cause’. This is where Barnes’s position in Platoon‘s narrative arc is important. Unlike the films of the Rambo trilogy where John Rambo is the central protagonist and hero, in Stone’s film Barnes is not. Instead, Chris Taylor, as retribution for his murder of Elias, kills Barnes in the film’s dramatic finale. In doing so, Chris destroys the physical embodiment of the immoral approach to war he has come to despise. As such, rather then ending the film triumphantly, Stone’s Rambo-figure dies in the jungle and his revisionist, racist and overtly masculine approach to the Vietnam War dies with him.

‘Rambo America’ is also figuratively critiqued in Salvador through the representation of Colonel Hyde. He is the embodiment of the militaristic logic of the Reagan era, constantly asserting the need for aggressive confrontation with the enemies of American power. His overwhelming desire for U.S. intervention is clear when he expresses the options to Ambassador Kelly during a rebel attack on San Salvador: ‘We either restore military aid or move to stage three. The 82nd airborne is on alert, and the marines are ready.’ In his eyes, if military funding for Right-wing forces does not work, U.S. military intervention is necessary: violent confrontation with the forces of anti-systemic revolution is the only option in his crude understanding of world politics.

This harshly militaristic approach to American intervention in the Third World makes Hyde the archetypal Reagan-era military bureaucrat, one who has ‘learnt the lessons’ of Vietnam. When Boyle urges him to re-think American funding of the repression in El Salvador that has led to the murder of Archbishop Romero and three American nuns, he retorts, ‘It was that kind of crap thinking that lost us Vietnam, you liberal asshole.’ Hyde is the opposite of Marshall Murdock, Rambo: First Blood Part II‘s deceitful politician, who organises the film’s central mission, but betrays Rambo as the protagonist makes an apparently heroic (and customarily violent) attempt to follow the mission through to its logical conclusion. Unlike Murdock, Hyde is fully committed to Rambo-style military engagement in the Third World, convinced that the ‘crap thinking’ of the liberal elite was the decisive factor in American defeat in Vietnam. Like Sergeant Barnes, though, rather than being a hero, Salvador‘s representative of ‘Rambo America’ is one of the villains of the piece.

Michael Denning has shown that, in analysing certain ‘cultural fronts’, one must

recreate the moment in order to give them life. Otherwise they appear as dead letters, the ephemera of cultural history. If such works rarely evoke responses in other times and places, if they do not in themselves constitute a political culture, nevertheless one cannot imagine radical culture, indeed any cultural flowering at all, without them; they are the crocuses of a radical culture.[38]

When considered alongside other Left political texts from the Reagan Era, and positioned in explicit opposition to the period’s myth of ‘Rambo America’, Oliver Stone’s interpretation of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia and Central America in Salvador and Platoon points towards such a ‘flowering’ of cultural forms during the Late Cold War, in which certain elements of mainstream filmmaking were able to develop an identifiably anti-imperialist accent. Since the Reagan-era American Left has thus far received so little scholarly treatment, both films provide a useful cultural lens through which to conceive of the developments in American anti-imperialist politics after the Vietnam War. In struggling against Reagan’s attempts to rid the U.S. body politic of its Vietnam Syndrome and thereby criticising the myth of ‘Rambo America’, Salvador and Platoon implicitly and explicitly reference the cycle of Hollywood filmmaking exemplified by the Rambo trilogy. In doing so, they dramatise a moving, politically astute and fundamentally intertextual critique of the gung-ho militarism encouraged by the Reagan-era Right. Filmmakers wishing to resist the hegemonic foreign policy norms of the twenty-first century could, therefore, do a lot worse than to return to Salvador and Platoon in order to learn some of the lessons of a previous era of anti-imperialist activism, and, perhaps in small part, to gain inspiration.

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich and Sharon Monteith, Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), p.485.

[2] Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser, ‘Never Having to Say You’re Sorry: Rambo‘s Rewriting of the Vietnam War’ in Film Quarterly 42:1 (Fall 1988), p.11.

[3] Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), p.643.

[4] Ibid. p.650.

[5] Marc Cooper, ‘Playboy Interview’ in Charles L. P. Silet (ed.) Oliver Stone: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), pp.76-79.

[6] ‘Winning Hearts and Minds’ in Films and Filming 393 (June 1987), p.15.

[7] ‘Who the Hell is John Daly?’ in Interview 18:8 (1 August 1988), p.92.

[8] Richard Coombs, ‘Beating God to the Draw: Salvador and Platoon‘ in Sight and Sound 56:2 (Spring, 1987), p. 137.

[9] Ibid. p.92; Karen Stabiner, ‘Fast Times at Hemdale Films’ in American Film 12:9 (1 July 1987), p.33.

[10] ‘Winning Hearts and Minds’, p.15.

[11] ‘Fast Times at Hemdale Films’, p.34.

[12] Ibid. p.34.

[13] ‘Winning Hearts and Minds’, p.17. For Stone’s arguments, see Cooper, ‘Playboy Interview’ op. cit. p. 79.

[14] For example, Frank Beaver, Oliver Stone: Wakeup Cinema (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994) p.81; Richard Keenan, ‘Salvador: Oliver Stone and the Center of Indifference’ in Dan Kunz (ed.), The Films of Oliver Stone (Lanham: The Scarecrow Press, 1997), pp. 97-98.

[15] Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The Aids Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p.96.

[16] Ibid. p.113.

[17] Indeed, critics on the Right seem to dislike Stone’s filmmaking just as much as those on the Left. See, for example, Michael Medved’s excoriation of the director’s films in Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992), pp. 217-227.

[18] The phrase is that of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, who briefly mention both films in Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 24, 205.

[19] Van Gosse, ‘ ‘El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam’: A New Immigrant Left and the Politics of Solidarity’ in Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (eds.), The Immigrant Left in the United States (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 302-330.

[20] Geoff Simons, Vietnam Syndrome: Effect on U.S. Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: MacMillan Press, 1998) pp.24-25.

[21] Ronald Reagan, ‘Peace: Restoring the Margin of Safety’ (speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Chicago, August 18, 1980), http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/8.18.80.html (accessed June 30 2008).

[22] Ibid.

[23] The essay was originally published in Tikkun in 1987 and is reprinted in Mike Wallace, Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), pp. 250-267.

[24] Ibid. pp. 25-251.

[25] Ibid. p. 267.

[26] Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, The United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), p. 545.

[27] Ibid. p. 547.

[28] Ibid. p. 548.

[29] Ibid. p. 558.

[30] Oliver Stone, ‘The Dream State of Recent History’ (commencement speech given at University of California, Berkeley, May 18 1994) http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/Stone/stone-grad1.html (accessed May 5 2008).

[31] Australian journalist John Pilger made a similar point in the same year that the film was made. In an essay entitled ‘The Americas – Vietnam Again’, he argued that the San Salvador Sheraton ‘echoed with Vietnam’ because of the number of U.S. army personnel in residence. See John Pilger, Heroes (London: Jonathan Cape, 1986), p. 452.

[32] Lynne Hanley, ‘The Official Story: Imagining Vietnam’ in Radical America 21:6 (November-December 1987), p. 8.

[33] Cynthia Enloe, ‘Bananas, Bases, and Patriarchy’ in Radical America 19:4 (July-August 1985), pp. 7-23.

[34] ‘Forward’ in New Left Review (eds.), Exterminism and Cold War (London: Verso, 1982) p. xii.

[35] Noam Chomsky, ‘Strategic Arms, the Cold War and the Third World’ in New Left Review (eds.), Exterminism and Cold War (London: Verso, 1982), pp. 235-236.

[36] Sturken, Tangled Memories, p. 109.

[37] There is a vast literature on the links between the developing ideologies of American racism and Western expansion in the nineteenth century, but perhaps the single best text is Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

[38] Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1997), p. 57.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 14, Spring 2009

A Nation Prepares for Change: Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam at a Crossroads

Dawn-Marie Gibson
© Dawn-Marie Gibson. All Rights Reserved

In popular histories of Black America, Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (NOI) have often been positioned as agents of racial divisiveness and anti-Semitism. Louis Farrakhan, a controversial and contentious figure in American race relations, has led the Black Nationalist and pseudo Islamic NOI since 1977. The Black Muslim minister reached what his aides believe to have been the ‘zenith’ of his career in 1995 when he led the Million Man March, and he continues to generate widespread censure, especially concerning anti-Semitic statements he alleges to have never made.[1] Farrakhan relinquished control of the NOI on 11 September 2006 on account of fresh health fears, and rather than appoint a successor, he delegated full control of the Nation to his executive board. Media reports which alleged that the NOI would either die with Farrakhan or buckle under the pressure of factionalism were as equally misplaced as notions that it would embrace orthodox Islam. Farrakhan returned to the NOI in February 2007, but has since made only intermittent appearances to his followers. This paper addresses three aspects of the NOI’s prospective future. Firstly, it examines with what success the executive board has managed the NOI in Farrakhan’s absence. Secondly, it addresses the various possibilities for the NOI when Farrakhan bows out, and thirdly, it challenges popular notions that the NOI will disintegrate when Farrakhan makes his final exit.

Louis Farrakhan is revered by his followers both inside and outside the NOI. NOI converts frequently refer to Farrakhan as ‘our champion defender’. Moreover, many leading figures in the African American community continue to look to Farrakhan as the heir to the Black Nationalist tradition of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. Farrakhan has devoted much of his adult life to building and leading the NOI. Following Malcolm X’s exodus from the Nation in 1964, Farrakhan was awarded a number of vacancies once filled by Malcolm by the NOI’s then leader, Elijah Muhammad. In the aftermath of Elijah Muhammad’s death in February 1975, his son, Warith Muhammad, was named the new leader of the NOI and his succession effectively marked the end for the NOI as many knew it. Warith renamed the NOI The World Community of Al-Islam in the West (WCIW) and introduced orthodox Islam at a speed that alarmed many, including Farrakhan. Unhappy with his lowly status in the new group, Farrakhan defected from the WCIW in 1977 and began to resurrect the old NOI, and since 1977, Farrakhan has led the ‘Resurrected NOI’ with little agitation from within. The fact that he has led unchallenged for over three decades is testament not only to his talents but to the fact that NOI converts genuinely believe him to be the rightful and divine heir to Elijah Muhammad. The NOI has depended upon Farrakhan’s charisma and direct leadership throughout its existence. Prior to 1998, the Nation had no noticeable structural apparatus and Farrakhan alone was in sole charge of all matters relating to the group. In 1998 Farrakhan took a leave of absence from the Nation for the first time in his career when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. During his absence, the national media produced a spate of reports alleging that the Nation would not survive Farrakhan’s death. DeWayne Wickman, for example, noted that:

Without Farrakhan at the helm, the Nation of Islam is just another fringe group with murky beliefs and a rabid, but small, following… The loss of Farrakhan also will bring an end to the black nationalism era that began with Marcus Garvey and fed the belief that this country’s race problem could be solved by creating a black nation within the United States.[2]

Farrakhan proved concerned enough about the accuracy of such reports to address structural deficiencies in his organisation on his return to the Nation in 1999. In an interview with Jabril Muhammad, for example, Farrakhan noted that he had been uncertain as to whether the NOI could have survived in its then haphazard state:

…as I laid there, not able to walk well, I mean I was in a very, very difficult condition. My mind, of course, is on the believers, on the Nation and on the future of this when I am no longer in the world. I called Minister Alim to my bedside to share with him my anguish. My anguish was over my knowing that the nation would not survive in its present form. It had to evolve beyond where it was in order to make room for the talented people that are outside the nation…[3]

Throughout 1999 and early 2000, Farrakhan and his senior aides established an exclusive leadership committee. The Nation’s executive board is composed of an upper and lower tier, the upper tier compiled of several senior NOI ministers who have devoted much of their lives to the organisation and the lower tier composed of Farrakhan’s ‘student ministers’. Appointments to positions in the board are made by Farrakhan alone, although it is clear that he does consider recommendations from his senior aides. Farrakhan’s board has proven fundamental to the Nation’s survival during his bouts of illness and it is thus unsurprising that he entrusted his Nation to the board when he experienced fresh health fears in September 2006.

News of Farrakhan’s decision to transfer control of the NOI to his executive board reached his followers and outsiders alike via a letter that he produced for distribution in the NOI’s news organ, The Final Call. In his detailed letter, addressed to the ‘Believers and supporters’ of the Nation, Farrakhan outlined his long battle with prostate cancer and asked his followers to submit to the rule of his board:

In this period of testing, you can prove that the Nation of Islam… is more than the physical presence of any individual, and that will live long after we have gone… I would prefer that the Executive Board of the Nation of Islam help solve the problems of the Nation, without asking me. Then, at this time of testing, it will show me that you are ready to move beyond personality to live and function on the principles that make personalities attractive.[4]

Farrakhan’s initial absence from the various meetings of the Nation’s board provided his subordinates with a rare opportunity to vie for greater influence and control. Though the media failed to get news of any in-fighting in the NOI’s leadership, Farrakhan’s close associate, Askia Muhammad, commented during an interview that the upper tier of the board did expose ‘abuses of power’ and carried out a ‘health cleaning’ during Farrakhan’s initial absence.[5] Revelation of such abuses within the leadership cabinet no doubt went some way towards Farrakhan’s decision to remove all ministerial titles from board members in 2007.[6] Those on the fringes of the executive board, including, Askia Muhammad, believe that the removal of ‘fair weather friends’ has increased the Nation’s capacity to function more coherently without Farrakhan in the future.[7]

Speculation over the NOI’s prospective future intensified when Farrakhan was rushed to hospital in early January 2007 to undergo a ‘life saving’ operation.[8] In Farrakhan’s extended absence, the board elected ministers to appear on his behalf at various events. Unsurprisingly, they repeatedly elected Ishmael Muhammad, the biological son of Elijah Muhammad and Farrakhan’s national assistant at Mosque Maryam in Chicago. During one of his first addresses on behalf of Farrakhan on 15 October 2006, Ishmael made a direct plea for unity in the NOI. At one point during the address, for example, he asked, ‘Can we subordinate our egos to the cause of our people?’.[9] The fact that he made such a plea inadvertently validated notions that the board was unable to manage the personalities in the Nation.

Farrakhan recovered sufficiently from his operation in early January to attend and address the 2007 annual Saviour’s Day convention, an event held in honour of the NOI’s founder, Fard Muhammad. In the days prior to his keynote address, the American media led the way in popularising the speech as ‘Farrakhan’s farewell address’, a belief which appeared to be confirmed when the NOI announced that the convention was be held in Detroit, the NOI’s birth place, as opposed to its traditional assemblage in Chicago. In the Chicago Sun Times, for example, Mary Mitchell construed the decision to move the convention back to Detroit as an effort to provide Farrakhan with an ‘appropriate stage’ to ‘take his final bow’.[10]

Official figures estimate that at least 40,000 people attended Farrakhan’s keynote lecture in the Ford field arena in Detroit on 25February. Much of the press who attended the convention did so in the belief that the event would see Farrakhan attempt to re-write his legacy or offer something of an apology for practising what Magida referred to as a ‘pragmatic anti-Semitism’.[11] Farrakhan did neither. His demotion of the NOI’s deity, Fard Muhammad, to mere mortal status during his lecture failed, once again, to produce any significant doctrinal changes in the Nation’s teachings.

Though there are members of the NOI who adhere closely to orthodox Islam, the group’s racial philosophy, which teaches that Caucasians are ‘devils’ and that their founder, Fard Muhammad, is Allah incarnate, prevents the group’s full acceptance in Muslim America. Farrakhan and his officials are aware of and sensitive to charges that the NOI is a cult. Askia Muhammad, for example, notes that:

…There are spiritual…fundamental differences from Elijah Muhammad’s teachings and the rest of the Muslim World…there’s an asterisk that the Muslim World have with regard to the Nation of Islam…but I think it applies to all African American converts to Islam in America…[12]

Rather than exit the convention atoning for his divisiveness, Farrakhan concluded his address by advertising a list of several ahistorical books, which included the controversial book, The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews (1992). The Secret Relationship is authored and published by the Historical Research Department (HRD) of the NOI, and the fact that the book’s authors remain anonymous is some indication as to how controversial the book is. Though authors of recently-published works on Farrakhan’s NOI, including Gardell, Magida and Singh, have accepted that the book is the product of the HRD of the NOI, converts in the NOI are well aware that this is not the case. Farrakhan has on at least one occasion during his addresses at Mosque Maryam stated that the book was authored by Allen Muhammad, an NOI convert.[13] Furthermore, during an interview with Akbar Muhammad he referred to the book as having been authored by a ‘research person’ as opposed to the collective effort of the HRD.[14] The Secret Relationship has all the superficial appearances of a well-researched book. However, a closer look at its content and sources reveal it to be nothing more than an ahistorical narrative based on the work of discredited scholars, with the sole intent of implicating Jews as having been the primary beneficiaries of the transatlantic slave trade:

Deep within the recesses of the Jewish historical record is irrefutable evidence that the most prominent of the Jewish Pilgrim Fathers used kidnapped Black Africans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history and participated in every aspect of the international slave trade. The immense wealth of Jews, as with most of the White colonial fathers, was acquired by the brutal subjugation of Black Africans purely on the basis of skin color—a concept unfamiliar to Moses. Now, compiled for the first time, the Jewish sources reveal the extent of their complicity in Black slavery in the most graphic of terms.[15]

Farrakhan’s inclusion of the book on his reading list infuriated his long-time critic Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League. Foxman, for example, noted that:

Minister Farrakhan’s reading list includes books that purport to expose ‘the truth’ about Jews and their control of the federal banking system or their role in the African slave trade… It’s a shame that Farrakhan had the opportunity to change his legacy, and he didn’t.[16]

After the 2007 convention, the NOI withdrew into itself and with the exception of brief interviews with CNN, ABC, BET and Al-Jazeera, Farrakhan kept a relatively low profile. The interviews that Farrakhan agreed to saw him address questions relating to the NOI’s doctrine, succession, his legacy and the prospects for the NOI’s survival. During his interview with CNN anchor Don Lemon, for example, he commented that:

I’m hoping that these (around me) will carry out the principles that Elijah Muhammad and Minister Farrakhan taught, so you won’t need any charismatic individual. The group that is leading, infused with the principles, wrapping themselves around those principles will lead the Nation in the proper direction…[Sic] [17]

In his interview with Al Jazeera, Farrakhan played down the fact that the NOI remains a largely racially exclusive organisation. He noted during the interview that:

…our duty was first to our own people, as the Prophet’s was…we are now inclusive of all members of the human family, but it started with the Black man and woman of America who are in the worst condition of human beings.[18]

The NOI’s ‘inclusive’ membership policy is something that is neither publicised by Farrakhan, his ministers nor NOI members. Whilst both Latinos and Native Americans enjoy an equal footing with their African American counterparts in the Nation, whites remain a different matter altogether. In fact, some of the NOI’s ministerial staff and members are still unsure as to whether whites are allowed to join.

Latinos were first permitted to join the NOI in 1975. They took on a more visible position in the Nation in the early 1990s, when Farrakhan appointed Abel Muhammad as one of his many national assistants. According to Teresa X Torres, a Latina convert to the NOI and regular columnist for The Final Call, many Latinos continue to perceive the NOI as an ‘all-black religion’. In an interview with Torres, she commented that:

Based on my own experience I believe that Latinos can identify with the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the pain of racism and self-hatred endured by our black brothers and sisters. As a people Latinos and Blacks have more in common than we do different… [Sic] [19]

Native American recruits now hold many prestigious positions in the NOI also. YoNasDa-Lonewolf Muhammad, for example, was appointed as the director for the Indigenous People’s Alliance in late 2005 and often delivers short addresses at the Nation’s annual conventions.[20]

Whites form a small demographic in the present day NOI. Whites who are registered members maintain a relatively low profile, so much so that many in the NOI, including Torres, are unaware they are allowed to join. According to life-long member Askia Muhammad, whites are involved in the NOI for their own ‘rehabilitation purposes’.[21] Moreover, Askia notes that if whites were to be given a higher profile in the NOI it would ‘lose its black character’.[22] Admitting whites to the NOI has serious implications for the Nation’s doctrine. Farrakhan and his subordinates will be forced to compromise and eventually annul their traditional ‘white devil’ teachings if they are to ever fully integrate the NOI.

Under Farrakhan’s orders his staff spent much of 2007 working inside the NOI, and the year proved relatively uneventful. Farrakhan gave his first official address in the NOI at the 2008 Saviour’s Day convention on 25 February at the McCormick place in Chicago. The 2008 convention lacked both the grandeur and aura that had characterised the 2007 convention, and the most significant moment of his keynote address came when he offered something of an endorsement of Barack Obama. During his address, for example, he noted that:

…as a result of Sen. Obama’s presidential campaign, ‘people are being transformed from what they were. His language is raising them above their racial, ethnic, cultural, religious differences, and he is wedding people into a bond that has never been seen before. You might say, “Gee, I don’t think Barack is Black enough”. He wasn’t supposed to be. If you want a Black leader, there’s Rev. Jackson; there is Rev. Sharpton; and there is Louis Farrakhan, and we don’t apologize,’ said Min. Farrakhan. Sen. Obama is not ‘the Black candidate, he’s the American candidate who wants to unite all the American people. You may not agree with him, then stand on the sidelines and watch… There are Caucasian people, right now, who don’t see Barack Obama’s color, they see that man as the only one able to save this country from itself… That man had empathy for people who are African or Black, but he has empathy and love for people who are White… This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better, because a better man may become her leader…’ [Sic] [23]

The NOI had proven itself reluctant to voice support for Obama throughout much of the primaries. Their silence appeared to stem from a fear that supporting Obama publicly would tarnish his campaign and intensify speculation that he was a ‘closet’ Muslim. The NOI under both Elijah Muhammad’s and Louis Farrakhan’s command has for the most part been an apolitical movement. Farrakhan involved the NOI in the American political process for the first time in 1984 with disastrous results, when his support for Jesse Jackson ultimately hurt Jackson’s campaign and left Farrakhan embroiled in widespread charges of anti-Semitism when he defended Jackson’s anti-Semitic ‘Hymie’ slur. Following the Nation’s involvement in Jackson’s campaign, the NOI reverted back to its apolitical status. With the exception of Akbar Muhammad’s article urging The Final Call’s readership to support Obama, the NOI remained largely silent on Obama’s campaign:

It is our duty to support one of our own when they have the tenacity and will to seek the highest office in this country… He can win, if we support him instead of sitting at home or voting for another candidate… Our vote and support is important to Mr. Obama becoming the next president… As Mr. Obama moves through states with large Black populations, I want to remind him that the way to get the Black vote is to ask for it. Barack, if you don’t, make no mistake that the other candidates will.[24]

The heated response to Farrakhan’s endorsement from Obama, his campaign, and that of his rivals reflected, if nothing else, the fact that Farrakhan remains a controversial figure in the U.S. Farrakhan’s endorsement may have been made in an effort to boost Obama’s support amongst Black nationalists or to put an end to fervent criticisms that the democratic candidate was ‘not black enough’. However, the Obama campaign moved quickly to distance Obama from Farrakhan, and during an MSNBC interview with Tim Russert, Obama assured viewers that he had not ‘solicited’ the support of Farrakhan. In an article for the Chicago-Sun Times, Mary Mitchell noted that:

When Sen. Barack Obama “rejected” and “denounced” the support of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan during the MSNBC debate last week, it wasn’t his finest hour. Fortunately for Obama, most black people understand the game. No matter how many times Farrakhan explains, defends or refutes anti-Semitic comments that have been attributed to him, his kiss is still the kiss of death… At 74-years-old, Farrakhan has paid his dues in the battle against racial oppression and hatred… Farrakhan’s appeal to masses of African Americans is that he is not a politician. And he is free to speak his mind because his organization does not depend on outside support. Obama should have found a way to escape Russert’s trap without denigrating Farrakhan’s legacy. But, like I said, we understand.[25]

Not all journalists were as sympathetic as Mitchell. Washington Post staff writer Richard Cohen, in contrast, noted that:

The New York Times recently reported on Obama’s penchant while serving in the Illinois legislature for merely voting “present” when faced with some tough issues. Farrakhan, in a strictly political sense, may be a tough issue for him. This time, though, “present” will not do.[26]

Since his return to the NOI in February 2007, Farrakhan has proven either unable or unwilling to guide his followers towards orthodox Islam, and the path that the NOI may take when Farrakhan bows out generated heated discussion after September 2006. There are at least five possible directions for the group to tread post-Farrakhan. Firstly, as something of a preferred option for Farrakhan, the NOI could be led by his executive board. Secondly, should the board fail to effectively manage the Nation they could elect a charismatic member of its upper tier to succeed Farrakhan. Thirdly, the NOI could split into warring factions with each vying for legitimacy, as happened in 1975 when Elijah Muhammad refused to appoint a successor. Fourthly, and less likely, the NOI may move to align itself with orthodox groups and in time embrace Islamic orthodoxy. Lastly, the NOI may use Farrakhan’s exit as an appropriate point for closure.

Farrakhan has often suggested that he would prefer for the NOI to be led by his board in the event of his death. Although it is commonly speculated that the NOI’s executive board struggled to run smoothly during Farrakhan’s absence, the board’s drive to purge itself of renegades has arguably bolstered its chances of functioning more coherently in the future. The upper tier of the NOI’s board is compiled of individuals who have devoted much of their lives to the Nation’s ministry, and several individuals in the upper tier of the executive board have served in the NOI under Elijah Muhammad, Warith Muhammad and Farrakhan. It is unlikely that these individuals will withdraw from the group when Farrakhan dies.

Farrakhan’s refusal to name a successor is most likely a result of his own fears that doing so would fan the flames of discord in his board. Though media reports have speculated that Ishmael Muhammad and the international representative of the NOI, Akbar Muhammad are serious contenders to Farrakhan’s throne, Farrakhan has never publicly endorsed either. The closest Ishmael Muhammad came to receiving an endorsement from Farrakhan came in March 2001 when he acknowledged the ‘development’ of his ministerial staff during a lecture at Mosque Maryam in Chicago:

…it’s not for me to say who’s next and Allah is already preparing whoever it is that shall come next. I thank Allah that there is a next… I’m proud of the development of Minister Ishmael and there are a number of young men and women writing me with their ideas…we shall be developing these young people… [Sic] [27]

Ishmael Muhammad is known to be positioned at the head of the executive board, and as the biological son of Elijah Muhammad, Ishmael is better positioned than most in the executive board. [28] Though he has previously played down his ambitions to succeed his mentor, Ishmael is well aware that Farrakhan’s throne will likely fall at his feet. Known by his co-workers as the ‘Fireball Minister’, Ishmael’s succession would ensure the survival of Elijah Muhammad’s doctrine. Both Ishmael and his mother, Tynetta Muhammad, are ideologically wedded to Fard Muhammad’s theology: both depend on it to justify their positions in the Nation.

Akbar Muhammad has a wealth of experience in the NOI. Though he is significantly older and less charismatic than Ishmael, he is nonetheless also well-positioned in the board. Alongside a cohort of upper tier ministers, Akbar has served the NOI under Elijah Muhammad, Warith Muhammad and Farrakhan, and has the added advantage of having garnered international support for the NOI for over 30 years. He is better placed than Ishmael to broker financial deals with the Nation’s biggest sponsors in the international arena, such as Libya. Akbar’s succession would no doubt see the NOI break away from its founding doctrine as Akbar is relatively more open and approachable than his subordinates. He is, for example, more willing than his counterparts to concede that questions remain over Elijah Muhammad’s leadership in the Nation.[29] As something of a pragmatic executive, Akbar is well aware that embracing a more orthodox Islam would expand the Nation’s lifeline.

Factionalism has been avoided in the NOI since 1977 but it may emerge in the immediate aftermath of Farrakhan’s death. Farrakhan’s admission that he had spent 2007 working on the inside of the NOI during his 2008 Saviour’s Day address is testament to his own reservations over the NOI’s future. The NOI’s failure to gravitate towards Islamic orthodoxy during Farrakhan’s initial absence suggests that, at present, orthodoxy is not an attractive option for the group. Extracting the racial element of the NOI’s theology would render the NOI nothing more than another ‘racial uplift’ organisation.

It is unlikely that the NOI will die with Farrakhan. Though the American-based chapters of the NOI rely more heavily on Farrakhan’s direct leadership than their counterparts in London, Trinidad and Ghana, there can be little doubt that the events of 2006 have bolstered the possibility that the NOI will survive Farrakhan. Furthermore, according to Dr. Larry Muhammad, director of the NOI’s school in Chicago, Farrakhan has just directed $700,000 of the Nation’s finances towards renovating the Muhammad University of Islam and much more towards renovating Mosque Maryam in Chicago.[30] The present day NOI suffers no shortage of new recruits, and at any given Sunday service, the Nation manages to recruit at least 10 new converts, the majority of which are African American males aged between 10 and 35.[31]

Farrakhan has made greater efforts to integrate the Nation and moderate its teachings over recent months. Altering the Nation’s theology requires Farrakhan to re-market Elijah Muhammad. During his address at the Education Paradigm conference in Chicago in August 2008 Farrakhan hinted that he would be making greater efforts to promote inclusion in the NOI:

I wish that Christians could hear me, I wish that they could understand that we are not enemies of Jesus. I wish that they could understand. I wish that the Muslims could understand that we are not enemies of the Prophet Muhammad; we love him. So on October 19th I’m inviting all to the dedication of the new Mosque Maryam, the new, and if it be the will of Allah, I will introduce you to the New beginning of that which is called the Nation of Islam… You think that you heard Elijah, I want to re-introduce him to you on October 19 at the dedication of the new Mosque Maryam.[32]

Farrakhan followed through with promoting inclusion and tolerance in the Nation during the re-dedication of Mosque Maryam on 19 October. During the address, he noted, that it was his wish for the Nation to take on an ‘expanded mission’, serving all sections of society regardless of race, and defended the Nation’s old teachings:

When Elijah Muhammad came among us he taught what you could call a black theology. A lot of people were offended by that; turned off by that. In the Muslim world they were angry; they said that: ‘Islam does not teach colour; what’s wrong with you people?’ …The man that came to us from Mecca, we call him Master Fard Muhammad, he had a black father and a white mother. That man came to us first because our condition was worse. He was so skilful, he developed a methodology along with an ideology that would start a process of transformation in our lives… That message you call Black supremacy; that fed a broken heart, a broken mind, a broken spirit…[33]

Farrakhan’s recent efforts to amend the NOI’s line of faith mark an important point of departure from his unorthodox teachings in the past. As to whether NOI converts will wholeheartedly accept and embrace the ‘expanded mission’ is yet to be seen.

Farrakhan remains a highly controversial figure in the U.S, as was indicated by the response that his endorsement of Barack Obama generated. Farrakhan’s legacy is—and will remain—hotly contested. That a large segment of Americans believe him to be a divisive figure is reflected in the current historiography of the NOI. The NOI has provided its African American converts, in particular, with a basis for group cohesiveness and self-definition since its conception, and the demand for such provisions will not likely dissipate from within the African American community in the near future. Farrakhan’s NOI looks set to continue well into the 21st century, and given that the Nation continues to attract a steady flow of new recruits, Middle America’s hope that the NOI will die with Farrakhan are misplaced.

University of Ulster

Notes

[1] Interview with Akbar Muhammad, 2 October 2007.

[2] DeWayne Wickham, ‘If Farrakhan dies, so will his group’ USA Today, 6 April 1999, p. 15A.

[3] Jabril Muhammad, Closing the Gap: Inner Views of the Heart, Mind and Soul of the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan (Chicago: Final Call publishing, 2006), p. 261.

[4] Louis Farrakhan, ‘Official Statement’, The Final Call, Volume 25. Number 48, p. 3.

[5] Interview with Askia Muhammad, 13 January 2008.

[6] See comments made during Farrakhan’s Saviours’ Day 2007 keynote address: ‘One Nation under God: The Confusion, The Guidance, The Warning’ [on DVD] (Final Call Incorporated, 2007).

[7] Interview with Askia Muhammad, 13 January 2008.

[8] NOI Officials confirm Minister Louis Farrakhan’s surgery, 6 January 2007, www.noi.org/statements_press_htm.

[9] Ishmael Muhammad, Why a Millions More Movement: the 2006 Holy Day of Atonement address [on DVD] (Final Call Incorporated, 2006).

[10] Mary Mitchell, ‘Is today Farrakhan’s last Saviours’ Day speech?’ Chicago Sun Times-Final Edition, 25 February 2007, p. A13.

[11] Arthur Magida, Prophet of Rage: A life of Louis Farrakhan and his Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 162.

[12] Interview with Askia Muhammad, 13 January 2008.

[13] Louis Farrakhan, Saviours’ Day 2004, Part 2: Reparations:  What Does America and Europe Owe?  What Does Allah (God) Promise? [on video tape] (Final Call Incorporated, 2004).

[14] Interview with Akbar Muhammad, 2 October 2007.

[15] The Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (Chicago: FCI, 1992), p. 7.

[16] Farrakhan ‘Reading List’ includes Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israel Tracts’. ADL Press release: http://www.adl.org/presRele/Natsl.

[17] Ashahed Muhammad, ‘Minister Farrakhan’s interview with CNN anchor Don Lemon’, The Final Call, 17 April, 2007 p.5.

[18] Ashahed Muhammad, ‘Minister Farrakhan speaks to the Arab world through Al Jazeera’, The Final Call. 10 April 2007, p. 5.

[19] Interview with Theresa X Torres, 16 September 2008.

[20] Interview with YoNasDa-Lonewolf Muhammad, 7 March 2008.

[21] Interview with Askia Muhammad, 13 January 2008.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Askia Muhammad, ‘The Gods at War:’ The future is all about Y.O.U.t.h’ The Final Call, 4 March 2008, pp. 2-3.

[24] Akbar Muhammad, ‘How does Barack Obama get the Black vote? Ask for it!’ The Final Call, 8 January 2008, p. 6.

[25] Mary Mitchell, ‘Why Obama ‘denounced’ Farrakhan: It wasn’t candidate’s best move—but most blacks understand’, Chicago Sun-Times, 2 March 2008, p. 13.

[26] Richard Cohen, ‘Obama’s Farrakhan Test’, The Washington Post, 15 January 2008, p. A13.

[27] Louis Farrakhan, Make straight in the desert a highway for our God, Part 2 [on CD] (Final Call Incorporated, 2001).

[28] Interview with Askia Muhammad, 13 January 2008.

[29] Interview with Akbar Muhammad, 2 October 2007.

[30] See comments made by Dr. Larry Muhammad at the opening of the ‘Educational Paradigm’ conference held at Christ Universal Temple in Chicago on 3 August 2008 [on DVD] (Final Call Incorporated, 2008).

[31] Observation of response to alter calls during weekly NOI sermons from the Muhammad University of Islam and Mosque Maryam, 2007-2008.

[32] Louis Farrakhan. ‘Educational Paradigm’ conference held at Christ Universal Temple in Chicago on 3 August 2008 [on DVD] (Final Call Incorporated, 2008).

[33] Louis Farrakhan, ‘A New Beginning: The re-dedication of Mosque Maryam’, 19 October 2008 [on DVD] (Final Call Incorporated, 2008). A transcript of Farrakhan’s address is also available in the 4 November 2008 edition of The Final Call, pp. 20-21.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 14, Spring 2009

The Illustrated Press: Richard Watson Gilder and the American Frontier

Jayme Yahr
© Jayme Yahr. All Rights Reserved

Deemed the little sister to European artwork and the ‘unwanted stepchild of art history’, American art has long suffered as an inferior Other in the traditional eyes of the art world elite.[1] American artwork produced prior to the mid-20th century has been attacked for its lack of sophistication and distinct historical style, even though the country’s past was largely derived from an array of Old World influences and national traits. Apart from this heritage, the insatiable American frontier spirit fostered an investment in democratic ideals and freedom, and because the United States maintains a social and industrial environment in which individuals can rise from rags to riches, American art and its promoters are unlike any other.

Richard Watson Gilder, who became assistant editor of Scribner’s Monthly Magazine and editor-in-chief of its successor, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, in the late 1800s, is one such promoter of American artists and writers. Born in Bordentown, New Jersey, in 1844, Gilder was interested in the publishing world from an early age, producing two of his own newspapers, St. Thomas Register and The Leaflet, while still a teenager. After a brief stint in the Philadelphia Artillery militia organisation and the death of his father, Gilder was forced to find a job and support his family. Gilder’s frontier, bootstraps, rags-to-riches persona was obvious from his earliest magazine jobs, often taking on more than one at a time. As his editorial responsibilities grew, so did his unwavering support of America’s art world. I argue that, from hiring unknown writers to commissioning works of art based on the Western frontier, Richard Watson Gilder’s competitiveness and often unpredictable editorial choices position him as an American promoter of the arts who embodied a patriotic, frontier spirit, evident in his control of the 19th century’s most popular magazines.

With regard to character, the art world, and the American businessman, Flaminia Gennari Santori remarks that acquiring artwork is ‘a representation of national character—bold, aggressive, business-oriented and yet naïve, enthusiastic, and even romantic—(which) reinforced the profile of the American businessman as contemporary hero’.[2] Gilder’s support of American artists and unbridled enthusiasm for magazine publishing illustrate Santori’s definition of national character and also exemplify Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential 1893 frontier thesis. According to Turner, the frontier was a defining factor in the formation of America and in the construction of the country’s national character. A unique geography, acute individualism and a patriotic self-image were the outcome of a society constantly in search of the new, uncharted and the seemingly impossible. Turner explains that the geographic frontier produced a set of common intellectual traits among colonisers, noting:

(T)o the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of the mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier.[3]

Turner’s theory changed the course of American historical studies by declaring that the frontier Americanised the New World, and moulded the nation of immigrants into a ‘composite nationality’ governed by democracy.[4] The frontier thesis has staunch critics and supporters, as well as those who fall somewhere in between.[5] Turner’s theory has been challenged for its inclusion of conflicting character traits, such as idealism and materialism, as well as individualism and cooperation; yet, as Jackson Putnam declares, ‘since when are ambivalence and contradictoriness unheard-of facets of national character?’.[6] Just as Putnam accepts Turner’s inclusion of clashing traits within the frontier thesis as representative of common characteristics in America’s national identity, Richard Slotkin argues that ‘(t)he most potent recurring hero-figures in our mythologies are men in whom contradictory identities find expression’.[7] To fully understand the implications of Turner’s frontier theory, the mythologies and hero-figures Slotkin alludes to must be addressed. Slotkin utilises the phrase ‘myth of the frontier’ to account for the legends that provide meaning and encourage reevaluations of past events.[8] Yet these myths of the frontier are riddled with heroes who personify conflicting character traits. Robert Hine and John Mack Faragher explain America’s fascination and acceptance of these contradictory frontier fables in terms of the ‘good-badman’ paradox. They contend:

The progressive narrative of the western is consistently subverted by the presence of pathfinders who are also critics of civilization, outlaws who are Robin Hoods… Americans are drawn to characters of paradoxical impulse, to ‘good-badmen’… It is an example of what the critic Stuart Hall calls the ‘double stake’ in popular culture, the double movement of containment and resistance.[9]

Although America’s history is filled with tales of Robin Hoods, the art world has struggled to support individuals who epitomise the heroic ‘good-badman’ persona. In the case of Richard Watson Gilder, his attempts to promote American artists and writers in the pages of The Century were met with resistance by fellow magazine staff members, as well as art world elite who were most interested in publishing and supporting work by Europeans. Apart from frontier myths and contradictory character traits, Turner’s analysis of Americanisation, expansion, and national character continue to be defining features of a country blessed and cursed by its attempts to redefine itself.

Despite Turner’s assertion that the frontier mind was ‘lacking in the artistic’, I propose that his frontier theory can be applied to boldly aggressive and unconventional magazine editors and art promoters like Richard Gilder. I suggest that the frontier embraced by these American art supporters is not comprised of state lines, borders, landmarks or geography; rather, it is a mindset embodied by the American art world. The frontier mentality was, and continues to be, competitive, individualistic, patriotic, domineering and often unpredictable. According to Ray Allen Billington, the frontier did not create democracy or individualism; instead, ‘each concept was deepened and sharpened by frontier conditions’.[10] The competitiveness and patriotism that were fostered by westward expansion are evident in the attitudes of many audacious Americans living in the late 19th century.

Additionally, the formation of an American frontier mentality is partially dependent upon Europe. The notion that America was developing its own environment and a national character while continuously detaching itself from European traditions is a Turnerian point of view that can be hard to sell, and to accept.[11] America cannot deny, nor entirely remove itself from its European roots. This land of immigrants will never be able to deny the fact that Europe influenced and continues to inspire the American art world through its once dominant academy system and legacy of patronage. For instance, the academy and apprentice system that flourished in France took hold in America, although its grip and influence were not nearly as strong.[12] The American Academy of Fine Arts was founded in New York in 1802, followed shortly thereafter by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1805, yet these groups did ‘relatively little to promote artists beyond the limited confines of their membership’.[13] As the years progressed, the role of academies in America shifted to reflect the changing interests of artists and the increased dominance of wealthy self-made art patrons, who created the National Academy of Design in 1826 and the American Art-Union (formerly known as the Apollo Association) in 1839.

Following in the footsteps of self-made art promoters who championed American culture through various leagues and academies, Gilder used magazines as a venue to show support for America’s literary and artistic worlds. In 1870 at the age of 26, Gilder made his first jump up the ranks of the publishing world to editor-in-chief of Hours at Home, a monthly magazine produced by Charles Scribner and Company in New York City.  After multiple years on the market, and in an effort to keep up with current trends, Scribner and Company made the decision to phase out Hours at Home, which was to then be replaced with Scribner’s Monthly, a new magazine spearheaded by Josiah Holland.  After the demise of Hours, Gilder became Holland’s assistant editor at Scribner’s Monthly, a move that set Gilder on a lifelong career path in magazines while simultaneously sparking his interest in the promotion of the arts.

Within his first year at Scribner’s Monthly, Gilder reworked the magazine to include an increased number of articles devoted to art and artists; six percent of the magazine’s total space. Within a decade, the arts-related writings had jumped up another four percent, to 10 percent of the magazine’s article space. Most of the musings in Gilder’s early years at Scribner’s were focused on exhibition reviews and D. O’C. Townley’s essay series on ‘Living American Artists’, which were accompanied by conservative, illustrated portraits of the individuals profiled. With the advent of advanced engraving techniques and developments in printing presses, illustrations became important complements to writings about art.  What were once standard portraits of artists became adventures in new American artistic styles and scholarship, exemplified by articles on John La Farge, Elihu Vedder and expatriate James McNeill Whistler. Scribner’s was on the cusp of New York’s burgeoning art scene, and the magazine’s emphasis on artists and their work reflected the growing public’s devotion to cultural pursuits.

By the middle of the 1870s Gilder had taken over editorial control of Scribner’s Monthly and within five years the magazine was booming, having grown from less than 40,000 copies in monthly circulation to over 100,000 copies by 1877.[14] It was noted in 1923 by Robert Underwood Johnson, who took over as editor-in-chief of The Century after Gilder’s death, that

What gave (Scribner’s Monthly) its novel character was that it was not merely a miscellany, like the excellent magazines that preceded it, but was founded in conviction, open-mindedness, ambition for leadership, and a determination to be of public service. The main idea of the editors was to discover what was best and then to exploit it… It was a strong influence upon the taste of the time. Among the movements of which it was either the pioneer or, among the magazines, the conspicuous advocate, were Free Art, Art in the Home, More Artistic Coinage, and International Copyright, which was finally established ten years after Gilder assumed the role of editor-in-chief of Century Magazine and was an important vote of confidence from American publishers who continuously accepted the work of English writers.[15]

Although ambitious in its output, forward-thinking and an embodiment of the frontier mindset, the increased production and labour costs of the magazine worried Scribner and Company, as well as the parent book-publishing house of Charles Scribner and Sons. Heightened tension between all parties led to an 1881 dispute over the right for Scribner and Sons to publish books serialised in the magazine. To end the conflict, the editors of Scribner’s Monthly bought out Scribner Company interest in the publication.  Consequently, the name of the magazine was changed from Scribner’s Monthly to The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, the first issue of which went to press in November of 1881. Virtually unchanged in format, the first issue of The Century was numbered Volume XXIII, a continuation of volumes set forth by Scribner’s Monthly. On the title page, Gilder and staff reminded readers that this was Volume I of a new series. In return for the change of name, the Scribers agreed that no magazine with the ‘Scribner’ name could return to print for five years. The terms of the agreement were followed; the first issue of Scribner’s Magazine appeared in January of 1887.

With Gilder at the helm of the newly-titled magazine, the economic stakes for its success were high and placed heavily on Gilder’s shoulders. The American frontier mentality was embedded in Gilder’s decisions, whether in his personal interest in artists, or in the new pathways blazed by The Century Magazine. According to biographer Herbert Smith, ‘Gilder happened to arrive at a position of literary influence at a time when American writers were crying for their independence, economic and esthetic, from the traditions of England. By 1880, the cry had been audible in America for more than half a century, but it was during the twenty years of Gilder’s greatest power that the longest steps toward the realization of American literary independence were taken’.[16] One of Gilder’s foremost publication policies was ‘America first’, a frontier move ripe with patriotism and forthrightness. He actively cultivated an American mindset and tangible American magazine that deemed the New World to be as reputable as the Old World. Even though The Century, in its earliest days, included work by European, particularly English, writers, Gilder looked first to America for stories and essays. Gilder chose to turn West when most other American magazines, especially those in New York, were still looking to England for the majority of contributions. As Gilder explained in a letter dated February 1887:

Our safes are full of admirable short stories and serials which we scarcely have room for.  If we should take any English serial today it would crowd out some American story which, in our way of thinking, has greater claims upon us.  Americans are interested in English and foreign subjects; but we prefer as a rule to have these articles written, or else to have the illustrations made, by Americans.  This is not provincialism; it is simply a matter of obvious duty.[17]

Yet, Gilder’s frontier Americanism cost the publication both literary contributions as well as American subscribers, two measurements of a magazine’s success. A champion of writers living and working on American soil, Gilder declared that, ‘the conviction is growing daily upon us that we must give place to our American writers’.[18] Further, Gilder and The Century continued to support the frontier framework set forth by Holland when the magazine was Scribner’s Weekly, including the rules that ‘everything (the magazine) published was paid for, and the names of contributors were printed. This was done first in the table of contents and afterward with the contributions, and later full credit was given also to draughtsmen and engravers’.[19]

Just as Gilder approached the role of editor with a frontier mindset, The Century was forging new territory with its embrace of technical advancements. In 1886 a rotary press was adopted in lieu of the traditional flatbed press, which increased magazine output tenfold. Supervised by Theodore Low De Vinne, the magazine ran illustrations on a flatbed press until 1890, when R. Hoe and Company built a rotary art press that enabled the magazine to print the first halftone illustrations from curved plates. De Vinne’s experiments with paper and ink combinations produced matchless presswork of both illustrations and text. Along with Gilder’s forthright promotion of America, De Vinne’s dominance in the technological field of printing presses gave The Century an appearance worthy of its editorial aspirations, was unmatched by rival magazines, and won admiration from master printers in Europe, some of whom sent representatives to study his methods.[20] Due to The Century’s dedication to reproducing artwork at the highest quality possible, and with Gilder at its head, the magazine was able to secure work by the best illustrators of the late 19th century. None of the artists or writers were salaried staff members, as The Century commissioned each work separately. Although not on staff, illustrators such as Joseph Pennell, Arthur Burdett Frost and Charles Dana Gibson were favourite artists of the magazine. Pennell was particularly famous for his etchings of the New York skyline and skyscrapers, often producing six or more for one edition of the magazine.  Moreover, illustrator Thornton Oakley produced a compilation of sketches in 1906 and 1907 which highlighted the American public at work, including railroad labourers and coal miners.  Commissioned numerous times, Gibson and Frost were responsible for such well-known works as the modern Gibson girl, and the illustrations in Lewis Carroll’s Rhyme? & Reason?.

Gilder was also interested in exploring America’s West where expansion, freedom and patriotism were fostered in the largely uncharted wilderness. Henry Farny and Mary Hallock Foote were two travel illustrators who worked extensively for The Century. Farny’s assignments included interviews with Native American chiefs Geronimo and Sitting Bull, as well as a 1000-mile trip down the Missouri River. Born in France, Farny moved to America with his family at a young age, settling in Warren, Pennsylvania, before moving to Cincinnati, Ohio. Like fellow Ohio artist Frank Duveneck, Farny traveled to Germany to study at the Royal Academies of Düsseldorf and Munich. While studying in Düsseldorf, Farny worked alongside Albert Bierstadt, a fellow American immigrant and painter. It has been suggested that Bierstadt, whose landscape paintings of the romanticised American West made him famous, encouraged the young Farny to discover the uncharted frontier, although it has been widely noted that Farny found inspiration in fellow Academy attendees Frank Duveneck and John Twatchman.[21] While abroad Farny was exposed to the new painting techniques championed by German artists including bravura brushwork, or thick brushstrokes, and the alla prima approach, or wet paint applied to wet canvas. Moreover, German artists and the Americans working in Germany often used a dark colour palette.  After returning to America, Farny travelled west in 1881 followed by additional westward trips in 1883 and 1884, where he observed and illustrated the completion of the Northern Pacific Transcontinental Railroad.

Foote, on the other hand, was one of the first widely-published American female illustrators, as well as one of the first artists to produce images of California gold mines and the wilds of both Idaho and Colorado.  Born in Milton-on-Hudson, New York, Foote became close friends with Gilder’s future wife, Helena De Kay, when they both attended Cooper School of Design for Women in New York City in the mid-1860s.  Although she worked with multiple professors at the Cooper School, Foote was guided and inspired by English artist William J. Linton, who taught the young Foote to draw directly on wood, and to fine-tune her sketching skills.  De Kay introduced Foote to Gilder, who fostered a strong editorial relationship with the artist, encouraging her to submit illustrations to The Century.  Gilder was particularly interested in Foote’s representations of her western experiences, as well as depictions of industrialisation and expansion.

Beyond the western adventures documented in The Century, Gilder was dedicated to providing an inside look at America’s art establishments, and he was unafraid to publish critical reviews. The Metropolitan Museum of Art was the subject of one such review in 1884, which addressed the institution’s need for educational aids such as sculptural casts and architectural models, instead of spending its funds on costly collector’s pieces. Eight years later, The Century lauded the Met’s progress towards fulfilling the need for educational aids, as well as the museum’s decision to remain open to visitors on Sundays. In addition to New York’s art institutions, museums in Cincinnati, St. Louis and Chicago were enthusiastically supported by writers such as Ripley Hitchcock who explored the topic of westward cultural expansion in his August 1886 review titled, ‘The Western Art Movement’.[22]

During the same period of time that Gilder championed American artists and writers in the Century, his personal home became a gathering place for his social circle of the foremost artists and literary minds who lived in or visited New York. ‘At home’ on Friday evenings, 103 East 15th Street, was otherwise known as The Studio. Gilder and his wife, Helena De Kay, welcomed such guests as pianists Ignace Paderewski and Adele aus der Ohe, violinist Leonora von Stosch, singer Clara Louise Kellogg, and actors and actresses Salvini, Joseph Jefferson, Eleanora Duse and Helen Modjeska. E. L. Godkin (editor of The Nation), John Burroughs (nature writer), Augustus Saint-Gaudens (sculptor), Mary Hallock Foote, Andrew Carnegie, Rudyard Kipling, John Singer Sargent, General William Sherman and William James were frequent visitors to The Studio, as were literary figures Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Howells and Henry James.[23]

Bret Harte, a frequent visitor to The Studio and an integral figure in Gilder’s social network, grew up in California, a true man of the Western frontier. As a child, Harte was interested in novels and by 1857 was writing for magazine publications including Northern Californian, Golden Era and Californian, before a brief period of success as an editor for the Overland Monthly. Reviews and regional stories were Harte’s tour de force at the Overland Monthly and the magazine quickly received attention throughout the nation. Harte moved on to the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine known for its stories, reviews, and illustrations of all things Western and frontier-oriented.  Yet Harte is best remembered as a critic devoted to the same American ideals championed by Gilder: realism in writing, particularly as it pertained to the ‘New America’, a land of change, expansion, and tolerance for differences of opinion. Harte also supported writers, as did Gilder, whether through his editorial work, or his critiques and reviews. A personal friend and collaborator of Mark Twain, Harte was additionally a part of the writers’ group formed by Twain, William Howells and Henry James, which was dubbed the ‘realist revolution’ of the 1860s and 1870s.[24]

Like Harte, William Howells was a leader of the ‘realism war’, a literary critic who was an editor of the Atlantic Monthly and a regular contributor to Harper’s between 1886 and 1892.[25] Although Howells supported American writers, he was not immune to the influence of England and English authors, especially in his early career. He explained that in his younger years, ‘(I) wore English glasses which (I) had to remove in order to look at American life with my own American eyes’.[26] A tireless supporter of writers, Howells, like Harte and Gilder, was also a champion of American causes and political change, from woman’s suffrage to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

No doubt Gilder was partly responsible for the mainstream success of these realist writers, as their works were published and promoted by The Century. Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886) was serialised in the magazine, as were Mark Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson (1894), Howells’ A Modern Instance (1882), A Woman’s Reason (1883) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Additionally, The Century excerpted Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), publications that remain popular to this day.

The Studio became a forum for the exchange of ideas, discussion and inspiration, as well as a rallying point of many young artists who had recently returned to America after time spent in cities such as Paris and Munich, including painters Frank Duveneck and William Merritt Chase. At The Studio, the foundation was laid for the Society of American Artists, a group officially formed in 1877 as a protest against the traditional, conservative National Academy of Design which was founded in 1826. At the Academy’s exhibition of 1877, a feud began between the older, more traditional artists, and the artists who were younger in age and experimenting with new techniques and individual styles. In response to the attention garnered by the works produced by the younger set, the older group delegated unwanted and obscure spots within the gallery space to the up-and-comers. The younger artists were outraged, especially Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who met with Helena de Kay Gilder and his artist contemporaries at The Studio. The meeting’s result was the Society of American Artists, a secessionist group joined by almost every member of the younger generation. Among the society’s members were Julian Alden Weir, John La Farge, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Albert Pinkham Ryder and John Henry Twatchman. Like the National Academy, the society held annual exhibitions of its members’ work. Although Helena de Kay Gilder was a member of the group, Richard Watson Gilder was the literal manifestation of the group’s ideals and new movements in artistic expression.

John La Farge, a prominent member of The Studio, was born in 1835 in New York to French parents. After completing school, La Farge embarked on a grand tour of Europe, visiting Denmark, Belgium, Germany and France before returning to America in 1857. Once back on home soil, La Farge settled in Newport, Rhode Island, to study painting with William Morris Hunt. While in Newport, La Farge became close friends with writers Henry James and William James, two members of Gilder’s social circle, and frequent visitors to The Studio. La Farge worked in many mediums, including painting, sculpture, stained glass and etching, receiving recognition in each type of artistic practice. Yet, to Gilder, La Farge’s illustrations were innovative, exemplifying new trends in American art in the latter half of the 19th century. As Henry Adams notes in regard to La Farge’s illustrations:

(La Farge) disliked the hard, linear effect of previous illustrations and consequently created his designs in wash, much to the consternation of his engravers, who had to translate his subtle gradations of tone into linear networks. Neither La Farge nor his artisans were ever satisfied with the result, but the friction between them led to a new style of wood engraving—the so-called New School or American School—which virtually eliminated modeling with contour lines to concentrate instead on tonal and atmospheric qualities. Thus, as in his paintings, La Farge chose both subjects and techniques that transcended the literal and the physical, that translated mundane realities into the world of spirit and imagination.[27]

Apart from his friendships with Henry and William James, La Farge worked closely with Augustus Saint-Gaudens on multiple projects, including the Saint Thomas Church and the Union League Club, both in New York. In addition to La Farge’s interaction with members of The Studio, the artist was promoted in The Century. From 1890 to 1893 La Farge’s ‘An Artist’s Letters from Japan’ was serialised in the magazine, and in 1904, ‘A Fiji Festival’ was published, a testament to Gilder’s interest in the artist, as well as tales of travel and expansion.

Besides championing the work of artists, Gilder was intent on promoting, with frontier conviction, American writers. On November 1, 1882 Gilder wrote a letter to English author Edmund Gosse noting, ‘We started an Author’s Club at our house the other night. You will be surprised to hear that there is no such thing in the city—but perhaps you will not be surprised either, for I doubt if there is such a thing in London. I do not know how it will succeed, but there seems to be a demand for such an organisation to bring literary workers together’.[28] Six years after the Author’s Club was established, Gilder became the Fellowcraft Club’s first president, explaining in a letter to American poet James Lowell in February of 1889 that, ‘About a year ago a club was formed here in New York, of journalists of the pen and pencil; it consists of two hundred or more men, most of the active ones on the daily papers of this city… Almost without my knowledge or consent, I was elected President of the organization’.[29] Moreover Gilder remarked in another letter to a friend that, ‘My interest in the Fellowcraft Club is, I may say, a patriotic one. The journalists of this city seem to need, and very much to desire, such a club as we are making for them… I have (taken on the role of President) simply for the supposed good of the Craft, and as I said above, the need for such a club is keenly felt by the best men in the profession’.[30] As exemplified by his letters, the frontier spirit was alive and well in Gilder’s efforts to promote American writers.

In addition to his efforts to include America’s prominent writers in the pages of The Century, Gilder was a founder of the American Copyright League and a fervent lobbyist on behalf of artists’ rights. Moreover, the Author’s Club, formed at The Studio, was an essential center for strategic planning and the foundation of the American Copyright League. Due to a lack of international copyright, authors lost extensive amounts of money through pirating in America and abroad. English authors were troubled by American publishers who reproduced stories and books without proper reimbursement and American authors faced the same fate in Europe. Often writers attempting to create a reputation were at a particular disadvantage, as the work of renowned authors from England were reproduced without royalty payments in American publications; thus the unknown or little-known authors were forced to take a backseat to pirated writings. Gilder was a staunch supporter of fairness and integrity in publishing, and worked tirelessly with the American Congress to pass international legislation. Moreover, Gilder devoted ample space in The Century to ‘Open Letters’ by American writers committed to the international copyright cause, in addition to sending associate editor of the magazine Robert Underwood Johnson to lobby for congressional support in Washington. The international copyright act was passed in March 1891, with much of the campaign’s success falling to Gilder and The Century.

When Richard Watson Gilder died in November of 1909 at the age of 5, The Century had began a downward spiral, unable to keep pace with cheap, mass-produced magazines such as McClure’s and Cosmopolitan. In its heyday The Century’s monthly circulation was over 220,000, a number much larger than any of its rivals, including Harper’s and Scribner’s Magazine, but by the first decade of the 20th century, that number had dropped to 125,000.[31] Yet, even with The Century’s fall from grace, Gilder’s influence on the publishing, art and literary worlds was visible in the increased opportunities available to artists, and America’s devotion to representing homegrown writers in mass-produced magazines. As explained in 1939’s Modern American Painting:

Never in the nation’s history has there been a time when art was so widely appreciated or so seriously practiced as it is today.  America salutes the past, and is grateful to Europe for the aesthetic problems it has solved for all nations.  But to this technical knowledge we have now added something that is entirely our own—our own way of life, our own way of thinking and feeling, or our American spirit, if you want to give this something its most inclusive meaning.  As a result, the world is witnessing the birth of a new school—The American School.[32]

Without Richard Watson Gilder, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, and The Studio, The American School would not have been possible, nor would the cultural landscape of the country look as it does today. As The Nation concluded on the occasion of his passing, ‘(Gilder’s life) was a message to the world, that, for all its shortcomings, in its finest citizenship, America remains a land of lofty ideals’.[33]

University of Washington

Notes

[1] Wanda Corn, ‘Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art’, The Art Bulletin 70.2 (June 1988), p. 188.

[2] Flaminia Gennari Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Master Paintings in America 1900-1914 (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003), p. 95.

[3] Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, The Frontier in American History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), p. 37.

[4] Ibid. p. 22.

[5] For an overview of recent scholarship in American history, including the frontier theory and ‘westering’ see Thomas Bender, ‘Strategies of Narrative Synthesis in American History’, The American Historical Review 107.1 (Feb., 2002), p. 129-153. For scholarship supporting Turner’s frontier thesis see David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1968), a study of the effect of economic abundance on national character and the frontier. William Cronon, ‘Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner’, The Western Historical Quarterly 18.2 (Apr., 1987), pp. 157-176. For a discussion of the contradictory nature of the frontier thesis see Marvin W. Mikesell, ‘Comparative Studies in Frontier History’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 50.1 (Mar., 1960), p. 62-74, and The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History?, Ray Allen Billington (ed.) (Huntington, New York: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1977).

[6] Jackson K. Putnam, ‘The Turner Thesis and the Westward Movement: A Reappraisal’, The Western Historical Quarterly 7.4 (Oct., 1976), p. 396. Putnam explains that ‘neither historian nor citizen can ever truly understand the history of the American West without first coming to grips with the subject’s symbolic and aesthetic meanings as revealed by creative artists’ (p. 398).

[7] Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 475.

[8] Ibid. pp. 474-75.

[9] Ibid. Stuart Hall quoted in Richard Slotkin, ‘Myth and the Production of History’, Ideology and Classic American Literature, Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (eds) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986): 70, 86; Ralph Samuel (ed.) People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 228.

[10] Ray Allen Billington (ed.), The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (New York: Robert E. Krieger Publishing Company, 1977), p. 5.

[11] See Turner, p. 23, and Billington, p. 5, as he discusses frontier character traits and the differences between the pioneers of the west and the citizens of Europe. Noteworthy is Billington’s statement that ‘It is obviously untrue that the frontier experience alone accounts for the unique features of American civilization; that civilization can be understood only as the product of the interplay of the Old World heritage and New World conditions. But among those conditions none has bulked larger than the operation of the frontier process’ (p. 7). See Mikesell, p. 62 for a summary and discussion of Turner’s frontier theory including the concepts of Americanization, national character, and America’s turn away from European influence.

[12] Erica E. Hirshler, ‘Claiming Our Property Wherever We Find it: American Art After 1865’, America: The New World in 19th Century Painting, ed. Stephan Koja (New York: Prestel, 1999) for an in-depth discussion of America’s academy system.

[13] Franklin Kelly, ‘Nineteenth-Century Collections of American Paintings’, America: The New World in 19th-Century Painting, ed. Stephan Koja (New York: Prestel, 1999), p. 195.

[14] Arthur John, The Best Years of the Century: Richard Watson Gilder, Scribner’s Monthly, and Century Magazine, 1870-1909 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), p. 77. Henceforth The Best Years of the Century.

[15] Robert Underwood Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1923), p. 87. Henceforth Remembered Yesterdays.

[16] Herbert F. Smith, Richard Watson Gilder (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970), p. 74. Henceforth Richard Watson Gilder.

[17] Ibid, p.78.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Remembered Yesterdays, pp. 87-88.

[20] Ibid. p. 182. See Theodore Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1964).

[21] Taos Painters: Henry Francois Farny (1847-1916), http://www.henryfarny.com/. See Spanierman Gallery LLC website for information regarding Farny’s Munich years, http://www.johnhtwachtman.com/bio.htm.

[22] Remembered Yesterdays, p. 191.

[23] The Best Years of the Century, pp. 1-2; Richard Watson Gilder, p. 23.

[24] David E. E. Sloane, ‘Bret Harte’, Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Literary Critics and Scholars 1850-1880, John W. Rathbun and Monica M. Grecu (eds), vol. 64 (Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1988), p.95. Henceforth Dictionary of Literary Biography.

[25] Gloria Martin, ‘William Dean Howells’, Dictionary of Literary Biography, p.117.

[26] Ibid. p.120.

[27] Henry Adams, ‘The Mind of John La Farge’, John La Farge (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), p. 36. See notes 67 and 68.

[28] Rosamond Gilder (ed), Letters of Richard Watson Gilder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916), pp. 119-120.

[29] Ibid. p. 185.

[30] Ibid. p. 186.

[31] Remembered Yesterdays, p. 233.

[32] Peyton Boswell, Modern American Painting (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1939), p. 11.

[33] Remembered Yesterdays, p. 266.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 14, Spring 2009

Live and Let Li(v)e: the Reduction of the American Dream and the Destruction of Queer Bodies in Laramie and Beyond

Christopher Young-Kramaric
© Christopher Young-Kramaric. All Rights Reserved

The essential tension that has driven this argument is a literary exploration of that which is real and that which is imagined in America. Of particular interest is the symbolic and psychological role that the Frontier, the promise of Westward Expansion, and the responsibility involved therein, played in the development of the American psyche. Each of these aspects of the American West’s legacy will be considered by addressing the question of how the closing of the Frontier—and with it the inescapable end of promise—led to a reduction of the American Dream and the destruction of queer bodies in the American West. This uniquely American conundrum will be explored by means of explicating its now structured and reoccurring representation in the writing of the American West as depicted in Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie Project. As such, this argument sets out to establish four main points: first, the American Dream and the Frontier share an inescapable reflexive relationship with each other; second, the American Dream, in response to the closing of the Frontier, underwent a reduction; third, this process has resulted in the destruction of queer bodies on the former Frontier; fourth, this process has been structuralised and incorporated into writing on and of the American West.

The debate over what exactly the American Dream is has been a major subject of discussion for decades now but for the sake of this argument the American Dream is best understood as closely related to the promise created by the American Frontier. The American Frontier and the notion of Manifest Destiny greatly shaped the American perspective of the Dream because America was cast as the recipient of a God-given mission to move westward, expand, build and profit. In the introduction to 1970’s American Dreams, American Nightmares, David Madden claims that:

‘The edenic promises of the American land helped shape aspects of the American character; ironic and paradoxical tensions between romantic and idealistic elements in that character, as it experiences the land, helped produce the American Dream’.[1]

In understanding Madden’s claim, the land and the possibility it promised was both romanticised and idealised in the American psyche, and by extension, the American Dream itself is a highly romanticised and idealised idea. The discussion of the promise of possibility appears quite often herein, and when it does, it is best understood as the very root of the American Dream.

Another central aspect of the American Dream is responsibility. Madden understands this aspect of the American Dream to be ‘a responsibility to transform the Dream into realities’ for some, and to ‘expose ways in which the Dream has failed’ for others.[2] Admittedly, this paper is more closely aligned with the task of the latter group, largely because—as this argument will prove—the realisation implied in the former is impossible. There is no guarantee of prosperity implicit in the American Dream. There was an overabundance of land and a certain promise of possibility during the early years of Westward expansion; as such, in the infantile stages of the collective American psyche’s development, possibility became that which was expected. Whether the task at hand is proving that the Dream can be made true or proving that the Dream in fact has no substance, there is an essential responsibility that accompanies its existence and that every American has been burdened with.

Connected with this responsibility is the concept of agency, understood here as the capacity for human beings to make choices and impose those choices on the world and on others. The essential problem with the American Dream—the reason it is counted here among that which is imagined in the American West—is alluded to in Madden’s discussion of responsibility. The American Dream, with its whole-hearted defence of Manifest Destiny and its affinity for the promise of possibility, seems at first to grant autonomy to not only the American Nation, but also to those entrusted with its expansion and growth. This, however, is nothing more than the imagined, and by now accepted, reading of the American Dream; in actuality, the American Dream represented the dissolution of American agency. This argument sees the American Dream as allowing no choice, no free will for the American populace: the economic and cultural demand to expand American presence and identity in the West was a task laid upon America, in most constructions by God himself, leaving Americans themselves with no active choice in the matter. After the Frontier years of American history, the Dream became nothing more than an unrequested inheritance. While it may be tempting to construe the responsibility of the individual American to prove the truth of the Dream as an expression of individual agency, that responsibility is better understood as originating from the passive role each has taken as an unwilling recipient of the American Dream. The problematic nature of the passive loss of agency on the part of America was not fully felt during America’s formative years when there was still land to be settled, cities to be built and money to be made, but as the implicit promise of the American landscape lost legitimacy with the closing of the Frontier, the loss of agency became apparent in American society.

A final point of clarification is what exactly is meant by a reduction of the American Dream. As the Frontier—the tangible embodiment of promise and possibility—closed, so too did the initial understanding of the American Dream. As land grew scarce and certain-possibility dwindled, individual failure and a failure to uphold the responsibility imparted upon Americans in the formulation of the Dream became new realities. As such, the Dream was reformulated and reduced as a means of not only alleviating the blame for individual failure economically, socially, or otherwise, but also as a means of preserving the belief in the Dream itself. In a sense, Americans have constructed a new dream which places them as the sole agent of their success (should they be so lucky to achieve success) and innocent bystanders to their own failures. The sense of a national goal and communal prosperity that was once heralded by Manifest Destiny has been replaced by an extreme individualism which has become the new formulation of the American Dream.

Of prime concern to this argument is how this cultural occurrence affects the queer bodies present on a landscape once defined by the possibility of the American Dream and now marred by the reduction of it, as well as how this process has been structurally embedded in literature. It is a structure that has been repeated over and over again in texts from Cather’s O Pioneers! to Harte’s The Outcasts of Poker Flat. This argument, however, limits its scope to The Laramie Project. In doing so, the existence of this reduction is not only brought to life through the phrase ‘live and let live’, but the undeniable structure which illuminates this reduction’s relationship to the queer body in literature can also be explored. This structure is important in that it reveals a common, inevitable and recurring destruction of queer bodies in the literature of the American West, and by extension sheds light on the reality of queer existence in an America unknowingly fighting to preserve a dream that has never truly been anything other than a false promise.

The Laramie Project, written by Moisés Kaufman and the members of the Tectonic Theater Project in 2001, recounts the true story of a gay student’s brutal murder. On October 7, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming in Laramie, was lured by two straight men to a distant location on the outskirts of the town where he was beaten, tied to a fencepost and left for dead. During the murder trial that followed, the two men accused of this heinous crime, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, revealed that the motivating force behind the murder was Matthew’s homosexuality.

Not long after Matthew Shepard’s murder, Moisés Kaufman and the members of the Tectonic Theater Project made their way to Laramie, Wyoming, and conducted a series of interviews with residents that would later serve as the basis for their minimalist play, The Laramie Project. In Kaufman’s introduction to the piece he describes the technique developed by the Tectonic Theater Project as ‘moment work’, whereby theatre is both created and analysed from a structuralist perspective, and all of the actions within the course of the performance occur as moments rather than in set scenes. Kaufman’s structuralist approach enables this argument to search for the underlying structure that informs The Laramie Project.

Using this technique, The Laramie Project becomes less of a performance and more of an interaction with the very people who live in Laramie. At the same time, however, they are made less like residents of Laramie and more like residents of America, as the surface level collapses to reveal underlying commonalities. Readers are given first-hand access to the emblematic symbols of America whose words and dramatic depictions serve as reiterations of similar scenes that have played out and continue to play out across the American landscape. Furthermore, in creating a theatre piece that reads at once as both performance and historical record, as fact and as fiction and as a middle ground between the socio-cultural history of America this argument attempts to access and the literature that it uses as its means, Kaufman has positioned The Laramie Project in a stylistically and theoretically queer space.

If what Kaufmann and the Tectonic Theater Project members claim is true, The Laramie Project not only developed from a structuralist perspective, but consequently reveals a structure that occurs again and again. Structural elements within The Laramie Project operate on two levels, perhaps better explained as functioning in two separate realms that are intrinsically interrelated: the historical and the narratological. Because of the emphasis put on the minimalist scenery and chameleonic role-taking within The Laramie Project the specificity of location and individual identity is de-emphasised. In effect, Laramie becomes just another town, the townspeople indistinguishable from any other residents of a dying Western city. This skewing of identity, setting and communal identification is the historical functioning of structuralism within the text. The innate features of the ‘American’ on the former Frontier remain while the temporal and superficial dimensions of the characters themselves fade in to the background. Highly connected with this historical structuralism is the telling of the story itself, the narratological structure. Again, because Kaufmann has succeeded in collapsing the American identity and its historical grounding—leaving only the core pieces of identity—the narrative itself comes to represent a story that is told again and again in the American West, perhaps with variant details, but with a core structure that remains constant at any time and in any place where the Frontier promise once thrived.

The complex structuring of this uniquely American phenomenon consists of six elements which remain true regardless of variant setting, characters or plot details. Although an initial formulation, these elements can best be defined as follows: (1) establishing a location defined by its relationship to promise; (2) the promise is threatened; (3) the onset of paranoia is confirmed through the retention of the ‘old’; (4) the queer body threatens the ‘old’ with its ‘newness’; (5) the introduction of a reductive motif which reduces the American Dream and reclaims agency, and (6) the queer body responds. An evaluation of various ‘moments’ within The Laramie Project allows for a more comprehensive understanding of what causes this structure, how it operates, and the consequences that spring forth from it.

The first element, establishing a location defined by its relationship to promise, serves as narrative reinforcement of the idea that Laramie is a location, like many others, defined by a deeply-rooted American relationship not only to space itself, but to the past promise which that space held. A look at moments with Sergeant Hing, the lead investigator of the Shepard murder, and Rebecca Hilliker, the director of the theatre programme at the local university, illuminates this understanding of location.

Sergeant Hing: It’s a good place to live. Good people—lots of space. Now, all the towns in southern Wyoming are laid out and spaced because of the railroad came through.[sic] It was how far they could go before having to refuel and rewater. And, uh, Laramie was a major stopping point.

Rebecca Hilliker: There’s so much space between people and towns here, so much time for reflection.[3]

The emphasis in Hing’s statement is clearly on what Laramie was in relation to the promise of Westward movement and prosperity. Laramie, Wyoming, therefore, offers specificity while its situation in a Frontier location constructs a commonality, which allows the reoccurring structure of the ‘live and let live’ motif that will soon play out there to be displayed as common to the American West as a whole. Rebecca Hilliker’s comment about space reinforces the correlation between the initial promise of the American Dream and the concept of space. The insinuation that space allows for reflection and is therefore a positive aspect of the Western landscape suggests a reformulation of increasing alienation on the closing Frontier as something to be viewed positively rather than negatively. Space equalled possibility at one time and now its continued existence in an altered state allows for reflection on that which has been lost in Laramie and in America. This first element is necessary to locate the narrative not in a specific town, but in a uniquely American environment that has been shaped not only by its relationship to the Frontier, but also by its insistence on the reality of the promise of possibility.

With the second element of the structure, the threatened promise manifests itself as an external force for which no logical reason can be offered without threatening the establishment of the American Dream. To admit the real possibility of failure and the literal end of progression would be to kill the heart of the Frontier promise that created the American Dream. This tension is best explored in an exchange between a company member and a resident of Laramie.

Greg Pierotti: So this (Laramie) was a big ranching town?

Alison Mears: Oh, not just ranching, this was a big railroad town at one time. Before they moved everything to Cheyenne and Green River and Omaha. So now, well, it’s just a drive-through spot for the railroad—because even, what was it, in the fifties? Well, they had one big roundhouse, and they had such a shop they could build a complete engine.[4]

This moment contains a nostalgic look at the promise that Laramie once held, a promise that Alison’s comments prove has expired. The Laramie Project goes a step further than just showing the promise as threatened, it is already gone and those left in the wake of its memory have a difficult time reconciling the end of what was. It is worthwhile to point out that even in her seemingly tacit acknowledgement of the promise coming to an end, Alison is unable to avoid focusing on the hope the past contained. Immediately thereafter, Marge Murray, another third generation resident of Laramie, chimes in with her own defence of the promise, connecting herself and her familial heritage to the legacy of the American Dream in Wyoming by pointing out that her mother worked in the aforementioned roundhouse. This moment gives voice to the experience of the promise of the American Dream dying out. The women, representative of the American West, shift back and forth between acknowledging the death of the Dream that built Laramie and shaped them, and their desire to blissfully invoke the past.

Norman Mailer once claimed:

Our country was built on the expansive imagination of people who kept dreaming about the lands to the West. When the frontier was finally closed, imagination inevitably turned into paranoia (which can be described, after all, as the enforced enclosure of imagination—its artistic form is a scenario) and lo, there where the westward expansion stopped on the shores of the Pacific grew Hollywood.[5]

As imagination dies out, paranoia sets in; it is that paranoia that manifests itself, at least in the case of the American West, in the form of a desire to retain the ‘old’. Nostalgia and the myth of what America once was become necessary for preservation—a search for and retention of what Madden calls the ‘usable’ past. One of the most persistent, vital and unquestionably destructive constructions of history in America comes in the form of idealised and historically-misinformed perceptions of gender roles and sexual normativity. Prior to having an extended written history, the maintaining of historical awareness, and by extension the American Dream, was accomplished through a historical process that relied greatly on oratory. Most times, the oratory that informed this referential historical perspective was religious in nature. Religious truths function as a link to universal truths that know no time; additionally, one may even go so far as to suggest that their God-given origin allows them to be easily construed as applicable in a country whose motivating task was believed to be handed down from God himself. Too often in these discourses, queer bodies serve to undermine the traditional, hegemonic role of the man, risk destroying or recasting the traditional familial unit which stood at the core of Frontier growth for so long, represent death because of their relationship to reproduction, and are conceived of as willingly accepting passivity. This last aspect is perhaps the greatest threat of all to a nation reacting quickly and unconsciously to protect a Dream that forced them into a passive role. This structural element is achieved in The Laramie Project through a moment that brims with religious rhetoric and the exposition of supposedly absolute truths.

Doug Laws: God has set boundaries. And one of our responsibilities is to learn: What is it God wants? So you study Scripture, you look to your leaders. Then you know what the bounds are. Now once you kinda know what the bounds are, then you sorta get a feel for what’s out-of-bounds. There is a proclamation that came out on the family. A family is defined as one woman and one man and children. That’s a family. That’s about as clear as you can state it. There’s no sexual deviation in the Mormon Church.[6]

Baptist Minister: The word is either sufficient or it is not.[7]

Doug Laws, a Mormon Church leader, and the unnamed Baptist minister are presented not because of an overwhelming relevance to the story of Matthew Shepard, but because of their relevance to a society grasping for something ‘old’ which must also be necessarily true even in the face of a shifting cultural and geographic landscape. They both establish boundaries that hope to contain the aspects of society that supposedly threaten its natural order—the queer bodies—and to limit a broader understanding of what and who plays a valid role in a shared American history.

The fourth structural element, the queer body threatening the ‘old’ with its inherent ‘newness’, is best displayed in a moment with Sherry Johnson, a university official, who explains that at the same time Matthew Shepard was murdered, a patrolman was killed in an automobile accident. She expresses outrage at the minimal press coverage his death received saying, ‘…here’s one of ours, and it was just a little piece in the paper’.[8] She continues:

…the media is portraying Matthew Shepard as a saint. And making him as a martyr. And I don’t think he was. I don’t think he was that pure. Now, I didn’t know him, but…there’s just so many things about him that I found out that I just, it’s scary. You know about his character and spreading AIDS and a few other things, you know, being the kind of person that he was. He was, he was just a barfly, you know. And I think he pushed himself around. I think he flaunted it. Why they exemplified him I don’t know. What’s the difference if you’re gay? A hate crime is a hate crime. If you murder somebody you hate ’em. It has nothing to do with if you’re gay or a prostitute or whatever. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.[9]

Because Matthew himself never appears in the play, the threat of the queer body is something never witnessed first-hand, but rather recounted in the words of the townspeople. In her statement, Johnson has drawn a line—one death belongs to a collective ‘us’, an ‘us’ that she distances from the murder of Matthew in her casting of him as wholly other. Space once held promise, and she turns to the creation of space between her community and the queer body as a means of putting the threat further from her. The irrational threat that his and all queer bodies pose to the American West comes into focus. He is associated with disease, moral questionability and promiscuity and, therefore, represents a sickness that is contributing, in her formulation, to the continued undermining and depletion of the historical tradition whose formulation has served to bolster the American Dream in the West for so long. Her final utterance, her non-understanding, speaks volumes about the situation in question. She does not understand any of what is happening to her or her world. She too is a victim and her confusion regarding the resentment she feels as a result of her own lost American agency serves as further validation of a threat being present. Her only sense is that something has gone wrong and she must find something or somebody to direct her anger towards. Unfortunately, that ‘something’—in Johnson’s and most other people’s formulations—is the queer body.

The introduction of a reductive motif that reduces the American Dream and reclaims agency brings this argument to the vital concept of ‘live and let live’. This motif is best understood in terms of what Madden calls a ‘rugged individualist rhetoric’ similar to that of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, the protagonist from The Fountainhead, who proclaims:

A self-sufficient ego. Nothing else matters. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing. I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave-society.[10]

While not explicitly named as such in every text that explores queer bodies after the closing of the Frontier in the American West, this ‘live and let live’ motif is both recurrent in other formulations and closely connected with the idea of American agency. Indeed, by ignoring the promise that initially defined the American West and its loss, and focusing instead on a simplified mantra, the initial loss of agency taken from America in the original formulation of the Dream is rectified. As such, one is able to grant oneself the authority to allow, to ‘let’ another to live—essentially becoming the agent of another’s destiny. In doing so, however, the loss of agency must be transferred to someone—in this structure onto the queer body, hence, the understanding of the ‘live and let live’ motif as a reduction. The Dream is dead, promise is gone, and now Americans must save themselves even at the expense of their fellow countrymen. Existence in America, therefore, becomes not something unquestionably given to all, but a privilege granted by some unto others. This reclamation of agency and transference of passivity on the part of America is played out upon the queer bodies of the American West time and time again. Marge Murray’s declaration displays this perfectly:

As far as the gay issue, I don’t give a damn one way or the other as long as they don’t bother me. And even if they did, I’d just say no thank you. And that’s the attitude of most of the Laramie population. They might poke one, if they were in a bar situation, you know, they had been drinking, they might actually smack one in the mouth, but then they’d just walk away. Most of ’em, they would just say, “I don’t swing that way,” and whistle on about their business. Laramie is live and let live.[11]

A troubling irony exists in Marge’s statement. Laramie, the West, and America are all governed by the rule of ‘live and let live’ but her description of the handling of queer bodies suggests that the queer body is granted no freedom to exist; its humanity is never even recognised. The use of the term queer bodies in this argument now becomes clear; no persons are present in the reduction, they have been reduced to mere bodies.

The final element, the response of the queer body to the reduction of the American Dream, is essentially a question of answering the challenge posed by the ‘live and let live’ motif. If the queer body takes ‘live and let live’ as truth and acknowledges an innate queerness—believing that the agency now claimed by the protectorate of the American Dream will grant them agency as well—it is destroyed. This is made perfectly clear in the moment featuring murderer Aaron McKinney’s explanation of what Matthew did to elicit the beating that led to his death.

Rob Debree: What was the first thing that he said or that he did in the truck that made you hit him?

Aaron McKinney: Well, he put his hand on my leg, slid his hand like as if he was going to grab my balls…

Rob Debree: So obviously you don’t like gay people?

Aaron McKinney: No, I don’t.[12]

The threat of the queer body is so great that it must be destroyed. Aaron, who has been constructed throughout as from the ‘other side of the tracks’ and associated with characters whose speech and demeanour suggests a lower class and inferior level of education, has become the representative of the failed promise of the American Dream. He embodies passive failure in a promise-less land and must protect his own agency, thus casting someone else in the passive role. This is not the only option however: should the queer body understand the implicit mistruth in ‘live and let live’—the reformulated ‘live and let lie’—it is permitted to exist, but only by accepting a passive role not of its own choosing, hence, becoming a mere recipient of society’s allowance to exist. In both cases the queer body is robbed of agency, validating the argument that perhaps destruction of the queer body occurs regardless of its response to the rugged individualist rhetoric that has become the reduced American Dream.

Understanding the reduction of the American Dream as a result of the closed Frontier and the loss of promise as an unavoidable facet of the American West allows for a more clearly decipherable understanding of the American Dream’s impact on queer bodies. While this argument does not suggest that the individuals, fictional or otherwise, are non-essential in this process, it is the acknowledgement of the standardised structure which is of greatest importance as it speaks to a collective identity and approach. In the moment called ‘The Gem of the Plains’, Tiffany Edwards, a local reporter, mentions the resounding sentiment of many people in Laramie and in other Western towns horrified by the murder of Matthew Shepard. She says that, ‘people were sitting in their homes, like watching TV…and going, “Jesus Christ, well that’s not how it is here”‘.[13] The truth revealed by the reductive structure of ‘live and let live’ is that, yes, indeed, that is how it is here. The faces may change, the situations themselves may be peppered with variations, but in the end, the paranoid American West puts queer bodies at the mercy of their ‘live and let live’ motif in an attempt to regain agency that was lost at the inception of the American Dream. In an opening moment, company member Barbara Pitts mentions the local inn’s roadside sign emblazoned with the statement, ‘HATE IS NOT A LARAMIE VALUE’.[14] Such a statement seems morbidly incorrect at the outset of the play and remains so until the structure that determines the queer body’s destiny in the American West is defined. After this structure has been acknowledged, the truth of that motel sign rings loudly. Hate is not a Laramie value; hate of the kind seen in Matthew Shepard’s murder, and in the destruction of countless other queer bodies, is a value that belongs to the whole of the American West.

University of Freiburg

Notes

[1] David Madden, American Dreams, American Nightmares (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1970), p. xvii.

[2] Madden, p. xvii.

[3] Moisés Kaufman, The Laramie Project (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), p. 6.

[4] Kaufman, p. 15.

[5] Norman Mailer, Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 723.

[6] Kaufman, p. 25.

[7] Ibid. p. 23, 25.

[8] Ibid. p. 64.

[9] Ibid. pp. 64-5.

[10] Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943), pp. 608-609.

[11] Kaufman, p. 17.

[12] Ibid. pp. 91-3.

[13] Ibid. p. 49.

[14] Ibid. p. 14.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 14, Spring 2009

Occidental Odysseys to Niagara, the Prairies and the Mississippi River: British and American Views on the Three Landscapes of the West

Adam Hallett
© Adam Hallett. All Rights Reserved

This article will look at the American landscape in various frontier settings between 1825—the opening of the Erie Canal—and 1893—the supposed closing of the frontier. I will specifically be looking at British and American views of Niagara, the Prairies and the Mississippi River.

This work will begin with a brief look at historical perceptions of American nature, many of which linger in the psyche of United States citizens and commentators on the country. These nature myths lead into some first impressions of the American landscape of the East in picturesque terms by Frances Trollope. There then follows the main body of the paper, which examines British and American travel writers’ views on three instances of the sublime in American nature. I do not wish to argue that these sites are the only examples of sublime American landscape; I am merely making use of them as the most widely written about in nineteenth century. Additions to this list could include the Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks, the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon. I maintain that those which form the subject for this paper were the most widely-known and discussed by tourists during the period prescribed, however.

American Nature Myths

American nature has incorporated many, sometimes disparate, myths applied to the same region. American nature could firstly be viewed as an agrarian field, land to be cultivated, sown and harvested for the benefit of man. America was also a garden, with welcoming nature placed upon earth for man’s benefit. This idea of the garden incorporates some civilised features and suggests the role of man as gardener. These first two conceptions of American nature were most strongly supported by the new country’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, whose Notes on the State of Virginia, published in English in 1787, contains the famous call to farmers, ‘Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth’.[1] These two aspects, ‘the mixture of garden and forest’ with its ‘artificial rudeness’ points towards the pastoral image of America.[2] America could also be Edenic, which is similar to the garden, but without evidence of civilisation; the myths described above correspond roughly with the picturesque.

The birth of the term ‘picturesque’ is most often associated with the eighteenth century English artist and clergyman William Gilpin. It is frequently applied to the work of Claude Lorraine, the seventeenth century French painter, whose warm subtle tones depict the combination of pastoral culture (or unobtrusive artificial objects) and the natural landscape, often rolling hills or water. Picturesque is expressed by the irregularity of nature, or the contrast between the roughness of nature with civilisation, often in decaying or ruined form, such as a mediaeval castle or rustic stone bridge. In literature we can think of Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’.

America could also exhibit the Romantic sublime, usually with mountains, gorges or waterfalls—an exaggeration of the picturesque, with mankind and culture absent. These natural features were often well-known to those who wished for this sanitised sense of the danger of nature and had been well-worn by tourists. The sublime, first defined by Joseph Addison and Edmund Burke was awful, terrific (in the original sense) and painful, but not necessarily lacking in pleasure: Edmund Burke’s is ‘a two-fluid theory: pain and pleasure are both positive qualities, and the removal of one is thus not equivalent to the addition of the other’.[3]

In addition, the North American continent displayed wilderness lacking in culture, which was not necessarily friendly to man, but which seemed to encourage pioneering types and could be ‘overcome’, as with any obstacle. Finally American landscape could be a nightmare: a land so wild and raw, or so immense in its exaggeration of the wildness of the wilderness that it was impossible to colonise and struck fear into those who saw it. This is beyond the Romantic sublime, and has little of what those observers would call beauty. It can still be described as sublime taking the definitions above, however. These various categories of American nature are subjective, fluid and contain similar ideas; Jefferson’s view of the West, for example, ‘was a complex map, comprising a series of interlocking images which can be simplified into three main areas: the Garden, the miasmatist debate, and the Northwest Passage’.[4]

These aforementioned nature myths represent a sliding scale from east to west, and therefore culture to nature in the nineteenth century. From England spreads the field and the garden, slowly colonising New England’s nature which began as a wilderness. This leaves the rest of America, the unincorporated states in the nineteenth century and the unknown lands as wilderness (or worse in the imagination).

Northeast America

The period which concerns this article is 1825 to 1893, during which time the Northeast was most often represented by European and native writers alike as picturesque. It was civilised enough for the contrast between culture and nature to take place, and the nature on show was rural and pastoral enough not be too threatening. At the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the next, Romanticism brought the idea of what Wordsworth and Coleridge called the sublime and an appreciation of the wilder nature of the Lake District and the Alps, though as we shall see, not everything described as sublime could truly be classed as such. America, on the other hand, had the Appalachian Mountains, which were impressive but were more akin to the picturesque; they lacked the implied danger of the landscape favoured by the Lake Poets:

The Connecticut and Hudson River valleys were among the earliest tourist regions in the United States not only because they offered varied views of mountains, plains, and river and were easily accessible to the country’s centres of population, but because they featured the most civilized American landscapes.[5]

Frances Trollope left Cincinnati and her failed venture in early 1830 and began her tour of the United States which was to become Domestic Manners of the Americans. She headed east towards the more cultured United States and away from the cursed Mississippi. While most travellers to America saw the East coast first and then travelled west, Trollope had entered America through the back door and didn’t leave the path of the Mississippi for some time. The change on entering the Allegheny region which, she says ‘is a garden’ must have been dramatic. Mrs Trollope effuses lavish praise upon the scenery, talking about its ‘endless variety’, which is what she identifies as lacking in the Mississippi landscape.[6] However, even this scenery is too large:

Again and again we enjoyed all the exhilarating sensations that such scenes must necessarily inspire, but in attempting a continued description of our progress over these beautiful mountains, I could only tell again of rocks, cedars, laurels, and running streams, of blue heights and green vallies (sic), yet the continually varying combinations of these afforded us unceasing pleasure… (looking back presented) a stupendous view; but having gazed upon it for some moments, we turned to pursue our course, and the certainty that we should see it no more raised no sigh of regret.[7] (Emphasis added)

That Trollope felt no regret to be leaving this ‘unceasing pleasure’ may seem confounding; however, it is the oppression of the landscape, necessitating attention without respite which seems to cause the relief at quitting the area. In contrast, European scenery is admired because of its contrast to the culture surrounding it:

For Europeans wild country was a single peak or heath, an island of uninhabited land surrounded by settlement. They at least knew its character and extent. But the seemingly boundless wilderness of the New World was something else. In the face of this vast blankness, courage failed and imagination multiplied fears.[8]

Trollope was forced to be inspired, and the pleasure was forced also; there was no respite or variety of civilisation and thus she became bored. This is not to say that this landscape was not beautiful to Trollope: simply that as with the less salubrious landscapes of the West, there was too much of it. We will now move slightly west to Niagara Falls; the first instance of the American sublime, which eclipsed both the picturesque Alleghenies and the Romantic sublimity of the European Alps.

Niagara Falls

Niagara Falls was first mentioned by Europeans in 1603, though never actually seen by the explorer: he was informed of its existence by Indian guides but did not deign it worthy of a detour.[9] On the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825, however, Niagara became probably the most important natural draw for travellers from across the Atlantic, as well as those closer to home. Mrs Trollope writes with excitement at the prospect of viewing ‘one of the wonders of the world’.[10] Trollope talks of herself not as a tourist, but a pilgrim completing the arduous journey to the site of her pilgrimage:

We…felt every cup of coffee as a sin, so impatient were we, as we approached the end of our long pilgrimage, to reach the shrine, which nature seems to have placed at such a distance from her worshippers (the Europeans?!) on purpose to try the strength of their devotion.[11] (Emphasis added)

As shown later, this response to Niagara is not uncommon and is reflected in the conferral of the status of a shrine by Pope Pius IX who, ‘at the urging of Archbishop Lynch of Toronto, established a ‘pilgrim shrine’ at Niagara Falls in 1861. This action bestowed upon Niagara—in the eyes of the Catholic Church at least—the same status as the most famous of Old World pilgrim centers’.[12]

Trollope’s response to Niagara is typically sublime. Superlatives gush forth, mixing the terrific awe and the pleasure which make up Burke’s idea of the sublime. Trollope begins by expressing that

terror, and delight completely overwhelmed me. I wept with a strange mixture of pleasure and of pain, and certainly was, for some time, too violently affected in the physique to be capable of much pleasure, but when this emotion of the senses subsided, and I had recovered some degree of composure, my enjoyment was very great indeed.[13]

Trollope is trying to view the falls as a picture: a single view on the landscape, imposing the will of the observer upon it. She goes on to say that ‘it is not for me to attempt a description of Niagara; I feel I have no powers for it’ and later, ‘how utterly futile must every attempt be to describe the spot!’ before spending the next several pages attempting just such a description.[14] Later, she talks of a ‘shadowy mystery (that) not even the imagination can penetrate; but I dare not dwell on this’, she says, ‘it is a dangerous subject, and any attempt to describe the sensations produced must lead direct to nonsense’.[15] Too long spent near the falls makes one lose language, as with the tower of Babel, you are too close to God. Similar religious thought is conveyed with ‘God said, let there be a cataract, and it was so’.[16] The cataract is an example of the power of God, but also, as with the ‘shadowy mystery’, something of the incomprehensible: why is Niagara? As Christopher Mulvey points out, there is a ‘plunging into bathos that would leave the writer damned utterly before his or her public’.[17] The falls are dangerous for other reasons, too. Patrick McGreevy points out, ‘as early as the 1830s, death had become part of the lure of Niagara. Guidebooks repeated the gruesome details of accidents, suicides, murders, and narrow escapes’.[18]

Niagara can be described as a frontier location. Not only is it the frontier between British and United States North America, but it is where nature meets culture, and culture, through language, is found lacking. Several authors including Frances Trollope, Dickens and Hawthorne also have Niagara as a frontier between God and man. Interestingly, Frances Trollope describes Niagara as ‘the fall of an ocean’, linking it to the Atlantic frontier.[19] Frontiers must be seen in time as well as space; it is almost as if Trollope desires to become closer to what she feels is a timeless, transcendental scene closer to God at Niagara. Anthony Trollope, seeing Niagara 30 years after his mother, also describes it in oceanic terms, imbuing that idea with the religious connotations of his mother. Trollope asks his reader to find the spot where ‘the waters are absolutely around you’, literally recreating the experience of a voyage at sea; ‘then you will flow away in your course to the uncompassed, distant, and eternal ocean’.[20] As Peter Conrad says, ‘Travellers took up the challenge of Niagara and they attempted to act out the ritual of Romantic response in the face of a landscape that reminded them more frequently of the sea than of anything they had seen on land before’.[21]

Both Anthony Trollope and Charles Dickens searched for tranquillity at Niagara and emphasised the need to be alone with one’s thoughts. Trollope writes, ‘Oh, my friend, let there be no one there to speak to thee then; no, not even a brother. As you stand there speak only to the waters’.[22] Dickens made precautions to be alone during his last visit in 1868, presumably to avoid a repeat of the following comment, reported in a letter to Henry Austin on the First of May, 1842.[23] His wife’s maid, he writes, ‘never looks at a prospect by any chance, or displays the smallest emotion at any sight whatever. She objects to Niagara that “its (sic) nothing but water”, and considers that “there is too much of that”!!!’.[24]

Dickens visited the falls in 1842 and found his senses battered on the approach:

I could see an immense torrent of water tearing headlong down from some great height, but had no idea of shape, or situation, or anything but vague immensity … I was in a manner stunned, and unable to comprehend the vastness of the scene. It was not until I came on Table Rock, and looked—Great Heaven, on what a fall of bright-green water!—that it came upon me in its full might and majesty.[25]

The author struggles to complete his sentence without an exclamation and is overcome with size. Dickens is the opposite of Anthony Trollope, who resorted to details and a guidebook description; Dickens retreats to abstracts and capitalised abstracts: ‘Peace. Peace of Mind’; ‘recollections of the Dead’; ‘thought of Eternal Rest and Happiness’; ‘Enchanted Ground ‘; ‘Darkness … Deluge—Light’.[26]

Dickens sees something of the Romantic sublime in the falls, but cannot comprehend the scale so substitutes his own opinion with a poor pastiche. He, after all, has little to go on: Marjorie Hope Nicholson, in her Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory talks of the ‘aesthetics of the infinite’, and says that ‘like men of every age, we see in Nature what we have been taught to look for, we feel what we have been prepared to feel’.[27] Dickens was completely unprepared for the scene which met him.

It is ironic that Dickens then goes on to criticise the volumes of ‘remarks and poetical effusions’ which contain pages ‘scrawled all over with the vilest and filthiest ribaldry that ever human hogs delighted in’.[28] This book can be seen as a poor mirror image of the three authors’ own attempts at describing the falls, or more correctly, a symptom of the impossibility.

Plains and Prairies

Just as Niagara is described like the great frontier of the transatlantic ocean, so the plains are described in the same way. The sea is often described as a homogenous, overpowering expanse of vastness; the imagery and language of the American frontier is the same, with various excursions West into nature described in similar terms. The plains for Dickens are ‘not to be compared with even the tamest portions of Scotland or Wales. You…see the unbroken scenery all round you…like a sea without water…. The excessive flatness of the scene makes it dreary, but tame’.[29] For the passage over he describes ‘the wind howling, the sea roaring, the rain beating: all in furious array against (the ship). Picture the sky both dark and wild, and the clouds, in fearful sympathy with the waves, making another ocean in the air’.[30] The abundance of water, with the rain, the waves and the ‘ocean in the air’ is as oppressive as the ‘barren monotony’ of the plains[31]. Washington Irving’s 1835 book, A Tour on the Prairies, begins on the journey towards the plains and includes language which is picturesque in style, similar to Mrs. Trollope’s account of the East Coast. Here, Irving is travelling in a landscape which is interesting and beautiful to his (recently returned from Europe) eye: ‘We were overshadowed by lofty trees, with straight smooth trunks, like stately columns… of a Gothic cathedral’, and the Indians described as great gossips ‘telling whimsical stories’. Further examples of distinctly picturesque and familiar landscapes can be found throughout the early chapters: ‘we came to a meadow in which were a number of horses grazing’ and ‘The beautiful forest (which) abounded in bee trees; that is to say trees in the decayed trunks of which wild bees had established their hives’ which are described as associated ‘with the farm house and the flower garden…the heralds of civilization’.[32]

The book begins, then, with examples of Jeffersonian ideas of nature as a garden, mixing the gentle picturesque landscape with unobtrusive, pastoral imagery. The bees are one example of Irving seeing and imposing civilisation on the wilderness in A Tour; the prairie dogs are painted in a similar light. Irving concentrates on the ‘human’ attributes of these creatures, personifying them and making the wilderness less wild. These animals are given greater attention, however, as they populate the great expanse of the prairies, the great void. The prairie dogs are described as a members of a ‘republic’ and are humanised by Irving who is not alone in creating imagined society for these mammals: ‘the prairie dog is, in fact, one of the curiosities of the Far West, about which travellers delight to tell marvellous tales, endowing him at times, with something of the politic and social habits of a rational being, and giving him systems of civil government and domestic economy almost equal to what they used to bestow upon the beaver’.[33] Irving ends the section by having Crayon dream of the dogs’ personified actions: ‘I could not help picturing to myself the inhabitants gathered together in noisy assemblage, and windy debate, to devise plans for the public safety, and to vindicate the invaded rights and insulted dignity of the republic’.[34] Hence Crayon has entered into the discourse of prairie dog humanising and has populated the plain with characters, as do other travellers mentioned here when presented with homogeneity in landscape. Likewise the writer, when struggling to comprehend the scene before him, takes something cultured and known, transposing it to the nature, and the unknown; the wild prairies become America, the republic Irving knows from the East. Returning to the travel account before reaching the plains, we find Crayon again describing the scenery as picturesque; the clearings and the forests inseparable from the descriptions of Europe and New England. Crayon talks of a ‘picturesque march’ and mentions the uniform Romantic approach for viewing the landscape: ‘the foliage had a yellow autumnal tint which gave to the sunny landscape the golden tone of one of the landscapes of Claude Lorraine’.[35] Crayon does, however, join the hunters in disrupting the tranquillity of the picturesque scene: ‘there was something in this picture of the last moment of a wounded deer to touch the sympathies of one not hardened to the gentle disports of the chase; such sympathies, however, are but transient’. This can be viewed as the regression to the wild in the wilderness and the waning influence of civilisation as man travels further west, something which the other literary travellers have observed in others, but not before experienced themselves. It must be made clear, however, that Crayon is Irving’s persona, not Irving himself. Irving the author is safely using Crayon—whose name suggests a pun on the implications and impossibilities of writing on American nature—to mediate the landscape and the actual experience of the West. Crayon claims that ‘man is naturally an animal of prey and however changed by civilization, will readily relapse into his instinct for destruction’.[36] By Trying to rationalise his behaviour, Crayon is being changed by the landscape. When he set out, Irving was trying to mould the wilderness to his own means economically and creatively, much as the pioneers and frontiersman do; civilising the wilderness. However, there is something about the American West which renders this, at least temporarily, impossible. In fact, in a comic inversion, the landscape moulds and alters Crayon.

By this point Crayon has only reached the edge of the prairies and is in a liminal state (meaning on the threshold, with psychological undertones) between the picturesque forest and the sublime waste. He is truly on the frontier and fearing essentially imaginary foes in the ‘howling waste’, just as with Dickens fearing the branches of the Mississippi, as will be shown below. This is another example of Crayon populating this ‘half savage’ emptiness with characters, unable to comprehend the scene and uncomfortable on the boundary between the two worlds. These characters have taken the form of Indian ghosts, republican prairies dogs and democratic bees.

Crayon, as with Dickens, likens the prairies to the sea; sublime in its vastness and emptiness: ‘A thunder storm on a prairie as upon the ocean derives grandeur and sublimity from wild and boundless waste over which it rages and bellows’; while Beatte hunting buffalo is ‘skirting along the horizon like a privateer in full chase of a merchantman’, populating this ocean with civilised figures.[37] Later, on this vast ‘ocean’ of ‘grassy undulating, or as it is termed, rolling country’ (further similarities to the sea), Crayon espies a cliff and makes use not only of the maritime metaphor, but also once more populates this wild expanse with something familiar to him; not the American republic this time, but the quasi-fairytale world he earlier wrote of in Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829) and one of his best known work Tales of the Alhambra (1832):

To the south west on the summit of a hill was a singular crest of broken rocks resembling a ruined fortress. It reminded [him] of the ruin of some Moorish castle crowning a height in the midst of a lonely Spanish landscape. To this hill (they) gave the name of Cliff Castle.[38]

Crayon also likens the journey over the plains to one at sea, with the boredom of unchanged landscape rendering anything different as disproportionately exciting:

After a tedious ride of several miles we came out upon an open tract of hill and dale interspersed with woodland. Here we were roused by the cry of Buffalo! Buffalo! The effect was something like that of the cry of a sail! a sail! at sea.[39]

And a little later: ‘The sight of any human being in this lovely wilderness was interesting; it was like speaking a ship at sea’.[40] Any break in the scenery is interesting, be it a rocky outcrop, woodland, or animal. Likewise, the ever-present threat of Pawnee attack is almost a welcome distraction to the travelling group who seem to grow increasingly weary on reaching the plains; there is something oppressive about the lack of interest. Crayon only describes the landscape in terms of desolation and lack: ‘The landscape was vast and beautiful. There is an expansion of feeling in looking upon these boundless and fertile wastes’.[41] Here it seems that Irving is feeling the sublime, but is unable to express it fully. He instead tamely calls it a ‘waste’ then compares it to the ‘close dungeon of innumerous boughs’ of the woodland. The vivid descriptions of the woodland and picturesque scenes have been replaced by an increasing interest in the troupe, flashes of animal interest (the buffalo, prairie dogs and wild horses) or imaged foes such as the Pawnees. It is interesting to note here that Crayon talks of the hunter who raises the alarm as ‘the author’ of ‘wanton fabrication’ which mimics Crayon’s own problems tackling writing about the prairies: namely, that if there is nothing to describe all that remains to be done is fabricate.[42] The narrative is peppered with Indian stories, designed to distract and entertain hunters with tales about the land in which they are travelling, but also detached, as the real prairie is not obviously interesting and full of adventure. The adventure for the rangers is of their own making: endless hunts or chases giving bursts of adrenaline to alleviate the boredom. It is notable that Crayon even begins to partake in these mounted hunts when in the prairies proper, after having earlier chastised the impetuous youngsters of the group for chasing after anything which moves. This is portrayed in perhaps the most exciting passage of the work as a whole: the Buffalo chase which ends with Crayon removing the tongue of one of the beasts as a trophy. The stories are designed by Irving to add interest and flavour to the narrative, one in which much of the excitement promised and hinted at by the omnipresent Pawnee threat. The suspense which these stories and the chapter subtitles create, often intriguing and exciting, ultimately disappoint. This increasingly leaves the reader with a wry smile at Irving’s artfulness in consistently building up, then gradually releasing suspense, normally through a comic event.

One of the most striking examples of the barrenness and hostility of the landscape comes after a brief buffalo chase:

There is something inexpressibly lonely in the solitude of a prairie. The loneliness of a forest seems nothing to it… There the imagination is left free to picture some livelier scene beyond. But here we have an immense extent of landscape without a sign of human existence. We have the consciousness of being far, far beyond the bounds of human habitation; we feel as if moving in the midst of a desert world… The silence of the waste was now and then broken by the cry of a distant flock of pelicans stalking like spectres about a shallow pool. Sometimes by the sinister croaking of a raven in the air, while occasionally a scoundrel wolf would scour off from before me and having attained a safe distance, would sit down and howl and whine with tones that gave a dreariness to the surrounding solitude.[43]

The prairies here are given sinister attributes, as are the creatures inhabiting them; the mood is successfully created by use of both sound and sight. This is the description of a literary imagination, I would suggest, which has embellished the actual scene somewhat. The loneliness is all the more acute after the ‘delirium of the chase’ and again Crayon concentrates on that which he can describe, the animals and the loneliness, ‘spectres’ on the prairie but the most concrete things which can be put to article. At this point Crayon, as with the rest of the group, is mentally and emotionally tired, and perhaps so is Irving, from the pressure of trying to bring the prairies to life and revisiting the barrenness which needs to be recorded for the reader.

Predictably, the return voyage’s account is rather rushed, with the occasional spark of picturesque description, but it seems as though both Crayon and Irving are now tired of the exertions of the tour, and A Tour respectively. The effort to prevent the narrative from becoming homogenous during the prairies just as the effort of preventing the tour from becoming homogenous has taken toll on both Crayon as narrator and Irving as writer, and, it may be argued, the reader. It is with a sense of relief on all parts that the final sea metaphor of the book is played out with the sighting of familiar civilisation akin to the sighting of land on a long and arduous sea journey: ‘Beatte climbed a high tree commanding a wide prospect, and took a look out like a mariner at sea. He came down with cheering tidings’; and thus ended Irving’s ‘foray into the Pawnee Hunting Grounds’ with Irving adhering to the idea of danger and adventure to the last.[44]

While Irving never truly comes to terms with the ‘howling waste’ of the prairies, he uses his persona to come to terms with the sublime American landscape and creates a sophisticated approach to the prairies. This, along with the episodic nature of the account, is a sometimes successful attempt at seeing the prairies on their own terms, though more often than not the picturesque rears its head to make Irving long for the culture of the East, and Europe in particular. With the bees and more particularly the prairie dogs, however, Irving begins writing an American culture upon the landscape, leaving something which is neither European culture nor natural wilderness.

The Mississippi

Like the prairies, the Mississippi is another example of American nature’s giant scale. Mrs. Trollope entered America for the first time up this river and her description is nightmarish. Like the plains it is vast and unchanging, described by Trollope as a ‘dreary scene’ with ‘an aspect of desolation’.[45] Dickens, too, seems to be haunted by the Mississippi:

And still there is the same, eternal foreground. The River has washed away its banks, and stately trees have fallen down into the stream. Some have been there so long, that they are mere dry, grizzly skeletons. Some are almost sliding down, as you look at them. And some were drowned so long ago, that their bleached arms start out from the middle of the current, and seem to try to grasp the boat, and drag it under water.[46]

As Christopher Mulvey points out, ‘the Mississippi had to be seen in time as well as in space’ it was so large.[47] Both Frances Trollope and Dickens wrote as little about the river as possible, despite the fact that it was a significant part of their trip; just as with Niagara, it rendered the authors lost for words, unable or unwilling to write about it. All three landscapes are inhabited with figures, real or ghostly, to detract from the scene and give the authors something to write about; at Niagara it is painters and tourists, allowing the writers to see the falls by mediation. On the plains there are the prairie dogs and the imagined bands of Indians—Irving’s book abounds with fearful descriptions of noises and half-seen figures—all false alarms. On the Mississippi there are, and I quote Frances Trollope, ‘no objects more interesting than mud banks, monstrous bulrushes, and now and then a huge crocodile luxuriating in the slime’—Mrs. Trollope appears not to find crocodiles interesting![48] While Dickens makes ghosts of the tree stumps and sawyers.

So what option is there for coming to terms with the sublime of the American landscape, if trying to the view them from the Old World perspective does not work? One possible solution is to make use of the landscape and treat it as a great American theme. Mark Twain is perhaps the most well-known writer on the Mississippi and knew the river from childhood. He let the river name him, rather than trying to impose himself on the river; hence Samuel Clemens becomes Mark Twain. In the autobiographical Life on the Mississippi the young traveller yearns to be an authentic man of the Mississippi:

“Going to heave it clear astern? WHERE’re you going with that barrel! For’ard with it ‘fore I make you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-dashed split between a tired mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!”

I wished I could talk like that.[49]

An integral part of Twain’s understanding of the Mississippi landscape and American fiction is that he can, by the point of writing at least, ‘talk like that’. The Mississippi became the backdrop and integral character in his best-known work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Likewise, Washington Irving lets his persona, Geoffrey Crayon, become written on by the plains landscape, finally losing his exaggerated Eastern manners in exchange for participating in a Buffalo hunt and cutting out the tongue. Though Irving himself (as opposed to his persona) is perhaps unable to accept the West to the extent that Twain does the Mississippi, he does write two further books after his Tour on the Prairies, exploring his interest of the West and the men who live there. Twain tries to break down the mediation and get to know his subject, writing what he sees using his knowledge of the language and history, as well as persona, like Irving. The grand scale is broken down to a local level and becomes a metaphor for the size of America and its aspirations. By incorporating these landscapes into his writing Twain leaves us with more fiction that fact, true, but fiction which is not driven by the myth and history stemming from European ideology or theory. Twain also seems to offer a means of coming to terms with the might of Niagara. As with the Mississippi, Twain takes the subject and does not try to find in it the sublime, but the American art of speculating and dollar-worship. Writing a satirical examination of the commofication of the scene, Twain replaces the awe of earlier writers with irreverence and comedy. He finds the ‘Indians’ (who are, it is revealed, actually from Limerick, Ireland) making souvenir moccasins. Trying to talk to these souvenir merchants in the rhetoric of the Native Americans he finds himself attacked and, he says, to ‘add insult to injury, they threw me over the Niagara Falls, and I got wet’.[50]

University of Exeter

Notes

[1] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), p. 164-5.

[2] Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford U.P., 1964), p. 93.

[3] Walter John Hipple Jr, The Beautiful, The Sublime, The Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetic Theory (Carbondale: The Southern Illinois U.P., 1957), p. 87.

[4] Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2008), p. 152. The ‘miasmatist debate’ refers to the idea that out of the many rivers, swamps and lakes of America comes a ‘syphilitic miasma that infected all who breathed it’ and was a symptom of the general degeneracy of the West—including its people and landscapes—which affected and infected Europeans (Ibid. 39).

[5] John Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (Amherst: University Massachusetts Press, 1998), p. 49.

[6] Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) (Gloucestershire: Nonsuch, 2006), p. 153. Henceforth, DM; ibid. p. 154.

[7] Ibid. p. 155.

[8] Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (London: Yale U.P., 1982), p. 26.

[9] Elizabeth McKinsey, Niagara Falls: Icon of the American Sublime (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 7.

[10] DM, p. 283.

[11] Ibid. p. 294.

[12] Patrick V. McGreevy, Imagining Niagara: The Meaning and Making of Niagara Falls (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 34.

[13] DM. p. 296-7.

[14] DM. p.302.

[15] Ibid. p. 297.

[16] Ibid. p. 299.

[17] Christopher Mulvey, Anglo-American Landscapes: a Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1983), p. 197.

[18] Imagining Niagara, p. 42.

[19] DM, p.297.

[20] Anthony Trollope, North America, Vol. 1. (Philadephia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.,1863), p. 105. Henceforth NA; ibid. p. 106.

[21] Peter Conrad, Imagining America (London: Routledge; Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 188.

[22] NA. p. 111.

[23] Christopher Mulvey, Anglo-American Landscapes: a Study of Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Travel Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1983), p. 195.

[24] Charles Dickens, The Letters of Charles Dickens, Vol.3, House, Storey, et al. (eds) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 231. Henceforth, Letters.

[25] Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (1842) and Pictures from Italy (1846) (London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd., 1910), p. 238. Henceforth AN.

[26] Ibid. pp. 238-9.

[27] Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: the Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: Norton, 1967), p. 1.

[28] AN, p. 241.

[29] Letters, p. 200.

[30] AN, p. 14.

[31] Ibid. p. 216.

[32] Washington Irving, ‘A Tour on the Prairies’ (1835) in The Crayon Miscellany (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), pp. 25-6, 29.

[33] Ibid. p. 108.

[34] Ibid. p. 110.

[35] Ibid. p. 35, 41.

[36] Ibid. p. 51.

[37] Ibid. p. 59, 98

[38] Ibid. p. 61.

[39] Ibid. p. 72.

[40] Ibid. p. 87.

[41] Ibid. p. 97.

[42] Ibid. p. 77.

[43] Ibid. p. 100.

[44] Ibid. p. 119,122.

[45] DM, p. 17.

[46] AN, p. 190.

[47] Christopher Mulvey, ‘Ecriture and Landscape: British Writing on Post-Revolutionary America in Mick Gidley and Robert Lawson-Peebles (eds) Views of American Landscapes (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1990), p. 108.

[48] DM, p. 17.

[49] Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 34.

[50] Mark Twain, Sketches, New and Old (New York: Oxford U.P., 1996), p. 70.

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 14, Spring 2009

‘America: Real and Imagined’: A Report on the British Association for American Studies Postgraduate Conference, University of Exeter 2008

Gareth James
© Gareth James. All Rights Reserved

On Saturday 15th November 2008, Exeter University’s School of Arts, Language and Literature (SALL) hosted ‘America: Real and Imagined’, the sixth annual Postgraduate Conference of the British Association for American Studies (BAAS). Organised by SALL postgraduates Adam N. Hallett, Gareth James, Andrew Nelson and Lewis Ward, the conference received funding from both BAAS and the US Embassy, while attracting over 50 postgraduate delegates from Seattle to Berlin, with SALL staff also chairing panels during the day.

‘America: Real and Imagined’ invited papers on ideas of the American West across a range of disciplines and historical periods. The keynote was provided by Professor Judith Newman, Head of the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham University, who gave a speech titled ‘Blowback: Andre Dubus III’s House of Sand and Fog‘. Newman covered the reception of the Iranian-American book in the context of ‘not knowing’ and multiplied perspective within the novel as an extension of the miscommunication between America and the world. Subsequent panels then dealt with topics as diverse as migration and assimilation in Laverne and Shirley, American heroism, spirituality, and issues of myth and political ideology across a range of historical and formal contexts, as well as touching on more eclectic topics such as the gentrification of the San Francisco Mission District and the American Girl Scouts. The 25 papers presented provided a fascinating cross-section of current postgraduate research within American Studies around the world, reflecting the thriving interdisciplinary approach to the field. Since November several of the conference’s papers have been selected for publication in the Spring edition of US Studies Online, including:

Adam N. Hallett: ‘Occidental Odysseys to Niagara, the Prairies and the Mississippi River: British and American Views on the Three Landscapes of the West’. Adam is a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter working on a thesis on British and American travellers in America. His research interests cover the nineteenth century American landscape, the travel writing genre, frontiers and transatlantic relations. Adam has also recently been awarded a place at the Special Summer Institute Programme organised by the Cultural Attaché’s office of the US Embassy at New York University that will focus on the Reconciliation of American Diversity with National Unity, to be conducted through July 2009.

Christopher Young-Kramaric: ‘Live and Let Li(v)e: the Reduction of the American Dream and the Destruction of Queer Bodies in Laramie and Beyond’. Christopher Young–Kramaric is pursuing an MA in English Literature and Theory at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He completed a graduate fellowship with the Center for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at Humboldt University, sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) on completion of his BA at Boston College. He focused on the development of homosexuality in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His article on the history of gay emancipation movements in Germany was published in Blackwell’s International Encyclopaedia of Revolution and Protest in earlier this year. He plans to pursue his PhD in Germany upon completion of his MA.

Jayme Yahr: ‘The Illustrated Press: Richard Watson Gilder and the American Frontier’. Jayme Yahr is an Art History PhD student and 2008-2009 Kollar Endowed Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Art collectors and myths of the American frontier are Jayme’s main areas of research. Her dissertation will examine New York’s artistic circles and America’s Gilded Age. Jayme has worked in the curatorial departments of such museums as the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum and the San Diego Historical Society. Currently, Jayme is a curatorial assistant at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and co-curator of Transatlantic: American Artists in Germany, a Frye Collection exhibition that opened in January 2009.

Dawn-Marie Gibson: ‘A Nation Prepares for Change: Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam at a Crossroads’. Dawn is in the final year of her doctorate at the University of Ulster. She is currently completing her thesis on the history of the Nation of Islam, and her research interests include African American religious and cultural history. She is a member of the British Association for American Studies, the Institute for Research for African American Studies and the Association for the Study of the World African Diaspora.

Nicholas Witham: ‘Rambo America’ Resisted: Intertextual Politics in Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986) and Platoon (1986)’. Nicholas Witham holds an undergraduate degree in History and Politics from the University of Warwick, and an MRes in American Studies from the University of Nottingham. He is currently working on a PhD thesis at Nottingham examining the intellectual and cultural history of anti-imperialist radicalism in late Cold War America.

On behalf of the organisers of ‘America: Real and Imagined’, I would like to again thank all those involved in the planning, financial aid and running of the conference, as well Professor Newman and the speakers involved in what was a lively forum for current U.S. Studies, continuing the event’s role in developing and showcasing upcoming research within the postgraduate community.

University of Exeter

U.S. Studies Online: The BAAS Postgraduate Journal

Issue 15, Autumn 2009

‘Visions, dreams and a few nightmares’: Roy DeCarava’s Representations of African American Workers in Harlem

Rebecca Cobby
© Rebecca Cobby. All Rights Reserved

I want to photograph Harlem through the Negro people. Morning, noon, at night, at work, going to work, coming home from work, at play, in the street, talking, kidding, laughing, in the home…I want to show the strength, the wisdom, the dignity of the Negro people…thus revealing the roots from which spring the greatness of all human beings…I do not want a documentary or sociological statement, I want a creative expression, the kind of penetrating insight and understanding of Negroes which I believe only a Negro photographer can interpret.

Roy DeCarava, ‘Guggenheim Application’ (1952) [1]

‘The black aesthetic is something that grows from our culture, from our experience that makes us see differently, feel differently’.[2] This statement by photographer Roy DeCarava and the excerpt from his Guggenheim Fellowship application (seen above) highlight one of the key tenets of his photographic philosophy, that because he is an African American photographer, his photographs of the African American community display a level of visual and emotional insight that cannot be achieved or replicated by a white photographer. Although often compared to figures such as Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Aaron Siskind due to similarities in technique and aesthetic, DeCarava strongly believes in the power of an individual subjectivity in the photo-making process that is always racially coded, stating decisively that “the black artist looks at the same world in a different way than a Euro-American artist…he has a different agenda”.[3] As such DeCarava is often credited with having a created “black aesthetic in photography”.[4] It is defined in the words of Richard Powell, after Stuart Hall, as a term to describe “a collection of philosophical theories about the arts of the African diaspora”.[5] DeCarava himself describes it as a means of “communication”, a way for people of African descent to be “understood and…heard” through their inherited “cultural history…and philosophical ideas”.[6] DeCarava’s cultural agenda is to illustrate that African Americans are not merely victims of history, ‘hardened’ into stereotypical caricatures ‘by centuries of struggle against man and nature’, but instead have created a private, complex world of strength, creativity and ideas, despite and, indeed, often due to, those very particular struggles.[7] Far from an art that is concerned only with racial uplift in a sociological sense, however, DeCarava positions himself and his work firmly against a history of sociologically invested images which did not portray ‘Black people as people’, but only ever viewed them ‘in the context of a problem’ or as fodder for journalistic exposé, seeking instead to relocate the black subject in an artistic visual space where African American experience is revealed as ambivalent and multiplicitous.[8] In doing so his photographs can be seen as representative of an aesthetic defined by Isaac Julien as exploring ‘territories and ideas… politically… through construction and reconstruction’ and through the evocation of ‘multiple identities which…challenge with passion and beauty the previously static order’.[9]

In order to explore these ideas in relation to DeCarava’s work, this essay utilises his photographs of African American male labourers in 1960s Harlem, analysing in particular the relationship he creates between vision and visuality, the viewer and the subject, the performance of black identities, and ideas of black heroism. In doing so it addresses two of DeCarava’s aesthetic techniques–his use of light and shade and his sense of physical distance from his subject–and the ways in which they are utilised to produce images that re-envision African American experience and reinforce the importance of the relationship between viewer and subject in visual culture. It looks at the ways in which DeCarava’s art can be seen as one of recuperation and reconfiguration of the black subject, and argues that despite its eschewing of sociologically-bent racial representations and direct political association (such as that seen in the New Deal-era documentary photography carried out by the Farm Security Administration (F.S.A.) and others) his images communicate a political message in its recognition of individual subjectivities and questioning of objective reality.

In this sense DeCarava’s photographic theory replicates and politicises key postmodern critiques which the medium sees as inhabiting the “world of the simulacrum” in which its ability to reproduce a tangible or truthful “reality” is wholly questioned.[10] Whilst this is now far from an original theoretical claim, in the context of 1960s Harlem (and even in the present day), debates over the visual representation of African American subjects are fraught with discussions over the construction of visual hierarchies, presumptive and narrow ideas about African American identity, and endless deliberations over questions of racial authenticity. ‘Society’, DeCarava argues, ‘is insane in its preoccupation with unreality’ [11]. In other words white “mainstream” society still preoccupies itself with the myths about African American character that are a product of its own creation, that have come to be considered an often unchallenged reality. As a remedy to this DeCarava has created something resembling Scott McQuire’s conception of an ‘oneiric archive’.[12] This mythic, dream and phantom-like body of work ‘contest[s]’ outmoded and ‘inherited fantasies of black manhood’ through a visual re-imagining of African American male experience that imbues agency, gravity and most importantly complexity upon those represented.[13] Sara Blair has also recognised this ‘oneiric’ quality to DeCarava’s work as a way of describing how it picks up from where Aaron Siskind’s photographs of Harlem in the 1930s leave off, ‘where alterity and self-knowledge are entangled and inevitably racialized…at the boundary between outsidership and belonging’.[14] As a photographer whom Blair recognises as ‘verging onto the territory of the non-objective, formally self conscious yet committed to the found material landscape’, Siskind can be conceived of as the closest photographic predecessor to DeCarava in terms of visually capturing the Harlem community.[15] Despite his professional and personal involvement with Harlem, and his claims to non-objectivity, however, Siskind cannot claim the same specialist ‘insider insight’ espoused by DeCarava. DeCarava’s images reflect his personal subjective vision of Harlem and its inhabitants as a life-long resident and neighbour, and as an African American with none of the claims to objective reality or known truths that past representations of black Americans have promoted. ‘I’m not a documentarian’, he maintains. ‘I think of myself as poetic, a maker of visions, dreams and a few nightmares’.[16]

In The Black Image in the New Deal (1992), Nicholas Natanson demonstrates the extent to which many documentary images of African American labourers during the Depression Era for publications such as Life magazine, relied on hideous stereotypes of watermelon-eating Negroes or subservient black waiters that simply bolstered historical myths, reinforcing the hierarchies of black and white and solidifying the ‘connection between service and African heritage’.[17] Natanson also identifies such visual rhetoric in publications like Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a piece that intended to prick the reader’s social conscience, but that in the process fell back on what Natanson labels as a ‘watermelon consciousness’, photographs of hopeless and helpless looking African Americans coupled with taglines which evoke all the myths of their slow-mindedness and social and economic irresponsibility: ‘The auction boss talks so fast a colored man can’t hardly ever tell how much his tobacco crop sells for’.[18] The most comprehensive example of documentary photography featuring African Americans during this era, the photobook 12 Million Black Voices (1941), features photographs selected from the F.S.A. collection by Edwin Rosskam accompanied by a polemically charged narrative by Richard Wright. Whilst this publication strove to highlight the human plight of the African American people during this period, the book’s evocation of black suffering and victimhood (‘after we have divided the crops we are still entangled as deeply as ever in this hateful web of cotton culture. We are older; our bodies weaker…our clothes are in rags we are still in debt’), and it’s focus on the mass rather than a community of distinct individuals falls short of DeCarava’s attempts to reclaim African American individual subjectivity.[19] In addition, the statistics-led, government-tied approach of this F.S.A.-related work is held by DeCarava to be suspiciously insincere. ‘I strongly suggest’, he says to Ivor Miller, ‘that they wouldn’t have paid so much attention to blacks and the poor if [the F.S.A.] hadn’t been…a government survey, designed to promote legislation and shape public opinion’.[20]

Peter Galassi states that DeCarava ‘resists the “documentary” label…not only because it tends to reduce photography to a mechanical gathering of facts, but because it implies a pose of sociological neutrality that is inimical to his art’.[21] The key word here, then, is ‘implies‘, as DeCarava’s shunning of representations that portray black people as sociological problems recognises the ideological weight involved in those visual constructions of black experience. By disregarding white mainstream documentary’s claims to photographic neutrality or realism, DeCarava is working against its inherent sociological bias towards viewing African Americans as problems or victims. Thus DeCarava’s photography complicates the relationship between art and document, fiction and reality. His photographs evoke the imaginative, the unreal, the dramatic, the performative, yet, he claims, are authentic and truthful reflections of ‘life as it is in the black community’.[22] Thus, he implies imagination, drama and performance are crucial factors in everyday African American life. One can never capture ‘real’ experience on camera, as the concept of ‘the real’ does not exist.

One of the ways in which DeCarava creates his poetic visions of African American experience is through his use of light and shadow. ‘I never use flash,’ he insists. ‘I hate it with a passion because it obliterates what I saw’.[23] This recognition of the power of light to blind and obscure rather than reveal is key to DeCarava’s aesthetic technique, as well as tying his work to ideas of vision and visuality that are a constant presence within African American artistic production and scholarship. As Michele Wallace recognises,

vision, visuality and visibility are part of a problematic in African American discourse [as] [h]istorically, the body and face of the black have posed no obstacle whatsoever to an unrelenting and generally contemptuous objectification.[24]

DeCarava’s use of light and shadow in his images are his attempt to ‘re-envision vision’, to rely on the darker tones of his photography to reveal something more truthful about the African American experience.[25] Westerbeck and Meyerowitz write:

That [DeCarava] photographs his black subjects in a dark space compels the viewer to adjust his vision, to make subtle distinctions, to see shades of meaning and emotion as well as light. The effect is to humanize his subjects who are frequently viewed only as stereotypes in our society.[26]

By creating such gradations in tone DeCarava challenges the viewer to work harder in their role as observer, to look closer and deeper into the darkness of his images, to re-see the black subject and to rethink their attitudes towards black communities and individuals by doing so. As Robin Kelley states, ‘in order to “know” the history of black working people we must slip into the darkness’.[27]. This process can be seen most clearly in DeCarava’s subway photography and particularly in the photograph Man with two shovels (1959) which the murky conditions of the subterranean subway train and the experience of the African American labourer’s commute are presented to the viewer as equally mysterious in their visual impenetrability.

Recalling, perhaps, for some viewers Walker Evans’s famous series of subway photographs, Man with two shovels portrays a man who appears to be sat opposite DeCarava inside an incredibly dark subway car. Here we see direct correlation in subject matter between DeCarava and photographer Walker Evans. Evans’s more famous subway images were taken unbeknownst to his subjects on a series of commuter trains. In DeCarava’s photograph, however, the viewer cannot discern whether the subject is aware of his photograph being taken, as his face is almost completely indistinguishable from the shadow around it. This darkness surrounding the facial area actively encourages the viewer to lean in closer, to try to penetrate the shadows for any recognisable characteristics. The image appears to play a trick on its viewer–at times a quick glance seems to produce the outline of a nose, or an eye; from certain angles or in certain light conditions one may glimpse the semblance of a mouth; and at other times nothing appears recognisable regardless of how long or closely one looks.[28] The use of natural light in this photograph has the effect of creating a gradation in tone from this very dark black, through various stages of grey in the man’s clothing and the surrounding car, up to the lightest, white tones which fall upon the man’s hands and the handles of the two shovels he holds. Thus there exists a visual link between the two apparent tools of the man’s labour–his hands and the shovels. The effect of DeCarava’s tonal variations is twofold. Firstly, the almost literal erasure of the man’s face in favour of his hands and tools provides a commentary on the ways in which working class peoples, specifically here African Americans, are often defined (or seen) solely by their labour role and particularly their ability to carry out physical work. Secondly, the darkness created by DeCarava’s lack of flash combined with the specific position of the shovels in relation to the camera creates a visual illusion. Rather than appearing as two shovels, at first glance they appear as one whose image has been blurred and therefore duplicated. The initial effect of the photograph then is to suggest that the camera and the people in the carriage have been subject to external movement–a jolt from the subway carriage perhaps, or from the elbow of a neighbouring passenger. This initial illusion of movement, followed by the subsequent realisation of the image’s stasis creates a strange and quite unsettling juxtaposition, and forces the viewer to readjust their preliminary visual assumptions about what they are seeing. The space of the subway car is cast as unstable, capable of illusion, subject to change over time and lacking in fixity; and the subject of the photograph is likewise subject to these visual shifts.

It is here that DeCarava’s aesthetic technique connects with his process of recuperation and revision. Just as we must adjust our method, intensity and duration of looking to see beyond the literal darkness of Man with two shovels, so too, DeCarava implies, must we alter our vision in order to more fully understand the nuances of working class African American experience. Quick glances are not enough, as they may prove false. Rather than rewarding the viewers’ efforts with a great revelation or truth about black experience, however, the act of peering into DeCarava’s shadows often leaves one with little insight or explanation. In her essay ‘In, Around and Afterthoughts’ Martha Rosler highlights two particular issues within social documentary photography: the tension between the viewer and the photographed subject–the “us” and the “them”–and the notion that photographs act upon the viewer through the dissemination of specifically selected visual imagery that generates this binary relationship. Both these issues intersect with the discrepancy in photography between reality and fantasy. Imagery can transform reality into a fantasy world through the utilisation of visual semiotic symbols. Such symbols may communicate certain hegemonic social, racial and political ideologies and thus create hierarchies between different groupings.[29] DeCarava’s use of the darkness in this photograph plays on this relationship linking the viewer and the viewed by erasing certain symbols that could create recognition and connection between them–here, the face and a sense of a stable, knowable, physical surrounding–and replacing them with shadow. Though the juxtaposition of the man’s hands and the shovels’ handles communicate semiotic meaning to the viewer in terms of the correlation between the man and physical labour, the creation of a hegemonic relationship between the viewer and the viewed cannot be completed and a racial or class-based ideology cannot be fully developed. The photographer’s statement that the ‘soft tonality’ of his work ‘reveals more’ may appear paradoxical, yet it becomes clear that what this photograph reveals is the processes through which hierarchies are created through visual practices and the ways in which aesthetics can be manipulated to challenge the formation of such hierarchies. As previously mentioned, DeCarava’s photographic philosophy centres upon the notion of individual subjectivity. ‘I’m not worried whether it’s easy to see or not,’ he states. ‘I’m very concerned about people looking at my work…but I’m not concerned about whether they see it at the expense of what I originally felt…the issue is, did it say what I wanted it to say?’.[30] Whilst this could appear to be a solipsistic, apolitical approach to art-making, the example of Man with two shovels reveals the political power inherent in the recognition of African American subjectivity in its ability to stand in opposition to the effects of white society’s racial myth-making.

DeCarava’s work is part of a tradition of African American art practices centred on these ideas of recuperation and resistance. DeCarava took up the camera in earnest from around 1947 onwards, his interest in the everyday activities of the working class inhabitants of his community echoing that of African American artists during the years of the Depression and beyond. Stacey I. Morgan highlights the close affinity that African Americans working in the social realist genre during the 1930s and 1940s, such as Charles White, Hale Woodruff and Charles Alston, felt towards the black working class. ‘This new generation of creators’, he writes, ‘felt themselves to be of as well as for the poor and working class masses of African Americans, often construing themselves as “cultural workers”‘.[31] This sentiment was shared by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas, who, as Amy Kirschke points out, ‘always sympathized with, and even romanticized, the common labourer, whose experience he had briefly shared’.[32] Douglas states that the work he carried out as a young man gave him the ‘opportunity to test [his] strength and [his] manhood’; and that, in terms of his art, ‘depictions of the working class’ were ‘the essence of the Negro thing’.[33] Equally, Jacob Lawrence’s more abstract artworks concerned the ‘fundamental but neglected importance of African American labour’.[34] It celebrated the men who ‘”helped erect skyscrapers and tunnelled subways…as well as swept the corridors of these same skyscrapers and subways”‘.[35]

It is this African American artistic legacy, the conscious desire to place the everyday worker at the centre of African American life, which DeCarava simultaneously utilises and reconfigures. Typical social realist depictions of the black male worker by artists such as White cast him as a representative of all struggling African Americans; a mythic and symbolic hero, who was imbued with all the masculine qualities that black men were thought ‘to be inherently incapable of achieving’ (such as courage, and morality), and who aspired towards social uplift and a dream of economic abundance.[36] Far from standing alone in his desire for freedom and social justice, he was often visually aligned with historic African American figures such as Frederick Douglass, Crispus Attucks and Nat Turner, and in order to ‘contrast monumental heroism with feats of survival in everyday life’.[37] DeCarava’s portraits, however, are concerned with the understated, quiet acts of everyday life that align his conception of black heroism more with the work of Lawrence’s Migration Series, for instance, than with the epic, aggrandising works of the social realist painters. DeCarava was tutored by Charles White in the 1940s, yet, as Maren Stange identifies, he ‘rejected aspects of his teacher’s social realist style’, favouring the approach discussed above that was concerned with individual, subjective, emotional realities and an aesthetics of slippage, rather than fixity.[38]

In DeCarava’s view, White’s colossal subjects were ‘dynamic, overpowering figures [that] spoke of strength and dignity, but they were symbolic rather than human. I wanted my work to be more human’, he maintains in a 1984 video interview.[39] Yet, rather than fully losing their symbolic status, DeCarava’s worker subjects are also figures in which, ‘the contradictions and anxieties of the moment and milieu are writ large’.[40] In his Guggenheim proposal the photographer expressed this idea of symbolism through his desire to locate the universal in the particular, the impressive in the ordinary. ‘I want to express that moment’, he declares, ‘when a man going to work has meaning for that man and for me… for all men going to work at that given moment, when that man ceases being one man, but becomes all men’.[41] The anonymity of his ‘representative’ figures indicates an allowance for a greater freedom of viewer subjectivity, as in the absence of any information about the subject the viewer may map ideas, emotions and meaning on to the subject and their actions. This of course poses a problem for the previous discussion of DeCarava’s art as one of resistance to viewer-imposed assumptions about African American identity and experience. If there is no essential, objective truth then any view of a subject, DeCarava seems to be arguing, can only reflect a subjective reality. If the darkness of his images prevents an ‘outsider’ from mapping any substantial claims onto the image, then it makes it difficult to imagine how these images could be reflecting any kind of universally recognised humanity unless the only thing to be recognised is our universal lack of fixity as individuals; our universal recognition that the self is always “unknown”. It seems more plausible, perhaps, to rethink DeCarava’s picture of men going to work in more specific terms. For if it is DeCarava’s self-affirmed status as an “insider” that leads him to take images representing ‘life as it is in the black community’, then surely such a subjective vision can only be understood by another insider. When we read “for all men going to work'” should we instead be reading “for all African American men who live in Harlem going to work”?

Man with two shovels is one of the more extreme examples in DeCarava’s oeuvre of this relationship between subjectivity and reality. The visual play operating across the image ensures that no objective reality can be found in its darkest depths. The photograph therefore becomes as much about the process of looking as it is about what the viewer is looking at. The viewer is challenged not only to reconsider conceptions of African American identity, but also to dispute the visual processes by which those conceptions are made. The anonymity and partial invisibility of the man with two shovels can be empowering in that it commands the viewer to look more closely, preventing their conceptions about African American masculinity from becoming narrow and fixed. However, the success of DeCarava’s philosophy depends on the compliance of the viewer in this process.

How then are these ideas of subjectivity, reality and resistance played out in images that rely less on DeCarava’s tonal qualities for their effect and more on his treatment of angle and distance? In such shots the focus is more on the invisibility of the camera to the subject rather than the invisibility of the subject to the camera lens. DeCarava’s street shots are often taken without the knowledge of his subjects in order that something “realistic” and spontaneous may be represented. By capturing his subjects in what we could label as their “natural” state, that is, by photographing whatever face they have chosen to show to the world during the moment of the photograph, DeCarava highlights that the inherent truth about individuals is their ability to control aspects of their personality or appearance depending on the situation. In the case of African Americans this process of adaptation can be identified as part of the ‘daily acts of resistance and survival…created in aggrieved communities and expressed through culture’, in this case, photography.[42]

Whilst Kelley identifies the primary examples of everyday political resistance in the black labour force as acts of sabotage such as stealing or absenteeism, he also highlights the more general reliance of these strategies on the ability of black working people to, in the words of Paul Laurence Dunbar, ‘wear the mask’, that is, to perform their identity; a tactic that can become either empowering in its allowance of ‘clandestine and evasive resistance’ or constricting as it conceals an ‘inner pain generated by having to choke back one’s feelings about racism’.[43] DeCarava’s photography brings to light the existence of this ‘survival strategy’ in the African American labouring community, whilst highlighting the role played by his kind of ‘humanitarian art’ in the forwarding of agendas of ‘survival’ and ‘freedom’.[44] The focus of these photographs is on the everyday actions of these men as they get up, go to work and earn a living, and support their family despite the social and personal hardships they endure at the hands of American racism. Thus DeCarava’s ‘Everymen’ join the ranks of other real life folk heroes in becoming black culture’s ‘answer to confirmed sceptics who… maintained that the oppressed lacked the courage to reject white America’s skewed, pessimistic view of their human potential’.[45]

The image Fashion Central (1962) features a man lugging a load of boxes presumably filled with fashion garments on a wheeled trolley down a Harlem street. The load is large, but practically and meticulously stacked, giving a sense of balance and stability to a structure which could otherwise be precarious or hazardous. The stance of the worker, his apparent lack of physical strain and struggle, and the sense of his continual movement, or potential for movement, belies the considerable effort needed to move such a large pile of boxes. Indeed, he pulls the load with only a couple of fingers. The angle of the photograph gives the impression that he is heading downhill, contributing to the sense of physical effortlessness and control displayed in his movement. Such a reading of photographs such as this has led critics to recognise DeCarava’s figures as balletic, as they move ‘dancelike…across the clear and clogged spaces of a dangerous environment,’ that is, the street.[46] Reminiscent of Jane Jacobs’s description of the grace and bustle of New York’s city streets—the ‘ballet of the good city sidewalk’—the metaphor is particularly apt here, as it implies an inner mental and physical strength, strict bodily discipline and control, and great stamina, all concealed by a seemingly effortless outward grace and poise.[47] Like a position held in dance the photograph holds the man’s movement still for the fraction of a second it takes to click the shutter and contains within it all the anticipation and potential for his next step.

The recognition of such qualities in the black worker allows one to view DeCarava’s photographs as directly countering the negative stereotypes, or as Aaron Douglas refers to them, ‘outlandish myths’, that ‘were concocted to justify the exclusion of black men from [American] industries. It was seriously argued’, Douglas reminisces, ‘that the black man’s eyes, ears and reflexes were not sufficiently keen for regular factory work or our sense of touch was considered to be inadequate for the control and effective handling of fine tools, delicate instruments and fine machines’.[48] Although DeCarava’s workers are out on the city streets rather than in its factories, by casting the black worker as a deft and graceful figure, with a body that appears more than able to cope with the work required of him, DeCarava is defying those white myths, replacing them with a vision of the African American worker that is capable, skilful and therefore valuable to society. However, two factors in the photograph (both of which emphasize the importance of natural light and tone in DeCarava’s photography, here highlighting symbolic meaning rather than providing the mixture of revelation and concealment operating in Man with two shovels) complicate this reading of simple recuperation and hint at the extent to which black labour is nevertheless curtailed and controlled by a white agenda. Firstly, the man’s movement occurs between the two white lines of street markings, a detail which could be recognised as a commentary on the utilisation and containment of black physical labour within white parameters. Secondly, the watch that the man wears catches the glint of the sun becoming a bright white strip that contrasts strikingly against his dark arm. By aligning linear time with the colour of whiteness, the presence of the watch reminds the viewer that the ease and leisure with which this man seems to move is illusory. His time is controlled by the needs of his white employer, and, on a grander scale, by the voracious needs of white American capitalism.

DeCarava positions himself above and at a distance from his subject and uses a long lens in order to focus in on his activity. As Westerbeck and Meyerowitz note,

the height from which [DeCarava’s] pictures are usually made is a very specific one, high enough to have an overview and reflect on the scene but not so high that you become detached from it. This is the view you get looking out the window of a typical Harlem brownstone or tenement.[49]

DeCarava’s choice of distance and angle highlights the casual, everydayness of the scene that he is trying to create, accentuating his position as an ‘insider’. For some this view may seem voyeuristic as he appears to spy upon the people in the street from above. Yet here one can see DeCarava’s particular subjective eye for the community he is so familiar with come into play. A certain warmth and familiarity is present in many of his images, an effect which comes not just from his combination of distance and proximity, but is also a product of his reliance on soft tonal gradation rather than high contrast lighting. Indeed, DeCarava has been marked out singularly in this period, as ‘what is most striking about his imagery is the exception it makes to the postwar rule of grainy prints, contrasty papers and a harsh misanthropy among photographers’ such as William Klein.[50] The effect is not to create a romanticised view of Harlem, however–poverty and decline are visible in many of his works–nor is this simply a celebration of the survival of humanity enduring economic hardship and de facto segregation, although the rhetoric of social idealism can certainly be detected in some of his images. In fact DeCarava’s politics appear to be rooted in the importance of recognising African American individual subjectivity in the face of the dangers of social homogenisation and the importance of being able to use that individual subjectivity in the interest of art rather than as just political and social tools.

The relationship between aesthetic technique and political meaning can also be seen in DeCarava’s other portraits of street workers. In Between Cars (1961), for instance, a man is again pulling a large load of boxes. The viewer cannot see his face, or much of his body. Rather than moving across an expansive, space as seen in Fashion Central, the parameters through which this man must move are restricted as he pulls his loads through a seemingly impossible narrow gap between two parked cars which threaten to swallow up him and his cargo. Here DeCarava plays with shape and angle in his photography, as a visual illusion produced by the diagonal, top-down perspective of this image makes it appear as if the gap the man moves through is getting narrower and will conclude in a dead end. Sense tells us that, as in Man with two shovels, this must be a trick of the eye (or the camera), that the way must be passable, as there would otherwise be no reason for this man to bring his goods this way. Thus this image takes on symbolic meaning, gesturing towards the passage of African Americans through the American workforce, as, due to low wages and institutional racism, many failed to progress beyond this stage of manual labour. Moreover, the man is moving between one white car and one dark suggesting his social position between two separate and conflicting worlds. Here we also see the clash between classes as the black labourer winds his way through the possessions of the more affluent. This allusion to the juxtaposition of the working class and an aspirational middle class as represented by the automobile mirrors another of DeCarava’s photographs, Graduation (1949) where a young woman stands in the street surrounded by rubble and detritus alongside a billboard advertisement for Chevrolet cars.

Similarly, in Pepsi (1964) a male worker is seen collapsed across his crates of Pepsi cola bottles, with the sun beating down on him; the repeated Pepsi logo and the billboards behind him advertising Tempo cigarettes with ‘bonded charcoal’ threatening to overwhelm his bodily presence. Again, we cannot see his face and so he becomes defined by his labour, his working clothes and the product with which he is working. Above him and to the right an advertisement portrays a smiling middle class African American man wearing a suit and leisurely smoking a cigarette. This image and that of the cartoonish cowboy below it evokes myths of American freedom, expansion and self-reliance to contrast sharply with that of the exhausted labourer slumped over crates of Pepsi. The run-down state of the billboard itself (paint is splattered on it and nails are hanging loose) mocks the images of affluence, aspiration and freedom it surrounds.

Taken alone these images could appear as despairing rather than empowering as the African American body is drained of physical energy for the sake of economic consumption and commerce, and individual African American identity and agency is subsumed by the forces of the market and the low social position of working class African Americans. To some extent the majority of DeCarava’s labour images across his whole career subvert the idea of the heroic worker obtaining dignity and social recognition through their work as the men’s efforts are haunted by symbols of whiteness that hound and control their everyday existence—corporate logos and advertising, white figures of authority, historic monuments to American freedom and democracy, or merely the colour itself. Yet DeCarava’s emphasis on aesthetics over sociology; on natural light rather than technologically created artificiality; the subtle balance between distance, angle and intimacy; and an insistence on the reclamation of individual African American subjects and subjectivity, takes the oft-celebrated iconography of the male worker and makes him complex and multiplicitous. The public spaces of the street and the subway allow DeCarava to make a political and social critique of the treatment of African American men in the American labour system via a focus on aesthetics and the individual rather than on the deeds of Union organisations or acts of direct political resistance such as rallies, riots or strikes. These are not politically didactic images; they do not lecture on the social ills of African American existence. DeCarava’s social and political agenda is bound up in a subtle aesthetic statement, one that ruptures the hierarchical relationship between the viewer and viewed, and relies on the creation of subjective visions rather than the relaying of objective fact. By transforming these acts of potentially dehumanising labour into creative artefacts—photographs—DeCarava creates ambiguous artistic narratives in which ‘muscle and bone and sunlight upon the folds of clothing are enough to tell the story of’ a complex and multifarious ‘life’.[51]

University of Nottingham

Notes

[1] Roy DeCarava in Peter Galassi, Roy DeCarava: a Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1996), p. 19.

[2] DeCarava in Ivor Miller, ”If It Hasn’t Been One of Colour’: an Interview with Roy DeCarava’, Callaloo, 13:4 (Autumn 1990), p. 857.

[3] Ibid., p. 847.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Richard J. Powell, Black Art: a Cultural History (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997), p. 15.

[6] Miller, p. 847.

[7] William L. Van DeBurg, Black Camelot: African-American Culture Heroes in Their Times, 1960-1980 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 27.

[8] DeCarava in Val Wilmer, ‘Roy DeCarava: an Uncommon Beauty’, Ten.8, no. 27, p. 4.

[9] Isaac Julien in Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), p. 16.

[10] Derek Price and Liz Wells, ‘Thinking About Photography’, Photography: A Critical Introduction, 3^rd Edition (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 21.

[11] Miller, p. 852.

[12] Scott McQuire, Visions of Modernity: Representation, Memory, Time and Space in the Age of the Camera (London: Sage Publications, 1998), p. 5

[13] David Marriott, On Black Men (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. vii.

[14] Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 56.

[15] Ibid., p. 49.

[16] Miller, p. 852.

[17] Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: the Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992), p. 18.

[18] Ibid., p. 26.

[19] Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), p. 43. DeCarava’s interest in the subjectivity and/or consciousness of an individual living within a community can be seen most effectively in his photobook The Sound I Saw (London: Phaidon, 2001) which matches a selection of his photographic back catalogue with a stream of consciousness-like poetic narrative that reads like a series of lyrical personal musings on the experience of living in Harlem.

[20] Miller, p. 841.

[21] Galassi, p. 27.

[22] Miller, p. 856.

[23] Ibid., p. 849.

[24] Michele Wallace, Dark Designs and Visual Culture (Durham & London: Duke UP, 2004), p. 186.

[25] Ibid., p. 191.

[26] Joel Meyerowitz and Colin Westerbeck, Bystander: a History of Street Photography (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), p. 342.

[27] Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994), p. 36.

[28] Interestingly, different reproductions of this image show slight differences in the amount of facial detail visible. The 1981 James Alinder edited collection Roy DeCarava shows the most detail, followed by the Peter Galassi Museum of Modern Art retrospective from 1996, then finally, the very dark reproduction in DeCarava’s own collection, The Sound I Saw, published in 2001. Although perhaps an incidental point to make, these discrepancies show the extent to which DeCarava and/or his publishers played with the tonal qualities of his works in order to achieve the right balance of light and shade.

[29] Martha Rosler, ‘In, Around and Afterthoughts (On Documentary Photography) The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton, (Boston: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 303-343.

[30] Miller, p. 850.

[31] Stacey I. Morgan, Rethinking Social Realism: African American art and literature, 1930-1953 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), p. 5.

[32] Amy Helene Kirschke, Aaron Douglas: art, race and the Harlem Renaissance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), p. 8.

[33] Ibid., pp. 5, 43.

[34] Celeste-Marie Bernier, African American Visual Arts (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2008), p. 121.

[35] Jacob Lawrence in Ibid.

[36] Michael Hatt, ”Making a Man of Him’: Masculinity and the Black Body in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Sculpture’ Oxford Art Journal 15:1 (1992), p. 21.

[37] Bernier, p. 131.

[38] Maren Stange, ”Illusion Complete within Itself’: Roy DeCarava’s Photography’ The Yale Journal of Criticism, 9.1 (1996), p. 73.

[39] DeCarava in Conversations with Roy DeCarava, a film by Carroll Parrott Blue. First Run Features, New York, 1984.

[40] Henry Louis Gates Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997), p. xvii

[41] Galassi, p. 30.

[42] Kelley, p. 8.

[43] Ibid., p. 7.

[44] Miller, p. 847.

[45] Van DeBurg, p. 53

[46] Sherry Turner DeCarava, ‘Pages from a Notebook’ in Galassi, p. 54.

[47] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York & London: Vintage Books, 1992), p. 50.

[48] Kirschke, p. 5.

[49] Westerbeck and Meyerowitz, p. 341.

[50] Ibid., p.342.

[51] Galassi, p. 30