Technological Utopianism in American Culture

Howard Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985)

This book promised to tell me about twenty-five different utopian thinkers in the years 1880-1940ish, all of whom counted on technology to carry out many of their utopian objectives. However, frustratingly, there was only one chapter on the actual plots of the utopias themselves. Segal seemed to dismiss his own sources, calling them stilted and sometimes formulaic, and chose to concentrate instead on the social circumstances surrounding the writing of these utopic texts. That was a bit annoying, considering that there were some really awesome-looking images in that chapter, particularly of the plans for King Camp Gillette's city in The Human Drift (1894) - a book which I think I should check out.

Segal argues that these twenty-five authors turned to writing about technological utopia, rather than creating actual utopian communities (like the Brook Farms and Fourierian phalansteries of the earlier part of the century) because society had grown to be more complex and bureaucratic, and it was harder and harder to imagine change on a community level. In the absence of this, these writers turned to technology on two counts: the technology of writing/imagination; and the technology of social control. Like the efficiency experts I covered in my review essay about Haber, Jordan, et. al, these writers saw administration as the saving technology which would eliminate emotions from politics and leave society running rationally.

These writers favored "megalopoli", as opposed to small towns, as ideal imagined communities. (See picture of Gillette's planned apartment building in his city, "Megalopolis," described in The Human Drift.)

Elements of the technological utopia which Segal argues have actually come to pass include the interpenetration of work and leisure; the elimination of popular political thought (partially as the result of the former); the death of play; the bureaucratization of art; and conformism in personality.

On page 95, Segal criticizes Leo Marx for saying that Americans stopped searching for the middle landscape after the Civil War - says instead that urban, suburban, and regional "middle landscapes" continued to be seen as ideal - ex. Frederick Law Olmsted's parks.

Segal teaches at the University of Maine, and has written on Henry Ford's village industries and a book called Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America.

Last Child in the Woods

Image of schoolchildren pulling carrots comes from the website of The Edible Schoolyard, a school-garden project in Berkeley, spearheaded by Alice Waters. Caption: "'The garden looks beautiful, it smells great, it tastes like heaven, the sounds are very calming, and the feel of the plants is wonderful.' - Emily, 6th Grade". The emphasis on the multi-layered sensual experience echoes Louv's ideas about the ways that plants or the outdoors could calm children with ADHD or other behavorial disorders.

Title: Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder (Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005)

Author: Richard Louv, journalist, columnist for the San Diego Union-Trib. Chairman of an org. called The Children and Nature Network. Author of other books about childhood and general life in America: Web of Life: Weaving the Values that Sustain Us (1998); 101 Things You Can Do For Our Children's Future (1993); and Childhood's Future (1992).

My review:

It's a difficult thing to read a book whose premises you fundamentally agree with, but whose presentation elides nuance and is ahistorical and alarmist. (Reminds me of watching "Fahrenheit 9/11" - ugh.) Yes, I do agree that kids spend too much time indoors playing video games; that it is a terrible thing that communities have little space for children to play in; that it sucks that parents are too afraid to let kids bike around by themselves, so they rein them in with cell phones and GPS devices or don't let them out at all; that it's bogus that science education seems not to foster a generalized love of the outdoors, instead directing children toward specialized technological achievement. But Louv's discussion of these matters relies so heavily on anecdote, and on fear, that I find myself picking holes in it almost against my will (and not just because I think Louv's characterization of the problem as "nature deficit disorder" is fundamentally opportunist - the man wanted to sell books, or his editor did, anyway).

A great kid-in-nature tome of earlier years: Gene Stratton-Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost (1909).

In many ways, Louv's central concerns are very similar to those of Progressive-era educational thinkers such as John Dewey (who he references on p 65, on the virtues of primary experience) and G. Stanley Hall (who idealized his own farm-based upbringing). Louv's book is mostly free from the nastier racial implications of the late nineteenth-century anxiety re: "overcivilization" and degeneration (nobody back then ever seemed to worry about whether black sharecroppers' kids in the South were becoming proper men - all that anxiety was reserved for cream-of-the-crop white children). However, Louv sometimes seems to assume that the standard-issue "kid" is a white suburban one. There are a couple mentions of the problem of equal access to natural areas, and a few interviews with black or Latino kids who come back from wilderness-ed programs fundamentally changed, but they feel like gestures.

Teddy Roosevelt had Louv-like fears a hundred years before Louv louved. Here he is, at about the age when "Teedie" would have started discovering his affinity for the outdoors - a lifelong affection he credited for his vitality and right-thinkingness. See his "The Strenuous Life" for more.

Although Louv does not prescribe the benefits of Outside as a tonic for race regeneration, he does focus on the benefits - a very androcentric approach, which totally ignores a deep-ecology or biocentric POV. Humans, and human kids, are what matters here, not the environment per se. I'll go into pick-apart mode here: Louv is basically arguing that human kids will become stronger, more mentally acute, be cured of behavior problems, and probably get better grades and better scores on their SATs, if they go wander into a forest every once in a while. Will driven middle-class parents everywhere now begin scheduling in nature-time for their little babies, to give them every advantage in the race for success? If it doesn't "work", will they stop? Is this any way to create a new environmental paradigm?

Louv's book touches on very complex contemporary environmental issues, such as whether or not religious groups will embrace a movement which they see as embodying some animistic pagan qualities (292) and even cites Jennifer Wolch's idea of the "zoopolis", or the new interpolation of wildlife and natural growth into the city. But his fundamental stance seems unprepared to grapple with the implications of the scope of the topic.

The questions I see arising here include the most basic ones about the aim of our society, including whether or not we believe in equal economic rights (and thus, access to nature) for all children; whether technological education and environmental education can ever go hand in hand; whether we are willing to control capitalism (in the form of development) in order to create an environmentally aware society; and whether the system of labor and settlement brought about by advanced capitalism can be amended so that humans continue to get a good dose of "nature time" when they are young - and whether these humans will be able to maintain their contact with nature once they are working full-time, as are the parents reading this book, or whether they will be so straitened with the need to earn a living that they will not be able to do so. The alienation of childhood from the natural world is not the problem. This is a symptom of the way society is going today, and as such, will not be "fixed" in and of itself, but needs to be viewed as a part of a constellation of larger issues around environmental ethics and human rights.

Caption text from article by Michael B. Smith, "The Ego Ideal of 'The Good Camper' and the Nature of Summer Camp", Environmental History, January 2006 (link): "Boys at Camp Dudley, the first YMCA camp in the country, learn the finer points of axmanship, a skill intended to reconnect them with both nature and the "good life" of their frontier forbearers. As critics of this romantic construction of both nature and American history would later point out, learning to use an ax did not in itself prepare children very well for life in a modern city or suburb. (Courtesy of the YMCA of the USA and the Kautz Family YMCA Archive, University of Minnesota.)"

Books to follow up on:

The American Boys' Handy Book, written by Daniel Carter Beard (of the Boy Scouts) at the turn of the century, was reissued in a centennial edition in 2003 - a circumstance I find fascinating.

Eva, my friend who teaches elementary school, recommended this one. Which reminds me that Eva; my sister Sarah, who teaches pre-K kids; and my friend Mira, who is considering going into environmental education, are all intensely concerned about the issues Louv brings up. But Eva and Sarah are criminally underpaid, and Mira will be, if she goes through with her plan. Are Americans ready to consider environmental education as something CENTRAL to childhood, not a frill to be cut as soon as the budget gets tight? If they aren't ready, why? Is it because we still think of it as something that should take place organically (ha), in the bosom of the family (or in the backyard of the family, rather), like it used to? And if it doesn't take place organically, is it still as effective? Can a kid "discover" something s/he has been pointed towards?

The End of Victory Culture

Roll the dice, lady. Roll the dice.

Title: The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995)

Author: Tom Engelhardt, a former journalist and book editor, now working as a fellow for the Nation Institute and writing for/editing the alternative news site TomDispatch.com. One of the things he works on for Metropolitan Books is called The American Empire Project and looks really awesome.

Argument: The time between the Cold War and Vietnam marked the beginning of the end of American triumphalism, which was at a high point at the end of WWII, but marred by the existence of the bomb. Combining a bunch of different previous scholarship about American exceptionalism (see Nash Smith), Native Americans (see Slotkin), narratives of war and racism (see Dower, Drinnon), as well as his own childhood reflections, Engelhardt seeks to answer the question of how Americans lost their loving feeling toward their own country - and especially, how children who grew up during that 1950s got to the point where they began to question the country's mission. All of this questioning added up to what Engelhardt terms The End of Victory Culture. (Problem: Weren't there dissenters and disbelievers in American culture all along? Anti-imperialists and war protestors? Socialists? Communists? Yes, there were... Also, there's still a Victory Culture: just ask any random person on the street in Concord, New Hampshire.)

Chapter-by-chapter:
I. War Story
1. Triumphalist Despair: Basic argument laid out.

2. Story Time: Real-life war stories of America, whose parameters are determined by the victors (see Lepore). Native Americans as central to these stories, while the black story is elided (and haunting in its absence).

3. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass: War stories in the movies. Short history of the Western, pre-1960, and its similarities with the war movies of the 1940s. A bit about captivity narratives; a bit about the "victim complex" (we are always the transgressed upon, never the aggressor).

4. Premonitions: The Asian Death of Victory Culture: How Asia became "the frontier", and how Korea became a precursor of/warning of what was to come in Vietnam.

II. Containments (1945-1962)
1. War Games: How the 1950s mixed wartime with peacetime objectives (see May). Includes section on children's war games (81).

2. X Marks the Spot: Articulation of tensions between inclusionary and exclusionary tactics during the Cold War (how are we safe? by assimilating difference, or rejecting it altogether?)

3. The Enemy Disappears: The invisibility of Cold War adversaries; coverage of the HUAC hearings and blacklisting (emphasis on the performative nature thereof).

4. The Haunting of Childhood: Childhood, during the Cold War, was the "symbolic meeting place" for two fears: the fear of infection by the Other (see juvenile delinquents); and the propensity of the media to "concretize the fantasies of the young and the nightmarish fears of grown-ups into potent products" (137). "Twilight Zone" seen as example of how these secret fears/fantasies emerged in the public eye.

5. Entering the Twilight Zone: The atomic stalemate "reflected the limits of what the American story, American national identity, could withstand" (157): we couldn't picture ourselves killing so many people without "provocation". This meant that adversaries had to be more careful, talk about things more, and that "a certain amount of control over the American war story...was placed in enemy hands" (161). Interesting piece on the invention of the Peace Corps as JFK's plan to Americanize far places through youth (164).

III. The Era of Reversals (1962-1975):
1. The First Coming of GI Joe: Evolution of GI Joe figures seen as marker of how American ideas of heroism and enemy-ship evolved during this time.

2. The Invisible Government: JFK's assassination, and subsequent conspiracy theories, indicated that Americans could now conceive that their government would keep things from them purposefully.

3. Playing with Fire: The story of Morley Safer's atrocity reports from Cam Ne, and how the response to it (people thought he was a Communist plant, and hey, he was Canadian) indicated America's inability to accept the possible moral bankruptcy of their mission in Vietnam.

Morley Safer at Cam Ne, 1965.

4. Into the Charnel House of Language: Vietnam's "backwardness" in the American war story led to linguistic machinations intended to help Americans process what was happening: an interesting analysis of the use of the word "quagmire", which holds that the word implies American victimhood, once again: Who's in the wrong, when men are being "sucked into" a war? The thing doing the "sucking", for sure. I'm never calling Iraq a quagmire again. (199)

5. The President as Mad Mullah: Nixon told advisors that he wanted the Vietnamese to see him as an evil madman so they would lose their nerve - a concept which fascinates Engelhardt, given American need to see their leaders as upright moral beings.

6. The Crossover Point: More on the American state of mind in Vietnam, including the "logic" of body counts, which built on itself, and the idea that America wanted to impose a "story" on Vietnam, not just political rule (214).

7. "Something Rather Dark and Bloody": The story of the My Lai massacre, and response to it. Interestingly, Engelhardt points out, everybody on either side of the protestor/establishment divide was interested in comparing the other side with Nazis.

8. The War Crimes of Daniel Ellsberg: Ellsberg, who worked for RAND and then leaked the Pentagon Papers, is seen as an exemplar of a young American who fell out of love with the war story he'd been raised upon.

D. Ellsberg.

9. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass (II): Reflections of the Vietnam War in film. Also, story of how young war protestors singlehandedly realized the twin fears of the Cold War era: Communism, and the vulnerability of the young.

10. Besieged: How the war protestors used the national media by manipulating symbols such as "Good War" paraphenalia in order to create a sort of living MAD magazine: a subordination of the accepted narrative. Those in charge were horrified: not only the war, but also the home agenda, was slipping from their grasp, due to the death of Victory Culture.

11. Reconstruction: How did post-Vietnam Americans, robbed of their self-image of conquering righteousness, think to recoup their self respect? Through the children, of course...

IV. Afterlife (1975-1994): Attempts to rehabilitate American self image include Star Wars, the first Gulf War (in its spectacular, TV-ready execution). More on GI Joe, and a bit of interesting, if slightly out of place, musing on the way that children's culture seems to drive all meaning before it in the creation of an apolitical, timeless global state of conflict (do I agree? don't know) (301).

Reviews: In Contemporary Sociology, George Lipsitz wrote (a bit scathingly, but rightly) that Engelhardt draws "sporadically and unsystematically" on recent scholarship, pointing out holes in interpretation caused by ignorance of such work as that of Eric Lott and David Roediger. Furthermore, Lipsitz continued, Engelhardt's unfamiliarity with the methods of cultural studies led him to write in a narrow, Myth-and-Symbol-style framework, ignoring contradictory or complicating aspects of his Overarching Narrative; and his lack of context for each cultural object (no analysis of the actors involved in production, etc) leads him to make unsupported guesses about their meanings. In the Journal of American History, Stephen Whitfield wrote that the book's analysis was "sprightly", if thin, and that Engelhardt's overall theory about triumphalism was worth encapsulating in book form. Both reviewers called Engelhardt a "leftist". It's interesting to see how differently a "popular" book is reviewed in scholarly publications...

Vocab words: "osculation" ("close contact, an instance of this; spec. (a) the mutual contact of blood vessels (obs.); (b) Geom., contact of curves or surfaces which share a common tangent at the point of contact (also used analogously of spaces of higher dimension)" - also, "kissing").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Books: Textbook from 1953: America Before Man; Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane E Levin, Who's Calling the Shots: How to Respond Effectively to Children's Fascination with War Play and War Toys (1990); MIA Hunter series ("Vietnam snuff novels"). Toys: GI Joe "Soldiers of the World" (p 175) and animal enemies. Movies: "North by Northwest"; "The Long Telegram"; "Fail Safe"; Morley Safer's reports on "The Burning of Cam Ne"; "The Dirty Dozen"; "The Wild Bunch"; "Bonnie and Clyde"; "Little Big Man"; "Soldier Blue"; "The China Syndrome"; "Coming Home".

Secondary: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992); Leslie Daikin, Children's Toys Throughout the Ages (1953); Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (1964); Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1979); Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (1966); Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925 (1975); Sydney Ladensohn and Ted Schhoenhaus, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (1990); Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991); June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (1993); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993); Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (1987); Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination (1991).

The Circus Age

Title: The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)

Author: Our own Janet Davis!

Argument: "This book argues that the turn of the century railroad circus was a powerful cultural icon of a new, modern nation-state" (10) - that the circus took shape in the way it did, where it did, because of the particular society in which it flourished. The circus represented the diversity and pleasure of the spectacle of a multitudinous America, but often in a way which reiterated cultural norms.

Chapter-by-chapter:

Circus Day: Rich descriptions of the public spectacle that was a circus coming into town in "railroad circus" days, followed by a basic overview of the historical currents which fed into the phenomenon (immigration, "the search for order", racism, empire, expanding overseas markets, incorporation - see Alan Trachtenberg). Davis then describes the three largest railroad circuses upon which the book will focus (Barnum & Bailey, the Ringling Bros, and Adam Forepaugh & Sells Brothers), making a case for them as the three largest, most widely-traveled, and most influential of the circuses, and differentiating them from Wild West Shows (the circus was less historically minded, more eclectic in subject matter, and employed the definitive "big top" canvas covering).

This photo of Barnum & Bailey camels on a main street parade was found on a website called camelphotos.com. Cue the "I love the Internet" theme song.

The Circus as Historical and Cultural Process: This chapter dips back in time to the 1790s, describing the evolution of the circus during the 1800s as "a metonym for national expansion and infrastructural development" (12). (In other words, the railroad, Western expansion, and the circus were intimately linked.) This chapter also discusses, using cultural theory of Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Judith Butler, how the different groups involved in the production of the circus came together to produce its "ideological content" (25). NB: On p 35, Davis discusses children's circus culture, including a circus toy set which modeled itself after TR's African safari of 1909.

These men were supposed to be "pearl divers from the Sandwich Islands" - an instance of American imperialism's absorption into circus-world.

Spectacular Labor: This chapter "illuminates the thick, physical framework in which the circus produced its ideological content" (39) - in other words, how did it all get done, and how does this "how" help us understand what workers, supervisors, and spectators expected? Spectators who watched the circus were not only intrigued with the parts of the show specifically designated as performance. They also congregated to watch the set-up and strike of the tent, and were fascinated/repelled by the lives of circus performers. Davis argues that these performers created a social world apart from "regular life", and also that the tightly wound methods and processes of the circus (they had to be tight, to fit onto the railroad schedule) brought the industrial order of organization to small towns far away from factories.

Respectable Female Nudity: Women were becoming more and more visible in the public sphere (see the "New Woman"), and the people who ran these circuses faced an interesting gender conundrum: what to do about their very visible female performers? In general, they tried to "reconfigure strong Euroamerican circus women into dainty, domestic ladies, and women of color into educational artifacts" (12). They did so with an eye to a subtle titillation of the viewer, playing with transgression, referring to sex obliquely, through "emphasis on female performers' lives, loves, and body-hugging tights" (85). Here is also a discussion of presentation of "untouched" tribes or "savages" in the circus context.

From the King of Beasts to Clowns in Drag: Masculinity in the circus and its contrasting meanings is the subject of this chapter, which holds that "performances...were sites of gender play that could provide audiences with liberating alternatives to disciplined lives of manly capital accumulation" (12). Although circus men were seen as exemplars of the athletic, "strenuous" ideal, they were also sometimes androgynous or dressed in drag - or, they were actually animals, dressed up as men. Here are examples of the animals' roles in particular tableaux, as well as the integration of evolutionary theory (chimpanzees used as examples of "Man, Previous to His Degeneration" [153]) and the emphasis placed on "ideal" or "alpha" specimens of megafauna (just like Carl Akeley and his Giant of Karisimbi). Men of color, even African-Americans, were often used as examples of apes or savages (182). Do hippos really have teeth that look like that?

Instruct the Minds of All Classes: Through the circus (and the Wild West show), American involvement in foreign countries was processed, naturalized, and contained. Episodes of foreign entanglement were re-broadcast in circus format, reenacted or dramatized. The overriding philosophy behind these representations was that circuses were "moral cheerleaders of expansionism" (194). Meanwhile, on a material level, animals and labor from overseas were used in performance, dramatizing the advantages of selective American extraction of talent and labor from foreign countries - however, Davis points out, the freakiness of these performers may have served to subtly uphold an anti-imperialist racial logic of exclusion (see Eric Love).

Looks like kind of a scary dream for a kid to have.

Legacies: From Las Vegas to the Bridges of Madison County: Contemporary analogues of circus culture, and some speculation as to what forms of culture may have taken its place.

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Don Wilmeth lauded the book for being "clearly written, persuasively argued, exhaustively documented", and wrote that it did an admirable job of completing its project of connecting the circus to the cultural history of the time. The book was also well-reviewed in non-scholarly pubs, including the NYT and the Times Literary Supplement.

Books to follow up on: Primary: Peter Harkness, Andy the Acrobat; or, Out with the Greatest Show on Earth (1907); William Hornaday, The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals (1922); Harvey Root, Tommy with the Big Tents (1924).

Secondary: Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport, and American Society (1986); Elizabeth Haiken, Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (1997); RJ Hoage and William A Deiss, New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (1996); Michael Kammen, American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change and the Twentieth Century (1999); Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Engima of Efficiency (1997); Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990); Patricia Vertinsky, The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century (1990).

Indians in Unexpected Places

"New Horse Power in 1913" - Collage by Arthur Amiotte. Oglala Lakota Artist (1994)

Title: Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004)

Author: Philip J. DeLoria, professor of history and director of the Am. Cult. program at Michigan. Author, also, of Playing Indian (1998) and coeditor of the Blackwell Companion to American Indian History (2002). Describes his areas of interest as "Issues of culture and representation, particularly concerning American Indian people; Environmental and Western American history." His family heritage - as Dakota Sioux - is key to his approach to this book. His father, Vine Deloria Jr, is an activist and historian (see reference to his activity in Krech's Ecological Indian); his grandfather, Vine Deloria Sr, who was a minister and an accomplished college athlete, forms the keystone of Unexpected Places' chapter on athletics.

Argument: During modernity, Native Americans, having been supposedly "defeated" at Wounded Knee in 1890, were facing some of the most adverse material (and spiritual) conditions in the history of white occupation. White Americans chose to see Native Americans as stuck in the past, defeated, contained, and/or passive. Deloria's mission is to use selected Native life histories to illustrate how, contrary to "popular" belief, Native Americans during this time were actively seeking out ways to shape and use the processes of modernity (including technology, mass media, film, etc). Through the use of these examples, Deloria asks us to consider the implications of our automatic relegation of American Indians to the realm of the "primitive" through stereotypical imagery, and to challenge the quotidian nature of this "directional" ideology.

Chapter-by-chapter:
Introduction: Expectation and Anomaly: This introduction situates the historical area to be explored in the early twentieth century, when, unexpectedly, "a significant cohort of Native people engaged the same forces of modernization that were making non-Indians reevaluate their own expectations of themselves and their society" (6). Deloria outlines the difference he sees between "ideology" and "discourse", preferring these terms to the more flat "stereotype." He also distinguishes between "the anomalous, which reinforces expectations" and "the unexpected, which resists categorization and, thereby, questions expectation itself" (11). As a broader project, he posits that looking at "secret histories of unexpectedness" such as this one has the power to "change our sense of the past and lead us quietly, but directly, to the present moment" (14).


Red Cloud Woman in Beauty Shop, Denver, 1941. Deloria uses this picture to illustrate how the gap between expectation and possibility for Indian roles both creates humor and reinforces structures of power.

Violence: The Killings at Lightning Creek: One of the first "expected" categories of "Indianness" in the early twentieth century was that of violence. Deloria shows how the massacre at Wounded Knee led to an understanding of the Indian as "contained," and that acts of Indian resistance on reservations were understood from then forward as "breaking out" or "breakouts" (such acts could include hunting illegally or moving from reservation to reservation, as seen in the chapter on cars and technology). These outbreaks, Deloria argues were not feared so much because of their promise of violence, but for "the eruption of resistant forms" of Indian culture. Furthermore, "these stories...helped establish critical contexts for the twentieth-century imagemaking even then beginning to take shape" (49). The fiction of containment meant that white society was apt to "forget" that the twentieth-century Indian was capable of acts such as the 1973 takeover of Wounded Knee (51).

Representation: Indian Wars, the Movie: Here, Deloria discusses the lives of Indians who took part in movie culture, either by acting or producing, and makes a case for their active agency in the new industry (as also articulated by LG Moses in his book about Wild West Shows). Buffalo Bill's "Indian Wars" movie (1914), the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and various pictures including DW Griffith's "Call of the Wild" (1908) are examined. Deloria takes special care to point to Native critiques of pictures which took advantage of Indian stereotypes, and includes an analysis of the pictures by Indian producer James Young Deer. What matters most, according to Deloria, is that "a significant group of early-twentieth-century Indian people...came rapidly to understand the power of representation and cultural production" (105).


The actor Luther Standing Bear.

Athletics: "I Am of the Body": My Grandfather, Culture, and Sports: This chapter opens with a very personal interlude introducing the life of Vine Deloria, Sr., who was a committed college athlete, and who, as Deloria says, at the end of his life, focused on this aspect of his past even beyond the other work he had done as a minister for, and elder of, the Lakota Sioux: "For my grandfather, race, religion, culture, and family were inextricably tangled with his feats on the playing field" (112). This revelation spurs Deloria to reconsider narratives of Indian athletes which could see them as having been exploited or denigrated by the teams and leagues they played for. Here he discusses the story of Charles Albert "Chief" Bender, a player for the Philly Athletics in the 1910s, the runner and Olympic medalist Louis Tewanima, and the many athletic teams fielded by the Carlisle School. In these situations, he says, "Indian mimicry of Indianness back at white audiences made it clear that there was both a shared sense of expectation and a critical Indian intelligence at work" (130). However, after the reservation system calcified in the post-WWI era, and the athletic system of the greater US rearranged along institutional lines, "the entire cultural, social, and economic system that had supported Indian athletes in the early twentieth century had been transformed in ways that almost completely shut them out" (133).

"Chief" Bender, of the Philadelphia Athletics.

Technology: "I Want to Ride in Geronimo's Cadillac": Here Deloria examines expectations that Indians would not be participating in the technological revolutions of the early twentieth century, with the most obvious exemplar being automobility. He looks at photography and advertising of the time period that portrayed Indianness as an *inspiration for* automobility (signifying freedom, fleetness, etc) without making a place for Indians themselves in the picture (hence, the photograph of Geronimo in the Caddy, which Deloria sees as a sight-gag set up by a white photographer, but then proceeds to use as a way to interrogate Geronimo's investment in being so portrayed). Indians who bought cars, using money gained from the sale of reservation land or oil, were seen as spendthrifty, while whites who mortgaged houses while keeping cars (see Middletown) were not. Meanwhile, in the lives of Indians, automobility "allowed Native people to imagine an even broader vision of Indian country, one that transcended individual tribes and places and helped create new expressions of the pan-Indian and the intertribal" (153).


Geronimo in the Cadillac.

Music: The Hills Are Alive...with the Sound of Indian: White fascination with the "primitive" in the early twentieth century led to white musicologists and composers visiting Indian reservations to try to "salvage" their music. Here, Deloria outlines the creation of an "Indian sound", which signifies, per Deloria, all of the expectations of what-is-Indian: "primitivism and social evolution, violent conflict, indigenous nationalism, Indian disappearance, the romance of the forbidden exotic, the haunted American landscape..." (184) However, he writes, there were also Indian performers in the realm of musical "high culture", most significantly, Tsianina Redfeather, a Creek Indian who performed in pieces which encapsulated Indianness (especially "Shanewis", an opera). Deloria examines how Redfeather was prized for her authenticity, but how her talent was sometimes written off as a result of a "natural" Indian gift, stripping her of agency for her accomplishments. As happened in the athletic realm, Indian musical performers lost the public's attention by midcentury.


"Princess" Tsianina Redfeather.

Conclusion: The Secret History of Indian Modernity: Deloria reiterates his idea that "expectations exist in relation to concrete actions" (225) and explains that this is why "stereotypes" such as the ones that manifest themselves in the Tomahawk Chop or the P. Diddy/Nelly song "Shake Ya Tailfeather", matter to Indian realities. Deloria writes, summing up, "These expectations have concerned, among other things, Native technological incapacity, natural proclivities toward violence and warfare, a lack of social development, distance from both popular and aesthetic culture, and an inability to engage a modern capitalist economy" (230). He then diverges into a brief discussion of how African-American culture overtook Indian culture as the touchstone of modernism, pointing to the urbanization of African-Americans as a significant factor (238).

Reviews: In the Journal of American History, Gretchen Bataille wrote that Deloria's book succeeded at its project, but did not offer very much more in the way of in-depth criticism. Meanwhile, in Reviews in American History, Leonard Sadosky lauded Deloria for managing to find a mode of examination that eschewed the traditional tragic story of Indian victimization by governmental forces, and calls the book "cultural history at its best".

Stories: The Pawnee word for "car", when cars first came out, was kiriir aawis tarusta, which means "smoking anus" or "smoke from the anus dragging" (154). In 1940, "the Cherokee actor Victor Daniels apparently applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for federal recognition for a new tribe - what one reporter called the 'Demille Indians' of Hollywood" (80).

Leads to follow up on: The broadside for the 1912 movie "Custer's Last Fight" pitched the movie as "educational - every school boy and girl should see it!" (82) The Redpath Chatauqua Collection, which is at U. Iowa.

New words: "sodality" ("association or confederation with others; brotherhood, companionship, fellowship").

Books to follow up on: Primary: John Joseph Matthews, Sundown (1934); Luther Standing Bear, My People, The Sioux (1928).

Secondary: Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (1996); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (p-back, 2002); Ivan Karp and Steven Levine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (p-back, 1991); Joy Kasson, Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (2000); Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (1999); Stephen Leuthold, Indigenous Aesthetics: Native Art, Media, and Identity (p-back, 1998); Andrew Brodie Smith, Shooting Cowboys and Indians: Silent Western Films, American Culture, and the Birth of Hollywood (2004).