The Rise of Multicultural America

Economy and Print Culture, 1865-1915

Susan L. Mizruchi

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807887967
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Between the Civil War and World War I the United States underwent the most rapid economic expansion in history. At the same time, the country experienced unparalleled rates of immigration. In The Rise of Multicultural America, Susan Mizruchi examines the convergence of these two extraordinary developments. No issue was more salient in postbellum American capitalist society, she argues, than the country's bewilderingly diverse population. This era marked the emergence of Americans' self-consciousness about what we today call multiculturalism. Mizruchi approaches this complex development from the perspective of print culture, demonstrating how both popular and elite writers played pivotal roles in articulating the stakes of this national metamorphosis. In a period of widespread literacy, writers assumed a remarkable cultural authority as best-selling works of literature and periodicals reached vast readerships and immigrants could find newspapers and magazines in their native languages. Mizruchi also looks at the work of journalists, photographers, social reformers, intellectuals, and advertisers. Identifying the years between 1865 and 1915 as the founding era of American multiculturalism, Mizruchi provides a historical context that has been overlooked in contemporary debates about race, ethnicity, immigration, and the dynamics of modern capitalist society. Her analysis recuperates a legacy with the potential to both invigorate current battle lines and highlight points of reconciliation.

Chapter 1: Remembering Civil War

The Civil War initiated a publishing industry. The war between the northern Union and the southern Confederacy inspired chronicles—photographic, historical, journalistic, and literary—at a rate unmatched by previous wars. Dime novels written for soldier audiences and run in series—“Dawley’s Camp and Fireside Library” and Redpath’s “Books for the Camp Fires”—sold in the hundred thousands. As one soldier noted of his appetite for “cheap literature … I, certainly, never read so many such before or since.” More conventional novels—Metta Victor’s The Unionist’s Daughter (1862); Charles Alexander’s Pauline of the Potomac (1862); John Trowbridge’s The Drummer Boy (1863); Edward Willett’s The Vicksburg Spy (1864); and Sarah Edmonds’s Unsexed: or, The Female Soldier (1864)—provided those at home and at war, on both sides, with a steady stream of courageous soldiers, wartime courtships, and cross-dressed spies. Newspapers and magazines featured dramatic war testimonials, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s account (in Atlantic Monthly) of his frantic search for Oliver Jr. (the future Supreme Court justice), who was wounded at Antietam. Editors like Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, and Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times assumed the role of elder statesmen as they reviewed military and diplomatic strategies, while one Alabama editor warned those corresponding with soldiers to avoid news “that will embitter their thoughts or swerve them from the path of duty.”¹

The most significant Civil War writing was retrospective. The literary surge of Civil War remembering began, it seems, with the drying of the ink on General Robert E. Lee’s April 9, 1865, surrender. This prodigious production continued to the end of the decade and beyond. Indeed, the need for imaginative recollection of this momentous event was intensified by historical distance, so that a writer in 1998 could describe the Civil War as still “unfinished.”² In this sense, the chief cultural effect of the Civil War was to keep Americans permanently fixed in the four years (1861–65) of traumatic conflict. The array of novels and memoirs published in the decades after the war by such varied and prominent authors as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Ellen Glasgow, Frances Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Henry James, and Ulysses S. Grant lend support to this view. At the same time, however, the war played a critical role in accelerating capitalist development and modernization (in part through its eradication of the antiquated institution of slavery) and thus seemed to all who witnessed it to speed the nation rapidly into the future.

Before the war, the country was largely rural and agrarian, with only the railroads qualifying as a “big business.” Between 1865 and 1895, most competitive industries—from textiles, oil, iron, and steel, to glass, paper, liquor, and sugar—entered into forms of cooperation that led to their formation as trusts. The need for managing and transmitting information both within and between growing business networks required ever more complex and efficient systems. The development in this period of new methods for typing and copying, filing and storage, spurred a communications revolution extending to the computer in the twentieth century. The most revolutionary invention of the antebellum era was the telegraph, an advance in communications technology unrivaled even by the telephone (introduced in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell). The telegraph, like other industries, profited greatly from the war, emerging at its end as a monopoly of Western Union. Many financiers made fortunes through bond purchase and speculation. And wartime investing prompted renewed calls for a national banking system and currency, which was instituted by the National Banking Act of 1863.³

On the eve of the war, the North was considerably more advanced than the South: more industrialized and urbanized, with twice the amount of cultivated land and a vast and well-consolidated railroad network. Because southern secession eliminated a key legislative barrier to economic development, President Lincoln was able during the war to usher various modernizing measures through Congress and sign them into law. These included the 1862 Homestead Act, which expedited western development, tariff legislation to advance northern industry, and the Pacific Railway Act, facilitating construction on the transcontinental railroad. The South’s great military resource was slave labor, which kept their lead, salt, and iron mines as well as agriculture fully productive. Slave labor also enabled an astonishing 80 percent conscription rate among the Confederacy’s white male population. Yet this resource proved unreliable (as fictionalized by Harper in Iola Leroy). Over time slaves became increasingly identified with the Union campaign when emancipation was embraced as its purpose. Frederick Douglass had predicted this in 1861: “The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time, but the ‘inexorable logic of events’ will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery.” On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, a measure that resulted in a major escalation of what had been a limited conflict. Ulysses S. Grant called it “the heaviest blow yet given the Confederacy.”⁴ In all, over 180,000 blacks served in the Union army. The desperate Confederate decision near the war’s end to arm slaves and grant them freedom in exchange for military service nullified the very principle upon which the South had staked its rebellion.

The end of the Civil War plunged America into a double-edged mourning—for catastrophic losses, personal and public, and for a way of life. While the war itself could hardly have provided the impetus to an industrial and technological transformation at once so complex and so rapid, the Civil War and modernization remained intertwined for many. The literature that was produced in the postwar years registered a view of an American society that had grown increasingly diverse and splintered. It was as if the great rift between North and South had yielded a series of aftershocks, resulting in many smaller cleavages and separations. Thus, in novels, memoirs, biographies, even in photographs, the war was portrayed as a highly particularized experience rather than a nationally definitive event.⁵ Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage was typical: it focused on the working-class men who either volunteered or were forced to fight because they, unlike their wealthier counterparts, could not hire substitutes. Crane’s war fiction was not the record of a nation but of a class, the class that in his view gave the most. This perspective was characteristic of many literary works that foreground the experiences in turn of free blacks in Ohio (Dunbar’s The Fanatics) the genteel poor in New England (Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women), subversive slaves in the South (Harper’s Iola Leroy), and northern war heroes (Owen Wister’s Ulysses S. Grant).

Thus, despite the complex combination of forces—social, political, economic—that set the long nineteenth-century process of modernization in motion, the Civil War was commonly understood in its own time and well after as the cause of modern social change. As Henry James famously characterized it in his 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, “four long years of bloodshed and misery, and a social revolution as complete as any the world has seen … the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind.”⁶ The challenge for the series of narratives explored in the following pages was to represent that social revolution. As a catalyst of change, whose impact was ongoing, the war for those who sought to capture its deepest implications remained truly “unfinished.” Each example discussed below is an effort to frame an image of a Civil War world that is remembered as traumatically continuous with the present. Indeed, these examples are most accurately viewed as sustained meditations on historical continuity in its own right. Among the Civil War effects most consistently remarked upon are the shift to a commercial ethos, the prevailing concern with capital and accumulation; the alteration of work, accompanied by a growing divide between owners, managers, and laborers; and scientific progress and the consumption it fosters. Through them all runs the ongoing drama of American diversity—the global reach of innovation and commerce; the immigrant backgrounds of key participants in the arts and sciences, in trade and industry, in education and government; and the reckoning with racial and cultural difference that resulted from slavery’s abolition—a drama whose script was the emergence of a uniquely heterogeneous nationality.

WAR STILLS

Perhaps no single late nineteenth-century device was more indicative of the changes the Civil War came to symbolize than the camera. Photography was pivotal in distinguishing both how the war differed from previous ones and how it helped to bring about a modern nation-state and industrial power.⁷ Moreover, the camera provided Americans with a distinct perspective on war in the abstract; it afforded a detached outlook on the carnage, as a spectacle devised with a viewer in mind. All the narratives discussed below, which represent the most popular and critically acclaimed late nineteenth-century works about the war, exploit the aesthetic prospects of mass death and mourning. The story of remembering the Civil War begins with Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner, two photographers who apprehended the dramatic possibilities of this fraternal strife and sought to memorialize it while it was still being waged. Brady’s beginnings are swathed in mystery, so only his immigrant origins (Irish) help to account for his driving ambition. Raised near Lake George, New York, Brady worked in Albany for portrait artist William Page before relocating to the more expansive urban environment of New York City. In 1840 Brady became a disciple of Samuel F. B. Morse, who was pivotal in establishing both telegraphy and daguerreotypes in the United States. By 1844 Brady had his own daguerreotype studio and in 1850 published a collection of portraits entitled The Gallery of Illustrious Americans. Brady’s title confirmed his success in identifying his studio with distinction; he made a point of profiling celebrities from Tom Thumb and Jenny Lind to Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln, who claimed that “Brady made me president.” Brady’s forte was entrepreneurship, and he reigned supreme in his time as a commercial emissary of photography who was quick to embrace technological advances.

Brady’s associate and ultimate rival, Alexander Gardner, was born in Scotland in 1821 and trained as a scientist but worked in a variety of professions, including bookkeeping and journalism. Employed by a savings and loan company, Gardner developed skills in business management that proved indispensable to his career in Civil War photography. Gardner appears to have met Mathew Brady in 1851 at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London, where Brady was awarded a prize for his Gallery of Illustrious Americans. By 1855, Gardner was earning praise for his own photography in the Glasgow Sentinel, to which he also contributed editorials in support of the laboring poor. The next year he immigrated to New York with his family, sought out Brady, and became his assistant, working in all areas of Brady’s operation.

Brady and Gardner anticipated the profitability of a monopoly on Civil War photography and took steps to make Brady’s name synonymous with it. Exploiting an acquaintance with Allan Pinkerton, head of what would become the secret service, Brady secured a pass from President Lincoln in 1861 that allowed him to travel with Union troops. Meanwhile, Gardner, as manager of their Washington offices, ordered quantities of four-tube carte de visite cameras, to satisfy another market niche—soldiers seeking to be photographed in uniform. He also signed a contract with a commercial photography establishment to reproduce images of major war personalities and mass distribute them as trade cards. Given their mutual aptitude for the technical and business ends of their enterprise, Brady and Gardner were probably destined to be rivals. Both claimed credit for the idea of photographing the war, and both petitioned Congress separately and almost simultaneously in February 1869 to sell their collections of negatives to the government.

Because he suffered from severe myopia and was content to handle social and financial matters, Brady relied increasingly on others to take pictures for his studio. In a review of his 1861 collection, Incidents of the War, the New York Times accurately confirmed Brady’s essential preeminence, while noting his penchant for delegating work. “Mr. Brady was the first to make photography the Clio of war. … His artists have accompanied the army on nearly all its marches, planting their sun batteries by the side of our Generals’ more deathful ones, and taking town, cities, and forest with much less noise, and vastly more expedition. The result was a series of pictures christened, ‘Incidents of the War,’ and nearly as interesting as the war itself: for they constitute the history of it, and appeal directly to the great throbbing heart of the north.”⁸ The subjects that predominated in the Civil War scenes of Brady’s photographers were respites, conferences, battle sites, and corpses. This was partly because photography at this early stage was unable to depict motion and also because photographers were barred from live combat. Yet there was a deeper limitation to Civil War photography: its inability to bridge the chasm created by a war whose effects were pervasive, but whose experience and meaning remained widely inaccessible.

Consider Gardner’s “The Burial Party,” dated April 15, 1865, at Cold Harbor, Virginia, the day after Lincoln’s assassination and less than a week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox (Fig. 1). The top of the photograph is framed by a dark row of trees, so lush that it looks like a beard or ruff for the horizon; and just below the trees, four black men, dressed in white shirts, darker pants, and hats, holding shovels, dig or stand poised to dig in the sandy, grassy soil. In the foreground, another black man, dressed in a coat and wool seaman’s cap, poses deliberately beside a stretcher upon which five skulls are neatly arranged. The nearest skull is straight up and grinning. There are no corpses in this image of burial, only the hint of one—a shoed foot, protruding rather ghoulishly from the middle of the stretcher. Details subtle as well as explicit establish correspondence between the living and dead: the white skulls echo the white shirts of the laborers; the shoed foot that provides the photograph’s central axis completes the body of the laborer on a direct line with it, whose feet appear buried in the grassy surface where he digs; the shoulder of the posed man grazes the closest skull, a contiguity reinforced by the equal number of skulls (five) and laborers (five). The monumental import of this picture taken presumably at this moment suggests that its memorializing effect is both particular and collective. A particular group fulfills the ritual obligation to bury the dead, while also symbolizing a larger collective will to bury the war.

Yet this elaborately orchestrated image raises more questions than it answers. Are these former soldiers, collecting the remains of their comrades, and if so, why aren’t they in uniform? Are they local inhabitants providing a proper burial for martyrs fallen far from the families who might have performed this function? Or are they professional grave diggers, hired to roam the country interring corpses still above ground ten months after the battle that took place June 1864? These men might as easily be exhuming for scientific purposes as burying for hygienic or spiritual ones, because dead bodies and their effects were viewed as keys to human diversity in the nineteenth century by natural philosophers (e.g., John William Draper) and anthropologists (e.g., Lewis Henry Morgan) alike. Whatever their identity and function, these men recall what most representations of the war assiduously repress: the economic transformation of black slaves into free laborers. The very difficulty of pinpointing exactly who these men are and what they are doing—do they serve the past (burying the bodies?) or the future (digging them up for science?)—signals the dynamic nature of this still life and of the war it represents.

FIGURE 1 :: “Burial Party. Cold Harbor, Virginia, April 15, 1865.” From Photographic Sketch Book of the War by Alexander Gardner (1865).

The Gardner photograph affords a critical distinction between universal and historically specific understandings of death. In all cultures, death rituals negotiate the ultimate experience of estrangement—the conversion of intimates (parents, spouses, children, friends) into others. But in post–Civil War America such rituals also distinguished relative states of kinship and alienation among native, migrant, and immigrant. To the extent that this highly composed scene stages an affinity between black Americans and the dead, it confirms social Darwinist views of their culture as obsolete or moribund.⁹ In keeping with dominant theories on the plural origins of humankind, death was understood increasingly in this period as an expression of prevailing class and racial hierarchies as well as of religious and cultural differences. For ethnologists, skulls and bones provided an encyclopedia of knowledge about human diversity. Scientists measured craniums and compared the immune systems of racial and ethnic groups. Social scientists studied mortality rates and the vast array of mourning customs. Philosophers and theologians explored contrasting views of the afterlife. Literary authors, painters, photographers, and advertisers sought to represent death as well as human difference in aesthetic and commercial terms. Making sense of death in this era required multidisciplinary approaches, which is one reason why Stephen Crane reviewed the Brady-Gardner archive while writing his secondhand account of the Civil War.

Indeed, Crane’s best seller, The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War (1895), seems situated squarely in an era of mechanical reproduction. The novel depicts a common soldier, Henry Fleming, who enlists...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Rise of Multicultural America: Economy and Print Culture 1865–1915
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Remembering Civil War
• Chapter 2: Racism as Opportunity in the Reconstruction Era
• Chapter 3: Cosmopolitanism
• Chapter 4: Indian Sacrifice in an Age of Progress
• Chapter 5: Marketing Culture
• Chapter 6: Varieties of Work
• Chapter 7: Corporate America
• Chapter 8: American Utopias
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index