Bananas, Beaches, and Bases

Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

Enloe, a political scientist at Clark and author of multiple other books about women, empire, and labor, sets out to prove basically that women exist in the arena of international politics. This is one of those ideas that seems obvious to an American Studies eye - of course there are women at every turn; of course gendered assumptions allow constructions such as military bases and light industry factories and tourism to exist - but may be transgressive when considered in light of assumptions about how diplomacy works.

Considering such figures and sites as Carmen Miranda, diplomatic wives, prostitutes who service military bases, and women who work in garment industries, Enloe tries to show that modernization "relies on women's contentment with traditional roles" - as auxiliaries, sex objects, or consumers. (In other words, "not only is the personal political, but the international is personal.") Enloe also shows instances of resistance to this general trend, as when diplomatic wives campaigned in the 1970s to be granted the status of "private persons" (rather than auxiliaries to their husbands' work), or when Philippine leaders asked that American soldiers be required to be tested for venereal diseases, as the prostitutes around military bases had to be, or when Mexican garment workers protested after the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, after which company indifference killed many of their co-workers.

In The American Political Science Review, Anne Sisson Runyan liked the book, though wished that Enloe had been more specific in describing exactly how international politics becomes "masculinized" (and men render concepts such as risk, security, and nationalism wholly masculine). In The Women's Review of Books, Anne McClintock (she of Imperial Leather, which I haven't read) loved the book; she especially liked how Enloe focused on the gap between women of privilege and women with no social capital, and how the first group is sometimes complicit in the oppression of the second.

Engines of Change

Engine and boiler from John Stevens' Little Juliana steamboat, 1804. Hindle and Lubar use steamboatery as an example of how inventions were often co-developed by several different independent people, who then competed to claim credit.

Title: Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790-1860 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986)

Authors: Brooke Hindle and Steven Lubar. Hindle, who died in 2001, was apparently a guiding light of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT), and an early adopter of the method of studying science, technology, and material culture in historical context. His first books included The Pursuit of Science in Revolutionary America (1956) and David Rittenhouse (1964), but apparently his most famous book is Emulation and Invention (1981), which was particularly focused on describing early American inventions in verbal terms for a verbally-oriented audience (that would be us, historians). Hindle worked at NYU and the Smithsonian, which published this exhibit companion volume. Lubar, Hindle's co-author, is a professor at Brown in the Department of American Civilization, with interests in material culture, museums, public culture, and the history of technology. Some other interesting books he's written or edited: History from Things: Essays on Material Culture, ed. with W. David Kingery (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993); InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993). Here's his blog about museums.

The painting "Men of Progress," 1863, by Christian Schussele, depicted famous inventors, with Samuel Morse at the center and Benjamin Franklin looking on benevolently from above.

My Review: Hindle and Lubar describe the history of early American invention as being powered by three factors: an abundance of natural resources (wood, iron); an abundance of labor (including slaves); and a cultural climate which favored invention. The "special American conditions," in this story, meant that fewer people rejected or protested against technological advancement, because more people were flexible non-specialists who participated in many different types of production; also, people could see how technology would widen economic gaps, because of the example provided by the European Industrial Revolution, and were able to adjust their speed of technological development to ameliorate its social effects.

Chapters include interesting ones on machine shops, communitarian experiments (the Shakers, New Harmony), and the rise of railroading. There are many good pictures, as you might expect from a book which came from a museum exhibit.

I found the book to be overly invested in a story of American exceptionalism that celebrated the inventiveness of classes of men such as machinists and inventors, without examining the later results of this technological development or questioning the rightness of all of this invention—there's a definite feeling of positivist progressivism about the narrative.

Reviews of Others: In the Journal of American History, John Staudenmeier lauded the exhibit and the book for having respect for technological achievements of the past, rather than making fun of bygoners' missteps (is that really so endemic an attitude?) But he says that extending the exhibit's scope beyond the 1860s would bring some of the more negative consequences of technological development to light, a move which he says the exhibit attempts to make, but is often thwarted by the sheer impressiveness (or "sensuality") of the machinery. In the Winterthur Portfolio, John Skemer wrote that the book avoided the "one-man, one-invention" schema of history, but criticized it for portraying the America of this time period as focused exclusively on technological advancement, citing works which have found that there were other, more flexible, cottage-type modes of production co-existing with this Whiggish drive for industrial advancement.

The Hall rifle, invented by John Hall, was the first American rifle with fully interchangeable parts. The government ordered 1,000 of them in 1819 and it took Hall four years to complete the order. Things got a lot better in the mass-produced gun business later on. Hindle and Lubar hold that the invention of fully interchangeable parts was one of the most significant American contributions to the world economy in the nineteenth century.

The Rites of Assent

Title: The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993)

Author: Sacvan Bercovitch, who admits in the preface that he was actually named after Sacco and Vanzetti! So awesome! Although the executed anarchists get no further mention in the book, the theme of dissent, coupled with the general awesomeness of the name, mean that they get pride of place in this entry. Bercovitch retired from teaching at Harvard U. in 2001, after a career including stints at Brandeis, UCSD, Princeton, and Columbia. Before and after retiring, he's won any number of Lifetime Achievement Awards, including the Bode-Pearson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in American Studies. Books mostly revolve around Puritanism and its place in the cultural imaginary: The Puritan Origins of the American Self, 1975; The American Jeremiad, 1978; The Office of The Scarlet Letter, 1991.

My review: This book is actually a collection of essays, published 1972-1991. The overarching story here is the way in which American official ideology establishes consensus, and has done so ever since the days of the Puritans.

The series of essays moves in chronological order. Bercovitch believes that after the Puritans, any belief in America also had to incorporate a belief in expansion and mission. The major contributions of the Puritans to the official American mindset, he writes, are "the preposition 'into'" (aka, the idea of progress), conceptual vagueness as to the nature of the community covenant, and the justification of imperialism on the continent (related to the first). Jonathan Edwards took the concepts of the Puritans and expanded them to a broader audience, modernizing and commercializing the message.

Meanwhile, after the Revolution, any concept of "dissent" or "rebellion" from this official ideology was also official-ized, meaning that revolution was state policy. Therefore, any threat of more "deep" or threatening revolutions, such as those perpetrated in France, could be submerged in the official fiction of omnipresent "American revolution." Thus, the individual and the nation emerge aligned.

Bercovitch sees this absorption of dissent as an immensely effective alternative for nation-building. He uses Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) as an example of how this plays out, literarily speaking: Hester eventually capitulates to the voice of the community and replaces her letter after casting it away. She's unable to find happiness outside the community, even if that would have meant freedom, and eventually returns. Bercovitch finds the ambiguity of Letter to be, in and of itself, somewhat smothering - if you can choose any meaning you want from the book, "its ambiguity is a function of prescriptiveness" (211) - the reader never ends up choosing, and therefore never ends up rebelling. Thus, American freedom of choice smothers all who would oppose. (Reminds me a bit of the Thomas Frank, Conquest of Cool, thesis - or perhaps it's vice versa.)

Reviews of others: In American Literature, Kenneth Price wished that Bercovitch had engaged with his critics while putting together this book, and pointed out that Bercovitch's idea of American ideological hegemony aligns itself too much with concepts of American exceptionalism. Price also writes that perhaps Bercovitch doesn't find an oppositional tradition within American thought because he's only looking at New Englanders - what about Rudolfo Anaya, or Harriet Jacobs, even Edith Wharton? Interesting. In the Journal of American History, James Hoopes wrote that Bercovitch's argument is a "greased pig" - if there's no such thing as radical dissent or even analysis that can step outside of the American tradition, then how could Bercovitch himself be analyzing? Hoopes doesn't buy the argument that SB's Canadian, Jewish, radical roots could give him enough of an oppositional positionality to make the switch happen.

Words: "chiliastic" ("of, pertaining to, or holding the doctrine of the millennium"); "apodictic" ("of clear demonstration; established on incontrovertible evidence").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Mary Shelley, The Last Man (1826); J. Fenimore Cooper, The Crater; Or, Vulcan's Peak (A Tale of the Pacific) (1847).

American Slavery, American Freedom

Title: American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975)

Author: Edmund S. Morgan, professor emeritus of the Yale history department. Studied under Perry Miller at Harvard. Teacher of John Demos. Winner of many awards for his books on colonial and early Republican history, and for his life work in general, including the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and a Pulitzer "special citation" in 2006 (is that like an Oscar lifetime achievement award? I think so). Other notable books (he wrote a bunch) are The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1955); The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (1956); and Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), which won the Bancroft Prize. Morgan has also written biographies of Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams, and Benjamin Franklin.

My Review: This book attempts to answer the paradox embodied in its title: how could a society founded on the ideals of human freedom accept the blatant violation of that ideals in its very midst? (Morgan sees this as the fundamental paradox of America as a whole.) In order to answer the question, Morgan looks at the hundred years during which Virginia existed previous to the beginning of wholesale African slavery, describing the social and labor conditions of the colony.

The Jamestown colony, he writes, was founded with a great need for labor - indeed, those who became rich at the outset were those who could manage to marshal the greatest number of servants, not those who had the most land or the most capital. The upper classes of Britain looked at Virginia as perfect place to offload the lazy, unproductive classes of people who were unemployed in the home country. These people would accept contracts to come to Virginia as servants and serve a certain term to pay for their passage. Once in the colony, excuses would be made to extend their term, and once they were set free, there was very little hope for the American Dream - land was difficult to work if you were doing it on a small scale; land was only available on the dangerous, Indian-proximate frontier; and women were scarce, meaning family life for these "small" ex-servants was nonexistent. More than anything, though, these servants usually just died so early in life (as did most people in Virginia) that they didn't have a chance to ask for their rightful place in Virginia's economic order.

For Morgan, this short life expectancy is one of the major reasons why Virginia's planters saw it as economically more advantageous to import English servants, rather than African slaves - why pay the higher price for a slave when s/he was likely to die soon, leaving a planter without having exploited the full "term" of their labor (that is, their lifetime)? There were some Africans in the colony before the end of the seventeenth century, but Morgan says that they were unaccompanied by the later racism they experienced. They worked alongside white servants, and intermarried with whites.

When life expectancy began to go up, and events such as Bacon's Rebellion convinced the upper classes that the lower classes were indeed dangerous, slavery began to look like a better option. With a plantation of African slaves, control would be easier and economic advantage easier to extract. In a story familiar from such books as Roediger's Wages of Whiteness, the white lower classes were pacified with minor economic advances, begrudging cession of political rights, and the knowledge that they, at least, were "better" than the Indians and black people living alongside them in the South. Meanwhile, the upper classes could (mostly) rest safe in their beds, knowing that the poor people who supported their wealth were enslaved and controllable. (The "mostly" refers to the fear a lot of them retained of slave rebellions, which were actually rare.) Voila - slavery and freedom, side by side.

Souvenir from the 1907 Jamestown Exposition ("Meet Me On The War Path"!)

Reviews: The book won the Francis Parkman Prize, as well as others. In the Journal of American History, Russell Menard wrote that the book was "graceful, learned and witty" (it is that) and loves it, mostly, except when he worries that by attributing all of English racism to economic need, Morgan gives short shrift to any possible other explanation - it's almost mechanical, an account which Menard compares unfavorably to Winthrop Jordan's more subtle work (presumably White over Black [1968] though Menard doesn't specify). Menard also wants more evidence about the decline in mortality, a point at which I found myself confused as well, and wants more drawn-out analyses of the difference in prices between slaves and servants. In the Journal of Social History, Lois Green Carr said that she liked the book, too, but thought that actually servants had more opportunity when "graduated" from service than Morgan had it, and that those who joined Bacon's Rebellion were not actually reacting from stringent conditions for freedmen at the time - that things were status quo for them, until about the 1680s.

Words: "feeoffee" ("a person invested with a fief")

Poster for Terence Malick's 2005 film "The New World," with Colin Farrell as John Smith - a film I have to admit I found myself embarrassingly swept away by, with a good representation of the dirtiness and desperation of the Jamestown settlement, and a really romantic one of the nobility of the Indian.

The Land Before Her

Sod house in Nebraska. Housekeeping in one of these was a real bear, but at least you stayed warm in winter.

Title: The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1984).

Author: Annette Kolodny. See previous post.

Argument: Returning to her emphasis (see The Lay of the Land) on the role of "fantasy" in construction of ideas about land, Kolodny proposes to examine how fantasies about western settlement allowed women to "enact relational paradigms on strange and sometimes forbidding landscapes" (xii). What she finds is not radically "environmental", and still partakes in the profit motive of capitalist expansion, but she does like the fact that "in the women's fantasies, at least, the garden implied home and community, not privatized erotic mastery" (xiii). The scope of the book is limited to the "women who write" during this time period, meaning, as she admits, that the fantasy amounts to "a distinctively middle-class invention: a vehicle for projecting the Victorian values of a genteel east onto an imagined bourgeois west" (xiv). Kolodny promises to write another book incorporating the voices of black women from the frontier - a book which, so far as I know, has not yet been written.

Wisconsin prairie.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Book One: From Captivity to Accomodation, 1630-1833

1. Captives in Paradise: Mary Rowlandson's A True History of the Capitivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) introduces Kolodny's theories about the captivity narrative and its function for Puritan society as "an example of God's chastening followed by His merciful deliverance" (23). Kolodny points out that although the bloody story of Hannah Dustin did not fit into ideas of meek womanhood, Cotton Mather presented it in a way which supported this lesson. The captivity narrative of Hannah Swarton, also publicized by Mather, drives home the lesson that those who decide to move far away from town (and thus, from their ministers) bring trouble upon themselves. Here Kolodny also begins to make the argument that for women, captivity narratives might have been a metaphor for their anger at feeling as though their husbands had bound them and dragged them off into the woods against their will (33).

2. Gardens in the Wilderness: One way that women dealt with their displacement was by planting gardens, making the very landscape familiar through acceptable female labor. Elizabeth House Trist, who traveled with a female slave from Virginia to Mississippi right after the Revolutionary War, was unable to enjoy the landscape in its "unspoiled state", but only when she saw that it had been cultivated. Eliza Lucas, who managed several plantations for husbands and fathers, planned and executed several large gardens - activities which she saw fit to detail in correspondence, even while downplaying her own sizable role. All in all, gardening, for Kolodny, is an activity through which "women shared with one another both their right and their capacity to put their personal stamp on landscapes otherwise owned and operated by men" (48).

3. The Lady in the Cave: A discussion of a popular narrative from 1788 in which an author, pseudonymously named "Abraham Panther", supposedly discovered a woman who had been abducted by Indians, slipped her bonds, and spent nine years living in a cave. Kolodny uses this examplar to illustrate how Americans attempted to accomodate to the spectre of white women living in the "wilderness", arguing that ultimately, although the narrative "offered a positive image of the white woman's capacity to survive and plant gardens in that same wilderness", "the nation took to its heart the heroic mythology of the wilderness hunter, eschewing the hybridized romance of the wilderness cultivator suggested by the Panther Captivity" (67).

4. Mary Jemison and Rebecca Bryan Boone: At Home in the Woods: Here Kolodny examines James Everett Seaver's 1824 A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison and Timothy Flint's 1833 Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, asking whether either of them presents the image of a woman at home in the wilderness in the same way in which Boone himself - or Leatherstocking - was perceived to be. Ultimately, Kolodny sees Jemison, who lived with and married into the Seneca tribe, as being painted as overly "Indian" (and thus unacceptable as a model), and shows that Boone, as seen through Flint's conceptualization, has her role reduced dramatically to the point where she is not seen as a actor in her own story, but rather, a dim part of her husband's more famous life.

Book Two: From Promotion to Literature, 1833-1850

5. Mary Austin Holley and Eliza Farnham: Promoting the Prairies: Many women found that the hardest thing about emigrating was leaving their families back East. Mary Austin Holly, in her book about Texas (1833), and Eliza Farnham, in her Life in Prairie Land (1846), about Illinois, both sought to ameliorate female fears about these separations by addressing specific female concerns, and by picturing the development of an alternative community in the western setting. Kolodny writes that these books laid the groundwork for the literary efforts of women invested in domestic fantasies.

6. Margaret Fuller: Recovering Our Mother's Garden: The eminently interesting Margaret Fuller wrote a book about Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory (Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, published 1844). This book recast the captivity narrative, characterizing the landscape as appealing, but pointing out that the woman often found herself trapped inside the walls of a house, unable to interact with it. En fin, Fuller "began to perceive that the demands of frontier life also thwarted the fantasies of women" (104).

7. The Literary Legacy of Caroline Kirkland: Emigrants' Guide to a Failed Eden: Kirkland tried to convince readers to substitute a more realistic idea of the American frontier for their romanticized, European fantasies of the cottage-with-trellis. In her A New Home - Who'll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (1837), Kirkland created what Kolodny calls "the first realistic depiction of frontier life in American letters" (133), complete with swindlers, unfinished houses, and disorder. Kolodny points out that this book was "derived...from a woman's need to reject the available male fantasies" (157).

Ms. Caroline Kirkland.

Book Three: Repossessing Eden, 1850-1860

8. The Domestic Fantasy Goes West: Troubling effects of industrialization and slavery upset female novelists of the sentimental era, who sought a new background for their family romances, one which would not be tainted by the problems of Eastern society. In the West of these novelists, Kirkland's realistic vision is submerged by scenes of domestic tranquility, where men and women shared separate-but-equal roles in creating a new Eden.

9. Alice Cary and Caroline Soule: Book Ends: Alice Cary's Clovernook; Or Recollections of Our Neighborhood in the West (1852), which described the Ohio Valley, made the important move of describing the effects of industry on a landscape previously described in glowing terms. Here Cary describes slaughterhouses, in 1853, years before The Jungle! (See page 186.) Caroline Soule's The Pet of the Settlement (1860) rejected this realistic/environmentalist turn, focusing instead on the possibility of "a prairie Eden converted into a human social garden", through the agency of a female main character (194).

10. E.D.E.N. Southworth and Maria Susanna Cummins: Paradise Regained, Paradise Lost: E.D.E.N. Southworth (not a rapper, though she plays one on TV) saw the West as a place where a human community could be renewed, "without the blot of slavery" (207). Her novel India: The Pearl of Pearl River (1856) situated a Southern aristocrat who has come to believe in abolition in a life-giving Western locale which allows him to synchronize his beliefs with his labor (abetted, of course, by a pure-hearted female consort). Maria Susanna Cummins, in her Mabel Vaughn (1857), created a new kind of ideal Western man: one willing to forge the characteristics of the iconoclast hunter and the stay-at-home agriculturalist. Kolodny holds that these new men were intended to counteract the influence of the Leatherstocking archetype, which was fundamentally hostile to the female.

Texas mesquite prairie.


Reviews: In the Pacific Historical Review, Julie Roy Jeffrey was occasionally unconvinced, pointing, among other things, to chronological confusion (which I felt too), but ultimately called the book "important." In the Western Historical Quarterly, Cynthia Sturgis wrote that she found this book an "effective complement" to Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, and added that the emphasis on garden imagery really shaped the book. American Quarterly had Anne Goodwyn Jones review the book, writing that the author was satisfyingly attentive to subtlety, methodologically daring, and that the book was brilliant in general. Jones wanted more attention to the differences, as Kolodny sees them, between "fantasy" and "raw experience".

Vocab words: "peltry" ("undressed skins, esp. of animals valuable for their furs; furs and skins prepared for sale; pelts collectively"); "factotum" ("a man of all-work; also, a servant who has the entire management of his master's affairs" - this often has negative connotations, I think); "calenture" ("a disease incident to sailors within the tropics, characterized by delirium in which the patient, it is said, fancies the sea to be green fields, and desires to leap into it" - awesome! - or, more broadly, "fever; burning passion, ardour, zeal, heat, glow").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Margaret Atwood, The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970)

Secondary: Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977); John Seelye, Prophetic Waters: The River in Early American Life and Literature (1977)

The Jungle

Title: The Jungle (1906) (I read the Enriched Classic edition by Pocket Books, Simon and Schuster, pub. 2004)

Author: Upton Sinclair, who was only 28 when this book was published. He had spent two months in Packingtown in Chicago doing research, in 1904 (citation). The book was turned down by five different publishers before finding one willing to commit. The success of The Jungle was career-establishing for him, but no other book that he wrote gained equal popular success. He did win a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Dragon's Teeth, about the Fascist takeover of Germany, in 1943.

Sinclair was a politician as well as an author, running for several offices on Socialist tickets, finally almost winning the governor's office in California in 1934 while running on the "EPIC" ticket ("End Poverty in California").

Some random facts: Sinclair was, perhaps not unexpectedly, friends with Jack London. His 1927 book Oil!, about the effects of an oil strike on a small Texas town, is being made into a movie filmed partially in Marfa, dir. by Paul Thomas Anderson and due out at the end of this year. Sinclair is also the source of the bon mot "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it".

Plot: Jurgus Rudkis, an optimistic young Lithuanian, emigrates to Chicago with his fiancee Ona and a large number of her extended family members. The book chronicles his systematic degradation at the hands of the Chicago stockyard system, and later rebirth as a member of the Socialist party.

The degradation, or, as Jurgus finally realizes, "soul-death" of immigrant workers (375), could be illustrated by the fates of Jurgus' various family members. Ona expires in childbirth, after the family cannot afford a proper doctor (and after she has worked herself into "womb troubles" by not taking enough time off after a previous birth [134]). Jurgus' elderly father Antanas dies after he takes a job in a dark basement, standing in acidic effluvia from the production of meat products (this is the only job he can get, as a less-than-perfect physical specimen). Jurgus and Ona's son Antanas drowns when he falls into a cesspool on the street (the sidewalk is elevated above the water-filled, potholed thoroughfare, which was supposed to be paved over, but wasn't, due to the corruption of public officials), but not before he's suffered from an untreated bout of measles, allowed to run its course for lack of money to buy a doctor's visit (171). Stanislovas, one of Ona's half-siblings, is literally eaten to death by rats after he is shut in to the factory where he works overnight (354). Ona's other half-siblings, unnamed in the narrative, take jobs as newsboys/girls, trying to make money for the family, but living on the street renders them intractable and corrupted. Ona's cousin Marija, originally a strong and unbreakable woman, becomes a prostitute in order to support the family, and develops a morphine addiction in order to deal with her situation. And finally, Teta Elzbieta, Ona's stepmother, reacts to all of this disaster by caring only about getting food, and losing all of her other motivations - perhaps the ultimate example of dehumanization.


Jurgus himself goes from a just-emigrated innocent, who believes in "work will set you free" (whenever anything goes wrong, he says "I will work harder" [23]); to, after injuring himself and losing his "place" (job), a frustrated alcoholic; to, after Ona is seduced by her boss, a raging animal, lashing out violently at the perpetrator; to a hobo, abandoning his family after the deaths of Ona and baby Antanas; to a criminal participant in the system of corruption, even going so far as to work as a scab during a strike; to, finally, a Socialist, with his soul restored by learning the "truth" of the system of labor that employs him.

It's unclear how exactly the play advertised would re-cast this story as "wonderful", but maybe they mean "wonderful" in the "awe-inspiring" sense.

Various descriptions of the physical ecology of Packingtown serve as a background to the story and to play up the corruption Sinclair sees as attendant to the entire system. See page 32-3 for a physical description of the stockyards; page 37 for the description of the land upon which Packingtown is built, which is literally made out of trash; page 116 for a description of "Bubbly Creek," a tributary that runs through Packingtown and literally boils over with pollution; page 417 for the Socialists' view of environmental management for ultimate human efficiency and freedom (cf. Bryson's chapter on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who Sinclair's character cites as an authority on these issues).

Long passages describe the unhealthiness of the meat, I think in order to point out the inherent corruption in the system (if your food is corrupt, it hits mighty close to the bone). See page 43 for the initial explanation that the companies "use everything of the hog but the squeal"; page 93 for descriptions of the spoiled food that the children of Packingtown eat; page 119-20 for descriptions of what goes into the canned meat; page 167 for descriptions of the sausage making process (Sinclair: "This is no fairy story and no joke"); page 385, on which a Socialist compares the situation of workers to that of the hogs; and page 413, on which a Socialist catalogs the systemic costs of adulterated food.

Major themes: Socialism. Labor. Progressivism. Reform movements. Corruption. Food. Factories. Dehumanization. Immigration. Environmental degradation. Prostitution. Drug abuse. Political machines. Class.

Reception: Sinclair famously said, "I aimed for the nation's heart and hit them in the stomach" - in other words, people were far more willing to consider the possible danger to their own food supply, than to empathize with the plight of immigrant workers exploited by a capitalist system. After reading an advance copy of the book, TR was "sickened", and called on Congress to establish tougher meat-packing standards. The book was eventually the major impetus for the establishment of the FDA. Supposedly TR coined the term "muckrakers" to describe Sinclair and other journalists who took on similarly controversial subjects in an effort to expose corruption and abuse.

Meat inspection was upped after the publication of The Jungle.

Books I've read that cover it: Jacobson - Barbarian Virtues; Adams - The Sexual Politics of Meat.

Barbarian Virtues

Funnily enough, the person who posted this photo on his/her blog chose to scan an edited version of the cover, leaving these multiracial infants standing (sitting?) accused, once again, of savagery...

Full Title: Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples, At Home and Abroad (1876-1917)(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000)

Author: Matthew Frye Jacobson, American Studies and History at Yale U. He's interested in race, immigration, imperialism, and structures of citizenship. His other books are What Have They Built You to Do?: The Manchurian Candidate and Cold War America (with Gaspar Gonzalex, 2006 - looks great); Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2005); Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (1998); and Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (1995). Right now he's working on a book about cultural memory and civil rights.

Argument: Jacobson seeks to create a new understanding of the American attitude towards "foreigners", within and without, during the era of Gilded Age industrialization and imperialism. In order to achieve this goal, he analyzes how political and public rhetoric went hand in hand with cultural production and with the nascent social sciences.

Jacobson has a clear motive here, one which accounts (I'm assuming) for this book being published by a popular press: the continuities between attitudes during this time period, and present-day American thought about immigration and foreign policy, are myriad, and Jacobson sees a huge danger in the complete neglect of this expansionist era in traditional history textbooks. "The stakes are quite high for Americans' national self-conception," he writes in the conclusion. "In expurgating the period of US expansionism that bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Americans adopt a broken narrative that casts Manifest Destiny and continental expansionism falsely adrift from 'modern' US history, and obscures the extent to which the modern state was built, and modern nationalism generated, in close relation to the imperialist project" (263).

The central contradiction of Jacobson's story - both today, and during the Gilded Age - lies in the fact that the presence of these "disparaged peoples" is as "reviled in the political sphere as it is inevitable in the economic" (9). Taking a psychological turn, Jacobson claims that the confusion of American attitudes towards immigration and those who inhabit foreign countries lies in the fact that our capitalist system, which always demands more expansion, requires their presence as workers and as markets, leaving Americans feeling dependent and amplifying feelings of resentment and racist thought (15). During this turn-of-the-century era, elaborate structures designed to assert the inferiority of the non-"natural" American arose - structures that went about sexualizing them, designating them as less intelligent, and ultimately, as less fit for citizenship, leaving white Americans to take the reins.

Chapter-by-Chapter:
1. Export Markets: The World's Peoples as Consumers: During this time period, United States manufacturers, facing a surplus of production, began to demand expansion of American markets (a "new frontier"!) They were very interested in places such as China and Latin America. In reality, in China, there was very little market for American products. This thwarted desire to sell led to an angry attitude toward the recalcitrant foreigner. Ultimately, the Chinese were denominated "uncivilized" because their wants were not as expansive as those of people living in the West. Meanwhile, in Latin America, in a realm of "pure imperial power and its deployment", United States policymakers created a "strategic infrastructure for an export economy whose requirements included canals, harbors, coaling stations, and naval bases all beyond the proper borders of the nation itself" (26). (See Panama, filibusterers, United Fruit, etc.)

Here Jacobson introduces the concept of "temporality" which was deployed in order to create room for an American "civilizing mission." Under Social Darwinist thought, certain peoples were ahead of others in a linear timeline of civilization, usually based, as Jacobson says, on "a hierarchy of evolutionary economic stages" (50). By using this "timeline," with Western Anglo-Saxons at the "top," Americans could argue that by providing trade goods, they were "helping" the less civilized gain ground - and, moreover, that the "less civilized" were incapable of self-determination.

2. Labor Markets: The World's Peoples as America's Workers: Because Americans wanted to be economically advanced, they required vast amounts of cheap labor. Ironically, they then feared the effects of the people who would do that labor on the body politic (and, literally, on the bodies of future Americans). Like the Chinese, these immigrants were seen as un-American because they did not possess the habits of purchasing of naturalized Americans. Jacobson examines John Commons, sociologist EA Ross, and historian Frederick Jackson Turner's attitudes toward immigration, pointing out that the three saw these incoming races as "degrading" to American labor. This chapter also covers the anti-Chinese movement and labor radicalism, pointing to the irony of the era's reception of the latter (immigrant workers were damned for being "fiery" if they belonged to unions; damned for being "submissive" if they accepted poor labor conditions). Immigrants in this period, Jacobson sums up, were seen as barbarians; relics from earlier epochs; "human draft animals whose brawn could be enlisted to carry out the designs of the Anglo-Saxon intellect"; visitors from the premodern, "whose accustomed deprivations threatened to bid down the American standards of living"; or Old World incendiaries whose dangerous politics "had no proper place in a self-governing republic" (96).

From Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890)

3. Parables of Progress: Travelogues, Ghetto Sketches, and Fictions of the Foreigner: Here Jacobson draws parallels between travel writing and literature about ethnic enclaves in American cities, pointing out that the people described often share the same characteristics: positive ones of childishness, innocence, honesty, gaiety; negative ones of sloth, animality, criminality, and lustfulness. These people were always seen in the aggregate, not as individuals "who might speak for themselves and whose recognizable humanity might make a claim on our sympathies" (125). And, of course, writings such as these eliminated any analysis of how the economic system might create structural conditions influencing the lives of the peoples under examination. Discussed: Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan books (see Markley's Dying Planet); Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives (1890); Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906); O. Henry's Cabbages and Kings (1904); Charles Dudley Warner's Mummies and Moslems (1876); Theodore Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt (1911).

4. Theories of Development: Scholarly Disciplines and the Hierarchy of Peoples: The developing disciplines of the social sciences - psychology, sociology, anthropology - did their part to create categories of humanity which could be used to exclude immigrants from the country, or to justify the paternalistic government of other countries. Jacobson points out that these disciplines had a "complex and often paradoxical" relationship with the travelogue - often taking "evidence" from the writings of those who had "been there," in an era before the time when anthropologists viewed field work as essential (141). Once these anthropological works had been published, travelogue writers incorporated elements of their theories, thereby perpetuating the cycle. Also examined: intelligence testing and its relationship with immigration policy; the eugenics movement.

5. Accents of Menace: Immigrants in the Republic: This chapter examines the way in which American racialist thought constructed images of the immigrant as "unfit" for the duties of independent American citizenship. Included in the analysis are reactions to Irish machine politics; immigration restriction movements; and the responses of immigrants like Mary Antin, who sought to prove that immigrants were capable of assimilation into the American body politic (this is an interesting point of view on assimilation - in this situation, Jacobson points out, proclaiming the capacity to Americanize is a defiant act, as opposed to a sad "erosion of cultural tradition" [205]), and the Silesian Jewish immigrant and student of William James, Horace Kallen, who argued that immigrants should be included on the basis of their difference.


Photo of Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the Filipino independence movement.

6. Children of Barbarism: Republican Imperatives and Imperial Wards: This chapter details the thought process which led Americans of the time to believe that American intervention in foreign lands - Puerto Rico, the Phillipines, Cuba, etc - could be seen as a divine mission to civilize and "spread democracy" to the residents. Imperial desires extended to the lands to be acquired, argues Jacobson, but definitively not to the peoples involved, who were seen as dangerous additions to the American citizenry, to be kept out of suffrage rights at all costs. (He points to the name of a popular pamphlet of the 1890s- "Our New Island Treasures and Their Peoples" - which neatly delineates this division.) Jacobson goes into detail regarding how this mechanism worked during the war with the Phillipines, and also includes reactions from immigrant and black groups inside the United States, who opposed imperial expansion in their presses, and immigrant and black soldiers involved in the war, who had sympathy for the Filipino independence movement.

Reviews (significant flaws?): In the American Historical Review, James Barrett praised Jacobson's synthetic vision, while writing that nothing in the book will be a surprise to historians of imperialism or immigration. Barrett viewed the book's inclusion of cultural material as a major strength, while wishing that Jacobson had situated the scientific racism chapter within a greater international context. In the Journal of American History, Edward Crapol called the book a "masterly synthesis" and a "brilliant refashioning" which achieves its goal of creating a new narrative about the time period, and "deserves a wide readership."



New words: congeries ("a collection of things merely massed or heaped together; a mass, heap"); houri ("a nymph of the Muslim Paradise. Hence applied allusively to a voluptuously beautiful woman" - ironically, in this context this word was used by a "travelogue" writer to describe young Jewish women in the inner city); bailiwick ("one's natural or proper place or sphere" - comes from the old meaning, the jurisdiction of a bailiff); latitudinarian ("allowing, favouring, or characterized by latitude in opinion or action, esp. in matters of religion; not insisting on strict adherence to or conformity with an established code, standard, formula, etc.; tolerating free thought or laxity of belief on religious questions"); pecksniffian (a "Pecksniff": "an unctuous hypocrite, a person who affects benevolence or pretends to have high moral principles; (also) a person who interferes officiously in the business of others"); poltroon ("an utter coward; a mean-spirited person; a worthless wretch" - good thing I looked it up, because I thought it meant "pirate." Or perhaps "brigand"?).

Pieces of history I need to know more about: the Monroe Doctrine. The Opium War. The Sino-Japanese War. The Russo-Japanese War. Jose Marti. The Platt Amendment. Mugwumps.

Facty bonbons: Filibusterer William Walker, who took over the government of Nicaragua from 1855 to 1857, was actually unseated not by the people of Nicaragua or any other governmental entity, but by Cornelius Vanderbilt, "whose Nicaraguan steamship line was threatened by Walker's ambitions" (39). This is probably not news to anybody else, but I did not know that Panama was part of Colombia (45). My ignorance on matters Latin American will hopefully be remedied by this orals reading process. Meanwhile, back in racist old USA, Henry James once wrote, worrying about immigration, of that "terrible little Ellis Island" (62). During World War I, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who once had sung the praises of the Germans, revised his racial thought by doing new research that would "trace the blood of the Kaiser back to the 'Wild Tartars,' exposing the Germans as round-headed Tartar imposters to Nordic greatness" (162). The formula used to arrive at the IQ number is as follows: mental age (as determined by the test), divided by chronological age, times 100 (165).

Leads to follow up on: On p 139, Jacobson mentions a scene of 1900s schoolchildren being asked about "lower races." The primer used: John Fiske's 1907 A History of the United States for Schools.


Mary Antin.


Books to follow up on: Because Virtues
was published by a popular press, the footnotes are in the mildly frustrating semi-academic form (where the notation system at the end of the book gives you the page number and then the string of words at the beginning of quote and then the citation...is there a technical name for that?) However, there is a really good bibliographic essay, one that it would behoove me to return to if/when I write more about any of these topics. Some initially interesting books:

Primary: Mary Antin -The Promised Land (1912), They Who Knock At Our Gates (1914); a list of African travelogues to be found on p 117; Melville - Typee; books by Charles Dudley Warner.

Secondary: Michael Adas - Machines as the Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideals of Western Dominance (1989); Melissa Banta and Curtis Hinsley - From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography, and the Power of Imagery (1986); Elizabeth Edwards, ed. - Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920 (1992); Curtis Hinsley - The Smithsonian and the American Indian: Making a Moral Anthropology in Victorian America (1981); Richard Hofstadter - Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944); Michael Hogan and Thomas Patterson, eds - Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations (1991); Daniel Kevles - In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1985); Stefan Kuhl - The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (1994); Nicholas Mirzoeff - Bodyscape: Art, Modernity, and the Ideal Figure (1995); Jan Nederveen Pieterse - White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (1992); Frederick Pike - The United States and Latin America: Myths and Stereotypes of Civilization and Nature (1992); Mary Louise Pratt - Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992); Edward Said - Culture and Imperialism (1993); David Spurr - The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (1993); everything by George Stocking, Jr., esp. Victorian Anthropology (1987); Michael Taussig - Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (1987); Nicholas Thomas - Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (1994).